Cognitive collapse is what happens when your brain literally can’t hold all the pieces of the puzzle at once anymore, especially after long-term exposure to emotional abuse like narcissistic manipulation.

When you're in a narcissistic relationship, your reality gets constantly distorted. You're told you're too sensitive, too needy, misremembering things, or the one causing the problems, even when your gut is screaming that something is wrong.

Over time, this chips away at your sense of what's real.

Then, when the relationship starts to fall apart or the discard happens, your mind tries to make sense of it all and it can’t. The betrayal, the contradictions, the loss, the humiliation, the grief… it's too much to organize at once.

So you crash.

It feels like:

• Spinning thoughts that won’t stop

• Needing answers but not being able to trust any of them

• Sudden overwhelm over basic things (texts, eating, leaving the house)

• Crying and panic that comes out of nowhere

• Feeling like you’re going “crazy”

• Believing it’s all your fault even when deep down you know it’s not

Your mind is literally trying to survive the confusion by collapsing into a simple narrative, even if that narrative hurts you. Like:

“I’m the problem.”
“He’s finally happy because he left me.”
“If I just get it right, I can fix this.”

That’s not the truth, it’s trauma logic.

And it’s what the body does when it can’t make sense of emotional injury, so it tries to create safety by blaming itself.