When He Is Sucking The Life Out Of You In Your Relationship
Pathological persons are energy and emotional vampires. They live off of your emotional content.
Part of their personality deficit is the lack of a stable and consistent inner core of a self concept so they need constant attention, distraction, and identity management from which they draw their identity.
Lots of their identity is acquired from their relationships since internally there is so little core self to draw from. This is part of the reason they are so exhausting. In order to get their emotional 'blood supply' from you, they 'hook you' into conversations, arguments, or any other kind of response they can get from you.
They live vicariously thru your own emotional expressions of love, frustration, confusion, etc. It doesn't always matter 'what' emotion is fed to the vampire (although narcissists like adoration) but just that there is SOME content is enough for them--even your tears, or your screams, or your insults. It doesn't matter...they just 'need' something, anything from you in the way of content. If they don't get the blood supply/emotional content from you, they will seek it elsewhere.
(Remember Dracula? He just moved from town to town taking it where he could get it?)
When you begin to break up, he will fear the loss of emotional supply. He won't fear losing you so much as he will fear not getting his identity and his sense of self from you and/or the relationship. He fears the loss of self or 'who am I without her?' This is a very fragmented ego state --one which only exists thru relationships with others.
So when you try to break up, he will continue to contact you which is why they are hard to break up with. They are predictable in their approaches to get you to respond to them (you are feeding the vampire his emotional blood supply every time you talk to him). These are some of his approaches and if you can get a bag of popcorn and just watch it like it was a LifeTime for Women movie and detach from it, you will see a whole movie pan out like this:
*One contact he's angry, blaming, shaming
When you don't respond to that verbally or emotionally (think like you are lobotomized with no facial expression...that's what I want women to do with these men) When you don't respond....
* Then one contact will be sweet, loving, buy you things or sending you things
When you don't respond...
* He will promise to do what you've asked for years...go to counseling, church, take meds, be nice, go to anger management
When you don't respond...
* He will get angry again--say you aren't working on the relationship which is why it's gonna fail
When you don't respond...
* He will accuse you of having sex with someone else and he's gonna go do the same thing
When you don't respond...
* He will quit calling for a while to make it look like he's moved on
They are boomerangs, they ALWAYS come back a few times.) When you dont' respond...
* He will indicate he found someone else or had sex with someone else
When you don't respond...
(Are you enjoying the popcorn and movie about now??)
* He becomes 'sick' -- he doesn't know what this mysterious illness is, or he has prostate cancer, MS, some other lethal disease
When you don't respond...
* He will just go back to drinking, drugging, dealing, driving too fast, etc.
When you don't respond...
* He will kill himself, leave the area, never see you again
When you don't respond...
* He will take the kids, drag you thru court, threaten to physically harm you
When you don't respond...
* He will tell you he's dating someone you hate or his previous girlfriend/wife
When you don't respond...
* He will tell you he will kill your pet he has custody of if you don't talk to him
When you don't respond...
* It will come full circle and will begin again, at the top of this list.
When I do phone counseling, it's all the same stories. I know that women think that their experiences are unique. But pathology is all the same--these people aren't very creative and don't deviate much from the strict internal structure that is associated with pathology. They ONLY react in certain ways so for me, it's pretty easy to predict. Once you are able to understand this, you can predict his sad/silly/stupid reactions to a break up.
Since they live off of your emotion and NEED it, the sooner you starve him out by having no contact (unless you have to because of your kids) but you adhere to no words exchanged and no emotional content on your face, the vampire will flee to the next available source to be fed.
When women don't disconnect once they understand the feeding and maintanence of pathologicals, they are doing it becuase SHE wants to remain. The ball is then in your court to figure out where you are still hung up so you can disconnect. This is not a judgment about women not being able to leave.
It is a POINTER to a place where the dis-engagment has hit a snag. Simply notice where the snag IS so that something can be done.
Resources
Sandra Brown's blog on Psychology Today: Pathological Relationships
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1 comment:
Agree with the pattern she explained ... like cookies from a cookie cutter. They are all basically the same only decorated differently ... focus on the cookie. I got caught up in the decorations ... free now ... but these type sort of cast spells on their victims.
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