One Day it Will be Wonderful……
Have you ever thought to yourself about your relationship with a narcissist, one day everything will be wonderful?
One day they will be the parent, partner, sibling or friend you want and need them to be. We will be close and know a deeper love and connection than ever before.
Perhaps it’s a narcissistic parent, you have the dream that they will love you and support you.
It will be even greater when you have children. Finally, you will have the parents that you always wanted and your children will have good grandparents.
Perhaps it’s a partner, the dream that one day you will get married and have a couple of kids.
If you have then the chances are that you have been sold a dream by the narcissist. It’s called future faking.
It’s this dream that keeps you close to the narcissist.
The thought is ‘Sure, it may be crap at the moment but one day it will be beautiful.’
This hope keeps you trying with them. And the more you try the more you give them the energy and attention that they thrive on.
A narcissist knows this.
They know exactly what you want and need them to be.
Then they pretend to be what you want, with the same dreams and desires as you have.
But it’s all fake, it’s just to keep you close.
Once they’ve reeled you in with the future faking, maybe not for the first time, they slowly start to withdraw.
Perhaps they promise to call, but then they don’t.
Your dreams start to crumble.
Desperately you reach for the dream and the person that you thought they were but they’re not there.
That warm caring person is no longer warm and caring.
It must be your fault, right? It must be something that you’ve done?
The more you ask them, the more you try with them, the more they are feeding from your energy.
Not to mention the huge ego rush they get from knowing that they don’t care, but that you do.
Either they outright blame you for the shift, or they drop subtle hints.
This could have gone on for years, decades even, or for a lifetime.
There is still a part of you that believes that they can be the parent, partner or friend that you want them to be. You cling onto this, with a fierce desperation because it’s all you have.
Perhaps you even tell your friends and family about what a great person they can be. Making excuses for their rude behaviour, embarrassed by them, but still clinging onto that hope that they can be what you want them to be.
Or else, you repeat the dream that you’ve been sold. The future together that you dream of, that keeps you going through the long dark nights.
It becomes that the relationship is based on what it could be not the reality.
The reality is;
always being very careful around them
watching what you say and do
ensuring that they are happy
compromising yourself
changing your character or preferences to try to fit in with them
isolating yourself with them
putting them first above everyone else
and pandering to their demands
All for the dream of what they could be at some point in the future. Perhaps they tell you, they will be like this once they’ve got a new job, bought that house or whatever it is. It will be something beyond your control.
However, even if they obtain this thing, whatever it might be, they are still not the dream. They change the rules, without telling you, to something else equally as potentially unrealistic or unobtainable.
It certainly isn’t what they are now, every day.
The more you cling onto this hope, the more they have you where they want you. The more power and control you give them.
All they have to do is fake for a while, work out what it is you want then sell you your dream.
Narcissists all do it, it’s an essential part of their method for reeling people in and keeping them.
The greater emotion you have in your connection with them, the greater control and power they have.
If you love them, then you are much easier to control and manipulate.
If you feel sorry for them, then you are under their control.
That connection, that you have, keeps you trapped with them.
You see, a narcissist is incapable of forming genuine connection with others. They are too self-absorbed, selfish and don’t care about others.
However, they will get a great ego rush from knowing that others care about them. They will relish hurting those people, they use their love against them. They sneer at them for being so weak as to love them.
It’s all about seeing them for what they really are. And for seeing the dream for what it is, fake, unrealistic and never achievable.
It takes time for the dream to die, sadly.
And sometimes this is when they’ve discarded you, once you have to process all the hurt and lies and grieve.
If you’ve broken free, it takes time to understand how you’ve been reeled in with their phony promises.
Then you grieve, not the person that they were, but the dream that they sold you.
You grieve the loss of that hope, that kept you with them for so long. It was the only thing that kept you with them, maybe for years.
Sometimes they die, without you ever having realised that dream that you had of them and your relationship. Then it all comes out, over time.
Regret is the worst thing about being involved with a narcissist.
Once you’ve broken free and you’ve had long enough to process it all, you realise that a part of you knew their game. And knew it long ago.
It all felt wrong from the start, but you pushed that aside.
You were going to have a wonderful relationship, they were going to be exactly what you wanted and needed.
The warnings that went unheeded, because you believed and clung to that dream.
The dream took over everything else, it meant that you ignored all those warning signs, all the advice of your loved ones and most of all the everyday reality of being involved with them.
The sad truth is that the narcissist saw something in you, a need that you had unfulfilled. It was a wound unhealed, possibly from decades before.
They sold you the dream of that need being fulfilled by them, and only them.
Then with time, and as they sense you becoming more and more reliant on them, they showed their true colours. The abusive incidents increased, you became a shadow of your former self, and all for hope.
Hope with a narcissist is a dangerous thing.
It keeps you tied to them, for a lot longer than is necessary, or longer than you would have thought. They’ve sucked you in.
The death of that hope is a sad thing, but it is essential to your breaking free and healing process.
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Originally published at https://comebackbrighter.com on March 15, 2022.