One of the best things about the internet is finding other high IQ people in it. There's nothing better than finding someone in their own lane who is clearly very smart, thinking about issues from their own perspectives (professional or otherwise), freely granting you insights you would otherwise never get in real life. When writing It Follows I spent quite a lot of time researching about various psychological issues and eventually found myself on... psychology/therapy/relationship YouTube? Essentially channels that talk about these issues. Most people are not very good, mostly saying obvious things, but every once in a while I hit a channel where the person is clearly very smart, producing real and true and never before seen (by me) insights.
There's this popular Obsession tweet going around now:
how your gf looks at you when you ask her to block the guy who "raped" her in 2019:
It's a good tweet, the response by everyone has been funny too, but it is interesting to think about what's actually going on in those situations in the cases where they're actually true. Coincidentally, one of those intelligent psychology-tubers I like wrote a message explaining it:
Imagine your store gets robbed and it sort of rearranges your psyche in a way you don't fully understand. (People keep telling you 'so what, you sell and part ways with items from the store all the time consensually, this isn't meaningfully different.' You yourself aren't sure why you keep waking up at night in a cold sweat.)
One day the robber walks back into the store. You instantly stiffen, scanning his body for the gun he pulled on you last time. Instead, he leans up against the counter, joking and laughing breezily as though you are old friends. You do everything you can to play along, hoping it will prevent him from pulling a weapon on you again.
He leaves without staling anything and you feel the biggest sense of relief you've felt in ages. From this point on, your sense of feigned kinship with him becomes the thing your body believes is keeping you safe from further violations. You start trying to signal closeness with him in every future instance where you feel most threatened.
When you learn he is telling people around town that he never robbed you, you handed him the items happily, it feels like an imaginary parallel reality is being offered to you — one that could maybe, at least delusionally, paint over the horror of what did happen, for the mere price of adopting some severe cognitive dissonance, which is already being heavily socially reinforced.
Acting in accordance with this false reality becomes easier (and much more instinctual for the body that lives in fear) than trying to push the boulder of reinforcing truth continuously uphill. But the traumatized self still fragments — tells the real story in moments of safety then snaps back to instinctual fear or shame defenses in moments of threat.
And then a bunch of people with zero understanding of how fawn responses actually work read about them on Twitter and can't get out of their own perspective about it.
This is extremely insightful and well explained, I love it. Many of her videos contain similar levels of clear and reasoned explanations for various psychological issues and it's wonderful to find people online who can be this clear about what they say and how they can contextualize it all so well. I love the internet.
One important thing to remember when breaking up with someone, or parting ways with (narcissistic) people in general, however, is that it's better to let them come out on top. This is especially true if you're a man breaking up with a woman, because women in general cannot handle rejection well, so you just have to let them win. At the lowest possible level this manifests itself as, some girl is attracted to some guy, the guy is not interested and rejects her directly, so her immediate response will be along the lines of "he's gay." It will not be, what's wrong with me, what did I do wrong, do I need to looksmaxx, etc, it will be, that guy is gay, because it couldn't possibly be true that he rejected me. And at the highest possible level this manifests itself as, he raped me, because it couldn't possibly be true that he had sex with me multiple times but he doesn't want anything more serious.
They cannot accept a world where they are lower than you, so a self-defense mechanism triggers to prevent their self-image from being hurt too much, and so they have to balance the ledger, that's when they get obsessed with getting back at you, with doing everything in their power to destroy your life, when the rape accusations come essentially, so that they have the last word. What they are fundamentally after is protecting their external self-image, and what you should be after is protecting your internal one.
Because it is a lot easier to successfully disengage from such scenarios, without letting them devolve into rape accusations, if you have a set of principles you live by and if you didn't act outside of those principles at any point in your interactions with this person, which should be the case, because you should always be acting righteously, and if this is the case, then you can say to yourself, "I know I didn't do anything wrong in my interactions with this person, it's fine" and you can actually let go without needing any external victories yourself, because you have internal ones.