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.
24 thoughts on “The Emotional Sea – The Post Disengagement/Escape Battle Part One”
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I realized after I posted my question asking if you use a pseudonym that, of course, it must be. It is a question that could easily have been answered by asking The Great Google. Thank you for the courtesy of your reply.
I think now I was motivated by curiosity and fascination that you are a real person, as evidenced by your response. It is odd to me to think of you being something of a spokesperson for the dumbfounding mystery, to me at least, of the narcissist’s mind. Your words are revelatory and at times overwhelming because I have been analyzing “you” for the whole of my adult life. It would not be an exaggeration to also say, even as a child I wondered, though I would not have been able to put words to my thoughts. (Both of my parents are narcissists.) And (apparently) I am an empath, after all.
Because of this, what I was actually thinking about your chosen name is that, for me, ‘Tudor’ brings to mind tutor. Although I imagine, with your intelligence, it is something much more clever. Don’t you wish now you could tell us just how very?
You wrote in one of your articles or shared in a video something about a narcissist being useful in society to accomplish certain things that others cannot, such as in business, because of the way his mind works, my words, uncluttered by things typical of most others. Therefore narcissism is, um, good. Or at least not entirely bad. I’ve reflected on the profundity of that thought until my brain hurt.
All well and good for business but devastating in interpersonal relationships. But because “no man is an island”, may I say, even the narcissist is compelled to attempt a connection. Or something.
I’m sorry my memory of your words is vague and that I don’t remember the source. I have been following you for awhile but this “language” is still very new to me. Perhaps you can remind me.
Dearest H.G. : I am in a race to discard before being discarded. I am a non-sexual secondary fuel supply. Can I win this…. I noticed the devaluation. I read that non-sexual secondary fuel supply like me, a co-worker so to speak, are rarely discarded. But, I want out. For my emotional health`s sake. Can I win this race?
I need far more information in order to provide you with an accurate assessment – you should organise a consultation with me.
Dearest HG.I hope you have heard it all. I see people on here tell you all sorts of things. So, this little scario of mine could be common. For me, it is all so embarrassing. I put my self in this situation, to have something and someone to think about. To fantasize about privately. For it all to be harmless and something that was just in my mind. I did not understand the mind well enough, and I did not know about pathological narcissism. I did not know about being an empath. So, I chose the wrong person to focus my mind on, because I did not know about being a narc magnet. I was presented with doves`s eyes when I first spoke to this person. He always spoke so nicely to me and was attentive at work. I think he hypnotized me. (I am not joking). After a couple of months of this, I remember my first words to him on my own, over 3 1/2 years ago. I said to him: I wish I were as cool as you. (I wear my heart on my sleeve, people tell me. Now I know that is not very smart). So he mentored me. And, I brought him lunches to the job about 3 times a week. Healthy stuff. and little gifts from time to time. I knew he had plenty of women, but I rarely saw them. He rarely brought his IPPS to the job, even rarer his DSL. I was relatively happy in my role, as a non sexual secondary fuel supply, although I wanted more. It was not to be, but, I had fallen in love with him. And then, I saw the mask slip a bit. 6 months ago. I felt like I was dying in plain site. That is when I googled and discovered narc cycles. Like, lovebomb and triangulation and silent treatment, etc. rinse and repeat. WOW. 3 years of that I went through. So for the past 6 months I have been carefully backing off. Blaming a cold. Bad weather. Injury. So I have been skipping days at work, in short. Changing my schedule bit by bit.. Breaking the momentum. However, I believe he has figured out that I am slowly distancing myself. He is extremely intelligent and charming and clever. I believe you would call him a mid ranger. I notice a hollow look in his eyes when he looks at me now. I feel like a little kitten backing away from a clever tiger. I also do not want him to sabotage my career if this is causing a narc injury. His colleagues told him that they envied that the had me as his protege. Now they ask him how am I doing. I wish they would shut up. His flying monkeys are always asking me how I am doing and why is my schedule changing. I give them babble answers. THE LOVE I have for him, is now also my collateral damage He future faked with me as well. That he was looking for people like me to grow in the field. He is well known in the field. I am trying to save my career. The broken heart will take time. I am trying to discard before being discarded, if that is the wise thing to do…very carefully…..
You are sensible to seek to escape. You will find consulting with me of considerable assistance in achieving this aim of yours.
Yes. You are right. I have never been the extremely clever sort. So, this scenario with this mid ranger is out of my league. And the broken heart that is crippling me, but did push me to seek your help, sure does not help my logical thinking. I changed my screen name/avatar from Michelle Clark to PrincessSuperEmpath. I like it. I hope you like it, as well. I want you to know that it is still me, a better me, and not a new person. Please help me to go Nova, Dearest HG. I am ready. Forever. I am a little shy, and will push myself for the private consultation. I do prefer the audio, though. It seems warmer to be on audio to speak about a cold subject. Thank you.
I look forward to assisting you through an audio consultation.
More observations – someone with NPD doesn’t just identity with being ‘evil’ but also ‘good’ and the truth.
I don’t understand something HG. You’re a self-confessed Greater Narcissist, and your blog certainly puts truth to this because you clearly know what you’re talking about – every post resonates deeply because of the desperate situation I found myself in with a Mid-Range, prior to recent escape. But why do you write it? Do you get positive fuel from it? I would have thought that it would be in your own best interests to keep the information to yourself. Are you trying to change who you intrinsically are in the process of writing? You warn empaths like me and point out what we need to do to escape the steel grip of a Narcissist, how to recognise the behaviour and describe narcissistic traits and behaviours so we can begin to comprehend what we’ve been through. But why do YOU write it? Very curious to understand your motivation, but am grateful for the lessons nonetheless.
We want the pain to end so bad, and our brains seek logical justification.
Even after careful reading and knowing of his gameplaying and your description of Devaluing messages.
Dec/Jan I went to myself, alone late at night, kids had gone to bed:
“Well, really, these Get-Your-Ex-Back youtube coaches have great wisdom in their advice. They seem much more optimistic than HG.
What the hell does HG know about real love anyway??
And would HG admit if some behaviour could start his empathy and love investment? Bah these men are so spoiled of course a happy hardtoget woman would teach them a lesson”
I thought of things to contact/respond to the breadcrumber about. Reasons to contact.
Luckily I didn’t.
But yes sometimes we force our minds to think that this ex might not be a narcissist.
Like the alcoholic sometimes thinks she is not one.
Cried to a collegue too, battle of withdrawal.
If you went through that love bombing and idealization and silent treatment and gslighting and devaluation, and hoovering, etc. over and over again, than this person is a narc by definition. That is some unusual crap to go through. It can not be compared to anything else. It is mind-boggling. Literally. Who has changed a person that is like this? What would the person do to survive any other way. The problem is the deceit. But, aren`t we empaths deceitful in our own little way? Deceiving ourselves that we can love away anything. Then become upset that we have deceived ourselves? Not really getting to know a person first. Allowing love bombing when common sense should tell us that no one can keep up such a pace? I will never be so prideful and lacking in humility ever again to believe that I can provide the happiness that a person is missing. They have to find it. I hope to share the search with them. Life does get boring. Mates are not usually perfect, from what I hear. People do treat one as less special as time goes on. People do let us down in so many ways. It is better to win than to lose, usually. It is better for ones success on this planet to face as little rejection as possible. It is not good to be curled up in a tiny ball over someone leaving or dis-respecting you. Too much depression caused by other people can also ruin you, if one has to work for a living, and is the head of their own household. Where does one fall if the rug is pulled out. I believe the Narc sees the unreliability of other people and their threat to ones autonomy and self preservation more than most people. I have to say, (ducks for cover), that I understand them. I just want to be able to live as well, and I know I can not survive the narc cycles. But, I understand it. Secretly, I admire a lot about it (ducks for cover again). Sort of like how the weak children admire the bullies. Of course, not the serial killers, and those that beat their target up all the time, and all that. I guess that is another reason we have police and prisons. And, even narcs despise certain other narcs. There are rules in everything. I guess that is quite empathic of me.
Michelle
No need to duck with me. I understand your feeling and comment.
Are these articles written by a team of people? Is narcsite.com an organization or a personal blog?
It’s written and administered by one person – me.
Your words are wise and, more than likely, have saved my life. I’m grateful for you educating others about narcissism. If only my family could get a glimpse of what I have been through…
Welcome Jennifer, you are most welcome. Keep reading, focus on your own defences and the issue of your family understanding will be of less importance to you.
Do you do anything but write?
Yes.
Do you use a voice changer?
No.
Is it safe to assume that you use a pseudonym?
It is entirely safe and indeed accurate to make that assumption, Gina.
As HG always writes, he is a army of 1!