I feel like I am purging some toxic residues these days. I really want to leave all the horrors of the past behind and start a new bright and unburdened chapter of my life. But it feels that there are lessons I need to verbalise and share with the world first.

I want to delve a little bit into the issue of manipulation and future-faking, which the narcissist uses to get the victim where he wants her and keep her the hook for as long as possible. I hope that describing this openly will release me from the hatred I still feel towards that person and from which I want to be liberated (I am not kidding, sometimes I feel like making a voodoo doll with that sick fuck’s face and asking god to send some horrible affliction onto that individual. I don’t like feeling these feelings, I want to be free from them. But this is what it is. In the name of the integration of my shadow, I am choosing to own all my feelings, including my hatred – just in case someone wants to judge me for feeling what I feel.)

As I described in my original post about the discard stage, I had a very heavy clash with reality following the desintegration of a ‘relationship’ with a narcissist. This person managed to mess me up big time. First he created the perfect fake persona that I would fall for, manipulating my emotions with the ‘love of my life’ garbage, making me attach and emotionally invest into that ‘relationship’, only to push me from the pedestal mercilessly and eventually kicking me to the curb in the most humiliating and degrading way.

Why do I still feel that hatred? Because it took me very long to fully comprehend the extend of the manipulation that I had been a victim of. What I am experiencing is called delayed anger and it is normal, just in case anyone wants to criticise me, anyway…

As the great psychologist Viktor Frankl said ‘an abnormal reaction to an abnormal situation is normal’.

Psychic rape

A relationship with a narcissist is from the start essentially psychic rape. They don’t need to take you by force. They manipulate you and make you believe they are someone they are not. If you knew who they really were, you wouldn’t touch them with a stick. But their smug, aren’t they? And the worst thing is that they are proud of their sick depravity. The depravity, which is hiding behind the I am such a cool guy facade (just look at the face of Jeffrey Epstein, you will see it there).

It’s the grand fraud they are so proud of pulling off. I can see the fuck smugly laughing inside. Yep, I fooled that chick, what a boss I am. I virtually want to throw up. Being a person with strong empathy, who has always aspired to be better and do good, I simply cannot comprehand the fucked up depravity of this scum of humanity.

The reason it all got to that bad point for me was for one thing – the narcissist’s future faking during the devaluation and discard stage. Because of the future faking, it took me a very long time to fully comprehend the situation. It was not my fault. I had no clue who I was dealing with and was taking that person’s words (rather than actions) at face value – a big mistake. I was clinging to the mask instead of acknowledging the filth I was actually dealing with.

The mind-fuck of future-faking

A truly vile narcissist wants to get as much supply from you as possible. So when he is bored of you, he would evaluate the residual supply in you and then try to put you on the back burned for possible future reuse. How does he do that? This was my experience: The narc wanted to be free to pursue his new ‘interests’. However, I was still the ‘hot chick that made him look good in front of his friends (puke, I am not kidding he really said that, oooh!)’ and he was risking that ‘he would not find another beautiful girl like me’ (unbelievable, isn’t it, what noble values he has, puke some more….) . So in his sicky sicky brain, he thinks – how do I prevent her from moving forward while not really giving her anything.

This is what he would do: He would deliberately say things to make me believe that he was just confused and needed space and time and that he indeed cared about me and wanted to salvage the ‘relationship’. That his intention was to come back. He used the same technique with his previous conquest, who, as a result, very humilatingly travelled across Europe to visit him in France, when he was already screwing me (yep), because he told her they were just taking a break because of the distance…..

He didn’t have the convenience of the distance with me but he would ask me to move out of a shared flat but insist that it’s just temporary, he would say that we would ‘talk’ about what was going on after he returned from holidays with his buddies, he would say he would take me to some amazing holidays afterwards (‘we are going to go to the Seychelles, baby’, more vomit here), he would send me a message on what would have been our fourth anniversary thanking me for ‘coming into his life and changing it for the best’. And of course, he would tell me he would always love me and respect me and that maybe we would be together again once he sorted himself out. Yep. These were the words and I chose to trust those words instead of observing the actions more carefully, to my great detriment.

So what were the actions? He would generally say that he would be in touch and we would talk about what still was ‘a relationship’ but in fact he would never be in touch. When I requested to meet and talk, he would have like five minutes for me, while making sure to let me know how he was dining out with his friends everyday, and obviously, he would ingnore me for Christmas, only to attempt to pretend we were friends when it suited him. He attempted to steal my novel, I am not kidding. He liked an idea for a story that I started developing and suggested we worked on it together when we were still together. After the discard, when I started realising he was not intending to fix the relationship, I told him that I assumed he acknowledged that the idea was mine, to which he replied that he was actually still working on it. Yep. I still have a paranoia about it, to be honest…

The damaging effects of future faking

But anyway. Back to the effects of his future faking on me. After the discard, gradually, as months passed and I realised he wasn’t really intending to fix anything, I accepted the relationship was over. In fact, my life started getting better. I started feeling more in touch with myself and started seeing that as a human being, he really wasn’t a match for me in terms of values and interests.

But I still cared for him. I spent four transformative years of my life with this person and had many warm and intense memories. I remembered him as supportive and caring in many difficult times and felt gratitude. I wanted to keep those memories. I wanted to keep this gratitude. I believed, and I still believe, that a relationship can end but you can still feel positive about the person. I had such experiences in the past and believed it would be possible with this person too. To have a closure – to acknowledge that we have messed up something that at some point had felt really precious.

I contacted the narcissist hoping to get this closure, remembering the person who had been telling me that I had changed their life for the best and that they would always respect me. Yep, I trusted that person’s words. But obviously, a narcissist being a narcissist, the moment I recontacted him was a cue to really unleash the heaviest devaluation. My wanting to have a closure and keep that warm place in my heart for him and all that had been was, in his ill mind, evidence of my weakness, and his superiority. Wonderful fuel for his delusions of grandeour.

I feel so sad for my past self that I was clinging to the memories, to the words, and looking for excuses for all those hurtful remarks that came after. Obviously, the narcissist had to tell me that he was doing so much better now, was really happy, hoped that one day I would be happy too, that he regretted nothing and that the relationship never really was all that hot and that I was always this or that… anyway.

I remember the stabbing feeling in my stomach. The madness of cognitive disonance kicking in and my naive belief that conflicts can be resolved and are just a result of misunderstandings. It was terrible. I was getting triggered, yet something in me, the manpulated brainwashed bit, was hanging onto the memory of the good person. Until that horrible grand finale that left me heavily traumatized.

That relationship affected my health in some profoundly negative ways. I learned a lot but I paid a lot. The horrifying manipulation that I fell for, how I let myself to be virtually led into the slaughterhouse still hurts me. The utter humiliation of the experience. I am not sure there is a way to forgive that. There certainly is no way to forget. And that, in fact, is a good thing. Narcissist have a habit of revisiting their victims when new exciting supply is not available. That probably would have happened to me at some point and if I were still in the clutches of cognitive dissonance, if I was still under the spell of the manipulation, it is possible that a false wave of regret and a fresh wave of love-bombing, would make me take that scum back. And then I would pay again. They say that many victims of narcissists go through multiple cycles of discard before truly understanding the problem. The attachment created by the manipulation is extremely strong and deep. Some people never recover.

It was only thanks to my commitment to my own psychologial healing and growth that I eventually stumbled on the first article about narcissistic relationships. I want to pay that forward and create more resources and information that people can stumble upon and have their breakthrough moments. It’s just the start. Anyway. I know that with all the trauma I had to endure because of this one misjudgement of a character I took myself off the back burner, I took myself off the shelf of old toys to revisit. I am a crazy bitch ex, just like his previous crazy bitch ex. It’s sad that people are so dumb and don’t realise where the pattern is.

Anyway, I hope that hatred that I still occasionally feel towards that individual, when I remember some of the sad chapters of that story, will eventually disappear. I hope this post will bring me closer to that goal. But until that happens, I will keep owning my feelings in their ugly entiriety.  I thought I was in a relationship with a wonderful, kind, mature and reasonable person, while I was being used by a smug fraudster. I want to forgive myself and I want to make everything for myself good from now on. And I want to stop caring whether karma does or does not deliver justice for me.