Are You Aware of This Humiliating Holiday Devaluation Technique?

I’ll never forget my first Christmas with Jamel. Jamel is the narcissist I wrote about in the following article:

We were together for three years until I left him, after he discarded me, in November 2020. You can read that story, here:

We celebrated our first Christmas in December 2017.

In my house, Christmas is a big deal.

The holiday season is very sacred to me and my mom. Now that Jamel was a part of my life we included him in our very personal tradition.

We bought him a number of gifts.

My mom got him a collection of football cards specifically because he played football in high school and wanted to go pro but couldn’t because of a knee injury.

She also had a gold chain she allowed me to give to him, as a special surprise. I (myself) had both, made and bought him Christmas gifts.

We wrapped and placed his gifts under our Christmas tree, and when he came by on Christmas he opened them.

When he saw the football cards my mom explained to him they were collector’s items that would be worth something one day. She’d given it to him as an investment toward financial gain, in the long run.

When he saw the gold chain, he held it in his hands and stared at it for a while — but never put it on.

This seemed weird to me but I brushed it off because overall he seemed really appreciative. This is what makes what he did next so surprising,

And downright disgusting.

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Jamel Excused Himself and Went Back to My Room

Soon after, I also went back to my room to spend some alone time with him. When I walked into my room I found him sitting on my bed holding a football card in one hand while scrolling on his phone with the other one.

He looked up and said —

The cards are worthless.

He explained how little value the cards had and showed me that they were invaluable. Apparently, some cards were worth like a dollar, some $2. He then said that my mom probably didn’t realize they were cheap.

I’m not well-versed in baseball cards or football cards so I didn’t know what to say but I felt embarrassed for my mom because I know for a fact she had tried her best.

My mom was three years into her retirement and on a fixed income. I was a few months fresh from graduating college and was taking a year off. My mom and I moved money around to make this feasible.

This was the agreement before I even met Jamel.

Now that he was in the picture, we moved things around even more to include him in our family dynamic. Specifically, because we knew he wasn’t receiving this at home with his own family.

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Christmas Wasn’t Special in Jamel’s Household

Photo by iStockPhoto.com
(At least, not for him.)

His mother, Pat, was an overt narcissist and Jamel was the scapegoat. His older brother, Anthony, was the golden child. All of the gifts and adoration went to Anthony. I’ve witnessed this play out in numerous ways,

Numerous times.

My mom grew up similar to him so she wanted to help me make this a Christmas Jamel wouldn’t forget. We did the best we could. And I really thought we did well. Until he then told me that the chain I gave him was also fake. I was hurt and I felt humiliated.

I didn’t have the money to buy expensive gifts.

None of these gifts were expensive but every single one of them came from the heart and had good intentions behind it. But now I was feeling very off about his intentions because he literally left the room to go price the gifts we bought him.

Now, I was realizing why he stared at the gold chain the way he did and never even seemed motivated to put it on. He wanted to know if it was worth it. Literally.

It struck me as really odd that the first thing he thought to do with these gifts we had gotten him was, check their price and research their value. No one I had ever dated had ever done something like this.

This would be the very first red flag that would indicate how greedy he truly was. This was also the first of several devaluation methods I would be exposed to — financially. But the most hurtful devaluation technique would take place six months later,

On our one-year anniversary.

…

I Wrote Him My First Book

It was an alphabet book where each page had a different letter of the alphabet on it; with each letter was either a place or something specific that was attributed to our relationship.

For example,

‘A’ stood for August, the month that we first met.

Sometime later, while we were on the phone, I would find out that he only made it halfway through that book. He never even bothered to finish it but would “get to it”.

This caused an argument where he gaslit me by saying if it’s a gift given to him then who am I to dictate when he utilizes it?

(Never mind the fact that if he ever gave me something he wanted me to make use of it right then and there.)

This rubbed me the wrong way and seemed weird because if it’s an entire book written for you and pretty much about you (and us) why wouldn’t you want to finish it?

I’d get a not-so-subtle answer to this question months later when he brought me over to his house where I walked in and as I was taking my sneakers off I felt my foot hit something.

I looked down and found that book I had written him laying there as if it had been thrown underneath his bed. It really looked like it had been dropped and kicked under there. And knowing his character,

It probably was.

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This post was previously published on medium.com.

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