‘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.
72 thoughts on “‘Til Death Do Us Discard”
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HG Tudor – he actually died, and very prematurely, passed away 2 months ago Dec 3 by a cardiac arrest in his sleep – I was only informed this Sunday Feb 3, by one from his coterie when I was visiting his city. I had tried to forget about him for several months, but I missed him every day and thought a lot about him. It turns out that I even thought about him the days when he respectively died and was cremated. So when the news came to me at first I did not believe it, thought it was a new scheme of his a very evil one. But when I had it confirmed with the authorities it was well confirmed. When I understood all about it, I was broken by sorrow and still am, have not eaten properly and lost weight. I loved him even though I knew. About if not all then much. I am pretty certain he died because of too much alcohol together with some kind of weekend substance abuse and beginning slight overweight. He used to have a higher position with a leading company in private equity. I feel so sorry for him that he did not take better care of his body but just pushed and pushed, all the time going for some sort of new ‘high’, with new ladies and-or sxx and drugs and alcohol. It became his dead that he could not just take it easy and just enjoy one woman and his really fine position previously. That he always needed to escape. Too afraid of intimacy. But also always looking for ‘something better’. I as a secondary intimate source, had enjoyed long periods of ‘gold’. RIP my dearest love ERS. You were definitely not easy but very much loved in spite of all your atrocities but also because of all your drive, humour, fab loving and your looks. I miss you terribly.
Blueocean, I’m sorry you are in pain. It will get easier. Your post speaks to the point I made earlier to NA. They are truly loved even if they don’t have the capacity to reciprocate.
I consider myself fortunate to have “found” you. You have offered great information and insight. I wish there was an easier way to disconnect from this Narc. I cried myself into being sick today, as it is exactly 2 months ago that I last made contact. We had a huge blow up the week before then, which was the last time I heard from him. I reached out to him the next week to give myself a sense of freedom from him, by wishing him well; telling him that I forgive him for all of his evil actions. Since then, no contact on either of our parts. This is the first time a “silent treatment episode” has lasted this long. I want to believe this is really, finally the end; because my heart has been ripped to shreads. The emotional rollercoaster I’ve been riding is so tiring and painful; and I never want to have to endure this kind of gut renching agony again. Unfortunately, I fell in love with him. I know it makes no sense to rational, mentally healthy people; but I do and don’t want him back in my life. What kind of mental illness do I have? It can’t possibly be normal to feel this way. How do I heal? How can I cope? Why is my delusional heart continuing to plague my rational mind, without ending? This must be what an addiction feels like. Forever craving the forbidden, toxic drug to feel the temporary misleading “high”. How the h*ll did this happen! I never saw it coming. Please offer any helpful advice you have.
Because of the nature of my job, I have to remain anonymous. Thank you.
Tormented in Texas!
Wanda Lee
Just stay here and keep reading. If you’re like most of us, it’s just going to take time to accept reality. It will eventually happen though. Go back and read older articles, particularly the ones about the emotional sea and post discard battles. HGs books are good too. Read, study and learn. Talking thru the comments helps, too. As time passes you can replace your emotional thinking that’s causing you so much pain, with logical thinking so you can move forward into the rest of your life. Hang in there! [hugs] ❤️
I understand that disengagement is the hallmark act of the Narc ending the formal relationship. I have experienced my share through my Narc father and boyfriends. However, my Nex-husband never discarded me during our 16 year relationship. The other abuse was certainly present, but not one discard. I divorced him, he hoovered me and I eventually ended the relationship by going full no contact. I know the residual benefits of having an accomplished wife and stable home environment were of great value to him, but still I am puzzled?
HG, do you think it was the residual benefits that kept him from discarding me? I did have an elongated Golden Period (10 years), but certainly went through Devaluation.
Likely to be a combination of the residual benefits and the fact there was no suitable IPPS available to replace you.
HG, Kimi said she had a golden period of 10 years. This does not sound plausible if she was indeed an IPPS. What do you think?
I regard it as unlikely.
Thank you for your response, HG!
And the illusion fragments further…
HG, I think you’re right. I certainly had some Devaluation during those first 10 years, however I still felt connected to and cherished by him. Something shifted that 10th year… I felt a gulf form between us, which I think may have been the Stranger period. Devaluation followed over the next several years.
To be honest, I’m tired of looking back and dissecting my experiences. I get it! I have a comprehensive understanding now. I think it’s time to be looking and moving forward! Fuck him and the others!
Insatiable Learner, thanks for asking the question! You and HG enlightened me!
*send him to u
Anyone that thinks HG is wrong on this one is wrong. 48 years after my parents nasty ugly divorce and after years and years of no contact, my 80 something year old father started to hoover my 80 something year old mother. We did not tell him where she was, he had stalked her all these years. He was out of fuel and on the prowl for some. He was also married to his current accomplice of many years. Police repeatedly called and he was quite persistent until her death. I hired an armed security guard to protect us at the funeral. You might think it has ended, but it has not. Never let your guard down.
It is never over. If he can’t punish me, he punishes those I love. Till death do us part… the only wedding vow he has kept.
Sarabella, a battle of the wills, yes I can totally relate to that!
It may sound strange, but our fights were the most interesting and exiting part of our whole relationship. Far better than the sex.
We both wanted to have the last word and I was verbally much stronger than he was, but he off course used all kind of manipulation tactics (deflection, word salad, blame shift etc.) and that made him strong in his own way. Oh I hated that, such an dishonest way of arguing, bleh!
Dirty, below-the-belt, insult throwing fighting. Been there a time or two.
The fights and battle of wills was hot. I felt so alive and tortured and well, it was hell. Because he fought dirty, just like you described. But I learned to be just as nasty and even deliberately learned to use his tactics and his narcissistic wounds were huge as a result. Giving up the need for the last word was THE Hardest. I refused to let him have it until I found a way to work it that made me feel ok about it and it did involve using alot of his tactics to implement and use on him. They are soul thieves and it took a while to figure out how to get most of me back.
But it was viscious. Truly viscious. We were a match for that in so so many ways, equal opponents. But it was awful, really and such a waste of energy and life.
HG my ex’s new supply left/discarded him. He attempted to Hoover her flowers, getting help, said he would change, stop hurting her. Etc. How long will this “new change/new person” typically last before he shows her he’s not changed?
See the article ‘But I Can Change’.
I sometimes think you give midrangers to much credit HG.
When I look at my 3 exes, they are just so mediocre, so dull and so cowardly. I’m I underestimating them?
Not that I will ever be frightened of them, but is there more to them than meets the eye? Are they just as evil as a greater underneath it all?
It seems so unbelievable, but then again, I have only seen their façade off course and I still don’t fully know what is underneath their masks.
I detest MRs, I do not give them credit.
Good to hear HG. Glad we have at least that in common 🙂
Omg u wud hate my ex so much. U wud think he’s such a coward! That’s why i wanted to send him u in my fantasy revenge!!
Their “evil” is covert in comparison to a lesser or greater. HG has written something about them which made it seem like they were the worst of all.
Lately I understood a painful truth about myself: as much as a Narc needs fuel, I need to fuel a Narc. Worse than that: while the Narc’s sources of fuel are interchangeable, I am “primed” to exclusively fuel a single Narc (until the next one, but it might take years for the next one). Awful.
Narseeker
Truth is often very painful, but understanding it is what let’s us move forward and grow as people.
If I may ask you one more (totally unrelated) question HG?
I have 3 older comments/questions about narcissism still in moderation, that I’m really curious to get an answer to.
Does this mean you won’t publish them or have you just forgotten about them?
As I’m still new here, I don’t know how everything works on your blog, but I would really like to find out.
I do not forget. The comments will be addressed when I have an opportunity to do so. I get to them all in time.
Good to know HG.
Patience is not my strongest point (understatement 😉 ), but it has been worth the wait so far.
No problem.
Ok HG I see we will not meet in the middle, so I will stop explaining why I worry about your absolute statement.
For me it works as follows: the more somebody will try to force me to see them or speak with them the more irritated I will become, so the more hoovers they do the less lucky they will be.
I hope this will eventually work for other people here too.
Your irritation is fuel.
I know HG. I mean on the inside.
My whole narcissistic relationship is one big joke at the moment and I can’t be bothered anymore.
I find narcissism fascinating though. Such a strange disorder.
I agree with Iris. It may be that you (as in all narcissists in this world) as a narcissist think we belong to you and you might hoover us over and over again. But still, if the entanglement is over for us, if the hoovers are just bothering and we look at you as a nuisance from the past; a delusional freak we don’t want or need in our lives anymore; from our point of view we don’t belong to you. And we don’t care if we fuel you while telling you to leave us alone; because we don’t care about you. At all. It’s a matter of perspective. Of course you as a narcissist would in your egotistical manner adopt the view of you being somehow indispensable to us; being dependent on people around you to wield your power at all you need us; we can leave you, stop being your belonging; we can tell you to stay away from us when you show up hoovering on our doorstep and then not think about you anymore. Because you are not important at all. We confront our issues and we come to a point when your power has no effect on us.
That is entirely the point, it is about our view of you. I know you say it is over from your point of view, but that is irrelevant to us. I am trying to get you to understand our mindset so you are not complacent. You say you do not care if you fuel us, well you ought to, because you are giving us what we want and also increasing the likelihood of us keep hoovering you.
I am not telling you that you belong to us to make some grand point about being all-powerful, I am telling you this so you understand our view point so you can then better defend yourselves.
I get your point HG. And I do realise that understanding your way of thinking will help me deal with my ex when/if he shows up again. I’m really grateful for that. And I will need your advice then for sure because I’m of course nowhere near indifference to him yet. I will try hard to attain it though.
It’s just that my life has for so long revolved around him, having lived in a confined reality of his choosing, it’s always been about him and never about me and I guess I’m suffering from a compulsive need to state matters from my perspective. But I get what you’re saying.
Welcome back HG. You’ve been missed!
Good. I am pleased you are able to see this in the constructive way it is intended.
I understand your second paragraph and I recognise your need to state your perspective and you are always welcome to do so here, that is part of its purpose.
It is evident to me that you are grasping this concept in the intended manner.
Thank you HG. I really appreciate your blog and your invaluable help.
You are welcome.
Hg tudor: ” I am not telling you that you belong to us to make some grand point about being all-powerful…”
>> nevertheless i like it😅
For some reason, knowing i belong to him gives me comfort. But i know it’s wrong. ☹️
Hi Iris, if they can still cause irritation or any kind of emotional response, you are not truly indifferent. Indifference=zero impact.
I know what you mean but it’s like a fly that is bothering you: it’s irritating you, but you don’t have feelings for the fly. That is what I mean with being indifferent to them.
I don’t like them, I don’t want the back and I don’t obsess about them, but it irritates me when they show up at my doorstep. I consider that to be rude and an invasion of my privacy.
I don’t show it off course, because that is negative fuel.
Therein lies the difference, knowing not to show it. Achieving that is possible, albeit sometimes difficult.
It is never over for the narcissist and so by default it will never be over for you. You will always need to look out for youself, especially if you left them with a narcissistic injury. There is nothing “spiritual” about a narcissist/object empath relationship.
They aren’t really that great HG. Once the veil is lifted they are just predictable and rather sad.
Some may be, not all.
We are stronger than you think HG.
I know you see much evidence to the contrary, but I became indifferent to 3 narc ex-boyfriends, so it can be done. They may hoover me naked and oiled up as Dimitrios suggests but I would only give them a coat and send them packing.
I will always be a narc-magnet, but that’s OK, I just have to leave as soon as I notice something that is off.
And thus it is never over, that is the point.
You can impose no contact but you belong to us and therefore you can say it is over but it is not. It is not a case of “oh you’re indifferent are you now? Oh okay, that’s the end of that then.” On THAT occasion you may not have provided fuel but the hoover may well have breached your no contact because we approached you and it does not mean it will not happen again. It is not over.
I see what you mean HG, but like you said: there is no full to be had and that makes it less and less attractive to hoover us. They may be persistent, but they are very efficient with their time and energy too.
I worry when you say that they will never stop people will feel powerless and will stop fighting because they think it’s pointless.
I see that you want to warn us, but do you see my worry?
No, if you think it is over you will be complacent. People say “oh he will never hoover me” and they say this after just four weeks of silence. You need to be jolted out of your complacency and understand what you are dealing with.
It is never over. You, however, by remembering that this is the case can do much to reduce the risk to a very low point. If you do not remain mindful of this risk, you will be complacent and you will be ensnared again and again.
I say it because he went 6 months without breaking contact. I mean real contact. It was I who broke it. And now it has been since March. And he was very, very clear that he didn’t care. And that he thought there was no way we could ever be civil with each other (super nova empath mode on my part). And there wasn’t a thing between us. Me, as a fuel source is done. He even said, when I tricked him, that even predators know when to retreat.
You haven’t addressed what happens when a narc loses control of the situation and the woma goes into super nova mode and doesn’t ever really come out of it. She never stops breathing deeply wounding fiery anger all over the narc.
He did hoover after 30 years with some lame story about us having unfinished business. But the stories and lies he used to explain the past were just that, lies, which he confessed to. So he had no ammunition to use to hoover me.
Narcs do lose control of situations they thought they fully controlled.
Retreat, but not surrender.
If they are a cowardly mid-ranger, they retreat and that equals surrender.
Not so. Retreat merely means backing away, to preserve resources, to avoid further damage and/or to dupe the enemy into a false position of superiority and over reach himself. A retreat is not giving up.
Surrender is giving up and thus is entirely different.
But we can put YOU in retreat mode for a long time. So its not up to you then anymore. He knows he can never come near me without being burned again. I am pretty sure he knows this. If we learn to keep YOU in perpetual retreat mode, we are forcing your surrender.
No, we decide to retreat based on the situation we are presented with. There is no doubt you bring influence to bear in that decision but it is our decision to retreat.
You may indeed cause repeated retreats and minimise the risk of further advances, the whole point of no contact, but there is no surrender, that cannot occur.
My MMRN will never ever surrender. I am an appliance, he owns me and he is a fuel addict.
From a narcs perspective. Its not important what they perceive as long as we know our truth.
Santa appearing every December doesn’t make him real. Or does it?
Wait, what are you telling me here? No, I still believe!
Ok, that can make sense. That I repeatedly forced him into retreat, but in his head, he never surrendered. Which would explain when we did have ‘open talks’ at one point, I was blown away by the depth of his held rage at me. Grabbing everything that had wounded him and raged at me with it.
But see, I think I have some narc traits to understand some of this. I told him at last, that he and I were in an EPIC battle of wills. And we were a dead match. Meaning, neither of us was EVER going to surrender. We could drive each other to retreat, but neither of us was going to surrender. There were times, I frankly was entirely turned on by the idea of surrendering to him, and I was tired of fighting. But it lasted less than 12 hours. It was just not going to happen. And so my anger at his betrayals and mistreatment of me would come back. And that is how he described ME. Going on destructive rampages while totally ignoring his own.
And in all of that, I do believe we both lost. It would require one of us to surrender and one of us to submit. It wasn’t going to be me. His terms of surrender were too perverted and too extreme. Too sadistic and cruel. And I know how he can be the opposite if he wanted but he would never give me that. So I could never comply. How I needed him to surrender to me, too, he could not do, either. He didn’t want to and he couldn’t.
Unlike his last abuse 30 years ago, when I did forget, this time, I won’t and I told him I will never be able to get past what he did.
Funny how people could look at our dynamic and call it deep love and passion. Such misinformation out there about what this is all about. I certainly read it all wrong.
All accurate.
The FR* may be over but the narcissistic relationship is forever and, if I look at it objectively, we are dis-engaged and I am here learning how to break the pattern and escape instead.
*formal relationship
No. He discarded. That was his finality. This post can be dangerous for some people, especially if they are not fully resolved and done with their narc. This makes is seem like there is always going to be another chance maybe not in the immediate future, but at some point. Some of you people really do just leave. Its in your head only that you think that this will go on forever with some of your victims.
I feel like you confuse that spiritual life concept where we are all a part of an interconnected web with something that never ends. But they aren’t the same thing. Some of you do just move on and never, look back. I have lived it with your kind.
No, it is never over unless you die or we do, it is dangerous to think otherwise.
I disagree, once you’re indifferent to them they become powerless. Then it’s just annoying when they hoover.
If you manage to attain that.
It’s not over when you die, HG. That would only be if we died on the same day. The ghost of the narcissist would still cling to me after his death. I can know intellectually that I have no choice but to have complete no contact but I’m not sure that will ever completely impact my heart even if I only remember him as a pos. That’s still giving him my energy.
Yup I’m living proof been discarded and hoovered back twice now
Why so much doom and gloom HG? 🙂
A narc may think that our “relationship” is forever, but he is wrong. We may temporally be brainwashed, but we aren’t brainless and we aren’t slaves either.
Maybe it’s time for us to say “enough is enough”, wouldn’t that be fun? 😉
So much evidence exists to the contrary.
I know, but still: it ends when the victims says that it ends and when he or she really means it.
Narcs may think they’re powerful, but they aren’t. We make them powerful.
No, it is never over, that is why one must guard against complacency. You may say it is over, that will not end it.
Why am I the only person who thinks she is gone baby gone for good? Wishful thinking? Meh. Either way, the only acceptable hoover would be initiated naked and oiled up. Anything less: DENIED.