The Email That Used to Ruin My Whole Day

There was a time when I could tell how my day was going to go before I even got out of bed.

It usually started with an email.

Not always long. Not always aggressive in obvious ways. Sometimes it was only a few lines.

My stomach would tighten the second I saw his name in my inbox. I wouldn’t open it right away. I’d tell myself I was waiting for a “good moment.” As if there was ever a good moment to read something that might unravel me.

But eventually I would open it.

And just like that, my whole nervous system would go into flight-or-flight, and my day would be centered around whatever my ex had just sent me.

The Ripple Effect of One Email

The content of the email didn’t matter as much as the effect it had on me.

It could be a complaint about something small, a rehashing of an old argument, or a new accusation.

And suddenly I wasn’t just reading an email, I was back in the dynamic I’d fought so hard to leave.

I would start drafting responses in my head while making coffee, stuck in the vortex of trying to figure out what he was thinking while trying to help my kids get ready.

One email could take up the entire day.

The Need to Respond

What I didn’t understand then was how much urgency I felt to fix it, clarify, defend myself, and be understood.

I would sit down and type out long responses. I would reread them, edit them, soften them, tighten them, try to anticipate every possible interpretation.

Then my finger would hover over “send”, because I already knew what was coming. There would be another long email with more accusations, more personal attacks, more covert shaming, more nervous-system hijacking.

Living Inside the Loop

High-conflict communication has a way of creating loops you don’t realize you’re in until you’re exhausted from them. You explain yourself, they reinterpret it, you clarify, they escalate, you try to stay neutral but they assign meaning anyway, and the loop continues.

What I didn’t see at the time was that the email wasn’t just communication. It was a system of engagement that kept me emotionally tethered to the conflict I was trying to escape.

The Cost I Didn’t Notice at First

The real cost wasn’t just emotional. Reading, responding to, then defending my communication with my narcissistic ex was stealing my time, attention, and presence from my kids, my community, and even my own needs.

I started measuring my days in terms of whether I had “resolved” the email situation yet. But unfortunately, high conflict personalities don’t accept resolution unless it benefits them. So I almost never felt settled, since the conflict felt never-ending.

What Changed (Slowly)

The shift didn’t happen all at once, but I felt things inside myself changing when I forced myself to stop responding right away. It took time to become comfortable removing the anxious need to respond, but once it became habitual, I started to shorten my replies.

Then I started asking myself a new question before responding: Is this actually something I need to engage with, or is this something I’ve been trained to engage with?

Learning Not to Step Into The Loop

The hardest part was tolerating the discomfort of not fixing each conflict, right away, with a fast, emotional email.

There is a very specific kind of anxiety that comes with letting a message sit unanswered and I think that it’s because I had been conditioned to believe that silence equals guilt, or that not responding was somehow cowardly.

There are many times I fell back into old patterns and had to re-learn what I had already worked so hard to understand. But eventually I realized that my strategy for dealing with my narcissistic ex included not responding to every email, and only giving a small amount of strategic time and presence to the emails that required response.

The Email That Still Arrives

Even now, I sometimes see an email and feel a flicker of that old reaction. I know that my body remembers faster than my mind does, and that involuntary shudder or flinching when I see his name in my inbox is a reminder that I have to stay the course and practice radical self-care.

When I care for myself and follow my strategy closely, my day is not ruined by an email anymore.

What I Wish I Knew Then

I wish I had known that:

Not every message requires engagement.

Clarity doesn’t create understanding when you’re dealing with a narcissist.

Narcissistic abusers use communication to retain conflict, even if it reads that they’re trying to resolve it.

Protecting my peace would sometimes look like doing nothing at all.

Accepting these truths has helped my nervous system to feel grounded and calm, no matter what I find in my inbox when I wake up.

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