No Contact: What's Coming Next?

So, you’ve discovered you love an abuser, and it’s not going to get any better. You’re ready to take the expert advice and go no contact in an attempt to end your toxic enmeshment and heal.

What can you expect from the narcissist next?

A series of stages of abuse:

1) First, the lovebomb hoover

The narcissist doubles down and the mask of the lovebombing ✨ sparkles ✨ once again in some touching way.

Expect gifts, love letters, promises of change, bouquets of flowers, and grand displays of affection.

This can be exceptionally difficult to resist from a lover or a family member because it’s the very drug you crave.

And you love their mask: you want to believe in it.

2) If you are strong enough to avoid that, they’ll GO INTO A NARCISSISTIC COLLAPSE.

You’ve triggered their core fear: abandonment and worthlessness from a parental figure.

At this point, they plummet into depression and become self harming and suicidal.

They may reach out to you in this state, and it breaks your heart. They’ll take accountability for some (not all) shames.

They also seem self aware in their despair. And they feel like children.

It lasts about as long as the flu.

When it’s over, they have a plan.

And they’ve convinced themselves it’s all your fault.

YOUR SCAPEGOAT STATUS IS RESTORED.

3) You may then get a dose of a micromanipulation hoover.

The narcissist will appeal to your pity. They suddenly have a life threatening disease. Or they want to confess a serious trauma (it may be a true one: they are traumatized people). Or they have decided to go to therapy. Or they want to go to therapy with you.

They want to sneak back in for their REVENGE.

If you’ve still resisted that hoover: you go scapegoat! THAT'S STRENGTH!

IT IS ABOUT TO GET SO MUCH HARDER!

Because now they’re wishing they were never born so now they need to make you wish you were never born.

4) ENTER NARCISSISTIC RAGE

They’re going to abuse you in a real take your breath away kind of way.

YOU HAD NOT THOUGHT THEM EVEN CAPABLE.

It could be violent, emotional, financial, manipulative.

It is pure revenge.

PURE HATE.

Expect that you’ll be stalked. Expect revenge porn, domestic violence, sexual assault, nasty rumors, even attempts on your life or threats on them.

And expect them to have no memory of ever loving you alongside a passionate delusion that you deserve everything they’re doing. They even delude themselves into thinking the law will agree with them, sure that their revenge is a form of justice for your audacity to abandon the most perfect person to ever exist.

They process you leaving them as a violation of their entitlement and grandiosity. They resent feeling that they “lost” a game with you and they think you walking away is you feeling as if you are better than them rather than protecting yourself from further abuses.

Without empathy, they cannot care about the ways they abused you and they never saw you as a human being with the rights to self love or agency.

They see supply as their property, so they perceive you as if you are a runaway slave.

They completely lose all tether to reality in this mental state and they become recklessly impulsive in their rage.

5) As you recover from this blow, they start their smear campaign.

They start warning everyone that you are dangerous, crazy, and obsessive: this is narcissistic projection.

The thing is this: they were always planting seeds of this smear campaign. They were always expecting this day to come. They knew what they were guilty of. They were telling anyone they could get to listen that they were exasperated with YOU for quite a long time.

So when the smear campaign begins in EARNEST, it won't come as a surprise to anyone. They've been hearing how terrible you are for a long time.

In the smear campaign, everything they did to you, they’ll tell people you did to them.

You’ll sometimes find their secret shameful confessions this way.

For example, if they tell people you are a closeted homosexual who had an affair with their best friend…

You will think, where did that crazy lie come from? He’s the one who seemed abnormally close to his best fr — OH SHIT.

But people who still believe their mask will believe this smear campaign.

And some of them are going to find you repulsive.

You will lose people you loved; you’ll feel embarrassed, feel attacked, and it will be totally unjust.

If you make it through this, congrats! 🎉

I BET YOU FEEL PROPERLY FILLETED LIKE A FISH!!

By someone you still have love for, no less--someone you haven't even grieved losing yet.

6) Now, there’s a choose your own adventure option!

OPTION ONE: you procreated with this narcissist or they have ANY SORT OF power in your relationship or access to you:

Making your life a living hell will be their mission towards you. By. Any. Means. Necessary.

OPTION TWO: They have no contact or access to you or power over you.

They’ll first try the HELL REVENGE OPTION desperately.

And then they’ll get bored AF.

And find new supply.

Forget you existed. They were never emotionally attached anyway. 🤷‍♀️

7) Fast forward to the future when new supply collapses them.

They think for a moment, maybe that stale, old supply of you can gas them up.

They make a new social media profile to get around the block, send you a DM…

They miss you and are sorry. You were the best they ever knew. They LOVE YOU.

Hello darkness my old friend.

HELLO AGAIN HOOVER.

WHAT DESTINY WILL YOU CHOOSE??

For individual coaching to recover from narcissistic abuse, BPD, or sexual assault, visit https://am-champion.com

For a copy of any of my books, check out this link:

Anne M. Champion is the author of This is a Story About Ghosts: A Memoir of Borderline Personality Disorder (KDP, 2024), Hunted Carrion: Sonnets to a Stalker (KDP, 2024), She Saints & Holy Profanities (Quarterly West, 2019), The Good Girl is Always a Ghost (Black Lawrence Press, 2018), Book of Levitations (Trembling Pillow Press, 2019), Reluctant Mistress (Gold Wake Press, 2013), and The Dark Length Home (Noctuary Press, 2017). Her work appears in Verse Daily, diode, Tupelo Quarterly, Prairie Schooner, Crab Orchard Review, Salamander, New South, Redivider, PANK Magazine, and elsewhere. She was a 2009 Academy of American Poets Prize recipient, a 2016 Best of the Net winner, a Douglas Preston Travel Grant recipient, and a Barbara Deming Memorial Grant recipient. She has degrees in Behavioral Psychology and Creative Writing.