Knowing the Narcissist : Hoover Risk : The Need For The Last Word

I often reinforce how the key to understanding who you have been entangled with and therefore maximising your own prospects of moving on is to comprehend that we operate from a different perspective from you. That is why so much of what we say and do appears odd, irrational and downright perverse to you, yet completely normal and understandable to us.

One of those ways in which the perspective affects the dynamic between my kind and your kind is the fact that we always want the final word. Now, of course, it may have occurred to you that since we regard the Narcissistic Relationship as one which lasts forever, how can there really be a last word? Once again, this does not matter to us and this highlights the contradictory nature of the way by which we behave. We are the ones in control and we must always exert that state of affairs. Therefore, within the Formal Relationship we want the last word in any discussion or argument. We want the last word when issuing our opinion about something. We want the last word when the Formal Relationship has been brought to conclusion. Indeed, even if you end the Formal Relationship and escape us we will still maintain that we had the last word and we ended it. We will skew the situation to maintain our control and sense of power, irrespective of what might actually have happened. This causes confusion, frustration and astonishment for you, which of course is all good fuel to us.

The need for the last word is also a device which is designed to set us on a collision course with your kind. You also want to have the last word. You want to be able to say your piece. You feel that it is only right that you are heard. You believe it to be a fundamental part of any relationship that you are heard and because you find yourself so annoyed, upset and frustrated with the way that we operate, this desire to have the last word, set us straight and assert your position becomes all the more important to you. If the Formal Relationship has ended, you also want to have the last say. You want to let us know what you really think of us. You want to make some last plea to the normalcy you believe still lurks somewhere inside of us. You want to make us hear you, listen and somehow accept that we are wrong and you are right. This desire of yours to say the last word is considerable and flies in the face of our own desire which of course leads to conflict, drama and opposition, all of which creates fuel which is what we want. You are left infuriated if you cannot have your say. You are furious if you have been denied the chance to articulate how you feel. You are upset that your desire to say what you want to say has been ignored, disregarded and treated in a roughshod manner. You want finality. You want some kind of closure and having the last say as we both stare at one another across the smoking ruins of our Formal Relationship is something which matters to you tremendously. We know this. This is why we make it so damn difficult for you to achieve, either talking over you, shouting you down, walking away or just disappearing. You feel cut-off, denied, unfulfilled and this gives us both Thought Fuel and Proximate Fuel if we stay to witness the reaction.

You are preoccupied with thinking about the injustice you have suffered at our hands. the sheer unfairness of what has happened, the need for restitution. You want us to know what we are. You want us to realise that we are bad, awful, horrible, an abuser. You want us to know how you feel. You want to say your piece, articulate your anger, your pain, your bewilderment. Your emotional thinking relishes this happening. If you are thinking about delivering any of the above, in person, through text or smoke signal. If you are discussing this need with a friend or therapist. If you are reading the latest piece of provocation that we have sent you, querying why you have behaved so abominably, criticising your past weekend behaviour with the children or demanding you repay us for some debt. Any and all of these matters will heighten your emotional thinking which will want to go one step further and make you engage with us either by confronting us in person, by ringing us up or firing off that venomous late night text volley.

Your emotional thinking will corrupt your empathic traits of fairness, honesty and decency. It will corrupt those narcissistic traits of pride and envy. Most of all however it will hone in on your empathic truth seeker trait in order to make you endeavour to deliver (your) truth to us in one last proclamation, a final declaration, that signing-off.

When that text arrives and finds you because your no contact regime is poor, it baits you and how many times have you failed to resist responding to this provocation. You have to set us straight, you have to put us right, you just cannot leave it be. Full of righteous indignation, bristling with anger, brimming with (your truth) you have to have that last word and you respond. You text. You email. You social media message. You call. You appear in person.

You provide us with pure fuel or challenge fuel. You risk an adverse response. You heighten your emotional thinking further and get drawn into a war of words, an array of accusations and a tussle of the (differing) truths.

And all this do

The need to have the last word also leads to you being susceptible to being hoovered because you feel that there are loose ends which need tying up. We instinctively  know this and rely on it to keep you hooked and providing fuel to us without ever allowing you to tie up those loose ends correctly. It is all part of the way we continue to manipulate you. No doubt you have found yourself in such a situation. You may now have moved on and know that the last thing you ought to do is engage with us in this way, no matter how tempting it might be. You have learned it will only result in fuel, if handled incorrectly and at worse you might even succumb to our charm once again and be sucked into the Formal Relationship again. Yet the desire to say those things you wish you had been able to say all that time ago or even more recently remains strong and powerful. Of course what you might say now would perhaps differ from what you might have said back then, when you did not know better than what you know now. You did not know what you had been entangled with, nor how you had been manipulated and thus your words would take on a different form compared to if you said them now, armed with knowledge and understanding.

Think back, when the need to say those last words arose, if you could have said them, at the time, what would they have been?

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