Number 3: Phantom messages and inadequate closure.
The spiritual closure and messages you never got. There are moments when you are certain you felt your phone buzz or vibrate, but upon checking, there is nothing. Your subconscious mind continues to hold on for a closure that never happens, a sorry, apology for wrong, or even a validation of suffering. Narcissists hardly, if ever, give true closure. It is as if grieving a death, yet no funeral. Your mind logically knows that they’re not there, but your body and emotional awareness remain there in the old reality, leading to moments of complete confusion and loneliness.
You’ll catch yourself reaching out to call them on your phone or cooking and planning with them unconsciously, only to be jolted into reality each time that they’re not there. You’ll be sitting at a coffee shop waiting for them to come in. You see and hear their voice, and your stomach comes crashing down. This phase is tough.
It makes you realize the harsh reality: the reality that you have to make your closure and do it alone. Face the harsh reality that you most probably will never get any validation or approval from them. And that is very hard, but ultimately for your healing. Real closure is when you approve of yourself, not when they approve of you, because they cannot.
Number 4: Complicated grief and mourning the fantasy.
You have complicated grief and mourning the fantasy that you believed was. You’re not mourning the actual nature of the narcissist. You are mourning the illusion that they presented initially, the idealized one that you wished them to be. You fell in love with their disguise. And when the disguise broke, your heart broke. When I discovered that my mother was a backdoor narcissist, and that was several years ago, it seemed that the entire substantive portion of my life had died.
To understand the loving, caring, least violent human being I had thought her to be nothing more than an illusion was to understand that my entire past was based upon deceptions. Sorrow resulting from this sort of loss is richly deep and complex. It’s not something you can just get over and move on from. Rather, you learn to live with grief. That is how you recover. Reassembling your life in small pieces is how you move on from it.
You may also want to read this:
Words That Destroy a Narcissist
9 Secrets ALL Narcissists Keep
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