Sometimes, you need to go back to that narcissist until there is nothing left for you to go back to. Sometimes, you need to give them a couple of chances until you wake up and hit rock bottom. Sometimes, you need to feel the emotions and experience the pain that comes from facing your reality. People force no contact on themselves hoping they’ll make it, but most of them fail to maintain it. Why? Well, they’re trauma bonded and are struggling with a lot of cognitive dissonance. They may also be holding on to that hopeless hope: “Oh, maybe it will work somehow. Maybe I need to fix it.” Their hope has to be shattered into a million pieces. They have to realize there is nobody to go back to. And sometimes, in some cases, reexposure is necessary. Going back to the source of their pain is an important and fundamental part of their healing journey.
The rule of thumb in this community is: “Oh, you should go no contact with the narcissist once you recognize the signs of toxicity in them. You must not look back ever again.” And that is the protocol one must follow. In most cases, that is what works and that is what one should do. But in some cases, people get stuck. They keep asking fundamental questions like: “Oh, I fell in love with a person who was so amazing to me. What are you even talking about? You’re telling me they have no empathy, they can’t be revived, there is no human element left in them, there is no soul in there. How can I believe it when I got to experience the best of them?”
No matter how you try to explain and answer their questions, their emotional self is not able to comprehend it, and they need to wake up to their reality. Cognitively, they might agree with you, but emotionally, they might find themselves stuck. In such cases, reexposure becomes necessary.
What is reexposure? Well, as the word suggests, it is re-exposing yourself to the narcissist’s abusive behavior. Going back doesn’t necessarily mean physically walking back into their life or moving back into their house. It’s like keeping an entry card, keeping that door open. You may not even need to communicate with them. You may not need to talk to them at all. It’s like observing their patterns.
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No contact means not looking at their social media profiles, not talking about them, not talking to them, and not consuming any information related to them. It’s a complete shutdown. But going back can mean looking at different data points to connect the dots and come to a conclusion on your own. An example of that would be letting them initiate a conversation with you and not falling for their trap. They might try to love-bomb you in the beginning. You play along a little bit, and then you just have to watch how their words do not match their actions.
You just have to go, “Tick, tick, nice. Okay, this is exactly what I know about his or her behavior, and they are following the pattern. They’re not doing anything different. They love-bombed me in the beginning, and now that I’m not fully giving in, they are raging at me. And this is murderous rage because they’re trying to punish me for leaving them in the first place, for not giving them what they wanted from me.”
You have to let your emotional understanding meet your cognitive understanding, which, in simple words, means you have to let your heart and mind become one to see them as they are. They are a monster. They are a soulless human being who can never, ever treat you right because they don’t want to.
When re-exposing yourself to the narcissist, you have to act less and observe more. It’s through inaction that you will be able to absorb a lot. You have to let yourself go through a very painful process of realizing the truth that will be revealed to you. Because I can assure you, the narcissist is going to do things they might have done to you before, but this time, while you are in this process, you will see things differently. It will click, and you’ll be like, “Oh, I see. Wow, this time I can understand what you’re trying to do here, how you’re trying to manipulate me, what your gaslighting tactic is, and what you’re trying to get from me.”
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It will hurt you. It will be really painful for you to finally see that ugly side of them. But that is the thing. That is what you want out of this. You do not have to step into denial by justifying their behavior. You do not have to go, “Oh, maybe this, maybe that.” If you do, you’ll waste this chance. That’s why I said, you have to keep still. Do not run the engines. They do not need to work. The narcissist will do the work for you.
Reexposure should be therapeutic in nature. You just have to relax and do nothing at all. Things will start shifting if you start observing their behavior. If you give yourself permission to see it right from the beginning until the very end, if you zoom out and look at it as a bigger picture, what I am sharing with you is scientifically proven to work. Trauma therapists use exposure therapy to treat individuals who struggle with anxiety, phobias, and PTSD. In fact, every trauma healing modality out there is a variant of exposure therapy.
What happens during exposure therapy? The individual is exposed to their trigger, but they are first trained to remain in a relaxed state. They are instructed to keep their body relaxed and let the learning happen. They watch the same scenario; sometimes it could be imaginary exposure. They might imagine the same scenario, they might think about the same thing, and let the reactions complete. Let their body go through the process so they can feel those emotions out. That is what you’re doing here. You are unintentionally doing exposure therapy on yourself.
That person is a source of your trauma, so you are re-exposing yourself to your trauma. You are stuck. This is an atypical symptom of trauma I’m talking about—your trauma bonding. Cognitive dissonance is an atypical symptom of trauma as well. So you are completing those trauma responses by gaining reality, by learning more, by extracting more information about them, by seeing their ugliness. So you are creating healing for yourself. You are creating closure.
This is the reason why sometimes going no contact right away may not be the right thing to do for a lot of survivors. I’m really curious to know what you think about this technique, and I want to know if you had to go back to the narcissist again and again to get your closure and to never go back ever again. Share everything in the comments below, and I will talk to you in the next one. Until then, as always, let the healing begin and continue.
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