Chapter 3: Triggering the Collapse

Triggering a narcissist is too easy; all you have to do is disagree.

If you read my first chapter, you might well wonder what exactly triggered that final decline. After all, we went 16 years, right? It couldn’t all have been that bad. And you’d be right - most of that 16 years was the slow, soul-leaching abuse that female covert narcissists (FCNs) dole out, mixed with just enough good times and manipulations to keep me hooked and working, always working to regulate her.

FCNs are always, always on the lookout for anything that might upset or dysregulate their own emotional state. To that end, covert narcissists tend toward a surveillance state that would make the NSA blush. Can’t have anything popping up that might up-end their fragile ego and emotional state, right?

So let’s set the table here. I’ve been a journaler for many years. I love the act of putting pen to paper and unraveling my thoughts in a slow and methodical manner, like a mechanic pulling the components of an engine and seeing what’s right or wrong. I love to look back a decade later and say “Oh ya, I was there that day”. Even the feeling of moving the stylus of a fountain pen around is satisfying after a day of beating on a keyboard and staring at screens. In short, I love journaling.

About four years into our marriage, Anne bought me a journal for personal use. She knew I had a penchant for buying higher quality, leather bound journals for writing, because life’s too short to be forced to write on high school quality paper. And so, rather happily and with the naive expectation of respect and privacy that I would have given her, I started using that journal to log interesting moments, work out issues from my childhood, and so on.

Imagine my surprise when the very next time we had a disagreement she immediately told on herself and began attempting manipulations using what she’d learned from reading that journal. When I rightfully called out her blatant invasion, her argument immediately became that I a)didn’t have any expectation of privacy, even in my own journal and b) “didn’t write about her often enough like a loving husband would”.

Lesson learned. The journal had not been truly a gift for my enjoyment but rather an additional means for Anne to draw supply from me, made all the sweeter by being able to do it sneakily and repeatedly. Her anger was that I did not live up to her unspoken demand.

After that day the journal became largely performative and I eventually found other ways to collect my thoughts. One of the chief ways of doing that was to create audio recordings on my phone late at night in the back yard while I wrangled the family dog. I would talk about lots of things but Anne’s frequent gaslighting and tantrums made regular appearances, along with her penchant for hypercriticism. Most often I would listen to the recordings in a day or two and then delete them; it just helped me to maintain a little sanity in a hostile environment. But some of those events were so egregious that I held on to them longer, both as proof to myself of reality as well as something I might need later on as proof of her erratic behavior.

Some examples:

• Phone calls with our realtor that needed a simple yes/no answer, but Anne insisted on being in the middle of them while refusing to actually contribute an answer. After the realtor and I finally picked a sensible path, within a day or two Anne would throw a fit about how stupid it was and insist on reversing course. And then want to change course again a day or two after that.

• A text message storm having a meltdown that I was “ignoring her” and “just wanted her to die”. After telling her my plans the night before, I had left the house early on a Saturday morning with the kids to run errands but I sent a text message quietly to say goodbye, rather than wake her. Keep in mind, Anne was chronically ill and generally confined herself to bed, (though when she wanted to she could go for hours in a shopping mall). I was constantly waiting on her hand and foot. She was also infamous for having meltdowns over being awoken too early after staying up most of the night doomscrolling social media.

Setting Up The Triggers

Creating those recordings was helping me keep my sanity, but it was also slowly changing my behavior. Rather than simply giving in to Anne’s tantrums and gaslighting to avoid the emotional punishment, I was quietly but firmly pushing back. I was becoming emotionally stoic when she would turn up the bad behavior and not letting it affect me.

While not a deliberate effort, I was running on survival instinct, drawing my own line in the sand, and refusing to lose who I was entirely. What I didn’t know at the time was that after 15 years of feeding her overinflated self-image and acting as an external emotional regulator for her, I was creating quiet signals and slowly setting up triggers for her covert narcissism to go first into a spiral and, later, collapse.

The list of things that can trigger a narcissist is endless but there are some core things that are most common. And I set off some of the very worst triggers in Anne.

• Indifference. Narcissists cannot stand people being indifferent to them. It’s a major form of rejection that absolutely terrifies a female covert narcissist (FCN) and rapidly deflates her self-image and by slowly pulling back from the emotionality of her attacks and letting her deal with her own emotional regulation I was rejecting her.

• Negative feedback/consequences. Again, deflating her self-image by rejecting her behavior. But rather than seeing the connection between her behavior and other’s acceptance, the FCN will simply see that as a rejection of her. And so it was for Anne when I’d push back, even gently, on her bad behavior.

• Narcissists need to feel like they own you. By pulling away emotionally and refusing to engage emotionally with Anne’s tantrums, I was breaking down her “safe” control over me and my emotions. That meant I was a threat to her own emotions because I wasn’t doing to work to regulate them for her.

Collapse

One day, just after Christmas, the surveillance state came for me when Anne found the recordings I’d created. What followed would ramp into the daily, hourly beratings that marked the last year of our marriage, and particularly the last four months. A narcissistic spiral that would eventually lead to my leaving the marital home and her eventual suicide. (See Chapter 1: Know the Beginning From the End for more on that part of the story.)

It became so bad that I actually gave up most of my electronic devices for her to hoard, which she then promptly began to go through looking for even a hint of some misdeed. And since there was, in reality, nothing there to find, her rage simply grew and grew. Her desperation extended so far that, in the weeks following her death, I discovered an online conversation between her and a hacker that she was considering paying to put back doors on all of those devices.

In the end I finally walked away from all of this almost a year after the spiral had begun. And when I did I refused to respond to phone messages and texts, setting up a female covert narcissist for her greatest fear of all: abject abandonment and rejection. For someone that one day thought they owned you and your nervous system (remember, FCNs hijack your nervous system so you’ll help regulate theirs), it’s a tremendous shock to the system to be suddenly cut off.

In the end, Anne’s seething narcissistic rage and need to control led to her suicide. And even then, she attempted to take a revenge beyond her passing. Coming full circle, had it not been for my penchant to journal things, she may well have succeeded.