The Emotional Sea – The Post Disengagement/Escape Battle Part One

Everything we do is regarding as a battle. It is a zero-sum game. What you lose, we gain. There may appear to be a “win/win” scenario during seduction but it is not the case. Believe me, we are getting what we want, The Prime Aims, foremost of which is control over you and positive fuel in huge quantities and the repeated binding as we draw you closer and closer to us. You are made to feel like a king or queen, but you will be deposed and beheaded or defenestrated in due course. You always pay for the golden period we shower you with.
We draw up our battle plans when we ready ourselves to seduce you. The Greater Narcissist adopts the approach of every battle is won before it is fought and operates through calculation, planning and a degree of instinct. The Lesser of our kind remain effective but they rely on being a blunt weapon, not possessing the intellectual finesse of Greaters. The lesser operates through instinct alone and relies on the visceral (unknown) need for fuel and control to drive his battle strategy. This is similar also for The Mid-Range Narcissists who also are driven by instinct although their approach is above that of the Lessers, aided by generally higher cognitive function. The Lesser is all about reaction and immediate response, an automatic adjustment, which is invariably successful because he has been blessed with those tools, blunt as they may be. The Mid-Range does have more subtlety with his reactions and responses, but they are no less instinctive.
Our engagement with you is not love. It is war. We conquer, overrun and blitzkrieg you into submission. We occupy you so that your heart and mind fall to us within moments. This army of occupation does not stop there as it raids the land it now resides in. Your resources become our resources and we ensure that our supply lines are fed from your assets.
The occupation eventually takes a savage turn through devaluation as we slash and burn, looking to grind you into the dirt before leaving you a stripped, bomb-blasted shell and setting off for a new campaign against some unsuspecting target. The theme of battle and your entanglement with our kind being a battleground, is one which is repeated throughout your engagement with us.
This is especially so once the callous disengagement has taken place. Disengagement is most common with the Intimate Partner Primary Source (wife, husband, cohabitee, partner, boyfriend or girlfriend), although it can happen with Intimate and Non-Intimate Secondary Sources, but it is rarer. Those secondary sources are more usually treated in a shelf manner, however the emotional battle is applicable to those in the relevant dynamic of secondary source with the narcissist. It is then that you find yourself confronted with three battles which take place one after the other. Not only do you have us as your foe but in an especially unappealing turn of events you find that in fact you are actually fighting against yourself. The first battle following disengagement is the emotional one.
You have been left with no explanation. If one was tendered it made no sense. You cannot reconcile where you are with what has been. The descent from gilded pillar into the dust has been swift and merciless. Whilst we (usually) do not set out to destroy you, it may feel that way to you or that has occurred as a collateral consequence of the pursuit of The Prime Aims. Every day you have run the gauntlet of scores of emotions, which has drained you, eroded you and taken a significant toll on your well-being.
Your emotions are red raw, heightened and easy to trigger. Your pain is extensive, agonising and brutal and it is during this emotional battle that your ally of cool, detached thinking has not fled the battlefield, it never turned up to begin with. Your ability to assess, rationalise and consider you position with the necessary critical analysis evades you.
All you are left with is a cauldron of emotion, which serves only to heighten your distress and your confusion. Nothing makes sense and you have not been left in a position to make any sense of what has happened. This is entirely deliberate and is put in place by the narcissism. It is consciously deliberate where you are dealing with a Greater Narcissist and unconsciously deliberate where you are dealing with a Lesser or Mid-Range Narcissist. I know so many of you use the phrase “hot mess”. This is entirely apt. You are a mess. Your life is a mess. The heat comes from your raging emotions as you veer between hysteria and anger.
Of the three battles that you fight post disengagement, the emotional battle, the first, is the one which you invariably end up losing. This is because you are utterly ill-equipped. If you were an army your troops would be sharing guns, you would not know which way to face, your supply lines have been overstretched and, in some places, broken and the enemy seems to appear at will. The fog of war obscures your vision. Is that us advancing or just the silhouette of a tree? You cannot tell.
Once you could, but no longer. It is a tortuous place and one which has been created through our design in order to ensure that when we return (and we will) you will be in no position to resist. Weakened, governed by emotional thinking rather than intellectual logical thinking you will be overrun easily. Intelligence is now defence, this is not about intelligence but the fact that your emotional thinking is far too strong for what little logic may exist.
This battle, where all you have is emotion, means that you want the pain to stop. You want the golden period again. You give no consideration or thought to what the price of such desires might be, or whether it really is the golden period once more. You are ruled by emotional thinking and this proves to be your downfall. We know this (Consciously or Unconsciously) and this is why our narcissism ensure syou are a churning, broiling scorching crucible of emotion. Our narcissism creates it, we want that. This is why your first attempt at no contact (without the benefit of specialist input form me) nearly always falls.
You are not equipped to prolong it because in this emotional battle all it takes is for us to come galloping over the hill once again, offering terms of the golden period and you surrender in an instant allowing us to occupy your territory once more in the understandable but ultimately forlorn hope of a peaceful co-existence.
As you drown in the emotional sea once again, you will feel a rescuing hand grab you and haul you out. Your relief is immense. The rescuing hand belongs to us and such is the effect of your emotional thinking that you will return into our grasp. The hoover that we deploy as we rescue you from the emotional sea succeeds so readily because you want to escape the turmoil and the quickest way to do so is to return to us.
What makes it worse is that as your rescuer we grant you a new golden period and thus your emotional thinking cons you further by telling you that it was absolutely fine to go back because ‘look everything is as it once was’. You have been rewarded for agreeing to return and therefore that was the right decision wasn’t it? Your emotional thinking rules supreme again as it cons you into thinking that this is the best outcome.
Your immersion in the emotional sea has permeated throughout you, any logic that was trying to gain a foothold to make you see clearly has been flooded out. Logic cannot make itself heard and you are drawn back into our grasp once again.
How do you win this first emotional battle? You cannot. You are in such a position that we always win this battle. The key however is not to participate in this battle but rather avoid it altogether. If you know there is a battle you cannot win, why would you ever fight it?
You would not. You would evade your foe, take steps to bolster your defences and seek to avoid this emotional battle. This is what you must do. Once you have gained awareness of the foe you are engaged with, possibly during seduction or more likely through the period of devaluation, you must then take those steps to prepare yourself. You either avoid the emotional battle altogether by escaping rather than being disengaged from (discarded). Alternatively, you steel yourself for the inevitable disengagement so that the emotional fallout is massively reduced and instead you find yourself transported to the second battle that takes places post discard which I shall expand on next.
If you have been disengaged, then you face the emotional battle and you will lose. You must avoid the emotional battle in its entirety or engage on terms in the second battle which follows post disengagement.
How do you eventually avoid this first emotional battle?
How do you start to journey across the emotional sea rather than continue to drown in it?
You use my work.
My work, works.
You are here. It is time to GOSO, get out, stay out.


Post-trampling, post rape and disengagement, my emotions are squashed roadkill. I feel so many things in the space of ten minutes, it’s like my previously reliable inner indicator is set on shuffle. I don’t know what feeling to act on. I feel overwrought.
Worst of all is the three images I have of ex-N in my memory, the one I want to have hold me (he wasn’t real), the disconnected icey-eyed hurtful one, and the one who electrifies me with fear because there was a point where I was completely at his mercy, and I thought “am I going to be killed now?”.
Cue urge to vomit and cry.
I thought I could confront him and stand my ground through sheer force of will, because the old me would master anything she put her mind to.
I greatly underestimated my damaged state, and his ‘black belt in bastardry’, shall we say. Olympic gold medal winning slipperiness and cruelty.
Yes, fighting against ourselves is the most hardest of battles. I am always fighting against myself! Our emotional thinking is stronger than any narc out there. I guess this is why the narc likes to grab the reigns of this.
I think I actually live in the emotional sea. I long to see land. All I have is this raft I cling on to, but this sea is kinda all I know….. And on my raft I have a little basket ball with a face on it called “Wilson” who doesn’t say much……(reference to the film Cast Away)
Do not underestimate my little wooden raft though! Many a storm its been through.
I too live in an emotional sea. The words HG used – COOL HARD LOGIC saved me from drowning. I ignored my emotional side. The narc uses our emotions against us. Brilliant article HG
Jane Hall,
Yes I thought I saw you in the emotional sea haha! Giving you a wave! Lol!
I will never ignore my emotions. I will try my utmost to control them. And sometimes I will fail. But that is HUMAN. To deny my human side is to deny me. Yes we can all have more logic, there is nothing wrong with that, but again I think there is a balance to be had. I don’t want to be so logical that it is then hard for someone to distinguish me from a narc. I am emotional, and that’s who I am.
Yes the narc uses emotions against us. But then it’s the emotion and reactions they need from us, and therefore we can use that also to our own advantage.
We always have something they want. You could think of it as we are the predators, and they are the prey. We simply hold out our beaming light, and they come along attracted towards it. It’s our job to zap them into oblivion or gobble them up when they do. Maybe HG doesn’t approve.
And like I care lol!
tigerchelle – I wouldn’t ignore my emotional side completely. No. Only in regards to my X. My emotions – feeling sorry for him, forgiving him and feeling that he was a little, teeny, boy child who needed a mamma to care for diddum’s. That kind of emotion I meant. My emotions are still there. I just switched them firmly OFF for X and they will STAY off for him. And him alone.
Yes, I saw you in the Sea too. LOL
Cliff hanger HG