Pressing Delete - The Discard Destroy Phases

Image by: Etienne Girardet

A narcopath will frequently discard his victim right at the point where they are anticipating some sort of reward for months or years of devotion and care and investing ‘everything’ in the relationship. Or at a crucial partnership point – the birth of a child, moving to a new country or state (the realisation of an ambition, completion of a project, attainment of a goal). Or when their victim has depleted all their financial, emotional and practical resources or is severely ill.

The devaluation phase of the narcissistic relationship will likely have taken some time. It started subtly and slowly the day after he ‘hooked’ you and then escalated as time went by.

The lying, stonewalling, gaslighting and smear campaign will have worn down your perception of reality. You got sick or fat or depressed or anxious, right? But you might still have been shocked at the moment your narcopath pressed ‘delete’ on you.

There will still be shock at the sudden personality change. The mask of the devoted husband has dropped, and what is left is unrecognisable to you – a cold, callous, calculated automaton. (I told my friends that aliens had abducted my husband and sent him back having taken his heart and soul).

If you try to bargain, to make him see reason; point out that you agreed to discuss things, to compromise, to get a reasonable explanation, to remind him that only yesterday he was swearing his undying love and making promises about your future together, you will find you are talking to a stone wall.

From the moment he discards you, it is as if he has pressed ‘delete’ on the whole experience. It is as if it never happened. One day you will be grateful to adopt the same attitude, but from that first moment, it will pull the rug right out from under you.

Even if you had caught glimpses of the monster before, you will have denied it to yourself. You slowly come to realise that you have been living in denial for a long time. I’m not saying you should accept the blame that ignorant others or your own tendencies to blame yourself for everything will foist on you.

You were lied to. You were used. You were scammed by a man of no conscience. You are possibly co-dependent, possibly trauma-bonded, but you are not to blame.

For a long time, you will question your own perceptions. Because it takes a while to realise that the man you placed at the centre of your world was a man in a mask. That man of the idealise phase never really existed. That man was just a talented con-artist. A talented actor playing back at you your own innermost hopes and desires. Telling you he loved you as he slowly deleted you.

That man you grieve for wasn’t ever real.

What is real is the remorseless freak now erasing the hard drive of your life, and the platforms you built before you even met him. He found the weaknesses in your operating system (your low self-esteem, your ‘insane’ loyalty, your blind trust, your addictions, whatever) and covertly uploaded a virus onto it.

And you are powerless to do anything about it. He’s way ahead of you. He started laying the groundwork for your destruction the moment he met you. It may or may not have been a conscious process – a strategically planned con – but his own nature forces him to replay the same game over and over. That of idealise, devalue, discard. 

So. He will deny ever having said any of the things you know he said. Including what he said half an hour ago (gaslighting). Later, if your lawyer forces you to use the ridiculous legal “he said, she said’ way of arguing your case, he will deny under oath what he said, she said.

He will twist every truth of your experience around so that you were the aggressive perpetrator and he was the victim. He will depict your time together as exactly the opposite of what actually happened – never mind the ‘normal’ occurrence of two people having two memories of an event. That is just how he makes his story work for observers – because most of us realise that there are two sides to every story.

He has an uncanny cunning about the way people think and feel. He is an expert at manipulating outward appearances such that the truth of a situation becomes the less plausible explanation and people believe the lie. As he deletes the truth, he overwrites it with a new programme, and before long, everybody is using the new programme as if it were the one that had always been there. Before long, it comes down to a simple paradigm of ‘do we believe the charming smooth guy whose perfect reputation is already embedded in our hearts or do we believe the near-hysterical woman banging on about betrayal?’

No prizes for guessing who will win.

The sooner you press ‘delete’ on the whole experience yourself, the better for you. NO CONTACT. But sadly that is not what our minds want us to do. It is simply not possible to press ‘delete’ on our memories, no matter how hard we try. Our minds want to figure out what the hell just happened.

Our minds want to go over and over the story from the very beginning and find cause for the way we just lost two, ten, twenty years of our lives. Later in legal ‘mediation’, your mind will go over and over the ‘evidence’ to find cause for how he gets to be awarded your home, your superannuation, your life savings, your children. 

The only way to deal with uncomfortable memories, flashbacks, and nightmares is to change our relationship to them. We can’t deny them, push them to one side, suppress them (they’ll come back later), or permanently distract ourselves from them.

We really have no choice but to come to terms with them/process them/integrate them/accept them/allow them/whatever language you prefer. Over time, and with hard emotional work, the pain of those traumatic memories lessens.

This ‘delete’ conundrum is really my principle purpose for building this site, for sharing my experience with others who are in a similar position (and there are a lot more of us than we can possibly understand to begin with because most of us are unaware of the condition of psychopathy in non-violent charming men). My purpose is to bring you as quickly as possible to the realisations that can take years without helpful help and supportive support.

My own NS has left a string of psychologically battered and broken women struggling to understand and recover decades after he discarded them. (This I know only by anecdotal evidence via friends of these women). I have since met women who have suffered for decades trying to co-parent with an NS.

 Why Acceptance and Commitment Therapy for Narcissistic Abuse?

Unfortunately, there is no scientific theory that teaches us how to press delete on our traumatic memories. Can you press delete on the memory of what you were doing this morning? Nope. ACT therapy teaches us how to process these traumatic memories by the use of metaphors and practices that we can bring to our thinking processes.

With reference to neuroscience, what these practices teach is how to create new neural pathways in the brain to restore traumatic memories to their rightful place in the past, and heal the traumatic ‘malfunction’ of feeling like the memories are happening right now, right here in the present (flashbacks).

The sooner you realise that anything and everything he told you might have been a lie, the better. The sooner you come to a place where you are no longer shocked and horrified by the fact that someone could lie about ‘a thing like that’, the better! You will be dealing with the fact that you have been lied to and lied about for some time to come. You have been building your software on an unstable platform for years. There’s no way back.

Press ‘delete’. Start again. Draw a line under it. All those clichés that other people start throwing at you the day after he leaves you reeling in shock.

You are trapped in a snare. The longer you struggle, the louder you protest, the tighter his snare will grip. You will not correct the wrongs he has done you. You will not right untruths with truth. You will not get an apology. You will not get justice. You will not change the way others now see you as a result of his smear campaign or your own nutty behaviour during the devaluation phase. You will never get ‘closure’. You have been deleted.

What a brilliant opportunity!

Now you get to focus on rebuilding a life for yourself and your children. They say you can’t rewrite history, but he somehow managed to rewrite yours, where your reputation is concerned. So you get to build a new one.  Or you get to find a way to let go of the need to have a ‘good reputation’ that you probably never realised you had before.

You gave him your loyalty, your love, your trust and your forgiveness and he somehow managed to twist it all back in on you so that you are suffocating under the avalanche of self-recrimination, victim-blaming and false impressions. So you get to totally re-assess your loyalty, love, trust and forgiveness. How brilliant! We never do this, as a rule. Or we might not have done it for years because we thought we had it all sorted. Don’t waste this huge opportunity for renewal!

He somehow managed to take all your material belongings – your home, your stuff, your career, your job. You gave him so much and the divorce courts gave him the rest, leaving you on your knees. What a great time to dig really deeply into what security and stuff and income really mean for you now you’ve lost them all. What a great time to get off the merry-go-round you’ve been on all your life.

There is still room to be grateful, even after so much loss. Grateful that you aren’t being spat at in the street, or having abuse hurled at you online, or rocks hurled at you while you are buried up to the neck in the dirt like some women experience in faraway countries. That you aren’t being shot by a policeman because of the colour of your skin. Or molested by adorable Bill Cosby because you drank the drink he gave you. It sounds crazy, but contemplating this stuff instead of shoving it under the carpet of your mind really works!

Allowing your attention to rest on the things for which you are grateful makes you feel better for a while. Simple. 

And if you are having that stuff done to you, there is still room for healing in focussing on gratefulness for the kindness you have received in the past or the kindness you are now learning to give yourself.

Focussing your mind on conceptual stuff of gratitude, the kindness of others – the good stuff – works to help you heal. Turning your mind away from the loss and grief and betrayal and blame and just bringing it back, again and again, to the good stuff. Reminding yourself that the good stuff is still out there.

You tangled with evil wearing the mask of goodness. Let that story go for a while. You can come back to figure it all out later. Just for now, just for a few minutes, focus on the good stuff.

©Margot MacCallum