How Trauma Bonds Keep You Hooked on a Narcissist

Dealing with a narcissist is like dealing with a (sometimes dangerous) infant strapped into the high chair of narcissism. You have been made to feel like it's your job to figure out how to supply, entertain, and clean up after an immature person. An infantile person who enjoys refusing to take their food, screaming because they are hungry, making a mess without a care in the world, throwing their spoon on the floor, laughing gleefully when they watch you pick it up over and over, turning their bowl over then throwing it on the floor and enjoying their power over you to make you responsible for responding to their actions to try to get things back to some semblance of order. But their agenda was never to contribute to order, their agenda was to see how much they could control you and make you react.

Does the infant care how much effort you have been through? (empathy) NO. Do they want things in order? Making things go well so they can be content is not a motivation for them, controlling you is. If you become frustrated and yell NO, they scream and wail that you are being abusive just as if you had screamed at an infant in a highchair. And every time you make an independent move to walk away they scream even more. Every move you make to do anything besides continue playing the game of picking up after them and serving them is seen as a sign they are losing control of you. And this pops their grandiose bubble of being the center of the universe. A frightening thing if you are strapped in a highchair and feel powerless.

Now they have successfully trained you to take responsibility for them and for making them happy. Because you were an intelligent, capable, kind, responsible person you initially stepped up confident that you could make them happy. And it appeared to work…at first. Then when they wanted more than you felt good giving they responded with infantile rage. This shocked you into confusion as to how in the world a grown person could be so self centered and demanding. Then suddenly their tantrum ended and they returned to the beaming lovable innocent person you fell for to begin with, just like nothing ever happened. So you let it go and from the wealth of love you have to give you forgive and forget. So they learn there is no consequence for their tantrums and continue doling them out to see how high they can make you jump when they say jump.

For a while you reasoned that there would eventually come a time when they would be satisfied and things would go smoothly. But you are dealing with a grandiose infant who has come to believe that they can determine reality. So they begin making irrational statements and demands that you find absolutely incomprehensible and impossible to comply with. Now you wake up to the realization you are dealing with a demented monster. So the discard happens, they leave or you leave.

But your mind has been trained to be in a constant state of fight or flight (or freeze or fawn). And now you think that you can, by using your intelligent mind, find your way out of the trauma bond that has you in its grips. But the more you think about it the more depressed you become (because depression arises from the inhibition of the parasympathetic nervous system), which arises from a chronically over activated sympathetic nervous system. In that state, the bodily systems that are not needed to meet the (perceived) emergency, including those that make life pleasurable are suppressed. You can’t think or reason your way out of this one; the more you use an already overactive mind trying to figure out the situation the more you activate your already overactive mind.

When we anticipate pain, many people may even momentarily stop breathing, unconsciously holding or suppressing their breath which activates the fight/flight/fawn/freeze response, and it therefore increases the sensations of anxiety and fear. Because narcissistic abuse creates CPTSD someone recovering can feel overwhelmed by stress, anxiety and fear. This is confused even more by the intermittent recurring activation of the emotional bond from love-bombing creating a desire to return to ones abuser. Relaxing and letting go of the fear and anxiety from CPTSD, AND the euphoric recall of thinking about the love-bombing is a necessary part of recovery from narcissistic abuse.

To get out of your head and reactivate the parasympathetic nervous system try this breathing exercise: Breathe in from your belly, slowly, through your nose for 4–5 seconds then out slowly through your mouth 4–5 seconds. Focus your attention on feeling your digestion processes and salivation response instead of whatever you have been obsessively thinking about. When you have plenty of saliva you will know that the Vagus Nerve and the parasympathetic mode have been stimulated. This deep breathing increases your oxygen supply and this helps produce endorphins, the body’s feel-good hormones.

Another technique I use is to announce to my higher power, when I catch myself feeling negative or ruminating I say out loud “I am sending this negativity back to its source” saying it out loud helps break the obsessive pattern from repeating in the brain. Instead focus on the breathing exercise to activate your vagus nerve and parasympathetic nervous system. And when you feel negative feelings make your face smile, smiling (even artificially) has been shown in studies to positively change brain chemistry. :-)