You were never difficult to love.
You were just easy to exploit.
He started by building a pedestal out of your own dreams.
He looked at you like you were the sunrise and the sunset and the only reason the tides bothered to move.
It felt like coming home.
But home eventually turned into a cage with the locks on the outside.
One day you were his everything.
The next you were a burden he could barely stand to look at.
You spend your nights scrolling through old texts trying to find the exact moment the light went out.
You wonder if you dreamed the goodness or if you broke the man who promised to protect you.
I have sat on that same cold floor. I have stared at a silent phone until the screen burned my retinas.
I have apologized for things I did not do just to keep a peace that did not exist.
You are not crazy for missing a ghost.
You are not weak for wanting the version of him that never actually existed to come back.
Your heart is shattered because it was handled by someone who treats people like disposable lighters.
He used your fire until he got what he needed then he dropped you in the mud.
This cycle is not your fault but it is your problem to solve.
You are trapped in a loop designed to keep you small and starving for crumbs of affection.
The ride only stops when you decide to jump.
Let us map out the mechanics of this torture so you can finally stop asking why and start walking away.
He did not pick you because you were weak.
He picked you because you were powerful and he wanted to see if he could own that light.
Most people think victims of narcissistic abuse are fragile souls with no boundaries.
That is a lie.
You are likely a person with an infinite capacity for empathy and a spine made of steel.
He saw your strength and decided to use it as his battery.
The Mirror That Steals Your Breath
The idealization phase is not love. It is a heist.
He did not fall for you.
He studied you.
He looked at the holes in your soul and shaped himself into the perfect plug.
If you loved poetry, he suddenly had a shelf full of Neruda.
If you felt neglected as a child, he became the ultimate protector.
This is called love bombing.
It feels like a drug because it is one.
Your brain floods with dopamine.
You think you found your soulmate. In reality, you found a mirror.
He was just reflecting your own best qualities back at you and taking credit for the view.
I remember the way he used to look at me. It was an intensity that felt like being seen for the first time.
I thought I was finally being cherished.
I did not realize he was just taking an inventory of my assets before the liquidation sale began.
The Slow Bleed of the Devaluation
The shift never happens overnight. If he hit you on the first date, you would leave.
So he waits.
He waits until you are invested. He waits until your lives are tangled like headphone wires in a pocket.
Then comes the first slight.
A joke at your expense.
A cold shoulder when you achieve something great.
A look of disgust when you ask for basic reassurance.
You think you did something wrong.
You try to fix it.
You try to get back to the golden days of the first month.
But the goalposts are on wheels.
Every time you get close to making him happy, he moves them ten yards back.
This is where the gaslighting begins to erode your sanity. He tells you that you are too sensitive.
He claims he never said the things you heard him say.
He makes you doubt your own eyes and ears until you are checking your voice memos to see if you are actually losing your mind.
You are not losing your mind. You are losing your self.
The Discard and the Ghost of Your Life
The discard is the most brutal part of the machinery.
It is the moment he realizes he has drained all the ego fuel he can get from you.
Or perhaps he found a newer and shinier battery to plug into.
He leaves you in the wreckage of a life you built together. There is no closure.
There is no sit down talk about why it did not work.
There is only a cold and sudden silence that feels like a physical blow.
He treats the end of a relationship like a trash pickup. He moves on as if you never existed.
You are left wondering how someone who claimed to love you can treat you with less dignity than a stranger on the street.
The truth is hard to swallow. He never loved you. He loved the way you made him feel about himself.
Once that feeling faded, you became an inconvenience.
The Counterintuitive Path to Freedom
You want to reach out. You want to explain your side.
You want him to finally understand the depth of the pain he caused.
Stop.
Silence is the only language a narcissist respects.
Any emotion you give him, even anger or tears, is a win for him. It tells him he still has a remote control for your heart.
He feeds on your reaction.
The most radical thing you can do is become boring.
Give him nothing.
No texts.
No social media stalking.
No mutual friend check ins.
You must mourn the man you thought he was while protecting yourself from the man he actually is.
The man you loved was a character in a play. He does not exist.
The man who hurt you is the only one who is real.
Rebuilding From the Ashes
Healing is not a straight line. Some days you will feel like a warrior.
Other days you will find yourself smelling his old shirt and sobbing on the floor.
Both versions of you are valid.
You have to learn to trust your own gut again.
That little voice you silenced for months or years is still there.
It is whispering that you deserve a love that does not require you to shrink.
It is telling you that peace is better than the high of a toxic reconciliation.
You are not a victim. You are a survivor who just finished a war you did not know you were fighting.
The scars are not signs of shame.
They are proof that your heart is durable enough to break and still keep beat.
Step off the ride. Let him keep the ghosts.
You have a life to reclaim and it starts with the very first breath you take for yourself and no one else.
The door is open.
You just have to stop looking at the lock and start looking at the sky.
The Funeral for the Version of You That Stayed
You are sitting in the quiet now and the silence feels heavy enough to crush your ribs.
You might be thinking that you wasted the best years of your life on a ghost.
You might be convinced that you are too broken to ever be whole again.
That is a lie the heartbreak tells you to keep you paralyzed.
I know you still wake up reaching for a phone that only brings you pain.
I know you still replay the arguments like you are trying to find a secret code to fix him.
It is okay to feel like a raw nerve in a windstorm.
Healing is messy and it is loud and it is the most honest thing you will ever do.
This journey we took through the cycle of his madness was not just a history lesson.
It was your eviction notice. You now have the map to the exit.
You have the vocabulary for the abuse that used to have no name.
You are no longer guessing.
You are knowing.
There is a profound difference between being a peacekeeper and being a peacemaker.
A peacekeeper swallows fire to keep everyone else warm.
A peacemaker builds a life where fire is no longer allowed to burn the foundation.
I wrote about this transformation in my book, Blessed Are The Peacemakers Not The Peace Keepers.
It is the anthem for those of us who are tired of the virtuous cycle of exhaustion.
It is for the person who is ready to move from servitude to actual service.
You have spent enough time being a martyr for a man who did not deserve your breath.
The heartbreak you feel right now is actually the sound of your old life cracking open to let the light in.
You are not falling apart.
You are falling into place.
Take your power back.
Take your silence back.
Take your future back.
You were never the problem.
You were the prize he was never meant to keep.
Stand up, walk toward the sun, and do not ever look back at the wreckage.
You are finally, beautifully, and dangerously free.
—
This post was previously published on medium.com.
Love relationships? We promise to have a good one with your inbox.
Subcribe to get 3x weekly dating and relationship advice.
Did you know? We have 8 publications on Medium. Join us there!
***
–
Photo credit: Sight Archives on Unsplash
