Sometimes God removes someone from your life because of conversations you didn’t hear, plans you didn’t see, and intentions you couldn’t detect. It doesn’t feel like a rescue at first; it feels like devastation. But later, looking back, many survivors say, “That breakup didn’t destroy me; it saved me.” That doesn’t minimize the harm; it honors the way grace can reach into the worst chapters and pull something holy out of them.
Meanwhile, the narcissist usually doesn’t experience that kind of transformation. Unless there’s a radical, sustained commitment to deep therapeutic work year after year—facing the shame, taking responsibility—most narcissists stay locked in the same loop: new faces, same story; new supply, same emptiness; new start, same ending. Self-absorbed regret follows like a shadow. The narcissist might miss the way you regulated emotions, the way you made chaos feel calm, the way your presence softened life. But instead of saying, “I did wrong,” the narcissist says, “I lost something that made me feel better.” That’s not love; that’s dependency.
Here’s the part that will set your heart free: your silence is preaching a sermon the narcissist can’t bear to hear. When you no longer argue, defend yourself, or explain your worth, you’re sending a loud message: you no longer have access to me. For a narcissist, irrelevance is worse than hatred. Hatred still feeds the ego; irrelevance starves it. That’s why there may be an explosion of behavior when a narcissist realizes deep down, “I’ve really lost control here.” This is often when the extinction burst happens—a last-ditch attempt to bait you, smear you, or provoke you. It’s ugly, it’s desperate; it’s a confession in behavior, if not in words, that you broke free.
So, what do you do with all of this? You make a choice that looks upside down to the world. You learn to wish the narcissist well at a distance—not to excuse the abuse, not to invite more of it, not to pretend nothing happened. You wish the narcissist well so that your heart can stop drinking the poison of resentment day after day. You release the need to see the narcissist punished; you let life, God, and the laws of cause and effect handle that. You step out of the role of judge and step fully into the role of healer—the healer of your own soul.
How the Narcissist Ends Up Playing Themselves After Misjudging You
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