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.
27 thoughts on “Bound”
Vent Your Spleen! (Please see the Rules in Formal Info)
This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.
At the beginning its like this..painfull…but day after day the pain its going out slowly slowly…more when you know who was that person..and one day you are free….it take time..but if you choose yourself like the most important in the life you can do it.
Now that I’ve become aware of narcissism, I see it all around me and realize that it has been around me all my life. My father, my first-love, my ex-husband, and now, two very recent former potential love interests (turned stalkers after I went no contact with them), have all been identified as narcissists. They all vary in the different schools.
Over the years, it never dawned on me, however, that I was essentially attracting the same person; after all, these guys all have different backgrounds. The two most recent guys were so eager to show me a glimpse of what lied behind their mask that they couldn’t even wait a more believable amount of time of us getting to know one another before they started with their shenanigans. It was actually the behavior of one of them that resulted in me learning about narcissism which finally shed some light on what I had been experiencing practically all my life.
I realize now that they were testing me to see if I would put up with their crap, but even though I showed them that I wouldn’t, they keep on coming and won’t leave me alone. I give them the complete silent treatment and it doesn’t phase them (sometimes they even have the nerve to act as if their “feelings” are hurt by me ignoring them). They just keep trying to get me to interact with them when I make it obviously clear that I have nothing to do with them. I can’t avoid them all together because we attend the same social functions unfortunately.
I just want to attract and be with a “normal” guy, but it would probably feel so awkward, that I’d probably think something was wrong or missing in the relationship. I suppose that’s the trauma talking. I’m definitely going to fight to overcome that.
Hi Jaysle, I understand exactly where you’re coming from. The naming of the game takes time and large amounts of pain I guess. I did the normal relationships in between my narcissistic childhood and finally meeting the narcissist that led me onto this path of knowledge and I always felt there was something vital missing in these normal love stories, I couldn’t really feel what I was supposed to. That scares me a lot now, what if the narcissist will be forever imprinted on my mind, what if freedom and moving on is illusionary?
Catherine
Stay here, keep reading and you will be free and able to move on.
Jaysle
You are a beacon of light.
So completely true. I see him in the most basic everyday objects, his favorite bottled water, a black truck similar to his…It’s inescapable. Life just doesn’t seem as vivid without him. 1 week no contact today and I am craving him bad…
Ivanka,
With time, it gets easier.. You just literally have to give yourself that time.. Stay strong in the no contact and preoccupy yourself with things you like to do and you’ll find the “craving” for him will subside.. Best wishes..
Thanks so much, HG, for this.. A perspective of a narcissist that is convinced that we are forever bound and forever missing their presence.. This just further reiterates in my mind that who I was dealing with is indeed a narc.. I asked him if he was afraid of losing me, and instead of giving me a straight yes or no, he simply said, “I won’t”.. He said that he would never lose me fully because we have a child together.. That she is a physical manifestation of our “emotional love” and that she would remind me (and he) every day that we are forever connected.. This is so true.. Narcissists are convinced in their “hearts of hearts” that we will never let them go..
I do not feel that connection any more. Even that makes me sad. There was no connection ever. Yes I saw him, but there is no connection left. Only an enemy. No bond. He should have been there, when I was twenty. I would have realised so much more earlier. No bond at all. Only an illusion. My life would have taken another course, meeting him earlier. I would have realised things earlier, which determined my life. No real bond. You are wrong, if you think, this bond cannot be broken. It is broken. Your kind cannot realise that. Your kind tries to force a relationship. Well it worked on you, why should it not work on us.
You are very right, Mona.
Narcs don’t want to believe that bond is broken. They prefer to delude themselves and think that the bond continues to exist. I guess, it is their protective mechanism. Without it, the knowledge that they are not so omnipotent, as they think about themselves, insults their ego mortally.
That explains harassment, stalking, hoovering when the Formal Relationship is ended. They refuse to accept the mere fact, that “people just come, people go” and it is nothing wrong with it! It is a life as it is.
But noooo, the delusion is so sweet and so comfortable, so they prefer to live with it. Sad.
* “people come and go”.
I guess, it is more correct phrase, than that mess I wrote. Lol.
I realized today that leaving isn’t enough. Blocking his number wasn’t enough so I’m changing my number. I’ve set up a new email and am now going through the tedious process of redirecting everything cyber to it. I notified my attorney of my NO Contact step and she sent me the kindest, sweetest, congratulatory email & said she was hoping I would.
But none of that is enough. I have 2 more books of HG’s to finish today then I have to block all things Narc related. Reading his FB posts, then the blogs, books, and brilliant consultation, gaining the understanding and TRUTH I needed got me here, but reading about Narcs daily, I’m afraid, will keep my thoughts and emotions bound to mine. I am going to have a difficult enough time detoxing in these first days & weeks of total blackout.
Is it better to continue to remind myself of what he is through Narc study or will that just keep bringing it all back to HIM?
As mentioned previously, it is inevitable that the acquisition of knowledge will evoke memories of the narcissist but this is a side effect of the medicine. If you did not read you would not have the tools to enable you to achieve freedom and you would be stuck. You need the knowledge and if this means thinking of the narcissist, so be it, but it will ultimately be in your interest. Shift your thinking so that you consider how to apply what you learn rather than just allowing yourself to be reminded of the narcissist – fix on the sense of achievement and becoming addicted to staying away from the narcissist.
Hg I think of your books and blog as antivenom. If one gets bit by a poisonous snake the cure is poison from the same type of snake.
HKGirl
The more I stayed here and read; the more everything faded, like magic. So, dive in, read and don’t stop until you feel better. It really works. Just grab the bull by the horns, slay it, gut it, roast it, then consume it.
H.G. You wrote the truth… The people of your kind create a deep bond both with love bombing and golden period than hell period… I broke with him, I told him to not call me or search me more and blocked on every device, but I feel every day that I miss him… and it is strange because I know very well how cruel he has been with me…and I know that it is only a good thing that he didn’t serch me this time for real (maybe he find another fuel source)… I hope to not think to him still for a long time. But
having read your articles, books, and having talked to you was very important to me to be able to detach myself from him and to implement and maintain the no contact, so I have to say you thank you.
You are welcome noah80.
This article reminded me of the invention of the Chessboard:
At the beginning I would feel like that Indian King, who loved his new game. The rice grains to pay off are not to high for the squares on the first half of the chessboard. It is when the mathematician moves the King over to the other half that the extrapolation of numbers are enormous, and the pay off is too high for anybody to sustain over a longer period of time.
It is a good story isn’t it. Have you ever worked out how many grains it would actually be in total?
Well…that’s the thing with exponential growth (and narcissistic manipulation tactics) it is almost impossible to say exact.
But if you ask a mathematician it could equal to about 210 billion tons.
I am obliged.
“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.”
I died in those very statements.
Mr. HG Tudor, I’m so bound to the narc that was in my life, how do I unbind myself? 🙁
It’s been 4 months since I’ve spoken to him and seen his picture. I just don’t want to feel this way anymore. It’s like he cast a hex on me or something :'(
It is entirely achievable. I will provide you with the tools, you then have to use them.
Thank so much HG! I will definitely use them 😀
What are the tools? Please?
Help.
They are contained within my books and provided through consultation.
For me it was much more subtle. We became special friends no promises no physical intimacy. Just a different world of escapism totally undertaken through inappropriate text. Then the silent treatment. Then the normality. I read the Narc MO and it’s my narc to a T. And then I think… maybe he was just a normal bloke, maybe it was me. I have to look at the facts. I’m empathetic. He bonded me to him..but really can someone get into your head like that. I’m strong, intelligent …. urgh * Bangs head agaist the wall as the mist descends yet again.