In the age of social media, there is not a more passive-aggressive way to say you don’t like someone than to block them on social media.  When you block someone, you have total control over what information gets to you and what the person learns about you.  Sometimes it is appropriate to block someone, but those aren’t the situations I am referring to. I am talking about situations in which someone doesn’t like how you acted and wants to cut you out of their life without first discussing the reasons.  They use blocking you on social media as a way to show they are unhappy with you but don’t actually confront the actual issue.  The narcissist is more than willing to block you on social media because they are passive-aggressive and don’t know how to appropriately confront issues. However, what is the reason a narcissist would unblock you once they have blocked you?

The first act of blocking you is how the narcissist tells you, albeit indirectly, that they don’t like how you acted.  It doesn’t matter whether you actually did anything wrong.  The narcissist feels a need to control you and the situation, so they block you.  This gives them the ultimate boost in their narcissistic ego because they are completely in control. They also know you are a caring individual who has emotions and will be hurt by this act of blocking if it appears to come out of nowhere, or was a way to not have to discuss an issue after a fight.

The narcissist is controlling and manipulative.  They block you because they want you to feel unstable and crazy. They want you to reflect on what you did to make the blocking happen, even if you had nothing to do with the decision. This is part of the devaluation stage of narcissistic abuse. The narcissist wants to make you feel less of a person. There are many ways the narcissist can devalue, but one is through this control of blocking you and the silent treatment that comes with it. They will devalue when they start to think you are getting too comfortable in the relationship.  A content partner is much harder to manipulate.

So, all of that makes sense on why the abusive and controlling narcissist blocks you, but why would they unblock you? As soon as they unblock you they are letting you back into their life so does that mean they are done controlling you?

Of course not! The narcissist thinks out each one of their actions and they never stop using control.  When they unblock you, they are changing up their tactic, but they aren’t controlling less. The narcissist has likely unblocked you because they aren’t getting their narcissistic supply filled somewhere else, or the blocking of you is no longer filling their narcissistic supply.  For the narcissist, their narcissistic supply is always being used up and they are on a constant search for how to refill it. Blocking you no longer serves its purpose, so they unblock you. They may tell you they have unblocked you, or they may not.  It can help boost their ego if they don’t tell you that you are unblocked but you reach out on your own. 

The narcissist relationship is a game of idealization and devaluation. They must alternate through these two extremes to strengthen the trauma bomb and ensure you are there when they need you.  They block during devaluation and then unblock if they need to move into idealization.  It is never about you and what you did or didn’t do.  It is always about the narcissist and what they need. You are simply a pawn they use to their advantage based on their own needs.  You have been placed into their life, so they think, to make them feel better about themselves and to do whatever they expect you to do.  When you are in a relationship with a narcissist, there is no independent thinking and you can’t make choices of your own.  Your life and decisions will always be controlled and manipulated by the narcissist.