Will a Narcissist Remember the Love You Shared?
Sometimes...but it's complicated
My journey with narcissistic abuse and recovery has been a winding road of healing…in which you feel as if you’re driving around a cliff with no protective railing.
It’s often felt like being lost in a disorienting forrest, so deep in hopelessness that your imagination crafts monsters lurking in every shadow, every crunched leaf.
But the miracle of light comes with every dawn…so you keep walking forward.
As the scapegoat child of two sociopath parents, with an NPD sibling and a life of trauma bonding — fully unaware of my own BPD or trauma responses for four decades — my curse in life has been to deeply love people who the world shuns — and to love people who shunned me, who even punished me for my love of them in fear of it.
Awakening to my patterns of trauma bonding and reprocessing my past led me to unmask people I’d preferred my denial over, which led to a deep grieving.
Most the people I’d unmasked I’d already lost — either to a sudden discard, a shocking betrayal, or a traumatizing abuse.
But I also found there were people who I’d been previously enmeshed with as my cluster b “Favorite People” relationships who I was no longer enmeshed with but who I hadn’t stopped all contact with, even though I could see clearly that they, too, were cluster b’s.
Histrionics and other borderlines aren’t hard for me to forgive. But some were narcissists or antisocials…
According to popular literature on the topic, all narcissists are ALL BAD — the devil incarnate — and they should be exposed and gone no contact with. Some even advocate for revenge and bad things to fall upon people with NPD.
To an extent, I agree that no contact is necessary, especially when recovering from trauma bonding: romantically, you do yourself no good to be with someone unhealed and lacking self awareness. That’s as true for narcissists as it is for anyone else.
I wasn’t free of toxic traits myself from my childhood. Healing means I must identify those traits, trace their roots, understand them, and learn how to manage them better.
Also, enmeshment with anyone isn’t actually healthy bonding.
It’s a codependent bonding style. It means you feel you need someone to talk to every day because you need a sense of FAMILY or a parental figure to help you regulate your emotions, to feel protected and worthy.
But do I think you should ALWAYS reject every narcissist and run like they’re boogeymen?
