A Letter To The Narcissist – No. 1
I invited readers to pen the letter that they would like to send to the narcissist that they entangled with. Here is the letter which ‘Cordelia’ would like to send. Does it mirror your sentiments and experience at all? How do you think the narcissist would react to receiving this?
“There’s really nothing I need to tell you. But there are a few questions that it would be fun to have the answers to. Please tell me: how does it feel to have been out-maneuvered?
I was one of two shelf IPSSes you kept at work. After I realized what you were, I shared that knowledge with the other. I heard she had fallen from grace and you were already trying to destroy her reputation by lying and saying that she was stealing equipment. I warned her. Needless to say, she’s not talking to you anymore. You’ll never know for sure whether or not her informant was me. You didn’t know it was me who told her, did you?
Me, me, me. You seduced me. We had a little romance and you promised sex eventually but that last part never happened. My husband isn’t bothered that we had a brief fling because he had given me permission to have one. He and I opened up our relationship two years ago–don’t you remember mining me for that little detail? You started adding a romantic side to our seven year-long friendship as soon as you dragged that tidbit out of me. You later lied to me about having your wife’s consent. You also hid her pregnancy from me, and that was when I left. But this is where you think, again, that you still have power. Again you are wrong.
I have no need to tell your wife about what happened because I know her reaction will just give you the fuel you need. I know you got her pregnant as a way of binding her to you permanently. She financially can’t afford to leave and won’t want to raise another son in a single-parent household. It’s why you chose her, yes? Telling her about us will just drive her closer to you. I think you were counting on that. I won’t tell her.
It wouldn’t surprise me if you tell her, though (and blame it all on me). After all, you want a catfight. I know, honey, I know. It’s amazing how I know it all, isn’t it? How does it feel to know that I’m not falling for it? You’ll only get to have one woman screaming at you, though I know you wish it were two. But take heart. You know just how much you can abuse her emotionally and still keep her around. You almost figured it out with me. But knowledge does not equal intelligence. The fact that I escaped, and the way I escaped, proves to me that you are not as smart as I am.
Therein lies the denoument. During that tepid, one-sided relationship, you were stupid enough to try to physically force me to kiss you at the office. I refused because I don’t mix work and pleasure and I wasn’t that into you at the time. You have terrible bad breath and your desire to extract my tonsils using your tongue is rather inefficient and unromantic. After I ended it and found out what you were, I knew you would be back for more.
I let the company know about that coercive stunt you pulled. You attempted to force me to do something that I didn’t want to do and you did it on company time (I was off the clock; you weren’t!) That’s sexual intimidation, regardless of how involved we were. You thought it was funny at the time. I think it’s hilarious that HR and I have harassment paperwork ready for you if you so much as look at me again. Who’s laughing now? I would love to know: What was the expression on your face when you got the email from me informing you that you were never to so much as say hello to me at work again or you’d be faced with a harassment suit? You replied back, begging me to meet you to sort all of it out. Did your blood boil to read the word ‘no.’?
At the moment I have the last word but I know it won’t be the last word from you. It is the last one you’ll ever get from me. All I need to do to wound you is simply to do nothing. My dear, you were in the military. How is it that I became the master of strategy and you are the one who is “outflanked and outgunned”? Do tell. How does that make you feel?”
Cordelia
35 thoughts on “A Letter To The Narcissist – No. 1”
Vent Your Spleen! (Please see the Rules in Formal Info)
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No apology needed – own your “essay”!
We’re such empaths 😄👏
I read your post, right? because I liked it 👍 I don’t disagree with a word of it. It’s clear to me that you’ve been doing the hard work to become Wiser Now. I applaud you for the work you’ve done and the work still to come. We’ve learned a great deal, haven’t we? Amazing to have this space to connect.
I’ll be keeping an eye out for your posts – I enjoy how you write 😉
This letter does not mirror my experiences, apart from the fact that the writer is aware of what the narc is and that there is no illusion left. As it is a letter addressed to HIM, so that means he’s present in her mind. She’s still thinking about how he is reacting to her.
Depending on which school the narc belongs to, he would react in different ways, but I’ll give it a try: a lesser would be wounded and furious. A midranger would be wounded, would think it supremely unfair and might try to plea and bargain with her, but would be wary of the threats; he would also intuitively sense that there is still fuel to be gained from that source and depending on what is going on in his fuel matrix might stick around and do some passive hoovers. A greater would be slightly wounded (bad breath? bad kisser?) but would hone in on the challenge fuel and respond with a smear campaign, and follow that up with malicious hoovers, knowing that there is more to be had from this appliance if he riles her up. How am I doing HG?
You shall see in due course MS.
Men in general do not like receiving letters or cards from women, particularly those that discuss “feelings.” Practically all correspondence will just end up in the trash or a desk drawer with other junk. The Narc, I’m sure, gets a surge of fuel and a good laugh from it.
HG asks if Cordelia’s experience mirrors my own. It does not, but I believe if her narcissist read this letter, any upset on his part would likely come from the threat of lost fuel/character traits/residual benefits. Assuming he has awareness of his narcissism, it could also cause him stress to be exposed as such to his wife, his coworkers and employer. As he never had the capacity for any emotional connection to Cordelia in the first place, she is left to dissipate the emotional weight she carried for the both of them. I’m glad you escaped, Cordelia. Know that you don’t suffer alone.
…. this is a strange and dangerous letter. Strange: Cordi and the narc did not even have sex. How come she is so offended? I consider myself an empath, but if I got a letter like this from a man I hardly kissed i would think he was nuts. I don’t get it. Unless she is obsessed with him, which is what it sounds like.
Dangerous: She is telling the narc what he needs to hear. She is screaming at him – I actually think he would laugh, in typical narc style. She is making sure that he doesn’t make the mistake of approaching her at work, i think she actually wants him to hoover her, and is warning him that he must do it elsewhere.
very weird
If I were the narc, i would scan over it and understand she is absolutely smitten with me. I would think: poor, sad fool. She won’t even know when I hoover her, if I bother at all, and she won’t know what hit her. She is dying for me to hoover her. She has told me exactly where i should not be treading — thanks, hun. See you soon, when I choose.
Actually, I wanted nothing more than to be left alone. HR granted me an on-campus restraining order to each of us, and I’m in the process of leaving the company. I guard my identity and privacy outside of work fiercely. He has plenty of supply outside of work and I’m just not worth it anymore. I’ll be hard to find for many, many years.
Well, somebody seems a bit vindictive…
So, HG, how would you handle that?
Responses to the letters will be provided at a later date.
HG, are you “replying” to our letters from the Narc perspective? Or are you just re-posting them again in the order they were received? I just did a search for my letter to see what number it was in the queue. If you are re-posting each letter in order AND you are posting one per day then my assumption is that you will be re-posting my letter right around the time of my narc’s piano concert. Hopefully this is just my overthinking but I find this to be so eerie.
The replies will be a future matter. The posting is entirely coincidental, I have no idea when the piano concert is.
Are you still accepting letters lol
I am.
where do I send it? cheers
narcissist1909@gmail.com
Very interesting letter and beautifully written. I can feel Cordelia’s cold, calculated fury rising like a mist from the page ..or screen lol :-).
It’s funny really, once an empathic person has their eyes opened and their emotional thinking under control, they can become as cold and mean as a narcissist – which I feel is totally justified by the way.
There’s something intriguing about that. Could it be that empathy and conscience (and narcissistic traits) are like muscles that either grow or deterioriate according to experience and use?
So, there must be another part of the brain that acts like a dimmer switch that controls the “volume” of empathy, conscience, and narcissistic traits.
When an empathic person is unaware of what is truly happening, they don’t activate this “dimmer switch”, however, that doesn’t mean the switch isn’t there. Just a thought.
I find the human brain truly fascinating.
Good post Wiser! And agree about the ‘noble’ professions. ‘Fuel’ and ‘glory gaining’ professions in a different perspective.
Thanks DUTG. There are double-sided aspects to them all, like there are in a lot of things, I guess.
Supernova
Yes, the supernova is an event, as HG has explained. It’s where a super empath’s empathic traits are temporarily reduced and their narcissistic traits flare up. This happens when the super empath’s awareness along with the abuse they’ve absorbed reaches a point where they have had enough. They will then protect themselves from the narcissist.
There is something about the emotions of pride, fear and anger, as well as the opposite of those – shame and say, contentment or peacefulness – that are quite interesting. These emotions are like two sides of the same coin.
When it comes to a narcissist, there is something about a loss of pride that triggers anger, shame and fear. These reactions happen to everyone to some degree, but with a narcissist, it’s intense and exaggerated. Also, there appears to be no room at all for a narcissist to admit shame, even though I believe shame is there. I think they would secretly do anything it takes to avoid the feeling of shame and appearing helpless or “less-than” to others. Personally, I think this is what “wounds” them – the feeling of shame due to being “less than” compared to other people. It burns them.
How we are perceived by others – or more accurately, how we think we are perceived by others – is what produces either pride or shame. Other people make the difference to whether we feel either way.
Speaking from experience, when I started learning about narcissism, I became more in tune with my real self and started to really listen to myself and my emotions. By doing this, I found that what other people thought of me became less important to me. Emotionally, I found that the more I cared about my own “self” and the kinder I was to myself, I became less dependent on others when it came to how I felt about myself. When you know yourself, you don’t need others as much to validate you or be a mirror for you. I started to realise that other people no longer had as much power over my own self-perception and therefore, over my emotions.
Going back to the “supernova”, I think a super empath gets angry and fights back because they also feel a loss of self-pride and a need for self-protection.
The intensity of the feelings and the scope for other emotions to also be present is what makes the difference, I feel.
Elle,
I’m sorry if I’ve rambled on and bored you to tears with my long post. I didn’t mean to.
I’ve just realised your post was only one word (supernova), while I went ahead and practically wrote an essay in response 🙄
I get carried away sometimes with my thoughts when I think about all this stuff.
Again, I’m sorry, and thank you for your one-word, very thought-provoking comment.
I love the sweet little girl in the picture, with the little bird on her desk.
None of this ever happened to me, but I found myself innocently in the middle of three other peoples’ triad.
I was a young engaged woman, working for some young, hot-shot engineer at a manufacturing company nearby. He was engaged to a young, quiet engineer who worked there as well. She had a roommate who also worked there as an engineer.
One day, I walked into my boss’s office, and his fiance’s roommate was standing behind him, rubbing his shoulders. I stood there, staring at the two of them while they stared back, then I turned and walked out.
I barely knew his fiance and didn’t know what to do, as far as telling her. I chose not to and hoped that he would improve his behavior. It was a temporary job, but before I left, when that crazy airvent was making me sick, someone was there to block it off – right quick and it was because my boss told them to! I have no idea what became of any of them.
I think it’s too wordy… Too much pointing the finger. It will mean nothing to the narcissist. The narcissist will not give a shit. There’s no getting revenge. It would be a waste of time entirely to send. The time to rehash crap is over.
On another topic…
HG – congrats on the newest heir to the throne.
Kathleen, I take these letters as the letter never actually sent but just sent here for closure. I love the series actually as with each one, the victim sounds like she got her self back.
Yes, I agree. At the most, the narc will scan it over once, focusing in on any future hoovering opportunities.
Hg are you still going to post your thoughts and how you think narcs would react to reading these letters? I am curious to know what you think and learn from your perspective.
I will.
It reminds me of a time in my future when he will look for me for a Hoover.
I’m glad I’m in a safe place while I build my walls and stronghold to keep him away from me.
It’s a very scary idea to know he’ll be outside knocking one day…
Holy HG readers! Are all narcs military members or conversely military members narcs? And in terms of national security and world peace, is this a good or bad thing?! Do your narc thing at work but stay single? The ‘noble profession’ thing – doctors, scholars, human rights advocates, clergy, military – is a major turn on for an empath. For my my next intimate partner, I will seek a drug smuggler. Signed, A. N. Empath
I agree, so many narcs in the military. I’ve counseled criminals, they are narcs and unafraid of the justice system.
I am not sure regarding the military; however, I would assume many are–its all about power and control. Mine was a Correctional Officer in a prison.
Now, I tend to gravitate towards scholars because that’s the industry I work in. Most of them are nice–some with huge egos.
I loved your comment regarding a drug smuggler…cute..
Drug smuggling has elements of power and control, so I’m going to rethink that lol!
Hi DUTG,
All of the “noble professions” that you mention can easily be either “noble” or “controlling” depending on how you choose to see them. Each profession could just as easily be a turn-on for narcs who want to exploit the position for their own selfish aims.
As HG would say, it’s all about perspective 😉