Break up? More like an escape.
And then how to get them off our tail?!
Why don’t they go away?
Break up. Yikes. When we’re in a relationship and the words – I think I need to break up – the first flash in our mind, we cringe. Breaking up is tough. It takes ages to think about, let alone to actually do. Even under the best of circumstances, breaking up is hard. Really hard.
In the kind of situation, you’re likely experiencing since you found this article in your quest for answers… Know you’re in the right place. Landing here after much confusion, sadness, and maybe some huge unresolved or inexplicable fights is the usual way.
And if you’re here because you’re thinking: Wtf is going on…?! Well then, I imagine you’ve been feeling blamed, ignored, frustrated, dissatisfied, mystified, and have even felt used. With all this stuff going on, getting to the place where we really and finally-for-good break up is extra hard to do.
What is recovery for you?
There’s nothing about you that made this happen.
Break Up or Bust
When we arrive here looking for answers and feel an urgent need to break up we’re pretty far down a twisted corridor of hell. You’ve known things were crazy. You know something’s wrong, and that you’re a long way from happy. And likely have been, and are in a maze of pain. A confusing place where nothing really changes for the better or resolves.
My hugest hope for you is that you’ll find yourself a deeper and maybe new way to think about your circumstances; that answers might begin to fill the gaps of wondering what’s wrong. That the thoughts and emotions can begin to make a different kind of sense and shift to benefit you.
In this tiny moment, I hope you can discover more about what it is you’re breaking up from, and how to go about it. – Let’s get to it and talk about the two difficulties in getting rid of crazy.
Break up From Crazy: A Break Up That Goes On For Ages
At the very mention of breaking up from crazy, they suddenly come back around and turn into Mr. Nice. or yes – Ms. Nice. She’s out there too!
Because of this, many of us try to end things many times before the final time and that’s perfectly okay. It really is. It takes as long as it takes.
Let’s say you manage to tell them it’s over. The first issue is that they seem to not want to let go. They fight the break-up with an energy that’s light-years more intense than anything they applied to make things work.
We finally muster the courage to bring up the break-up and here they are sticking to us like chewed gum on the bottom of our flipflop. Where was all this togetherness months ago?
Breaking Up: Reaction Number One: Nice
Suddenly we find this self-focused person we’re trying to break up with is not ignoring us and is no longer ambivalent, nor emotionless. They’ve brought up the heat intensely, ramping up to keep us from our break-up goal.
They’re gonna whip out: Nice. Nice will be promises and slogans about how good we are together. This will be familiar. If they’re desperate enough they’ll throw in some begging. They might toss in something extra, tears.
When a pathological user is crying, take that as a guarantee that they’re in a tight position. In this scenario take this to mean that you’re very valuable to them as a resource.
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Recovery is filled with lightbulb moments.
You’re not alone.
Why Can’t They Just Go?
From their point of view hanging on and the histrionics make sense. Why would the person who’s using us – making use of us – for their own entertainment or other things easily let us go? Their interest in hanging on to us is primal and fundamental.
The way they react to us breaking up with them is in direct relation to what they gain from us. As always the spot we fulfill in their “needs” determines how they behave towards us. It stands to reason that if they could they’d keep us all in a cupboard forever to pull out whenever they need something.
Breaking Up With Evil
Breaking Up with Evil: Escaping Coercive Control on Amazon
Five women’s true stories of being ensnared hauled through the confusion, lies, fear, and pain, and breaking away.
Told in their own words, they leave nothing unsaid. Find validation and see new glimpses of the truth as they share their stories… Stories that could be any of ours.
Break Up: Reaction Number Two: Mean
On the other side of nice is mean. Once it seems we’re sticking to our guns about breaking up, the user brings on the second tool in their arsenal: Mean.
This is where they insult us and criticize us, and for some, this is when the violence comes in. They like to tell us we’re imagining things and that all the malarkey is our fault. This is what many people refer to as gaslighting.
Everything They Do Serves One Basic Purpose
Whatever we call it, this opposition, this word salad, nonsensical, crazy-making, gaslighting soup is extremely simplistic in purpose. Hold on to your hats for this one: insulting and telling us we’re imagining things has the same purpose as being nice. So, what’s it about? It’s to get us to shut up. This is all hot air and their own fear packaged into mean so that we don’t break up – in this case.
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It Takes as Long as It Takes
Here’s what’s going on: They respond with nice or mean depending on our importance to them in that particular moment. Just imagine for a split-second that love’s got nothing to do with it, even if they say it does.
Break Up Pain Galore
Hold your own hand now, and just for a sliver of time imagine that even though we think they love us… Breathe into the idea that maybe their love isn’t what we think it is. Let that marinate for a flash of a sliver of time.
Questions open up the door to another world of answers: For example, what if we feel and see what’s between ourselves and them as love – because we’re made of love – rather than because they can genuinely express love or feel love?
Questions Bring Answers: But Which Question?
Ask yourselves, rather than, Why doesn’t he do this-instead-of-that? Or, Why does he say these things? For one millisecond ask, What if he doesn’t actually love me? Yep. Try that on. Think about it, What if he doesn’t…? Not even if he brings on the waterworks and cries like a baby. What do things look like then? Is there more room for an answer to their actions?
There are answers; there are logical reasons it’s hard to break up with them: We may come to a place where we realize that within their minds we each fill a spot that answers their varying needs and nothing more.
Users Use Others For Everything They Need
What they respond to in a break up is in accordance with their needs. If you’re key to them for a cozy place to sleep, or as a resource for money, access to a car, the internet, or a place to shower: They’re gonna balk at parting ways. When you’re the one thing that makes them seem respectable to others, they’re going to hang on.
For example, if it’s their parents who give them money or give them a stamp of approval that keeps them looking normal to the world, the pathological user (aka sociopath, aka narcissist) will hold on hard. If you’re the gateway to a group of people they want to use, they’ll hold on hard.
When we’re the place they eat, shower, hang out, get high, surf the internet, watch porn, jack off, sleep, brood, get their laundry done, are the address on their driver’s license, and serve as their home front to the world. Well, it makes sense, doesn’t it? Wouldn’t you hang on too?
Holding on for Goods and Services, Access to Others, or Respectability
They hold on hard if you’re the roof over their heads. When they have no one else ready on the side that they can quickly move in with, it’s us or the streets. Additionally, they hold on to us hard if this break up will make them look bad to someone else who provides something important.
Their point will be to get us to stop trying to break up. They want to get us to back off the break-up. to achieve this they’re going to use one or both of the only two tools a user has: Nice and mean. That’s all they got. – News flash: They aren’t geniuses or master manipulators.
The goal behind using these two tools is very simple. Because they need a place to stay, and along with that, likely a shower and that food in your fridge. To keep from being tossed out, they’ll be either nice or mean or more likely, a combination of both or a flip-flop between both.
Break-Up Avoidance on Their Part
So, it’ll be more promises; they hope the promises hit the spot in us emotionally leading us to soften and let them stay. Or they whip out accusations. They hurl insults. If this sparks guilt or shame or confusion or fear that it might lead us to cave. Either “nice” or “mean” can lead us to acquiesce and let them stay.
In Days of Plenty, We May Be of Little Value
On the other end of things, if they have plenty already, a breakup could potentially go more easily. If they have another place to hang out and play video games, they might easily walk away. If they have a “fiancé” eager to move them in… Well hells-bells, as my grandmother used to say, they’ll be gone before we can blink. – They can walk away so easily that we’re stunned.
Even so, their reaction to us ending the roller coaster with a breakup awakens the natural (for them) instinct to hold on to and continues to monitor their prey. Monitoring us is what hoovering is all about. In their minds, it’s for their own safety.
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Lightbulb moments.
Breaking Up is Gut-Wrenching
The truth is, breaking up with a pathological predator, a sociopath (quite likely that one you’re thinking of as a narcissist) is gut-wrenching and horrifying.
Here’s the thing: Just as “normal” behavior and thinking didn’t make anything better while we were “together”. Nothing normal is going to work in the breakup. Learn how to be, and do, and say what maneuvers them from our lives. Behaving and thinking from our point of view of “normal” will not work out well for us.
We can learn to do what needs to be done, and say what needs to be said so that they can hear and understand, and so that they respond in the way that we need things to be for a change. Flip the tables.
Break Up 101: Leaving and Lying: Break Up With Crazy
Here’s a bit of a start to what we can do… Leave ’em: Act as if everything is peachy. Have that (last) pizza together and then without them knowing it’s over, makes this pizza night your last contact.
Kiss ’em goodbye and then block them. Silence… Not a word to them. The effect of no contact is the hugest message we can send. This is not a message they haven’t “heard” before. Zillions of people have gone no contact with them before you.
Lie: Another option is one where we outright lie. Have that “break-up” talk and scenario. And tell them: You’re so great. I know it’s all my fault. – We’re lying.
They Lie and They Believe Lies
When we say this line, we don’t really feel this way about all the malarkey that’s gone down. But say this or your version of this so that we aren’t seen as a threat to them. Their perception is that when we break up, then we’re a threat. When we end it they think we just might tell everyone how horrible they are.
Users don’t want us to tell others how horrible they are. Not wanting us to blow up their house of cards existence… They know their life is glued together with our “normal”; with our great goodness and true-blue realness. They do get it that they and their life is BS. – This is exactly what they ensnared us for: To hold their life together.
If we go around talkin’ – this would keep them possibly from grabbing onto other souls to make use of. And they really think that all the things they’ve done – even all that stuff we don’t know about – is going to come tumbling out of the closet. This fear of what we’ll do and say is part of why they hang on. And this fear is what the hoovering and all the smearing is all about.
We’re letting them think they’re amazing. This is deliberate. – this makes us a non-threat and leaves it easier for us to walk away without them hanging on or hoovering.
Find your way back to you.
Trust Your Gut
We know in our gut that we did nothing to make this person do the things they’re doing. We just didn’t. If sometimes you wonder if it was your fault. That simply proves that you’re normal and that you’re doing what “normal” does. We give second chances, and third chances.
“Normal” takes responsibility, and many times even when there is no responsibility to be taken. This is the true place for boundaries. We are not responsible for their inhumanity.
Break Up Bravery Takes Us Through It
Now that you’ve mustered up the courage to leave or tell them to hit the road dig deep to understand the truth of their intense reaction.
Hopefully, we truly discover what this all was so that our cognitive dissonance and confusion can resolve. We all want to resolve each loss and heal the very specific trauma from this relationship that isn’t. ‘Cause you are real. You are normal, and you get to be exactly what you are, which is beautiful inside and out.
Here’s to REAL True Love and Happiness!
Time to Thrive!
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