Idealize, devalue, discard

Idealize, devalue, discard is an online model of a relationship cycle: you're put on a pedestal, then criticised and pushed down, then dropped. It also covers what people call "devaluation" and the "narcissist discard phase".

The longer explanation

The three-phase language comes from narcissistic-abuse writing. Cleveland Clinic uses it when describing love bombing, and a Psych Central writer describes a return ("hoovering") once the cycle is complete. It borrows from the psychoanalytic idea of splitting: seeing someone as all good, then all bad. The three phases are a survivor-community model of what many people say happened to them. They aren't a clinical diagnosis or a test, and they can't tell you what is going on in another person's mind.

Example

For weeks you're the best thing in their life. Then everything you do is wrong. Then they're gone, and cold about it.

What it is not

A relationship that cooled, or a breakup you didn't want, isn't automatically this cycle. Neither is one bad week after a good start.

Online use vs research use

Online, "narcissist discard phase" and "devaluation" are used for any harsh ending. They aren't research terms, and the research on splitting belongs to a different framework.

Avoidant or narcissist?

The same shape can show up in an avoidant story: fast closeness, then withdrawal, then an exit (the "avoidant discard"). The difference people describe is the middle phase. With avoidance it is distance and shutting down, which protects the person from feeling too much. In the devalue phase of this model it is criticism, blame and humiliation, which is control. Avoidance is protection; abuse is control, and they can occur together (see avoidant or narcissist). A 2025 meta-analysis (Mohay et al.) reported that vulnerable ("covert") narcissism links most strongly with preoccupied (anxious) attachment, moderately with fearful, and only weakly with dismissive; grandiose narcissism wasn't linked to attachment style. It's correlational, and it describes groups, not any one ex.

I wasn't on a pedestal. I was a person, and I'm leaving the stage.