THE DISCARD
We may think it is a narcissist leaving our life and never wanting anything to do with us again, but really this narcissistic delisting is something we experience over and over with a narcissist even when still attached to them.
We are discarded every time we are dismissed, deemed irrelevant, or dehumanized, which of course is part and parcel of narcissistic abuse.
Narcissistic abuse tears up the very fabric of our soul, and our humanness - the place of feeling whole, valued and safe.
Sections:
- The Narcissistic Discard
- The Shock of the Discard
- Why the Discard Is so Traumatic
- Why They Must Discard You
- Stages of a Discard
The Narcissistic Discard
When a narcissist discards you, things don't end pleasantly and in a way that can be processed humanely.
The narcissist will assert that they were honest, loving and credible and that you threw their love away and acted with a lack of integrity and care for them.
There will be zero responsibility taken for their behavior, actions, words and lies. You will be dismayed to discover that there is no empathy, compassion or concern for your life now. In fact, if the narcissist can make you pay dearly for not serving their false self adequately, by taking everything from you that they believe they are entitled to, this further vindicates their insatiable ego.
If you stay long enough to reach this stage, your self-esteem and sense of inner calm will be in tatters.
Your narcissistic partner will pick one last angry fight, leave you in tears, and throw a final devaluing statement about you back over his shoulder as he stomps out the door.
Others simply disappear and will not reply to your texts or calls, leaving you without closure and forever puzzled about what happened.
The Shock of the Discard
Falling from the dizzy heights of being idealized is such a heavy shock.
We may have believed that we were the narcissist's 'everything', and certainly this appears to be the case in the love-bombing stage of the relationship and reappears when a narcissist is hoovering us back into their clutches in order to retain us for narcissistic supply.
What we may not have realized until much later, is that we were 'necessary' to the narcissist, but not as a flesh and blood human being with a soul and feelings.
A narcissist is never 'in love' with you, they are incapable of that. They are only 'in love' with the feelings of relief you grant them from their inner wounds, no different to a heroin addict being in love with heroin.
The replacement person may have been groomed and waiting for quite some time, if not already enlisted in the narcissist's life.
In relation to narcissistic relationships, the narcissist's involvement with you is all about what they get out of it.
The narcissist seeks to make you responsible for tending to and dancing around their wounds, by using you to their advantage and scapegoating you as the person to blame for why they have such disgraceful and regular all-consuming negative emotions when their inner traumas are not being offset adequately enough with narcissistic supply..
All of this is shocking because YOU regard humans as human beings, not objects. You care about their heart and soul rather than objectifying or sexualizing them and using them for ego feeds and agendas. You may even still care about the narcissist. It is unthinkable for you to be able to grasp how the narcissist operates.
The relationship was never about you, team or 'us', it was about being with a severely damaged individual whose thoughts and actions were always about them, without consciousness or remorse.
One of the hardest things to come to terms with is this: the narcissist doesn't care about me and can live without me.
Why the Discard Is so Traumatic
It truly is one of the cruelest things that you could ever go through.
I can hear you saying,
“How can this person say they love me and then throw me away like I don't exist?”
“Why do I feel like my heart is broken and I can't even breathe and I'm not going to survive after being discarded?”
When a narcissist has decided you have got too close - you know what is under the mask and they could possibly be exposed, or if they have drained you of all that you could possibly give, or you no longer supply the stuff that makes their life interesting and exciting enough, or if better narcissistic supply appears, or if you were only ever used as a tool to momentarily freed the ego or punish on a current partner...or for whatever reason they have decided you don't fit in to their agenda anymore - then you will be sacked from their life.
The narcissist won't return calls, won't deal with you face to face. It is like No Contact has been reversed, the narcissist is the one executing it - with unyielding deliberate force.
Why Must the Narcissist Discard You?
To preserve his or her False Self, the narcissist must deny and reject your True Self at all costs.
Deep within, your True Self knows it deserves honesty, team play, empathy and real love. The trauma screaming inside you is because you are not living aligned with your True Self. The emotional pain is the signal to tell you how far off track this relationship is.
If your needs, feelings and opinions were valued by the narcissist, this would mean that you would no longer be dancing around the narcissist's wounds, pandering and catering to them.
Then they must discard you and move on to more fertile narcissistic supply.
The horrible, never-ending and disastrous eventuality for narcissists is that all relationships with others will end up being discarded, discredited and delisted by them.
The real reason for this is because the narcissist has completely discarded themselves.
The narcissist has attempted to kill off their own True Self; they have disowned and divorced themselves from it and put a fictitious character in its place (the False Self).
When the deeply damaged, wounded and abandoned True Self emerges, the narcissist lines someone else up, projects their pain onto them and tries to destroy them, which unconsciously is all about trying to destroy their shameful True Self - the inner vulnerable parts that they have no desire to meet, heal and resurrect in order to become whole.
The narcissist does not relate to him or herself with empathy, love, kindness, vulnerability or self-honesty or self-soothing. Instead, the narcissists self-relationship is delusional; it operates in egoic and pathologically disordered ways, designed to prop up the False Self and grant this fragile insecure identity the feed of significance.
The narcissist has no resources to relate to you as a valued human with a soul, because people cannot grant what and who they are not being to themselves.
Stages of a Discard
Signs a Narcissist Is Getting Ready to Discard You
Signs a Narcissist Is Getting Ready to Discard You
And quite tragically if you have been emptied out and there's nothing more to take or gain from you, the discard is probably right around the corner.
They have to discredit you. They have to make themselves out to be the better person.
Another sign can be if, and this is a really sad and a really horrible sign, but if you are broken and you've been emptied out and there's nothing more to take or gain from you, or you have a serious health issue, the narcissist will discard you.
Because as far as the narcissist is concerned, it's all about them and they don't have any Inner Self to grant to you. They don't have the emotional resources to make it about you.
So, if it becomes all about you because you need support absolutely, well, then the narcissistic rage is triggered, "How dare you want my energy, I'm here to get your energy. I am going to have to leave you."
This could also be if you just had a major crisis in your life where you've lost your job or you've lost somebody dear to you or something terrible has happened in your life, emotionally a narcissist may just ditch and run, which, of course, is incredibly painful.
Also too, it's important for you to start preparing yourself for the possible hoovers It's just really important to know that no matter what comes out of the narcissist's mouth, "I would never leave you," and all these things that they say, any one of those three things could be a warning sign that a narcissist is about to discard you.
Well, one day the blow up could be so big and so ugly that it is the end of the relationship because that's how narcissistic relationships generally go.
During & After the Discard
Well, definitely during the discard, you may be shocked to find out how cruel a narcissist can be, because when they have decided that they're going to discard you, this black and white individual has immediately decided that you are no good, that you need to be thrown in the trash, that you are bad, horrible, that the relationship was all of your fault and they have to smear you. They have to discredit you. They have to make themselves out to be the better person.
When this happens, you're going to be shocked. You're going to be horrified. You'll be accused of things that you couldn't even think of, let alone do.
Not only have you got the horrible trauma of a breakup of a relationship and all of the fallout that happens with narcissistic breakups, you're also going to feel like, "How could I have ever believed this person loves me" or the heartbreak really is the person who's meant to love me can treat me so horrifically.
It's not about that. It's really about - I'm going to punish you as much as I can and I'm going to get as much stuff as I can and I'm going to make your life as difficult as I can, because they've decided that they hate you.
You're dealing with this incredible trauma bond that is beyond explainable, because you will literally feel like your life support has been cut off and you feel like you're going to die and you're losing your mind. With this, there is just so much trauma in a discard.
Discard is one of the most painful things that you could go through. What can be likely to happen is the narcissist may replace you very, very quickly, because as far as a narcissist is concerned, they want to punish you because all of the relationship problems in the end were your fault and that's just what false selves do. They're very nasty. They're very vengeful.
The Narcissist's Hoover
Now, what a narcissist may also do is hoover you and what this means is if you pull away and you get strong enough or you just have to be that way, you start pulling away and you're licking your wounds and you're trying to get on with your life and you're trying to work it out and if you don't come back begging and pleading and all the things that we've all done, the narcissist may come back to hook you back up again and it's not about love. It's not about care. It's about an ego injury.The ego injury is, well, if you don't make contact and you don't beg and plead and you don't come back, well, oh my God, it must mean that I'm not significant and I'm going to have to go back and reel you in again, not for love, not to take responsibility, not to create solution and healing in the relationship, but to get that ego feed.
How to Use the Discard to Your Best Advantage