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By Chelli Pumphrey, MA, LPC | Denver, CO Being in a relationship with an abusive partner is exhausting. Monitoring a partner's mood is labor, and if you've done it for years, your nervous system is likely frazzled, and your mind, body, and heart are exhausted. Most advice treats this exhaustion as a symptom to manage with sleep hygiene or some medication. But the tiredness is information. It is a red flag alerting you to the chronic patterns in your relationship. Today we’re

Many of you already know the relationship is bad for you. That's not the question. The question keeping you up at 2 a.m. is why knowing that hasn't been enough to make you leave. This is the question I hear more than any other in my work with survivors of narcissistic and abusive relationships- usually followed by "what's wrong with me." Nothing is wrong with you. Here's a hill I will die on as a narcissistic abuse therapist

You leave the house. Change your number. Go no-contact. Put in eighteen months of therapy. And you still flinch at a certain tone of voice. Still feel your stomach drop before you've even registered why. I've sat across from enough survivors to know this isn't a failure of effort. It's a nervous system doing exactly what it was trained to do, long after the training stopped being useful. This is usually where ketamine-assisted therapy enters the conversation. EMDR, somatic

There's a moment almost every survivor describes to me, and it usually comes with a confused, almost apologetic look on their face. They've left. The relationship is over. And instead of relief, they feel like they're falling apart. I know he was bad for me, a client told me not long ago. So why do I miss him like this? Why does my body feel like it's shutting down? If you're reading this because you just left, or you're trying to leave, and it feels less like heartbrea