Save yourself the heartache

Time of India

06-05-2025

Kalpana Nair is a Certified Life Coach from the Life Coach Training Institute from San Diego, USA. She is also an MBA in Marketing, from ITM, Mumbai, India and has a BSc degree from Chatham College, Pittsburgh, USA. She has worked in the corporate sector for 15 years with Contract Advertising, Colliers International and Product of the Year, in Business Development and have been responsible for creating a network of top corporate clients for the companies I worked in. LESS ... MORE
Narcissists don't have the faculty to love. When you get this you understand the cycle of abuse they put you through for the sensation of power and control.
It is heady seeing a grown adult squirming. It is a kind of dominance felt by the toxic person when they see this adult wanting a certain emotion from them. The toxic person feels power giving the adult the emotion when they wish to and withholding it when they deem fit. All of this keeps the adult firmly in their grasp to puppet around.
We often romanticize love, thinking if we give more, understand more or hold on longer, try and become better and work on the relationship, the other person will eventually meet us with the same sincerity. But when it comes to toxic relationships, especially with individuals who have never truly known love, this hope can become a trap.
A broken cup cannot hold water, just like a person raised without love cannot offer love. No matter how convincing they seem, they do not have the reserves within them, like you have.
The truth is, toxic individuals are re-enacting the only blueprint they've ever known – one rooted in neglect, emotional manipulation, control and survival. Their relationships aren't expressions of mutual connection but are systems of power and control. They are replaying their earliest memories of wanting love but never receiving it – and then surviving that constant neglect and hatred by developing this persona that you see that no longer needed it. It helped them survive. Now, they play with what you hold dear – which are the emotions you seek as a healthy individual – and control you through their toxic manoeuvres in dispensing those.
This is what we call the cycle of abuse and it's not random. It is patterned and predictable. It begins with idealization or love bombing, when you're flooded with attention, affection and intense connection. It feels intoxicating. You believe you've finally found 'the one.'
But what follows is devaluation, when subtle put-downs, gaslighting, emotional withdrawal or criticisms are disguised as concern. You find yourself overthinking, blaming yourself and morphing your values, boundaries and your personality just to keep things stable and not wasting all the time and effort you already spent on them.
Eventually comes discard, when a cold withdrawal, silent treatment or dramatic exit leaves you spiralling with self-doubt and grief. But then, just when you begin to reclaim your strength, comes the hoovering, when sudden apologies, nostalgic messages of euphoric recall or promises of change melt your heart and you believe they have done the self-work and changed.
You are willing to give them the second or third or fourth chance and just like that you're pulled back in. This is the on- again-off-again craziness that you see all over the place, especially magnified in tinsel towns of the world.
You keep trying and believing that if you love them enough, they will change.
But here's the sobering truth:
They don't have the faculty to love. They never learned how as they never experienced safe, healthy and consistent love.
This isn't personal. It has to do with altered grey matter in their brain that causes them to not have empathy, remorse or guilt. It's not about you not being enough. It's about them never having developed the internal capacity to meet you there.
Healing begins the moment you stop trying to decode them and start choosing you.
Your healing begins the moment you say: 'They don't have the capacity to love.'
Your healing comes when you hold on to your truth, your sincerity and all the love and empathy you showed. These are your best, most purest emotions. They are to be upheld and used to fill you.
Be humbled by your truth – that you have what it takes to get your heart to ache. You have the faculty to feel.
Use it for your own good. For your highest soul-connection.
Rejoice and feel lucky and save yourself the heartache knowing you have been found to connect with your soul's wisdom and love!
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Views expressed above are the author's own.