I hadn’t believed him initially, every day? But then things began to add up: the tension in the room, the little sideways looks, the tentative pulling back. He was polluting the well, and I hadn’t even realized. But what shattered me was what my friend then told me. He said the narcissist had gone so far as to inform him that I was demon-possessed, that I was harmful, that proximity to me would somehow spiritually and emotionally harm them. I had to sit with that for a very long time. I just couldn’t get my head around how one person could take it to such an extreme degree of character destruction. But I understood that it was projection at its finest. He wasn’t talking about me; he was talking about himself. When narcissists befriend your enemies or even your friends, they’re not doing it because they enjoy those individuals. They are doing this because they need a new audience, and that crowd is their new one.
They will smile, get to know, even overshare, all to build faux intimacy. It’s all to get those folks to believe in their version of it. They don’t want truth coming in its raw form, so they hustle fast. They rewrite history. They reverse the narrative. They make you shut up, to make your silence proof, your boundaries betrayed. And if they can’t persuade everyone, they’ll persuade just enough to make you believe that you’re being trapped, that you’re alone, and paranoid. But this is what I’ve discovered: the truth has a funny way of emerging, of showing up when the people who care about you genuinely begin to sense the difference between truth and semblance.
Number 2. The manipulative love letter
There is this type of message a narcissist sends when he knows he is going to lose. It is not like rage; it is not like revenge. It is like love or at least the imitation of love. It always arrives too late after silence, after room, after they’ve realized the reversal of power, the ultimate breakdown of what delusion they’d had over you. You look at your phone, and there it is: a lengthy, mawkish message, a letter full of memory and yearning, sentences that read like they’ve just come into consciousness.
Suddenly, they remember all that you begged them to remember: the way your hand trembled as you wept, the moment you left but came back after turning around, the things you gave up that they never once thanked you for. Now they remember everything because, suddenly, “God has awoken them.” They become so divine, and it reaches reality. They speak of fate. They speak of God, destiny, and that the two of you are soulmates. They tell you that what you have is rare, a once-in-a-lifetime experience, that you deserve a second chance.
You may also want to read this:
7 Signs That A Narcissist Is Done With You
What Happens To Narcissists When They Get Older?
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