Hoovering

The illusion of repair

 

 

 

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Introduction — the vacuum of longing

This essay is a reflection. It’s written from the desire to understand what repeats itself when love becomes entangled with emptiness. What began as something personal has ultimately become a mirror in which many may recognize themselves.

 

Hoovering takes its name from the vacuum cleaner: the pulling and drawing in the attempt to regain what has been lost. In relationships with a person with covert narcissism, this notion gains an almost symbolic weight. The moment you create distance, a void emerges in the other that’s not about missing you, but about control. Not the ache of a heart that has lost something precious, but the discomfort of a self that has lost its mirror.

 

That void becomes unbearable because it marks the boundary between the real and the unreal. Where the healthy person feels sadness and allows grief, the person with narcissism feels disintegration: a looming abyss in which the constructed self threatens to fall apart. Hoovering then becomes an attempt to halt that process, to regain significance through the gaze of the other.

 

Clinically, hoovering is a regulatory mechanism. The person with narcissism tries to soothe an internal emptiness through external contact and validation: an attempt at affect regulation through the other. It echoes what once emerged in childhood: an attachment dynamic in which closeness was never safe, but conditional. Instead of contact rooted in vulnerability, there is contact rooted in panic: “If you let go of me, I disappear.”

 

For the one on the receiving end, hoovering often feels like confusion. The sudden messages, the unexpected warmth after months of silence, the carefully chosen words that resemble remorse. Everything in the tone evokes recognition: the voice from the beginning, when love still seemed mutual. And precisely that recognition touches something deep within you — the memory of connection.

 

But what is being reawakened here is not genuine repair. It’s the repetition of an old dance: pulling close and pushing away, idealizing and denying. A movement in which love cannot breathe, because it remains trapped in a dynamic of fear and control.

 

Hoovering is therefore not a sign of change, but of refusal; the refusal to acknowledge that the relationship has ended, that boundaries exist and that love is not possession. And yet, painful as it is, there is a certain beauty in this dynamic: it reveals how deeply the longing for repair is rooted in the human psyche. Even in the distorted form of hoovering, you can hear the echo of a primal longing: that connection was once whole and that perhaps it could become whole again.

 

 

 

The cycle of denial

Hoovering usually appears at the end of a cyclical pattern that began long before. What seems on the surface like a sudden expression of regret is, in truth, a continuation of the same dynamic that shaped the relationship from the start: pulling in, idealizing, devaluing, discarding and then pulling in again. It is a closed loop sustained by denial.

 

In the first phase, idealization, the other is not simply a person, but a mirror of perfection. In the presence of that person, the individual with narcissism experiences themselves as whole. But because that feeling does not arise from within, it is as fragile as it is intoxicating. The moment reality intrudes — when you set a boundary, feel tired or simply reveal yourself as human — the mirror becomes dull. The disappointment that follows is unbearable because it confronts the narcissistic person with their own emptiness.

 

Where healthy attachment can tolerate that the other also fails at times, the person with narcissism experiences that as betrayal. The emerging pain of the unsafe child, once ignored, belittled, or shamed, is reactivated. Instead of feeling that pain, attention shifts to you: suddenly you become the source of their unrest, the carrier of their unbearable feeling. And so begins the devaluation: the systematic diminishing of the other to restore a sense of control.

 

When you eventually extract yourself from this cycle — often exhausted, confused, but determined — the phase of rejection begins. The narcissistic person turns away completely or seems to immerse themselves in a new beginning. But beneath the surface, something still gnaws: not the loss of you as a person, but the loss of what you represented. You were the keeper of their apparent wholeness. And when that mirror falls away, the false self collapses with it.

 

That moment of loss activates what Otto Kernberg described as narcissistic rage and disorganization: the struggle between a fragile ego and an overwhelming emptiness. Out of that emptiness arises the impulse to hoover: an attempt to regain control, not out of a desire for genuine closeness, but to restore the sense of self.

 

Clinically, this is a regressive movement: the reactivation of an old attachment strategy. The narcissistic person returns to the relational stage to avoid what they cannot bear internally: rejection, loneliness, truth and shame. Hoovering is therefore not a rational decision but an affective survival response rooted in a deep fear of self-loss.

 

To the receiver, it may look like the other has finally gained insight. The tone is softer, the words familiar; it resembles remorse. But what unfolds here is not a moral awakening — it’s the psychological necessity of maintaining the image of a self-affirming relationship. The narcissistic individual denies not only the end of the relationship, but also the reality that led to it.

 

Hoovering is thus the final act in the cycle of denial: the inability to integrate the break as fact.

 

Where healthy grief allows movement — from idealization to reality, from loss to meaning — the narcissistic dynamic remains imprisoned in repetition. The pain of loss is not lived through but reinterpreted and reshaped into strategy.

 

 

 

The mechanism of hope

Hoovering works not only because the narcissistic person cannot let go, but also because you are still hoping. Not hoping for repetition, but for healing: that this time it will be different, that the suffering has meant something, that the other finally feels what you felt all along and sees what you have long seen. That the other will finally acknowledge and confess.

 

Hope may be the most human of all emotions, yet within this dynamic it becomes part of the mechanism: a psychological thread that keeps the cycle intact. The words with which hoovering appears strike precisely at that vulnerable place. They awaken memories of the beginning, of the softness of idealization and the feeling of finally being seen.

 

In your brain, the same circuits light up as in addiction: the dopaminergic systems that anticipate reward. Even the thought of repair — before anything actually changes — creates a sense of relief. The body reacts as if love is returning, while in truth it is the anticipation itself that feels rewarding.

 

This neurobiological mechanism explains why partners often relapse into narcissistic relationships, even against their better judgment. Hoovering triggers the memory of connection, but not the connection itself. It is the re-experience of the first stage, a brief spark of hope that dulls the painful awareness of loss and momentarily revives the illusion of love.

 

Psychologically, this is a form of trauma bonding: the linking of pain and reward, of injury and relief. The nervous system learns that the very source of confusion is also the source of comfort and that makes letting go so difficult.

 

In attachment terms, the original tension of the unsafe child reappears: the parent who gives closeness and withdraws it, who promises love and then retreats. The child learns to survive by hoping again and again, by interpreting every signal of attention as proof of love. That hope, once an adaptive strategy, becomes a trap in adult relationships — an inner conviction that love can be regained if only you understand enough, forgive enough and feel enough.

 

Hoovering touches precisely that place.

 

The narcissistic person senses your longing and mirrors it back — often without malicious intent, but from their own need for regulation. Their words sound sincere — “I’m still in love with you,” “I want to hold you,” “I feel so much regret” — because in that moment, there truly is affect. But it’s an affect that cannot endure, because it’s not carried by inner integration. Once the threat of loss has been neutralized, the system shuts down again.

 

The hope you feel is therefore not naïve. It is ancient, rooted in the most human desire to connect and to believe that love transforms. But within this cycle, hope is not the path to healing; it is the thread that allows the cycle to sustain itself. Real healing begins only when hope shifts from the other to yourself: when you realize that the person you long for is an illusion, that the love you are waiting for already lives within you and that repair is found not in repetition, but in recognition.

 

 

 

The language of guilt and remorse

There is always a moment when the silence is broken. After more than a year, a message appears that sounds different from all the rest. No blame, no defensiveness, but remorse. “I feel so much regret,” “I miss you,” “I've hurt you.” The tone is softer, the words seem to resonate with truth. And for a moment, it feels as if something is shifting;  as if the other finally dares to enter the mirror you have been holding up all along.

 

But what happens here is rarely true remorse. It is the language of remorse — the form without the core. The words function as a regulatory tool: an attempt to soften the tension of loss, not to take responsibility. The person with narcissism senses that your heart opens at vulnerability and their heart is vulnerable, but not sustainably. It’s affect without reflection, emotion without integration. Words without meaning.

 

In that moment of supposed remorse, the narcissistic person is not seeking forgiveness but reaffirmation of existence: Do you still see me? The apology becomes a means of restoring the fragile sense of self. Heinz Kohut described how the narcissistic self remains perpetually dependent on external affirmation to hold itself together. Remorse then becomes not a moral act but an attempt at self-preservation. Instead of introspection — the ability to see yourself through the eyes of the other — projection returns: the other once again becomes the container for the fragile self.

 

For the one receiving this remorse, it feels entirely different. The words reach something essential, they reopen the memory of connection. You hear not only the sentence, but also the undertone: the longing for healing, the awareness of loss. And that’s precisely what makes it so deceptive. For where genuine remorse implies an inner movement — a willingness to confront yourself, to carry guilt and shame — pseudo-remorse remains suspended in language. It speaks of pain without truly bearing it.

 

Hannah Arendt wrote that thoughtlessness is the beginning of moral decay. In the context of hoovering, that insight becomes tangible. Remorse loses its moral weight when it’s not rooted in the capacity for inner dialogue. Those who cannot hear themselves, repeats themselves. The narcissistic apology is therefore often not a conversion, but a repetition of the same emptiness in a different form.

 

Donald Winnicott described true remorse as a sign of the true self — a self that only emerges where safety exists. But in the false self of the narcissistic person, that space is sealed. The remorse sounds lifelike, but it is an echo without origin. It's genuinely felt in the moment because the moment is their only reality. Once the tension subsides or new distraction is found, the temporary capacity for empathy fades just as quickly.

 

For the receiver, it’s both confusing and hopeful. The words land exactly where they are meant to land. For a moment, they open the place in you that still longs for recognition, for truth, for a form of repair. But this is precisely where you must be vigilant. Not by hardening, but by discerning. Where words are not carried by action, remorse is not a bridge but a lure.

 

True remorse breathes silence. It doesn't seek an answer, doesn't ask for return and doesn't aim to restore control. It’s not demanding and doesn't plea for forgiveness. True remorse creates space for truth — and only in truth can something new take shape. Not between you and the other, but within you.

 

 

 

The soul as bait

Sometimes the other does not return with words, but with signs. An unexpected like, a song you once listened to together, a photograph that subtly evokes something from the past. Or, more refined still, a digital footprint: a name suddenly appearing in the contact form on your website. It’s contact without touch, presence without responsibility. A form of communication that says nothing and yet means everything.

 

 Hoovering has many faces, but this is its most delicate: the indirect attempt to re-establish connection through symbols, memory and resonance. The person with narcissism knows that words can be too direct, too risky. So she chooses something subtler, something powerful precisely because of its ambiguity. Because you feel it. Your body recognizes the vibration of the past, the resonance of a world that still lives somewhere in your system. One glimpse of a name, one song and suddenly you are momentarily back in that old reality — not out of foolishness, but because your nervous system remembers that contact as love.

 

What unfolds here is, in essence, a form of conditioning. During the relationship, your brain was trained to associate attention with meaning. Every form of acknowledgment, however minimal, became a reward. Now, after the break, that same system remains active: a signal of presence triggers the old pattern. The emptiness of silence is briefly interrupted by a spark of hope and that feels like relief. Clinically, this is a dopaminergic response, similar to what is seen in addiction: the body does not respond to real contact, but to the expectation of contact.

 

The narcissistic person doesn't always use this subtle power of memory consciously, but always instinctively. By appearing in your awareness, she temporarily restores her own sense of existence. She doesn’t need words, because the echo of the past speaks for her. This is what psychology sometimes calls a narcissistic feedback loop: the self is restored through the attention of the other, without any real encounter taking place. The presence of the other becomes a reflective surface in which the shaky self-image temporarily regains shape.

 

For the receiver, this feels like an energetic disturbance. You know it means nothing and yet something trembles. It evokes not only longing, but also fatigue — the recognition of an old, inner ache returning. The soul feels the difference between memory and reality, but the body needs time to learn that distinction. That is the paradox of trauma: even the echo of what was unsafe can initially feel familiar, because it was familiar. But familiarity is not the same as safety.

 

In a spiritual sense, hoovering on this level is not communication, but occupation. Not in the literal sense of domination, but as an energetic phenomenon in which the other, through subtle signals, claims your attention. And attention is energy. Wherever you look, life flows. And wherever you keep looking, something of you remains. It takes courage to withdraw that gaze — not out of resentment, but out of love for yourself.

 

For every sign the other sends is ultimately a signal of emptiness: a call from a self that does not know how to exist in silence. And within that lies the tragedy. What looks like power is often fear; what resembles control is actually panic. And yet, painful as it is, it’s not your task to fill that emptiness.

 

When you stop responding, the dance stops. You see through the mechanism, you still feel it, but you no longer let it rule you. The gaze you once directed toward the other turns inward. What once served as bait becomes a mirror — a reminder of how deeply you have loved and how far you have come in letting go.

 

Hoovering loses its power the moment you realize that what you feel is not the return of love, but the echo of an old pattern that once wore the name “love.” The silence that follows feels frightening at first, but slowly becomes pure. It fills with something quieter than hope and stronger than longing: harmony.

 

 

 

The break as sacred boundary

There comes a moment when something inside you falls silent. Not out of resignation, but out of clarity. The endless tide of pulling and pushing loses its force. The echoes grow softer, the signs less insistent. You sense that a threshold has been reached; not between you and the other, but between repetition and repair. What once began as love now ends not in hatred, but in a kind of sacred exhaustion: the realization that continuing any further would no longer be faithful to yourself.

 

In that silence, the true meaning of breaking emerges. Not as destruction, but as the separation from what no longer belongs to you. Psychologically, this is the moment of differentiation: the reclaiming of the self after a period of fusion. During the relationship, you were constantly attuned to the other — her moods, her emotions, her chaos and emptiness — until you almost forgot yourself. Now begins the process of disentangling, in which your system relearns how to regulate from within. The breath that for so long sought rhythm outside you slowly returns home.

 

The break is painful because it demands something our culture rarely teaches: grieving without a story. There is no clear ending, no shared conclusion, no mutual farewell. Only you know what has been lost. That makes the grief lonely. And yet, within that loneliness, there is a kind of purity. Grief is the path on which hope transforms into truth; where the past no longer exists as a promise, but as a memory.

 

Clinically, this is the moment when the traumatic bond begins to unravel. The nervous system, accustomed to swinging between euphoria and emptiness, must learn that calm is not a threat. What once felt like emptiness in the absence of stimulation is, in reality, space. This is where the reprogramming happens: the body learns that safety no longer depends on the other.

 

The boundary you draw is therefore not a wall, but a threshold. It marks not the end of connection, but the beginning of inner integration. You are not saying no to love, but to the form in which it had been imprisoned. It’s the transition from symbiosis to selfhood: the stage in which autonomy and connection can finally coexist without destroying each other.

 

In this phase, guilt often rises. You may feel guilty for no longer rescuing the other, for keeping the door closed, for not responding. But your non-response is a response: an act of mature love that dares to distinguish between compassion and complicity. It’s the moment when empathy finds its rightful measure.

 

Somewhere along the way, you notice that your need for explanation fades. You no longer seek the right words, no longer wait for acknowledgment, justification or truth. The silence that once felt like exile becomes a livable place. The emptiness you feared reveals itself as fertile. Where the old pattern dissolves, a subtle peace begins to take root.

 

The break is no longer a sign of failure, but of growth. It becomes a rite of passage: a necessary fissure through which light enters. In Jungian terms, it is the beginning of individuation: the reclaiming of the parts of yourself once outsourced to the other. You become the inhabitant of your own inner home again.

 

What remains is not hardness, but clarity. A quiet form of love that needs nothing in order to exist. The other may remain where she is — in her stories and her repetitions — but you now stand on the far shore, in the field of reality and meaning. A place where love no longer pulls, but breathes. Where boundaries are not punishment, but the protection of truth.

 

And somewhere deep inside, you feel that the break that once seemed unbearable is now precisely what has made you whole.

 

 

 

Finale — Love without suction

A day comes when silence no longer startles you. When the screen stays empty and that emptiness no longer means absence. When you no longer wait for signals, but no longer fear them either. The storm hasn’t vanished, but its force keeps diminishing. What remains is a slow quieting, as if your nervous system is finally learning to breathe at your pace.

 

Love without suction is not spectacular. It needs nothing in order to exist. It doesn't pull, doesn't cling and doesn't try to persuade. It’s not oriented toward repair or validation, but toward presence. It lives in the space between two breaths, in the stillness of recognition: I am, and you are. In that space lies freedom, not struggle.

 

After the break, love becomes something different from longing. It becomes a form of awareness; a way of seeing that no longer seeks to possess but to understand. The pain of the old dynamic has taught you something no theory could ever explain: that connection can only exist in purity where truth is present. Everything that’s not rooted in truth eventually returns as emptiness.

 

Clinically, this is the moment when the nervous system finds a new equilibrium. The hyperarousal of constant threat gives way to regulation. You no longer need to respond, to interpret, to rescue. The survival reflex shifts into presence. What once felt like letting go of the other turns out to be a return to yourself.

 

Sometimes the other still appears, as a thought or as a flash of memory, no longer as a threat, but as part of your history. You may still feel compassion, even love and tenderness, because somewhere you know she too is trapped in her own repetition. But the difference now is that you are free to see that without being pulled back in. Compassion is no longer complicity, but understanding without overstepping your own boundary.

 

Love without suction is love that seeks to change nothing. It’s not oriented toward what could be, but toward what is. It breathes with life without grasping for it. It does not attach to form, but to essence: the quiet acknowledgement of kinship, even with what has caused pain.

 

Perhaps that is what healing ultimately means: not that the past disappears, but that it loses its power. The other lives on as memory, but you live on as a whole person. And in that wholeness, love becomes pure again; no longer the hunger for recognition, but the presence of truth.

 

There, at the center of yourself, it is finally quiet. No more vacuum pulling you in, no echo dictating your movements. Only the soft breath of something that no longer needs anything. And perhaps that's what love, in its purest form, has always been: not a movement outward, but a coming home to the space where nothing and no one needs to fill anything.

 

A sincere reconnection seeks the other to share what's true;
hoovering seeks the other to escape what's true.

 

 

 

 

Epilogue — The empty middle

What remains after the dissolution of illusion is not emptiness, but space. The empty middle you once fled turns out not to be a loss, but an origin. Here, where no game is being played anymore, a person meets themselves again; no longer as an extension of the other, but as the living center of consciousness.

 

The movement of pulling and pushing, of control and loss, has given way to silence. In that silence, the essence of love unfolds as it was meant to: not as power or mirror, but as presence. It possesses nothing, pulls nothing in and makes no promises. It simply is.
And in that being lies the most radical form of freedom — the freedom to feel without losing yourself and to connect without abandoning who you are.

 

Hoovering was the illusion of restoration; this is the beginning of wholeness.
The return to the empty middle is not a retreat from the world, but a return to truth. Here, nothing needs to be held onto, because everything is already present.