The first thing you must understand is that they never actually fall in love with you while they are love bombing you. They never see you as a person; they fell in love with a snapshot of you. Think back to the beginning. Think about how they looked at you. It felt like they were seeing into your soul, didn’t it? But they were not. When a narcissist meets you, they take a mental picture. In this snapshot, you’re smiling, perfect, accommodating, obedient, and most importantly, you have no needs of your own. You are a two-dimensional image designed to reflect their greatness. In this stage, you’re not a human being to them; you’re a prop—a character in the movie of their life, cast in the role of the perfect savior or the perfect trophy. As long as you stay in that two-dimensional snapshot, as long as you remain a cardboard cutout that smiles and agrees, they love you. But here is the tragedy of human relationships: you cannot be a snapshot forever, can you? You are a living, breathing organism. You get sick, get tired, have bad days at work, and have opinions that differ from theirs. You have emotional needs.
The moment you become real, the moment you show a sliver of humanity, you ruin the snapshot. To a healthy person, seeing your partner’s vulnerability makes them love you more; it makes them want to protect you. It deepens the bond because they realize, “Oh, this person is real and they trust me with their pain.” But to a narcissist, your vulnerability feels like a betrayal. They feel genuinely deceived. In their mind, they think, “I signed up for the perfect fantasy. I signed up for the person who was always happy and made me look good. Now this person demands I deal with this reality, their reality. This person is complaining. This person is crying.” They don’t see your pain as a cry for help; they see it as a breach of contract. They feel like you lied to them by pretending to be perfect, even though you never pretended— they just projected their perfection onto you.
This is why they look at you with such coldness when you’re crying. They’re not confused; they are disgusted. They are disgusted that the object is acting like a person. This leads us directly into the most critical part of this dynamic, which is a specific stage that almost every survivor misses.
The Assessment Phase: Unconditional Love as Weakness
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