But it does not last long. That brief moment of awareness, that flicker of guilt or regret, dies off very quickly because the narcissist’s brain cannot sit in shame; it short circuits. The reflection turns on for a few seconds and then, boom, they snap back into delusion, back into the hero role, back into the victim’s story. They gaslight themselves the same way they gaslighted you. They will say, “I did not force them to stay; they chose to stay.” If they stayed even after I told them I was not happy, then that’s on them. They point to your loyalty and call it foolishness. They look at all the things you did to save the relationship and use those very things to prove to themselves that you deserved the outcome.
“How true,” they say. “She shouldn’t have; she should have known better. He saw the red flags and still stayed. So how is it my fault?” This is how they rewrite history inside their mind. Why? Because the truth is unbearable. The truth would shatter them into a million pieces. So they build another version of reality where they are still the good person, where they are justified. They were pushed to the edge, where you were the one who broke them. And in that twisted version of the story they tell themselves, you were naive, you were weak. You made them do it. You brought out the worst in them. There is no space for remorse in that version of the story, is there? There is only blame, and you carry all of it.
Now, if you were the one to discard them, if you had the strength to walk away first, then the bruise inside them is not just shame; it is rage. They start living in fantasies where they punish you. They start imagining your failure. They want you to lose; they want your relationship to fall apart. They want you to come crawling back. And when you do not, it kills them because in their mind, they own you. They created you. You’re not supposed to survive without them. So your success becomes a threat; your healing becomes an insult. And that is when their thoughts become really dark and obsessive. That’s when they start planning and plotting. That’s when their energy starts reaching you. Even if you have gone full no contact, you start to feel it too.
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