"you're leaving the narc? "

So. I hear you’re beginning to consider thinking about mulling over the possibility of your perhaps pulling away from that narcissist of yours. WHY??!! Why unleash his toxic spewage on the rest of us; why grasp at the vision of a happy and fulfilling life for yourself while making the rest of us targets for his fake, psychopathic pursuits? **Narcissists HATE to lose. When you say, “It’s over,” you, a sane person, mean, “It’s over.” To the psycho you’re talking to, however, you are throwing down the gauntlet and saying, “Take THAT, Buttface.” If you say it’s over, he’ll instantly click into “I don’t think so” mode. Which brings us to: **He WILL pursue victory. He won’t pursue YOU. It will LOOK like he’s pursuing you, but I assure you most vigorously, he’s not. He’s wanting to put things right back to the way they’re SUPPOSED to be, with him screwing with your mind and your taking it, with you’re dousing him with adoration and admiration no matter how he treats you, and if you take him back he WILL incorporate in there some punishment for your “abandoning” him. He wants you back, all right, but on his terms, with exactly the same degree of selfishness and psychopathy as before. Nothing has changed. If you respond to him and give him another chance, you’ll regret it. **He will want to check up on you. Because he loves you? Oh, my, you haven’t been listening, have you. No, because he wants to make sure you’re suffering without him. Memorize this: Knowing you’re miserable without him is as satisfying to him as having you with him. If he can’t keep you feeding him attention in the relationship, he wants to know that you’re thinking of him and having a hard time without him afterward. He’ll eventually offer to alleviate your suffering by accepting any and all apologies and taking you back, and then once you’re together again he’ll abuse you until you get sick of it and end it again. If he can keep you swaying nauseatingly between the two situations indefinitely, he will be having a very happy time of it indeed. **Your only hope for success is a cold turkey break-up. No, you can’t “still be friends.” No, the occasional e-mail is not harmless. Narcissists who have been dumped will NOT be normal ex-mates any more than they were normal mates. Respond to him and he will, without fail, hurt you and devalue you again. Every little contact, every “chance encounter,” will set you back in recovering from what’s been a psychologically traumatic experience for you. You can’t heal from a trauma you’re still experiencing. If you’re going to recover from this, you MUST stay away from him. Marvel from a distance at his efforts to hurt and abuse you even though you’re not even together anymore. There are a couple of different strains of narcissistic ex-mates. The Herpes Narcissist ~ He never goes away completely and flares up when you need it the least. He will come back and act like absolutely nothing has happened and the two of you were just having a tiny tiff, for which he’s prepared to forgive you. He’ll act this way even though you’ve been ignoring him for four months and have a restraining order out on him. This looks like love and devotion on his part, but it’s not. If you warm to him in a weak moment he’ll do a brilliant job of reminding you why you left him in the first place, and you’ll have suffered a major setback. The Lyme Disease Narcissist ~ He goes away, but not until you’ve employed radical defense routines for months and then you’re left with bothersome lasting reminders of the experience. If you were married and have kids together, he’ll make your divorce proceedings a living hell just like he did your marriage. He’ll act like he can’t wait to get rid of you, and then stall and impede the divorce as much as humanly possible just to make sure you know who’s in control. And that’s BEFORE the real nightmare begins, with the custody arrangements. You need to stay as strong as a pillar of rock to get through it, and then you still have to deal with him until the kids are grown. The Itchy Rash Narcissist ~ The best of the four, really. The only way to get over an itchy rash is to ignore it no matter how excruciatingly annoying it is, no matter how much you know giving it attention with bring relief, and then after ages of depriving it of attention it really does go away. A very few extremely lucky targets (as target luck goes) are dealing with a Train Wreck Narcissist. These jewels will, often without warning or provocation, leave suddenly and completely with as much cruelty and abuse as possible and are never heard from again. Often they will sniff a hint of intent on your part to end or at least abate the abuse you’re enduring, and in a knee-jerk response they’ll do what they perceive to be abandoning you before you abandon them, and they’ll do it coldly, harshly and totally. Though their targets are devastated and profoundly hurt, they are left alone to commence their recovery without threat of interference from the abuser. They don’t feel even remotely lucky, and I have utter compassion for that, but in the context of recovering targets, they’re sitting prettier than they’ll ever know: It’s a whole lot easier to recover from a trauma that you’re not still experiencing, over and over again. The best way to get rid of a narcissistic tumor on your life is to “stay down” in his eyes when he’s in his stupid devalue-you stage. It’s like a head start on a new life without his crap. He’ll probably ignore you and treat you like dirt, and then, later, want to see you again. Here’s where you ignore him. Treat him as you would the unfortunate young man two doors down who has a man’s body but the wits of a four-year-old, and who knows how to dial your number and send e-mails but who has absolutely nothing to say. Just likes doing it. Get caller ID and don’t answer his calls. Delete messages without reading them. If he shows up, keep the conversation on the doorstep– don’t let him in. Just answer with bland monosyllabic responses, no questions. They HATE to be thought of as boring; if that’s the vibe he gets from you, he’ll fade away comparatively quickly. Trust me. This is what you want. All narcissists are selfish, mentally disturbed abusers. They’re not cute, they’re not cuddly, they don’t have “hidden potential.” They don’t “get better.” They’re self-absorbed actors pretending whatever they have to in order to get attention. Period. Hear the fat lady singing? After an experience with a narcissist, you’ll need to recover. You’ve been badly used and abused, and you need to face that in order to go on and have a healthy, whole life. You need to mourn and you need to get mad about how that assclown had the nads to hurt you like that, before you can heal. Remember: Every word, glimpse or gesture from or about him is a trigger, a set-back, and the fewer of these you allow into your life, the faster and cleaner your recovery will be.