Not a bang, but a whisper...(How a Covert Narcissist Discards You)

Checkmate, bitch

Unfortunately, I still have to work with/for and occasionally see my narcissistic ex-girlfriend. Yeah, if there was ever a time to preach the “Don’t date someone you work with” line, it was immediately after I realized just how psychologically fucked up I had been by this master manipulator. It’s a terrible situation that I brought on myself. Yet, I want to use this space to talk about how devaulation ends: as you might suspect, I had been cast into an abyss of confusion ever since we were involved. I had been put off balance through a combination of being built up and attacked covertly. My biggest mistake was in thinking that at some point, she would clarify everything, fix things between us, and we could resume our lives together, or just be cool being friends or whatever.

This is 100 percent fantasy and the product of the cognitive dissonance that she had been cultivating in me for about 2 years. She had been stringing me along for most of 2016 even though we had broken up. She was living with her ex again but called him “her room mate.” She even said (at the beginning of this phase) how much she hated him, couldn’t stand being in the same house as him, and that, on the other hand, she wanted to be with me, realized that she needed me. It was all a matter of time before it worked out was the prevailing sentiment. And yet, as time went on, communication became less and less. I tried to continue talking to her, asked about seeing her outside of work, and I tried to do a lot of work for her so I would have a reason to hang around her in the office. She even tried to make me think that management was considering me for a promotion. It turns out that she had combined two different environments for gaslighting me: personally and professionally. And she had made many people complicit in helping her accomplish this.

What was the effect? Devaulation leading to discardment. Throughout 2016, I was subjected to a mixture of cold silence and moving moments of affirmation from her. She would go weeks without saying anything nice to me, but then suddenly tell me how attracted she was to me, and how she “wanted to take my name one day.” She used the phrase “Good things come to those who wait,” in order to string me along throughout the whole year, but as you can imagine when you’re getting so many hot and cold signals from someone--I felt like something was not quite right.

What did I believe before going into the discarding phase? I believed every rationalization that made it seem like both coincidence and selflessness were contributing to a tale of “Star-crossed lovers.” In all actuality, I knew that she would maybe stay with her ex because he had more money than me and that it was better for her daughter. I accepted that. I reasoned that I couldn’t understand because I don’t have kids of my own and that things are different when you have kids. I reasoned that she was being “a good person” by sacrificing her own happiness for her daughter’s. Tragically, I believed that I was also "being a good person" by not rocking the boat. I reasoned all of these things so I could still trust her and hold her up as someone that still “meant the world to me.”

I was wrong. I was blind. And when it happened, it happened with a whisper and not a bang. She texted me one morning while I was at work, “I want you to know because you’re sensitive and have a tendency to feel things deeply that he (her ex) is coming to the Christmas Party. It’s where I work too and you have to respect that.” I was floored. I made a smart-ass comment but tried not to make a huge stink about it--I know that I can get very argumentative and rude sometimes--but in all actuality, what she said then, the premise “I know you’re sensitive” is directly a phrase used by gaslighters. Only later, after I had a complete nervous-breakdown, did I realize what is probably very apparent to everyone: they had been together the whole time. Not only that, but they were getting married.

Discarded.

And so I fell.