I Had the "Suicide Disease": How I Healed Trigeminal Neuralgia and Narcissistic AbuseI Had the "Suicide Disease": How I Healed Trigeminal Neuralgia and Narcissistic Abuse
The Shiftshow with Adriana Bucci
Adriana Bucci recounts how years of severe jaw pain and trigeminal neuralgia intersected with narcissistic abuse from her mother. She shares how learning about the mind body connection and processing repressed emotions coincided with becoming pain free and reshaping her life boundaries.
16:46•7 Oct 2026
From "Suicide Disease" to Pain Free: Adriana’s Journey Through Narcissistic Abuse and Healing
Episode Overview
- Long-term chronic pain may be linked to repressed emotions rather than purely structural issues once the original injury has healed.
- Emotional abuse from a narcissistic parent can lead to lifelong suppression of feelings like anger, shame and fear, which may show up as physical symptoms.
- Recognising emotional abuse as trauma is a key step toward understanding chronic pain in the context of the mind body connection.
- Consistent inner work to feel and process emotions can coincide with a reduction or resolution of chronic pain.
- Building self-respect and setting boundaries, including going no contact, can follow naturally from acknowledging and working through buried emotions.
“"Within four months of doing the work, I was 100% pain free."”
Curious about how others navigate their sobriety journey? This episode of The Shiftshow with Adriana Bucci zooms in on chronic pain, narcissistic abuse, and how the two can collide in one person’s life. Adriana shares how a wisdom tooth extraction spiralled into years of TMJ dysfunction, dry sockets, shingles in her mouth, and trigeminal neuralgia – a condition she notes is nicknamed "the suicide disease" because of how intense the pain can be.
At one point, she even told her husband, "I'm going to try to give you another 10 years before you're probably going to have to call yourself a widower," capturing just how hopeless things felt. You’ll hear how she spent thousands on physiotherapy, chiropractors, mouth guards, TMJ specialists and nerve block injections, yet nothing truly helped. The turning point came when she stumbled on the mind body connection through Dr John Sarno’s work and an app for chronic pain.
Initially offended by the idea that repressed emotions could be linked to her physical symptoms, she pushed past her scepticism out of sheer desperation – and within four months, she says she was completely pain free. Adriana links her pain to growing up with a narcissistic mother, describing how emotional abuse and gaslighting led her to bury feelings of anger, shame and fear.
She explains how these repressed emotions can build up like a pressure cooker and end up expressed as chronic pain. As she started processing those emotions, she noticed both her pain easing and her self-respect growing, eventually setting boundaries and going no contact. For anyone dealing with narcissistic abuse, chronic pain, or both, this episode offers a candid look at how emotional healing can sit alongside physical recovery.
It might leave you wondering: what is your body trying to say through your pain?
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