Is your relationship making you physically sick?

When my nine month lease finally expired, I looked haggard. I felt like the character on the Nine of Wands Tarot card. Fine lines had sprung up around my eyes and lips and my neck looked crepey. I looked at my reflection in the mirror, shocked. Now that I had gotten myself to safety, I could check in and connect with my body. I realized the physical toll that living next door to a malignant narcissist had had on me.

I moved to Umhlanga, a small coastal town in South Africa to retreat and heal after leaving an emotionally abusive relationship. I rented what seemed like the perfect cottage. It had everything I needed and was within walking distance to a nature reserve and beach. It was attached to the main house but seemed private. What I did not know was that my landlady was a malignant narcissist (Malignant narcissists display traits and symptoms of both antisocial and narcissistic personality disorder.) I cannot emphasize enough how dangerous these personalities are.

An example of her callousness was revealed to me after her beloved pet of 17 years had a stroke. Concerned, I asked how her dog was doing. She burst out laughing and proceeded to show me, using her own body and dragging her leg, how “hilarious” her dog looked trying to walk. The stroke had paralyzed its back legs. She had absolutely no empathy and found her dog’s suffering highly entertaining. I felt incredibly uncomfortable witnessing the pleasure she was deriving from her dog’s pain.

For nine months I was harassed, invaded, hurt, spied on, shouted at, controlled, monitored and terrorized. She even went through all my garbage every week. I mentioned that I had lost one of her teaspoons and must have thrown it in the bin by mistake. She let slip that if that was the case, she would have found it… The hair on the back of my neck went up.

I wanted to run away as far and as quickly as possible but I could not afford to lose my deposit. I felt trapped. I decided to grin and bear it. I would act compliant and continue to live in the same fawn-freeze trauma state that I had adopted within the relationship I had just left. Instead of escaping to safety, I’d walked straight into another spider’s web.

I only realized how badly I had been affected when a jogger ran past me on the beach in the final week of my lease. As I sensed his presence behind me, I jolted and started screaming. I’m not sure who got a bigger fright, him, or me. His sudden appearance had terrified me. It was super embarrassing but my nervous system was so frayed it was sensing danger everywhere. I had Complex-PTSD and it would take a few years for my startle response to quieten down.

This particular experience revealed to me how dangerous these personalities are. Not only do they hurt you psychologically but they literally suck the life out of you. My landlady was feeding off my fear and terror. While she was getting stronger and more vibrant, I was literally aging by the day. As I began to cut the cords and start to heal from the trauma of that experience, I slowly started to get my glow back. Now that she was no longer feeding off my energy, my body could start to rejuvenate and repair itself.

Reflecting back, I realized that this was not the first time my health had been negatively impacted by a relationship. I grew up in a volatile home and developed debilitating migraines from the age of nine. I also experienced intense stabbing pains in my gut. They were so painful that I’d drop to the ground and lie in the fetal position until they subsided. It would take another 20 years for celiac disease to be formally diagnosed.

In my twenties, I developed Rheumatoid Arthritis in my right knee. It flared up again in my thirties when I was living with an emotionally abusive partner. Since cutting ties with all the toxic individuals in my life, my migraines and RA have both gone into remission. It is true, disease in the body is a reflection of dis-ease in the psyche. When we heal the patterns and programs that keep us locked in abusive relationships and habits, we heal the body. My migraines, RA and celiac disease were my body’s way of letting me know I was not safe. I was living in a toxic environment that was poisoning my system.

Being in a relationship with a narcissist or any other cluster B personality type destroys your physical health. The relationship could be with a boss, friend, romantic partner or family member, and in my case, even a neighbour and landlady. Anyone you are interacting with on a regular basis that has a pathological personality can harm you.

It’s not just the psychological stress that impacts you but the physical toll all that stress has on your body. Narcissists are incredibly toxic and stressful to be around because of the continuous uncertainty they create. You are always ‘switched on’ walking around on eggshells waiting for the next attack. When you are in a relationship with a narcissist you are constantly oscillating between idealization and devaluation. At the same time, you are dealing with gaslighting, countering, verbal abuse, rage attacks and criticism. The escalation toward emotional or physical violence causes profound stress.

Some of the most damaging stress a human can experience is interpersonal stress, the stress that exists in the sphere of your interpersonal relationships. This is why divorce is at the top of the list of stressors. Other examples of interpersonal stress include being in a one-sided relationship, having a demanding boss who bullies you or a neighbor who is incredibly noisy and disruptive.

All this stress has a toxic effect on your physical body. It creates a pattern of chronic inflammation. The unpredictability and lack of equilibrium within the relationship makes it parasitic. By extracting narcissistic supply from you, the narcissist is drawing energy from you by feeding off your fear, pain and anxiety. It makes them feel powerful when they see you cowering and tiptoeing around them. They don’t have empathy for your plight, they only see through the lens of how much power they have over you.

In this relationship dynamic, your nervous system enters a state ofSympathetic Dominance. In this state the Sympathetic side of the autonomic nervous system is over dominant. Your thoughts, actions and reactions are now controlled by this reactive state. This state is also known as ‘Fight or Flight’ or what you may be experiencing when you feel ‘stressed out’.

When you are in this wired state, your heart rate increases, your breathing speeds up and your blood pressure rises. Cortisol floods your system and inflammation increases in the body. Chronic inflammation in the body begins to produce inflammatory molecules called cytokines. These indicate an inflammatory response in the body. Chronic stress and inflammation are bed-fellows. These inflammatory molecules affect every organ and tissue and lead to inflammatory diseases. It makes sense that inflammatory disease would arise out of an inflamed environment.

Chronic diseases like diabetes, multiple sclerosis, chronic fatigue syndrome, Hashimoto’s hyperthyroidism, Graves disease, rheumatoid arthritis, fibromyalgia, psoriasis, lupus, Crohn’s disease and Colitis, all tend to show up like clockwork in individuals who have been in long-term relationships with narcissists. Long-term or familial stress creates an increased inflammatory response in the body which sets the stage for inflammatory disease to take hold.

As second side effect of living with an energy vampire is weight gain. When I was living with an emotionally abusive borderline (comorbid covert narcissist) I picked up a lot of weight very quickly. It was the first time in my life I had ever been overweight and I was flummoxed. When I got away from the person and relationship, the weight literally fell off of me.

From a spiritual perspective, I feel the weight added a protective layer against the abuse. It acted as a buffer. From a scientific perspective, the stress of a toxic relationship slows down your metabolism. As you approach middle age, the body’s stress response intensifies. The body tries to balance itself by slowing down the metabolic rate. It’s an adaptive mechanism to help deal with stress. Unfortunately, this damages the body and can manifest as weight gain and an inability to lose weight. It also manifests as chronic fatigue, hyperthyroidism and brain fog.

Combine all these factors, and you can see how a toxic relationship with a narcissist completely takes over your body and your life. You begin to lose touch with reality as the narcissist becomes your only reality. As your health begins to fail, you become more vulnerable and dependent on the narcissist. It’s a mean twist of fate, instead of supporting you and helping you, they kick you while you are down. They use your ill health as fodder to devalue and demean you further. It’s a vicious cycle.

The more you numb out and deny the abuse, the more you ignore the needs of your body. This chronic neglect leads to you being diagnosed with all sorts of illnesses and being prescribed a host of medications that ultimately treat the symptoms, but not the cause. It is my hope that if this article resonates with you, that you will feel inspired to finally start putting yourself and your health first. No person, job or relationship is worth sacrificing your health.