A note before we start: this letter discusses narcissistic abuse, anger, and self-blame. Take it at whatever pace you need. You can stop and come back.

In her book Rage Becomes Her: The Power of Women’s Anger, Soraya Chemaly tells a story about sitting at the dinner table with her family when she was eight years old. When dinner was over, her father told her to get up and help her mother clear the table while her younger brother stayed in his seat. Her brother looked at her and grinned.

She was furious.

She knew that what was happening was unfair, and she refused to get up unless her brother had to help too. Her father eventually gave in.

I keep thinking about this story because it is such a simple example of what anger is supposed to do. Chemaly was eight years old and her anger was giving her information. She knew that she was being treated differently because she was a girl, she did not like it, and she said so.

Unfortunately, many girls receive a very different education around anger. We are taught to be nice, forgiving, accommodating, and easy to get along with. We learn that anger can make us difficult, aggressive, dramatic, bitter, or unlikable. We are often encouraged to think about why the other person behaved the way they did before we have even had a chance to decide how we feel about it.

Research shows that these messages follow us into adulthood. Victoria Brescoll and Eric Uhlmann studied how people respond to anger expressed by men and women in professional settings. They found that people tended to attribute a man’s anger to the situation, whereas they attributed a woman’s anger to her personality. An angry man had a reason to be angry. An angry woman was seen as angry. More recent research has found that women can still be judged negatively for expressing anger, including anger about gender inequality.

I think this matters when we talk about narcissistic abuse because many women have been practicing the suppression of anger long before they ever meet the person who abuses them.

Maybe you grew up in a house where one person got to be angry, and everyone else learned how to manage that person. Maybe you were the easy child, the peacemaker, or the one who never caused any trouble. Maybe you were taught that good people forgive, that holding onto anger is unhealthy, or that being compassionate means trying to understand why someone hurt you.

There is nothing wrong with being compassionate or forgiving. I value both of those things deeply. However, they become dangerous when we use them to override our own emotional responses.

By the time you enter an abusive relationship, you may already be very good at talking yourself out of what you feel.

The relationship only reinforces it.

What happened when we expressed anger

Maybe you confronted them about a lie, and the conversation turned into a discussion about your tone. Maybe you told them something hurt you and ended up apologizing for hurting them. Maybe they gave you the silent treatment for three days. Maybe the entire story was rewritten until you were the aggressive one, and whatever they originally did disappeared from the conversation.

Sometimes pushing back escalated the abuse. Other times, the punishment came later and was difficult to connect to the original conflict, although you knew exactly what it was for.

Your nervous system learned from every one of those experiences.

Pete Walker describes fight, flight, freeze, and fawn as four survival responses. Fight is the response that helps us push back when we believe something is wrong. To use it, we need to believe there is sufficient safety to defend ourselves.

In an abusive relationship, there often isn’t.

If your anger repeatedly creates more danger, your nervous system learns to stop using it. I think of it like a smoke alarm in a house where, every time it went off, someone punished you for making the noise. Eventually, you would take the battery out. The alarm was working exactly as it was supposed to work, but listening to it had become dangerous.

This is what can happen to anger.

You stop trusting it. You stop expressing it. Often, in time, you may have trouble recognizing it at all.

The problem is that anger does not disappear simply because we stop listening to it.

Anger turned inward

In my work, I see suppressed anger show up in many different ways. One of the most common is self-blame.

Instead of being angry with the person who lied to you, manipulated you, controlled you, or abused you, you become furious with yourself.

How did I let this happen?

Why didn’t I leave?

How could I have been so stupid?

Why did I go back?

I knew better.

I hear versions of these questions constantly from people recovering from narcissistic abuse. The anger is there, but it has changed direction.

Sometimes it comes out with people who are safer. You tolerate terrible behavior from the person who has frightened you and find yourself losing your patience with your children, your friends, or strangers. This can create even more shame because now you have evidence that seems to support the fear that you are the problem.

Other people lose access to anger almost completely. They feel numb, depressed, exhausted, or disconnected from what happened. Emotional numbing is a well-documented part of trauma, and sometimes having very little emotional response is evidence of how much your nervous system had to shut down in order to get through what was happening.

This is why I think learning to access anger can be such an important part of narcissistic abuse recovery.

We spend a lot of time in trauma therapy talking about regulation, and for good reason. You need to be able to calm your nervous system when it is overwhelmed. But healing also requires being able to feel the full range of your emotions without immediately deciding that some of them are unacceptable.

I have worked with many people who are afraid of their anger. They worry that if they really let themselves feel it, they will lose control. Some are especially afraid because they have spent years watching another person use anger to intimidate, punish, threaten, or humiliate them.

When that has been your model for anger, it makes sense that you would want nothing to do with it.

But feeling angry does not give you permission to abuse someone. It also does not mean that you are becoming like the person who abused you.

Anger is an emotion, and emotions give us information about what we need.

The work is learning how to receive that information and decide what to do with it.

The gift of anger

One of the things anger can tell us is that a boundary has been crossed.

This is especially important after narcissistic abuse because many survivors have become disconnected from their own preferences. If you have spent years monitoring someone else’s moods, anticipating what they need, and changing your behavior to prevent conflict, it can become surprisingly difficult to answer a very basic question:

What do you want?

I ask people this in my work, and sometimes they genuinely do not know.

So I ask another question.

What didn’t you like?

That is usually easier.

Maybe you didn’t like the way they spoke to you. You didn’t like being questioned about where you were. You didn’t like having your phone checked. You didn’t like being punished for spending time with your friends. You didn’t like being pressured into sex. You didn’t like being lied to and told that you were crazy when you noticed the lie.

Your anger can help you recognize those things.

Once you know what you don’t like, you can begin to understand your boundaries. You can start paying attention to what feels respectful and what does not. You can begin making choices based on your own values instead of organizing your life around someone else’s reactions.

This is what I mean by constructive anger.

Constructive anger does not require confrontation. It means that you can feel angry, understand why you are angry, and make a conscious decision about what you want to do with that information.

Sometimes you may need to speak up or set a boundary. Sometimes you may need to leave. Sometimes you may need to talk to someone you trust, document what happened, or bring the experience into therapy.

If you are still dealing with an abusive person, expressing anger directly may not be safe at all. This is especially important in situations involving coercive control, separation, stalking, or ongoing coparenting. You never need to confront someone in order to prove that you have found your voice. Your safety comes first.

You can listen to your anger privately.

You can believe what it is telling you without telling the other person anything.

Over time, learning how to work constructively with anger gives you another way to protect yourself. You can stop treating the emotion as evidence that there is something wrong with you and start asking why it showed up.

There is also research showing that suppressing emotion does not make the emotional experience disappear. James Gross’s work on emotion regulation found that people can reduce the outward expression of emotion while still experiencing physiological activation internally. In other words, looking calm and actually being calm are not the same thing.

This is important for people who became very good at looking fine during abuse.

You may have learned how to keep your face neutral, say that everything was okay, go to work, take care of your children, and continue functioning while your body was under enormous stress. That ability may have helped you survive. It does not mean that your feelings went away.

Healing gives us the opportunity to start listening to them again.

A practice for this week

For one week, I want you to pay attention to your anger without trying to change it or act on it.

Start with small things. Please do not begin with the worst thing that happened in your relationship. Anger work can bring up a lot, and there is no benefit in overwhelming yourself.

Notice when someone cuts you off in traffic, interrupts you, asks you to do something you do not want to do, or treats someone unfairly in a show you are watching.

When you notice irritation or anger, ask yourself:

What am I angry about?

Then ask:

What is my anger telling me that I need?

Maybe you need respect. Maybe you need more time. Maybe you need someone to stop asking. Maybe you need rest. Maybe you simply do not want to do what is being asked of you.

You do not have to do anything with the answer this week.

The practice is listening.

If you have spent years believing that anger makes you difficult, selfish, dangerous, or unlovable, learning to listen without immediately judging yourself is enough.

Soraya Chemaly was eight years old when she looked across that dinner table and knew she was being treated unfairly.

You knew things once, too.

Healing is learning to trust yourself enough to know them again.

With you in the journey,

Erin

There’s an old tale whispered along the chilly coastlines of the north, a story about a seal who could slip out of her skin to become a woman. One moonlit night, she leaves her sealskin behind on a rock, drawn to the dance of the waves and stars. From the shadows, a lonely man watches her twirl. In a moment of desperation, he takes her skin and hides it away. Without it, she can’t return to the sea. So, she stays, she marries him, and raises their child. Day by day, she pours herself into this new life, becoming a devoted wife and loving mother. But slowly, something within her begins to fade. Her hair thins. Her skin starts to crack like old parchment. The sparkle in her eyes dims, not from dying but from living so far from the ocean that nurtured her spirit.

Years later, as fate would have it, her child discovers an old bundle tucked away in the rafters: her sealskin, stiff with age but unmistakably hers. She brings it close to her face and is flooded with memories—everything she once was comes rushing back. And with that realization, she makes her way home to the sea.
Clarissa Pinkola Estés calls this tale the story of the soul skin, the part of us we lose and must strive to reclaim. To me, it captures what abuse does to those who feel deeply; these letters I write are ultimately about one thing: unlearning how to vanish and learning instead how to return to ourselves.

People can disappear in so many ways. Fawning is one of the most insidious forms because it sneaks up on you, disguised as being easygoing or agreeable. Not too long ago, I shared my thoughts on the fawn response, that instinctive trauma response to please a threat when escape feels impossible, is actually pretty smart for our survival. But here’s where it gets complicated: after years of doing this, hollowing yourself out to fit someone else’s needs, you become so adept at hiding that not even you truly notice what’s happening.

The Fawn Response

Time and again in my work, I see this pattern unfold: fawning doesn’t just make you pliable for someone controlling, it teaches them precisely how to keep you around.
Think back on moments when you expressed a real need. Maybe you asked for something small or wanted just one evening alone, and somehow that became an issue. Did the atmosphere shift? Did you sense consequences disguised as reactions? Whatever form it took, your body filed it away as evidence: needing anything here costs too much; it’s better not to need at all.

Fawning and narcissistic abuse fit together like a lock and a key, and that is not an accident. A person who abuses needs two things above all: control and someone whose attention stays fixed on them. The fawn response hands over both. When your nervous system is wired to read moods and put the other person first, you become the ideal partner for someone who wants the whole relationship to orbit their needs. They do not have to force it. Your survival skills do the work for them.

And the relationship trains you deeper as it goes. The trauma bond, that inconsistent warmth that comes and goes, the affection that arrives right after the punishment, this is the cycle that builds a powerful attachment that forms through repeated fear and relief (Dutton & Painter, 1981). Every turn of that cycle teaches your body the same lesson. Keep them happy, and you stay safe. This is why fawning shows up so often in complex trauma. Pete Walker names fawn as one of the four survival responses to ongoing danger, right beside fight, flight, and freeze (Walker, 2013). What looks from the outside like being agreeable is, underneath, a person managing a threat they could not escape.

But let’s be clear, that isn’t weakness, it’s your nervous system calculating risks. Each time you shrank yourself, it helped avoid conflict; that lesson sank deeper into your bones. Over months and years, someone who once had strong opinions can end up feeling nearly voiceless, not because something’s wrong with them, but because every attempt to assert themselves has seemed too costly.

This is where many people carry their grief, not in sharp moments but in that slow erosion over time when you can’t pinpoint when it started. You learned everyone else’s language fluently while losing your own voice. You can gauge the mood of any room within seconds, yet draw a blank when asked how you’re doing. You anticipate others’ needs perfectly, but become silent when it’s your turn to share.

Coming Back in Small Steps

So how do you reconnect with that hidden self? It doesn’t happen overnight or by force; instead, it’s about returning gradually through everyday moments, one small preference at a time.

It starts quietly, less like grand revelations and more like simply acknowledging what you want, even if it’s just within yourself for now. Recognizing that little “no” that bubbles up inside you and allowing yourself not to talk yourself out of it before it fully forms sends a powerful message to that part of you in hiding: it’s safe now; come back into the light. You’re not crafting a new identity from scratch, you’re just letting your true self re-enter the room.

A Practice for This Week

Choose one small thing and claim it as yours. It could be a meal you’ve been craving, or simply declining an invitation that you feel obligated to. Tune in to how your body reacts when you assert that choice. notice any instincts pulling you back toward appeasement or smoothing things over for others’ comfort. You don’t have to follow those instincts; allow discomfort while holding firm in your decision, that’s your path forward. That’s finding your footing again.

Please note that it is not necessarily safe to say no or set a boundary with an abusive person. We will be going through exactly how to do that in later letters, but for now, it is best to start in low-stakes, very safe situations.

✦

If any part of this resonates with you, I hope you’ll afford kindness toward who you’ve discovered within these words. You kept calm because calm kept you safe; reducing yourself felt like your only option for survival back then...and there’s nothing shameful about that.

For years, you’ve made sure those around you were okay, but guess what? It’s your turn now, you’re allowed to seek out who you’ve been all along. You were never truly lost; instead, you’ve simply been waiting for yourself all this time, and now it’s time to head home.

With you in the Unlearning,

Erin

“Trauma is a fact of life. It does not, however, have to be a life sentence.” - Peter Levine

Your body knew before you did. In the space before a single thought could form, it had already made its choice, and the choice was not yours to make. You did not go somewhere. You were taken somewhere, pulled back behind the glass of yourself, present enough to witness but too far away to reach. And the limbs that carry you through your life simply went still. This is not a failure of will. This is not a character flaw. This is the oldest protection your body knows, the one it reaches for when fighting would not save you, and running is not possible. It is not a malfunction. It is the freeze response. It is the reason you find it hard to move, and it is the reason you are still here.

When a wild animal emerges from a freeze, it can look frightening. The whole body shakes and jerks and convulses, almost like it’s having a seizure. But researchers have filmed this and slowed the footage down, and what they found is remarkable. The animal is not malfunctioning at all. It is finishing the fight. Its legs are running the escape it never got to run, and its body is completing the struggle that got cut off the moment it froze. When the shaking finally stops, the animal gets up and walks back to the herd as if nothing had happened. The fear moved all the way through it, and then it was gone.

We are built to do this, too. Your body came with the very same way of shaking fear loose and letting it go. You can see it in the trembling after a car accident, in the good cry after a scare, in the way a child sobs and shakes and then runs off to play a few minutes later. This is the work of Peter Levine, who spent his life studying how the body releases trauma. But most of us had this trained out of us a long time ago. Calm down. Stop crying. You’re fine. Pull yourself together. We learned to hold the fear in instead of letting it move, because that was what made us acceptable. And so it stayed inside us, waiting for a safer time.

Coming out of a freeze is not about forcing yourself to get up and function, but about letting yourself thaw. And that always happens slowly, and always with self-compassion.

There is so much shame around the freeze response. We call ourselves lazy. We call ourselves broken. We look at everything we couldn’t do, and we blame ourselves for the paralysis on top of it. But shame is the very thing that keeps us frozen. A nervous system that feels judged will not soften. It clamps down harder. The way out is the opposite of how we usually treat ourselves. It is warmth, and patience, and the sense that it is finally safe to come back.

Start With Self-Compassion

Put a hand over your heart, or anywhere on your body that feels comforting, and offer yourself three simple truths. First, tell yourself the truth about this moment. “This is really hard right now, and it hurts.” We cannot be gentle with a feeling we won’t even admit we’re having. Next, remind yourself that you are not alone in it. “So many of us freeze like this. It’s part of being human, and part of having survived something hard.” Then give yourself the kindness you would give a frightened friend. “May I be gentle with myself right now. May I give myself what I need.” This is Kristin Neff’s self-compassion break, and on the hardest days, it is enough all by itself.

This work is best done with a trauma-informed therapist. Your body froze in the first place because you were alone with something too big to carry by yourself, and it isn’t meant to thaw in isolation either. A good therapist becomes a safe person to come back to, someone who can help your body let go of what it’s holding without overwhelming you all over again. If you can find your way to that kind of support, please do.

This Week’s Practice

But the freeze doesn’t wait for your next appointment. Here are some gentle things you can reach for in the meantime. Go slowly, and only as far as feels kind.

Warm your body. Wrap yourself in a blanket, or hold a hot mug in both hands, or stand under a warm shower. A frozen system doesn’t need force or cold. It needs warmth, because heat is one of the oldest signals of safety the body knows.

Let your eyes wander. Slowly turn your head and look around the room, and let your gaze rest on anything that feels pleasant to you, like the light on the wall, a plant, or the sky outside. You are showing the oldest part of your brain that the danger has passed, and this room is safe.

Let your body move the way the animals do. If your hands or your legs want to tremble or shake, you can let them. That is your body’s built-in way of discharging fear, the very thing that got trained out of us. You can also sway a little, or rock yourself, or move into a slow stretch. Keep it small and gentle. You are not forcing anything loose. You are just letting the movement finish.

Use your voice. Hum a few notes, or let out a long sigh you can actually hear. Your vocal cords are connected to the vagus nerve, so even a little humming reaches inside and helps your body calm down.

Find something solid. Press your hands flat against a wall, or push your feet into the floor, or hold a pillow against your chest. A freeze tends to float us up and out of our bodies, and steady pressure helps us come back down into them.

Reach for one safe person. Text someone a single word, or go sit near your dog. You don’t have to explain anything at all. Our bodies were made to settle down near someone kind, and you were never meant to thaw all by yourself.

And if even this feels like too much today, just keep your hand on your heart and let it stay there. That counts. It is already you taking care of yourself, and the thaw is already beginning.

So please don’t put “getting unstuck” on the list of things you think you’re failing at. You are not lazy, and you are not broken. You are thawing, slowly, and on your own body’s timeline. No feeling is final, and this stillness is not where you live. It’s just where you’re resting for now.

You will move again. I promise.

With you,

Erin

A Note on the Science

The framing of the freeze response as a survival state rather than a personal failing, of the body’s built-in capacity to discharge stored survival energy and how it gets conditioned out of us, of self-compassion as the ground that makes nervous-system safety possible, and of the somatic and polyvagal practices described here draws on the following:

Dana, D. (2018). The polyvagal theory in therapy: Engaging the rhythm of regulation. W. W. Norton & Company.

Levine, P. A. (1997). Waking the tiger: Healing trauma. North Atlantic Books.

Levine, P. A. (2010). In an unspoken voice: How the body releases trauma and restores goodness. North Atlantic Books.

Neff, K. D. (2011). Self-compassion: The proven power of being kind to yourself. William Morrow.

Neff, K. D., & Germer, C. K. (2018). The mindful self-compassion workbook: A proven way to accept yourself, build inner strength, and thrive. Guilford Press.

Porges, S. W. (2011). The polyvagal theory: Neurophysiological foundations of emotions, attachment, communication, and self-regulation. W. W. Norton & Company.

van der Kolk, B. (2014). The body keeps the score: Brain, mind, and body in the healing of trauma. Viking.

I cried every day in kindergarten.

Not for myself. I cried because I could feel it when the child beside me didn’t understand the lesson, or missed their mother, or felt left out. I was a raw, exposed nerve walking around in a cold, harsh wind.

Over the years, I learned how to regulate my emotions. I learned to steady myself, to smooth my face, to keep going. But underneath it all, I was still a little sponge, absorbing everyone around me — their moods, their needs, their pain.

What I did not understand until much later is that this exact tenderness — this bottomless capacity to feel other people — is the very thing that made me a target for some of the most abusive relationships I would ever have.

Most of the people I work with have something in common. They are never the weak ones. They are never the naïve ones. They are some of the most intelligent, strong, creative, kind, generous, empathetic, deeply feeling, altruistic, and inspiring people I have ever met. I could be biased, because I truly love everyone I have ever worked with. But I do not think it is a coincidence that some of the brightest lights are the ones targeted by darkness.

And it is not only something I have noticed. There is research showing that people like this — the deeply empathic, the highly attuned — are targeted and harmed at higher rates, not lower. Predators are looking for something, and it is so often exactly this.

What the deeply sensitive have in common

If I had to put a clinical word to what these bright lights share, I would call it neurodivergence. First, because I am neurodivergent myself. And because so many of the people who sit across from me have been diagnosed with autism, or ADHD, or some type of learning difference. The ones who have not are almost always either exceptionally intelligent or profoundly empathic — and I have come to consider both of those a kind of neurodivergence too.

Because this is the other thing we share. From the time we were very small, we were told we had to work to fit in. We were asked to take the enormity of our spirits and squeeze them down to fit inside a finite and cold world. We were told we cared too much. That we felt too much. That we needed to toughen up. We were made to feel strange for knowing, or sensing, or seeing something that most people around us simply could not see.

So we learned to hide our intelligence, to swallow the thing we wanted to say out loud, to bury our sensitivity, to dim our own light. We got so good at it that most of us forgot we were doing it at all.

And as painful as that already is, there is a more painful truth underneath it. Every dimming, the shrinking, the hiding, the practiced disappearing of ourselves, is the exact thing that primes us for a narcissist.

Why did they choose us?

Think about what a lifetime of masking and people pleasing actually trains a person to do. It trains you to prioritize everyone else over yourself. To put your own needs last, or to forget you have needs at all. To manage how everyone else feels and to call that love.

Now think about what a narcissist is looking for. Someone who will set their own needs aside, prioritize theirs instead. Narcissists are extraordinary readers of people, and they do not choose at random. They choose the empathic, the forgiving, the optimistic, and the caregivers.

You were not chosen because you were naïve or not enough. You were chosen because you were powerful in a way that they needed.

The wound is where the light enters

Most of us arrived already hurt and carrying a wound of rejection. Long before this relationship, we were called weird, difficult, dramatic, or too sensitive. We were told our reactions were wrong and our perceptions could not be trusted. We walked in already carrying complex trauma and carrying it inside a body that feels more than most bodies do.

It is not only that neurodivergent people carry more complex trauma, though we do. It is that we feel it at a depth that other people rarely have to survive. Our joy runs high. Our grief runs deep. Our fear can swallow us whole. When something hurts us, it does not tap us on the shoulder; it wrecks the whole house.

It’s a common mistake to think that everything that’s biological is genetically caused. — Gabor Maté

Gabor Maté has spent much of his life pointing at this overlap. He believes that a great deal of what we call neurodivergence and a great deal of what we call trauma are far more entangled than we like to admit. A sensitive child becomes a kind of early-warning system, absorbing the stress in the room and adapting to it long before there are words for any of it.

Your sensitivity is yours, and it never needed to be explained away. But a nervous system this open, living in a world this cold, gets wounded early and often. Both are true at once.

So when an abuser tells you that you are too sensitive, that you misunderstood, that you are overreacting, it does not land as a warning. It lands as something all too familiar. It matches a story the world had already written about you, years before this person ever appeared.

And so the pain turns inward. Instead of asking what is being done to me, you ask what is wrong with me. But that question was never yours. It was handed to you a long time ago, and you have been carrying it quietly ever since.

When feeling is too much, the nervous system shuts down

So what does a body do when it feels everything and has been told feeling is wrong?

It shuts down.

When the feeling is too much and leaving is not possible, the body reaches for its oldest mercy. Stephen Porges named this state dorsal vagal, the shutdown that lives beneath fight or flight, the place a nervous system goes when there is nowhere else to go. For many of us, it does not look like a collapse. It looks like coping. I call it functional freeze, and I think you may know it from the inside.

You keep going. You show up to appointments, answer emails, and smile on cue. From the outside, your life looks whole. But somewhere behind your eyes, there is a pane of glass between you and your own days, and you find yourself watching your life instead of living it. “I’m fine” leaves your mouth on its own while the truest part of you waits somewhere far off, somewhere quieter, somewhere that doesn’t hurt.

This is not a failure. This is intelligence. When you feel as deeply as you do, numbing was the only way left to stay standing. Your body chose survival, the way it always has.

Immobilization in the face of terror is not a choice. It is the body’s ancient, automatic wisdom. — Stephen Porges

And a mind like ours does one more thing: it opens a loop that cannot close. So the relationship does not end when it ends. It keeps circling in you. You replay, re-read, searching for the answer that would finally make it make sense. An answer a narcissist will never give. And so you stay tied to it, long after you have walked out of the room.

And this is where I begin with most people I have worked with. They are at the very bottom of the trauma ladder, stuck in a frozen state. They have been there so long that they often don’t even know they are in a hole. They think this is just how life is and how they are.

I was once there too. I spent so many years completely disconnected from myself, my body, and life. I crawled out of the hole once too. I know this terrain now. I know the way home. And I am reaching out my hand to guide you whenever you are ready.

The same way in is the same way out

Everything that kept you stuck is the same thing that will set you free.

The empathy they turned against you turned toward yourself, finally letting you believe your own pain instead of arguing with it. The sensitivity they call too much is not too much. It is intuition. And all that attention you spent a lifetime pointing outward, you get to turn it around now toward yourself.

Nothing about you needs to be fixed. You do not need to become less sensitive, less deep, less feeling. You are not broken and in need of fixing. You are tender, and perceptive, and deeply human, and in need of healing.

That is what we are here to Unlearn. That your Super Powers were weaknesses.

The freeze can thaw, too. Not by force but in doses small enough for the body to adjust to and trust. This is how the part of you that went away slowly learns that it is finally safe to come home.

And that coming home has already begun because you are still here, still asking, still reading to the very end of a letter like this one.

With you in it,

Erin

A Practice for This Week: Feeling, Freezing, Coming Home

Find ten quiet minutes and your journal. There is no right way to do this, and nothing you write has to be shown to anyone, ever. If a question feels like too much today, let it go and simply rest a hand on your heart instead. That counts too.

One — Where you feel it.

Bring to mind a recent moment when a feeling arrived far bigger than the situation seemed to call for. Don’t judge it — just describe it. Where did you feel it in your body? What older moment did it seem to echo? Your feelings are not too big. They are carrying information you are meant to have.

Two — Where you go quiet.

Where in your life do you move through the motions while feeling far away? When do you first remember learning that going numb was safer than feeling? When you are ready, write one sentence to the part of you that learned to freeze: “You kept me safe by going quiet. Thank you. It may be safe to come back now.”

Three — Turning the gift around.

Name one way your sensitivity has protected someone else. Now imagine pointing that same care at yourself this week. How would you speak to someone that you deeply love? What would you do to take care of someone who was going through something similiar?

When you’re done, finish this sentence in your own words, and let it be the thing you carry out of the week: “I am powerful. My superpowers are ___________”

This letter is companionship, not treatment. Neurodivergence and complex trauma are real and heavy things, and you were never meant to carry them alone — if you are struggling, please reach for a trauma-informed therapist, and in a crisis, your local emergency or crisis line.

Arrondo, G., Osorio, A., Magallón, S., López-del Burgo, C., & Cortese, S. (2023). Attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder as a risk factor for being involved in intimate partner violence and sexual violence: A systematic review and meta-analysis. Psychological Medicine. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0033291723001976

Book, A., Costello, K., & Camilleri, J. A. (2013). Psychopathy and victim selection: The use of gait as a cue to vulnerability. Journal of Interpersonal Violence, 28(11), 2368–2383. https://doi.org/10.1177/0886260512475315

Haruvi-Lamdan, N., Horesh, D., Zohar, S., Kraus, M., & Golan, O. (2020). Autism spectrum disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder: An unexplored co-occurrence of conditions. Autism, 24(4), 884–898. https://doi.org/10.1177/1362361320912143

Mazefsky, C. A., Herrington, J., Siegel, M., Scarpa, A., Maddox, B. B., Scahill, L., & White, S. W. (2013). The role of emotion regulation in autism spectrum disorder. Journal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry, 52(7), 679–688. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jaac.2013.05.006

Wheeler, S., Book, A., & Costello, K. (2009). Psychopathic traits and perceptions of victim vulnerability. Criminal Justice and Behavior, 36(6), 635–648. https://doi.org/10.1177/0093854809333958

A note before we begin: this letter talks about trauma and the survival responses that come with it. Read it when you have the space for that. If any part of it feels like too much, you can set it down and come back later. There is no wrong way to do this.

Last week I wrote you about fawn, the response that befriends the danger it cannot escape. This week I want to talk about the one that gets even less recognition, because most people think they know what it looks like and they are only seeing half of it.

When we picture freeze, we picture collapse. The person who cannot get out of bed. The blank stare. The shutdown so complete that the body goes limp and the world goes far away. That version is real. But there is another version, and it is far more common, and almost no one names it. It is the freeze that keeps working.

You go to work. You answer the emails. You make the dinner, remember the appointments, and ask people how their day was. From the outside, you appear to be functioning. Inside, something is braced, still, and far away. You are moving through your life without quite being in it. That is freeze too.

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What functional freeze is

Freeze is what a nervous system does when fighting and running are both off the table and the threat is still there. The body cannot act, so it holds. It goes still and braced, conserving energy, waiting for the danger to pass. In the animal world, it is the deer gone rigid, the mouse that stops moving in the cat’s mouth. It is not a choice. It is one of the oldest survival strategies there is.

What we do not talk about is that a person can live in a low, steady version of this for years. The dramatic collapse gets a name. The quiet, functioning version does not. You keep doing the things. You just do them from behind glass.

This is what people sometimes call a functional freeze. The threat response never fully shut off, so part of you remained immobilized while the rest of you learned to keep the surface running. You are not frozen on the couch. You are frozen at your desk, in the meeting, at the dinner table, doing everything that is asked of you while feeling almost none of it.

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The spectrum of freeze

Freeze is not one state. It runs along a spectrum, and knowing where you are on it helps you stop judging yourself for it. It is one of the four survival responses your body runs under threat, alongside fight, flight, and fawn (Walker, 2013).

Functional freeze is the top of it. You are still moving through your days. You look fine from the outside. The stillness lives underneath, in the flatness and the fog and the stalling over small things.

Freeze is deeper. The braking starts to show. Getting through the day takes everything you have. You cancel plans. You cannot answer the phone. The tasks pile up because there is no reach left in you to meet them.

Frozen is the bottom. Full shutdown. The collapse we picture when we hear the word. You cannot get out of bed. The world goes distant and you go with it. Everything is too much, so the body chooses nothing.

Think of it as the bottom of a ladder. Healing does not start with feeling good. It starts here, at the still, shut-down base, and climbs slowly up from there. Most people I work with begin in some state of freeze, whether they know it or not. That is not a sign you are behind. It is where the climb begins.

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What it feels like from the inside

It rarely feels like fear. It feels like flatness. Like watching your life on a screen instead of living it. You are numb, or foggy, or oddly far from your own body. Time blurs. You know you should feel something about the good news or the bad news, and the feeling does not come.

It also shows up in ways we almost never connect to trauma. Forgetfulness. Losing your keys, your train of thought, the reason you walked into the room. A wired but tired feeling, exhausted and unable to rest at the same time. Motivation that will not come, no matter how much you lecture yourself. And the strange stall over small tasks. You arrive somewhere and sit in the parked car for twenty minutes before you can make yourself get out. You are tired but cannot bring yourself to start getting ready for bed. The dishes, the text back, the form that takes five minutes, all of it sits undone, not because you do not care but because something in you cannot cross the gap from knowing to doing.

That gap is not a character defect. It is a nervous system idling in a low freeze, with the brakes quietly on.

Many of the people I work with describe it as going through the motions. Present enough to pass. Absent enough that nothing quite lands. They have often lived this way so long that they no longer think of it as a state they are in. They think it is who they have become.

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The labels that get it wrong

Because functional freeze does not look like the collapse we expect, it gets called other things. Lazy. Unmotivated. Checked out. Not trying hard enough.

And because the person is still functioning, they often aim those words at themselves. Why can’t I just do the thing? What is wrong with me? Everyone else manages, and I can barely feel my own life. They mistake a nervous system stuck in a survival state for a failure of character. They call the freeze a flaw and then blame themselves for it.

It is not laziness. Laziness has no fear underneath it. Freeze does. What looks like not trying is very often a body that is still, quietly, braced for impact. The flatness is not the absence of a problem. It is protection, still running, long after the danger that switched it on.

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This week’s practice

A gentle heads up before you begin. This one can stir things up. If it does, reach for the tools we gathered in Tools For Our Journey. Your breath, your grounding, a walk. You can stop at any point.

This week, we are not trying to climb the ladder yet. We are just going to notice which rung we are standing on and meet it with kindness rather than blame.

We meet ourselves where we are. Where are you on the freeze ladder today? Functional freeze, moving through your days with the stillness underneath. Freeze, where the braking shows, and getting through takes everything. Or frozen, the full shutdown. There is no wrong answer, and it may shift day to day. Just notice where you are right now.

Then bring mindful self-compassion to that exact place (Neff & Germer, 2013). It has three moves, and you can do them in a minute or in ten.

First, name it without a story. Not I am in freeze. Go to the body instead. Where do you feel this? Maybe a tightness in the chest, a heaviness in the limbs, a blankness behind the eyes. Put a hand there. Then name the raw feeling in a word or two. Tight. Fear. Sadness. Anger. Numb. That is mindfulness. You are watching the feeling instead of being inside it, labeling it without the whole story wrapped around it.

Second, remember this is part of being human. You are not the only one. Right now, all over the world, countless people are moving through a functional freeze of their own. If it helps, picture them, all of you, holding hands. This too is one of the ways a human body carries what it has been through. It is not a defect in you. It is a thread that connects you to everyone who has ever had to survive something.

Third, be your own best friend. Ask yourself what you would say or do for a best friend in this exact state. You would not call them lazy. You would be gentle. Offer yourself that same thing. Wrap your arms around yourself in a hug, which actually releases oxytocin and helps settle the body, or simply tell yourself, You are doing the best you can.

That is the whole practice. Not fixing the freeze. Meeting it, exactly where it is, with the kindness you would give someone you love.

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If you have spent this whole time believing something was wrong with you, I hope you can see now that you have been having a normal response to abnormal, painful events. The forgetting, the flatness, the stalling, the numbness, none of it is a flaw in your character. It is what a body does to survive more than it could hold. There is nothing wrong with you at all for surviving. Nothing.

With you in the journey,

Erin

✦

References

Walker, P. (2013). Complex PTSD: From surviving to thriving. Azure Coyote Publishing.

Neff, K. D., & Germer, C. K. (2013). A pilot study and randomized controlled trial of the Mindful Self-Compassion program. Journal of Clinical Psychology, 69(1), 28–44.

Letters of Unlearning is for education and reflection. It is not therapy or a substitute for individual mental health care. If you are in crisis, please reach out to a licensed professional or a crisis line in your area.

A note before we begin: this letter talks about trauma and the survival responses that come with it. Read it when you have the space for that. If any part of it feels like too much, you can set it down and come back later. There is no wrong way to do this.

Last time, I told you the difference between being chased by a tiger and living with one. Being chased is a single terror. Your legs pump, your lungs burn, and then it is over. Living with one is something else entirely. The tiger is on the other side of the bathroom door when you are brushing your teeth. It is at the dinner table. It is the thing that tucks you in at night. There is no woods to escape into, no moment when the danger is finally behind you.

So what does a body do when it cannot run and cannot fight? It learns to befriend the tiger. To read its moods. To make itself agreeable, invisible, useful, and small.

That is what this letter is about. Not weakness. Not a character flaw. One of the most intelligent things a frightened nervous system can do, and the one that gets misunderstood the most.

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Why the body befriends what it cannot escape

Befriending the tiger is not a decision you make. It is the fourth move in a sequence your body runs on its own, faster than thought, in a fixed order.

First, it wants to fight. Push back, defend, meet the danger. If fighting is not safe or not possible, it reaches for the next move and tries to run. Get away, put distance between you and the threat.

But when you live with the tiger, both of those doors are shut. You cannot fight the parent you depend on. You cannot run from the partner whose anger only grows when you resist. When fight and flight are gone, the body does not surrender. It reaches for what is left. It fawns. Or it freezes. These are the two that get mistaken for personality the most. Today, we stay with the fawn response. Next week I will write you about the freeze.

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What the fawn response actually is

Fawning is surviving danger by managing the dangerous person. You become who they need you to be. You track the mood before it arrives. You smooth, soothe, agree, apologize, and make yourself useful enough or small enough that the threat passes over you.

Think about what that takes. Reading a volatile person’s face in real time. Feeling the temperature of a room shift before a single word is spoken. Adjusting your voice, your posture, your needs, on instinct, to keep the peace. These are not the habits of someone who is weak. They are advanced skills, built under pressure, that kept you safe when no one else would.

The clinical name for it is the fawn response, named by Pete Walker as the fourth survival response alongside fight, flight, and freeze (Walker, 2013). It is the one that receives the least understanding because, from the outside, it does not look like fear at all. It looks like kindness. It looks like being easy to love.

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The labels that we give for fawning

The world rarely calls this survival. It calls it people-pleasing. It calls it codependence. And both words have quietly carried blame.

There is an accusation hiding inside the term people-pleaser. The word suggests you are being fake. Telling people what they want to hear because you are calculating. As if the smiling and the agreeing were a performance you chose to put on.

It was never a performance. It was a nervous system that learned to walk on eggshells. When you grew up or lived alongside someone whose reactions you could not predict, staying pleasant was not dishonesty. It was surveillance. You were not managing your image. You were reading the floor for the board that creaks, because the last time it creaked, something bad happened. That is not inauthenticity. That is a body doing threat assessment in real time and calling it politeness.

Codependence has received the same treatment. For decades, it has been used to point at the person who adapted and say the problem lives in them. Too giving. Too accommodating. Too lost in someone else. As if the adaptation came from nowhere. As if a nervous system would abandon itself for no reason at all.

There is a grain of truth in the labels. Fawning does involve over-giving. It does involve losing the thread of your own needs. But naming the behavior while ignoring its origin turns a survival response into a personal defect. It takes something your body did to protect you and hands it back to you as proof that you are the broken one.

You are not broken. You did what a body is built to do when every other way out has been closed.

A survival response that runs often enough stops feeling like a response. It starts to feel like a personality.

So many of the people I work with have lived in fawn for so long that they no longer feel it as something happening to them. They feel it as themselves. I’m just a giver. I’m just easygoing. I’ve always been the peacemaker. The response has been running so continuously that it has gone invisible, the way you stop hearing a sound that never stops.

This is the week we take back the pen. Not to cross anything out—but to write in the margins of everything that has already been written about you, everything that called your survival something shameful, something broken, something to fix.

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This week’s practice

A gentle heads up before you begin. This one can stir things up. If it does, reach for the tools we gathered in Tools For Our Journey. Your breath, your grounding, a walk. You can stop at any point.

This week, we are looking for the fawn response and calling it by its name. In your journal, ask yourself: when did I first feel that I needed to be the peacemaker, or be likable, or make myself useful, or I would be in danger? Let a memory come. Maybe more than one. Write down what you were reading, what you were managing, what you were afraid would happen if you stopped.

Then thank that part of you. The peacemaker. The caregiver. The one who kept everyone calm. Write a few lines of gratitude for how hard it worked and how well it did its job. It helped you survive something that a child or a partner with no way out should never have had to endure. It does not need to be scolded. It needs to be thanked.

Nothing has to change today. We are simply meeting this part of you with thanks instead of blame. That is where the real change begins.

The thing you were told was wrong is very often the reason you are still standing. Before it deserves anything else, it deserves your respect.

With you on this journey,

Erin

References

Walker, P. (2013). Complex PTSD: From surviving to thriving. Azure Coyote Publishing.

van der Kolk, B., et al. (2014). Yoga as an adjunctive treatment for posttraumatic stress disorder: A randomized controlled trial. Journal of Clinical Psychiatry, 75(6), e559–e565.

Letters of Unlearning is for education and reflection. It is not therapy or a substitute for individual mental health care. If you are in crisis, please reach out to a licensed professional or a crisis line in your area.

**Trigger Warning- this letter talks about the impacts of CPTSD

We need each other as much as we need food and water.

Connection is not a luxury. It is not something the strong outgrow. It is a biological requirement, wired into us from the very first breath.

The research bears this out. We learned, heartbreakingly, from infants in orphanages whose physical needs were met but whose human needs were not. They were fed, kept warm, kept clean. But without being held, without touch, attunement, and connection, many experienced what’s called failure to thrive, and some did not survive. The body cannot grow on food and water alone. We are built, from the start, to need each other.

There’s another finding that makes this even starker. When researchers look at brain scans of children who were severely neglected, they often see fewer neural connections than in the brains of children who were actively abused. Sit with that for a moment. The absence of connection can mark a developing brain even more deeply than the presence of harm. Sometimes what wounds us most is not what was done to us. It’s what we needed and never received.

Once you understand that, trauma starts to make a different kind of sense.

Because if connection is a survival need, then a threat to our connection, to our belonging, to our sense of self in relationship, is a threat to survival. Trauma was never only about a threat to our life. Trauma is any event that leaves a mark that distorts the lens through which we see ourselves and others. Any wound that makes authentic connection harder.

That’s a much wider definition than most people use, and I’ll be honest with you about where I stand. I believe almost everything we struggle with has a trauma root. The patterns, the reactions, the beliefs we can’t seem to shake. Underneath, there is almost always a wound, and that wound almost always formed in a relationship.

PTSD is being chased by a tiger. CPTSD is living with one.

PTSD is what happens after we survive a threat. And it doesn’t have to be a threat to our life. It can be any threat to our sense of self. Being humiliated, rejected, made small, told over and over that who we are is wrong. The body registers those as danger too.

CPTSD is what happens when that threat isn’t a single event but a way of life. When it’s relational. When the people we depended on were also the ones we weren’t safe with, and we grew up alongside the danger instead of escaping it. There was no one tiger to outrun. We lived in the house with it.

What happens when the tiger appears

When a threat hits, your brain has a built-in order of operations.

The back part of the brain, the reptilian hindbrain, and the middle part, the limbic emotional brain, both fire instantly. Dan Siegel calls what happens next flipping your lid. The two lower brains pop the top off the neocortex, the human, rational part of your brain, and it goes offline. This is by design. When a tiger is chasing you, there is no time to reason. You need to run.

And while you’re running, your brain is doing something remarkable. It is encoding everything. Every sound, every smell, the snap of the twig under your foot, the light in the sky. It files it all away in the back of the brain, fast and without words.

Why? So that the next day, if you hear that same twig snap, you don’t wait around to find out whether there’s a tiger. You’re already running. There is no rational thought behind a trigger. The thinking brain was never part of the chain. That’s what makes a trigger feel so total and fast. It is the survival system doing exactly what it was built to do, reacting to the past before you can even register now.

The story we tell afterward

Here’s the part that matters most for healing.

As the danger passes and your frontal lobes come back online, they start doing their job again. They go looking for meaning. They want to explain what just happened.

And here’s what we see again and again in this work. After something painful, we almost always tell ourselves a negative story. Worse, it is usually a negative story about ourselves. I should have seen it coming. I’m too much. I’m not enough. It was my fault. A child especially does this because blaming the people they depend on is far too dangerous, so they turn it inward instead.

This is why trauma distorts the lens through which we see. Not just the lens through which we see the world. Mainly, the lens through which we see ourselves. Every threat leaves behind a story, and over a childhood of them, those stories harden into a belief about who you are. That belief feels like the truth. It isn’t. It’s just the meaning a frightened brain made in the dark.

Why it shows up in love

This connects straight back to attachment.

Your nervous system doesn’t only remember danger. It remembers what familiar feels like. If love came mixed with fear when you were small, your body filed that bundle away as normal. So later, the calm person sets off no alarm and registers as flat. No spark. And the intense one, the one whose moods you have to track, lights up every old circuit and feels like home.

That isn’t bad taste. It’s a nervous system reaching for the only version of love it was taught to recognize.

And here’s the hope

The same brain that learned all this can learn something new. The encoding isn’t permanent. The story can be rewritten. As you have new experiences with people who are actually safe, the alarm slowly learns that not every twig snap is a tiger, and the thinking brain gets to write a truer story about who you are.

You didn’t get a broken brain. You got one that learned to survive. Now it gets to learn it’s safe enough to stop running.

✦ ✦ ✦

This week’s practice

This week, we’re going to get curious about one of those stories. Not to argue with it. Just to find it and look at it in the light.

Since we are diving into something that could be traumatic, please remember Tools for Our Journey.

Most of us carry a negative belief about ourselves that runs underneath our relationships. It usually takes the shape of an “I am” statement. I am too much. I am not enough. I am unlovable. I am only wanted when I’m useful. I am safer alone.

Find somewhere quiet and ask yourself this. When it comes to love and belonging, what is my negative I am statement?

Let it come without editing it. You might feel it in your body before you find the words. Notice when you first remember believing it. Notice whose voice it sounds like, if it sounds like anyone’s. You don’t have to fix it or talk yourself out of it. Naming it is the work for today, because you can’t rewrite a story you can’t see.

If this brings up a lot, go gently. Put a hand where you feel it, and remember, this belief was a meaning your brain made in the dark. It was never the truth about you.

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You came by every one of these stories honestly. They were the meaning a frightened, growing brain made of a frightening world. They kept you bracing, and bracing kept you ready. But you’re allowed to find out who you are without the story now.

This is enough for today.

✦ ✦ ✦

With you on the path,

Erin

✦ ✦ ✦

A note on care

These letters are a companion to healing, not a substitute for therapy or medical care. If you are in crisis or thinking about harming yourself, please reach out to the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline (call or text 988 in the US), or your local emergency services. You deserve support that meets you in real time.

References

Ehlers, A., & Clark, D. M. (2000). A cognitive model of posttraumatic stress disorder. Behaviour Research and Therapy, 38(4), 319–345.

Herman, J. (1992). Trauma and recovery. Basic Books.

Maté, G. (2022). The myth of normal: Trauma, illness, and healing in a toxic culture. Avery.

Nelson, C. A., Fox, N. A., & Zeanah, C. H. (2014). Romania’s abandoned children: Deprivation, brain development, and the struggle for recovery. Harvard University Press.

Perry, B. D. (2002). Childhood experience and the expression of genetic potential. Brain and Mind, 3, 79–100.

Siegel, D. J. (2020). The developing mind: How relationships and the brain interact to shape who we are (3rd ed.). Guilford Press.

Spitz, R. A. (1945). Hospitalism: An inquiry into the genesis of psychiatric conditions in early childhood. The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, 1, 53–74.

van der Kolk, B. (2014). The body keeps the score: Brain, mind, and body in the healing of trauma. Viking.

You might have taken one of those quizzes that tells you your attachment style.

Anxious. The one who reaches. Who texts again, smooths things over, gives a little more so they won’t leave. Or avoidant. The one who pulls back, who goes quiet when someone gets too close, who would rather handle it alone.

Maybe when you got that label, it fit so well and made so much sense that now it feels like you have it for life. Like that’s just who you are now.

I want to give you a different understanding.

Your attachment style was never a fixed type you got stamped with. It’s a strategy. And strategies can change. This is something you built, often at a very young age, to get your needs met when getting them met directly didn’t feel safe.

To understand the strategy, you have to start with the need. We all have the same two needs underneath. We need closeness, and we need to not lose ourselves in it. So we’re all afraid of two things. We’re afraid of being abandoned, and we’re afraid of being engulfed. Having both of these fears does not indicate that something is wrong with you. That’s just part of being a human.

What gets called an attachment problem is the strategy you built around those fears. Some of us learned to push people away before they could get too close. Some of us learned to pull people in and hold on so they couldn’t leave. Most of us did both, depending on the relationship. None of that is because you have a need. It’s the strategy you use when the fear of not getting the need met arises.

That’s where the styles come from. Anxious is built around the fear of being abandoned. So the strategy reaches, holds on, and works to keep people from leaving. Avoidant is built around the fear of being engulfed. So the strategy keeps distance, stays self-reliant, pulls back when people get too close. And disorganized is both fears at once, wanting closeness and being terrified of it in the same breath.

There’s a simple way to get these needs met. You ask. You say I need you closer, or I need some space, and a safe person hears you and meets you there.

But most of us never got to learn that. When you were little, and you asked for what you needed, what happened? Maybe you got punished for asking. Maybe your needs got ignored, no matter what you did. Maybe you got blamed for even having them. Maybe it just didn’t matter, because nobody was listening.

So you stopped asking. You found other ways to get your needs met, because asking directly wasn’t safe. When that happens early enough and often enough, it shapes you. There’s a name for this kind of wound. It’s relational, or developmental, trauma, and it’s the root of what we call CPTSD. We’ll go deeper into that in the next letter. For today, I just want you to hold onto the simple version. Your attachment didn’t come from nowhere. It came from what you learned about closeness in a relationship or many relationships.

You didn’t learn this only from your family

We talk a lot about the family of origin, and that matters. But your first relationships in life weren’t only with your parents. They were your siblings. Your teachers. The relative who watched you after school. A coach. A babysitter. The first friend with whom you formed a bond. Then later, your first crush, your first relationship, the friendships that broke your heart. Every one of them taught you something about what closeness costs, and whether your needs were welcome.

The culture taught us too. It hands all of us rules about what we’re allowed to need. Some of us were taught to be agreeable and easy, to never be too much, to put everyone else first. Some of us were taught the opposite, to never show fear or sadness, to handle everything alone, to never look weak. Different messages, same result. We all learned that some of our needs were not safe to show.

This isn’t about blame. It’s about seeing how wide the training really was, so you stop believing the problem is something broken in you. Your attachment style isn’t a defect. It’s what you absorbed, from a lot of places, about how to stay safe and stay connected at the same time.

These patterns change more easily than you think

Here’s the part that holds all the hope, and it’s the part people get wrong.

We’re told our attachment is a fixed type. Anxious. Avoidant. Like it’s stamped on us for good. That’s just not true. Your limbic system, the emotional center of your brain, was shaped in relationship, and it keeps being shaped in relationship. Every relationship rewires it.

This is exactly why therapy works. People think therapy helps because of the advice. It’s not really that. It’s the relationship. When you sit with someone safe, week after week, and you bring your guard, and they don’t hurt you, your limbic system learns something new. Oh. This can be different. That relationship is rewiring you.

But it isn’t only therapy. Every time you show up differently in any relationship, you’re rewiring your limbic system. Every time you ask for what you need directly instead of going underground for it. Every time you let a safe person stay close. Every time you set a boundary, and the world doesn’t end. You’re laying down new wiring, one experience at a time.

The strategies were built in a relationship. They get rebuilt there, too. That’s the whole work we’re doing together in these letters. We’re planting seeds. You won’t see all of them grow at once, and you don’t need to. You just need to start with the most important relationship you will ever have. The relationship with yourself.

✦ ✦ ✦

This week’s practice

This week, get curious about where your strategy came from. Not to dig up pain. Just to understand it, with some compassion for the kid who figured it out.

Find somewhere quiet and sit with two questions. Write the answers down if you can.

What did I fear more as a child, being abandoned or being engulfed? Most of us know in our body which one cut deeper. Did you most fear being left, forgotten, or not chosen? Or being controlled, taken over, given no room to be yourself?

How did I learn to handle that fear in a way that worked then but doesn’t now? Did you become the one who never needs anything? The one who gives everything so they won’t be left? The one who keeps people at a distance so they can’t get in? Name your strategy. And then thank it. It kept you safe once.

If this brings something up, go gently. Remember the tools from our Tools For Our Journey letter. You don’t have to finish it in one sitting. Noticing is the whole beginning.

✦ ✦ ✦

You built these strategies when you were small and had no other options. They were smart. They worked. And the same way you learned them, in relationship, is the same way you get to unlearn them now.

You are not stuck with what you were handed.

With you on the path,

Erin

✦ ✦ ✦

A note on care

These letters are a companion to healing, not a substitute for therapy or medical care. If you are in crisis or thinking about harming yourself, please reach out to the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline (call or text 988 in the US), or your local emergency services. You deserve support that meets you in real time.

References

Maté, G. (2022). The myth of normal: Trauma, illness, and healing in a toxic culture. Avery.

Siegel, D. J. (2020). The developing mind: How relationships and the brain interact to shape who we are (3rd ed.). Guilford Press.

van der Kolk, B. (2014). The body keeps the score: Brain, mind, and body in the healing of trauma. Viking.

Walker, P. (2013). Complex PTSD: From surviving to thriving. Azure Co

“It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.”

— Jiddu Krishnamurti

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I want to say something to you that I wish someone had said to me. You are not failing at healing. You are trying to heal inside the same conditions that produced the wound. That asks for a very different kind of compassion than the kind you have probably been giving yourself.

Most of us imagine recovery as a private project. We left, or we are trying to leave, and now it is on us to repair what was broken in the quiet of our own lives. So when the healing is slow, when we keep getting pulled back, when we walk out of one harmful dynamic and somehow find ourselves in another, we reach for the only explanation we were ever handed. We decide the problem must be us.

I want to widen that lens. Because here is something the numbers make impossible to ignore. Narcissism in our culture is rising. And when narcissism rises, the number of people it wounds rises right alongside it. You are not an unlucky exception. You are part of a wave.

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The Rise Is Real, and It Is Measured

This is not a feeling about the world getting colder. It has been tracked. Narcissism scores among American college students rose roughly 30 percent between 1979 and 2006, before social media existed at scale. Then, from around 2010 to 2012, when smartphones moved these platforms off desktops and into our pockets, several related measures shifted in the same window. The platforms did not invent narcissism. They built a machine that rewards it. Self promotion gets reach. Outrage travels faster than nuance. Run that across hundreds of millions of people for fifteen years, and you get a culture quietly training itself in the exact behaviors the diagnosis is built to measure.

And it is far more common than you were told. You may have heard someone insist that only about one percent of people truly have it, as if your experience must be an exaggeration. The largest study we have, of more than thirty thousand adults, put lifetime prevalence closer to 6 percent, and even that is conservative, because the manual barely captures covert narcissism and does not name the biggest red flag of all. A persistent refusal of accountability is not even in it.

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The Wound Is Deep and Wide

Narcissism does not happen in a vacuum. It happens to someone. Every rise in the pattern also corresponds to a rise in the number of people walking around with the wound.

The CDC estimates that close to half of American adults have experienced psychological aggression from an intimate partner in their lifetime, and that does not even count what we absorb from parents, family, bosses, and coworkers. When you sit in a waiting room or a school pickup line, you are very likely sitting among other people carrying some version of what you carry. You were taught to feel like the only one. This is what I mean when I say it is not just you. Not as a slogan. As a literal description of the world you are healing in.

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Healing In A Toxic World

If healing feels harder than it should, it is not because you are weak or behind. It is because the very forces that produce narcissism at scale are still running while you try to recover. You are not healing in a neutral field. You are healing inside the conditions. Notice how each thing recovery asks of you, the culture pushes the opposite way.

Healing asks for connection. The opposite of trauma is belonging. Yet we live in one of the most individualistic cultures ever measured, where the self is the only unit that matters, and reaching out to others can feel like weakness. You are asked to rebuild trust in a place built to keep us separate.

Healing asks you to value tenderness. But we are constantly sorted by competition and rank, in which empathy reads as a liability, and worth is measured by how much you produce. The sensitivity that makes you loving is the same sensitivity that the culture keeps telling you to harden.

Healing asks for accountability and repair. And we live inside steep hierarchies where power concentrates at the top, and accountability does not follow it up there, which is exactly the condition harm needs to continue, because harm only persists where accountability cannot reach. You are trying to learn that people can own their impact in a world that keeps modeling the refusal to.

So if you have been gentle with everyone but yourself about why this is taking so long, let this be the correction. You are doing tender, countercultural work in hostile weather. Of course it is hard.

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What This Changes for You

I am not naming the sickness to leave you hopeless. I am naming it because the truth is the thing that finally lifts the self blame off your shoulders. Self blame is the glue that keeps the bond stuck. As long as you believe you caused it, you will keep returning to fix it, keep auditing yourself for the defect that invited it. The moment you understand you were standing in conditions far larger than you, the self interrogation loses its fuel.

None of this excuses the person who harmed you. There are always reasons, and there are never excuses. But your healing does not have to wait for the culture to change. You get to build a small, warm, accountable world inside the larger cold one. A few real relationships. Your own restored trust in your perceptions. A nervous system that has somewhere safe to land. That is not adjusting to a sick society. That is refusing to.

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This Week’s Practice

Self blame does not soften when we argue with it. It softens when we meet it with something gentler. The researcher Kristin Neff calls that something mindful self compassion, and she names three parts to it. We notice the pain instead of pushing it away. We remember we are not the only one carrying it. And we offer ourselves the same kindness we would offer a friend. This week’s practice walks you through all three on the page.

Find a few quiet minutes and your journal. Before you write, place a hand somewhere steady and take one slow breath out, longer than the breath in. Then move through the prompts in order, because the order is doing the work.

Mindfulness. What am I blaming myself for in my recovery right now? Name it plainly, without softening it or piling on. Name the emotion and where you feel it in your body.

Common humanity. Given everything in this letter, how many other people are likely struggling with this exact thing tonight? Write the sentence: I am not the only one, and this is part of being human in a world like this one.

Self kindness. What would I say to a dear friend who told me what I just wrote? Write it to them first if that is easier. Then change the name to your own and read it back as though it was always meant for you.

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Save this one for the next time the world tries to convince you the problem is you. It rose around you. It did not start in you. And you are not healing it alone.

I will see you next week.

Erin

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These letters are for education and reflection. They are not a substitute for professional care. If you are healing from narcissistic abuse, I encourage you to seek out a trauma-informed specialist, not a generalist, someone trained in the specific dynamics of relational trauma. If you are in crisis or thinking about harming yourself, please reach out to the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline by calling or texting 988 in the US, or contact your local emergency services.

References

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. (2011). The National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey (NISVS): 2010 summary report. National Center for Injury Prevention and Control.

Stinson, F. S., Dawson, D. A., Goldstein, R. B., Chou, S. P., Huang, B., Smith, S. M., . . . Grant, B. F. (2008). Prevalence, correlates, disability, and comorbidity of DSM-IV narcissistic personality disorder: Results from the Wave 2 National Epidemiologic Survey on Alcohol and Related Conditions. Journal of Clinical Psychiatry, 69(7), 1033–1045.

Twenge, J. M., Konrath, S., Foster, J. D., Campbell, W. K., & Bushman, B. J. (2008). Egos inflating over time: A cross-temporal meta-analysis of the Narcissistic Personality Inventory. Journal of Personality, 76(4), 875–902.

Hofstede, G., Hofstede, G. J., & Minkov, M. (2010). Cultures and organizations: Software of the mind (3rd ed.). McGraw-Hill.

Most of us were handed a script before we were old enough to question it. At first, it came through fairy tales, then movies, then every rom-com we ever laughed, then cried our way through. The arc was always the same. Love is the pining. Love is the chase through the airport. Love is the longing that finally gets rewarded with the kiss as the music swells and the credits roll.

We absorbed that arc so completely that we never thought to ask whether it was true. And here is the tender, complicated thing about that script. It did not just give us unrealistic expectations. It trained our nervous systems to recognize a certain feeling and call it love.

The feeling it taught us to chase was wanting.

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Healthy Love Is Liking, Not Wanting

Here is the first place the story comes apart. You can only want what you do not have.

Wanting requires a gap. A distance. An absence you are aching to close. The longing only exists because the thing is not yet yours, or not reliably yours, or always slipping just out of reach. The moment you truly have it, the wanting has nothing left to feed on.

So when we are taught that the feeling of love is the feeling of wanting, we are quietly being taught to fall in love with distance. With unavailability. With the ache itself.

But healthy love is not an ache. Healthy love is stable. It asks for consistency and some form of commitment. It is not a feeling you fall into but a relationship you actually have. Which means that real love is closer to liking than to wanting. It is the quiet, durable pleasure of someone who is reliably there.

And this is not just poetry. It is biology.

Neuroscientists have found that wanting and liking are two different systems in the brain, run by two different sets of chemistry. Wanting is the dopamine system. It is the engine of craving, pursuit, and anticipation, and it lights up most fiercely when a reward is uncertain. Liking is a quieter system, run more by our natural opioids, and it is the actual experience of pleasure and contentment once the thing is ours. The unsettling discovery is that you can want something intensely and barely like it at all.

That gap is the whole trap. The trauma bond runs on wanting. On intermittent reinforcement. On a dopamine system held permanently inflamed by not knowing which version of the person you will get today. The good days spike the craving and the bad days deepen it, and the longing gets mistaken for love precisely because it is so loud. But a screaming want system is not a measure of how much you love someone. It is a measure of how inconsistent they are.

When we equate love with pining, we are doomed to forever long for someone instead of actually liking and loving them.

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A Spark You Tend, Not an Explosion

Healthy love is not an explosion. It is a spark that you grow and tend until it becomes something steady enough to actually work with.

Love is not supposed to be all-consuming. It is not supposed to burn your house down. It is supposed to be the flame you warm yourself next to and cook your meals over. The fire that destroys and the fire that sustains are not the same fire, even though both are hot, and we were taught to chase the one that leaves only ash.

So much of the healing is letting our bodies relearn the difference. The blaze that consumes everything feels like passion when you have never known anything else. But you cannot build a life next to a wildfire. You can only build next to a hearth.

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The Reward Was Never the Chase

Here is where the story comes apart again. The happily ever after sells us a finish line. Chase the person, win the person, and then arrive at a permanent state of happiness. As if love were a prize you secure once and then possess forever. As if the feeling of wanting, held tightly enough, becomes a guarantee.

But there is no finish line. There is no arriving. Every real relationship will have ruptures. Misattunements. Moments where two nervous systems miss each other, and someone feels unseen.

A healthy relationship is roughly twenty percent rupture and eighty percent repair.

That ratio is not a flaw in the relationship. It is the relationship. The repair is where the trust actually gets built. The repair is where you learn, in your body and not just your mind, that you can be a disappointment to someone and still be safe with them. That a rupture is not an ending. That someone can hurt you and then turn toward you instead of away.

But we were never sold that part. The movie ended with a kiss. No one filmed the hard, ordinary, sacred work of two people taking accountability and finding their way back to each other again and again.

So most of us arrive at love profoundly underprepared. We have a low ceiling for the discomfort that repair requires, and underdeveloped skills for the very thing that makes lasting love possible. We brace for the rupture as proof that it was never real. When in truth, the rupture was just a part of the story no one ever showed us.

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What the Reward Actually Is

If the reward is not the chase, and it is not a permanent feeling, then what is it?

The reward of a healthy, long-term relationship is something the script never even mentioned. It is building something so trustworthy and so solid that it becomes a foundation. A place to stand. The ground beneath a life you get to build together.

Not a feeling you fall into. A structure you construct, repair by repair, until it can hold real weight.

And here is the part that changes everything once you feel it. A healthy relationship is supposed to be so consistent that the excitement stops coming from the relationship itself. The thrill moves to what you get to build inside of it.

When the ground stops shaking, you finally have somewhere to stand. The relationship becomes steady enough to disappear into the background, in the best possible way, and the aliveness shows up in the life you are creating together. The home. The work. The children. The ordinary mornings. The relationship is not the firework. The relationship is the foundation the whole celebration gets built on.

For those of us coming out of relationships that felt like standing on shifting sand, this is a radical reframe. We were taught that love was the dizzying part. The uncertainty. The not knowing where we stood. Stability felt like boredom because chaos felt like home.

So part of the unlearning is letting our bodies discover that steadiness is not the absence of love. Steadiness is what love actually feels like when it is real. The calm is not the relationship dying. The calm is the relationship working.

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A Gentle Invitation

You do not have to overhaul your understanding of love today. Just notice.

And if you feel up for it, let yourself journal the answer to some of these questions.

What does it feel like in my body to want?

What does it feel like in my body when I like someone or something?

If I had always known that love is liking and not wanting, how would that have changed my approach to dating?

What would a safe, healthy, consistent love feel like in my body?

Wanting reaches. Liking rests. One leaves you anxious and refreshing your phone. The other leaves you settled, even a little bored, in the best possible way. Neither answer is wrong, and you are allowed to not know yet. You are simply learning to feel the difference. That feeling is information, and it is there for you.

You were not broken for falling for the script. You were taught it before you could consent to it. And the same self that learned it is fully capable of unlearning it now.

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The kiss was never the ending. It was barely the beginning. The real love story is the one the cameras never stayed for, the slow and steady building of something that can actually hold you. And you are allowed to want that kind of love. The kind you do not have to chase.

With you in the unlearning,

Erin

References

Berridge, K. C., Robinson, T. E., & Aldridge, J. W. (2009). Dissecting components of reward: “Liking,” “wanting,” and learning. Current Opinion in Pharmacology, 9(1), 65–73.

Berridge, K. C., & Robinson, T. E. (2016). Liking, wanting, and the incentive-sensitization theory of addiction. American Psychologist, 71(8), 670–679.

Robinson, T. E., & Berridge, K. C. (1993). The neural basis of drug craving: An incentive-sensitization theory of addiction. Brain Research Reviews, 18(3), 247–291.

There is a particular kind of suffering that arrives after you leave. It does not feel like the clean ache of a relationship ending. It feels like something has been taken from you. The missing comes in waves that knock the wind out of you. You check their social media before you are even fully awake. You bargain with yourself constantly. You compose messages you do not send, then send ones you swore you never would.

If this is where you are right now, I want to say something clearly, because no one said it to me when I needed to hear it. What you are feeling is not heartbreak. It is withdrawal. And withdrawal is not about actually missing them. Withdrawal is also survivable. Not because you are strong enough to white-knuckle through it, but because there are real things, body-level things, that help you ride it out.

The people I work with often arrive convinced that the intensity of the missing is proof that the relationship was love. They have it backward. The intensity is proof of the chemistry. A bond built on intermittent reinforcement does roughly what a substance does to the nervous system. When you walk away, your body goes into detox. The pull you feel is not your heart telling you the truth. It is your biochemistry going through a known, predictable, time-limited process.

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The Two Drugs You Are Detoxing From

There is a name for the state a trauma bond manufactures, and naming it helps. It is called limerence. Limerence is that obsessive, all-consuming fixation on another person, the intrusive thoughts, the euphoria when they are warm, the crash when they go cold, the sense that you cannot feel right until they return. In a healthy bond, the early intoxication softens over time into something steadier and calmer. A trauma bond never lets it soften. It keeps you in a limerent state on purpose, because the hot-and-cold is what keeps the chemistry firing.

Here is what is happening underneath. Romantic obsession runs on dopamine, the same reward chemical that drives the high of a stimulant. The chase, the anticipation, the hit of a text back after silence, all of it spikes dopamine the way cocaine does. At the same time, the attachment itself runs on the body’s own opioids, the soothing, warm, all-is-well chemistry released in moments of closeness and relief. That is the calm flood you feel when they finally turn warm again after pulling away. So a trauma bond is not one drug. It is two at once. The dopamine of the chase, which is the stimulant, and the opioid of the relief, which is the sedative. You are essentially detoxing from cocaine and heroin at the same time.

I tell you this not to frighten you but to take the shame off you. When you understand that you are coming off two of the most powerful substances the body can make, all at once, the depth of the suffering finally makes sense. This is why willpower alone does not touch it. This is why people who would never relapse on anything else find themselves typing the message at two in the morning. You are not weak. You are in withdrawal from a real and serious chemical dependency, and withdrawal of this kind deserves real care. The good news, held within the science, is this. A drug-like state is a time-limited one. The chemistry that built the bond is the same chemistry that, left unfed, will slowly quiet and clear.

I am going to give you twenty things that help. We start with the body, because the craving lives in the nervous system long before it reaches your thoughts, and a settled body is what makes everything else possible. Then we steady the part of you that wants to reach back. Most of these are practices you do for yourself, with yourself. That is the point. We are slowly becoming the steady presence we kept looking for in them.

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Part One: Steadying the Nervous System

The craving is the surface. Underneath it is a dysregulated nervous system that learned to associate one person with both the threat and the relief. These first ten are for that deeper layer. They are not about willpower. They are about giving the body the safety cues it has been getting from the wrong source, and learning to give them to yourself.

1. Change your temperature.

The body responds to temperature faster than it responds to reason. When you feel anxious or angry, when everything is running too hot, cool yourself down. Splash cold water on your face. Hold an ice cube in your hand until the sharpness pulls you into the present. When you feel sad, heavy, shut down, warm yourself instead. Wrap your hands around a hot mug. Pull a warm blanket over you. You are not distracting yourself. You are sending the body a signal it cannot argue with, telling it that this moment is survivable.

2. Use the 3-4-7 breath.

When the wave crests, the fastest way back into your body is the breath. Breathe in through your nose for a count of three. Hold gently for a count of four. Exhale slowly through your mouth for a count of seven. Repeat three to five times. The long exhale activates the parasympathetic nervous system, the body’s rest and settle mode. That out-breath tells your body, in the only language it fully trusts, that there is time, there is space, and you can afford to release.

3. Move enough to shift the chemistry.

Movement changes what is circulating in the body. A brisk walk. A few flights of stairs. Yoga or gentle stretching, which calm the system rather than rev it up. Even ten minutes counts. This is the body learning it can feel alive without the chaos.

4. Discharge the activation.

Trauma and craving live as energy that wants to move. Animals shake it off after a threat passes, and so can we. Shake your hands and arms out hard. Push against a wall. Wrap yourself in a blanket and let yourself shiver or cry it through. You are not falling apart. You are completing a stress cycle that the relationship never let you finish.

5. Find oxytocin, including from yourself.

The body is craving connection chemistry it learned to get from one person. It can get it elsewhere. A long hug held past the awkward point. A pet curled against you. Time with people who feel safe. And here is the part we forget. Giving yourself a hug, arms wrapped around your own body, releases oxytocin, too. Real closeness, even closeness you offer yourself, gives the body what the bond was only counterfeiting.

6. Ground through your senses.

When the spiral is loud, the senses bring you back faster than thinking ever will. Slowly name five things you can see, four things you can hear, three things you can touch, two things you can smell, and one thing you are grateful for. The brain cannot fully spiral and orient to the present at the same time. This walks you, one sense at a time, out of the memory and back into the room you are actually sitting in.

7. Give the body deep pressure.

The nervous system settles under steady, even pressure, the way a swaddled infant settles. This is proprioceptive input, and it is deeply regulating. Wrap yourself tightly in a blanket. Lie under a weighted blanket and let its weight hold you down in bed. Get a massage if you can, or press your own palms firmly along your arms and legs. The body reads steady pressure as being held, and being held is exactly what the system is reaching for.

8. Feed and water the body like it matters.

Withdrawal makes us forget the basics, and a body running on no food, no water, and no sleep will feel every craving twice as loud. A glass of water. Protein, not just caffeine. Bed at a reasonable hour, even when sleep is difficult. You are not being indulgent. You are lowering the volume on the whole system.

9. Make a plan you can look forward to.

Once a week, put something on the calendar that is purely yours to look forward to. It does not have to be big. Binging a favorite show. Going out for ice cream. A long bath with the door locked. Here is the secret. Dopamine comes not just from the thing itself, but from looking forward to it. So let yourself think about how good it will be before it arrives. The anticipation itself is a clean hit of the very chemistry the bond used to hijack, and now you are the one supplying it.

10. Lay down a new track at night.

The late-night hours are when the bond is loudest, because the body is tired and the defenses are down. Build a wind-down that belongs to you. A warm shower. A hand on your own heart. A few slow breaths in the dark. You are not just getting through the night. You are slowly teaching your body that rest is safe, and that safety can come from inside you.

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Part Two: Riding Out the Craving

With the body steadier, we can meet the part of you that wants to reach back. These next ten are for the moment the urge surges and the mind begins to argue for the very thing that hurt you.

11. Name it as withdrawal.

The pull is a chemical event, not a sign that leaving was a mistake. When you call it a withdrawal, you take the wrong label off it. You stop reading the craving as longing, love, or destiny, and you start reading it as detox. That single act of renaming loosens its grip more than you would expect.

12. Try urge surfing.

A craving is a wave. It rises, peaks, and passes, usually within about 20 minutes. Urge surfing is not resisting the wave. It is letting it be there without acting on it. There is an old truth at the center of this. Pain multiplied by resistance equals suffering. The craving is the pain, and it is real, but most of what makes withdrawal unbearable is the fighting against it, the clenching, the panic that it should not be here. When you stop bracing and simply notice the urge, where it sits in your body, what it actually feels like, the suffering loosens even when the pain remains. You watch the wave swell, knowing it has to crest, and you ride it the way a surfer rides water, staying with it until it sets you down gently on the other side. Each wave you ride this way teaches your body that the urge is not an emergency and that you can feel it all the way through without obeying it.

13. Keep two truth lists in your phone.

When the missing hits, the mind quietly rewrites the person into who you wish they were. So you keep the truth where you can reach it fast, in the notes app on your phone, with you everywhere you go. Keep two lists. The first is what they actually did and actually said, in real quotes, in their own words, the things that made your stomach drop. The second is a list of their actual characteristics, who they really are when the charm wears off. Read both when memory becomes distorted. The lists remember what the craving makes you forget.

14. Find an accountability buddy.

Pick one person you will text before you reach out, not after. The moment you want to break no contact is the moment the mind has already rewritten the story, and a buddy holds the truth steady when you cannot hold it alone. If you do not have someone like this, you can build it. SLAA, which is Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous, exists for exactly this kind of bond. So do online and in person support groups for narcissistic abuse recovery. Reaching for that kind of support is not a sign that you are doing this wrong. It is a sign you understand what you are actually up against.

15. Make a plan for the wave of doubt and shame.

At some point, withdrawal will whisper that it was not that bad, that maybe you overreacted, that maybe this was all somehow your fault. That wave of doubt is also a wave of shame, and it turns on you. It is the most predictable part of detox, so you make your plan now, while you can think clearly. When the doubt and the self-blame hit, you read both truth lists. You text your buddy. You say to yourself, This is the bond talking, not my memory, and not the truth of what I am worth. You decide today what you will do, so the wave does not get to decide for you.

16. Finish one small thing.

A made bed. A watered plant. A single sent email. Completing something hands the brain a clean hit of dopamine that asks nothing painful of you. Bonus points and bonus dopamine when you write it down and put a check mark next to it. The crossing off is its own small reward. When the big thing feels impossible, the small finished thing is not a consolation prize. It is medicine, and it is chemistry working in your favor for once.

17. Show up consistently for yourself.

Intermittent checking is how the bond keeps its hold, the same way a slot machine keeps a hand on the lever. I highly recommend blocking them if you can. And if you cannot block, that is completely fine. If you do not feel ready, that is perfectly fine, too. This is not really about them at all. It is about becoming the consistent person for yourself, the one who shows up for you the same way every day, so your nervous system finally learns it can count on someone. That someone is you.

18. Delay, do not decide.

When the urge to contact them surges, you do not have to win the whole war. You only have to wait. Tell yourself you can reach out in one hour. Then in another hour. Delay is not denial. It is buying time for the wave to pass, and most of the time, by the time the hour is up, the urge has loosened enough that you no longer want to.

19. Write the unsent message.

Sometimes the body needs to say the thing more than it needs them to hear it. Open a note on your phone and write everything you want to send. Hold nothing back. Then close it without sending. The discharge is real even when the message never leaves your hands.

20. Remember, this too, shall pass.

The intensity feels permanent, but it isn’t. Nothing in the body holds at full volume forever, because nothing in us is permanent. Feelings are weather. They arise, they move through, and they pass, whether or not we do anything at all. The craving that feels like it will last the rest of your life is, in truth, already on its way out the moment it crests. Every wave you ride without reaching back is the bond losing its hold. The days when it feels impossible are not failures. They are detox. And you do not have to get through them by sheer force of will alone.

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Here is what I want you to hold on to on the worst nights. Withdrawal is not evidence that you made a mistake. It is evidence that the bond was real, chemical, and strong, and that you are now stronger than it. Every wave you ride without reaching back is the bond losing its hold and your nervous system finding its way home.

You will not feel this way forever. The intensity that feels permanent tonight is, in fact, the most temporary thing about this whole process. The missing softens. The constant bargaining quiets. One day, you will notice you forgot to check, and you will realize the wave came and went, and you barely felt it.

Until then, you ride it out. One wave, one breath, one finished small thing at a time. And you do not white-knuckle this alone.

With you in the unlearning,

Erin

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A Practice for This Week

The next time a wave hits, before you do anything else, try this. Place one hand on your chest and one on your belly. Breathe in for a count of three, hold for four, and out for seven. Do this three times. Then, instead of bracing against the urge, let it be there and simply watch it, the way you would watch a wave you know has to crest. Remember that the pain is real, but the suffering lives in the resistance, so you stop fighting, and you ride. Say to yourself, out loud if you can, this is withdrawal, not heartbreak, and it will pass. You are not trying to make the wave disappear. You are riding it, with your own steady hands on your own steady body, until it quiets on its own.

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This letter is for education and reflection. It is not therapy or a substitute for individual mental health care. If you are in crisis or thinking about harming yourself, please reach out to a licensed professional or a crisis line. In the US, you can call or text 988 to reach the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline.

A Note on the Science

The framing of trauma bonds as a withdrawal process, of limerence as a drug-like state driven by dopamine and the body’s own opioids, of cravings as time-limited waves, and of the nervous system practices described here draws on the following:

Burkett, J. P., & Young, L. J. (2012). The behavioral, anatomical and pharmacological parallels between social attachment, love and addiction. Psychopharmacology, 224(1), 1–26.

Dana, D. (2018). The polyvagal theory in therapy: Engaging the rhythm of regulation. W. W. Norton & Company.

Earp, B. D., Wudarczyk, O. A., Foddy, B., & Savulescu, J. (2017). Addicted to love: What is love addiction and when should it be treated? Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology, 24(1), 77–92.

Fisher, H. (2016). Anatomy of love: A natural history of mating, marriage, and why we stray (Rev. ed.). W. W. Norton & Company.

Levine, P. A. (2010). In an unspoken voice: How the body releases trauma and restores goodness. North Atlantic Books.

Linehan, M. M. (2015). DBT skills training manual (2nd ed.). Guilford Press.

Tennov, D. (1979). Love and limerence: The experience of being in love. Stein and Day.

van der Kolk, B. (2014). The body keeps the score: Brain, mind, and body in the healing of trauma. Viking.

Walker, P. (2013). Complex PTSD: From surviving to thriving. Azure Coyote Publishing.

The question is never ‘Why the addiction?’ but ‘Why the pain?’

— Gabor Maté

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You know it was bad. You have cataloged the harm. You can name the gaslighting, the devaluation, the moments that stripped you of yourself. You have read the books and recognized your relationship in every chapter. You can explain exactly what happened to you.

And still. There is a part of you that misses them.

This is the part of recovery that no one prepares you for. The shame of the missing. The bewilderment of still longing for the person who hurt you. The 3 a.m. ache that does not care what you know.

I want to tell you what is actually happening in your body.

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A Trauma Bond Is Not Love

What you are feeling is not love. Even if it feels exactly like love. Even if it has all the same textures of love. Even if love is the only word your mind has for the way you cannot stop reaching for someone.

A trauma bond is a condition of the nervous system. It is biochemistry. It is what happens when a body is run through a particular kind of cycle for long enough that the cycle itself becomes the home.

The cycle goes like this. There is a period of intensity, often unbearable. Devaluation, criticism, withdrawal, contempt. The body floods with cortisol and adrenaline. Then, without warning and without resolution, the intensity breaks. Affection returns. Sweetness. Apology. The reunion that feels like air after drowning.

In that reunion, the body floods with oxytocin and dopamine. The relief is so total that the nervous system marks the entire cycle as something to seek out. Not the cruelty. The relief that came after.

Over months and years, this rewires you. Your body begins to associate the person who caused the harm with the substance that ends the harm. They are the only one who can give you what only they have taken away. This is the loop. This is the bond.

It is not your judgment. It is not your character. It is a conditioning at the cellular level.

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Why You Cannot Logic Your Way Out

The neuroscience here matters because it explains the gap between what you know and what you feel.

When your nervous system has been wired through trauma bonding, your reflective brain can hold one truth while your survival brain holds a completely different one. You can know, with full clarity, that this person harmed you. You can know it in your prefrontal cortex. And your limbic system will still send signals through your body that say: that person is the source of relief. That person is home.

This is why you can read every book on narcissistic abuse, attend every workshop, journal every truth, and still find yourself reaching for your phone at 2 a.m.

Knowing is not the issue. Wiring is the issue.

This is why “just leave” does not work as advice. Because what people are actually being asked to do is detox while still ringing the bell that has rung in their body a thousand times to mean comfort.

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The Slot Machine

The piece that makes trauma bonding so much stronger than ordinary attachment is something behavioral psychologists have known since B.F. Skinner. It is called intermittent reinforcement.

Here is the rule: the most powerful conditioning is not consistent reward. It is an unpredictable reward. A pigeon trained on a consistent food schedule gives up quickly when the food stops. A pigeon trained on an unpredictable schedule will keep pressing the lever long after the food is gone. The unpredictability is what binds the bond.

This is why slot machines work. This is why we cannot put our phones down. And this is why trauma bonds are so much harder to leave than relationships that were consistently bad.

It is not that you loved them more. It is that the chaos was a more powerful conditioner than steady cruelty would have been. You learned to wait for the reward because the reward was rare and unpredictable. The waiting itself became the bond.

You did not do anything wrong. You met the most powerful conditioning system in behavioral science, in the body of someone you loved, with no warning that this is what was happening to you.

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You Are Not Missing Them

Here is the reframe that took me years to find.

You are not missing the actual person.

You are missing the version of them that existed in the relief moments. The one who was sweet after the cruelty. The one who promised it would not happen again. The one who, for a few hours or days, was the person you fell in love with.

That version is what addiction researchers might call the substance. It is not who they were most of the time. It was who they were, just often enough to keep you reaching.

When you grieve them, what you are grieving is mostly the version your nervous system bonded to. The one they showed you in the beginning and during the reunions. The one who, if you are honest, you have not actually been in a relationship with for a long time.

The grief is real. But the person you are grieving was never the whole person. They were a sliver that the rest of them used to keep you bonded.

Letting that land is part of the unbinding.

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The Body Can Be Unwired

Here is the part I want you to keep, especially on the days when the missing feels like it will never end.

Everything that was wired can be rewired.

Not by understanding. Not by willpower. Not by waiting it out. By giving your body, over time, consistent experiences of safety that are not paired with harm. By staying long enough in the absence of the cycle that the cycle stops being your nervous system’s idea of normal.

This is what no contact actually does. It is not a punishment. It is not a moral stand. It is a detox protocol. Distance from the source of the conditioning so the conditioning can fade.

The first weeks are the hardest because the body is in physical withdrawal. The middle stretch is hard for a different reason, when the body has quieted enough that the grief underneath it can finally surface. And then, slowly, something else begins. The reaching stops. The 3 a.m. ache thins. The voice that misses them gets quieter.

Not because you forced it. Because the wiring was given a chance to settle into something new.

The bond was not love. It was biology shaped by harm.

What comes next can be love. But love is something a regulated nervous system is capable of, not a bonded one. The work of the cocoon, the work of the unlearning, is what makes you capable of the real thing.

You have not failed at love. You have been bonded by something that was never love to begin with.

That is the difference. And it changes everything.

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A Small Invitation

This week, when the missing rises, try this.

Place a hand somewhere grounding. Heart, belly, or the back of the neck. Take one slow breath. And say, out loud or in your head, or write down in your journal:

This is my nervous system having a healthy response to an unhealthy situation.

The bond is not the same as love.

I am detoxing from chemistry. My body knows how to heal.

You do not have to believe it. You only have to let your body hear it.

That is enough for this week.

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With care,

Erin

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A note: These letters are a companion, not a replacement for therapy. If you are healing from narcissistic abuse or any form of relational trauma, please consider working with a trauma-informed therapist who specializes in this work. Not a generalist. Someone who understands trauma bonds, nervous system dysregulation, and the particular ways narcissistic abuse rewires the body.

References

Carnes, P. (1997). The betrayal bond: Breaking free of exploitive relationships. Health Communications.

Maté, G. (2008). In the realm of hungry ghosts: Close encounters with addiction. Knopf Canada.

Skinner, B. F. (1953). Science and human behavior. Macmillan.

van der Kolk, B. (2014). The body keeps the score: Brain, mind, and body in the healing of trauma. Viking.

There is a voice that doesn’t use words. Listen.

— Rumi

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Most of what gets written about healing from narcissistic abuse focuses on what comes out. Process the grief. Speak the truth. Name what happened. Reclaim the story.

All of that is real. None of it is the whole picture.

The other half of recovery, the half that does not get talked about enough, is what gets to come in. And in the early and middle stages, the honest answer is: not much. Not yet.

I want to tell you why.

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The Cocoon

When your nervous system has been under chronic relational threat for years, the body has to convalesce. The cells need quiet. The mind needs unstructured time. The body needs to be unwatched. The whole organism needs to be allowed, for a while, to be small and slow and contained.

This is the cocoon.

The cocoon is the work. Without it, nothing else integrates. The breakthroughs do not stick. The clarity arrives and then leaves before you can hold onto it. The body cannot keep what it has not been allowed to rest inside of.

Inside the cocoon, something starts to happen. Slowly at first, then more steadily. The voice that has been buried under the chorus of everyone else’s interpretation of your life becomes audible again.

The cocoon is fragile, though. And the world does not respect it.

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The Thought Holes

Dana Morningstar, in Out of the Fog, names something I have watched happen to nearly every survivor I have worked with. She calls them thought holes.

Her metaphor is precise. Thought holes are to thinking what potholes are to a vehicle. Hit one and the damage strands you on the road to healing. Leaves you stuck back in the emotional fog you were trying to climb out of.

Thought holes, in her framing, are unintended bad advice from others. They come from therapists, friends, family, lawyers, priests, doctors, anyone. They are usually well-meaning. The people delivering them often believe they are helping. The damage comes anyway.

The thought holes I hear most often from the survivors in my practice sound like:

“It takes two.”

“You have to take responsibility for your part.”

“Why didn’t you just leave?”

“You picked him, though.”

“Forgiveness will set you free.”

“It couldn’t have been that bad if you stayed.”

“Maybe you were just too sensitive.”

Each one was delivered with good intent by someone who has not read the literature, has not lived inside the dynamic, and has no framework for what coercive control actually does to a person. Each one pierces the cocoon.

The damage is not just emotional. It is structural. A cocoon that gets punctured every time you tell your story stops being able to hold you. The convalescence cannot be completed. The work cannot land.

This is why energy protection during recovery is not optional. It is not a weakness. It is not avoidance. It is the precondition for everything else.

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The Deeper Layer

Here is the harder truth.

The thought holes do not stay outside.

After you hear “It takes two” enough times, you start hearing it in your own voice. After enough people ask “Why didn’t you just leave,” that question becomes your question. After the chorus of “You picked him” lands enough times, you become the one saying it to yourself.

The voice in your head that blames you was installed, not born.

It is the chorus of every thought hole that ever pierced the cocoon, now playing back from the inside.

There is a name for the mechanism that makes other people blame you in the first place. Social psychologist Melvin Lerner identified it in 1980, in The Belief in a Just World. When people cannot bear to face the randomness of harm, they look for what the survivor did to deserve it. Blaming the survivor protects the observer’s belief that the world is fair. It does nothing for the survivor.

And there is a name for why that blame, once delivered, becomes so hard to shake. Ronnie Janoff-Bulman’s 1979 research on self-blame in trauma survivors documented something that has held up across decades. Self-blame can feel like control. If you caused it, the logic goes, you can prevent it next time. The cost is your sense of self. The benefit is the illusion that you are not at the mercy of forces you cannot predict.

Both mechanisms work in the same place at the same time. The people around you protected themselves from the randomness of harm by locating its cause in you. And you protected yourself from the randomness of harm by accepting that location, because accepting it gave you something to do with the chaos.

This is how internalized blame works. The voice that started as the chorus around you becomes the voice inside you. And once it is inside, it is very hard to recognize as foreign.

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The Reclamation

The voice has an origin. The origin is not you.

This is the sentence that, once it lands, changes the relationship to the voice entirely. Not because the voice stops speaking. It does not. The change is that once you can hear whose voice is actually speaking, the argument is over. There is nothing to prove. The voice was never yours to argue with.

Underneath the borrowed voice is the one that has been quiet for a long time. Yours. The one that knew what was happening when no one else could see it. The one that registered the wrongness when everyone around you was insisting things were fine. The one that is still here.

The cocoon is what gives that voice room to become audible again. The cocoon is what keeps the thought holes from puncturing the work.

The cocoon is not permanent. Eventually it opens. Eventually the work becomes load-bearing enough that the voice on the outside can no longer install itself on the inside.

But the cocoon comes first.

If recovery feels slow right now, that is the work. Even when it does not look like it.

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A Small Invitation

This week, listen for the voice. Not to argue with it. Not to fix it. Just to notice.

When a thought arrives that sounds like blame or shame or “you should have known better,” pause. Place a hand somewhere that feels grounding. And ask yourself:

Whose voice is this, actually? Where did I first hear it?

You do not have to answer. You only have to notice that the voice has an origin. And the origin is not you.

That is enough for this week.

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With care,

Erin

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A note: These letters are a companion, not a replacement for therapy. If you are healing from narcissistic abuse or any form of relational trauma, please consider working with a trauma-informed therapist who specializes in this work. Not a generalist. Someone who understands trauma bonds, nervous system dysregulation, and the particular ways narcissistic abuse rewires the body.

References

Janoff-Bulman, R. (1979). Characterological versus behavioral self-blame: Inquiries into depression and rape. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 37(10), 1798–1809.

Lerner, M. J. (1980). The belief in a just world: A fundamental delusion. Plenum Press.

Morningstar, D. (2017). Out of the fog: Moving from confusion to clarity after narcissistic abuse. Morningstar Media.

“You are the sky. Everything else, it’s just the weather.”

— Pema Chödrön

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Picture a vortex. A swirling column of energy, chaotic and magnetic, pulling everything within reach toward its center. That is what it feels like to be near someone who has hurt you in this particular way. Their crises, their accusations, their charm, their cruelty, their endless need. All of it spinning. All of it generating a gravitational pull that is almost impossible to feel without being moved.

This is not your imagination. And it is not your weakness.

The people who hurt us in narcissistic relationships create a real energetic field. Their nervous systems run hot. They generate chaos because chaos is the medium through which they get what they need: attention, supply, control, regulation through other people’s reactions. Once we have been in close proximity to that field for any length of time, our nervous systems learn to orient to theirs. We become tuned to their frequency. Their moods become our weather.

When we step out of the vortex, even partially, the pull does not stop. It often gets worse. Because the vortex needs us. And we, in ways we did not choose and did not understand, have learned to need it back.

The Many Ways We Get Pulled Back In

We get sucked in by defending ourselves. They say something untrue, something cruel, something designed to land in the softest place. And our whole body reaches to set the record straight. No, that is not what happened. No, that is not who I am.

We get sucked in by trying to make them understand. We craft the perfect explanation. We rehearse it in the shower, in the car, at three in the morning. If we could just find the right words. If we could just say it in a way they could hear, then they would see.

We get sucked in by watching. Checking their social media. Asking the mutual friend. Listening for the car door. Tracking their life from a distance because some part of us still believes that if we know what they are doing, we will be safer. We are not safer. We are tethered.

We get sucked in by fear, by obligation, by guilt. What if they hurt themselves? What if they are struggling? What if I am the bad one for leaving? Their pain becomes our responsibility. Their consequences become our problem to solve.

We get sucked in by replaying. The mental loops. The imagined conversations. The trial we hold for ourselves at three in the morning, where we are both prosecutor and defendant. Their voice in our head, criticizing, accusing, demanding, even when they are nowhere near us.

This is how the vortex stays alive. It does not need them to be in the room. It only needs your attention.

Coming Back to Your Side of the Street

There is a concept in twelve-step recovery called staying on your side of the street. The street has two sides. Yours, and theirs. On your side is everything you can actually do something about: your thoughts, your choices, your reactions, your body, your healing, your life. On their side is everything else. What they think of you. What they say about you. What they do, who they tell, what they refuse to understand. None of that lives on your side.

You cannot heal on their side of the street. You cannot even stand there for very long without losing yourself.

So we practice coming back. Over and over. Not perfectly. Not all at once. We notice the pull, and we name it. I am over there again. I am rehearsing. I am tracking. I am defending in my head. And then, gently, with as little self-criticism as we can manage, we come home.

What does that look like in practice? It looks like dropping the rope in a tug of war you were never going to win. It looks like letting them be wrong about you. It looks like refusing to explain. It looks like turning your attention, again and again, to the only life you actually get to live. Yours.

Your side of the street is not a punishment. It is not isolation. It is the only place where you can actually grow something. Your peace, your boundaries, your discernment, your self-trust. None of that can be cultivated in the vortex. All of it grows on your own ground.

This is not abandonment of them. It is the reclaiming of you.

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This Week’s Practice: This Side of the Street

When you notice yourself spinning, pulled back into the vortex, pause. Place a hand on your chest. Ask yourself one question:

Whose side of the street am I on right now?

If the answer is theirs, you do not need to fix it. You do not need to keep thinking about it. You only need to come home.

Try this: write down the thought that has you spinning. Underneath it, write: This is on their side of the street. And then this: What does my side of the street need from me right now?

Sometimes it is water. Sometimes it is rest. Sometimes it is one phone call to one safe person. Sometimes it is putting your phone in another room.

Whatever it is, it is yours. And it is enough.

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Come home to yourself this week. Again, and again, and again. That is the work. That is the whole work.

With you,

Erin

Most people who come into my office are confused, disillusioned, and desperate for answers.

They have usually already done what most of us do. They have gone online. They have found a red flag list. Sometimes twenty signs. Sometimes fifty. They have read it carefully, looking for the moment they should have known better.

He walked in front of me on vacation. He hated the holidays. He did not introduce me to his coworkers. The list makes the whole thing feel solvable. As if the answer was always there, and if you just memorize the right warning signs, you will be safe next time. As long as you never date anyone who hates the holidays, you will never get hurt like that again.

I wish it worked that way. It just doesn’t.

People are not red flag lists. Even people with the same diagnosis do not fit a clean mold. Two narcissists can look completely different. One is loud and arrogant. The other is quiet, bookish, and beloved by his community. People are different every time. You cannot study one and predict the next. You cannot build a profile that protects you.

So trying to figure another person out lands in one of three places. It confuses you further. It gives you reasons that turn into excuses. Or it sends you into hypervigilance, scanning every new person for signs, never able to rest. None of it keeps you safe.

Here is what does.

People are different. Abuse is the same. It does not matter what the person looks like, how they were raised, what diagnosis they have, what kind of childhood they describe. Abuse is always a pattern. And patterns cannot exist where accountability and repair are present.

That is the whole thing. That is the only assessment you ever need.

There are always reasons. There are no excuses.

Reasons explain behavior. They do not change behavior. The moment we let a reason become an excuse, we are the ones holding the relationship together with our understanding, while their behavior stays exactly where it was.

So instead of tracking red flags, reasons, or diagnoses, we track this: how is accountability handled when harm has been done?

Healthy relationships are hard work and not easy for anyone. Even the best partnerships have moments of rupture, misattunement, and hurt. However, the research is clear- it is not the absence of conflict that defines a thriving relationship, it is the presence of repair. Roughly 20 percent of relating is rupture. The other 80 percent is finding the way back.

Real intimacy is built in the repair. And you cannot have repair without accountability.

The only red flag is the inability to take accountability

Real accountability is not a sincere apology. It is not one thoughtful conversation. It has three parts.

Acknowledgment. They name what they did. Cleanly. Without softening it, without rewriting it into something you both contributed to equally.

Understanding of impact. They sit in what their behavior did to you. They do not need you to manage their guilt about it.

Changed behavior over time. Not perfection. Consistency. What they do over weeks and months matches what they said in the conversation.

When all three are present, harm becomes a moment, not a pattern. The sequence breaks.

When they are absent, the pattern continues. And patterns without accountability do not stay where they are. They escalate. A relationship without accountability is toxic at best and usually turns abusive over time.

This is why you do not need fifty red flags. You do not need to decode their childhood or their diagnosis. You only need to watch one thing: their ability, or inability, to take accountability after harm has been done.

If accountability shows up, the pattern shifts. If it does not, the pattern escalates.

That is the whole assessment.

You did not miss the red flags. You were looking at the wrong thing. Now you know what to watch for.

With you, Erin

Before you reflect

These questions can stir things up. Before you open your journal, take a moment to ground.

Place both feet on the floor. Feel the weight of your body in the chair. Take one slow breath in, and a longer breath out. Look around the room and name three things you can see. Remind yourself: I am here. I am safe enough. I am only noticing.

This week’s reflection

• What reasons did I find that became excuses? What did I tell myself about their childhood, their stress, or their wounds that softened what their behavior was actually doing to me?

• What patterns have emerged across my relationships? Looking back, where did the same thing keep happening in slightly different forms?

This is a reflection, not an interrogation. You are not on trial. You are gathering information about your own life, gently and on your own terms. If anything feels like too much, you can close the journal and come back another day.

Last week, you opened your journal and answered a single question. What you are hoping most to learn, and what you are hoping most to unlearn. I hope writing it felt like something. Maybe relief. Maybe grief. Maybe a tightness in the chest you did not expect. Whatever came up, it was honest, and that is everything.

Before we go any further, I want to give you something to do before you sit down with that journal again.

Because here is what no one tells you about journaling for trauma recovery: you cannot write your way out of dysregulation. If your nervous system is flooded, your pen will only deepen the flood. The body has to come first. Always.

So this letter is the foundation. Every letter from here forward will invite you to write, to reflect, to look at something you may not have wanted to look at. None of that will land if you go in completely dysregulated.

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A Note Before We Begin

These letters are a companion. They are not a replacement for therapy.

If you are healing from narcissistic abuse or any form of relational trauma, the most powerful thing you can do for yourself is find a trauma-informed therapist who specializes in this work. Not a generalist. Someone who understands trauma bonds, nervous system dysregulation, and the particular ways narcissistic abuse rewires the body. The right therapist is the single greatest accelerant of healing I have ever seen, and I waited until I was thirty-six to find mine. I do not want you to wait that long. If you are already in that work, beautiful. These letters can sit alongside it. If you are not yet, please consider this a gentle invitation.

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What These Letters Will Be

Letters of Unlearning is a weekly companion. Every issue brings you a feature letter from me, an honest look at one piece of the recovery terrain. Some weeks, I will share the science of what is happening in your body. Other weeks, I will bring you stories, including my own and those of the people I have walked alongside in my practice. There will be exercises. There will be prompts. There will be moments where I gently challenge a belief you may not have realized was running the show.

Everything I offer is a suggestion. You get to opt in. You get to opt out. You can do an exercise once and never again. You can skip a letter entirely. You can adapt the prompts to fit your life or set them down because today is not the day. You are the authority on your own healing. I am only ever a guide.

So this letter, today, is the one I want you to come back to. Because every time you sit down to do the work that follows, the protocol is the same.

You settle the body first.

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Why We Regulate Before We Reflect

When your nervous system perceives danger, even old danger that lives in memory rather than the present moment, your prefrontal cortex goes quiet. That is the part of your brain you need for reflection, for nuance, for self-compassion, for new insight. When the body is in survival mode, that part of you is not online. You can sit with a journal for an hour and produce nothing but the spiraling thoughts you have already had a thousand times. You can also, if you push too hard, retraumatize yourself.

This is not your fault. This is how human nervous systems work. It is also why every trauma-informed therapist trains you to ground before going into the material.

Here is the promise of this work: when you give your body a few minutes of safety first, the journaling becomes something different. It becomes a conversation with yourself rather than a confrontation. You can hear your own wisdom. You can let what is true rise.

Ninety seconds of regulation. That is usually all it takes.

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The Tools

These are the practices I teach my clients before we move on to anything harder. You do not need all of them. You need to know one or two that work for your particular body on a given day. You can try them and discard the ones that don’t feel right.

The 3-4-7 Breath.

This is my favorite regulation exercise and one I use most often on myself and my clients. Breathe in through your nose for a count of three. Hold gently for four. Exhale slowly through your mouth for a count of seven. Repeat three to five times. The long exhale stimulates the vagus nerve directly, which is the body’s brake on the stress response. This is your emergency tool. Use it before journaling, in the middle of the night when worry wakes you, before a difficult conversation, anytime your chest tightens.

Grounding Through the Senses.

Place both feet flat on the floor and notice the contact. Then look around the room and find five things you can see. Four things you can hear. Three things you can touch. Two things you can smell. One thing you can taste, even if it is just the inside of your mouth. End by saying one thing you are grateful for out loud or the mantra, “I am alright, right now.” This brings you back into the present, where you are safe.

The Butterfly Hug.

Cross your arms over your chest, fingertips just below your collarbones, so your hands look like the wings of a butterfly. Close your eyes or soften your gaze. Tap your hands alternately, left, right, left, right, slow as a heartbeat. Breathe. Continue for one to two minutes. This is bilateral stimulation, the same principle behind EMDR therapy. It tells the brain you are safe enough to integrate.

Walking Outside.

When breath and grounding are not enough, sometimes the answer is to leave the room. Put on shoes. Leave the phone behind or silence it completely. Notice the ground under your feet. Notice the sky. Walking is inherently bilateral, integrating the two hemispheres of the brain in a way no journal can. Even ten minutes counts. Even pacing your hallway counts if leaving the house feels like too much today.

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This Week’s Practice

Open your journal. At the top of a fresh page, write the date and Personal Toolkit.

Then take a few minutes to consider: which of these four practices feels most accessible to you? Which one do you want to try first? Are there other regulation tools you already have that work for your body, things you have stumbled into over the years that bring you back to yourself? Walking the dog. A specific song. Hot tea. Cold water on your face. The shower. Your hands in the dirt.

Write them down. All of them. The ones from this letter you want to try, and the ones you already know belong to you. This is the beginning of your own personal toolkit, in your own handwriting, in your own words.

There is no right answer. There is only what works for the particular nervous system that lives in your particular body. You are the only one who can know.

I will be back next week.

In the meantime, breathe.

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A Permission Slip

Some weeks, you will not have the bandwidth for any of this. You will read the letter, mean to do the practice, and then survival will take everything you have. That is also okay. The tools do not expire. The work waits. You begin again the moment you are ready, with no debt accrued.

You are not behind. There is no wrong way to do this.

Most stories start at the beginning. But our story together will have to start right where you are today. In the messy middle.

Some of you have been in the messy middle for weeks. Some for years. Some for decades. And no matter how long you have been there, what I want to offer you today is hope. Not through testimonials or client success stories, even though I have those too. I want to offer you hope by sharing my own journey.

If there were a reward given in my high school for being most likely not to succeed, I probably would have won it by a large margin. I came from a very dysfunctional home with a lot of abuse. I was bullied mercilessly in junior high. By the time I got to high school, I had endured so much trauma that I would go entire days without uttering a single word. I was a ghost of myself most of the time. I began to use alcohol and drugs to feel anything other than the pain of being inside my own life and my own body. My dad died during my senior year of high school, and soon after, I left to go live in the college dorms. Little did I know how vulnerable I would be to what came next.

Our eyes met at a party, and it felt like we were the only two people alive in the entire universe. The first month together was the best I had ever felt in my entire life. I never knew anything could feel like that. We ran through a car wash and kissed passionately, drenched with soapy water. We stayed up all night staring into each other’s eyes, telling each other every hope and every fear. I thought, this must be what love feels like.

I was so in love that I didn’t notice the criticisms at first, or how they had quietly escalated into put-downs. I thought he was just being honest because he loved me. Before I knew it, he was accusing me of flirting at parties, of staring at men I hadn’t even seen. Then came the public humiliation. Then the violence. And afterward, he would cry and tell me I was his soul mate and that he had never loved anyone like this before. I told myself that the universe wouldn’t let me feel this way about someone unless we were meant to be together forever.

The abuse eventually escalated to the point that I saw my life flash before my eyes more than once. Leaving was the hardest thing I’ve ever done, but I knew my life depended on it. Even though I couldn’t sleep from the constant ache in my heart or eat because of the lump in my throat, I kept going. I promised myself that if I ever truly healed from this, I would help others do the same. I was 19 years old.

I wish I could tell you that was the end of my story. But I remained trapped in the messy middle for decades. Constantly caught in trauma bonds, without a name or language for it. While no one ever put their hands on me again, that first relationship had rewired my nervous system for a particular kind of emotional roller coaster. For years, I chased the euphoric high of being adored one moment, only to crash through the withdrawal of being diminished, betrayed, and abandoned the next. Different faces, different places, but always the same script and the same invisible plotline.

I earned my master’s in psychology and began my clinical work, hoping to help myself along the way. I did a lot of therapy and cycled through a lot of therapists. I read every self-help book I could find and devoured the psychology literature. And the entire time, I never really found what I was looking for: an answer to why this kept happening to me and how to make it stop.

I was thirty-six years old when I finally found a therapist who specialized in narcissistic abuse recovery. It was in that room that I figured out everything I needed to know and finally healed. I began a practice specializing in narcissistic abuse recovery and trauma bonding, and I met my husband, all in the same month.

I know how hard this recovery can be. I have had to climb my way out of the depths of hell many times, just to be pushed back in. But I also know the messy middle is not your destiny. I have watched people arrive in my office completely undone, convinced they would never feel like themselves again, and I have watched those same people find their way back. Not to who they were before, but to someone truer. Someone they actually recognize.

That is the journey I am here to walk with you.

Since specializing for the last decade, I have watched the conversation around narcissistic abuse and trauma bonding grow enormously. People now have access to information I never had, and that matters. What I also know is that information alone was never enough for me, and it isn’t enough for the people I sit with either. Knowing what happened, or even what kind of person does this, is only the beginning.

The deeper work is in the unlearning.

And I want to be specific about what that means, because it is bigger than most people realize when they start this journey. The unlearning is not just about what the abuse taught you. That you are too much, or not enough. That love always comes with conditions. That you have to earn your place in someone’s life. Those things absolutely need to be unlearned, and we will do that work together.

But we also have to go back further. Because most of us arrived at that relationship already carrying a curriculum. Messages absorbed in childhood about what we deserved, what love looked like, how much of ourselves it was safe to show, and how agreeable we needed to be to remain loved. That curriculum is what made us vulnerable long before this person ever arrived. And until we examine it honestly, we will keep living by its rules without even realizing it.

That is what these letters are for. Unlearning what the abuse taught you, and unlearning what conditioned you for it in the first place.

I have walked this path. I have been guiding people on this terrain for a long time. I know the way home.

I hope you will join me.

This Week’s Practice

Before the next letter arrives, I want you to do one thing. Go get a dedicated journal for this work. Something that belongs entirely to this journey, something you choose with intention. It doesn’t have to be expensive or beautiful. It just has to be yours.

When you have it, open to the first page and write the date at the top, then answer this in whatever way feels honest.

What am I hoping most to learn, and what am I hoping most to unlearn?

There are no right answers. This is not a test. It is the first conversation between you and yourself, and that conversation is the whole point of everything that comes next.