The Long Goodbye Part 2: The Narcissistic Client Returns

If this is the first time you have visited my website, welcome! My name is Christine Elaine and the content on this site is based on my personal experiences, observations, intuitive downloads and guidance. It’s not meant to be gospel, medical advice, financial advice or anything but my own experiences and observations. I am also not talking about domestic violence or physical abuse in this post. I'm not a therapist, so please get support if you need it!

Also, this is a website for adults and we're talking about adult content. There is cussing. If you are offended by swearing, go somewhere else!

This is Part 2 of a series I’m calling the Long Goodbye, about the strange manifestation of situations that are happening as a result of the ascension process (“AP”).

I am airing my own dirty laundry here, in detail, so that YOU can see how these situations are manifesting for another person. I have done so much emotional labor in analyzing this, and it’s a huge flex to use this experience to help others.

The time I spent looking at the details will not be wasted if it helps you put the pieces together, and accelerate your own alignment with the NEW that is manifesting in your life.

The Great Separation is a term that describes how we are separating from people and situations in our lives. This is happening because we have been released (liberated) from being trapped in unhealthy situations because of circumstances beyond our control.

What I think is happening in these situations is that a higher authority is at play, and is fixing these situations for us. We don’t need to fight or resist our way out of it. This is because the cosmic energies are just doing all the work. It takes time to happen in 3D, but these energies are separating us from people who are not a frequency match.

The way it manifests sometimes is just WEIRD. Also, I’ve noticed that sometimes the manifestation looks like it’s just more of the same old 3D gunk. But it isn’t! It just looks like that because you are supposed to notice the patterns and use the situation to make different choices. That means choosing yourself over the manipulator, standing up for yourself or whatever issue you are working through.

The Universe uses these situations to squeeze the most benefit out of us and everyone else. We are given so much grace and opportunities to choose differently, and yet some people won’t choose to evolve.

While you are in the situation, you might experience powerlessness because you can't go back to people pleasing, and you can't hustle your way forward. You might feel like you're broken in some way. You might not innerstand why it looks more like the old 3D instead of the new 5D. That's why I am writing this post.

So, here’s my story about a narc client who came back for the purpose of using me to get his parasitic emotional needs met. This is one of THREE Long Goodbye stories that I have a personally experienced. I’ll share the other two in separate blog posts.

My Mom died in November 2022. Right before she passed away, a client who is an attorney returned from the past. He wanted me to work on a content marketing project.

The backstory is that I have known this man for about 15 years. I initially met him because he found my legal blog during the foreclosure crisis. He hired me to teach him how to analyze home loans to help his clients fight foreclosure.

In 2018, this guy hired me to work virtually as a paralegal on his cases. I have another business, Desert Edge Legal Services, where I offer paralegal services to individuals, businesses and lawyers.

I was paid an hourly rate for paralegal work for the work I did with this client.

There are many problems with the legal field as a career, which you can read about here on my other blog. I thought being out on my own would fix the career issues I was having, but I ran headlong into my codepdendent issues and struggled to make enough money.

This client eventually changed the scope of our agreement and I wound up doing attorney level work for very little money. I was doing legal research, drafting complaints (the document filed to start a lawsuit), and investigating cases.

Some of these things could be classified as paralegal work, but the investigation and gathering of information and orchestration of all of that was far beyond the standard tasks that paralegals typically do.

This client had me investigating a case in Washington DC to figure out a cause of action for a tenants organization. I did that and did it well, like the good little people pleasing scapegoat I was programmed to be!

I determined the causes of action, developed the legal strategy, wrote the complaint, hired the expert, flew to DC to coordinate testing and further investigation, and more.

So, when I got back home from that trip, the client accused me of not doing the work I was billing him for, and fired me on short notice.

I was a contractor and not an employee so I thought this person was within his rights to end the work arrangement. And while that's still true, he has taught me to consider carefully who I decide to work for on projects.

As time went on, I realized that this guy manipulated me into what should have been a six figure consulting gig at a paralegal’s hourly rate. It took me awhile to innerstand that I had been manipulated by this client. YEARS.

I enjoyed the work but it just never occurred to me that it was outside the scope of what I was charging. I have always been the go-to person that figures things out, and I enjoyed the problem solving and making things come together. That is a good thing but it is also part of how I was programmed to put others first.

One of the reasons I chose the legal career is because I saw a court hearing in my parents divorce. It profoundly affected me as a child and it makes a lot of sense that these kinds of issues showed up in my work life.

As upset as I was about the way the client handled the situation, I resolved to learn from it and move on. Fast forward to August 2022, when he showed up again. He wanted me to work on a side business, a blog project.

He initially said he wanted to get out of the legal field and wanted to help people as a coach. (This was a red flag. It is a MAJOR investment to become an attorney!)

He said he was passionate about the subject and couldn't wait to begin.

Knowing that the guy got a lot of high value work out of me the last time, I negotiated more money from him and a defined term length to avoid having the rug pulled out from underneath me.

We started working on the project in October. My Mom died in November. This guy never acknowledged that my Mom had passed. It was business as usual. That was another red flag.

Curiously, the month after he found out she died, he started with the abusive behavior. This is a pattern I’ve noticed recently with narcs and manipulators: you can’t be vulnerable, because they will see it as an opportunity to exploit you.

And that is exactly what happened with this client.

In January 2023, he “forgot” to mail my fee payment. I’m sure he was testing me to see how long it would take me to ask him for the money. I waited several days and then e-mailed him. He said he’d had the virus, and that he’d put the check in the mail.

Ultimately, it took him three weeks to finally pay me. However, I also continued to work on his project because he had always paid me in the past. I also didn’t want to be buried in work after he finally did pay, which would have slowed everything down.

This was extremely disruptive, and the disruption became this guy’s primary weapon of abuse. I was working virtually, but the number of disruptions this guy created was impressive.

This is how these kinds of people take advantage of small business owners. They avoid signing contracts and boundaries around your work agreement. They believe they have the upper hand by not signing contracts, which isn't necessarily true. Some other kinds of contracts are enforceable, and the fact that they had the intent to move forward on your terms means they might still be on the hook.

You might be thinking that a written agreement will protect you. Not necessarily. If the other party has a lot of money, they will break contracts with you and stiff you anyway. Not paying you is often part of their strategy. If you don't have the money to pursue them, all the better.

It’s very important to ask a lot of questions ahead of time, before you agree to do any work for them.

I wish it was simple to just do some work. As time moves on it has grown more and more complicated to work for other people. Their lies and manipulations have made it increasingly difficult to work in America.

The American workplace is inherently codependent and they want so much out of you, but don't want to pay for it. This is why you have to protect yourself.

Can you afford a major business disruption? It's happened to me at least three times, and I cannot afford another one. The risk is too great to just assume a company or a person has the money.

When you consider that banks don’t lend money for a mortgage without proof of income, it makes sense for small business to determine creditworthiness. They must prove they can afford to pay you.

I doubt this client could have obtained a bank loan to pay for this kind of project. Some of these predators offload their risk and inability to get credit to small business owners.

Meanwhile, the client was sabotaging all efforts to make money. He did that through criticism, shooting down ideas, ridicule, insults, not renewing domain names, expired website certificates, taking days to respond to requests that he pay to fix something, not listening to experienced professionals about what he was doing, and more. He also would criticize my ideas, then wait a month and pretend it was his idea and tell me to implement it.

He would also send e-mails at crazy times, outside of business hours. It wasn’t uncommon to get an e-mail from him at 3 am.

Yet, he wouldn’t be available during regular business hours. He would also predictably throw a tantrum three weeks into the month, screaming about how he wasn’t making any money. This was carefully timed though, because he had to disappear at payday. You can’t scream at someone when you owe them money.

It became obvious in the Spring of 2023 that this project was never going make a dime of revenue and it was intentional.

I wondered why he went to all that trouble when he didn't plan on making any money. To innerstand this, we have to think like a narc.

He was probably having trouble getting narc supply from anywhere else. The narc playbook is on the internet now and everyone is aware of what they do and how they do it. Narcs are being backed into a corner right now, because time is up. Evolve or die.

He had to spend money to get me back into a position where he could abuse me, because of the way he treated me last time. Narcs are always working on backup supply, and if they have money, they don't care how much it costs. It's just a cost of doing what needs to be done to hoover you back into their lives.

It was a Long Goodbye. I felt stuck and it was upsetting. But I took action anyway.

I began to look for ways to leave. The first thing I did was to minimize the time I spent on his work, to make time for other projects and to minimize toxic interactions.

I started to use Chat GPT to write his blog posts. Another flex. I started using AI tools for marketing and used his project for the learning curve.

I started ignoring most of his temper tantrums, stopped offering suggestions and just didn’t engage with him if I didn’t have to. Things had become so toxic and I saw that he was really pushing hard to enmesh me. He wanted me to feel sorry for him because he wasn’t making any money, even though he was the problem.

I never took the bait. He kept baiting me. The more he pushed, the less I engaged.

I was just a contractor, after all. All I owed this guy was what I agreed to deliver for him, and that’s it. He wasn’t entitled to abuse me just because I was working for him.

In June, he called and took responsibility for the project failing, which is interesting. But the conversaton was just a way for him to get me to feel sorry for him.

I suggested we use AI to write books for him. In July, I delivered five ebooks that I used AI to write. All he needed to do was edit them for publication. Sounds pretty awesome, right?

This guy was PISSED and demanded that I take a 75% pay cut.

Can you guess why he was so angry? You need to use narc logic here.

He finally had some products to sell and an opportunity to make money. That's what he was screaming about all the time...yet he was sabotaging the whole thing.

It was never about money. He wasn’t actually going to allow this to become a profitable business.

I also made him look bad for writing all these books in a month when he kept making excuses as to why he couldn't write even one. I think he probably felt a lot of shame and embarrassment.

If I wrote five or six e-books in a month, why couldn't he write ONE book? Narcs feel a lot of shame when they think you have surpassed them or outshine them.

Ultimately, when he refused to pay the full invoice for the month, I stopped all the work on his behalf. I also retained control over the digital assets I created for him, removed all the backlinks to his website and began using the channels for my own purposes.

I also told him to NEVER contact me again, because I was done wasting time on his bullshit projects.

The Long Goodbye was over. The transition was no big deal. Nothing collapsed or fell apart, and it was a huge relief to know I wouldn’t get any more e-mails from this guy.

I did send him an e-mail demanding payment, and I detailed his abuse and manipulation tactics. He of course didn’t respond, but he had his VA attempt to hack into my e-mail account to gain control over it and the social media channels linked to them.

He just couldn't stand being told NO. Instead of working out a resolution, he thought he could just steal it from me. Unbelievable! There will be additional consequences to him for his behavior.

While this chapter is over, I soon realized that ANOTHER Long Goodbye began unfolding. I'll tell you all about that in another blog post.

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