#2: Hoovering.
The second pattern you’ll see is something called hoovering, named after the vacuum cleaner brand. And this is where they’ll come back around and suddenly become the most amazing version of themselves. So they might be apologetic, they might be insightful, and they will almost always be promising change. And this is where they want you to remember all the things that made you fall for them in the first place. So during this hoovering, you might get the most beautiful apology or maybe it’s actually a faux apology, but it is the best thing you’ve ever heard from them. And they might promise that they’re going to get help. Maybe they might even actually start therapy.
And during these times, it’s like everything is right. All the pieces are coming together. They’ll remember your birthday. Maybe they’ll bring you flowers and write you letters that sound like they’ve had a complete personality transplant. And if you’ve been starved of this kind of treatment from them, it can absolutely feel like a miracle. Like what came over them, you don’t know, and you don’t care because finally all the pieces are coming together, and finally you get that happy ending that you’ve always wanted. But really, they’ve just switched tactics because the aggressive approach didn’t work, and now they’re trying the opposite. So this isn’t a genuine reflection.
Read More: Narcissist Favorite Text Messages.
What it is is a strategic shift and it’s designed to draw you back in. It’s kind of like a salesperson who starts with the hard cell and when that doesn’t work, they switch to being your best friend who’s really just there to help you get the best deal. So what we’re looking at with hoovering is just the same old desperate need for supply. It’s just expressed through seemingly positive behavior instead of negative. So no, they’re not apologizing because they’ve realized they’ve hurt you. They’re apologizing because they believe that an apology will work to restore contact and give them access to you once again. And they’re also not promising to change because they want to be better. They’re promising to change because they learned that’s exactly what you want to hear.
So hoovering is more dangerous than the aggressive escalation because it feeds directly into your hope that this person can change, that maybe the relationship wasn’t as bad as you thought, and that this time it’ll be different. So your empathy and your pattern recognition get hijacked by what looks like exactly what you’ve been waiting for. And once they’ve secured your attention again, once they feel safe that you’re not going anywhere, that old pattern will return because the underlying psychology hasn’t changed. They still need constant external validation to feel stable and they still lack the internal resources to maintain genuine empathy or respect. So the hoovering behavior was really just a performance designed to solve their supply problem.
Recommended Book: Becoming the Narcissist’s Nightmare: How to Devalue and Discard the Narcissist While Supplying Yourself- By Shahida Arabi.
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