Secrets
Do you remember when you were at school and your friends all appeared to know something that you did not? They gave each other knowing looks, made sideways references to “this thing” and smiled and giggled. Unsettling wasn’t it? You asked them to tell you, you pleaded and you may even have become upset or angry, threatening your friends with some repercussion if they did not tell you what it was that they knew. Usually it was nothing. Just a device devised to play a game with you, to provoke a reaction, to cause you to react and it worked. Then you were in on the secret and you could join in and play it against the next unsuspecting individual. Nevertheless, you did not like that sensation of not knowing did you? Few people do. How many times when someone has gone missing, have anguished people declared,
“It’s the not knowing which really gets to you.”
The apprehension you experience when you wait to receive your examination results. You know you studied hard during the year, carried out the revision in the right way and you felt the examination went well, but you can never be sure can you, it is the lack of knowing which gnaws away at you until you receive the result.
Waiting for some test results concerning your health causes anxiety and concern. Even if it is bad news, once you have those results you can then take action, make plans and formulate a way forward but whilst you do not know, you are stuck, paralysed and frozen. It is an unpleasant sensation at best and an utterly debilitating one at worst.
You do not like secrets. We thrive on them.
So much of what we are is a secret. We are like a series of chests, compartments and vaults in which various secrets have been placed. Some have been placed there with the intention of never being revealed, either to you or even to ourselves. Others are those secrets about what we really are or what we actually do and we close the lid, slam the door shut and turn the key in the hope that you do not find them out and expose us for what we truly are. We do not want you to find out that the honey-coated façade is just that as you open a dark box and find the full horror of our true behaviour lurking inside. The past behaviours and historic actions are consigned into the depths of archive storage to prevent you from knowing what we really did to our ex-partner, what was said to our brother that has meant we have not spoken in ten years or the catalogue of infidelities that we engaged in. If you were ever allowed admission to those dark corridors you would pass the vaults, chests and caskets into which the secrets of our kind have been placed. Wife-beater, alcoholic, smack head, fraudster, closet homosexual, expenses fiddler, serial cheater, elder abuser, fence, conman, contemptor of court, distant parent, liar, convict, tax fraud, cross-dresser, sexual degenerate and so much more besides. Many secrets, some which you may eventually look upon, so many you may never know about. So many secrets hidden away, pushed into the recesses, concealed and secreted so that prying eyes do not learn the truth of what we say and do.
Yet, our secrecy goes further than that. We delight in letting you know that we have some kind of secret in order to exert control over you. We revel in giving you a glimpse of something but then pulling it from view. We engage in half-comments, low whispers and veiled comments in order to pique your interest but then we relish withholding the full tale. We take pleasure in these insignificant mysteries that cause you to question and probe. After all, we do know how you behaved when you were so much younger and how the sensation of not being able to know troubles you. It troubles you and your kind more than others. Like the older boy at school, we have snatched your lunch money and now hold it above your head, almost in reach as you hop and jump, frustration increasing as you attempt to recover it. You want to get hold of what it is that we know so you can satisfy your own need to know. We recognise this and therefore engage in the playing of games where we suggest, hint, partially reveal and allude to so that your interest is gained. We tease as we make oblique references to something in the expectation that you will bite. We will sit staring into space, cultivating the appearance of depth and intrigue as you observe us and wonder what we are thinking about. You will of course ask and we will give you some cryptic response which as you pondering and probing further. Whatever we told you is nothing to do with what we were actually thinking about. We may have been admiring the view from the window, we might have been wondering how the match would turn out and most likely we were considering which of the growing stable of prospects to message next. Instead we will trot out some comment or line which gives the appearance of us being pre-occupied with some weighty matter, something possibly beyond the wit of you, something which makes us appear mysterious and heavyweight. The intrigue adds to the allure but it also plays to your desire to need. The keeping back of information, the withholding of knowledge, the cloak and dagger routine is all part of the act. The true secrets will never be revealed to you. The secret we allude to is non-existent. It is just a device to control you. It is a means of keeping you bound to us, asking, wondering and probing. The half-answers and titbits are there to confuse, bewilder and cause your anxiety. The mysterious murmurs, the ponderous gaze and the comments to ourselves which you can only partially hear are mere ruses. They are to give us the appearance of depth when it is lacking. The creation of so many apparent secrets is to keep you away from the real secrets by leading you in a different direction and to make us appear deep and of substance. We look to snatch your consideration and scrutiny and make it belong to us instead.
The playing of secrecy continues after the cessation of our formal relationship. Always when you have been discarded and often even when you escape, how many times are your night bedfellows not some other person but the ghosting questions of how, what, why, when and where? You are given no answers as to what has happened and this is when the secrecy takes on the greatest significance as we have entered you into the maze where you try to find a way through it in order to understand how we could have done what we did, what on earth happened to you, why did we do those things, when will we come back and where did it all go wrong? We condition you throughout your dance with us to be intrigued by us, to wonder, to speculate, to pontificate and so forth so that it builds and builds until when we cast you to one side you can do nothing but keep wanting to learn our secrets, to open those doors, to slide back the bolts and open the portals, to raise the lids and lift the covers. This keeps you coming back to us, it keeps you hanging on in the hope that one day there will be a momentous reveal and it will all make sense. You wait in the expectation that all the secrets of this person that you still love will be revealed to you. But it never happens. Not by him or her. The unmasking comes from another place.
It is no secret that you have the key to the narcissistic universe in your hands now.
11 thoughts on “Secrets”
Vent Your Spleen! (Please see the Rules in Formal Info)
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Good day HG. Happy Winter Solstice all! I like this mobile friendly format! Still glitchy on edit, but I’ve figured out an easy fix.
Secrets.
Empath, stop talking!!!!!! Seriously. Its a thing. Stop offering yourself up so readily. Never disclose your hearts long kept secrets no matter how “in love” you are.
Knowledge is power. The more knowledge someone has of you the more power they potentially have over you.
See at this point I don’t give a damn about past experiences with narcissists. The key word here is experience. You are the one with the problem if you keep gravitating to narcissist for your relationships. If you are listening to what was going on in this entire blog, the fact that you go back to, or start a relationship with another narcissist, or stay in one with the same narcissist means that you are the problem in your relationships. If you haven’t figured out now that you are being duped by these people, then you don’t care or mind if you are being duped by these people. I’m sorry if you don’t like this rant or if it seems harsh. But if you remain or initiate, you are allowing yourself to be battered and abused. Stop blaming that b******* on the narcissist. They know what they’re doing. When you know what they’re doing and you continue in the relationship and or you don’t make an immediate concentrated effort to change that s***. You are the problem.
You need to remember that your self-preservation is and should be your biggest priority just as it is the narcissist’s. It is not unkind or sinful to act in your OWN interests. Doing things for and of yourself first is not the same as doing it against someone else.
This is not my intent to batter people that are healing from the realisation of the objectification by the narcissist. It is to make you understand that the narcissist is not your problem. You are your problem. Empath, love thyself. Don’t let kindness be the chink in your armor. You can be tough, self-reliant, self-interested, creative (even within a relationship) without ceasing to be a kind and giving person.
Don’t allow anyone to take this away from you. Certainly not in the Name of Love. When you do that you are giving a big part of your being away. You are making yourself even more vulnerable than you already are. If you can’t realize this about the narcissist and his machinations and can’t overcome it you are simply codependent, obsessive or both.
You are the key to your own freedom. HG has been very plain about that. Trust me fellow empath. If you want to be free, if you want out… ignite your own fury. Ignite your fury on your own behalf. Then get all your ducks in a row. Be smart. Trust only yourself. Serve only yourself. Keep up your own facade. Heal from within. Elicit the help of the uncontaminated or incorruptible in your circle of friends and family. Avoid all others you don’t know have you at 110%. In my case, I consciously made enemies of the narcs friends and family and they shunned me and told the narcissist they couldn’t come to my house as I was a mean, evil, gossip monger….in essence I isolated myself from them with their own mutual conviction that I was mean and crazy. You are a hateful, mean, crazy, and horrible b**** if you mention jobs, income , or responsibility in any sentence and especially combined into a sentence. Lol!! Too easy. TOO much fun.
People, please, stop talking about that damned narcissist like it actually meant something when you know for a fact that it doesn’t and did not and get DAMN angry on your own behalf.
I find HGs articles enlightening, informative, and entertaining. I do not however, find them realistically TERRIFYING enough as to what a narcissist truly is and to get across definitively and with horrifying impact, that the gnashing, angry, infirmity of the fury inside the irretrievably broken narcissist, cannot be, and will never be, quenched. It can only be extinguished at the end. Don’t be there at the end.
I am l taking my Super duper contagion empath self respect and pride (read narcisstic tendencies) intact within my awesome self, and burning the building on my way out. I shall watch the smoke on the horizon after I leave it behind and to bed with the nightfall in favor of the sunrise and all the days ahead.
There were some horrors in terms of withholding information and keeping secrets.
Once he unwittingly explained one of his technique of not giving anything away; I had asked him his opinion on an email I was writing regarding a job. “Don’t give them all the information, leave them wondering so they have to get back to you- make them ask, that way you have the upper hand. You have to be able to manipulate them”
I realised he did this kind of thing with me all the time, I would have to pump for information but it was never given, particularly where our/my future was concerned. I never knew what was happening, its how he wanted it. I was constantly on standby by for the next bombshell eg “I’ve applied for a job at the other side of the country….”
I think that the biggest secret he was keeping is besides his shame and churning fury he was empty and incapable of love.
He even had to point out “I know how to be with a woman”- as if convincing himself, the secret was that he had been abusive to his previous partner.
My ex-greater was the expert of this, and he also knew that this was the best manipulation tactic with me. The secrets, or the illusion of a secret, was always the external factor for our conversations, and when I was clever enough to figure it out, he rewarded me by making it a secret between me and him. He used to call it: Conversexual, and defined it as relating to, or characterized by, sexual desire created from intelligent conversation. He would have this intense look in his eyes, and say:
“Nobody brainfucks better than the norwegian ice queen”.
I truly am grateful for how the information on this blog has changed my understanding of what it really was.
All of it is so accurate, HG!! So much secrecy and intrigue.
The last line is the best, you are absolutely brilliant!!
True and thank you.
There is so much freedom in freely acknowledging your talents. It’s a shame society won’t allow it more.
I’m sure you can’t do that as freely in real live, but you can do it here. I do envy you 🙂
Thank you
Spot on there HG and a very interesting article! You’re describing me. I abhor secrets, not knowing, being kept in the dark. It turns my world upside down; I feel unsafe and unstable around unpredictable people cloaked in mystery.
My narcissist used this against me mostly by way of keeping information to himself; not letting me in on plans, not answering my obvious questions, going around and about everything and like you describe he was murmuring half sentences that I never could grasp. My life, my thoughts, my feelings, my actions were all demanded to be known by him, to be put in the open; I wasn’t allowed to know much about him though.
Mysteries tend to create obsession, and that’s where I ended up. Playing detective by myself trying to ascertain the things he did tell me; spending my life thinking about him all the time just as he meant for me to do. I still do. I have this urge to know the truth, to be able to explain things and put them in an understandable context. So I’m here in bed with my how’s and why’s still; being helped so much by you HG though.
The unmasking certainly comes from other places. Some women are just as bad as them in that they delight to tell you. What a terrible game some poeple play.
“The unmasking comes from another place”… True!
But unfortunately not the details about the ‘why, how, where, what’ in this specific relationship. I have spent hours, days, weeks, months trying to figure him out, I still do. So often a situatian, a song, a photograph, a text, an instagramstory crosses my mind and I wonder ‘what did he mean by that’? And lately I think: what was meant for me, what was meant for somebody else? The mind-fuck just keeps going on. Some days I’m fine, other days I just want someone to shoot me in the head.
There’s so much gunk to wade through but whenever I hear someone say “So and so is so secretive” a red flag shoots up. People have a right to privacy and anonymity. Narcs hate this. They hate not knowing everything about everyone and if they’re not privy to everything, out they come with the word “secretive” – pure projection of course.