‘Til Death Do Us Discard
The word ‘discard’ is well-known in the lexicon of the narcissistic world. I prefer disengagement since it is more accurate. Our rejection of you is temporary. However, for the sake of familiarity, this article will persist with discard.
The discard forms one of the four cornerstones of the traditional narcissistic embrace. The seduction, the devaluation, the discard and the hoover. There are many variations on this, something that many commentators and victims do not realise, but that is a matter for a different day.
Discard brings with it a sense of finality. The impression that we have extracted everything we can from you and that we are finally done with you. You have served your purpose and we no longer have any use for you. I do not think discard is an accurate description. We certainly toss you aside with no concern for your well-being or emotional state. We suddenly stop communicating with you. You cannot contact us as we vanish, walking off the face of the earth. If you receive some kind of half-baked explanation, then you ought to consider yourself as lucky to receive even that. We are, however, never done with you. The discard as such is a temporary cessation to the dance that you and I engage in.
I have written elsewhere of the main reasons why we discard and chief among them is the fact that we have acquired a new toy. You are old, stale and no fun anymore so you are left at the bottom of the toy box as we become infatuated with our new shiny and glittering toy. Of course your discard is not permanent. Once I selected you, you had a role to fulfil for the rest of your life when it comes to me. You have no choice, so far as I am concerned, in respect of this role. I assigned it to you and I regard you as obligated to carry it out forever. I may decide that I require you again for the purposes of triangulation. I may want the new primary source to pump out even more positive fuel because they feel threatened by your re-appearance. Like some corpse, we resurrect you in order to unnerve the new primary source. We will hoover you and tempt you with the prospect of winning our favour once again. When we triangulate you in this fashion you can rest assured that what is being said to you will be said in a similar way to the new primary source. We may comment to you: –
“She is just someone to pass the time with, she is nowhere near as special as you are to me.”
Around the same time, we will be telling your replacement primary source,
“Don’t worry about her. She cannot let go. I am not surprised really because I did so much for her, but it is you I want, you are so special, far more than she ever was.”
You are spurred on by such encouragement and double your efforts to please me in the hope of winning me back. The replacement is spurred on by such encouragement and she doubles her efforts to keep me and ensure you prove to be no temptation to me.
We will bring you back if the new prospect turns out to be less effective than we thought. We decide that they need to be consigned to the scrap heap quicker than usual and therefore we will turn to that person we know. You. We know all about you and how you will react and therefore it is far easier to return to you and hoover you than seek someone new again. This has the added benefit that the passage of time will have allowed you to recover from our abuse but also the longing that we imbue in you, when we discard, will continue to gnaw away at you and thus when we decide we have ended the “discard” you are easy to hoover.
We may be utterly delighted with your replacement but decide we will end the “discard” in order to punish you further. At this stage we have no interest in engaging in a romantic and intimate relationship with you again. Your replacement serves that role most effectively. No, we want to punish you. We will hoover you in an unpleasant and savage way, smearing you and parading your replacement around to all and sundry and explaining how wonderful it is to be with someone who truly understands us, loves us and is not abusive as you were.
We may toss you aside and come nowhere near you for weeks, months and even years. We know that the nature of this “discard” is such that no matter how hard you try; you remain vulnerable to being sucked back in. This is because you have not been able to cope with the ever presence we created and your frequent reminders of the golden period. It is also because you want answers, finality and understanding and because we flounced off the face of the earth, you did not get those things and the desire to receive them remains strong even years later.
We do not truly discard you. We push you to one side but you serve many purposes afterwards. You recover so your fuel provision increases again, you are the provider of both positive and negative fuel, dependent on how we hoover you. You are needed for the triangulations we wish to deploy. This cycle of picking you up and putting you down again, as and when suits us, is one that will go on and on until such time as you decide to break the pattern of “discards” and escape instead. Of course when you try to escape us we do not regard this as ending our binding arrangement. You are mis-guided, perhaps listening to the biased voices of others which is affecting your judgement. You, in our minds, do not get to choose when the arrangement ends. All the way through our lives, we will use you and then push you to one side before coming back again at some future point. If you allow us the means of contact by drifting into our sphere of influence again then we will hoover you, because the opportunity is too good to pass up. You are then drawn in, the cycle commences once more and a further “discard” will happen. You can see by the repeated nature of this process that there is no real discard, only a temporary cessation to our entanglement, but one tendril always remains wrapped around, continuing the connection so that we can draw you back in at our choice.
Even if you take steps whereby you expose us for what we are or reveal us to other people who accept what you say, we will withdraw to lick our wounds but this discard is temporary also. We still want your fuel and we want it badly. We also have a desire for revenge. We may not resume matters in a benign method when this happens and instead opt for the malign approach in order to extract fuel, but the entanglement will begin again at some future point.
We put you down but you can always be picked up again. Rest assured that this will happen repeatedly and even if you think the nature of the discard was so harsh, so savage and seemed so final, it was not. We will return, if able and do it all again.
The only true discard of our toxic entanglement is when one of us dies. Only then is there finality.
34 thoughts on “‘Til Death Do Us Discard”
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What about the gray area? You’re being devalued, but you uncover a situation he can’t wiggle out of so, he leaves because it’s the only thing he can do. In his mind, did I escape or was I discarded?
Neither. You may have been given a silent treatment as part of the response to the wounding you have caused or he has disengaged.
Hmmmm……I guess that is no big surprise……although I was rather hoping that the answer would have been yes………Diva
Diva, we need to find them and point them to this blog, then they’d be able to prevent hoover or if hoovered, provide absolutely no fuel. However, seeing as HG is a greater, they would have to somehow do a Sarah Connor to prevent any sort of successful hoover.
HG I note your comment to Jenna that you have in fact hoovered every one of your ex victims. Have any of your hoover attempts, been unsuccessful, whereby you realised upon commencement that it was a pointless exercise and thus you stopped the hoover…….and if so…….why or how did that transpire? What action did that individual take for you to come to a conclusion that you deemed it unsuccessful or not warranting further effort on your behalf……..that’s if you were unsuccessful and you may not want to admit to that!!!!……..Diva
In short, no.
Hg, has there been any ex that u have not hoovered? Because, there are soooo many….
No.
HG, I have a question about discard, if you would explain, I’d be so grateful. I was in a relationship w a narc for 3 years. We broke up got back together several times. The last time, in March, he didn’t come back. I found out he had been seeing a girl in his AA group for months. Lying to and cheating on her and me. I contacted her to tell her he had been cheating and lying.(She forgave him immediately) I also told his AA sponsor bc in his one year sober, he claimed his focus was honesty and not cheating again. He was in therapy and AA. I thought he was changing, he wasn’t. He had to make me look crazy and shut me up fast (he is counting on his AA friends to testify for him that he is sober and a changed man in an upcoming serious DUI trial). I’m sure he worried that if I kept talking, someone might realize he was still a liar and cheat. So, as a lawyer, he figured a quick way to shut me up. He filed for an emergency order of protection. The affidavit was total lies. I didn’t fight it bc I didn’t want to see him and reopen old stuff. So the order is in place for 2 yrs. Does a narc filing for an OOP mean I am free from the possibility of him coming back around/Hoover someday?
Hello Gwyneth, he wants you to stay out of the way for the foreseeable future so he can focus on his new IPPS and also to progress matters through AA. He does not want you interfering and therefore he will not hoover you, unless you approach/contact him first and then it will be malign. He will otherwise not hoover until devaluation occurs with the new IPPS which will be months/years down the line, but when that happens, you are at risk of a hoover in accordance with the Hoover Trigger and Hoover Execution Criteria.
Thank you so much for your reply. I also wondered why there has been absolutely no evidence of them on any social media for 9 months. I found the answer to that in another of your posts. Thank you.
One last question… do you know of narcs who claim the narc characteristics are due to their alcoholism? That is what mine said. Then he went to rehab, AA and therapy. He swore he was changing. I thought he was. He wasn’t. But I wonder if that could be true in any case.
See the article ‘Cheers – The Narcissist and Alcohol’.
I feel he was after some sort of ‘thrill-seeking’ component to my disengagement.
I was gut-wrenchingly devastated the first and second time I was discarded (during reconciliation he said that I ‘did the right thing’ !!?!?).
After a couple of times of hearing him say, ” It’s THE LAST TIME! I’m DONE!”, I started thinking ‘oh, it’s this again, here we go again…
I could feel him watching my reaction.
I think he saw it was tinged with indifference and that was the signal for him up the ante in order to extract that original severity of hurt from me.
I would find myself being disengaged from a couple of hours prior to ex wife’s visit, or whilst he was packing for a business trip flight, property was smashed, he took me to a foreign country and discarded me in the hotel room and so on…
Is this what is meant by ‘psychopath narcissis’ – needing the pleasure derived from causing the most pain and it’s why the cycle is perpetuated?
But I was daft enough to keep being hoovered.
I do not know where to put my comment. Therefore I do it here. There was a very interesting documentary about new scientific research. It was about trauma, which – indeed – seems to be inherited by one generation to the next. They found some evidence that traumatic events of parents find their way into the genes of their children. They did it with mice. They stressed normal male mice, let them copulate and took them away. The little mice had no contact to their biological fathers, but showed a lot of abnormal behaviour. The male mice tended to be more aggressive, the female ones seemed to be more anxious than normal mice. No joke.
This abnormal behaviour could be calmed down by a very warm and healthy environment. It was not their fate to be anxious or aggressive for all their life, if – and that is very important- the environment is healthy.
They also found out, that a genetic predisposition can be activated as if a switch is turned on.
So, if you have a genetic predisposition it needs some special triggers to activate them and then the certain behaviour manifests.
That would support my own experience that I have become much more aggressive after the encounter with the narcissist. I changed. My whole feelings changed. I talked to other women (not on this blog) who made similar experiences. And I do not believe that I will be that empathic one that I have been before. The percentage of empathic and narcissistic traits inside of me have changed. It is another combination of percentage now. It is not only an emotional numbing of some empathic traits, which come to the forehand some day again. I definitely changed.
Reverse that could mean too, that you, HG, are able to develop other feelings than your restricted ones , if there are some genes left in your DNS, which have the needed information .They “only” must be activated.
I know that you exercise cognitive empathy to develop some kind of empathy but how to develop feelings of joy and happiness?
Maybe about body contact – without sex ! in a therapeutic environment.
I know you do not like it.
But the worst tasting medicine is usually the best.
(It is not my need to heal and fix to give you that proposal – there is no need anymore – , but it is interesting, if there is some effect or not.)
Strange, I thought “Anne” and “ajo” are ‘the narcissists’.
That’s funny. No, I just don’t have any respect for a**holes or mean people in general. My narcs were always midrangers because I am a sucker for a victim. I truly believed my narcs were broken men so when this last one showed his true colors and was mean to me, I set out to find out who he was. I contacted every ex and guess what…he lied to all of them and to me. Lie after lie after lie. The more I uncovered, the harder it was to comprehend because he painted himself out to be such a kind man who was just broken and had been abused as a kid.
Once I knew who he was, it was war. But, I soon realized I found no relief from it. It just fed the new story he had created in his head that I was now crazy. So in our last contact I rose above and acted like I didn’t give two shits about him, turned the tables and told him to give me my privacy (even though I had contacted him regarding payment of money he owes).
I could bury him further. I know things that could get him fired. He is an elementary school teacher and I do not believe he is safe around children and has even been accused of inappropriate behavior (I don’t think he is a pedophile, but he has boundary issues for sure). But, I believe strongly in Karma. I feel it’s best to let him dig his own grave and be faced with the consequences that he still is in fact the same man who cheated on his wife with co-workers and a parent and got exposed and lost nearly every friend in his life. He has healed just enough to feel good enough to repeat his prior actions. The tiny group of people who believe he was sorry for what he did the first go round will hang their head and walk away when he does what is next and he will end up with what the narcs fear most…BEING ALONE. That will be his ultimate punishment.
In the meantime, I don’t attack him. I ignore. But if he did attempt to malign hoover me in person, I have a pocketful a passive aggressive comments that will leave him bewildered and furious. He will get a slap on the wrist if he tries. For example, “Wow, you must really be happy now because you’ve put on weight. Good for you. See ya!” Said with a smile. Hahaha. Perfect for the guy who is manorexic as my narc was. He’ll just die.
Nope, I’m not a narc. I just don’t put up with mean people.
Great!
I still have the HARDEST time believing that my midrange would even attempt to speak to me after the absolute amazing wounding I have inflicted on him. He will paint me black forever. I’m sure seeing me reminds him that I won. I took our mutual friends with me. They believe ME!! I befriended his ex’s and he knows it now. If he ever attempted to malign hoover me in person I will tell him he ought not mess with me. I do not fear him and he knows this. My guess is he’ll never contact me. He is far to scared of my wrath. There is nothing in it for him and midrangers like him don’t enjoy the malign punishment like those greaters do. He only wants adoration, and he will NEVER get that from me again and he knows it.
I’m in the same boat – I also have the hardest time believing my ex somatic lower midrange would return for more wounding. He has completely withdrawn/discarded, perhaps to lick his wounds, but considering he sees all women as whores and fungible, I think he’d prefer a new option instead of risking further wounding with me.
Huzzah! ajo.
Ajo, my ex mid-ranger hoovered in a benign manner even though i escaped, exposed, and wounded him. That’s when i realized he’s a narc.
Jenna,
That’s likely because you escaped. Different ballgame. I was discarded and replaced before he even discarded me. Therefore he was finished with me. I think that’s totally different.
Oddly enough, I write this upon waking and after having 4 dreams over the last 6 months that I tried to talk to his new IPPS and she was mean to me, last night I dreamt that I was talking to her and they had broken up and I asked if he had cheated on her and she said yes. That she had caught him with a mother of a former student of his. I then went to go find him and give him a piece of my mind and he was scared of me. I’ll just die if that comes to pass!! Haha.
HG Tudor, thank you! I’m in this cycle, but he hasn’t disappeared. Phone calls, tests, the occasional appearance. When i ignore him though he gets upset. My purpose! I took good care of him. Why doesn’t he just tell me the truth and let go?
Because in his mind you belong to him.
ok..de acuerdo con usted..pero yo no quiero nada con esta persona ya lo conozco y no me interesa su personalidad..lo tengo en contacto cero..si aparece ..que debo hacer con el?
He leido todos sus libros en español y me han dado muchas respuestas y ayudas .gracias.
Por favor mas titulos en español..especialmente Fury..y Target.
intento leer en ingles pero no soy muy buena en ello.
Gracias
*evolutionary
Mr Tudor,
Reading this articles I have to disagree with the statement that sadisme has to be grounded in a sexual context.
This explanatory context of your everlasting pattern of perspective, no matter what the circumstances, is to me more than a sadistic streak.
I read the book ‘Sapiens’ by Yuval Haran a couple of years ago.
He claims that the human kind entered the top of the food chain too soon. Although I didn’t agree with every paragraph of his brief history of the evelotionary travel of the human kind, I now have to reconsider.
If this is the everyday reality for too many human beeings walking the earth, then I do see his point.
Surely some do choose when the disengagement happens? Like those who get over things quickly or are indifferent? Sounds callous but I did toss aside (or was discarded) by ex narcs and I got over them in less than a day, if even that. I mean complete no contact, to them I disappeared off the face of the earth, complete indifference, I didn’t think about them anymore as soon as it happened, in fact I quite often have to think hard to remember them, they’re outta my head. Sometimes I rack my brains when questioned by friends especially now I’m having a lot of conversations on emotions due to my entanglement with greater and they say things like we’ve known you all these years and you never said you dated so-and-so! So those ones certainly wouldn’t get any reaction or emotions out of me if they are lucky enough to locate me. The one I actually pined over for ages was not even a narc, the most peaceful relationship I had and I make a huge effort to still be in touch. Ex-narc I was married to, once I decided it was over, it’s over. He’s maximing fuel extraction by using the children and I admit I’m the loser on that but feelings wise, nothing, I would walk away and not remember him again. It’s the greater that has got me searching and brought me here though and I did at one point wonder if he’s the one who will always be able to hoover and get something from me for life. I don’t wonder anymore.
Gone round the house a bit but what I’m trying to say is there must be many who escaped you and can never be hoovered for fuel again, but I guess you would never admit to that, HG?
No, I would admit it here. The only ones who have escaped and cannot be hoovered are no longer here.
Spot on as usual. Got drawn back in a few months. Discarded again and he needs to “move on”
Old, stale and no fun…you wanna know what I found at the bottom of my toy box? A Glock! And it is so shiny and new that I can’t wait to play with it! And there is a shit-ton of finality in murder! Then I can toss his narc ass into a hole in the ground. God damn it to hell, this post pissed me off! There should be an emoji that is hopping-up-and-down-mad. I would make great use of it.
I am being metaphorical; I do not own a Glock.
all very true the pieces are finally being brought together I realize me if I want this to end it had to be me to cut all ties and association with him
You’re about to trip 6million hits. \o/
I have you now that explain me everything in such accurate way . I want all narcissists of my life far away from me . Even my ” great love ” , the last one . It’ s final . I don’ t even to think about them near me , ESPECIALLY the last one . My mother was narcissistic , she desangaged from me 6 years before dying , I didn’ t know about your kind of people , but ( emotionally destroyed) I didn’ t come back . She had tortured me all my life , I thougt of her as evil , I love her anyway , but the discard was so unbelievable malignant , that after a certain period of time , I decided never to come back to her . Till she died . I still remembered her smile the last time I saw her and ask an explanation for such a pain she inflicted me ( I was a devoted child in spite of her attitude ) and for , that devious smile , I knew I couldn’ t come back