The First Emotional Battle

THE FIRSTEMOTIONAL BATTLE

Everything we do is regarding as a battle. It is a zero-sum game. What you lose, we gain. There may appear to be a “win/win” scenario during seduction but it is not the case. Believe me, we are getting what we want, The Prime Aims, foremost of which is control over you and positive fuel in huge quantities and the repeated binding as we draw you closer and closer to us. You are made to feel like a king or queen, but you will be deposed and beheaded or defenestrated in due course. You always pay for the golden period we shower you with.

We draw up our battle plans when we ready ourselves to seduce you. The Greater Narcissist adopts the approach of every battle is won before it is fought and operates through calculation, planning and a degree of instinct. The Lesser of our kind remain effective but they rely on being a blunt weapon, not possessing the intellectual finesse of Greaters. The lesser operates through instinct alone and relies on the visceral (unknown) need for fuel and control to drive his battle strategy. This is similar also for The Mid-Range Narcissists who also are driven by instinct although their approach is above that of the Lessers, aided by generally higher cognitive function. The Lesser is all about reaction and immediate response, an automatic adjustment, which is invariably successful because he has been blessed with those tools, blunt as they may be. The Mid-Range does have more subtlety with his reactions and responses, but they are no less instinctive.

Our engagement with you is not love. It is war. We conquer, overrun and blitzkrieg you into submission. We occupy you so that your heart and mind fall to us within moments. This army of occupation does not stop there as it raids the land it now resides in. Your resources become our resources and we ensure that our supply lines are fed from your assets.

The occupation eventually takes a savage turn through devaluation as we slash and burn, looking to grind you into the dirt before leaving you a stripped, bomb-blasted shell and setting off for a new campaign against some unsuspecting target. The theme of battle and your entanglement with our kind being a battleground, is one which is repeated throughout your engagement with us.

This is especially so once the callous disengagement has taken place. Disengagement is most common with the Intimate Partner Primary Source (wife, husband, cohabitee, partner, boyfriend or girlfriend), although it can happen with Intimate and Non-Intimate Secondary Sources, but it is rarer. Those secondary sources are more usually treated in a shelf manner, however the emotional battle is applicable to those in the relevant dynamic of secondary source with the narcissist. It is then that you find yourself confronted with three battles which take place one after the other. Not only do you have us as your foe but in an especially unappealing turn of events you find that in fact you are actually fighting against yourself. The first battle following disengagement is the emotional one.

You have been left with no explanation. If one was tendered it made no sense. You cannot reconcile where you are with what has been. The descent from gilded pillar into the dust has been swift and merciless. Whilst we (usually) do not set out to destroy you, it may feel that way to you or that has occurred as a collateral consequence of the pursuit of The Prime Aims. Every day you have run the gauntlet of scores of emotions, which has drained you, eroded you and taken a significant toll on your well-being.

Your emotions are red raw, heightened and easy to trigger. Your pain is extensive, agonising and brutal and it is during this emotional battle that your ally of cool, detached thinking has not fled the battlefield, it never turned up to begin with. Your ability to assess, rationalise and consider you position with the necessary critical analysis evades you.

All you are left with is a cauldron of emotion, which serves only to heighten your distress and your confusion. Nothing makes sense and you have not been left in a position to make any sense of what has happened. This is entirely deliberate and is put in place by the narcissism. It is consciously deliberate where you are dealing with a Greater Narcissist and unconsciously deliberate where you are dealing with a Lesser or Mid-Range Narcissist.  I know so many of you use the phrase “hot mess”. This is entirely apt. You are a mess. Your life is a mess. The heat comes from your raging emotions as you veer between hysteria and anger.

Of the three battles that you fight post disengagement, the emotional battle, the first, is the one which you invariably end up losing. This is because you are utterly ill-equipped. If you were an army your troops would be sharing guns, you would not know which way to face, your supply lines have been overstretched and, in some places, broken and the enemy seems to appear at will. The fog of war obscures your vision. Is that us advancing or just the silhouette of a tree? You cannot tell.

Once you could, but no longer. It is a tortuous place and one which has been created through our design in order to ensure that when we return (and we will) you will be in no position to resist. Weakened, governed by emotional thinking rather than intellectual logical thinking you will be overrun easily. Intelligence is now defence, this is not about intelligence but the fact that your emotional thinking is far too strong for what little logic may exist.

This battle, where all you have is emotion, means that you want the pain to stop. You want the golden period again. You give no consideration or thought to what the price of such desires might be, or whether it really is the golden period once more. You are ruled by emotional thinking and this proves to be your downfall. We know this (Consciously or Unconsciously) and this is why our narcissism ensure syou are a churning, broiling scorching crucible of emotion. Our narcissism creates it, we want that. This is why your first attempt at no contact (without the benefit of specialist input form me) nearly always falls.

You are not equipped to prolong it because in this emotional battle all it takes is for us to come galloping over the hill once again, offering terms of the golden period and you surrender in an instant allowing us to occupy your territory once more in the understandable but ultimately forlorn hope of a peaceful co-existence.

As you drown in the emotional sea once again, you will feel a rescuing hand grab you and haul you out. Your relief is immense. The rescuing hand belongs to us and such is the effect of your emotional thinking that you will return into our grasp. The hoover that we deploy as we rescue you from the emotional sea succeeds so readily because you want to escape the turmoil and the quickest way to do so is to return to us.

What makes it worse is that as your rescuer we grant you a new golden period and thus your emotional thinking cons you further by telling you that it was absolutely fine to go back because ‘look everything is as it once was’. You have been rewarded for agreeing to return and therefore that was the right decision wasn’t it? Your emotional thinking rules supreme again as it cons you into thinking that this is the best outcome.

Your immersion in the emotional sea has permeated throughout you, any logic that was trying to gain a foothold to make you see clearly has been flooded out. Logic cannot make itself heard and you are drawn back into our grasp once again.

How do you win this first emotional battle? You cannot. You are in such a position that we always win this battle. The key however is not to participate in this battle but rather avoid it altogether. If you know there is a battle you cannot win, why would you ever fight it?

You would not. You would evade your foe, take steps to bolster your defences and seek to avoid this emotional battle. This is what you must do. Once you have gained awareness of the foe you are engaged with, possibly during seduction or more likely through the period of devaluation, you must then take those steps to prepare yourself. You either avoid the emotional battle altogether by escaping rather than being disengaged from (discarded). Alternatively, you steel yourself for the inevitable disengagement so that the emotional fallout is massively reduced and instead you find yourself transported to the second battle that takes places post discard which I shall expand on next.

If you have been disengaged, then you face the emotional battle and you will lose. You must avoid the emotional battle in its entirety or engage on terms in the second battle which follows post disengagement.

 

 

18 thoughts on “The First Emotional Battle

  1. Jenna says:

    A friend who has never been w a narc, will not understsnd this battle and used to tell me to just move on. She had even harsher words for me. She made me cry and panic. I ended up going nc with her.

    1. Tappan Zee says:

      Jenna — me too. with others who do not get it. my circle is getting smaller and snugger. it can be hard. way harder than it seems or “should be” to others who onlook. trust your instincts. nc with any one is better than allowing further abuse. even if it’s sort of collateral or whatever a person would call it that doesn’t intend. some where HG wrote a stat to give an example of going nc with potential narcs (albeit dating partners) if one suspects it from the onset. like if 9 of 10 people you date in a give time are narcs and you eliminate them at the onset. 90% were. if you got one “wrong” the odds are still in your favor. same logic and math applies to others (not necessarily narcs just ppl) if we feel icky about someone and get rid of them (put ourselves first for once and trust ourselves) we may get a couple wrong. oh well. we are safe. not sorry. totally out of context and paraphrase of what i have read, learned & applied here.

      1. Jenna says:

        Hi TZ, thank you for ur advice.

        The NC w my friend has almost come to an end. I find it difficult to hold a grudge. She has many good qualities that i should take into consideration.

        I texted her 1) that we need to talk, 2) that there are some things she texted that hurt me, 3) that i need to clear my heart, 4) if we are both non judgemental and understanding we can work past this. She agreed we should talk.

        She has been my friend for over 10 yrs and i will not let the original cause, ie. ex narc, take that away frm me.

  2. Lisa says:

    My upset is….I didnt get to turn on my Supernova before departure. Now I feel like my power has been taken. Had I had just a little more time, Id have blown his ass right out of the water, one way or another. Now…Ive got nothing.
    It (the latest tragedy) was all short lived fortunately but I still feel like he got the last action in. Argh!!!!

    1. Lisa says:

      Oh…and he shall be referred to as…’the con man’

  3. Scout says:

    Another excellent, informative article…
    I did escape because I knew the truth of his infidelity and I couldn’t face another devaluation. The pain, trauma and confusion was unparalleled during that phase, and although I had lessened the emotional impact due to escaping, the post-escape smear campaign was one hell of an emotional roller-coaster ride all of its own.

  4. Brian says:

    You give love a bad name!

  5. K says:

    Yes, all of the above and the Kraken, also, consumed my heart and gutted my soul. You are right; it was agonizing and brutal. He kicked my ass. (shock and awe)

  6. ;peace out says:

    At the end of the ‘battle’ the narc takes off his now exhausted, omnipotent mask and you feel pity.

  7. Diva says:

    “You either avoid the emotional battle altogether by escaping rather than being discarded.”……….in my experience you do not avoid the emotional battle even if you escape…….it may not be the same as a discard emotional battle (I haven’t experienced that)…….but escaping is an emotional battle in itself. You will question your decision over and over…..maybe it is worse than a discard….because if you have been discarded it wasn’t your choice. An escape is your choice and therefore you believe that you are now solely responsible for the pain and suffering that is now heaped upon you…..there is no point in complaining, you don’t have the strength and in any case, to some degree you have now brought this onto yourself. It’s not unlike the pain and suffering you were dealing with before you escaped…….maybe it’s worse because you are now dealing with it on your own. Don’t forget that when you live with a narc, nearly all of the decisions are taken away from you…..the narc calls the shots…….having been with a narc for many years you somehow lose the ability to make decisions for yourself because you are not allowed…….so I go back to stating that simply making that decision to escape, never mind actually implementing it, is a massive emotional battle in itself. Well it was for me in any case. Fantastic article ……really enjoyed it……Diva

    1. HG Tudor says:

      Thank you Diva.

    2. cantevergoback says:

      So true Diva, it’s a constant battle…I know how bad I felt most of the time at the end but now I don’t even know how I feel, I don’t trust myself and sometimes I find it difficult to make even the simplest of decisions because for so long I weighed every decision against what I thought his reaction might be, add to that I am still battling against my own belief systems, I know I owe my Narcopath nothing for the way he treated me he completely betrayed me but I value loyalty and I still feel like I am being disloyal…I know that the man I fell in love with doesn’t exist but that doesn’t mean I’m not still in love with him…I wish I had your off switch, I keep trying to tell myself he’s dead but it doesn’t seem to be working!

      1. Diva says:

        Hi Cantevergoback…….I would like to reply to you but I wanted to ask you a question first…..why do you feel disloyal? That comment confuses me a little although the rest of the post I could completely relate to!!!……Diva

        1. cantevergoback says:

          Diva-it’s just my disordered thinking mired in the false guilt… even though we hadn’t gotten married yet(was probably future faking) I vowed to love him and support him “if I loved him I would….” support, help, not give up on, not leave.

  8. -K says:

    P.S. I forgot to say, that you were my “benefit of specialist input.” You equipped me for the battle by helping me to place logic and pride above the devastating hurt.

  9. thepianist20 says:

    Oh my dear Narcissist,,

    WHY ARE YOU SO CRUEL?!

  10. -K says:

    You are correct, HG, the emotional battle is fought within ourselves. But how can we not participate in this battle? It’s a stepping stone to our liberation. And we do not always lose this battle, in fact, by escaping we not only win the battle – we win the war.

    1. HG Tudor says:

      You always lose the first one K, there are other battles ahead that you can win.

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