Have you ever had a narcissist just up and disappear on you?, how did that feel? I remember my ex-husband used to do that.
He would be coming home every day, everything would be normal and then about once or twice a month
he just wouldn't come home one day. I wouldn't know where he was, we didn't have cell phones.
We were broke and it was a long time ago and quite honestly
I would just be completely at a loss for where he was. I would try to figure it out,
I had no one I could call and ask he didn't really have a lot of friends.
He would just be gone. Today at QueenBeeing.com,
we're gonna talk about why narcissists disappear, what it means and how you should deal with it.
So let's get started. (Closed captioning provided by Athena Moberg and CPTSDfoundation.org).
My name is Angie Atkinson and on this channel, I offer free, daily video coaching to help you discover, understand and overcome
narcissistic abuse and toxic relationships. I like to call it toxic relationship rehab.
So if that sounds good to you, hit that Subscribe button and let's get going.
So if you're dealing with a narcissist and you're dealing with someone who continues to
disappear on you, every time you turn around, they pull the disappearing act, they vanish, their out of sight,
there are some things to remember. So let's start off with
discussing what it actually means to disappear. In the case of my ex-husband,
he would usually come home late, late, late that night, sometimes the next morning.
I would never know where he had been and he would always be drunk and God knows what else was going on with him.
He would have also stolen all the money out of our bank account,
which back then, holy crap was bad, because even though we didn't have very much money,
he would almost
inevitably be the rent money or the food money that I needed to pay the bills or feed the kid with. So that was a
painful, difficult thing and it's ultimately one of the reasons I ended up leaving him,
but what in general does that mean?, what does it mean when a narcissist disappears?.
Let's talk about it. If I were to ask you, what is the opposite of love? What would your first response be?, hate.
Here's the thing, it's not really hate.
The opposite of love is actually indifference and when someone goes to you, you're experiencing indifference
or at least it feels that way. The emotional effects of this are incredibly devastating and especially for people who already have low self-esteem,
which as you know
the narcissist has worked very hard to make sure that you have low self-esteem, am I right?.
And why does a narcissist disappear?, what do you think?. Let's talk about that. I mean you at least deserve a basic conversation
explaining why this happened to you?.
Well
the fact of the matter is those people who do ghost
narcissists in this case, are doing so because they don't want to deal with your reaction to them saying I'm out of here.
They're avoiding their own discomfort by walking away from you and nottalking about it.
They aren't thinking about how it's gonna make you feel and they don't really care.
Somebody will be
moving along, having a life with a family and then all of a sudden boom their significant other disappears, drops off the planet.
It seems to be related to our current culture, that's what the narcissist tells him or herself,
This is what everybody does. There's almost always a double life factor with the narcissist, whether it's cheating related or otherwise,
but why do they do it?, and how do they do it?. What's it all about?.
Let's start here. If we're honest with ourselves, we can admit that most narcissists seem to me looking for something, they're looking for supply,
they're looking for love, well maybe a different kind of love and we're looking for, but they're looking for something right?. Sure,
they might say they want love and caring and hope and all this stuff,
but in reality, they feel very uncomfortable if they ever find anyone to love them.
Which is probably part of the reason you ended up where you are right now. Being in love with a narcissist is difficult,
but for a narcissist, being in love isn't really the same as it is for other people. If they were really digging into it,
they were really trying to feel what love is all about,
they would have to admit they're terrified of it,
and the reason in my opinion that they're so terrified is they're afraid that if they allow themselves to let go and love you for
real, you might leave them. Almost every narcissist that I've ever known has had a serious fear of abandonment
and so they tend to doubt your authenticity, even if you've been with him for 35 damn years,
they tend to pretend that you're not authentic or believe they are not authentically there for them.
They devalue you because you love them, because they know they can never live up to anyone's expectations,
they also think that other people can't live up to theirs and the truth is, as we've talked about before, narcissist
they project their negative qualities onto you. We can look at this from a few different angles.
First of all, love feels unsafe to a narcissist and that's why it seems like they're always looking for a better supply.
They prefer to be admired, because to them an admiration feels safe,
it's earned, you see it's earned, whereas love is given, even though in my opinion love is also earned a little bit,
but since the narcissist earns
admiration through in their opinion, they're different you know experiences and their different credentials and their different accomplishments,
they feel a lot safer being admired and that is part of the reason that some
narcissists do the whole double life thing. They want to seek
attention as we all know, but also
admiration from a wide variety of people.
They would rather have a whole bunch of people admire them than be loved by one person.
The fact is that narcissists live in a big fear filled mess of a world. They're always afraid of being exposed.
They're always afraid of being abandoned and they're always afraid of losing control.
This leads them to kind of live in a constant fight-or-flight mode, so they're always on the defense.
They're always unable to let their guard down and as a result
they don't really find themselves attaching to people in a healthy way,
which means that inevitably they destroy the relationship.
Some people will say it feels like a punch in the gut or in the face. Some people feel insulted.
There's a huge lack of closure that happens with this,
I hear this from a lot of people. Eventually you can move on, but of course your self-esteem is completely pushed into the ground before
that happens. In some ways,
the worst part of it is
you never get broken up with, you never get the closure, you realize that that person didn't even consider
you worthy of a conversation, it's devastating. Why does it feel so bad to go through this?.
Well
I'm gonna tell you something really interesting about the human brain right now. Being rejected in a dating situation
or any kind of social situation, it actually activates the same part of your brain as physical pain.
Studies tell me that you can actually reduce
emotional pain with tylenol, what about that?. In addition to this link between biological pain and emotional pain,
there are certain specific factors that contribute to psychological stress that happens in this case. For example, being ghosted
gives you no idea how you're supposed to react. I mean, it's completely ambiguous,
you don't know to be worried if something happened to this person,
you don't know if they're hurt and laying in a hospital bed, you don't know if you should be angry or upset,
you don't know if they're just suddenly busy, you don't know what happened to them
and because you don't really know what happened, your brain doesn't know how to react. Bieng connected to other people has always been important to
human survival, this was all the way back to the cave person days, in order to survive
we needed to have a group of people, we needed to have a mate,
we need to have people we were close to, because of that, our bodies,
our minds have developed a system that watches for social queues.
We monitor our social
environments without even knowing it to look for the queues to tell us how to behave, because our social queues are
happening around us and we are empaths, we are very hypersensitive to those social queues.
We would normally know how to behave accordingly,
but because of the fact that we don't know what happened to this person when they went away from us,
That goes to us, we don't know how to act and that messes with our heads in a big way. It creates a sense of
emotional
distortion or dysregulation, we feel out of control. In some cases,
the narcissist will use the silent treatment as part of the disappearing act. Take a look.
Here's an example of how the silent treatment kind of happens in a relationship.
So our couple is going to be called Jack and Jill. Jack's a narcissist, Jill is his victim.
Lately, she's noticing that he's going out all the time, he's not responding to her when she calls him.
She feels really upset, neglected, anxious.
So she does what most everyone would do when she tries to talk to him about it during the next time they're together.
Well at that point he pretty much tells her she's full of crap, overreacting, he says I'm done, I'm going out, that's it.
He leaves, he goes out with his friends, he gets drunk. She tries texting him,
he sees the text but does not respond to that. Later on she brings it up again
and he basically ignores her, gives her the silent treatment, doesn't respond to her and at this point she begins falling, she's falling,
she is getting sicker, she is getting more upset,
she is feeling more alone and he keeps going out and getting drunk. So she decides she's going to try something new.
She starts googling stuff.
She comes up with this amazing idea and she thinks, you know what?, maybe this is really gonna work. I can talk to him,
I can fill him in, I figured out this is exactly what he needs to hear,
so she's got a plan, but will it work?, she isn't sure. So the next day Jill decides
she's gonna have a discussion with Jack and she thinks he's gonna see the light. Very quickly,
she realizes this doesn't happen and she's back in tears. Meanwhile jack has nothing to say about it,
he's quiet, confused, you know innocent, next thing you know,
he's on Facebook talking about how terrible his life is and all of his little flying monkeys are
comforting him and feeling sorry for him. And meanwhile, here's Jill over here, holding the responsibility for this "problem" in their relationship.
This is the silent treatment. In case you weren't aware,
the silent treatment is just another way that the narcissist attempts to control you.
It is a form of emotional abuse and it's usually used by narcissist or people with narcissistic tendencies.
It is all about putting the narcissist in the position of being in control of the situation
and it's designed to help the narcissist make you shut your mouth as in to avoid you
asserting yourself or having any opinion whatsoever. In some cases they do it in order to increase
the conflict, make it more difficult for you, avoid resolving the conflict, because that makes you uncomfortable and they like that feeling.
Sometimes it's about not taking personal responsibility
or not making a compromise and in many cases it's about punishing you for something that they think you did wrong, like a
perceived ego slight, of course what happens is very often exactly what they want to happen,
that's they get a reaction from you and they feel like they are in control of you.
So you obviously, you're an empath, you understand how to deal with people, you have the ability to compromise, a strong
conflict resolution skill set, you probably in general don't even enjoy conflict.
So during the time that the narcissist is being silent,
you're probably trying really hard to get in touch with them, to figure out how to fix what happened,
try to make them understand you, just like Jill did in our example,
but of course this is generally met with contempt, disdain, more silence, completely ignoring you,
whatever and basically this makes you feel like you're nothing, like you're so insignificant that you don't matter or that you and your issues
become less and less real, more and more
non-existent for the narcissist.
Of course that makes you feel like you're not good enough, like you have nothing to offer,
like everything's your fault and before you know it you might find yourself
apologizing to the narcissist, even though clearly you're not the one that should be apologizing.
Most narcissists are about as emotionally mature as a toddler or maybe up to a five or six-year-old child.
They kind of pout, they don't want to play with their friend in the sandbox,
they fight with their friends on the playground, they decide they don't want to share their toys or whatever.
That's the same kind of thing and just like a five year old, like we've talked about recently, a
narcissist acts just like a child emotionally.
They might refuse to talk with you, anger realease, storm-off and then you are left feeling like what in the heck just happened?,
I'm confused, I'm rejected, I don't understand what the heck just happened.
So same deal with a child on the playground,
but in this case since the
narcissist gets to decide whether or not they're going to talk to you or give you a "chance".
Well, then there's this false, but strong sense of control,
so the narcissist will then demand that you apologize for whatever it was that you may have done, some BS, made-up,
transgression or maybe just the fact that you had the nerve to I don't know,set a boundary or ask for equal treatment.
Sometimes this makes the narcissist want to abandon you and then you start the discard phase and this is when you might start actually
presenting the ultimatum and say look this is it, I need to know yes or no.
So then at that point, the narcissist might decide to end the relationshiprather than actually admit being
abandoned, because they might think, well now you've set this
ultimatum and you're saying you're gonna leave if we don't fix this and so I'm just gonna leave you instead. Ghosting
doesn't just ask you to question the relationship that you were just in, but it also causes you to question yourself
and this is the worst part of it. You ask yourself, why didn't I see this coming?.
What could I have done to be a better judge of character?. I was too smart to miss this one.
What did I miss?. What did I do to make it happen?.
How do I not let this happen to me again in the future?, should I just never trust anybody again?.
It's really one of the most basic
psychological systems we have in place as human beings and it helps us to not only monitor our own standing in the world,
but also it affects our feelings of self-worth, our feelings of self-esteem, our ability to believe that we're worth anything in the world. When we're
rejected our self-esteem goes to the ground, it drops tremendously quickly. That makes us feel like we don't belong anywhere,
makes us feel alone.
If you have experienced ghosting,
especially if you've experienced it more than once. This is something that is intrinsically connected to your own personal, psychological
self. It might take you longer to get through this than
it would someone who had higher self-esteem, because you're gonna have less of those connections, like we've talked about before the
neurotransmitters are'nt going to be connecting like they should be, you have less of the natural opioid
painkiller stuff released in your brain see and after a rejection this plummets and
especially for people who have lower self-esteem, it's incredibly painful and like we talked about earlier,
the narcissist has worked really hard to make sure your self-esteem is on the ground. Ghosting is like the silent treatment on steroids, okay?, and
psychiatrists, psychologists, mental health professionals they're going to tell you that this is like the ultimate
form of emotional cruelty. It basically leaves you powerless and gives you no closure. You can't ask questions,
you can't find out what was going on, you can't get any sort of information that would help you to process this experience
effectively on an emotional level. It stops you from
being able to react in any healthy way at all and it prevents you from expressing yourself, your emotions from being hurt.
It's really important that you can do that and in order to maintain self-esteem.
So what are you supposed to do to get through this mess?
I mean the fact is that regardless of what the narcissist intended to do, they ghost you
because they're being passive-aggressive, whether they know it or not,they're going to leave
psychological scars on you from doing this obviously. They don't really care if they leave scars on you,
they just want to make sure that whenever they're ready,
they can come hopping back into your life
and that might be part of the reason they ghost. I once had a narcissists ghost on me and he
spent a holiday and several days around the holiday away from me and then showed back up in the middle of the night at my
house
and he was very upset that I
wasn't sitting there waiting for him and made up a big a lie story about how he had been arrested and all those other stuff, because
I never saw any prove of that stuff. So, how do you move forward?.
What do you do next?.
The first thing you have to remember is that when someone does ghost to you, it literally says not one thing about you personally, it
has nothing to do with who you are, it has nothing to do with how lovable you are.
The fact is you're lovable my friend, you're worthy
and even though it feels like somebody walking away from you like that means you're worth nothing, that's not true.
It really says a lot about the person who did the ghosting, it says a lot about the narcissist in your life,
it shows they don't have the courage they need to deal with the issue of walking away. I think more than courage, its gumption,
it's they don't want to deal with the discomfort of saying goodbye to you, they don't want to give you the opportunity to say
goodbye to them or to say your truth to them either
They don't understand it or they just don't give a damn, in either case, you're left pane,
wondering what to do, right?, but what it all comes down to is that their messages
- don't have what it takes to be a real live grown-up. I'm not mature, I'm not responsible,
I don't care how you feel, but here's my thing,
if somebody ghosts you, I would consider it an opportunity,
especially if that person is a narcissist, an
opportunity to take back your life and start doing things the way you want to do them.
I know it's painful, and I know you're sitting here going
what the hell are you talking about Angie, but I'm telling you right now, if you are ghosted by a narcissist,
I want you to change your mind,
I want you to consider it a blessing.
Think about all the people who are still fighting to get away from a narcissist for thirty years, forty years and they're still stuck there
because the narcissist keeps them in that little ball. If you've been ghosted,
I want you to look at this as an opportunity and a gift. I want you to block the narcissist,
I want you to proactively become no contact. I don't want you to tolerate one bit of this from anybody,
I want you to use it as an opportunity
to move forward and away from the narcissist, even if you know they're coming back for three or four days,
don't tolerate it. This is not acceptable behavior for anyone in a relationship.
So when you put it all together
what it all comes down to is that the
narcissist is mostly concerned with what the narcissists wants and when you feel so desperate to know where they are at every moment
That's like supply for them
If you call their phone
150 times and you text
150 times and they're stressing out and oh my gosh this woman won't leave me alone or this man won't leave me alone,
that's supply for them, any emotion that you give them is supply for them.
So I'm going to tell you something, in my
personal opinion, if I knew then what I know now, what I would do in a
situation like that is I would not react to it.
If you want them to stop treating you that way,
stop reacting to them when they do that, act like you didn't even notice
they were gone act like you have no emotion about it. Do not respond emotionally.
It's going to be difficult, nearly impossible, do your best.
That will be the only way that you can potentially change the behavior and the truth is, if you're dealing with someone like this on
a regular basis,
maybe you need to think about moving on and stepping away from that person and even just go to be somewhere safely without them,
by yourself or with just your kids, so that you can heal and be with people who actually do deserve
someone like you in their life
and maybe that means you just love yourself a little harder than you ever have, it's worth the try, take care of yourself, know that you're
not alone and know that you have support if you need it. Join the SPANily, Let's get connected.
Alright,
this brings me to the question of the day and the question of the day is;
have you had a narcissist disappear on you before, pull the vanishing act and if so, how did it feel to you,
and how did it turn out?, and what advice would you offer our fellow survivors who are also going through a similar situation?.
Share your thoughts, share your ideas, share your experiences in the comments section below and let's talk about it.
Alright, that's all I've got for you right now,
but as always thank you so much for being a part of my day in a part of my life
and hey, thanks for letting me be a part of yours, it really does mean a lot to me.
I want to take a quick minute to just give a quick shout out to my
amazing channel members, you guys
rock. Thank you so much for being your awesome selves and for all of your support,
helping me to help our fellow survivors discover, understand and overcome
narcissistic abuse and toxic relationships, it means more to me that I can say.
Thank you again, so much.
My amazing channel members include; Angela. Susan. Roxanne. Debbie.
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Again, I just want to say thank you so much for hitting that join button, your support really does mean a lot to me,
thank you again. Alright that's all I've got for you right now,
but as always thank you so much for being a part of my day and a part of my life and hey,
thanks for letting me be a part of yours,
it really does mean a lot to me. Now before I go, make sure you take a look at the videos
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