When I ponder over the past connections I made with narcissistic individuals, I’m reminded of why I should never be inclined to return to them.
Many times, I’ll have a memory of something that occurred with these individuals while I was in their stage of devaluation. That’s when so many things occur to me.
For one, those individuals that are actual narcissists hated me. I mean they highly detested me to the core.
The behavior of those narcissists was never conducive to love for me at all. Much of the time, they pretended to care for me while showing me very little true care.
I mostly received breadcrumbs from those narcissists. Only when I was in their stage of idealization, also known as the love bombing phase, did I receive their attention. That attention, however, was based on their own hidden agenda for what they truly wanted from me.
Beyond their initial high with me upon being on their pedestal of praise when I was first captured into their traps, those narcissists devalued me as much as they possibly could in overt ways, and although those ways hurt me, it was their covert abuses that hurt me even more.
Many times, I’d call them out on the behavior that was outright disrespectful towards me, but there were more times when I was stunned into disbelief that a person I cared about would actually mistreat me so badly and even subtly grin about it.
The covert abuses were harder to prove because no one else would see them happen but me. They were such subtle abuses that I would even have to question myself it the abuses really happened to me. If it weren’t for the journals that I kept, I wouldn’t have believed those things happened to me.
The Narcissist of Subtle Abuses
One such narcissist I recall having their hooks into me as if their life depended upon it was one dub The Identity Thief. This narcissist literally attempted to embody me – soul and body [and spirit if that were even possible]. It was as if this narcissist tried to infuse themselves with me so that we could be one and the same.
I should have noticed that something was off when conversations teetered on obsession. There were so many red flags I ignored – some subtle and some blatantly in my face. I was constantly on the receiving end of their devaluations and discards, but in the beginning, I just summed up their behaviors as them being moody and me lacking understanding of them.
It turns out, this identity thief was and is a full blown covert narcissist. They always made themselves out to be the victim when they were clearly in the wrong about a lot. I found myself always apologizing for their negative behaviors projected onto me until I finally had enough and cut their bonded cord of attachment to me.
It took some years for me to break away from this narcissist because of my own issues with being a people pleaser and being fearful of doing so because of how I would look to others and to them. Yet, after doing much research, prayerfully weighing the costs of applying what I learned from much research, and going through enough of the narcissistic cycles of abuses this narcissist used against me, I finally cut the cord from this identity thief in both the natural realm and the spiritual realm.
The Identity Thief did all within their power to usurp my gifts as their own, despite their own giftedness. They simply were not content within themselves to let me rest and let me be me. Yet, at the same time, this narcissist not only envied me, they despised me. The hate was so palpable I could often see their body vibrating to contain it.
The look in the eyes of the Identity Thief often told me all that I needed to know about which cycle of abuse I would incur from them. Oftentimes, even the low vibrational sound within their voice would alert me to a darker presence. More than battling against them, I was battling against an evil spirit [or spirits] which possessed them.
Yet, I learned so much from being around this narcissist. In fact, a therapist I saw assigned me to do a case study on this narcissist’s behaviors as a way to match up the criteria found within the DSM-V. It turns out, I not only learned more about the intricacies of narcissistic personality disorder, but I educated the therapist about this disorder too.
In addition, I learned so much that simply referring to the patterns of behaviors for narcissists described within the DSM-V doesn’t do complete justice. One literally has to experience being around a narcissist to actually learn about the disorder, and once one learns from one narcissist, one literally finds that being around other narcissists enables them to fill in other missing gaps of information.
The Identity Thief was/is the narcissist of subtle abuses. I have had multiple dreams detailing that their issues of abandonment and narcissistic injuries are entrenched within them, and they are bound not to let go. They have attacked me in such subtle ways that I didn’t see their missile of pain coming in my direction. It could have been the way I said something that caused them injury or the fact that I disagreed with something I considered a benign point, but this narcissist would get back at me in the most subtle ways so it wasn’t always so obvious.
In fact, it might take me days before I realized I’d been devalued, and the only reason I knew to recall anything regarding this would be that something was never quite right about an interaction I’d had with them. For the most part, I stayed walking on eggshells in my relationship with them because I never knew really what could set them off. It became so that I began journaling a list of things about myself that posed an issue for this narcissist, and as it turns out, I realized that they hated that I was simply me.
This is not the only narcissist I think of, but this is the narcissist with whom I maintained the longest friendship. I considered this narcissist like family – a part of me – which is why I often found it so difficult to break away. In the same way, we’d had also formed a deep trauma bond and soul tie with each other, and I prayed hard to break it. I mean, I did some serious spiritual warfare to break any ties this narcissist had to me so I could walk away and never look back.
When I think of all the devaluing I suffered which were mostly subtle, but harsh and vicious attacks, that made me question my reality, I think about how I never want to reopen that door. I think about how I will never go back to this situation again, and even if change in this narcissist were to present itself to me, I have come to realize that once a narcissist is always a narcissist. The door will remained closed.
My Voice Unchained 