Idealization, devaluation, discard, hoover.

1. Idealization

Early in the relationship — and again at the start of each new turn of the cycle — there is a flood of attention, intensity, declarations, intimacy, future-talk. You are perfect. You are different. You are the one who finally understands them. The pace of the relationship outruns ordinary acquaintance; the language is the language of certainty very early. This phase is sometimes called love bombing, especially in the original-attraction context.

The phase feels real because it functionally is real — the warmth is not faked exactly; it is a real expression of the narcissist's investment in successfully attaching the new supply. What it isn't is a foundation that scales. There is no version of the relationship in which this phase is sustainable, because the underlying personality structure cannot maintain that level of attention to anyone but itself for very long.

2. Devaluation

The intensity tapers. Small criticisms appear. Withdrawal patterns set in. The same things you once did that drew praise now draw silent disapproval, or open contempt. The conversation that used to be effortless now requires careful maneuvering to avoid landmines you don't know are there. Things you said in the idealization phase — vulnerable disclosures, hopes, fears — start being repurposed as ammunition.

This phase is often the longest. It can last years. The slow tempo is part of why it is so disorienting from inside: there is no clean before/after moment, just an accumulating sense that something has gone wrong that you can't quite name. In the covert presentation, devaluation is delivered through silence, withdrawal of warmth, and the slow buildup of resentment, rather than through open contempt. See the covert profile.

3. Discard

At some point — often when the supply you provide has been exhausted, or when a more attractive supply has appeared, or when you have begun to recognize the pattern and threaten the system — the relationship ends. Often abruptly, sometimes brutally, frequently with a sudden inversion in which you are presented as having been the abuser all along.

The discard does not necessarily look like a final break. With covert narcissists especially, it can take the form of an ongoing emotional withdrawal — the relationship is dead, but no one is allowed to say so. Or it can look like a co-parenting configuration in which the discard is permanent but the harassment continues for years afterward.

4. Hoover

Then, very often, the cycle restarts. A sudden message. A crisis they need your help with. A health scare. A child that needs you to be civil. A long, plausible apology. A sudden flood of warmth that mirrors the original idealization phase precisely, because it is sourced from the same machinery. The phase is named hoovering after the vacuum brand: the survivor is being pulled back in.

Some survivors go through the hoover-and-restart loop dozens of times. Each turn ends in a fresh devaluation. Each turn extracts more from the survivor. Most survivors who eventually achieve a durable exit have done so by recognizing the hoover as a phase of the cycle rather than as a fresh start, and by maintaining no contact through the period in which the hoover would otherwise land.

Why the cycle keeps working

The cycle is not weak. It exploits real human attachment machinery. Intermittent reinforcement — unpredictable rewards mixed with punishment — is among the most behaviorally addictive schedules known to learning theory; the literature on its use in animal and human conditioning runs back to B. F. Skinner. The narcissist did not invent it deliberately, but the pattern delivers it reliably, and the survivor is, in a real sense, neurochemically hooked to the next idealization phase even after every prior one has ended badly.

This is why “just leave” is not the helpful instruction it sounds like. Leaving a narcissistic relationship is closer in difficulty profile to leaving an addiction than it is to ending an ordinary unhappy partnership, and the literature on what helps comes from those adjacent fields as much as from the abuse-recovery one.