Narcissistic Reality Distortion: When Facts are Rewritten
- Elle Dee
- Jan 24
- 4 min read
Updated: 4 days ago
It has been eighteen months since I left her for the final time.
Seventeen months since I stopped working at her business.
We’re entering our second year of active litigation.
Throughout that time, any communication I’ve initiated with my ex focused on the logistics of closing out our relationship.
Those endless tasks that come into play when you’re turning one life back into two.
Consolidating.
Splitting.
Moving.
Signing.
In contrast, communications she’s sent during that same period have remained consistently personal.
This post is a look at one small subset of those messages.
Songs Sent by My Ex
These are the times my ex sent me songs after I left our relationship in July 2024.
Nothing else.
No surrounding context.
No interpretation yet.
Date Sent: | Song: | My Reply: |
July 18-19, 2025 | Linda James She's in Love With You Joey The Grass is Blue Longer Than Always | "Why did you send me this? Are you ok? |
September 14, 2025 | Insensitive | "Lol. K." |
November 29, 2025 | I Just Called to Say I Love You | "What's going on?" |
January 17, 2026 | Leather and Lace | Please stop sending me songs. I've moved on. A long time ago. Please do the same. |
Why I Looked Back
I hadn’t looked at these messages as a group until now.
It’s the text I received just last week that changed that.
The one sent January 17, 2026.
It wasn’t the text itself that made me curious.
Or the song she had sent.
What sparked a closer look was her reaction to the boundary I set in response to it.
Narcissistic Reality Distortion
My response to her sending the song:
“Please stop sending me songs.
I’ve moved on.
A long time ago.
Please do the same.”
The reply she sent back:
“Oh thank Jesus.
I thought you were holding on trying to have me in your life forever, because you can’t take care of yourself.
I dream of the day when you really do let me go and move on.”
When Reality is Rewritten
I looked more closely at emotional confusion in relationships and specifically at our communications since the breakup.
Even at a casual glance, it was overt:
My interactions with her followed the same pattern for more than a year.
They were respectful, calm, brief, and neutral.
There was no ambiguity in tone or intent.
It was consistently clear the relationship was in my past.
I left no room for confusion about that.
In contrast, maintaining connection seems the primary point of most texts my ex has sent my way across those same 18 months:
She regularly volunteered information about her own life.
She repeatedly asked for updates on mine.
Her tone shifted between gratitude and hostility based on what she believed would produce the outcome she wanted.
So for the reply she wrote to make sense, multiple facts have to be ignored:
Every message was initiated by her.
All non-essential contact over the eighteen-month period came from her.
None of the emotional engagement she offered was reciprocated.
Nothing I said encouraged prolonging or repeating the conversations.
Attempts to disengage were respectful but repeated, and consistent.
For reasons I don’t get to understand, her storyline that day called for me to be needy, helpless, desperate, and standing in the way of her freedom.
When the facts didn’t align with that, she overrode them with more convenient “truths.”
She overrode ME with more convenient truths.
What This Means to Me
This is what it looks like when commitment to a storyline overrides what’s observable, provable, and real.
It's why smear campaigns work.
It's how we lose friends and community without ever speaking our stories.
It's how they hold on to us when we've done all the things that should have set us free.
If you’ve ever wondered whether someone would really lie "that shamelessly" - even when the record says otherwise - this is the scale it can happen on.
Nothing significant was at stake here.
No reconciliation.
No court leverage.
No audience.
This was just her demanding once more that I trust the fiction she tells over the facts I live.
I don't do that anymore.
🤎Elle
This bonus post is part of a 7-part companion series to The Narcissism Files.
This piece is part of a larger documented project called The Narcissism Files, which explores the aftermath of this shift and all the came after.
I write more about smear campaigns and the fiction they spread about us .
Read more here.
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Want to keep exploring how narcissistic reality distortion does acute harm over time?
A Related Project Some of the themes explored here - narcissistic reality distortion, gaslighting, and the slow erosion of trust - are examined more fully in The Narcissism Files, an ongoing written project about narcissistic abuse and neurodivergent vulnerability. It’s not a guide or a recovery plan. It’s an attempt to name what happened clearly, without fixing or reframing it. You can explore the project here: |
Process Statement
This post was written entirely by the author, without AI involvement. Every word, structural decision, formatting choice, and punctuation mark reflects the author’s own process and intent.
The formatting on this site is intentional. Short lines, generous spacing, and visual breaks are used to reduce cognitive load and reading fatigue, especially for autistic and neurodivergent readers.
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