WHY IS A NARCISSIST TRYING TO GET YOU BACK? The hardest part is to get over the first weeks and months after the separation. Many people are not strong enough to maintain No Contact and get lured back to the dark realms of their narcissistic partners before they have been able to recover and heal sufficiently. If you are one of these people, please do not be too hard on yourself. It is extremely difficult to break free from a narcissist and mental recovery takes a long time. It usually takes several failed attempts, until one day you simply have enough of all the lies and abuse and you leave without looking back. Even then you might find yourself missing "your" narcissist every now and then, especially if he or she is trying actively to get back together with you... What helps during those moments of weakness is to remember the bad moments with your partner. One of the tactics I used to get over my narcissistic spouse was to remind myself of something bad he had done whenever I felt I was missing him. When I remembered how my spouse had mistreated me, lied to me and cheated on me, my mind was filled with such anger and disgust that all the "nostalgic" thoughts of getting back together with him disappeared instantly. This kind of approach significantly aided my recovery and healing after ending the relationship. In the beginning I was not strong enough to maintain No Contact and I found myself asking my spouse to get back together with me. That is always a big mistake. A narcissist is feeding on the misery of people around him. When he sees you are "desperately" in love with him, that is the ultimate source of a narcissistic supply. A narcissistic person is often feeling happy to see you suffer due to your love for him or her and is enjoying when he or she can discard you and reject you. That makes them feel they are in total control of the situation (and they are actually right about this, they ARE in total control and can play around with you as they like, either discard you or mercifully allow you to be with them again). Your pain does not evoke any sympathy in a narcissist. If you show your weakness you are only making your situation worse and a narcissist gets more Supply when he or she can reject you in a cold, cruel way. Even if a narcissist does not reject you, the end result is that you are only getting back to the point where you started and your misery will continue a bit longer, until finally you find the strength in you to cut your spouse loose. The longer you wait, the harder it is to heal and recover. After performing a long-term close observation of my spouse, I noticed that he was behaving in a very predictable way. He was in a way like a "robot", reacting to certain things always in the same way. Interestingly most of the features in his behavior were classical examples of the behavior of a narcissistic person. When I finished the relationship with him after finding out about cheating and lying he totally discarded me, disappeared and was silent for about a month or two. There was only a casual email time to time regarding some practical matters (I responded with one sentence, if even that). Of course he never admitted to cheating and lying, even thought I had the proof. Regardless of his rejection (or perhaps because of that), I slowly started to recover. Then after couple months his behavior started to change. He started to send emotional emails and he told me he still loved me and wanted to get back together with me (even though he still could not admit the cheating and lying). My silence and ignorance made me appear like a challenge to him. He HAD to get me back in order to prove himself he was still irresistible. When he was together with me, he had access to a constant narcissistic supply in form of me telling him all the time how much I loved him. When I was gone from his life, he had no one to tell him those things, and he started to get withdrawal symptoms... - Maria, cheating-infidelity ~DC
Posted on: Sat, 10 Aug 2013 17:02:27 +0000