In the wake of a relationship with a narcissist, you keep asking yourself: Does he remember me at all? Does he remember us? And how does he recall the life you’ve had together the common experiences? How does a narcissist experience memory? They have dissociative memory gaps; they do not possess a continuous memory. And because they have these black holes strewn across the galaxy of their episodic life and autobiographical experiences, they are unable to maintain a core identity.
Memory and Identity
Identity is just another memory word the memory of yourself, the memory of the continuous “I.” In many respects, identity is a synonym of the self, or what used to be called the ego. So, if your memory is short, if you’re unable to recall things, especially in the long term, then it would be very difficult for you to develop a cohesive, coherent narrative of who you are.
This is a pathological process; it’s a problem with the integration and synthesis of one’s experience. It’s not only a defense. Freud, Jan, and others suggested that dissociation is a defense against unacceptable content. Yes, it is. But the outcome is a deficit in the ability to put together things in a way that makes sense of one’s life and imbues it with meaning.
Your Role in the Narcissist’s Mind
You, as the narcissist’s former intimate partner, former best friend, or former anything, fit right into this maelstrom into this vertigo vortex. You fit right into this chaotic scene. And this is the narcissist’s mind: a whirlpool, a kaleidoscope. It’s never static; it never settles down.
The dynamics have taken over. The narcissist has a dynamic instead of a mind, and so it’s very, very difficult for the narcissist to revisit any territory of his or her previous life.
How Memory Works?
We all generate memories on the fly. Memories are not like books in a library or folders in some archive. They’re not like files in a computer; you don’t access them and find them unchanged. There’s no immutability of memory. Memory is mutable. Memory constantly reshapes itself, reforms, disintegrates, and then reforms again.
This constant process of reconstruction is ad hoc, and it often yields memories that are incompatible with each other regarding the same event or the same point in time. And this is totally healthy. This is how all people remember.
The Narcissist’s Fragmented Memory
With the narcissist, however, the situation is exacerbated. The situation is egregious because the narcissist is unable to get hold of the fragments and shards that ought to be put together into a jigsaw puzzle which would then be experienced counterfactually as memory.
Whereas healthy people create memories, store them in long-term memory, and then retrieve them albeit altered the narcissist doesn’t have this system. The narcissist has to confabulate. The narcissist has to create fake, wannabe pseudo-memories, which he then convinces himself are real and have actually happened.
Your Place in the Narcissist’s Illusion
And you are no exception. You’re just a piece of the puzzle. You’re just a figment of the paracosm the alternative reality that the narcissist inhabits. You are a character, a protagonist in a work of fiction, which is in progress and constantly unfolding. You have no separate, independent, autonomous, objective existence. You never had.
From the very beginning, you were converted into an internal object. You spent your life with the narcissist as an internal object confabulations and ego-congruent delusions pass for memory with the narcissist.
Memory vs. Delusion
Whereas other people have memories, narcissists have confabulations, which they then misexperience as memories. While others have narratives and self-awareness regarding their strengths, weaknesses, and limitations, the narcissist has ego-congruent delusions. These delusions make him feel good make him feel messianic and are founded on a distortion of reality.
In this chaotic landscape, your prior existence in the narcissist’s life evaporates. The relationship you’ve had, the things you’ve done together, the shared experiences all of these evaporate in the final stages of the shared fantasy, where you are converted into a persecutory object: an enemy.
Do Narcissists Remember You?
Let’s take a step back. When the narcissist thinks about you rarely, much more rarely than you care to admit it’s painful to accept. Once you have left the shared fantasy, once you’ve been discarded or abandoned him, you are no more. You are erased, like a file on a computer.
You still exist, of course. When you delete files on a computer, they’re still there, but there’s no way to access them. The address pointing in your direction is gone. You have become a latent trace an imprint, a vacated internal object relegated to the recycle bin. No longer active in any meaningful psychodynamic way.
The New Narrative
When the narcissist moves on, he reframes an overarching self-enhancing narrative, which has two parts. One part accounts for the past justifying his behaviors and sustaining his grandiosity, and the other focuses on the present and future, idealizing someone new.
You are embedded in the past-oriented part, trapped there like a relic. You are a placeholder, a deactivated icon an ancient memory never to emerge unless the narcissist needs to resurrect you for a Hoover.
Dark Retrospection and Rosy Nostalgia
When the narcissist does recall you, he does so in two ways: dark retrospection and rosy retrospection.
- Dark retrospection demonizes you. Your faults are exaggerated, and your bad qualities are magnified. You become the scapegoat for everything that has gone wrong in the narcissist’s life.
- Rosy retrospection occurs later, in preparation for Hoovering. Here, the narcissist remembers only the good times: your laughter, your care, your soothing presence. This paves the way for re-idealization.
But whether dark or rosy, you are never remembered as you truly were. The narcissist gaslights himself, creating a distorted version of you one that serves his internal dynamics. So, does the narcissist remember you? Rarely, and never as you were. The narcissist remembers only the internal object the representation of you that has nothing to do with reality. Shared experiences, the life you lived together? None of it remains.
Narcissists have almost zero episodic memory. They exist in a solipsistic bubble universe, and you are but a fleeting reflection on its surface. Your presence, your face, and your shared moments are irrelevant and erased. The narcissist never truly remembers you, because to him, you never truly existed.
Leave a Comment