“I miss you…”
Emma is in her zone. We’ve all been in that zone.
You know the zone I’m talking about.
Not the flashy, girlboss kind you see in Pinterest quotes. This is real shit. This is the ‘I’m finally getting over that malignant narcissist with no contact’ zone.
Apartment clean? Check. Body strong? Check. Mind strong? Emma thinks it is. But she is about to find out there is still work to do.
Her mornings start with deadlifts and lemon water, not tears and gut-wrenching over-analysis. She doesn’t flinch when her phone pings anymore. The silence that used to scream now feels like welcomed peace.
After months of no contact from her ex, Jake, and clawing her way out of the emotional fog, she is relearning what a full meal and a full breath feel like. She feels solid.
Grounded.
Almost free.
And that’s exactly when it happens.
A single text message.
Just three words. From him. Jake.
“I miss you.”
And that’s all it takes.
No apology. No accountability. Just a breadcrumb. A flicker of a whisper. That proverbial slap in the face with a dead rat.
And as insulting as it is, it still floods her bloodstream like crack to a junkie.
Her heart speeds up. Her thoughts spiral. In a flash, the version of herself she worked so hard to build vanishes in seconds and she crashes out.
And the worst part?
He didn’t even notice she was doing that ‘no contact’ thing. This time she made it to three months, four days, six hours and eleven minutes. A personal best.
Have you ever been there?
Have you ever felt that sickening thrill, that rush of confusion and longing, when the person who shattered you suddenly throws you a breadcrumb and you feel like things could be different with them.
This time maybe things can be better. Be honest with yourself. How many ‘this times’ have you endured? I know I have gone through way too many.
The Lingering Fog
You would think the silence would bring peace. The narcissist is gone and so is the torment. So that should make you happy. Right?
Right?!?!?
Wrong. For survivors of narcissistic abuse, the silence can feel like punishment, even if they are the ones enforcing it. In fact, it feels like withdrawal from an addiction. But you do what you must do and what many social media influencers tell you to do. You cut off the narcissist and you go no contact.
But even after months of no contact, the fog doesn’t always lift. Some days are clear. Other days, you’re standing in your kitchen and forget what you were doing. You go to bed with tightness in your chest, and you wake up already tired.
That fog isn’t weakness. Girl, it’s a trauma response.
When someone has slowly eroded your reality, love-bombed your nervous system, and gaslit your memories, your brain stays stuck in a kind of suspended animation. You may have escaped the person, but your body still thinks you’re in danger.
Every moment of joy feel fragile. Like it might be taken away if you do the slightest wrong thing. You question yourself. You double-check your words before you post, text, speak. You replay old conversations and try to see them from a million different perspectives just to see if you missed something.
This is what it’s like when you were conditioned to work for love.
Why TF do I keep doing this to myself?
Before you blame yourself for the relapse, let’s break down what’s really going on in your brain.
Most people think leaving a toxic relationship is the hard part.
But the real war starts after you walk away.
It’s not just your heart that’s confused. It’s your brain.
Narcissistic abuse creates a cycle of reward and punishment that literally rewires your neural pathways. That love-bombing that feels so good? It’s swiftly followed by sudden withdrawal, then intermittent validation. It’s a psychological loop that mirrors addiction. Every small “crumb” of approval lights up the same brain centers as drugs.
So, when he slides into your DMs like the slimy creep he is, it’s always something that takes him a mere five seconds to type. But your brain, it’s the dopamine motherload. That good feeling though? It doesn’t come from love. It comes from the unpredictable nature of the reward. It’s the same reason people get hooked on slot machines.
At the same time, your cortisol levels (your stress hormone) have likely been running high for months or even years. Your body has adapted to chaos. It’s used to walking on eggshells.
So, when you finally find peace, your system can interpret it as unfamiliar, even unsafe. Calm begins to feel like boredom. Silence starts to feel like rejection.
The result?
You crave the exact thing that’s hurting you, and you second-guess the very progress you’ve made. Your nervous system has been trained to survive inside a war zone. Now that you’ve left the battlefield, your brain doesn’t know what to do with all this annoying peace.
It’s just your typical tangled up brain wires.
Why does healing feel like a full-time job? Because you’re not just recovering from heartbreak. You’re actually deprogramming yourself. In short, you’re detangling a lifetime of gnarled up brain wires and knitting them all up into a beautiful, colorful sweater called insight.
Because you weren’t just manipulated emotionally. You were trained to not only navigate but literally thrive in survival mode. People who don’t have your trauma bonds could never survive the situations that come easily to you. It’s a strength you have, but also a debilitating weakness. And it’s not something you snap out of just because you white knuckled your way through a few months of no contact.
The strength and weakness you have is that you learned to anticipate moods. To edit yourself before speaking. To doubt your memories. To silence your needs. All of that takes time to unlearn. And the worst part? You might not even realize it’s still happening until the next trigger hits you like a wave and you become unhinged for another guy or girl.
But here’s the truth most people won’t say out loud. You are not messed up. You’re not crazy. You’re not too sensitive, or dramatic, or weak.
You were rewired for survival. With that comes powerful strength.
And now, you get to rewire and leverage that hidden strength to build the vibes you want in your life. Not the depressed, clingy, lonely vibes. The strong, empowered, “I can take on the world’ vibes. Those vibes are yours to build when you want to.
But simply avoiding the narcissist is not going to make this go away. No. You need to get in there, friend, and do the deep work if you plan to heal from this. If you don’t, the next narcissist will just repeat the same cycle with you again.
And you already know what special kind of hell that leads to.
You don’t need closure from them. You need connection with yourself.
Now it’s time to rebuild. On your own terms.
That’s why I created the Emotional Recovery Journal.
It’s a 30-day guided practice designed to help you reconnect with your intuition, break out of trauma loops, and rebuild the version of yourself that never needed their approval to begin with.
Normally I’d charge $20 for this kind of journal. But you can download it free, right now, because healing should never feel out of reach.
You’ve already done the hardest part by walking away.
Now take the next step. For you.
You were rewired for survival. Now you get to rewire for power.
[Download the free journal here]