Ending a Narcissistic Relationship
Red Flags
It is very likely that if you’re in a narcissistic relationship, you would have noticed some red flags at various stages. Maybe your partner was manipulative, played on your emotions, was gaslighting you, would blame you for things you didn’t do…
However, when you bring these things up to your partner, they would turn the situation around on you; “How dare you call me manipulative?! You know how much I love you. You’re always blaming me for things that aren’t my fault. You’re too sensitive!”. And then you end up feeling like the bad guy.
It might get to the point that you stop bringing up these red flags. Choosing instead to bury your hurt or to mould yourself into what your partner wants so that the red flags don’t seem so bad.
Trying to End the Relationship
It may get to a point where you decide the relationship needs to end. You try to end the relationship with your partner, but they pull you back in. “You’re the only one for me, no one else can love you as much as I do, no one else gets me like you do.”
The relationship will almost never end when you want it to end.
You get pulled back into the relationship and decide to really give it a go this time. Maybe your partner reverts back to the love-bombing that they were doing at the beginning of the relationship; making you feel cared for, loved, and special. They shower you with attention and affection, and you feel that things will be okay.
This might happen a couple of times, where the relationship goes back to being amazing, but then quickly slips into manipulation again. You might try to end the relationship again but be coaxed back into feeling loved and cared for.
Sudden Ending
At some point, usually out of the blue, the narcissistic partner will end the relationship. There is no talking them out of it. There is often no explanation as to why they’re ending it. It is just over.
The narcissist is generally a very competitive person, and what this means for the end of the relationship is that they like to “win” the break up. Therefore, they will somehow make you feel completely unloveable during the course of ending the relationship. They might say things like “I was the best thing that ever happened to you”, “No one else will love you like I did”, or they might simply blame you for everything that went wrong in the relationship, making you question whether you should even attempt to find love again.
The narcissist can then be very cold towards you, often they will cut their ex-partner out of the picture completely, cutting off all communication immediately. This can leave you feeling very confused and hurt. As mentioned previously, they often won’t have explained why have ended the relationship, or let you have your say, so you are left with a lot of questions and unspoken uncertainty.
Another aspect of “winning the break up” will be to move on first. They will likely find another partner quickly because, as a narcissist, they are generally charismatic and charming, and they will flaunt this relationship so that they know you see it. They will put it on social media, see mutual friends - and they know the mutual friends will tell you - and so on. This will make you feel even worse, and make you question your relationship with them altogether.
Things to Remember
It is so important to remember the following things;
No one is blameless in a relationship. As much as they are trying to blame you for everything that went wrong in the relationship, they are to blame as well - most likely more so than you.
Take what they said with a truckload of salt. Remember that most of what a narcissist says and does is to serve them in some way. They are actually very fragile individuals, and so all of the manipulation, underhanded aggression, and emotional abuse is a way for them to not be hurt by others. This means that everything they might have said or did to you, was more about protecting them than hurting you - and therefore is very unlikely to be a truth about you.
You are not unloveable - they were incapable of loving you correctly. They might have made you feel unloveable, and I know some people who spend years feeling unloveable after such a relationship, but the realisation that they are not unloveable, they simply deserved more love than their ex-partner could give them, changes everything and is a massive turning point in healing from a narcissistic relationship.
It takes time to heal from a narcissistic relationship. We wouldn’t expect someone who leaves a physically abusive relationship to jump straight back out there and start dating, to bounce back to their old selves straight away. So why do we expect it after an emotionally abusive relationship - because that is what a narcissist is; they are emotionally abusive. Give yourself time to relearn who you are, what your boundaries are (because these would have been bent and broken beyond recognition), and to be yourself again.
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