The Silent Poison of Abuse That Creeps in Like Carbon Monoxide

If I had to explain what narcissistic and emotional abuse feels like

It’s carbon monoxide poisoning

There’s no warning

No loud explosion that wakes you up

No flashing sign that tells you to run

It doesn’t look like what people expect when they hear the word abuse

There are no bruises to prove it

No police reports

No broken bones

It’s quiet

It’s calculated

It’s devastating

It starts when you least expect it

Usually, it looks like connection at first

They study you, not because they care, but because they need to know where your weaknesses are

They listen carefully, file away the details, figure out how to make you trust them

They make you feel seen

Heard

Chosen

It feels like safety… until it doesn’t

And by the time you realize the air around you isn’t safe, you’ve already been breathing it in for far too long

That’s the thing about this kind of abuse

It creeps in the same way carbon monoxide does

You can’t smell it

You can’t see it

You don’t notice the atmosphere changing

You just keep breathing, unaware that every inhale is laced with something designed to break you down

At first, it feels harmless

Comfortable, even

You don’t question it, because it doesn’t feel threatening

You think you’ve found something solid

But underneath the surface, the damage has already started

And the most dangerous part

You won’t notice right away

The manipulation doesn’t show up in obvious ways

It comes quietly

In small moments

In the way they twist your words

In the way they challenge your memory, make you question what happened, plant seeds of doubt so subtle you can’t trace them back

It starts to fog your thinking, like your mind’s oxygen is thinning and you don’t even realize it

You lose track of what’s real

But you tell yourself you’re overthinking

You convince yourself it’s stress, exhaustion, life

Anything but the truth, that you’re already standing in something dangerous

The people around you don’t see it either

They see you working, smiling, showing up

They see the version of you that’s holding it together, not the version falling apart behind closed doors

And you get good at performing

Because when the damage is happening inside you, in your mind, your heart, your self-worth, nobody else notices

It feels like breathing in poison with every interaction, but you don’t recognize the symptoms right away

They’re slow

Creeping in over time

First, you feel tired

Then disconnected

Then unsure of yourself

Your mind feels foggy, like the oxygen’s been replaced with something heavier

You second-guess your instincts, your decisions, your memories

It’s subtle at first, but the fog gets thicker

Your clarity, the part of you that knows how to stand grounded in your truth, starts to disappear

Your energy fades without explanation

You can’t focus

You lose motivation

You can’t find the version of yourself that used to feel sharp, capable, steady

It happens gradually

Breath by breath

Comment by comment

Lie by lie

The same way carbon monoxide builds in a space, quiet, constant, deadly, until there’s no clean air left to breathe

And one day, you’re functioning on autopilot, and even that feels exhausting

You’re surviving, but you’re not present

You’re existing, but disconnected from your own life

It feels like you’re walking through a fog you can’t escape

And still, you tell yourself it’s fine

You stay

You adapt

You blame yourself

Because by now, they’ve trained you to believe you’re the problem

That’s the final layer of control

Making you question your own reality so completely, you stop trusting yourself altogether

And once that happens, they don’t have to control you with force

You’ll do it for them

You’ll silence yourself

Shrink yourself

Convince yourself this is love, or at least the best you’ll ever get

Meanwhile, the world looks at you and sees someone holding it together

Nobody sounds the alarm

Nobody questions what they can’t see

But eventually, the symptoms start to show

The exhaustion in your eyes

The heaviness in your energy

The way your words sound hesitant now

The way you’ve retreated so far inside yourself, you barely speak with certainty anymore

It’s like watching someone in the final stages of poisoning, their system shutting down, but the source invisible to everyone else

And when they finally notice the change

They don’t trace it back to the abuse

They don’t ask what happened to you

They decide you are the problem

They call you distant

Cold

Negative

Overly sensitive

They say you’ve changed, like it happened in a vacuum, like your breakdown was unprovoked

They don’t see the slow, deliberate dismantling that led to this version of you

They see the symptoms, not the cause

And the one who caused it

They stay untouched

They keep smiling

They keep manipulating

They keep painting themselves as the steady one while you unravel in plain sight

It’s the perfect setup for them

Destroy you quietly, then sit back and let everyone believe the destruction was your fault

And by the time you recognize what’s happening, you’re already carrying the weight of their narrative

You start to believe it too

You question yourself

You blame yourself

You silence yourself

Because that’s how this kind of abuse works

It rewrites your entire sense of self while the world holds you responsible for the fallout

It’s the most dangerous form of destruction

The kind nobody sees coming

The kind nobody holds them accountable for

The kind that leaves you standing in the wreckage of yourself, suffocating in plain sight, wondering when everything slipped away

The kind that convinces everyone the problem is you

All while the air around you was poisoned from the very beginning

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If you’ve lived this, I see you.

This is the part people don’t understand about emotional and narcissistic abuse. The damage doesn’t always show on the surface. It works quietly, destroying you from the inside out while the world keeps telling you to “move on” or “just leave.”

I share these truths because nobody should feel crazy for not seeing it sooner. Nobody should feel alone for staying longer than they wanted to. And nobody should feel silenced for struggling to put themselves back together after the fact.

You’re not the problem.

The air was poisoned from the start.

And your story deserves to be heard.

With raw truth and the strength to speak it,

Lindsay-Michele

Living, healing, and navigating both the silence and the survival

🖤 www.lindsay-michele.com | @downtherabbithole.lm