The Rejection Loop: Why Narcissists Hurt You to Make You Stay
Some People Don’t Fear Losing You; They Fear Losing Your Reaction
There’s a strange kind of heartbreak that happens when you realise someone never loved you, but they “needed” you to stay addicted to the idea that they might.
It wasn’t love, and it’s not hate either. It’s control.
And control only works when you're still playing the game.
I Want To Play A Game
The emotional junkie doesn’t want connection.
They want emotional supply, so they push you away to feel powerful, then they expect you to crawl back to feel wanted.
It’s not personal, it’s their addiction.
When they say they never wanted you anyway, what they really mean is “Prove to me that I’m wrong, show me your pain, and make me feel worth chasing.”
Then they reject you, but if you accept it without flinching, they spiral, because the loop breaks, the game ends, and they’re left alone with the truth, which is that you were their drug.
I’ve lived through this with someone I once called family.
And no matter how disgusting their behaviour got, they still expected the same ritual: Them pushing, me chasing, and the cycle continuing to spin.
But I stopped.
Not with drama.
Not with shouting.
Just silence and one harsh fact.
I said, “Cool. I never would’ve picked you either.”
And the rage that followed wasn’t about pain; it was about exposure because the parasite had lost its host.
Spilling Over On Social Media
We see this pattern on TikTok now too, with Women filming themselves threatening divorce, expecting their husbands to fall to pieces and plead for another chance.
Except like me, some of those men are done.
They don’t chase, they just say, “Okay,” and then they pack a bag and they leave.
And you see it happen in real time; the woman who issued the threat crumbles, because it wasn’t a threat, it was a test she thought she could control.
But when the control is gone, so is the identity.
She’ll say, “He was never supposed to leave. He was supposed to fight for me.”
But what exactly were they fighting for? The privilege of staying in a broken loop?
The tragic thing is that what you're seeing isn't heartbreak, it's withdrawal.
It's a rage-fuelled meltdown from a narcissistic brain that only ever bonded through control.
They don't want love.
They want to feel needed at that moment without having to create the connection, which would compel you to need them.
But when you’re no longer emotionally dependent on their chaos, when their bait no longer works, you become useless to them.
Or worse, you become a threat to their illusion.
So if you’re being cursed at for not chasing someone who never truly cared, you’re not in the wrong; you’re doing something right because you broke the loop.
If they’ve gone screaming all over the place trying to suck you back in, then that’s not love either; that’s just what happens when a parasite realises the host has grown immune.