.bashrc somehow looping and sourcing itself (fork bomb) - bash

Question

I'm using a web host with an Apache terminal, using it to host a NodeJS application. For the most part everything runs smooth, however when I open the terminal I often get bash: fork: retry: no child processes and bash: fork: retry: resource temporarily unavailable.
I've narrowed down the cause of the problem to my .bashrc file, as when using top I could see that the many excess processes being created were bash instances:
top - 13:41:13 up 71 days, 20:57, 0 users, load average: 1.82, 1.81, 1.72
Tasks: 14 total, 1 running, 2 sleeping, 11 stopped, 0 zombie
%Cpu(s): 11.7 us, 2.7 sy, 0.1 ni, 85.5 id, 0.1 wa, 0.0 hi, 0.0 si, 0.0 st
KiB Mem : 41034544 total, 2903992 free, 6525792 used, 31604760 buff/cache
KiB Swap: 0 total, 0 free, 0 used. 28583704 avail Mem
PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND
1001511 xxxxxxxx 20 0 11880 3692 1384 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.02 bash
1001578 xxxxxxxx 20 0 11880 2840 524 T 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 bash
1001598 xxxxxxxx 20 0 11880 2672 348 T 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 bash
1001599 xxxxxxxx 20 0 11880 2896 524 T 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 bash
1001600 xxxxxxxx 20 0 11880 2720 396 T 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 bash
1001607 xxxxxxxx 20 0 11880 2928 532 T 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 bash
1001613 xxxxxxxx 20 0 11880 2964 532 T 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 bash
1001618 xxxxxxxx 20 0 11880 2780 348 T 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 bash
1001619 xxxxxxxx 20 0 12012 3024 544 T 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 bash
1001620 xxxxxxxx 20 0 11880 2804 372 T 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 bash
1001651 xxxxxxxx 20 0 12012 2836 352 T 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 bash
1001653 xxxxxxxx 20 0 12016 3392 896 T 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 bash
1004463 xxxxxxxx 20 0 9904 1840 1444 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 bash
1005200 xxxxxxxx 20 0 56364 1928 1412 R 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 top
~/.bashrc consists of only:
# .bashrc
# Source global definitions
if [ -f /etc/bashrc ]; then
. /etc/bashrc
fi
# Uncomment the following line if you don't like systemctl's auto-paging feature:
# export SYSTEMD_PAGER=
# User specific aliases and functions
export NVM_DIR="$HOME/.nvm"
[ -s "$NVM_DIR/nvm.sh" ] && \. "$NVM_DIR/nvm.sh" # This loads nvm
[ -s "$NVM_DIR/bash_completion" ] && \. "$NVM_DIR/bash_completion" # This loads nvm bash_completion
If I comment out the last 3 lines like so:
#export NVM_DIR="$HOME/.nvm"
#[ -s "$NVM_DIR/nvm.sh" ] && \. "$NVM_DIR/nvm.sh" # This loads nvm
#[ -s "$NVM_DIR/bash_completion" ] && \. "$NVM_DIR/bash_completion" # This loads nvm bash_completion
Then the terminal functions as expected and no excess processes are created. However I obviously can't use nvm/npm commands while it's disabled as nvm isn't started.
I'm relatively inexperienced with bash and can't seem to figure out why this is happening. It seems that bash is somehow calling itself every time it opens, which creates the loop/fork bomb once the terminal is opened.
How can I prevent this while still being able to use nvm/npm?