When He Was Making Me Sick: The Science Behind What Emotional Abuse Does To Your Body
- wiredandwildcore
- May 18
- 9 min read
In my last post about sciatica, I mentioned almost in passing that one of the things that helped my back the most was lowering my stress — specifically, removing a major source of chronic stress from my life. I said we'd talk about it more later.
This is later.
I want to be clear about what that "major source of chronic stress" actually was. It was a five-year relationship with a man who was emotionally, psychologically, and financially abusive. And I want to talk about it not because I enjoy revisiting it, but because I am a highly intelligent woman who let it happen for years, who felt profound shame about that for a long time, and who now understands — backed by actual science — that my intelligence had almost nothing to do with it.
If you are in something that feels like what I'm about to describe, I want you to read this post the whole way through.
How It Starts: The Charm Offensive
He didn't start by breaking me. Nobody does. That's the entire point.
He started by being the most attentive, magnetic, compelling person I had ever met. He was smart. He was charming. He made me feel like the only person in the room. In clinical terms, this is called love bombing — and it is a deliberate strategy, whether the person deploying it consciously knows it or not.
Research published in Violence Against Women describes how perpetrators deliberately weaponize affection to foster dependence — presenting as attentive and ideal early in the relationship, then alternating unpredictably between cruelty and kindness once emotional investment has been secured. The empathic partner — and it's almost always someone with genuine empathy, genuine warmth, genuine capacity for love — tries to make sense of the cruelty by working harder to restore the earlier warmth. In doing so, she deepens the bond through the very act of trying to understand it. Psych Central
He was, as I came to understand much later, a narcissist. He was also, as I described to a friend once, too smart to physically abuse me. There would be no bruises. No visible evidence. Just a slow, methodical dismantling of my sense of reality, my confidence, and eventually my health. Coercive control is a form of abuse where the main goal is to degrade, isolate, and deprive a person of their rights to physical security, dignity, and respect — putting the victim in a state of terror and entrapment. It doesn't require a single physical act to be devastating. Soteldopsychotherapyclinic
The Cycle That Kept Me Trapped
He broke up with me regularly. Not once, not twice — repeatedly, across five years. And then, within days or a week, he would reappear as if nothing had happened. Or he'd reappear blaming me entirely. Or he'd gaslight me so thoroughly that I genuinely began to question whether the breakup had even happened the way I remembered it.
This is not chaos. This is a documented psychological mechanism.
Trauma bonding occurs when intermittent reinforcement — the unpredictable alternation between punishment and reward — creates powerful emotional bonds that are resistant to change. These bonds are not signs of weakness but rather predictable outcomes of human attachment systems responding to cycles of threat and reward. Your nervous system becomes calibrated to the cycle. The relief when he comes back feels like love. The anxiety when things are bad feels like something you caused and therefore something you can fix. Relentless criticism, jealousy, and gaslighting provoke strong emotional reactions — and then the narcissistic person swoops in to soothe and "rescue." The documented impacts are consistent: exhaustion, a sense of complicity, shame, perceived weakness, and a dependency that feels impossible to explain to anyone who hasn't lived it. YourTangoSentiopsychotherapypractice
Nobody around me could understand why I stayed. A few people who had just met him told me something felt off. I couldn't see it. I was too close, too conditioned, too deep in a bond that had been constructed specifically to keep me there. That is not stupidity. The same capacity for empathy that makes survivors excellent partners, parents, and friends makes them more susceptible to the specific mechanics of narcissistic abuse. Narcissistic Abuse Rehab
I stayed because I was terrified of being alone. I stayed because I kept believing he would change. I stayed, eventually, because I had been told so many times that I was the problem that I started to believe it. It wasn't until I sought professional help — a therapist who specialized in exactly this — that someone finally reflected reality back at me clearly enough that I could see it.
The Financial Piece Nobody Talks About
Emotional abuse has a financial dimension that doesn't get nearly enough attention. Some form of financial abuse occurs in 99% of abusive relationships, and can lead to enduring economic issues for victims throughout their entire lives. PubMed Central
Mine looked like this: I supported him when he lost his job. After he found a new one, I was still paying for the majority of everything — somehow it had become the default and neither of us named it. He would ask me for money for specific bills; I would give it to him and later discover the actual bill was significantly lower than what he'd requested. He drove my car constantly and never offered gas money or insurance. I bought groceries for myself and he would eat everything within two or three days, so I'd buy more. I did the math once, several months in: I had spent $4,000 on groceries in four months. As a single woman living alone now, I spend approximately $250 a month.
I'm not sharing these numbers for shock value. I'm sharing them because financial abuse is insidious precisely because it happens so gradually that you don't see the full picture until you do the math. And by the time you do the math, you're already in so deep that the financial dependency has become another reason it feels impossible to leave.
The Hiding. The Lying. The Exhaustion of Keeping Track.
My family didn't approve of him. I knew this. So early on, I hid the relationship — told myself it was temporary, that once things were more stable I'd be honest. But the hiding evolved. His belongings were in my apartment. I couldn't have family visit. I was managing two separate versions of my life simultaneously and struggling to keep the facts straight between them.
The cognitive load of sustained deception — even deception you've been manipulated into — is enormous. Abusers use tactics including isolation from family and friends, and threats to expose or harm, as mechanisms of coercive control — and those tactics work precisely because they make the victim the architect of her own isolation. I wasn't hiding him from my family because he told me to. I was hiding him because he had made the consequences of transparency feel unsurvivable. Soteldopsychotherapyclinic
He threatened to expose the relationship. He used that threat as leverage. And I, a person who considers herself deeply intelligent, spent years managing the impossible geometry of a life built around someone else's cruelty. The shame I felt about this — and still sometimes feel — is real. It is also, I now know, part of the design.
What It Did To My Body
emotional abuse effects on body
Here's where the science becomes impossible to ignore.
Chronic stress causes the muscles of the body to be in a more or less constant state of guardedness. When muscles are taut and tense for long periods of time, this triggers other reactions in the body and can promote stress-related disorders. In my case, those stress-related disorders included a spine that was already compromised by degenerative disc disease — and a nervous system that was running on cortisol around the clock. APA
Cortisol dysfunction results in unmodulated inflammation following reactivation of the stress response, which may contribute to a cycle of inflammation, depression, and pain — and pain itself is a stressor that may reactivate a pro-inflammatory stress response. Read that again. The stress causes inflammation. The inflammation causes pain. The pain causes more stress. The cycle feeds itself. nih
Stress-induced inflammation has been directly implicated in chronic low back pain and sciatica specifically. My physical therapist told me my structural issues — narrow hips, weak core — were creating the conditions for my spine to deteriorate. What she couldn't fully account for in her assessment was that I was also living inside a sustained trauma response that was keeping my entire musculoskeletal system in a state of constant tension. Both things were true simultaneously. Waldenu
The prevalence of chronic pain among women who have experienced intimate partner violence has been found to range from 38% to 94.5%. Nearly every woman. Research is unambiguous that violence — including psychological violence — becomes metabolized into women's very physiology. Early experiences of abuse can manifest decades later as chronic health conditions. DvsnSmith
When I finally ended the relationship and moved into my own space — a place where I didn't have to manage someone else's chaos, someone else's needs, someone else's narrative about who I was — something shifted in my body. Not immediately, and not completely. But the baseline tension that I had been living inside for years began, slowly, to release. My back improved. My sleep improved. My inflammation markers, when tested later, had decreased. I am not making a causal claim I can't prove. I am telling you what happened.
Why "Just Leave" Is The Most Useless Advice Ever Given
If you are reading this and recognizing your own relationship, I
need to address the thing people always say: why didn't you just leave?
The question "why did you stay?" is one of the most damaging questions a survivor can be asked. The more accurate question is: given what the relationship has done to your nervous system, your perception, and your sense of reality — why would leaving be straightforward? Psych Central
Leaving a trauma bond is not a decision. It is a process. It requires, first, being able to see the relationship clearly — which is nearly impossible from inside it, when someone has spent years systematically distorting your perception of reality. It requires access to support — financial, emotional, logistical — that abuse often systematically removes. And it requires confronting the terror of the very aloneness the abuser has used as a threat throughout the relationship.
I left when I finally reached the point where the pain of staying became greater than the fear of leaving. Not a moment before. And even after I left, the pull was real. Trauma bonds are powerful emotional attachments formed through cycles of affection, manipulation, and distress — and they do not dissolve simply because the relationship ends. It took therapy, time, and a conscious daily choice to stay gone. Narcissistic Abuse Rehab
What Strength Actually Looks Like On The Other Side
I am not going to tell you I healed and became a better version of myself and everything was worth it, because I don't believe in reframing abuse as a growth opportunity. What happened to me was not okay. It did not need to happen for me to become who I am.
What I will tell you is what strength looks like from where I'm standing now:
It looks like not needing a man to feel complete. Not because I'm closed to love — I'm not — but because I no longer confuse intensity with love, or fear of losing someone with wanting them.
It looks like not being afraid of being alone. Alone, it turns out, is quiet. Alone, I can hear myself think. Alone, nobody is eating my groceries or asking me for money or breaking up with me on a Tuesday and acting like nothing happened on a Wednesday.
It looks like learning about my own patterns — the codependency, the people-pleasing, the terror of abandonment that made me such an ideal target — and doing the actual work of changing them. Not overnight. Not perfectly. But consistently.
It looks like complete, total, non-negotiable no-contact. Not because I hate him. Because I know myself well enough now to know that any contact is a door, and that door leads somewhere I will not go again.
And it looks like writing this post. On a public platform. Under a pseudonym, yes — but with my whole chest.
If This Is You
If any of this resonated — the hiding, the cycle of breaking up and coming back, the gaslighting, the financial entanglement, the slow erosion of your own sense of reality — I want you to know something: you are not stupid. You are not weak. You are someone whose empathy was weaponized by someone who knew exactly what they were doing.
The National Domestic Violence Hotline is available 24/7 at 1-800-799-7233, or by texting START to 88788. They can help you safety plan, find resources, and talk through options without pressure or judgment. You don't have to be in physical danger to call. Emotional and psychological abuse are real. Financial abuse is real. Coercive control is real.
You don't need permission to leave. But if you need someone to tell you that what you're describing is abuse — consider this that.
Note: This post reflects personal experience and is not a substitute for professional mental health support. If you are in an abusive relationship, please reach out to a qualified therapist or domestic violence resource.
- Forever Wired & Wild⚡🌿
Citations:
Lesiak & Gelsthorpe. (2025). Violence Against Women. Via narcissisticabuserehab.com
NIH/PMC. (2023). The Silent Epidemic: Domestic Violence and Its Devastating Impact on Women's Health. ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
NIH/PMC. (2023). The Trauma and Mental Health Impacts of Coercive Control: A Systematic Review. ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
NIH/PMC. Factors Mediating the Impacts of Child Abuse and Intimate Partner Violence on Chronic Pain. ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
Domestic Violence Services Network. (2023). The Enduring Impact of Abuse on Mental Health. dvsn.org
Hannibal, K.E. & Bishop, M.D. (2014). Chronic Stress, Cortisol Dysfunction, and Pain. Physical Therapy, 94(12). pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
American Psychological Association. (2024). Stress Effects on the Body. apa.org
Dutton & Painter. (1993). Traumatic Bonding. Violence and Victims. Via narcissisticabuserehab.com
PsychCentral. (2019). Narcissists Use Trauma Bonding and Intermittent Reinforcement. psychcentral.com
Soteido Psychotherapy Practice. (2026). Trauma Bonding in Narcissistic Abuse: Why You Can't Leave. sentiopsychotherapypractice.co.uk
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