"Show me how you are deleting this recordings from every fucking hard drive and deleting this YouTube channel and I swear if you lie to me we are done, even more done than now. You are a fucking criminal and I am sick of your downplaying and blaming me for your actions instead of accepting responsibility. Simple question, did you delete it yes or no? And don't you lie to me.  "     

                                                                                                                                                                                     L.O. (The Terrified Victim)

Phase Two: Devaluation Part A

 

What is meant by "Devaluation Phase"?

The second phase in the narcissistic abuse cycle is called devaluation and is marked by the following changes in dynamic:

 

  1. Emotional Distance:
    Where once there was warmth, admiration, and a connection, the narcissist now withdraws. They become colder, less responsive, and subtly critical, often without explanation. The target may try to 'fix' things but will not succeed. .

  2. Subtle Criticism and Undermining:
    The narcissist begins to chip away at the victim’s self-esteem, using sarcasm, passive-aggressive remarks, or “helpful” advice that is disrespectful. Praise is replaced with criticism, often disguised as false concern.

  3. Gaslighting and Reality Distortion:
    The narcissist begins to manipulate facts, deny past promises, and question the target’s memory or perception. This is designed to erode the victim’s trust in their own judgment and increase dependency on the abuser's version of reality.

  4. Withdrawal of Affection:
    Acts of affection dissapear. Communication becomes erratic. The narcissist may disappear for hours or days, ignoring messages, only to return with no explanation, subtly conditioning the victim to accept this behavior as normal.

  5. Triangulation and Comparison:
    The narcissist introduces third parties, real or fictional, to provoke jealousy and insecurity. They may talk how others find them attractive, implying that the victim no longer measures up.

  6. Shifting Blame:
    Conflicts arise more frequently, but the narcissist always blames the victim: “You’re too sensitive,” or “you are mentally ill, you need a therapist”

  7. Silent Treatment:
    As punishment or control, the narcissist may go silent, not to resolve conflict, but to assert dominance and provoke the victim into 'reactive abuse' behavior. The victim often apologizes for offenses committed by the abuser.

 

Purpose of the Devaluation Phase:


This phase is not accidental. It is calculated to:

  • Test the victim’s emotional dependence & weaken boundaries

  • Create confusion and cognitive dissonance

  • Prepare the stage for either discard or hoovering

Where the love-bombing phase seduced, the devaluation phase enslaves. It does this by trauma bonding, a well known phenomena akin to gambling addiction and is caused by intermittent repetitive reinforcement. The narcissist will hijack your body's biology to addict you to their abuse.

January 2024

L.O. and I began the new year making plans for our future. She painted vivid pictures of our life together in Germany. We even discussed marriage and the possibility of having children. Emotionally invested, I began taking real steps toward meeting her, I applied for a passport, we discussed possible travel dates, looked at ticket prices and I started researching visa requirements for a one month stay.

January also marked a turning point. That was when the façade began to crack. We had our first serious conflict, which I now recognize as the end of the love bombing phase and the start of my devaluation.

We had been writing competitive poetry together on our private Discord server. When I slightly criticized one of her poems her reaction was swift and extreme. She exploded into a torrent of verbal abuse, using words I had never heard come from her lips. 

Narcissistic Rage

Furious, she insisted I had no idea what I was talking about and that, as a professional writer, she knew better. She swore at me and, despite my attempts to calm things down, continued attacking until she abruptly blocked me, on Discord, WhatsApp, and her phone.

I was stunned. I had no idea why such a mild comment provoked that level of hostility. I tried to reach her by email over the next three days, but received no reply. I was distraught and deeply confused.

Looking back, it was a textbook case of narcissistic injury. Even the slightest perceived criticism had pierced her fragile self-image. But more importantly, I now believe she had simply exhausted her ability to maintain the mask. The sweet, loving persona she had presented since August was wearing thin. Behind it was something far colder—someone who preferred cruelty, control, and sadism to connection or honesty.

The End of the Honeymoon

That incident marked the end of the love bombing. Through the rest of January, the affection continued, but now it came in waves, sudden mood swings, cold silences, and erratic bursts of anger, followed by apologies and renewed declarations of love. It was the beginning of the intermittent reinforcement cycle, the psychological hook used by narcissists to establish trauma bonding through unpredictability.

The honeymoon was over.

 

The Truth Dawns

February 2024:

Shifting Expectations

In February, I obtained my passport and began arranging my visa to travel to Germany. I was fully committed to meeting L.O. and exploring our relationship in person. On the day I received my passport, I was overcome with excitement. While driving home, I recorded a video where I happily shouted, "I'm coming to Germany!" and sent it to her, expecting her to share my enthusiasm.

Her response, however, was disappointing and revealed the first clear sign of what would become a pattern of postponements and backpedaling. She sent a voice note in which she was audibly flustered, stammering:

"So, wow, I'm very proud of you that you organized all of this and wow, it's amazing, it's getting real now. I'm like, shit. In this moment in your video when you said, "I'm coming!" and I was like, shit, I have to do some workouts today because he's getting serious about it now and I'm like, fuck. No, I'm just kidding and I can't believe you're really coming here. It's just, wow. I just, oh my God, always when I think about it, I just always hope that it's not going to be disappointment for you... I just hope it won't be a disappointment for you because I know what you're hoping that will happen and stuff... I mean, if you're next to me and we will be like strangers, you know... I can tell you there will be disappointments. I'm sure there will... If this person stands next to you, there's always something that you're like disappointed by... I just hope you're being realistic and shit and if you promise me you're realistic about things, then I really, really look forward to meet you."

(See audio recording below with German subtitles)

Above is a voice recording of the narcissists reaction to realizing that I was serious about visiting her in Germany. In contrast to the first voice message this one is markedly different in tone and it is easy to hear the reluctance and hesitation in her message. (Voice altered to protect privacy)

Unexpected response

This response was shocking and confusing. For months, we had been engaging in intimate conversations where L.O. had consistently initiated discussions about physical intimacy. She had repeatedly assured me that our age difference was irrelevant and that she couldn't wait for close physical contact. Now, suddenly, she was expressing reservations and setting expectations for disappointment.

I responded expressing my confusion about this sudden shift, but she remained silent for the rest of the day. This silence was particularly problematic as I was supposed to purchase my flight ticket that same day, which now became impossible given her new reservation. This was the first postponement. The first of many.

At 3:00 a.m. the following morning, L.O. sent me a WhatsApp message that compounded my confusion. Rather than acknowledging her own reservations, she blamed me, claiming I had been placing "too much pressure on her to have sex", a complete fabrication given that she had consistently been the initiator of our intimate conversations. The message continued by stating she had time to think things over and ended by saying that she felt this "contact" was not good for her and that she was not interested in feeding my ego by being my sexual plaything and that I should rather go "be with your old wife". She then Blocked me again on all platforms.

 

This incident exemplified several classic narcissistic tactics:

 

  1. Moving the goalposts: Changing expectations after I had committed resources and emotional energy
  2. Projection: Accusing me of pressuring her about sex when she had been the primary initiator
  3. Creating artificial obstacles: Introducing new concerns precisely when progress was about to be made
  4. Blame-shifting: Making her reluctance my fault rather than taking responsibility for her changed feelings

 

This would be the first of eight postponements over a seven-month period, each one accompanied by an increasingly implausible explanation. Once she actually tried to convince me that we needed to delay our meeting as she was starting a new job and in Germany it was "customary to go out every night with your new colleagues to drink, for at least the first two weeks." The cancellations served multiple purposes in the narcissistic playbook: maintaining control over the relationship, testing my commitment, and perhaps most importantly, ensuring that the fantasy relationship remained just that, a fantasy, without the reality check that an in-person meeting would provide.

 

Escalating Devaluation


March 2024

The dynamic shifted from manipulation to direct sabotage. It all started with a WhatsApp conversation gone wrong. She flew into a rage when I complained that she was ignoring me, and she then blocked me and gave me the now familiar 'silent treatment'. 

She then contacted me again a few days later demanding that I delete every message and photo I had of her and our conversations, including my own texts. This is how she deletes evidence of her rages and blackmailing attempts as well as her verbal abuse.

Several interesting things to note. She uses the word 'destroy' 6 times. This is typical of people with catastrophic thinking patterns. Also, the text highlighted in blue is typical projection, accusing me of doing the very things she is guilty of, and lastly note how she never calls it a relationship, even though there was talk of marriage and a family she still calls it a 'contact'. Narcissists deliberately avoid acknowledging any obligation and use words like this to justify their behaviour. 

False Accusations

When I refused to comply with her demands, she acted on her threats by sending detailed emails to both my wife and my employer. The message to my employer, reproduced below, was especially alarming in its calculated attempt to destroy my career and reputation.

With the subject line "Urgent: Harassment and Stalking by Employee," L.O. contacted my employer, falsely accusing me of harassing and stalking her for "almost a year."

Her email included extreme and fabricated claims: that I had "terrorized and stalked" her, "threatened to kill" her, and had used AI to "manipulate voice messages" and create "AI talking porn." She ended the message by threatening to report me to the German police the next day if my employer failed to act immediately.

She later deleted several YouTube videos on her channel to hide her expertise in AI voice creation, including ones narrated by an AI version of her own voice that she created before ever meeting me.

The allegations were deliberately fabricated to damage my reputation in the AI video space, a calculated move to cast doubt on my ethics and cause maximum professional harm.

 

Below: The email she wrote trying to get me fired.

She simultaneously deleted our entire Discord chat history, over 800 pages of messages, in an effort to erase all evidence of our mutual relationship, which would have immediately disproved her later claims of harassment. Months of conversations, poetry, scripts, shared plans, and emotional confessions were wiped out in minutes.

It was narcissistic rage, triggered by my refusal to comply with her demands. More than that, it marked the first time I saw just how far she was willing to go to maintain control, targeting me where it would hurt most.

And despite threatening to go to the police and claiming she was severing contact, she did the opposite. She remained in close, daily communication with me right up until August 2024. In July she sent me an invitation letter to meet in person. I believe I’m fortunate that I never accepted it.

Below: My reaction to her first blackmailing of me

Below: The email L.O. sent to my wife, filled with lies, distortions, and unsubstantiated claims. No evidence, just accusations carefully worded to cast herself as a helpless bystander. It is a passive-aggressive attempt to sow division while presenting herself as the innocent party. Classic victim-playing and sympathy baiting, straight out of the narcissistic playbook.

Below is an example of her blackmail tactics. The narcissist explains what she will show to my acquaintances if I do not comply with her wishes. She frequently blackmailed me. It was her only method of 'negotiation'.

Cycles of Abuse and Reactive Abuse

 

April 2024

The spring months of 2024 revealed a clear and destructive pattern. We alternated between brief periods of calm and sudden, manufactured conflicts, usually followed by L.O. disappearing for days or even weeks. These silent treatments became increasingly brutal and took a growing psychological toll.

 

April was the worst. L.O. vanished for 21 days, three full weeks of total silence after months of daily, intense contact. I suffered a breakdown during this period, and as described below, became desperate to get some sort of reaction from her. As the silence grew longer, I became desperate for any sign of her.

 

With all social channels blocked, I turned to email, the only method she hadn’t shut down. My emails began as pleas but, as the silence dragged on, they grew darker. I now recognize this as reactive abuse, a documented response to sustained psychological manipulation where the victim lashes out in uncharacteristic ways. That recognition does not erase the guilt and shame I still feel about what I wrote.

 

Narcissists provoke these reactions deliberately. They know where to apply pressure and when to withdraw. Once they trigger a reaction, they store it as ammunition. Later, when they want to present themselves as the victim, they pull those responses out of context to support their story. These tactics are well documented in psychological literature.

 

When L.O. finally returned, she used my emails against me. She ignored everything that led to them and focused only on my worst moments. She called me a "psycho terrorist," a "fucking criminal," a "sick 60-year-old pervert," and other names. She used those emails to shame, threaten, and control me, reminding me constantly that she could share them with others if I did not comply.

 

This tactic, provoking extreme emotional reactions and then using them as proof of the victim’s instability, is common among narcissistic abusers. It serves several purposes:

  • Shifting blame onto the victim

  • Collecting "evidence" for a future smear campaign

  • Inducing shame and self-doubt

  • Creating a power imbalance that forces the victim to seek forgiveness

 

During this time, I began researching narcissistic personality disorder and recognized many of the same patterns in our relationship:

 

  • Gaslighting: She denied past conversations or rewrote events to make me question my memory

  • Ghosting: She disappeared without explanation, creating anxiety and confusion

  • Blocking and blame-shifting: After provoking conflict, she cut communication and blamed me for her actions

  • Intermittent reinforcement: She alternated between affection and cruelty, creating a psychological dependency

 

Even with this awareness, it was difficult to let go. Like many victims of narcissistic abuse, I still hoped the woman I fell for would return. I could not yet accept that the loving, attentive partner I once knew had never been real. She was a carefully crafted persona, designed to hook me into the cycle.
Next: The devaluation worsens