Just how unique, would you say, what you shared with your narcissist actually was?  I’m fairly confident that for you, as it was for me, it was the first time you’d ever felt love for another person of such ineffable breadth and depth.  But what if I told you that, for our narcissist, evoking such deeply soulful feelings from their empath was old hat?  The status quo.  The norm.  Their basic modus operandi.  Would you believe me?  Probably not.  After all, what we shared with them was something that we have most likely never before shared with anyone else and we sincerely long to believe the same of our narcissist – that it was special, that we were special!  To imagine any differently would, in our eyes, sully an unparalleled purity.  But we are looking at what transpired through the naive innocence of our eyes, forming a forgiving opinion of an unforgivable and unsalvageably broken person’s inner-most thoughts, feelings, and intentions.  For it was in loving our narcissist that we defied all logic and reason by seeing great amounts of good within someone where none ever truly existed.  My beautiful, the truth is, what you shared with your narcissist, while unique and “once in a lifetime” for you, was nothing more than another romp down the same old bumpy backroad your narcissist has traveled time and time again with previous sources of narcissistic supply.

If you are not already privy, allow me to share a hard and bitter truth with you.  Your narcissist, the person with whom you shared untold very private and personal facets of yourself – fears, dreams, aspirations, even the brightest and darkest corners of what we’ve grown to understand and define as our soul – was nothing more than a consummate con artist whose sole purpose in courting you was to coax and drain as much emotional “food” from you as they possibly could before casting you aside and moving on to their next victim.  Just as a vampire feeds on the life force of a person via their blood, so does a narcissist feed on their empath’s life force via what their empath generously shares in the form of time, attention, affection, accolades, adulation, and, most especially, sex and sexual energy.

For the narcissist, being in a relationship isn’t about building a healthy, respectful, mutually loving and nurturing connection with someone whom they wish to share a future but rather it’s about finding someone, an empath, from whom as much spiritual energy and external validation can be extracted, regardless of the strain on the relationship/marriage, even to the point of the relationship/marriage, itself, imploding.  While I know that might be a very difficult reality to accept, let alone embrace, sadly, it doesn’t make a bitter truth any the less true if it is unwelcome.  I know with Julia, my narcissist, I honestly felt that what she and I shared was remarkably unique and was, indeed, once in a lifetime.   In fact, after seeing Julia and me together on several occasions, a friend commented as much, saying, “My wife and I have the same connection you guys do; it’s truly once in a lifetime.”  However, little did I know that what Julia and I shared was nothing more than a prolonged pit stop on the journey to her next victim.  In this case, her third husband, Artie.

Some people might postulate that Julia must have felt a deeper, stronger, “better,” [insert interrelational dynamic monicker here] to have married Artie instead of me,  but the fact of the matter is that once a narcissist finds someone whom they feel they can adequately control through their tried-and-true methods of manipulation – mainly triangulation and gaslighting – they will do almost anything to retain that rarest of commodities in and with their new supply, their new puppet, even venturing into marriage.  After all, what does another divorce truly matter to someone who does not value relationship/s and the people with whom those relationships are cultivated and shared?  What we must understand is that there is no true sanctity when it comes to any relationship for a narcissist, including and especially marriage.  If there were, your narcissist would have respected the very reasonable relationship boundaries, and you, by not pursuing any relationship/s with anyone else that could or would have threatened what you shared with them.  Period.  And yet, there they were with person-after-person, either chasing after them or enjoying being chased after by them, day-in and day-out, and they did absolutely nothing to dissuade all of those inappropriate advances, texts, e-Mails, and dialogue.  In fact, they surreptitiously facilitated and encouraged those relationships in an attempt to foster as much external validation as they could.

Truth be told, Julia and I had actually discussed getting married within the first year of our relationship, and it soon became a common topic that graced many conversations over the course of our 4-½ year relationship, with promises of a better life together one day.  In fact, Julia continued to dangle that carrot in front of me, ad nauseum, up until the last few weeks we were officially “a couple.”  The only reason our nuptials never came to fruition is that I finally began seeing through and questioning her thinly veiled attempts to control me and the relationship via fear of her removing her love by leaving via a seemingly endless parade of discard phases (which she did far, far more times than I care to admit), and triangulation via the multitude of men in her reverse harem whom she kept just a little too uncomfortably and inappropriately close.  And when I started challenging her control, rebelling against her efforts to triangulate and manipulate, she stepped up her already aggressive campaign of soliciting attention, affection, and inappropriate company from other men in a failed attempt to reassert that control.

Does that sound like your relationship with your narcissist?  For that matter, does that sound like your narcissist?  I won’t be the least bit surprised if you answer, “Yes,” to both questions because, you see, that is the stereotypical narcissist’s MO, how they conduct themselves, their personal and private affairs and relationships.  And the most painful truth of all is the fact that this is how and who they are in each and every relationship they’ve had and will ever have with every single person who comes into their lives, but most especially romantic relationships.  As with the succubus creature from mythical tales of yore, the narcissist’s entire approach from the beginning of a relationship to its inevitable demise is to locate, ensnare, and drain as much life and love as surreptitiously as possible from their new source.  Then, once sufficiently drained, discard that source and move on to the next victim – lather, rinse, repeat.  It wasn’t too long ago that I found myself embroiled in this distasteful dynamic with Julia, so I do sincerely remember all too well the hell that you have gone through and are going through.  And I understand that this is such a horrific reality to accept.  But it is reality, nonetheless.  And while what you gave to your narcissist and to the relationship was just as beautiful and unique as you, what they shared with us was, for them, nothing more than a cookie-cutter relationship.  In fact, don’t be too surprised if your narcissist’s next victim has a very similar name as you, if not the same name, sharing similar physical attributes and even features.

If you could be a fly on the wall in your narcissist’s current (new) relationship, you would see and hear so many of the same actions and lies once bestowed upon you, now being regurgitated by your narcissist to their new source of supply.  But take solace in the fact that your narcissist is no longer spoonfeeding you the same deceptive drivel interspersed with the same surreptitious shenanigans, becoming defensive, even livid, when you start to question the validity of their lies and half-truths.  And though you might have initially envisioned yourself as your narcissist’s savior, the one person who could and would protect and deliver them from all the perils and evils of the world that sought to soil their divine purity and steal them away from you, the reality is that the only person who needed any measure of deliverance from any true evil was you from your narcissist.  And from our vantage point, it may indeed appear that our narcissist is now blissfully riding off into the sunset with our replacement.

Consider, however, that you’re not so much witnessing your narcissist happily riding off into a beautiful sunset with someone new, but rather embrace the reality that a spiritual pariah has been exorcised from your life and this is, instead, a sunrise marking the dawn of a new day and a new chapter of your life free from narcissistic abuse.  After all, is the life you share(d) with your narcissist the life you would have ideally envisioned for yourself for the remainder of your days?  I certainly hope not, beautiful.  At the time, if you would have asked me that question, I would have instantly answered, “Yes!”  And I would have continued blindly and willingly following my narcissist all the way to the slaughter.  But now as I stand here, admittedly still healing, I look back and am so thankful that I am no longer mired in my myopic misery, believing the greatest lie incessantly professed to me by my narcissist – the lie that abuse is love.

My beautiful, you and I have never actually met.  And the reality is we probably will never meet.  But it is my belief that we, all empaths, are of one larger, collective soul.  And we are entrusted with an infinitesimally tiny piece of that communal soul, pinched off and bestowed within us to be its keeper for however many days we are here.  And it is through this hell we have trod, and by this pain which we have endured, that you and I find ourselves ethereally and spiritually bound to each other once again.  If you take anything away from today’s article, believe me when I tell you that one day you will look back at where you once were with your narcissist, and then at where you are, no longer enslaved and healing if not finally healed, and you will smile.  But until then, do not relent, do not lapse, and please, I beseech you, do not embrace your narcissist’s lies that things will be better, things will be different; happier, if you just try one more time!  What broke you simply cannot be what makes you whole again.  That’s not how healing works.