The Six Phases of Fuelling

Fuel is our lifeblood. Whether it is positive fuel from admiration, delight and love or negative fuel from hatred, anger or upset, we want fuel. There are many, many different ways in which we will manipulate you, many different machinations, some wonderful and others terrible, that we will use against you to extract fuel from you. These different methods appear during the six phases of fuelling.

1. Seduction

A period when everything is rosy in the garden. We are the most wonderful person you could ever meet. Kind, considerate, amusing and entertaining. We are generous with time or money, sometimes both. We are impressive in terms of our achievements, our abilities, the people that we know, the places that we have been and we just happen to like all the things that you like as well as we engage in our tried and trusted practice of mirroring. If we have chosen you to be our intimate partner we will be gushing with love as we sweep you off your feet with borrowed love quotes, gifts and sensational love-making. It is irresistible and you will succumb to this intense love-bombing whether we want you as our partner in love, friend, trusted colleague or reliable family member. Our seduction is powerful, effective and is aimed at getting you hooked on us as we begin to drink from your positive fuel that you will provide to us during the golden period.

2. Devaluation

In this second phase we have found your positive fuel has lost its potency. You are no longer providing us with the earnest and amazing admiration that we require and this is entirely your fault. The consequence of this is that we must continue to draw fuel in order to sustain our existence and now we must do this by extracting a contrasting fuel, negative fuel. This is derived by treating you badly, meting out silent treatments, shouting at you, provoking you and unleashing the whole malevolent content of our Devil’s Toolkit against you. We want you to shout insults at us in anger, we want you to plead with us to stop our torment of you, we want to see you sob in desperation at our continued abuse of you. Tears, frustration, anger and hatred are all delicious emotions which will fuel us and they provide such a magnificent and stark contrast to all of the positive fuel that you once gave that the effect for us is considerably edifying and invigorating.

3. Respite

We do not want to keep the devaluation in place all of the time otherwise you will break too soon and deprive us of our primary source of fuel. Accordingly, the third phase is one where we allow you some respite from the devaluation. We reinstate the golden period and you provide us with relief tinged positive fuel. This is of an excellent quality as it is heightened by your relief and joy at returning to the golden period. It also allows us to convince you that the golden period can be resurrected so you will not leave us and instead keep trying to recover it. We will alternate between devaluing you and offering you respite, back and forth between these two states in order to confuse you and keep you in situ. The contrast between treating you well and treating you badly also provides us with a greater degree of fuel as your emotions are pushed and pulled by us. This phase may last for years as we move you back and forth, one week everything is wonderful and then you are plunged into a fortnight of awful treatment with you completely bewildered as to why this is happening.

4. Preventative 

You may be pushed to a point of no return. You may have received some outside help from a friend or a professional who understands what is actually happening to you or it may be that you do not know what is happening but you know that you cannot allow it to continue any longer. In such a situation when you warn us that you are thinking of leaving us or that you intend to end our relationship we will instigate the preventative phase. This is designed to stop you from going. We will provide a massive dose of the golden period but we will also ally it with promises to mend our ways, seek help and change. None of it is meaningful but it is a desperate measure to prevent you from leaving us. We decide when we no longer want you, you are not superior to us and therefore you are not allowed, in our minds, to make this decision. By applying these preventative moves, which might be seeking pity, forgiveness, understanding and sympathy, we aim to stop your departure and then drink deep of the fuel that you will provide as you soothe away our concern, responding favourably to our stated intention to better ourselves. Your delight at hearing us say these things provides us with further fuel.

5. Benign Return

Whether you escaped us or we cast you to one side through one of our callous discards we will also seek fuel through the benign return. Similar to the preventative stage but this takes place after there has been a cessation in our relationship. You try to stay away from us or you have been trying to get back with us but we have kept you at arms’ length for some time until we decide that we want your positive fuel once again and we approach you taking you back. We may seek forgiveness, express we made mistakes, that we were not thinking clearly and so on, all done in order to con you into resurrecting the relationship. If we ended it, you will return with joyful open arms. If you ended it, you will return delighted you have got us to agree to making changes. Of course nothing changes. It is all about the fuel and as you respond in a favourable manner, admiring us again, expressing your love and gratitude, portraying relief we will take all this fuel.

6. Malign Return

This also takes place post cessation of the relationship. You may have ended it and resisted out attempts to hoover you back in. We may have ended it and you want to return to the fold but we will not let you as we have a replacement. In either instance we will not forgo the opportunity to extract additional fuel from you by continuing to administer terrible and hurtful manipulations against you. We may no longer be in a relationship but this will not stop us from lashing out, lying about you, invoking the assistance of others as we smear your name and doing everything we can on a repeated basis to cause you to become angry and upset and thus provide us with fuel. You may not have heard from us for some time but there will be some trigger, some opportunity and whilst we may not want you back or we may be unable to cause you to come back, we will still look to provoke an emotional reaction from you and obtain fuel. It is always about the fuel.