Their footsteps echo inside your head as they walk away. You feel glued to the floor, unable to move, unable to breathe. The person you loved the most just walked away from you, leaving you in a puddle in the middle of the floor. You drown in your own tears and your chest feels like it’s sinking in. They never once look back to make sure you are ok. In fact, it seems that they did everything they could to make sure you never would be ok. This is the most pain you have ever felt, and you just don’t know if the suffering will ever end. And the only thing you can think is, “how can they do this to me”?
The narcissist’s next act is the discard. It’s intended to be painful and cruel. It’s intended to make you feel like you weren’t enough and that you did this to yourself. You are exactly where they want you to be and you feel exactly how they want you to feel.
During the devaluation, the stage was set for this painful goodbye. Your biggest fear was that they were going to hurt you and leave you. Like a thriller, they kept you living in suspense, waiting for that moment that would scare the life out of you.
When the narcissist started to devalue you, they had decided that your time with them was almost up. They needed to hold on to you a little longer though, the timing had to be right. They needed the last little supply you could give them. You had to do one last job for them. It could be anything. Image control, caregiving, financial support. They still needed you to play the last part in their twisted game. In most cases, they also had to get things lined up with the new supply so that they would never be without it.
A breakup with a narcissist is not a normal breakup. There is no apology, remorse, or regret. They won’t sit with you on the floor telling you how sorry they are. They won’t say that they messed up and ask for your forgiveness. A narcissist isn’t capable of those emotions. Instead, the person who is causing you all of this pain won’t look at you, or if they do, you see no emotions in their eyes. They have become a robot that was programmed to destroy you.
Let’s put aside the fact that they just dismantled your entire world and walked away from you during the hardest moment of your life. The pain doesn’t end here. The narcissist is on their way to start the smear campaign if they haven’t done so already. They know you will tell people the truth. How they completely gaslighted you and manipulated you into the version of yourself that cannot get up off that floor. The version of you who feels like they will never be whole again. The narcissist now has a new agenda - make everyone think that you are crazy so they never believe you when you tell people what they did.
They will do anything to protect their image. “How dare you tell people the truth about what I did?” The more you try to reach out to people, the more people will believe their story because, after all, look how “nice” they are to everyone. You will feel so alone and isolated because that’s what the smear campaign is meant to do.
This stage doesn’t just end when they walk out the door. They’ve declared emotional war on you. They will rewrite the love story you once thought you had. They will tell others that they never really loved you or that they fell out of love with you (this will all be news to you, btw). They will blame you for the collapse of the relationship, telling everyone how you were always “crazy”, “emotional”, and “too much”. They will spread lies about your relationship and what you did, which are meant to get back to you so you can feel discarded all over again.
And after all this pain and suffering, you quickly realize that the abuse does not end here.
