Narcissists & The Baffling Break-Up: Q & A (Part 1)

I now provide email counseling via Q & A and I felt that my exchange below with a male victim of a female narcissistic partner would be helpful to everyone. As we know, while the female narcissist may be worse than her counterpart, the basic narcissistic behaviors of these people is amazingly similar. The exchange below could just as easily have been between me and a female partner of a narc. I think that all of you who visit here will resonate with this person’s story. I will post our exchange in several parts. Enjoy!

Dear Zari…

I have found the last couple of weeks a real struggle. It’s baffling as I was only in the relationship one year with this girl and yet she has had such a profound affect on me. I was with my last partner 16-years and before that, I was married for seven years and then divorced but neither break-up left me feeling like this. I am friends with both my ex-wife and ex long-term partner. I sometimes think I must be the crazy one to struggle over this girl given she clearly has no problems with moving on. Anyway, my questions are as follows:

1) What triggers the devaluation? It’s so strange how things changed suddenly from one extreme to another. The actual break-up occurred while I was drawing a picture of her and the kids for Xmas. To do it, I looked at the Instagram picture she had of her and the kids and, initially, this was fine. But then she began to block me and unblock me. When I mentioned this, she became annoyed and made it impossible for me to finish the project. Things then started to escalate even though prior to this, she was engaging, sexual and told me she loved me. She ended it officially in early Dec but we texted and emailed throughout Jan 2018. I reached out for months after but she ignored me. It appeared that she was messaging someone pretty heavily on social media. She hovered in July and we texted and emailed for two weeks until she went cold again. In September, she was back, messaging until end of October and I couldn’t take it anymore. I told her we should probably go no contact to which she sent a nasty email saying she had found someone else anyway and good luck. I felt she was just playing games with me.

Answer: You are right to feel as if she is playing games because she is. To a narcissist, it is ALL a game. I wrote an article about it…Narcissists & The Game of Life...which described how narcs play by a different set of rules than everyone else on the game board. You are still assessing the break-up with the expectation that she is going to behave in a normal manner and it just isn’t so. Nothing and everything can trigger a devaluation. Things can be going great and then – BAM – this person disappears. And then BAM, they reappear. In each case, the trigger can be completely unknown. We go over each and every conversation verbatim, making ourselves crazy trying to figure it all out. This is why, when we demand answers, they can’t really give any, often throwing out some lame excuse such as “I could tell you didn’t love me anymore” or “you are the one that changed, not me”. Because they don’t have logical reasons for doing what they do, they become very cruel and accusatory when all we want is to know what happened so that it doesn’t happen again. People ask me if the narcissist feels guilt and I say ‘yes, but it is NOT remorseful guilt. It is what I call INCONVENIENT guilt which, by my definition, means that they KNOW they are SUPPOSED to be feeling guilty about the way they are treating us but they CAN’T and it is INCONVENIENT that they know they’re supposed to so they treat us cruelly to compensate. Do you understand this? And ‘cruel’ is often to mild a word for what they do. You have to look at this way. The way she treated you was so ILLOGICAL and RIDICULOUSLY MEAN that you have no choice now but to chalk it up to HER disposition. It truly has nothing to do with you. There is no rhyme nor reason to the trigger or the devaluation itself.

2) What makes her ditch someone quicker than others? I have read that narcissists seem to like people who are challenges, but I’m not sure of this since I read conflicting info.

Answer: I think that they DO like people who are challenges but they can go either way. A narcissist likes chaos. So, for those relationships where the narcissist’s partner poses to particular challenge, the narcissist just creates the challenge herself and, thus, the chaos. That’s all that is. And because each partner is different, it takes a narc time to figure it out and the time to do this can vary.  There’s no time limit. Narcs can be with you for 10 years, 10 weeks, or ten months. It’s all the same in the end.

3) Once they find a new person, do they ever think of you again or do they consider you dead? If she has a new person – as I suspect she does – will I ever figure again in her thoughts? It’s hard to comprehend as we went on lovely walks and she talked about the future so readily. When we split, I mentioned some of these events, but reminiscing did not seem to affect her at all.

Answer: The problem here is that to YOU those lovely walks meant something but to a narc, these events mean nothing except perhaps in the moment. She probably did have a lovely time on the walks but unfortunately it’s a matter of “out of sight, out of mind”. The “pleasantness” of the moment only lasts for the moment. It has no LASTING affects. So, sure, she will think of you if something reminds her of you or, say, if her current partner causes her grief and she remembers how you took her back no matter what but it’s not the “nostalgic” feeling of sadness that a normal person would feel.

4) Since she has no official diagnosis (to my knowledge), I start to distort or question myself. The reason I’m interested if she lasts longer with other men is because I’m thinking it might be indicative of whether I am also culpable in some way. In the end, she found fault with everything I did. The fact that I exercised daily annoyed her and my eating habits were irritating. She felt I did not like her kids. Now, it’s true I did not like some of the behaviors, but who would? Her son shouting ‘do this now’ and kicking water at me from a puddle as we got out of the car did not endear me. But if I gave this impression when I met her, it was not reflected in her actions towards me then. She told me she loved me and had never met anyone like me. The irony of this is that the trouble started when I actually began to fall for her and became more responsive. I just wonder if chasing her when she ended it sealed my fate. When she said I never demonstrated my love for her, I felt compelled to overcompensate.

Answer: By telling you that you “did not demonstrate your love”, she wanted you to chase her because it gave her a thrill to turn you away. These people are cruel. You are placing far too much merit on words that are typical narcspeak. Whether you chased her or not makes no difference at all. A narcissist bends accordingly and she would have simply found another verbal way to derail you more than she already did. You can be indifferent or you can chase her…it simply doesn’t matter. Don’t over-think the break-up. EVEN IF “chasing her” “sealed your fate”, then you need to be grateful it did or you’d still be struggling in the quagmire. I’m really not sure why guys are so bound and determined to blame themselves no matter how cruel these women are. She is still who she is.

5) What I also find odd is how effected I have been. We were together a year, whereas my last relationships lasted 16 and seven years. However, in terms of both time duration and intensity, I have never felt like this. I feel really damaged by this experience and it lasted just a year. My sleep patterns are off, I think about her too much and how I could have handled things better. Generally, I can’t seem to accept the reality. Strangely enough, I felt I was moving on in July until she hovered again after having said only three weeks earlier that she did not want me to contact her. I found her second disappearance worse than the first. I did suggest no contact to her, but that was only borne from her comments and she has ignored any reach outs I have made since.

Answer: Okay, I find that with the guys I speak and correspond with, there’s more of an ego dynamic going on about the break-up. Women, I believe, are more accustomed to being “dumped” or getting broken up with. We’ve been going through it since high school so we know that breaks up can happen over anything at all. That being said,  relationships with disordered people just affect us differently. I went through a horrific divorce which looked liked a walk in the park compared to my relationship with the narcissist and I also had a relationship with a guy years ago who broke my heart but we’re very good friends now. So, it is simply different and I believe this is because to figure out what happened and why it didn’t work takes so much mental energy. You can never be friends with these people because they were never your friend to begin with. There’s no closure because there are no answers but the truth is that there’s nothing to figure out. You dated a girl with an extreme narcissistic personality and that NEVER works out. Nothing you could have done could have fixed it. To pick apart your own behaviors to find fault is cutting yourself short because whatever you did (and none of us are perfect) or might have done pales in comparison to her rude and disrespectful behaviors. Her punishments never fit the crime.

6) I do need to move on and break this stuck cycle, but it’s not easy and I still feel drawn to her for reasons I cannot explain, but yet logically I ask myself how could I have a healthy relationship with this person anyway?

Answer: Exactly. You have to focus on that logical thinking. The relationship was not sustainable and if a relationship is not sustainable what is the point?

7) Is she likely to inspect my social media?

Answer: She might here and there check on all past boyfriends just to keep tabs on her former conquests.

8) Even as an unhinged person, doesn’t she see that I have so much to offer? If I met someone who ticked off the boxes of what I like, even if I was unhinged surely I would want to hold onto this to benefit me. I have a nice home by the sea, an interesting job, many talents, and I love to share everything I have. I cycle, walk, and keep fit. I am highly educated, caring, charitable, and people hire me to speak about my adventures. She seemed to love all this and now she seems to be only intent on finding other men to replace me. I can only assume there was something lacking with me to cause her to keep hunting for an alternative. I could fully understand if I suddenly became a slob or my behavior suddenly changed, but I acted no different. I did chase her, but that was only when it all ended. It would be like me finding an attractive woman who loves adventure and wildlife and really cares about me, but ditching her purely to find someone else. It just does not seem to make sense. When she hovered, I started to think I couldn’t be that bad if she returned. It’s all so confusing.

Answer: The concept I speak of in my answer to question #3 applies here as well. It doesn’t matter what you have or what you can offer. Initially, those things may draw narcissists to us but they can’t hold on to that feeling. Narcissists live in what I call a “no preference world” where they can live/spend time at an adorable house by the sea with someone who leads an exciting and professional life OR in a trailer with someone who is the complete opposite. It makes no difference to them. Different things attract them about different people but the end result will always be the same. A NORMAL girl, of course, would weigh in and choose the house by the sea with the great guy but we’re not talking about a normal girl here.

9) If I move on and meet another girl, will this have any impact on her at all?

Answer: Why does that matter? Even if it “impacted” her, it wouldn’t be for any good reason.

10) Is there any other possible reason to explain her behaviors, or does she just fit the narcissistic bill so well?

Answer: She fits it to a tee. This girl is nothing nice.

Stay tuned for Part 2! If you are interested in emailing coaching and have questions for me, I’d be happy to help you. Click here for information….