To the outside world, it seems simple.

If someone hurts you this much, if someone keeps breaking you down and draining you – then surely you just leave?

But you know how different it feels when you’re in the middle of it.

Letting go doesn’t feel like freedom. It feels like withdrawal.

Like an impossible task.

As if you quite literally can’t exist without the other person.

And this has nothing to do with weakness.

It has everything to do with how your body, your nervous system and your brain have been wired.

Why letting go of a narcissist feels so hard

The power of trauma bonding, nervous system wiring & physiology

Your body recognises the narcissist as ‘safe’

If you grew up in an environment where love and safety were conditional – where you had to adapt, please, and constantly scan the mood – your body unconsciously learned that love always comes with tension.

The result?

Real safety feels unfamiliar, and therefore unsafe.

While danger feels familiar, and therefore safe.

So when you enter a relationship with a narcissist, your body immediately recognises the pattern. It feels ‘familiar’. Not because it’s love, but because this is what your system once adapted to.

Your nervous system doesn’t seek happiness. It seeks what it knows.

This is what makes breaking free feel like a threat, even when part of you knows it’s the only way forward.

It’s not a mindset problem. It’s a physiological addiction

Many people believe they just need to be stronger or develop more self-love to finally let go.

But the truth is, your body has encoded this relationship into your nervous system and brain as a form of survival.

The narcissist has become a stimulus your body has learned to attune to, just like it adjusts to the rhythm of your breath or your heartbeat.

Every argument, every reconciliation, every push and pull has trained your system to register that dynamic as normal.

So letting go doesn’t just feel like emotional grief.

It feels like an attack on your entire system.

Your body registers it as a threat to your survival.

The physical reality – your body remembers everything

Your nervous system doesn’t just respond to what the narcissist says or does.

Their voice, scent, gaze, the way they move, even how they breathe… all of it becomes a trigger your system links to both danger and what once felt like love.

That combination of threat and connection creates deep confusion.

Each time you see them, hear them or even catch their scent, your body reactivates the old wiring.

It shifts into alertness.

It starts scanning for signs of danger.

And at the same time, it longs for that familiar sense of connection.

This is why even a message, a photo or a memory can completely throw you off balance.

Your body is still caught in that chemical cocktail of craving and defence.

Trauma bonding – the chemistry of chaos

A narcissistic relationship isn’t just mentally exhausting. It also holds you physically in place.

The constant cycle of affection, rejection, tension and hope keeps your body stuck in fight, flight or freeze.

Adrenaline and cortisol.

The stress hormones released during this ongoing state of alertness become addictive to your system.

The emotional rollercoaster activates the same pathways as a physical addiction.

Your body keeps craving relief, reaching for a moment of approval, a kind word, or that rare glimpse of tenderness.

This has nothing to do with love. It is pure biochemistry.

And this is why calm can feel almost unbearable at first.

Your body is still on edge, still bracing for something to happen.

Real safety feels like emptiness until your system slowly learns that rest can be safe too.

The nervous system – why letting go feels like dying

What you’re experiencing runs deeper than thought.

Your nervous system was trained early on to find safety in adapting, pleasing and sensing what others needed.

In a narcissistic relationship, that same pattern is reactivated.

Safety feels unfamiliar, and therefore unsafe.

Danger feels familiar, and therefore safe.

As long as your nervous system holds that programming, letting go feels like a threat.

Not because you truly believe you can’t live without them, but because your body experiences it as life-threatening.

Real healing begins in the body.

Not through understanding, but by slowly learning what true inner safety feels like.

The deepest wound – abandoning yourself

Beneath the addiction to the narcissist lies a deeper pain.

The pain of abandoning yourself again and again.

Every time you crossed your own boundaries to save the relationship.

Every time you silenced your truth to avoid their anger.

Every time you thought,

“If I just try harder, maybe they’ll love me.”

This is the core wound of the codependent.

You left yourself to hold onto someone else’s love.

True freedom begins the moment you decide you’ll never leave yourself again.

Why standard therapy often falls short

Learning to set boundaries?

Building more confidence?

It sounds good in theory.

But as long as your nervous system still seeks safety through adapting, you’ll keep falling back into old patterns.

Real healing doesn’t begin in your mind.

It begins in your body.

• Nervous system reset – so your body learns to feel safe within you, not in someone else’s approval.
• Limbic healing – so love no longer feels like survival.
• Integration of the parts you had to disconnect from – so you become whole again, without needing the other person.
• Restoring your relationship with yourself – so you never abandon who you are, no matter what happens.

You are not broken. You were programmed.

And that wiring can be rewritten.

Codependency is not a personality trait.

It’s a survival strategy that once kept you safe.

But now you get to choose.

Will you keep replaying the old pattern, or dare to break it?

You don’t have to keep reliving what hurt you.

You can learn what it means to feel safe inside yourself.

You are already whole, even without them.

Are you ready to stop losing yourself in old patterns?

Let me guide you step by step through that process in my 16-week recovery programme.