You may remember a version of yourself that felt articulate.
You may remember speaking easily.
Being able to think clearly,
Express yourself clearly.
Hold conversations,
Present ideas,
Tell stories,
Explain things without second-guessing every word.
And then something changed.
You may lose words now mid-sentence.
Your mind might go blank during conversations.
You may freeze when someone challenges you.
Maybe you over-explain simple things,
Or you rehearse conversations in advance before you even walk into the room.
And you may feel mentally slow around certain people,
Even though you know you are not.
And you may wonder,
What happened to me?
Am I becoming less intelligent?
Why can't I speak properly anymore?
And if that's something you've experienced,
I want you to understand this very clearly from the beginning.
You are not losing your intelligence.
Very often,
You are losing access to yourself under threat.
My name is Martha Curtis,
I'm a psychotherapist and coach.
I work with creatives and I support individuals who are or have been in abusive or controlling relationships.
And alongside my clinical and coaching work,
I also run an institute where we train ICF-certified coaches and support leaders in building psychologically healthy,
High-functioning environments.
What I've described in the beginning is one of the symptoms of narcissistic abuse and chronic emotional stress that people rarely talk about properly.
Because emotional abuse affects far more than our confidence.
It affects cognition and memory,
Speech,
Attention,
Language retrieval,
And your ability to stay present enough to express yourself in real time.
And in this talk,
We are going to explore why trauma and narcissistic abuse can affect speech,
Thinking,
Memory,
And verbal confidence.
We will look at what happens to the nervous system when expression stops feeling emotionally safe and why survivors often freeze or lose words during conversations.
And why many highly intelligent people start feeling mentally fragmented under chronic emotional stress.
We will also look at the role of hypervigilance,
Shame,
Self-monitoring,
Dissociation,
And the freeze response.
And importantly,
We will talk about what begins to return when safety returns.
Because many survivors are not dealing with a broken brain.
They are dealing with a protective brain.
By the end of this talk,
I hope you will understand your symptoms with far more clarity and far less shame.
You will begin to see that many of the things you thought reflect weakness,
Incompetence or damage are often trauma responses shaped by chronic emotional unsafety.
You will also understand why your voice may disappear around certain people but return in safer environments.
And hopefully you will leave this conversation with a different relationship to yourself.
Not as someone who has lost their mind,
But as someone whose nervous system adapted to survive.
One of the most distressing parts of narcissistic abuse is that you can be struggling intensely,
While nobody around you fully sees what is happening.
You may expect trauma to look emotional,
Crying,
Fear,
Anxiety.
What?
Beta often don't expect is cognitive disruption.
Forgetting simple words,
Losing your train of thought.
Walking into a conversation and mentally disappearing.
Reading the same sentence five times,
Feeling articulate alone but fragmented around certain people.
And you may even start questioning whether something is neurologically wrong with you.
And what can feel frightening is that you may remember being highly articulate before the abuse.
Professionals,
Writers,
Leaders,
Teachers.
People who once trusted their own minds.
I have worked with them.
And they had all these experiences after narcissistic abuse.
When someone lives in a narcissistic or emotionally unsafe environment,
The nervous system adapts around threat.
The brain becomes focused on survival.
Under chronic stress,
The body releases cortisol and stress hormones repeatedly.
Research shows that prolonged stress affects attention,
Working memory,
Concentration,
Emotional regulation,
And cognitive flexibility.
In the nervous system,
Starts prioritizing scanning,
Anticipation,
And monitoring instead of relaxed expression and spontaneous communication.
The system becomes organized around protection.
This is often the point where you start becoming confused about yourself.
You might think.
Why can I speak normally alone but freeze around certain people?
Because the issue is not intelligence.
The issue is safety.
If someone repeatedly interrupts you,
Mocks you,
Criticizes you,
Twists your words,
Punishes your honesty,
Or uses your vulnerability against you,
Your nervous system learns something very quickly,
That speaking has consequences.
And over time,
The body begins preparing for those consequences before you even open your mouth.
This is where hypervigilance enters communication.
You start monitoring their face,
Their tone,
Their reaction,
Whether you are saying the wrong thing.
Whether you sound stupid,
Whether you are about to trigger conflict.
At that point,
Part of your attention is no longer with your thoughts.
It is with danger.
And you may have told yourself that you are just anxious,
But what may actually be happening is that your nervous system is entering a freeze response.
The freeze response is a survival state where the nervous system partially shuts down in order to minimize threats.
And when this happens during communication,
People often experience mental blankness,
Loss of words,
Fragmented speech,
Difficulty thinking clearly,
Difficulty accessing memory,
Stuttering,
Delayed processing,
It can feel terrifying.
Especially because many survivors know internally that they are intelligent.
They can feel the thoughts somewhere inside them.
They just cannot access them in real time.
And one way of understanding this is.
.
.
It's like trying to speak while your nervous system is holding the emergency brake.
And another major factor here is shame.
In narcissistic environments,
You can become highly self-conscious while speaking.
You may start rehearsing conversations.
Editing yourself constantly,
Over-explaining,
Apologizing excessively and trying to avoid criticism or emotional reactions before they even happen.
And this,
Of course,
Creates cognitive overload.
Instead of simply speaking,
A person is simultaneously monitoring themselves,
Monitoring the other person,
Predicting reactions,
Trying to stay emotionally safe.
That is an enormous amount of processing happening at once.
Let's talk about what happens when your voice was never emotionally safe.
This pattern may have begun long before your adult relationships.
Might have started in childhood.
Being interrupted constantly,
Being mocked,
Being told that.
You are too sensitive,
Having feelings.
Corrected,
Having feelings corrected,
Being punished for expressing anger,
Being ignored,
Being talked over,
Being made to feel dramatic for having emotional reactions.
Over time,
The nervous system learns that expression is risky.
And once that learning becomes deeply embedded,
It follows people into adulthood.
It follows you into relationships,
Meetings,
Friendships,
Conflict and intimacy.
Let me tell you why survivors often feel unintelligent.
This is one of the most painful parts.
You may even have moments where you wonder whether you are becoming stupid.
But what is often happening is state-dependent functioning.
In safe environments,
Cognition improves,
Language returns,
Humor returns,
Creativity returns.
But in threatening environments,
The nervous system reallocates resources towards protection.
Person loses fluid access to themselves.
And that is not lack of intelligence.
It's a survival adaptation.
And many people discover this very clearly after leaving narcissistic environments.
I have seen this happening in a lot of my clients.
Suddenly they can think again,
Speak again,
Remember things again.
And become articulate again.
And the experience can be emotional because they realize,
Hey,
I was never incapable,
I was unsafe.
And another important part of this is dissociation.
When the nervous system becomes overwhelmed,
People can partially disconnect from the present moment.
And this affects memory encoding,
Tension,
Presence,
Verbal retrieval.
So that is why many trauma survivors struggle to recall conversations clearly after conflict.
Or suddenly lose access to information they know they know.
The brain under threat prioritizes survival,
Not perfect cognitive organization.
And the body keeps score during conversations.
Trauma is not only psychological.
It is physiological.
The body remembers environments where speaking led to punishment,
Humiliation,
Dismissal or escalation.
And later,
Even in safer environments,
The body may still react automatically.
Your throat may tighten,
Your thoughts may disappear,
And speaking may suddenly feel effortful.
The nervous system braces before the mind even catches up.
One of the most important things for you to understand is that Healing often restores this cognition.
Speech,
Memory,
Confidence and spontaneous expression can all improve.
As your nervous system begins experiencing more safety.
Because safety changes nervous system functioning.
And this is something I teach my clients often.
You do not heal communication by forcing yourself to perform harder under threats.
You heal it by helping the nervous system experience enough safety to stay present while speaking.
Understanding the pattern is important,
Because many survivors personalize symptoms that are actually physiological responses.
Also helps to reduce environments where constant self-monitoring is required.
Slowing conversations down can help.
Grounding me for difficult discussions.
And therapeutic work around shame and nervous system regulation.
And importantly,
Safe relationships help,
Because you often rediscover your voice relationally,
Not through performance,
But through safety.
And here you might want to pause and ask yourself a few questions.
Around which people do you lose access to your words?
And what happens in your body when you speak.
How much of your attention goes into monitoring reactions instead of expressing yourself?
And when do you feel most connected to your natural voice?
If narcissistic abuse affected your ability to speak,
Think clearly,
Remember words,
Or express yourself fluidly.
You are not alone.
A traumatized brain is not a defective brain.
It is a protective brain.
Your voice did not disappear.
And in many cases,
It went into hiding.
And when enough safety returns,
You may discover that the parts of yourself you thought were gone,
Were still there all along.
And if this talk resonated with you,
Please consider sharing it with someone who has been struggling with brain fog,
Freezing or loss of verbal confidence after emotional abuse.
Until next time.
