Love Me, Hate Me, But Never Ignore Me
I want your love. I want your hate. I want your joy. I want your tears. I want every single emotional ounce that you possess and I want it directed at me. It is easy to understand why anybody would want to be loved because isn’t that what everybody only ever wants to have? To love and be loved. Of course it is. I only ever wanted to be loved and no matter what I did, no matter how hard I tried it was denied to me. Push yourself harder, go further, work harder and you can have it. I was promised that gain repeatedly and I complied. I strove and I toiled and I grafted. I studied, I obeyed, I trained, I ran and I ran fast, I jumped and I jumped higher than anyone else. I tackled, I shot, I pushed, I swam, I wrote, I complied, I answered, I read and I read. I did everything that was ever demanded of me. Does that sound familiar to you? Of course it is. You know what it is like to give your all and it still not be enough. You know what it feels like to keep trying until you feel like you have nothing left to give anymore. Why do you think that we are so effective in extracting that sensation from you? It is because my kind has been schooled in such a technique for so long that it becomes second nature.
Of course I was praised. I was encouraged. I was supported. I was pushed. I was told and instructed and ordered. The plaudits came but there was always the caveat.
“That is an excellent result, next time try for one hundred per cent.”
“Brilliant time but I know you can do it faster. You just need to try harder.”
“It is good but not as good as you can do. You are better than that.”
“Not bad but you will let me down if you do not get to the top of the class.”
Still, although it was conditional praise it was still praise nonetheless and this combined with my endeavours meant that I was never ignored. The achievements accumulated, the prizes were gathered and the accolades were acquired. Upwards, always upwards. Accordingly, your praise and admiration means so much to me. It was always the standard by which I was judged and so it is the same now. I crave the adulation and the passion, that is why I work so hard to cause you to give it to me. I want it, I want to be seen, I want to be recognised and that means I must receive your emotion sodden attention. It does not matter if you are shouting at me or beggin me to stop, so long as it id directed towards me. This is why everything I do is calculated to provide a reaction.
When I am seducing you, you must never ignore me. I have too much invested in your acquisition to lose you to someone of something else. My bombardment of you with messages and attention is to draw you to me, but it is also to ensure that you do not venture somewhere else and I am denied your attention. This is why I will text you and if there is not a prompt response I will text you again, then again, then call you and then turn up at your house. I need to know you are responding to my seduction. I need to control you. There is too much at stake to allow you to ignore me.
Once devaluation begins then I need once more the emotionally charged attention that comes from you weeping, shouting and screaming. It never troubles me in the same way that it troubles you to be shouted at. I require it and all it does is make me feel powerful because I know that I can prompt these responses from you by virtue of my manipulations. I know by saying nothing that you will beg and plead with me to explain what is wrong, hang around me, eyes wide in confusion as you beseech me to tell you what you have done wrong.
I am not fussy about the emotions which you pour my way. Good or bad I will take them all. The bad do admittedly make me feel more powerful but the sweet potency of favourable responses and eyes glowing with admiration are most welcome too. That is one of the reasons I alternate back and forth, making you happy and joyful towards me and then full or woe and anger. The contrast reinforces my omnipotence because I am the puppetmaster. One moment I can make you laugh and then with a flick of the switch I have you in tears. That is power. That is control and this is what emphasises my greatness. Yes, I know you consider such behaviour wrong. I am well aware of that and do not be fooled by any pretence to the contrary. I am fully aware that such behaviour is considered, bad, wrong and evil, according to your values but you ought to know that this game is not being played according to your rules. It is played with mine and I always have to win.
Should you be treacherous and be the bad person that I always suspected you to be and ignore me, then I will provoke you all the more in order to gain my reaction. Few of you realise that this is the aim, at least, not until much later. You are unable to understand this sudden escalation, this switching because of the confusion that you are mired in. I am grateful that this is the case for when you ignore me I begin to crumble. The edifice that I have built up begins to crack, splinter and fracture and I must escape your betrayal and seek out the emotions of others in order to compensate for your seditious behaviour. If I cannot bring your love or hate to the fore, I cannot remain to be ignored, for that is my death sentence and I am not allowing you to sign that warrant. I must be loved for I am worthy of the most perfect love, I must be hated because my works are that of the devil and attract your furious ire. Always look my way, always give me your emotions and never turn your back on me. Do that and all will be well. At least, for me, but then, isn’t this all about me anyway?
21 thoughts on “Love Me, Hate Me, But Never Ignore Me”
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I find a lot of the articles on this website to be hard to follow. The topic, narcissism, is very interesting, but the way things are worded are confusing.
Hi HG,
I ignored mid. narcissist with grey rock method few days ago.
Should I be aware now from hoover?
I don’t understand the question.
HG, I actually wanted to ask does ignore would be trigger for hoover me next time when he see me or every time he wants to hoover me he will remember that I ignore him and it will distract him from hoover?
Ignoring wounds. This pushes the hoover bar upwards meaning a hoover is less likely BUT it can be counteracted by other criteria in the HEC which lower the hoover bar. It has to be looked at in aggregate.
HG,
Doesn’t that mean that I need to pay more attention to avoid HEC than to no contact and ignoring implementation?
Thx
No.
Hi HG
i need you help!!!
After one year of NC, a few days ago I accidentally met my mid.narcist in the parking lot near my new job, it turned out that at that place crossed our ways at work. I ignored him with the rock face method while he was calling me.
I have few questions for you.
Do I need to change the parking space?
or he will change the way to his job because I ignored him and he is currently wound now?
Am I painted white for a sec because he saw me and immediately painted black because I ignored him?
Thx
1. Changing parking space would be advantageous as it would reduce the risk of a hoover trigger.
2. He probably won’t change his way to work. Yes, you wounded him and this will mean the Hoover Execution Criteria (when there is next a hoover trigger) will be less likely to be met (but it depends on other factors which I do not have knowledge of from the information given). The impact of his wounding will lessen over time however.
I recommend you consult with me so you can give me more information and I can provide you with a fuller and more accurate response.
I would imagine it’s quite frustrating to be ignored completely.
It is worse than frustrating WIO, it is infuriating.
Theres this girl ive known since my kids were in early grade school and her father built her up where she had to be number one at all times. She had to be the center of attention. Its gotten to the point at one of the sports theyre in with her that a lot of the parents and children are fed up with her and how she has monopolized the coaches time and attention. Shes more or less taken over and when anyone else outshines her her dad and her are outraged and try to sabatoge it in some way. They will even insert themselves into that other childs success and claim they had a part in it or draw from it in some way.
Its exhausting to watch. i dont know how they keep it up staying on top but i guess their fragile egos and survival depends on it.
Ive been teaching my kids about narcissism and how unhealthy this is to have to be number one all the time. Im teaching them to understand why this girl has to feel noticed all the time and instead to understand it opposed to feeling anger over it. She is set up for a lifetime of struggles. No one stays on top or is first forever and life cant be controlled. Things happen that will knock you off your game. Her identity and whole sense of wellness is based on being the best and being noticed which wont last. Its not reality and one day she will have to face this and will not know who she is anymore or her true self worth.
My poor narcissistic ex-husband had parents who had an achievement wall and the children strove to accomplish things worthy of being put up on the wall. As adults they still stove to be on the wall and none of them thought it was odd that they still had this drive. When I met his parents (and was introduce to the wall), I noticed that my ex-husband had nothing on the wall and I comment to his mother, “where are so and so’s accomplishments?” And she said “When he does something worthy of being on the wall, he will be put on the wall.” My ex-husband is a managing partner of a law firm. It is no surprise that he also ended up as a narcissist. He often cut me down because I grew up in poverty and with “folksy” parents, but I was never made to feel that I was not good enough or had to achieve to be loved. I will take that any day over competing to be on that blasted wall.
This is really fascinating to read. I had a narcissistic father, not sure whether he was a true narcissist, but my brother is is a full blown narcissist.
When not busy on, I would compete for attention to some degree. By the time I reached high school, i realised what was happening and I refused to participate. However come up the enormous amount of pain that I was in resulted in me smoking a lot of marijuana and barely graduated from high school. I still truly regret those choices.
Anyway, as I got older it became evident to me that I was in no way supposed to ever be successful — not professionally, not as a mother, not as a wife. If I were professionally successful that would trigger my father and my brother, if I was successful as a mother and wife that would threaten my mother.
Without realising it, i acquiesced to that . Myfather was generous financially because he could be, but it was with the understanding, unspoken of course, that I would remain in my assigned role in the family. I would never achieve more than he in my brother or my mother.
Years down the road, as an adult, my brother beat the hell out of me and my father watchedand let it happen. Then, at trial, He testified against me and lied for my brother.
Turns out you can’t manipulate 12 people on a jury! He was convicted and I went no contact. ( Actually I had gone no contact right after keeping me up.)
Over the instilling decades they have both tried over and over to somehow get a reaction for me. In the event that there had to be some responses always come through my attorney. I only wish I had the sense to leave long long long ago.
Dear HG: are Ns offended when they are blocked by us on all avenues? Curious what goes through their heads when we implement NC via phone and media blackout.
We are wounded. Fury ignites. Hoovers will follow if the HEC is made out and they can be executed.
What does happen when a narc runs out completely of people in their life? When fuel cannot be gained? When they have no family, friends, job, prospective new appliances or any on the side, doesnt seem to have a coterie, ageing with no prospects of anything and basically everything backfired on them? Alone in the world spending hours and days completely alone.. their demise brought about by themselves..
Read the book Fuel.
I went through the same thing when I was a kid. Always listening to those sentences “well done but the next time…” ” I know you can…”. For some rrasson I’m not a narc. but a superempath. And I think it’s a conscious decision I made at some point.
Butterfly
I remember making a conscious choice to be empathic and not like the narcs around me. I think it was more like embracing who I already was, though, and accepting it.
HG,
assuming my current live-in narc (I think) provoked a severe fight yesterday and was really horrible, shortly before his friend arrived for the long weekend, so I would a) not talk with his friend because I’d stay away from them and not get the idea to want to go out with them and b) seem the … crazy or whatever one, of the two of us … …. (or do you see another reason?) — …. And given the fact that he got me 100 % ignoring him in return … along with me making it obvious that I dressed up for going out with other people — — what will his next step be, when his friend is gone? Will be another 3 days though …