A narcissist has to stay in control of the situation and keep getting “supplies” from you at all times, especially when you are not in their physical presence. They have to influence you to keep you under their thumb. One of the easiest and best ways to do so is via text. When they can’t control you directly, they control you through their weird texting habits.
First: Texting Non-Stop and Demanding Constant Attention
Narcissists disregard your boundaries, including your time and activities, prioritizing their need for constant attention. They believe they always own you and demand your attention, viewing any diversion as disloyalty. This leads to continuous texting and intense interactions, making you feel anxious and dependent on their validation. They manipulate you into a cycle of addiction to their attention. And when they lose interest, they abruptly withdraw, leaving you in emotional chaos and exacerbating feelings of anxiety and stress. Their texting habits manipulate your biochemistry, leaving you feeling ignored and craving their validation.
Second: Making You Feel Ignored by Not Responding
They are on their phones constantly with other people and other sources of supply and treat you as if you do not exist. Or they would be online, and you would be online as well, but they would not respond to you when you are expecting some kind of response. They make you feel ignored, and this ignorance is what kills your self-worth. When a narcissist does this, they are confessing that they do not consider you as an important part of their life as you consider them. They do not care about you; they do not care for your presence. They don’t see you as a valuable person that they are attached to.
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They just caught your attention. They got you in the trap; they sealed the deal. Now that you are theirs, they don’t have to care about anything else because they know they have you. And this is one of the ways of devaluing you so that you keep begging, keep asking for that attention, keep questioning yourself: What did I say wrong? What did I do wrong that made you ignore me? Do I need to change something in my behavior for you to change? For you to become the person that you were in the early stages of the relationship? That is the kind of justification, rationalization, and thinking that happens in our heads when this kind of devaluation victimizes us.
Third: Exploitative Se*xting
Se*xting is another behavior in the texting habits of a narcissist. Now, there is nothing wrong with se*xting, but when it comes to a narcissist, their texting is all about se*xting especially quite early in the relationship, just right after the initial contact. They send provocative images and expect you to send the same without caring about how you feel or knowing if you want to do this or not. They just somehow want to jump in and “open your clothes” by a text.
That’s what’s going on, and that is what they do. That is one of the ways they degrade you because you may participate in the se*xting; you may share stuff. But later, when they start devaluing you, when they start putting you down when they start degrading you, you start feeling embarrassed.
You feel a lot of shame, and you start berating yourself for participating in the early se*xting, not being able to see it for what it was, and so on. But you need to know that it is one of their addictive behaviors that just prey on people for the same very purpose. They have these other people in line, and they just go to them alternatively and ask for nudes, provocative pictures, and all of that stuff. Once they get them, they use this person and the pictures, and then forget about this person forever—or temporarily, until they need them again and come back.
Fourth: Rare Heartfelt Conversations
Some other times, they would reach out and have a very witty, fun-filled, heartfelt conversation with you. You would feel connected, and you would feel seen. They do it especially somewhere near the devaluation stage, where this is given as breadcrumbs. Probably, they are in a good mood, or they want something from you, or they want to prevent you from leaving. There is some kind of ulterior motive that you can’t see.
But this texting is quite witty, fun-filled, and connected. It feels heartfelt, but it’s not. And ultimately, it is just one of those special and unique experiences that you have that makes you feel fulfilled.
But then they deprive you of the same, and this kind of conversation either does not happen again throughout the relationship, or it happens after a very, very long time when they want something from you and they know they won’t get it easily. What it does to you is that it just reinforces your trauma bonding. It makes you keep coming back and craving the same intensity that you felt once in that conversation.
It increases your cognitive dissonance, and you ask questions like, Well, maybe he is not that bad. She is not so narcissistic. Why else would she or he have such a heartfelt conversation with me through text? They don’t see you at all. It’s just more about how they feel and what they want. Once they get it done, they move on.
Fifth: They Leave You Hanging
They leave you hanging by hooking you with a small text without interest or content. For example, they might send a text early at 9:00 a.m. saying, “Good morning,” but then when you respond instantly, they leave you hanging there. It’s like them pressing a button in you, eliciting a reaction, seeing that you were still there, and then running away taking some kind of sadistic pleasure from seeing you suffer from wanting to have that conversation.
This mind game, push-pull, back-and-forth, drives a person crazy because you do not know how to respond to this kind of behavior. You do not know where you are; you don’t know what your status is; you don’t know where you stand in this relationship; you don’t know what’s happening because it’s confusing. They would ignore you, and if you ignored them back, then they would come in and drop this little text: “Hi,” “Hello,” “Good morning,” whatever.
You respond, and you think, Maybe now they have realized, and then they drop you like a hot potato. And it is the same pattern again. It keeps happening over and over again until you just feel like you have turned into a shell of yourself.
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