Narcissistic Personality Disorder

Why Do Narcissists Hoover After Long Periods of No Contact?

There are only two reasons....

What does an alcoholic do when they are all out of liquor?

They go take a swig of cough syrup.

What does a drug addict do when they are all out of drugs?

They go huff on some rubber cement.

What does a narcissist do who is low on supply?

They Hoover YOU.

You’re the syrup. You’re the glue.

Narcissists don’t experience empathy or emotional connection; that’s why we call it “supply.”

They experience other people like a drug addiction.

It’s also why when you leave them for abuse or betrayal before they discard you for a more potent drug, they collapse and scream like a drug addict in withdrawls.

Because they’re in withdrawls.

What they get high off of is anything that feeds their narcissism and makes them believe they are the best or most important in the entire world.

Their fantasy self only feels real if others believe in it. That’s the supply.

That’s why the very simple solution plaguing all the children in A Nightmare on Elm Street was simply to recognize FREDDIE WAS JUST A DREAM.

“You turn your back on the monster and you take away its energy.”

The monster only exists with your FEAR feeding it.

The narcissist only exists with your SUPPLY feeding it.

It’s why no contact and no reaction starves a narcissist and liberates you.

Narcissists get that high in three ways:

Your adoration, self hate, and self sacrifice.
Their abuse of you in which they feel better than you by having power to hurt you.
Competition with others in which they perceive they “win.”

So the hoover will come at two potential times:

They see you are doing well and it makes them feel envy.
They just lost supply and their ego is wounded.

Regardless of either option, they’re going to make sure it hurts worse after than it did the first, second, or third time they came back.

It will either be intentional to hurt you or it’ll be because you just do not get them high anymore.

They need that burst of DOPAMINE, and they can’t get it from you because they already have a tolerance for you so it’s boring.

They’re children emotionally, so they need constant stimulation and new toys.

And they’ll be angry at you for not giving them the supply to get them stoned immaculate like you did back when you were a new, shiny toy.

A narcissist can only regulate their emotions through others, and if you’re no longer a potent drug to feed the narcissism, then you might as well be WORTHLESS.

And that MUST be your fault and MUST be true because their fantasy needs it to be…so logically, they think that means you should be punished.

They can’t feel your feelings or care that you hurt. They can’t see you for who you really are. They can’t conceptualize nuance or complexity in people. They can’t love you despite your flaws. They can’t even love your strengths, only envy them. They can’t appreciate the things you’ve done for them. They can’t feel guilt. They’ve never experienced people that way.

They think they’re “normal,” so everyone in their mind is just like them (except they are THE MOST IMPORTANT), so they project whatever self loathing they have onto others. They seek to punish others for the very things they are guilty of. Their purported values are never things they actually feel or practice.

And they do entangle with other narcissists often for explosively toxic relationships that mirror their childhood with their narcissist parent(s), and NPD is common, so other narcissists help to validate this fantasy that no one is authentic and everyone is just as bad as them. They can project onto narcissists and it’s true, so their fantasy world feels more real from that supply.

But, ironically, they treat other narcissists WAYYYY better than non-narcissists and narcissists will even band together and be flying monkeys against a loving person. Non-narcissists trigger them to fear that they’re abnormal or missing something. Our expressions of feelings really agitate them.

They don’t even feel or understand their own feelings, which is part of the problem.

In order to be their fantasy self, they have to be emotionless.

Because if they felt their real feelings, they’d never stop crying.

And they think emotions are weak. Loving someone would mean that person has power over them.

Never that.

So there’s just a black hole.

And they don’t know who they really are. Their false self is all a parody of past supplies and people they envy.

Their performed empathy, love, and sexual desire for you all hobble on a peg leg.

They’re too consumed in escaping their own hurt through fantasy and denial to recognize anyone else’s humanity.

And deep inside that black hole of their repressed feelings lurks…

The SHAME MONSTER.

The repression and denial of everything they’ve done to others. Their true self.

And alongside that…

RAGE.

For the trauma that created them.

And if you keep returning or stay with the narcissist long enough…

YOU’LL 🎈

FLOAT 🎈

TOO 🎈

They’ll make sure you feel exactly as they felt in their unprocessed childhood despair.

It’s what they’re trying to escape by getting stoned on supply all day every day.

Narcissists have been running from the monster in their own ribcage since they were little.

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My memoir, This is a Story About Ghosts: A Memoir of Borderline Personality Disorder, is now available on Amazon.

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Anne M. Champion is the author of 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, and a Barbara Deming Memorial Grant recipient. She has degrees in Behavioral Psychology and Creative Writing.