For a long time, I thought understanding would save me.
I read about narcissistic abuse and finally had language for what I lived through. I could explain the patterns, name the manipulation, and make sense of years that once felt confusing.
I thought that would be the turning point.
But it wasn’t.
Because even after I understood everything, my body still reacted like the past was happening in real time. A slightly loud tone could tighten my chest. A small disagreement could stay with me all day. I would over-explain simple things like I was still trying to prove I wasn’t a problem.
That was the phase no one prepared me for.
The phase where your mind wakes up, but your nervous system is still living somewhere years behind you.
People talk about awareness like it’s freedom, like once you “know,” everything inside you reorganizes. But awareness is strange. It gives you clarity without immediately giving you relief.
You stop blaming yourself. You finally see what happened clearly. And still, something inside you doesn’t relax.
You feel small in normal rooms. You feel guilty resting. You feel tense around calm people without understanding why. And it makes you question yourself in very quiet ways.
You start wondering, if I know I’m not broken, why do I still feel like this?
I asked myself that question more times than I can count. At first, I thought I needed more insight. Another book. Another realization that would finally click and undo everything at once.
But the deeper I went, the more I noticed something uncomfortable.
My reactions weren’t logical. They were automatic. My body would tense before my mind even had a thought. Guilt would rise before logic had a chance to interrupt it. Fear would show up in places that were objectively safe.
That’s when something shifted for me.
I started wondering if this wasn’t a thinking problem at all. Maybe some things live deeper than thoughts.
Because when you grow up around emotional unpredictability, your body learns survival early. You become sensitive to tone, mood, silence, tension. You adapt quietly, without realizing you’re adapting.
And when that adaptation repeats for years, it stops feeling like adaptation. It starts feeling like who you are.
So even when life changes, your body doesn’t immediately follow.
You can leave the environment. You can grow older. You can understand everything. And still, your nervous system keeps bracing, scanning, preparing for something to go wrong.
Not because you’re broken. Because you were trained that way.
And when I saw it like that, something inside me softened. I stopped calling myself damaged and started seeing myself as conditioned.
That shift changed how I approached healing.
Because when you believe you’re broken, you rush. You pressure yourself. You become harsh with your own process. But when you see conditioning, a different kind of patience becomes possible.
What was learned slowly can be unlearned slowly.
I stopped trying to think my way out of reactions that were never created by thinking. Instead, I started observing them. I noticed how my shoulders tightened in safe rooms, how calm situations felt unfamiliar, how kindness sometimes made me uncomfortable instead of relaxed.
And for the first time, I didn’t shame those reactions. I got curious about them.
That curiosity changed everything.
Because I realized something simple but hard to accept: you don’t heal years of conditioning through realizations. You heal it through repetition.
Through small moments where you let your body experience something different from the past. Moments where you pause instead of spiraling, stay instead of shrinking, speak without over-explaining, rest without apologizing.
This part of healing is very unglamorous. There are no dramatic turning points, no cinematic breakthroughs. Just slow internal shifts that are almost invisible from the outside.
And that’s where many people lose hope, because this phase feels confusing. You understand everything, yet you still feel pulled by old emotions.
But maybe that gap isn’t failure. Maybe it’s transition.
Your mind may have left survival mode, but your body is still catching up. And bodies don’t change through pressure. They change through safety, patience, and repeated new experiences.
So if you’re in this phase, try to be gentle with yourself.
Instead of rushing to fix every reaction, notice it. Name it softly. Let it pass without turning it into a judgment about who you are. Not every old response means you’re back at the beginning. Some responses are just echoes leaving slowly.
You are not weak for still feeling the past in your body. You are human for carrying what you survived.
And the fact that you can now see the gap between what you know and what you feel means something inside you is already changing.
Awareness may not be the end of healing, but it is the doorway.
And if you’re standing in that doorway right now, feeling like everything makes sense in your head but not in your chest, you’re not alone there.
Some of us are learning safety for the first time, slowly and honestly, without pretending it’s easy.
If that’s where you are, take a breath.
You’re not broken. You’re patterned. And patterns can change.
If this felt like something you needed to hear, I write more like this in small, honest pieces where I unpack healing slowly, without pretending it’s simple.
You can follow along on Threads if you want the raw, in-between thoughts I don’t always put into blogs.
And if you prefer deeper reflections like this, you can join my newsletter. It’s where I write more personally and share things I don’t post anywhere else.
Wherever you read from, I’m glad you’re here.
