Narcissistic Personality Disorder

Why Isn't the Narcissist Hoovering You?

And what about the ones who won't leave you alone?

If the narcissist does not hoover you, it means you are lucky.

In order for this to happen, one of these four things must be true:

They have new supply and they are BUSY, BUSY crafting a brand new toxic enmeshment.
If the narcissist knows you are miserable, struggling, or broken, they will not hoover you. This means their mission is accomplished. Knowing you are hurt or traumatized regulates their self esteem. They feel they have power over you, are better than you, and have given you your karma: narcissists believe themselves godlike in that they can judge others and dole out punishments. A narcissist is much more likely to hoover when you seem to be doing well or have moved on.
If the narcissist knows you have strong evidence to unmask them to others, they will not hoover you out of fear. Usually, a sudden discard happens because the narcissist is aware that you are onto them. You are questioning inconsistencies, finding their mistress’ lipstick stains on collars, exposing lies, learning about narcissism. They are terrified of facing shame and their true self, so they will run from that by running from you and never coming back.
If the narcissist believes you will reject them, they may not hoover. Due to their high sensitivity and repressed insecurities in favor of grandiosity, they cannot handle rejection. It will be a narcissistic injury, and they avoid injuries at all costs.

For a narcissist to hoover, they have to believe they still have power to manipulate you and you are still believing in their mask and their performances of love.

It is also important to remember that a hoover never comes because they love or miss you: a hoover is an act of revenge.

Every hoover I ever received and fell prey to was always followed by an increase in abuses and even more stunning betrayals than the first time.

I was watching a video of a self aware narcissist who was talking about why he would hoover empaths relentlessly, and he said it was because “they are difficult to break and are resilient.”

He saw it as a conquest, a game, and the empath who loved him was an opponent that he couldn’t win against, because they would do better, look better, or get better partners after they broke up.

This made him feel jealous and worthless, so he’d want another attempt to break the empath to “win the competition” and assert power over them through pain.

So, they hoover and begin to embody the character of the person they were when using you for supply.

He said it was much easier to break other narcissists or toxic partners, which is why he dated them more often than empaths, but he was always aware that the empaths were genuinely loving and more independent than his narcissist partners, and this agitated him to the point of mental deterioration.

He also admitted that he was more likely to suffer a mental collapse in which he became dangerous from an empath, because he’d get so obsessed with winning and revenge that he’d want to kill the empath or assert power using fear, physical or sexual violence, stalking, or intimidation.

The reason empaths are so hard to break though, which narcissists can’t understand without the empathy to feel our emotions, is because, like them, our hearts are already thoroughly broken.

The fact that we can feel a narcissist’s broken heart is part of why we attract to them and they feel so familiar. We want to heal them, and we want to be for others the things we didn’t get in childhood.

Since we were the scapegoat children, we were orphans. We had no lovebombs from our parents: we were never golden childed or spoiled between our abuses. The abuse was consistent and charged with hatred, with breadcrumbs only to keep us performing as functional negative supply.

We parented ourselves, raised by wolves, and we had to bear all the blame for the shames of our entire family of narcissists, and that was heavy, so it made us pretty tough at surviving our heartbreak.

But if doesn’t mean we don’t hurt. HURTING IS JUST ALWAYS OUR BASELINE.

We may have even trauma bonded to our toxic siblings. I know I did. LIKE A BITCH.She was my favorite person of all favorite people from the time I was a child. And she really hurt, betrayed, and discarded me. And yet I love her still. The enmeshment with a sibling is a very thorough one.

I think she loves me too, deep down, as well as she can, and maybe she discarded me and stays distant because she loves me, or because she knows, as do I, that we have caused each other irreparable heartbreak, and she has some shames she cannot allow me to discover, because she cannot bear to look at them herself.

I’m not sure about this theory — maybe it is just my fantasy — but sometimes I think the narcissists who flee you and then leave you alone maybe love you the most of all the NPDs in your life.

If they leave you alone, maybe they know they couldn’t treat you how they think you deserve, and they don’t want to hurt you further.

Maybe it is their act of protecting you, from themselves.

Some narcissists, however, are extremely deluded and desperate.

And they will hoover you by stalking — despite knowing you would reject them, knowing you have unmasked them, or knowing they had already traumatized you.

A good example of this would be Britney Spears’ (a borderline) first husband, who she was married to for two days, Jason Alexander, who crashed her wedding and live-streamed the whole thing, saying he was her real husband.

Another example is Drew Berrymore’s stalker, Chad Michael Busto. Just days ago, he interrupted her at an event, screaming to her, “You know who I am. I have to speak to you while I’m in New York!”

She was promptly rushed off stage and he was arrested. He previously stalked Amber Heard.

If supply is desperate and delusions are high, they will hoover you and everyone else in their Rolodex who they have abused and lost.

And they will chase strangers who they’ve obsessed over, as their fantasy self and the real world become blurry to them.

They’ll do this online and in person.

They most often attract to and hoover or stalk people who seem maternal, sweet, wholesome, or nurturing, because their core trauma is parental abandonment, being knocked off the golden child thrown in toddler years. This is true regardless of their gender or the gender of who they stalk.

They become wholly disconnected from reality. That stalker clearly thought Drew Berrymore was going to hear him out; Britney’s ex really thought he was still her husband.

Delusion and denial are very real things.

But you can hear the panic and desperation in both videos.

You can hear that they are on the edge of violence, because being rejected by their target is an offense to their narcissism.

They react poorly to boundaries, and at rejection, they feel a deep need for revenge because they’re having PTSD responses from their childhood rejection from their narcissistic parent.

My neighbor who attacked me and SA’d me for several weeks had a similar rage, delusion, anxiety, and desperation when I was being attacked. He even cried once while assaulting me, and I genuinely felt bad for him because it was such despair.

So, when you reject them, via leaving after unmasking or ignoring a hoover, be mindful of your safety always.

They will usually get new supply and obsessions eventually, but as they get older and lose more people, they become increasingly confused, resentful, and desperate. Both my parents got nastier with age and progressed into Alzheimer’s, which is highly correlated to NPD.

You always need to be mindful that their PTSD is dangerous, severely so if they have ASPD, which is just a more deeply traumatized narcissist.

For genuine empaths/borderlines, this is why it’s very important to know how to spot narcissists and never enmesh with them, no matter how you feel empathy for them and/or like them. I’m not just talking about romance, but as friends, coworkers, etc.

The empathetic thing to do for them is always maintain a distant but kind demeanor with them and block their attempts at enmeshment, knowing you’ll drive them to damaging collapses if you enmesh…

…and you’ll drive yourself right into trauma or collapses too, maybe defending your life.

You’ll see the best version of them and you’ll also bring out the worst in them.

No contact is best. If you must have contact though — work or family — use grey rock tactics, try to be boring, act dumb, and when you have to engage, compliment them and always belittle yourself. Don’t disagree with them.

Document everything they do, especially in a professional setting, put a camera in your office, and make note of the things they accuse people of to know their shames that they’re masking. Record conversations, summarize things you spoke of in email.

Always expect they can betray you unjustly and without guilt or empathy due to their anger and hatred.

Basically, cover your ass.

Have employment insurance, and be ready to sue. (Been there. On the plus side, I now have a really excellent lawyer who specializes in employment litigation who I really trust. I was able to take a full year off work and pay off a ton of debt thanks to her.)

Because even if you do all the above, you still will probably agitate them because they were socialized in narcissistic families that had scapegoats, so you’ll remind them of the empaths in their family they abused with their parents. They hate your authenticity and they hate that people like you, and they can and will be triggered to abuse you.

They can smell a lifelong narcissist scapegoat. We all act a lot alike. I can smell them too — and ever since childhood, it was like narcissists knew: this is who we rape, this is who we bully, this is who we hate, this is who we impersonate with our masks, this is who we want to die to make our mask and fantasy self real, this is who we crucify for our sins…

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

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

A new blog sent to your email twice a week for $5 a month.

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.

Subscribe to my blog, Blooming on the Borderline!

Subscribe for weekly stories