Narcissistic Personality Disorder

The Two Best Ways to Get a Narcissist to Want You Back

And how it hurts them when you do these things...

I have Borderline Personality Disorder: I was raised as the scapegoat child by two sociopath parents, and as a result, I trauma bonded to narcissists nearly exclusively until I went celibate at 35 to focus on my healing.

I played Ring Around the Rosie in the cycle of lovebomb-devalue-discard until we all fell down over and over again, and I just couldn’t even get back up again.

I hit rock bottom: I eventually knew that narcissistic abuse was going to kill me if I didn’t figure out how to get out of the cycle and heal my childhood abandonment and attachment wounds.

It’s not a metaphor to say it was like quitting an addiction.

Due to the child trauma, the chemical processes in the brain are exactly the same as addiction for all Cluster B’s. It led to excruciating withdrawls that even landed me in the hospital and made my body prone to vicious infections, and the grief is something that hasn’t yet gone away fully, though I’ve come a long way in my healing.

People always ask me how they can hurt the narcissist back or how they can make the narcissist chase them and want them back. They want the drug back, not the healing.

To this day, despite eight years of celibacy, I still get hoovers from old narcissists. They’ve chased me relentlessly.

(I'm sure some are reading right now--HEY Boo! Stay haunted!)

So, I’ll give you the secret.

It’s actually INCREDIBLY EASY TO HURT A NARCISSIST.

And it’s also INCREDIBLY EASY TO GET THEM TO CHASE YOU.

There are only two things you must do:

1. Move On

This is the easiest way, but it’s not always the wisest.

When narcissists would discard me or cheat on me, I simply went to Tinder or went back to another narcissist I’d been entangled with.

I didn’t do this out of revenge. I did it out of my own disorder. Moving on was how I was able to sidestep the grief of abandonment.

With BPD, abandonment leads to suicidal ideation as we get trapped in the depression stage of grief.

In moving on to another narcissist, I could also avoid processing my grief from childhood that was so painful it threatened to kill me.

As they always say, “The fastest way to get over somebody is to get under someone else.”

Then I’d post pictures with my new lover.

And my phone would start BLOWING UP.

Suddenly, the last narcissist (and even ones before that!) would be at my beck and call, ready to give it another go on the merry go round from Hell.

And it was always worse that time than the last time...

This is something you must always remember: the narcissist is not healed if they’re hoovering you, so they’re never going to come back and close the cycle of trauma bonding and love you.

They’re only coming back to try once more to destroy you more fully.

As soon as you let them, the abuse begins again.

When you move onto another person, this wounds narcissists nearly fatally — because of the following:

They’re possessive — they believe they owned you. And even though you’re an old toy they don’t want to play with, they sure have no intention of seeing anyone else play with you. Once they do, they get angry and think, “MINE!!!”
They’re jealous — they can’t stand the idea that you might think someone else is better than them.

If it’s a man, they’re ESPECIALLY insecure that another man’s penis may be better than theirs.

This was something almost every hoovering narcissist pressed me on: they wanted me to tell them how and why their penis was THE BEST penis. It’s strange and emotionally immature, but they don’t have a SELF — and their false self is PURELY EGO, so that means the shell of their body is incredibly important to them.

I think we are all insecure and appearance focused to an extent — because the narcissistic culture makes us so — but they’re more concerned with vanity and surface things than anything else because they lack internal worth or identity.

However, the reason I don’t recommend this strategy, other than the fact that I simply don’t believe in revenge, is because when you sidestep your grief and move on, you’re toxic too, and the likelihood that you’re going to get entangled with another narcissist if you don’t do your healing work and stop trauma bonding is about….

You’re just signing yourself up for more severe pain, which isn’t really worth the benefit of delayed grief.

And when you fall for a hoover from an ex, it’s pure fantasy that this time around is going to be “better.” No matter what they promise you — even if they promise you therapy — they will not change.

Because if they TRULY loved you, they’d leave you alone and not hoover you ever, knowing what they’re capable of doing and how they hurt you.

And if you TRULY loved yourself, you’d consider yourself worth investing in caring for and healing and you’d do the work required to heal, including grieving, educating yourself, and becoming self aware to your own trauma responses and how past abuses affected you.

2. Level Up

This one is harder, but I highly recommend it.

Heal.

Reach for your potential.

Raise your status.

LEVEL UP AND GLOW UP.

Narcissists operate in split thinking — things are all good or all bad.

In order for themselves to survive, they must think of themselves as not only all good, but THE BEST.

Therefore, it’s very important for them that all supply is BENEATH THEM.

This is why they abuse instinctively and they’ll often sabotage knowingly: they can’t allow those around them to reach their potential, because that would make them feel like they were THE WORST.

Status means EVERYTHING to a narcissist.

Status and power are all false constructs: you only have as much status or power as you can convince others that you deserve, and things like money and social status can be swiped away in a heartbeat by a variety of things. Neither of them are real: they're both fantasy.

Real worth and self love come from within, and a spiritual connection with humility is the foundation for that.

The only true power is love and God, and access to both requires healing and humility.

Regardless, if a narcissist sees you attain status, accomplish goals, care for yourself, and glow up, they’re going to be SUPREMELY jealous.

So they’ll often hoover you and try to bring you back down to being beneath them when that happens.

No matter what happened to me in life — and I’ve been through some horrific traumas at the hands of sociopaths — my instinct was to NEVER, EVER let that interfere with my goals and dreams.

I kept working towards my degrees, I graduated undergrad and grad school with multiple degrees and a 4.0 GPA. I focused on my writing and won the Academy of American Poets Prize. I published six books. I published in over 200 journals.

When the worst thing in the world happened to me — when I was stalked, drugged, and sexually assaulted for several weeks — I turned myself inwards towards my writing once again and began blogging.

I amassed millions of views. Now, any past narcissist that googles my name finds my books and finds my blog in which I have thousands of followers.

I’ve alchemized my pain into wisdom. I’ve nurtured my talents.

I learned a trick about narcissists: they abuse those who they feel threatened by, so I let narcissists teach me my potential and worth and I never let them take it from me.

Knowing narcissists the way that I do, I can tell you that nothing angers them more than this. And yes, they’ve read my work and they’ve attempted hoovers.

But I went to therapy, immersed myself in studying Cluster B disorders, and reread all my journals starting from childhood. I dedicated myself to healing and self awareness with the same ferocity that I’d dedicated myself to my degrees.

I also traveled the world and engaged in social justice causes and tried to use my empathy to spread light to combat the darkness so many of us sit in as a result of narcissistic and sociopathic abuse, which goes far beyond romance and is tied to child abuse and the political sphere as well.

As I healed internally and grew, I healed externally too. My acne cleared. My IBS went away. My mysterious chronic infections that responded to no antibiotics vanished. My hair even got silkier. My genuine smile returned.

I began to WANT to take care of myself the more I healed. I wanted to sleep well and eat well and meditate and do yoga and protect my boundaries and my peace.

None of that was/is easy, but the benefits are enormous, miraculous even. On my journey, I’ve been lucky to get feedback from and/or coach other borderlines like me also, and that’s been moving, validating, and meaningful in my life. I've also coached sociopaths and narcissists, some self aware and some not.

It’s amazing how deeply trauma touches everything, so that even our appearance is affected.

This is a picture I took of myself as I was trauma bonded compared to when I was making some huge breakthroughs with my healing of my BPD and trauma bonding. (Neither have filters or are edited).

It’s no different than before and after pictures of recovered drug addicts. My therapist commented, “Did you notice that you’re getting prettier?”

That’s why my number one beauty tip is: heal your childhood trauma. Break the cycle of abuse.

After I posted this picture, THREE past narcissists (who were not even my friends on social media — they’re always creeping!) reached out THAT DAY.

But here’s the catch…

When you’ve REALLY, TRULY leveled up….

You won’t want them back.

You’ll realize how much happier you are without them.

You’ll realize that your worship of their false self was a false god, and you’ll no longer desire it.

You’ll run from predators instead of running towards them.

You’ll value your sobriety from trauma bonding.

I don’t have hatred for narcissists in my past. I understand their pain, and I forgive them now. I still have love for them (and grief for some, especially my family), because my love was always real.

But now, I just say a prayer for them and leave them on read or reply a polite, “Thank you for the compliment. I hope you’re well.”

Keep reaching to see how high your potential really goes and keep tending to your inner flame of self love, letting no one come along and snuff it out with their own projected pain.

Know your worth and what real love deserves.

My new book, Hunted Carrion: Sonnets to a Stalker is now available on Amazon!

For individual coaching, visit https://am-champion.com

If you’d like to support my writing, check out my books or Buy Me a Coffee.

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Anne M. Champion is the author of This is a Story About Ghosts: A Memoir of Borderline Personality Disorder (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 Grant recipient, and a Barbara Deming Memorial Grant recipient. She has degrees in Behavioral Psychology and Creative Writing.