I am an experiencer and a coach, not a therapist. So I will answer this question as if I was answering it to myself. This is a description of my own experience. You might recognize yourself in it.
Love-bombing and mirroring are the gateway drugs into a toxic enmeshment. They feel like the best thing ever, the highest high, the greatest love you’ve never had – but this is where the emotional abuse already starts. This is the bait.
By love-boming and mirroring, the toxic person is showing to you a deep desire to know you, to understand you, wanting you, loving you – to attune to you.
If you come from a biological family where you actually had to over-extend yourself in order to get any kind of connection, where you were parentified because your parents where overwhelmed or not present, where your parents were not attuning to you but you had to attune to them (for example, they were narcissistic themselves) – then you’re highly vulnerable to a person coming along and all of a sudden mirroring you.
This will feel like the greatest drug ever.
A toxic person who lovebombs us and/or mirrors us gives us the (fake) promise that the life of self-rejection and over-extending ourselves will finally be over. We are finally finding someone who mirrors us and attunes to us.
This is something everyone craves for and narcississts can use it to their advantage with EVERYONE.
People who had neglectful or narcissistic parents are “simply” ESPECIALLY susceptible.
To me it felt like a new dimension was opening up and as if EVERYTHING in my life, even the negative stuff, had had meaning – because I had found this “wonderful person”. My life was complete, I felt unstoppable and “good enough”, maybe even perfect. As long as the narc was happy, everything was perfect. I was perfect, my life was perfect, he was perfect, we were perfect.
Of course, this gradiose “love” is fake and not real.
The toxic person only idealizes us as long as we fit into their role for us – the role of being an extension of themselves.
They then enter the next cycle of the enmeshment: devaluing and discarding.
This is very painful to everyone, but especially to people who have never had anyone mirroring them in childhood.
The childhood wounds only get deepened and increased by this sort of treatment (narcissistic abuse).
The resulting emotional pain is excruciating and can be physical and long-lasting.
But what does a person, who has never known any other pattern for closeness and mirroring, usually seek? (Plus, they are now in a great deal of pain and nothing seems to soothe this type of pain? It’s stronger than the usual pain of a break-up, it’s excruciating and like being ripped apart to the core.)
They seek the next person who is going to mirror and/or love-bomb them.
It’s “the next hit”.
It’s the only thing that soothes the pain – sometimes a little bit, sometimes pretty well.
At this point, we’re really just surviving.
And it’s important not to be ashamed of this pattern, but to recognize it, so you can break it and create a new pattern.
I personally came to see my pattern of dating cluster Bs (sometimes diagnozed ones!) as an addiction.
At some point, the addiction didn’t give me any comfort anymore. – I was still addicted, but I wanted to stop. I had stopped smoking and other addictions before, so I knew it was possible.
And I believe it’s only when the addiction stops working that we start wanting to go back to the root cause and really work on the childhood wounds. Until then, finding the next hit is good enough – simply because the pain is too great. There needs to be a quick fix.
But once the quick fixes don’t work anymore and we’re completely burnt out, once we’ve “suffered enough”, the will to change the pattern arises.
When a vampire has bitten you, throwing a patch on there won’t really do the trick. You’ll remain a vampire thrall.
But at some point, the “drug” didn’t work for me anymore. And also: I had always known (or at least suspected) that these people were liars, but there had always been a tiny, but strong voice of hope inside me, saying: “yeah, they probably lie and/or are very unaware or immature, probably highly narcissistic or full-blown narcissists, but I still hope that they’re truthful, so let’s go for it”. – This voice of toxic hope is a result of unmet needs from childhood.
Some toxic people can be very persistent and there is always a psychological reaction to “absolute certainty”. This makes it even more important to be aware of one’s patterns, so we can stay awake and change course whenever necessary.
Several things are crucial in order to change the pattern – or rather – to let go of it and develop a new one:
- It’s very important to let go of the toxic/unrealistic/childlike hope that things could be different with that person. This toxic hope kept us attached to our parents in childhood because we depended on them. But we no longer depend on them or on another toxic person.
- It’s crucial to stop seeking mirroring and love-boming. This can be achived by hypnosis, self-hypnosis, positive affirmations and a generous routine of self-love and self-care. The pattern of self-rejection and self-abandonment in order to stay with an exploiter has to be broken and replaced by connecting with the self in a positive way.
- Our compassion, understanding, desire to understand and focus need to shift from the abuser to the self. (This includes the negative focus we have on the exploiter once they withdraw their emotional drugs and dish out a chaotic blend of reward/punishment or stone-walling or devaluation and discard.)
I highly recommend working through all of this (and maybe more, depending on your own personal case) with a therapist.
You can break this pattern and start dating and desiring healthy people. Or you can be happily single. Being single is perfectly fine, too. Choosing to be single is a great way to make time and space for the additional self-love and self-care we need in order to break the pattern of self-avoidance and self-rejection.
The pattern of self-avoidance and self-rejection is another thing that enables us to “stand” toxic people in the first place. People are wired for connection. We want to connect with other people – it’s natural. But if you are avoiding and rejecting yourself, you will most likely connect with a person who also rejects you.
They’re not rejecting the role they have for you and project on you (idealization) – but they’re rejecting you (devaluation and discard). So in order to stop being rejected, we try fitting into the roles people project on us. Thereby, we abandon ourselves, which, again, deepens the core wounds. That’s why many relationships seem to make us worse and don’t “fix us”.
To get out of this pattern, we must stop rejecting ourselves. We need to embrace ourselves. Being single gives you the time and capacity to do this fully. So there is nothing wrong with being single. Sometimes, it’s necessary and the most healthy thing you can do for yourself.