SurvivingInfidelity.com^®

Two years ago I was involved (online in a chatroom) with a clinical narcissist starting in Summer 0f 2019 and ending in Summer of 2020. Anyone who has been thru that type of emotional/verbal abuse knows the severity of it & thank God it was just ONLINE. We may have had a "bad" boyfriend or husband in life, but dealing with a clinical narcissist is a different animal. I've educated myself on these creatures in depth....so in depth I should have a Masters in psych by now, LOL. I went thru all the phases, the idealization, love bombing, devalue, discard and replace stages. All the while he was still trying to contact me daily, even during the discard and replace stages and continued to call well over a year after I went NC.

And the "flying monkey" he triangulated and replaced me with was a piece of work herself. The drama queen herself has admitted to being diagnosed a borderline. In summer of 2020, I messaged her on the chat program to ask if they were talking, she denied it, even though they were. Then I was nice enough to warn the poor girl about him. After she was sneaking around with him as well as saying things behind my back, the smartest chess move I could have made was going cold NC and letting her get a taste of the roller coaster ride that she supposedly wanted to experience so badly without me standing in the way. "Here ya go, he's all yours...have fun, lemme know how it goes." Har Har Har!

So, on this chat program, there is a toxic and negative "drama" chatroom called the Lion's Den where people bash and bully each other for pure fun. I don't go in that chatroom on my main screenname because I don't want anymore drama than I've already was thrown into 2 years ago, however I do go on a fake name to watch the OW get trashed by everyone. Men and women in that chatroom tell her personal business, call her ugly, call her a bad mom, call her a slut, basically everything she accused me of being.

I know what you are thinking, "I WISH I COULD WATCH THE OW GET THE CRAP KICKED OUT OF HER BY OTHERS ON A DAILY BASIS! LOL. However, it's getting to a point where it's just unproductive and taking time away from me trying to improve my life. It's almost like an addiction, waiting around for her to get in a fight and lose, which happens daily. And then once I feel like I got to witness a dose of her karma, which doesn't take long, I sign out. Talk about narcissistic! I'm being "narcissistic" myself, getting joy from someone else's pain, even though this girl DESERVES it times 10.

I already know she will continue to get trashed and exposed in that chatroom whether I'm there on a fake name or not, so WHY DO I KEEP GOING BACK TO WITNESS HER DAILY KARMA? Are there any tips you guys have to disconnect from this particular addiction. Is this a form of obsessive compulsive disorder?

I would relish the opportunity to watch the AP suffer the consequences of her own actions. However, at some point you do have to move on and just rest assured that they are awful people who will suffer through most of their lives. Good riddance. Let the bottom feeders stay on the bottom where they belong.

I think the idea of participating in an online community dedicated to bullying is abhorrent, no matter who is involved. These activities warp people's minds and allows them to dehumanize other people; if you do this long enough, it will start to affect how you treat and interact with people in real life (if it hasn't already). Even if OW deserves to be called a slut, a bad mom, ugly, etc, it would still be a tragedy if she attempted suicide because she couldn't cope with the constant onslaught of online vitriol.

Quite honestly-- and I'm saying this with the utmost compassion-- it doesn't seem like you're just addicted to this chatroom about the OW, but with online drama in general. I don't mean to diminish the very real pain that you experienced in your online relationship; after all, many of us work fully remote and haven't even met the people we interact with on a daily basis, but from the little you've written here, it seems like you've forsaken real-life interactions for a virtual soap opera.

The attraction to this medium is understandable; you can hide behind a fake name and an avatar and say things to and about people that would get you punched and ostracized in real life. But that's a terribly unhealthy way to live.

As a first step, I advise you to get into therapy, ideally with a specialist in addiction and/or personality disorders, so that you can cope with the damage done by this guy you met online, learn healthy coping mechanisms, and disengage yourself from toxic online environments and interactions.

[This message edited by BluerThanBlue at 8:36 PM, Thursday, May 19th]

As much of a train wreck as it is, ask yourself how much space in your head she gets to have rent free. She deserves NONE.
Try to focus on you and your life, and leave the trash out by the curb, not in your valuable head space.

I think you’ve gotten enough satisfaction out of this.

Time to move on.

I would guess that one of the things you are looking for is justice. That was a real sticking point for me for years. What had happened felt wholly unfair…and, for me, that called into question how ALL of life works. It challenged the very foundations I had.

Ultimately, it was a concept that I just had to let go of. I couldn’t think of one single thing that could happen that would make everything else that had happen somehow "ok". I could get little "snippets" of satisfaction here and there…but comparatively, they felt hollow, simple, light - and that was subsequently only making me feel more injustice. It wasn’t what was or wasn’t happening…it’s that what happened incurred a "debt" that could never be simply "paid". There was a lot of grief in that.

In the bigger picture what I came to ultimately understand was that I could be "lucky" or "unlucky". It was a perspective that only I could determine. Life itself just IS.