If Your Narcissistic Ex Has a New Partner, Read This

If your narcissistic ex is treating their new girlfriend or boyfriend better than they treated you, it’s not because they have something you don’t, and it’s not because your ex has changed.

It’s because the two of them are in the idealization phase.

If you take the relationship you had with your ex and zoom out, you’ll probably notice there were four phases it kept cycling through: idealization, devaluation, discard, and hoovering.

This is an oversimplification, but this basically means — things were good, things were bad, things reached a breaking point, things calmed down… and then the whole cycle repeats.

The first phase, idealization, is when they make you feel seen, valued, and understood to sell you an unrealistically positive version of the relationship.

To you and the people on the outside looking in, this phase of the relationship can look like a beautiful, passionate, and genuine example of two people who were “meant to be.”

But it’s really just a manipulation tactic narcissistic people use to get you emotionally invested, and it’s exactly what you’re seeing now in their new relationship.

But here’s the catch: this phase doesn’t always look the same.

It can range anywhere from private moments where they make you feel like you’re the only one who sees them to a fast, over-the-top romance with gifts, trips, and public declarations of love.

And the length of the love bombing phase can be just as unpredictable.

We surveyed a 1000 people on our email list a few years ago and the length of this phase ranged from a few weeks to almost a year and a half with the average being three months.

I’m telling you this because if you’re here thinking “We had idealization phases too, but he or she never did X, Y, and Z with me,” I promise it isn’t personal.

It all depends on what your narcissistic ex thinks will work best. But if you’re anything like our community, it takes more than just hearing that to understand and actually believe it.

So, I want to let you in on a huge secret.

A narcissist’s deepest, most protected secret is that underneath it all, they feel:

• unlovable
• unwanted
• inadequate
• worthless
• weak

These feelings usually come from traumatic early childhood experiences. 

And these experiences teach them that getting validation, admiration, reassurance, power, and control from others (narcissistic supply) is the only way to feel safe, secure, and worthy.

It’s really sad, and might make you think:

“Maybe this new person is just better at giving them what they need than I was.”

But it doesn’t work like that because those feelings of being unlovable, unwanted, inadequate, worthless, and weak are still there, and they aren’t going anywhere.

They’ve spent their entire life constructing a false sense of self that feels lovable, desirable, capable, worthy, and strong out of narcissistic supply to suppress the painful feelings they have.

And they’ve done such a good job that they’ve convinced themselves that those feelings don’t even exist.

So they’re stuck in this cycle of desperately trying to fill their bucket with supply, but it never being enough because the feelings they’ve suppressed keep poking holes in the bottom.

And on top of that.

They can’t even see the holes because seeing them would mean acknowledging those feelings exist. And doing that would destroy the sense of self they’ve spent their entire life building.

So instead of fixing the holes, they demand more supply from the people around them.

Like a parasite, they latch on and start sucking the life out of you.

We’re talking things like:

– your time

– your energy

– your space

– your money

– even your health

And they just keep taking and taking until you have nothing left.

Then they move on to the next source of narcissistic supply.

And that’s why it’s only a matter of time before this new relationship goes through the exact same cycle you did — idealization, devaluation, discard, and hoovering.

Final Thoughts

Thank you for reading today’s episode of the Unfilteredd: Narcissistic Partners podcast.

If this was helpful and you’d like to read the next one, please subscribe to our newsletter — we’ll let you know as soon as the next episode is released.

My name is Juliana Akin, your guide to overcoming the effects of narcissistic abuse — and I can’t wait to connect with you in a future episode.

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