Bound
One of our central aims when we have targeted you is to bind you to us. During our seduction we create this magical place and invite you and only you to inhabit it with us. We build a fantastic place and place you on a pedestal in the centre of this artifice. It is very difficult for you to realise this is a fallacy and even harder to do something about it. Every day, every hour that you remain close to our influence allows us to create more ties, more connections and increase the extent that you are bound to us. We make you feel fabulous, worshipped and loved. The dizzying, whirlwind nature of our passion is unlike anything else you have known and you readily accept it. It is of course not informed consent. You have no idea what we are, but nevertheless you accept all of this wonderful treatment. You allow us to permeate every aspect of your life. We draw you into ours and make you feel special and privileged for being allowed to do so. Consider how we penetrated your every network so everywhere you turned we were there.
We knew all your friends, we ingratiated ourselves with your family and got to meet your colleagues. We knew all the places you liked to go to and introduced you to some additional ones. We made sure we knew every favourite thing of yours, from books to plays to food. Your wine rack became stocked with the types of wine you preferred, your wear the jewellery that was bought for you after careful solicitation of what you deem pretty and I occasionally arrive bearing a new book from the stable of authors that you enjoy to read. Bit by bit I invade your life and as our relationship progresses at light speed, the gradual, creeping advance of my influence has actually gained more than a toehold. It has spread across your territory like some formidable weed that cannot be held back, covering and smothering. My clothes hang in the wardrobe, I have my favourite chair at your house, you now buy the cereal that I prefer to eat in the morning even though you think it is just a mouthful of sugar. You now wash my socks, my songs populate the iTunes playlist and the bathroom is testament to my occupation with the bottles, razors and accoutrements mingled amongst yours. You cannot fail to see my influence all around you, but you welcome this and from it you gain a great happiness. From dating, to staying over, to co-habiting and on to marriage, this inexorable march of sudden and frantic seduction, although this is only ever apparent with hindsight as at the time it was the right thing to do, results in our lives entwining as I wrap my tendrils around your life and drag you tight against me. So many links, connections, lines and ties between you and I.
These ties keep you in place despite the abuse that is to come. It is sudden and bewildering but you will not give up easily. Not only did you say those vows, you meant every word and we know this. You will not let what we have built up crumble to dust. Admirable as your fortitude may be, you may as well stand on a beach and command the tide to halt its own unceasing advance for all the good you will do. This will not stop you trying though. We know this. The ties are many and they are tight so you will not run for cover at the first administration of a silent treatment. You will not down tools and walk away when the shouting continues long into the night. You do not pack a bag and leave it in the hallway, sitting on the stairs as you wait for us to return, late at night, from whatever tryst we have been engaged in. You keep going, bound to the hope that everything will be good once more, that the golden period will return. You hang in there, you battle, you demonstrate misguided resolve as we lash out time and time again, drawing the negative fuel from your distress, dismay and disarray. You will not let go. The connections are too many. Our behaviour is reprehensible as we open up front after front after front against you, leaving you confused and crushed. We twist, blame, push and pull yet you will not waver. No matter how many times we knock you to the floor you keep coming back for more, dragged back onto your feet by the ties that bind you to us.
Then one day you remove yourself from our toxic influence or in some instances you are removed. Those ties remain but there is an elasticity which allow you to escape us. To be taken away from the acidic words and vicious schemes. The insults, the violent rages, the isolation and the denigration may have been halted. You may no longer be subjected to being spat at, your hair pulled, your money withheld, your social interactions curtailed and your self-esteem trampled underfoot. You may have escaped the daily devaluations which came at you in so many different and unedifying ways but your ordeal is far from over.
You may not have our furious face shouting into yours anymore. You may not be sat cowering behind a locked bathroom door as we pound on it demanding you come out. You may not lie crying in a bed made to feel empty by our absence. You may not stand outside the study seeing the glow of the monitor within, under the door and wonder who we are engaging with online, that knotted sensation in your stomach inducing sickness. You may have escaped many of these manipulations but the ties that bind remain.
The bond we have created with you is so strong, so deep and so far-reaching that every day you will feel a vast void at being parted from us. You will excuse the abuse as you hanker for those golden days. You will feel like something has been ripped from you by our absence. Even though you know how terrible we have acted towards you, you will still suffer that sense of illogical loss. Every day feels empty. You wonder what we are doing, who we are with and whether we are thinking about you. You see our presence all around you still, people still ask about us, you collapse on to your bed burying your face in that t-shirt we kept under our pillow and you still smell us on it. You drink deep of the scent, hoping the nagging pain will recede, that somehow you will be magically restored to where we once both were, when we were happy. Your run your fingers over the tub of hair wax which we left and you remember watching us as we carefully applied it. You cannot bring yourself to discard it, clinging on to these reminders of the joy that once abounded in these walls. You pass the bookcase, touching the spines of the volumes we bought for you, the words and letters all further reminders of our presence here in this house. You miss us you miss us so much, you shouldn’t do, not after what we have done. Not after the vile treatments you have suffered. It makes no sense that you should feel this way but you do. You ache for us, the ties that remain are still being pulled and yanked, even though we are not there with you. The searing pain rises as another reminder appears, the tie still strong. Unlike an umbilical cord which provides life, your cord to us continues to pain you. When will this end? When will this agony recede and be replaced by something else? Would it now not even be better to feel nothing? To be numbed and anaesthetised so you do not have to endure this ongoing pain.
The bond we create with you is so powerful, so deep and so long lasting that it is often the aftermath of the ties that bind that hurts more than the abuse itself. That is how dangerous we are.
30 thoughts on “Bound”
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I think I’ve become more addicted to these postings then my ex narc. Lol. I felt all these things the first two weeks post disengagement. Then he lied to me in a text while the new supply was sitting right there with him. Since he’d cheated the first 4 months of their relationship by still being with me, I was still on the joint account. In those two weeks so many people came forward with truths about his past, lies he had told me, and info on other women that when he lied saying he told the bank to take me off the account four months ago and he would turn me in for fraud for accessing the account something in me turned. The man who promised undying love and protection lied and threatened me for the sole purpose of keeping his facade up with the new supply. That cut those ties immediately and I came right back at him. I told him not waste his time with baseless threats, I wasn’t scared of him, and I would haunt him indefinitely but indirectly with whatever woman he tried to ensnare. His new supply, her family members, and his family were all sent copies of text messages, sexts, his d*ck pics, flight receipts, hotel payments, and numerous “insufficient funds” emails from his bank account. (She was a new widow and he was moved in within 3 weeks knowing the insurance settlement was coming.) I blasted him on social media and the internet. I made it known I wouldn’t go away reminding others, yet I would not maintain direct contact with him. He’s a coward and went into full retreat. He’s become edgy and nervous according to my own monkeys. And he’s shifted focus of his triangulation to the wife before me. I think I even shocked myself. I’m a nurse, a healer, the giver till I’m worn down. Yet that one threat ignited something and dismissed other things. He is a shell to me. An empty vessel. I don’t miss him or long for him. I think nothing of him except the rare pang of pity for being so pathetic.
Stay addicted to HG’s posts… you will not regret it!
Where’s the Neuraliser when you need it…
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=RRq_MvT33pA
Your backwards brain washing is working.
I went from needing the articles to be indifferent to nauseaus.
I feel literally sick reading this.
Just the description of these ties is unbearable to me.
Then one day, after so many years, and before we have cut you out of our life….we have an affair (yes, with another “N”). That affair helps teach us what a “N” is, (because we found HG’s articles).
We never knew what a “N” really was, but now we understand. Our situation with you, afforded us the opportunity to escape him, (debilitating as it was). But now we understand what he is and what you are.
It is beyond liberating to finally understand. Everything now makes sense. You have forever lost us…..
I could not have figured it out without your help HG. Thank you from the bottom of my heart ; )
-K
You are most welcome K.
I feel like I am getting my ass kicked these last two days. Bound, The Overload, How Could You?, My Secret Garden, Eyes Wide Shut, Tell Tale. Ouch! This all hurts. The only redeeming words are: “It is of course not informed consent.” Just recently I have been able to use the Keurig without thinking about my ex. Your kind is just as dangerous as heroin, if not worse and I want to be comfortably numb like Karen. Rehab is a bitch.
HG is the methadone.
Heroin is no exaggeration. Great analogy, particularly as they’ve isolated you and afterward you realise you have no positive structures to lean on at all.
HG, you write much about the victims being bound to the predictors, but when it comes to the narcissistic sociopath it the predator who is dependent upon the victim. To me, the narcissist is likened to a baby and the victim a mother. The baby latches onto the breast for fuel for life, must have that fuel to exist (in the illness of his mind). It makes me want to shout, I’m not ya momma, at these guys. Go feed yourself somewhere else. Who is
bound? Who is the slave? Who is “baby”? The narcissistic sociopath, of course. The victim can overcome the abuse but the narcissistic sociopath will likely never recover. Why do I say this? Because the narcissistic sociopath will never fully cooperate with treatment, deception prevents successful treatment. Bound indeed.
This is a good reason to explain why a narc never leaves their víctims and put them in “stand by” and hoovers. In my case I began reading you HG because I met a second narc in my life, but I can say that an empath like me can forget a narc F.O.R.E.V.E.R because I broke with my first narc almost 4 years ago and I never came back him, even I do not think of him at all, he is past, does not exist in my mind…even sometimes I can’t remember anything good in that relationship because nowadays I see him like a poor man who didnt know love…no anger…no feelings….nothing, zero…he does not exist….
Well this makes “I will not abandon you” make more sense now…..
I validate this only having intimate knowledge watching break ups and then seeing how completely failed the narcs were in my family. The relationship didn’t matter to them, what they kept being reminded of was their failure at ever being normal. I wasted a lot of time on misguided compassion. I should have laughed at them. But what I saw was pathetic, desolate, self-pitying and then a new fantasy reconstruction, again doomed to fail.
Boundless
Very true, but while the Empath gives their all and then mourns the relationship and travels the long road to recovery, the Narc having no emotional attachment, is not bound to the Empath in the way they think. He just latches onto another tit uninterrupted.
This article out of all of them really speaks to me. Those ties are why so many victims go back or are afraid to leave. No one likes to feel heartache and pain. This is exactly the reason when you do leave you break every connection there is to the narc, if possible. No contact is meant for the narc so they cant get in contact with you mainly.
Bound is the exact word id use. Ive felt bound for years but its my own doing bc its up to me as a victim to walk away. Its the pain that keeps me from doing so. I really feel for those that are living with or married to their narc that must be so much more difficult. Its all difficult with these types of relationships.
Its an awful addiction and the withdrawals are the worst part. Its the weeks after you instill no contact that are way more painful than the abuse itself. Figuring out who you are, feeling numb and dead inside, the deepest of depressions. Its hell. Its no wonder we go back. So if you break no contact do NOT beat yourself up! Breakups arent easy in normal relationships, so ending a narcissistic relationship is definitely not going to be easy.
And, for you (your kind in general) to wish to bind to us empaths, this is how powerful WE are!
*sort of off topic confession*
I usually do not think in terms of revenge, though it has crossed my mind today. Not sure why. I really do not like that I am even entertaining it for a few minutes. It bothers me. I am usually content with No Contact, escaping and not being found. That is victory for me and I am pretty good at it too (little self brag). Though today, I had horrible thoughts! Then I tell myself, “I am not gonna do it, nope, nope, nope”. Though I had an idea of how it could be done. It is sooooo not healthy though. Catholic guilt sets in, Buddhist thoughts tell me its the path to suffering and, would it not be glorious? Nope, I am good. (This is my inner battle today). Here is the weird thing, I do not wish to direct revenge on my last ex. or anyone I know. I really do not ever wish to see or hear from him ever. I want to find some random jerk and make him pay for it. That is really horrible. Is this common?
Indy, http://www.shipyourenemiesglitter.com
12345, You are just awesome!!! I used to do glitter projects with his daughter (who loved it) and he hated it. All over his house. LOL
The glitter pic on the link made me laugh out loud hahaha. I wouldn’t bother, because he isn’t worth my bother since he is nothing. Cute joke though, 12345. Talk about being bound, glitter does a fine job:)
The bag of gummy dicks, tho!! 😂😂😂
Hi Indy,
I don’t know what your idea is but if the guy is a jerk it would probably hurt him as much as stepping on a lego.
And maybe you would just make yourself feel bad about it..
Live well and succeed. Best revenge.
Big hug to you !
I know, you are right 😊 Just had an urge today to be a little savage. 😂
Haha! I totally understand you.🥂
Indy, isn’t this is what karma is actually all about? You reeking your revenge on some unconnected random is actually that person’s just rewards for an act they committed at some point in their past (in this life or a previous one). Does this mean the narcpop have got it coming in a future life? Mmm
Hmmmm…but then Karma will get me too. I have pretty quick Karma, I drop gum on the street and I am done-for! (usually I loose something). It is pretty weird.
Speaking of revenge, I just read HGs revenge book, it is good too! I got revenge the Narc way, without knowing I was doing it (on my ex husband almost 20 years ago). So, I will lay low now, off Narcdar.
Thanks Indy, I hope you will post a review too.
Will do now!
I am obliged.
HG
Holy crap Batman! Is it comment inventory clearance at Tudor Manor today? You ARE a machine.
Indy
Youre preaching to the choir here lol.