Trying Behaviour
You do not give up easily do you? We are pleased that this is the case. You try to resurrect what we once had. You will look to resuscitate our relationship. You want to breathe new life into you and me. You want to salvage what you can from the wreckage and build something anew. You will not let the life slip from what we have, you will not step out of the tangled and twisted remains and walk away. No, you try. You try to make it work, you try to see what can be done, you try to sort things out. You try to make everything right again, you try to make us happy, you try to please us, how you try to please us. You try to fix us, you try to banish these demons which plague us, you try to shed light and joy. You try when everything seems lost, you try when all seems pointless and you try despite everything else suggesting that what we are is a lost cause. You try because you believe in hope.
But what is this hope that has you trying on a superhuman scale, which has you wiping away the tears, picking yourself up, dusting yourself down and standing up once more to try to do the right thing? If you were not with our kind but someone normal and the relationship was foundering would you try as you do with us? Of course you would try and steer the good ship towards calmer waters but you would not try to the same extent as you do with us. Where two people find they no longer have anything in common, they may be content to leave matters as they are and drift along in neutrality. It is not heady and wonderful but neither is it awful. Is beige such a terrible place to be? There is security, the children have grown up and you have your separate interests. There is no hatred, far from it, but neither is there passion any longer, but something in the middle. This is deemed as acceptable and you are happy to trundle along in this manner. You do not try to rekindle those early days of your honeymoon period. In other instances, this mediocrity is found to be stifling. If you hear another gardening anecdote or incident at the bowling club, you will go spare. You want to travel and experience new things. Your other half is more interested in the home brew and the latest episode on television. There is no hatred, there is no passion but this time the middle is deemed suffocating and unacceptable. You do not try to rekindle what you once had but instead decide you want something else. You move on to something else, be it a single life with new pursuits or finding a new person who shares your interests. The separation is amicable, fair-minded and there is no turbulence. The relationship ran its course and you saw no reason to try to make it anything different.
Yet with us it is so different isn’t it? You try your absolute best to get things back on track, you try until you are shattered and exhausted, bewildered and confused. How can you not achieve what we once had again? Why is it so elusive? Yet you do not give up. You keep on trying. Again and again.
Such is the intoxicating power of the golden period, such is the addiction of this utterly falsified state of affairs, such is the massive attraction of that seemingly perfect love, you try your damnedest to resurrect it. Sometimes there is a glimmer of a return or even a brief sortie to that promised land once again and you know that your repeated trying has succeeded. It never lasts. It never stays. Still, you exhibit that indefatigable spirit as you try once more, looking to rekindle that special love we once had.
You even begin to sacrifice pieces of yourself in order to try to bring it back. You try to guess what we want all the time. You walk on those eggshells in order to avoid disrupting the fragile peace. You agree to do things you would never have countenanced once upon a time but hey, it is worth trying isn’t it? You decide to spend more time with us, sacrificing your relationships with your friends and with your family, but you have to try don’t you? You cannot be said to have not tried to make this work and if you had it once then surely you can get it again can’t you? You submit to more and more of our demands, demeaning yourself, degrading yourself and suffering our repeated denigrations but you convince yourself that this is all worth doing because you are trying to achieve a greater aim. You have hope that you will succeed and bring back that elusive golden period. You forgo invitations to events because you know it will displease us. You do not invite people to the house to avoid causing a disruption to the evening, since we want peace and quiet. You try not to say anything when we return late from who knows where. You try to remain silent when we spend hours staring into the screen on our laptops, tapping away, our minds somewhere else. You retreat, back-off and compromise, giving away more and more of yourself and your life as you try to succeed.
Thus here is the awful warped nature of being ensnared by us. In a normal relationship you may not try to the same extent because the excitement and passion was not as it was with us. Yet, this relationship is one where trying will bring about success. Yes, you won’t establish that paradise that exists when we seduce you, but it never actually existed to begin with. It is a fiction. However, trying to succeed with someone normal and healthy is entirely achievable. You will not, by contrast, ever succeed with us. You can try over and over and over again but for all this effort and endeavour you will not get what you want. What we once granted you will only ever be given again in small doses and then only as part of this continuing manipulation so that you remain in our grip so we can gather fuel until we throw you aside. No matter how determined you are, no matter how great your resolve, no matter the fact that you put every breath, every ounce of effort in to trying to make things work between you and us so everything is golden, it will never ever work. It cannot because you cannot control the golden period. Only we can and we choose who is granted it and when in accordance with our need for control and fuel.
Try to understand that.
19 thoughts on “Trying Behaviour”
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Having healthy boundaries for what behaviour we will tolerate from others is the beginning of healthy self-love.
I’m appreciating the ancient wisdom of the person who said “love others as you love yourself”. It’s not MORE than you love yourself. It presupposes a healthy love for self as a starting point, as a place of strength from which to begin all responses to others.
“Put on your own oxygen mask before helping others with theirs”, so to speak.
Not kill yourself trying. You are valuable.
It takes great courage to walk away.
I’m reminded of the story of the good Samaritan: he knew when he’d done all that he could, all that was appropriate and reasonable under the circumstances.
He was kind and compassionate.
He was empathetic.
He didn’t exhaust all of his resources, however. He knew when to leave the responsibility for healing and change with the other person.
He knew when to walk away.
Caroline
I really liked your point about the Good Samaritan. “He knew when to walk away.”
Yes! That’s an important point that we need to keep in mind.
Thanks Windstorm.
Sometimes it can be hard to know when we’ve done enough, can’t it?
Feeling guilty can make us stay, or give more and try harder even when our internal warning alarms are letting us know we are approaching burnout.
It took me a long time to figure out where the line was in a professional capacity, and then a personal capacity. It is a good thing to feel comfortable knowing that our resources are finite and limited. It’s a very good thing to feel comfortable saying “no”.
When we breathe out, we keep a reserve amount of gas in our lungs, a certain amount of positive pressure to keep the alveoli expanded. Our bodies instinctively know we must guard our resources and not exhaust or misuse our reserve capacity.
HG , have you heard of the enneagram personality system . I read a few books on it and took the test long ago . A psychologist I knew used this method sometimes , along with all her other testing like Myers Briggs . I remember it was very descriptive about a child’s attachment to his / her parents . Each 9 points had a different attachment style with their mother and father and it described the personality based off questions …it was easy to kinda memorize how a person would act when healthy or when the person was mentally depressed etc . And it even theorized which personality would commit murder when compromised or in a certain mental state …9 personalities -9 pointed star .
No, I am not familiar with that.
Both of those “tests” are basically pseudoscience. There is no validity to either of them. You would be better off reading your daily horoscope.
Pale Horse
Haha. I’m a Libra, and my horoscope says I’m compatible with decent guys who like to drink beer and want their world rocked. Eerily accurate. What’s your sign?
NA, I am a Cancer.
And irregardless, I would like my world rocked!
They are interesting ways to learn ….about other people. I have a large family and could fit many of their personalities into the enneagram. It can help with business and learning how people respond to certain words too. I could see how a person could manipulate the public in advertising with these tests .
The last paragraph is so crucial.
So important to grasp.
It is completely honest and authentic.
It should hit right at the very core and take hold…This must….must…be taken in and truely absorbed.
It is as a stinging lash, a pounding thrashing on the ears of that heart that does not want to hear, that mind that resists life’s defeats.
And make no bones about it…this is defeat of sorts..of course it is.
Because it is accepting that it is a war of neverending battles to infinity and back.
And yet this is the defeat that is the victory because it is necessary to embrace this defeat…this no mans land…in order to look beyond it. To cease engagement via acceptance takes the defeat away.
An unwelcome, unwanted and bitter medicine all this awful truth..
…that must be swallowed down..a very bitter pill to swallow indeed.
Oh..how hearts burn when he/she is not what we thought them to be, oh how eyes weep, our knights in their armour dreams false and vain..
Unbearable …until it isnt.
Yes..because accepting will one day change tha status of unbearable.
The last sentence of this article is immensly powerful:
*”Try to understand that”*
In those words there lies the master key…
It opens the big closed door when you turn it. True understanding…a full grasp of the facts …feeling and sensing…will ultimately lead you to freedom.
Dulling down to ease your pain..wont work.
The whole aspect of being empaths…the sensing, the feelings…the intuition..is wholly and completely required.
Narcissists prefer your confusion very simply to throw you off the scent and have you running in circles wimpering not even knowing which wound to lick first…
Narcs must stop you taking the medicine of truth…they must stop you…dull you down.
Reach deep..to that last strengh I know is there…resist..use you fight not to challenge them for their sustenance…use it to hear what you do not want to hear.
Use your remaining strength to understand.
Your abilities remain.
You will go on.💞
Begin.
DebbieWolf 🐾
HG, if a narcissist is hunting for a “great catch” in his opinion and initially the girl treats him as friend and he finally seduces her after a year of friendship and she becomes his girlfriend, will it lenghten the golden period? Will the narcissist treat her better comparing to the girl which he seduced after for example 3 months of being friends?
Devaluation is affected by factors described in the article about why we devalue you and is not related to the ‘lead-in’ period.
This is painful to read, and has already brought me to tears.
It is true that with “normal” relationships, there is no way that I would put up with certain “deal breakers”, yet with the Narcissist, the “deal breakers” were major, catastrophic breakdowns from the boundaries crossed so severely and continually. But, I still could not let go. And, if I did let go, I was crawling back to him, again, in no time.
I would even look at myself, as if from a distance, and tell myself to “stop!”. But, I couldn’t stop!
Never giving up…my greatest strength and my greatest weakness. A blessing and a curse.
“It cannot because you cannot control the golden period. Only we can and we choose who is granted it and when in accordance with our need for control and fuel.
Try to understand that.”
This is where I am at.
Perversity rules. I don’t think the golden period ever returns for the narcissist or the ‘appliance’. Does Humpty Dumpty feature in any of your fairy tales? That was me – climbing back onto the wall – full of cracks and missing pieces of shell, trying to hold on and stop from falling again, but the wall became more unstable and I lost more of myself desperately trying to put myself back together (emulating the golden period) but it was a lost cause. The n-ex may have returned via hoovers, benign or malicious, but the n-ex couldn’t regain the same golden ground either so the demands and put downs escalated as I jumped through hoops to make things ‘right’. N-ex having sourced yet more appliances merrily chased his next golden fix. N-ex must be exhausted by now and perpetually disappointed. I eventually climbed off that wall, not fell. There remains the cracks and missing shell – the emotional scars/pull – but am adjusting and life goes on. I’ve worked through the disbelief, shock, grief, hurt and anger, but I could only do that once I knew the truth and accepted it. I’m still working on bitterness for the wasted years, but even that grows less – as I’m ‘wasting’ even more of my time on that self inflicted negative emotion. I’m learning to let go…. and grow.