Hoovering to Heartache
The word hoovering comes from the Hoover vacuum cleaner, an appliance that sucks up. It is a common tactic used by narcissists when they have lost their supply and want them back. Unfortunately, they want their supply back for all the wrong reasons, not because they truly love them and can’t live without them. What they can’t live without is a constant supply of energy and attention from their victim. There may well be other things the victim supplies that enhance the status of the narcissist like money, or meets their needs like lots of sex.
This is an excerpt from a personal story I shared in a book I co-authored several years ago. At the time I was a relationship coach but was yet to really become familiar with the narcissistic cycle of abuse. It certainly was a good lesson for someone who helps others with relationships.
How do you mend a broken heart? A loving heart that’s been broken multiple times by the same person. What does it take to restore belief in yourself and confidence that you can find a healthy, sustainable relationship in the future?
These are some of the questions I asked myself when my relationship with the man I believed to be my soul mate, finally ended. My self-esteem was in my boots, and I struggled to believe in myself as a woman, mother and coach.
How could someone who had told me he would do anything to get me back just a few months before and suggested marriage, now have a multitude of petty reasons why our relationship could never work? It made no sense to me whatsoever. I spent weeks trying to understand his reasoning, until one day it dawned on me that it wasn’t about making sense of anything. It was about him and his fears – most specifically, his fear of commitment. These fears had literally killed our relationship and there was nothing I could do to change that. No matter how many hoops I jumped through, and how much I twisted myself into a human pretzel, I couldn’t compete with the fears of the past. Fear is the opposite of love. No healthy relationship can grow from a place of fear. Fear is toxic to a relationship, slowly poisoning it as surely as weed killer poisons plants.
I twisted myself into a
human pretzel
Something had to change that was certain, I couldn’t go on beating myself up for being myself. Was I really unlovable because I disliked loud, thumping rock music and went to bed before midnight. Did yelling at my 18-year-old daughter for getting me out of bed to pick up a dead mouse in the dining room while she had drinks with her friends, make me the mother from hell? In his eyes, I couldn’t be trusted to live in the same house as him and his children. The really strange thing was, nothing had changed. I had never liked loud rock music, late nights or rudeness from my children. A critical video and audio started playing in my head about how I was to blame for so many things.
Now, I look back and wonder how a successful 50-something professional woman could have become disempowered to this extent. Why did I give my power away? Why did I automatically feel I was to blame? Was it really to do with this relationship or did it go right back to my childhood?
I did a lot of work on myself, because at the end of the day, we can only do change work on ourselves. I had genuinely believed him when he started love bombing me after a year of being apart. I was in such a good space then, only to be brought right down by believing that he genuinely wanted the relationship to work. In hindsight with what I know now about narcissists, it was a hoovering manoeuvre. This guy, while not a full-blown narcissist, certainly had narcissistic traits.
Narcissistic behaviour is crazy making. You can try and try to make sense of it but it’s nonsensical and it will do your head in. Be very aware of hoovering. The honeymoon phase is very short lived and it will progress quickly into the devalue and discard phases. If you’re getting your life together without the narcissist, letting him back in is a bad move. Yes, there’ll be promises of undying love and how he’s changed but this won’t last. Don’t let yourself be hoovered back to heartache!
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