Aftershock – The Narcissistic Abuse Phenomenon

 

For those who find themselves in an aftershock following an abusive relationship, know that real healing is possible – even if it feels completely out of reach.

Aftershock is a phenomenon that occurs when someone leaves an abusive relationship and, rather than feeling relief, the person feels worse than before they left. It’s an uncomfortable reality that leaves many stunned and questioning why they can’t move on and why they might need to reconnect with the abuser.

However, the aftershock is rooted in peptide addiction. Our brain releases peptides – chemicals – for every single human emotion we feel. When someone is in an abusive relationship, their cells become accustomed to receiving heavy doses of these peptides, creating an emotional addiction.

When the relationship ends, people are suddenly cut off from their source of peptides, and they experience withdrawal.

This withdrawal can manifest as deep despair, panic attacks, anxiety, and an overwhelming feeling of not surviving without the person they are no longer with.

Additionally, aftershock and trauma bonding can intertwine to create a situation where the person feels an internal pull towards their abuser. This is the result of their ingrained trauma of abandonment combined with the brain’s craving for the peptides they were receiving from them.

The good news, however, is that there is help available. The key to healing aftershocks is recognising and understanding the patterns at play.

Then you can then begin to loosen this bondage and reprogram your body and mind to heal from this trauma and move forward.

 

 

Video Transcript

Welcome, dear Thriver, to Thriver TV, where you can heal for real from narcissistic abuse. If you have not yet subscribed to my YouTube channel, please do so, and I’d love for you to share my work with others who need it.

My name is Melanie Tonia Evans, and I’m the author of the bestselling book You Can Thrive After Narcissistic Abuse, the Number One System for Recovery from Toxic Relationships.

Over the last 15 years, I’ve helped thousands of people from over 150 different countries detox from narcissists, up a level beyond them and go on to create their dream lives despite their sufferings in those relationships.

If this is something that you may be interested in, I’d love to introduce you to my free masterclass, You Can Heal For Real. The link is with this video because in there, you’re going to receive a quantum healing that’s going to give you relief and start granting you your soul, your life force, and your sanity back.

 

Am I Experiencing Aftershock?

Today I want to talk to you about aftershock because it’s a phenomenon. Aftershock is a phrase I coined years ago, and pretty much nobody is talking about this.

Aftershock is when you feel worse after leaving an abuser than you did with the abuser. This happens even if you are the one who leaves. We know discarding is really painful if you’ve experienced that, but even people who’ve decided to leave and they feel good about going and getting on with it can be hit with aftershocks afterwards.

Aftershock leaves you stunned as to why you can’t get on with your life, and even though you detest this person and know they’re so bad for you, you may feel yourself manically missing them.

You may even question yourself and say to yourself, “Well, I must love them, and this relationship must be meant to work. Maybe it’s a soul contract.”

It’s weird to people who are on looking because surely you should just be able to get away from somebody who’s abusive and start getting better because you’ve got the space and the distance from them. But when aftershock strikes, it’s anything but that.

Now maybe you are going through this, or you’ve gone through this, and it really shocked you as well. If that’s you, let me know in the comments below.

I really want you to know, and maybe you need to hear this, that after being narcissistically abused, the aftershock is actually more common than not.

The reason why you can’t get on with your life or stop obsessing about somebody is because of aftershocks. You may be battling your own cognitive dissonance where you’re coming up with excuses and justifications for why you should get in contact with this person or how you might be able to fix the relationship or thinking that there may be salvation with this person because the aftershock just feels so unbearable to go through.

There are deep reasons for the aftershock, and I promise you it hits really after a toxic relationship with virtually everybody. Even when people break up with a toxic person and never hear from them again or don’t get the repercussions from them, which is rare, even those people can suffer from aftershocks.

 

 

The Reason Aftershock Strikes

The reason why you go through aftershocks is because you’re no longer in the fight. When you’re with a toxic person, you are regularly triggered, which releases adrenaline and cortisol.  Even though this wreaks havoc on your system, if it’s medium or long-term, it keeps you distracted and in the present in the fight.

But when you’re away from this person and have some space, what happened last week, last month, last year, and decade can catch up with you because you’re stationary. All of this kind of rubbed into your consciousness in a way that is really awful.

Aftershock feels like overwhelm, deep despair, total heartbreak, and so much more. One of the biggest things about aftershocks is the obsessional thoughts, the looping thoughts, the stinking thinking of what happened, what should have happened, and what could have happened.

You go over and over and over it all in your head and you can’t stop doing it and you just don’t get any resolution and you’re astounded in aftershock how it’s sucking your energy dry. You feel so empty, and you could feel much worse than even when you are with the narcissist.

You may feel like a terrible psychic virus has overtaken you and it’s just draining out all of your life horse. You may feel like you’re literally dying in aftershock. It brings to mind the U2 song I Can’t Live With or Without You, and I’m not going to burst into song because I can’t sing.

But aftershock, truly, it can feel more painful out of the relationship than you’re feeling in the relationship, even though to get out of the relationship when you left, you know that you barely got out of there alive, you barely survived the abuse, but yet now you feel worse. It’s crazy.

In aftershock, your abuse symptoms escalate. You’re struggling to function, and you may feel totally addicted. This is one of the craziest things about it, wanting to break no contact with that person. You might want to reconnect.

It could be feelings like you just want closure, you want understanding, you want repair, you want remorse. You want reconciliation despite knowing that that never worked in the past, no matter how many times you tried to go for that. The real reason why so many people break no contact is because they’re suffering from the phenomenon of aftershock.

Now, let’s go deeper again into what’s really going on here. I want to talk about peptide addiction and aftershock. Peptide addiction is something that I’ve gone deeply into in the past, and I’ve shared lots about it on this platform, and it was a game changer for me in how I healed. It was one of my biggest turning points.

 

Peptide Addiction and Aftershock

Some of the gravest feelings of aftershock are panic and addiction, waves of anxiety and triggered fear and feelings of not being able to survive without this person may cause you to try to stay energetically connected.

These are things like trying to feel their energy and constantly researching everything you know about this personality type. Maybe you stalk their social media. You ask people who know about them for information. Maybe you’re getting psychic readings on how they feel about you. Do they still love you? Are they coming back? Do they regret what they did? Or maybe you just break no contact. I did that dozens of times, and a lot of other people have as well.

Peptide addiction occurs because the cells in your body are chemically used to receiving strong doses of the emotional peptides that the hypothalamus in your brain has been creating. This is important.

There’s a peptide for every human emotion you can experience, and you’ve been having large doses of things like anger, betrayal, invalidation, and injustice, all related to the shocking things the narcissist has done to you.

You are emotionally addicted physiologically to these states. That’s the truth. It’s been discovered in lab tests with rats studies that when given emotional peptides, rats will forego food, water, self-care, and cleaning themselves for the peptides. They will literally starve and thirst to death.

It can be argued that emotional peptides are as addictive or maybe even more addictive than any synthetic drug. When you leave a narcissist, you’re away from your drug of those emotional peptides that you’ve been receiving and will go cold turkey.

Your cells are literally craving the connection with the peptides. It’s your body, it’s your cells that are your emotions, and the emotional craving will make your head obsess about the abuser and what they did to you because that’s going to give you another kick of your hypothalamus, making more of those peptides.

Your brain’s going to give you every excuse to return to the scene of the crime where you can get the drug again from the abuser who dishes it out.

 

Aftershock is Trauma-bonding

All right, so there is another layer to aftershock. Let’s look at this. It’s good old trauma bonding. Aftershock is to do with trauma bonding as well. Trauma bonding is horrible. It’s an aftershock as well.

It’s that horrible feeling of you can’t stop wanting to go toward somebody that’s hurting you, and you can’t stop thinking about them, and it’s very hard for you to try to reconnect with them. The most direct law of trauma bonding is this. It’s simple. We’ve bonded with the people who represent our unhealed inner stuff. It really is that simple.

Okay, so let’s say you’re still internally carrying the trauma of abandonment, the terror of abandonment. You’re going to be attracted to and attractive to people who are prone to abandon people, who don’t commit, who aren’t loyal, who aren’t going to respect you.

You will also show up in highly triggered ways where your age regresses to your young abandonment trauma, and your reactions will fuel the possibility of abandonment. You’re also going to stay connected to people who abandon you, trying to force them and change them into being loyal and safe and committed to you.

But of course, it doesn’t work. The only remedy to this is being able to let go, go inside and heal the trauma of abandonment, and then you’re no longer trauma bonded to people who will abandon you. You break the binds, you go free, and it also changes the patterns of your relationships in the future.

 

Conclusion

The right inner work is the most powerful way to heal all these layers of aftershocks. I want you to have hope. You don’t have to stay in these horrific feelings and this powerlessness and feel so addicted to that person. My aftershock, like virtually everyone’s, was mind-bending.

It absolutely shook me to my core. It stunned me. After discovering and applying quantum tools and specifically quantum freedom healing to address my inner trauma bonds, I was able to release the peptide addiction loop, and I got calm and resolution in those places inside where I was carrying all of the trauma of the previous events and hurt that was the abuse.

Not only did I heal from the aftershock, but I also emerged as a much more whole, up-level person than before I even went through it. The same has happened for so many people in our community, in our wonderful community, as a result of taking on the inner work that I help them do in my healing programs.

As such, I’m really excited to tell you about my upcoming 10-week bootcamp course, which is known as Thrive, which has a whole week dedicated to aftershock specifically, and it also has many other juicy up levelling, up-levelling healings and tools such as becoming a boundary beast and becoming impervious to abuse and abusers, and being able to detox and powerfully move forward in your life in all areas of your life. This is why this is called Thrive.

If you’ve been struggling with what I’ve talked about today, I can’t recommend that you look at it enough.

All right. So I really hope that today has made sense. I hope it can give you hope and it really allows you to know you’re not going crazy, this is really common, there is a name for this, and please know you can heal for real from this pretty quickly when you get onto it the right way.

I’d love to hear from you in the comments about if this resonated with you and if you’re going through this, and also if you’ve already healed and up-levelled from this, because that helps give other people hope as well.

Also, too, pass this video on to somebody you know who is going through aftershocks so that you can help and bless them to get better.

All right, so until the next one, keep smiling, keep healing, and keep thriving because there is nothing else to do. Lots of love. Bye-bye.