Out of the Fog: How Covert Narcissists Use Fear, Overwhelm & Guilt to Keep You Trapped (and How to Reclaim Your Power)

Have you ever felt like you were slowly losing touch with reality in a relationship? Like your sense of self was unraveling one confusing moment at a time?

Being in a relationship with a narcissist—especially a covert narcissist—isn’t just confusing. It’s like trying to find your way out of a maze that’s constantly rearranging itself. You can feel something’s wrong, but you can’t quite name it. It’s as if your inner compass has been tampered with, and every step forward pulls you deeper into a fog you never agreed to enter.

As a Somatic Experiencing Practitioner, I want to help you see what’s happening beneath the surface—and more importantly, how to begin reclaiming the clarity, grounding, and self that is your birthright.

Let’s pull back the curtain.

The Illusion: When Connection Is a Cage

In healthy relationships, we relate, we connect. There’s honesty, repair, and shared growth.

But a narcissist doesn’t relate—they strategize. They don’t want to connect; they want to control.

Imagine being invited to play a game, but no one tells you the rules—because the rules are constantly shifting to benefit the other player. You think you’re building a relationship, but they’re playing chess, making quiet moves to corner you, emotionally and mentally, without you even knowing you’re on a board.

This is how covert narcissists operate: they don’t need to yell or insult you directly. They chip away at your sense of reality with subtle digs disguised as jokes, manipulative concern masked as love, and shifting goalposts that keep you off balance.

Their goal? To destabilize you. Because when you’re grounded, when you’re rooted and clear, you become what they fear most: uncontrollable.

The Roots of the Trap: Fear, Overwhelm, and Guilt

Let’s look at the “unholy trinity” of emotional manipulation that covert narcissists rely on: fear, overwhelm, and guilt.

🧠 1. Fear: The Fast Track to the Survival Brain

Fear is the master key to hijacking your nervous system.

When fear is triggered, your logical brain—your prefrontal cortex—goes offline. You drop into survival mode, where the only questions that matter are: Am I safe? What do I need to do to make this stop?

In this state, we stop discerning what’s healthy or right. We focus on avoiding danger, often through trauma responses like fawning (people-pleasing), freezing, or fighting in desperation. And narcissists? They love this. Because now, instead of advocating for yourself, you're preoccupied with managing their emotions.

They’ve trained you to regulate them at the cost of your own stability.

💣 2. Overwhelm: A Nervous System Under Siege

Overwhelm is what happens when your emotional system gets flooded.

Constant arguments, shifting moods, walking on eggshells, gaslighting—it’s a barrage of emotional chaos with no space to rest, recover, or make sense of anything.

Picture your nervous system like a computer. Now imagine having 50 tabs open, videos auto-playing, popups flying. What happens? The system crashes.

That’s exactly what covert narcissists aim for: to keep you in a constant state of internal noise, unable to access your intuition, your logic, or your peace.

😔 3. Guilt: The Deepest Hook of All

Guilt is the most invisible and most powerful of the three.

Especially if you’ve experienced emotional neglect or narcissistic abuse as a child, guilt can feel primal. You were wired to equate someone else’s pain or anger with your wrongdoing. If they’re upset, you must’ve done something wrong. If they withdraw, you must not be enough.

That subconscious belief—that you’re bad if others are unhappy—makes you a perfect target.

A narcissist will say things like:

• “After all I’ve done for you…”

• “You’re so selfish.”

• “Why are you making such a big deal out of this?”

And just like that, guilt drags you back into a trauma response. You abandon your own needs and boundaries in a desperate attempt to reconnect with someone who’s never really been trying to connect with you in the first place.

The Cost: A Body and Mind at War

From a somatic perspective, this emotional loop of fear, overwhelm, and guilt causes your nervous system to get stuck in dysregulation.

• You may find your digestion is off.

• You’re always tired but can’t sleep.

• You feel like you’ve shrunk inside your own life.

You begin to lose sight of who you are—not because you’re broken, but because you’ve been strategically ungrounded.

But here’s the truth: no matter how long someone has tried to shrink you, your grounded self still exists inside of you.

The Shift: How to Break Free and Rewire Your Nervous System

Healing is not about “getting through to them.” That’s the trap.

When you say to a narcissist, “When you do this, it hurts me,” they don’t feel empathy. They feel confirmation that their manipulation works.

So what’s the most empowering thing you can do?

Stop playing the game.

Instead of trying to get safety from the relationship, you learn to create it within yourself.

This is not an overnight fix. It’s a repatterning process that requires:

• Coming back into your body, safely.

• Building your nervous system’s capacity to feel and tolerate discomfort.

• Learning to respond from your grounded self, not your survival self.

That takes time. It takes practice. And it’s nearly impossible to do alone.

Why I Created the School of Transformation

I didn’t want to just tell survivors what to do. I wanted to create a space where we could actually do the deep work together.

At the School of Transformation, we meet live on Zoom every week. We come together as survivors from around the world—many of us dealing with childhood trauma, narcissistic abuse, and nervous system dysregulation.

But more importantly, we don’t just talk about healing. We heal.

We breathe together. We ground together. We practice tools from somatic experiencing and trauma-informed care. We help each other grow strong roots, so that the wind can blow—but we no longer fall.

You were never meant to live in confusion, fear, or guilt. You were never meant to be manipulated into forgetting your worth.

You were meant to live clear, grounded, and free.

And that journey? It starts by coming back home—to your body, your truth, and your power.

If you’re ready to take that next step, join us inside the School of Transformation. You don’t have to walk this road alone.

Because even if someone spent years convincing you otherwise… that clarity, that wholeness, that you—is still in there.