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__________ The goal of this website is to give support to people who are facing problems in their relationship related to cheating, abuse and narcissism. I am living in Europe and English is not my native language, I wish you will excuse me if I make some grammatical errors. I have a background in neuroscience and behavioral sciences and I am currently doing brain research related to these topics in university in my home country. I decided to write in English because I wish to reach as many people as I can around the world. If you wish to read more about me, please visit page Site Overview. __________ Today I have been thinking about the recovery process after ending a relationship with a narcissist. 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 a narcissist 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 your narcissist is trying actively to get back together with you. What helps during those moments is to remember the bad moments with a narcissist. 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 narcissistic 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.
In the beginning I was not strong enough to do this, and I found myself asking my narcissistic 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 narcissist is feeling happy to see you suffer due to your love for him or her. A narcissist is enjoying when he or she can discard you and reject you. That makes a narcissist feel he or she is in total control of the situation (and a narcissist is actually right about this, he or she IS in total control and can play around with you as he or she likes, either discard you or mercifully allow you to be with him or her again). Your pain does not evoke any sympathy in a narcissist. If you show your weakness to a narcissist, 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 with a narcissist will continue a bit longer, until finally you find the strength in you to cut a narcissist loose. The longer you wait, the harder it is to heal and recover. After performing a long-term close observation of my narcissistic 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 narcissist. 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 though 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 a 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. I know he was trying to get together with one woman after our separation (in fact I left him because I found out he was trying to approach this woman in a romantic way behind my back, in other words attempting to have an affair with her). I heard that he praised to her how much he loved her etc but she was not interested in him (I think she was smart enough and could see through his mask already at that early stage, unlike me when I first got together with him). When she kept rejecting him, he felt lost and lonely and turned to me again, trying to get back to his former source of supply. I rejected him, and soon after that he started a relationship with one of his former girlfriends, who was still interested in him enough to get romantically involved with him. However, he did not find her to be satisfying enough for him, so he kept on calling me and emailing me, telling how much he loved me and missed me. He said that he does not love his former girlfriend as much as he loves me, that he hopes we could be together again etc. He was to say the least emotionally cheating on that poor woman when he was trying to get back together with me behind her back, in the same time sleeping with her and making her believe he wanted to have a future with her. Seeing how easily he was ready to cheat on her and to lie to her made me respect him even less. I knew I would never want to get back with a dishonorable, unreliable person like that. In the end I can say that his pathetic attempts to get back with me even though he was in the same time already involved with someone else helped me to detach from him mentally. I will get back to you soon. Now I will send a big virtual hug to you all! - Maria If you wish to familiarize yourself with my blog and to read older posts, click this link to go to the Blog Main Page. If you wish to submit your own story and get feedback and support for your situation or if you wish to contact me for any other reason, click
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