NPD: The Hoover Maneuver- Round Two

The hoover maneuver is when the narcissist has completed the 3 stages of abuse: idealization, devaluation, and discard, and wants to go back for seconds. So, he sucks you back in and repeats the spin cycle.

Hoovering happens when the narcissist wants to reassert his control over you. He is looking for narcissistic supply.

The classic hoover technique is an out-of-the-blue call or text from the narcissist, after he discarded you. He will act as if nothing has happened. He may randomly show up at your door, just stopping by for a visit, as if everything is fine. Or he may say he left something at your house.

Should you take the bait, expect a brief honeymoon phase (idealization phase one, round two). But it is just long enough to pull you back into the web.

Then the devaluation will ensue. Red flags pop up all over the place. The narcissist will become bolder and more callous in his manipulation. Again, clearly showing you that he doesn’t care about you.

Again, you get hurt. Rightfully upset, you question the narc’s behavior and the relationship. You will get nowhere in trying to talk about the relationship rationally like adults.

Understand that the narcissist is not interested in your feelings. Nor is he interested in having a healthy relationship.

His world is constructed of lies, which either you help, or you hinder. Either way, the lies are the narc’s reality, and you are in no way allowed to reckon with the truth.

Narcissists thrive on dominance, power, and control.

Everything is a game to the narcissist.

He likes to push the buttons- to see how much he can get away with. Consequences rarely enter the narc’s mind, and only in the sense that they apply to him.

He likes to push limits. He breaks boundaries, with a distorted sense of entitlement.

The more covert and overt abuse that the narc applies, the more the victim goes reeling, blind-sided, tortured and confused.

This furnishes him with a sense of power and superiority. He does not care that he is hurting an innocent person. Nor does he care that you wouldn’t do this to him. He also does not care that this behavior is unsustainable, intolerable, and will end the relationship for good.

The narcissist thinks in the short term. He wants what he wants, he wants it now and feels entitled to it. There is no logic in the narc’s asinine behavior.

The narcissist trashes every relationship. This manifests the most with the very people who have given him chance after chance.

Every time he would put on his good-guy mask and would plead his case, which always included blaming others, he was shown mercy and wasted it, repeatedly. The jobs, relationships, family members, etc., who tried to help the narcissist out of his strife.

As many times as opportunity is given, is as many times as he will trash it.

You have to understand that the narcissist is a lie; a living, breathing, lie machine with a black hole where his conscience should be.

By allowing him back into your life, in any sense (work, friendship, relationship, etc.) you are perpetuating your own disappointment. He won’t change.

Narcissists are fundamentally damaged at their very core. This damage cannot be undone. No one can go back in time, reraise a narcissist, and redo the narc’s entire personal development so that they’d grow up properly and make good citizens, parents, people, etc.

The best thing a victim of a narcissist can do is accept that the narc’s malfunction is not yours. The narcissist’s behavior is not your burden to reckon with. You are not responsible for another adult’s cruel, reckless, and abusive behavior. You are only responsible for yourself.

You will get treated worse and worse each time you get hoovered back into the relationship with the narcissist. You will feel worse and worse.

An unhealthy attachment, a trauma bond, may have developed. This is the driving force that keeps victims stuck in the cycle of abuse. You can’t stay like this. But you feel like you can’t let go either. So, you miserably try to make this traumatic fuckery of a relationship work; but to no avail.

Understanding narcissism, trauma bonds, and other neurological preservation mechanisms is an extremely helpful key to unlocking the mystery of “knowing better”, but still getting pulled back into the chaos of a toxic relationship.

Go no-contact and stay no-contact so you can finally heal, once and for all.