A World Beyond Narcissism
Premium articles on narcissism and other cluster B types. Find freedom and personal power through knowledge of psychology and the practice of spirituality.
Narcissistic Abuse Recovery: Where To Begin
Narcissistic abuse recovery is an arduous process. This beginner’s guide to healing can help you establish momentum in your journey toward freedom and growth.
Narcissistic abuse is a rigid funnel which sucks you into a state of mental and emotional claustrophobia. At first, your relationship with the narcissist appeared to be a wide-open space filled with opportunity.
But as you poured more and more energy into it, you felt the space around you vanish, and the psychological walls converging. As a result, narcissistic abuse seriously affected your willpower and rendered you powerless to fight back.
Having rid yourself of the narcissist, you now feel stuck in a different way:
The remnants of narcissistic abuse are holding you back from healing and moving on.
Yet all it takes to make a difference is a shift in perspective, and a little bit of support. Once you light the spark, there’s no telling how brightly the fire will burn.
To start the process of recovering from narcissistic abuse:
1. Drop The Victim Label
As long as you view yourself as a victim, you will unconsciously perpetuate and empower narcissism and stunt your recovery from narcissistic abuse.Although our experiences do shape us and define our present, creating an identity out of them is completely up to us.
The alternative to being a victim of narcissism is to consider yourself a targetinstead.
For one reason or another, you found yourself on the radar of a narcissist.That can happen to anybody, either through birth or misfortune.
The minute you become conscious of how detrimental narcissism has been to your life, you gain the profound power of choice in your narcissistic abuse recovery.
You can either let your past conditioning influence you, or you can decide to work toward a new future based on new experiences, which eventually overwrite the old ones.
How a person identifies themselves is hugely important. A label is a self-fulfilling prophecy which only deepens. Will you be a victim without power, or a target who is no longer willing to be manipulated by narcissistic abuse?
2. Establish A Space Immune From Narcissistic Abuse
The road to recovering from narcissistic abuse can be long, painful and full of frustration. This is because narcissists take away your greatest asset: your space.
We all need physical space to feel safe, psychological space to think and make wise choices, and emotional space to connect deeply with our True Self.
How Narcissists Teach You To Self-Deprecate And Self-Censor
Approaching a narcissist brings with it a strange feeling. A sense of unease and tension. You notice defensiveness rising within you. A call for readiness. A need to perform. To prove yourself. To lock horns — or be subdued and devoured.
There is no letting your hair down when in the presence of a narcissist. Their desire to get the upper hand, and their hunger to extract narcissistic supply, will never cease. From the moment they lay eyes on you, until the second you leave, they are locked on and ravenous.
Those who are uninitiated in the art of narcissism are the easiest prey. Such people maintain civility and politeness, believing that when someone speaks to you, you listen. The uninitiated also adhere to the golden rule — treat others as you would like to be treated. So when they meet a narcissist, they assume that they are speaking with someone interested in a fair and mutually-beneficial exchange. Before long, the narcissist has them subservient like good puppy dogs, and is sucking them dry.
The one who is initiated knows better. They will disengage their energy from the interaction, hence putting an immediate halt to the narcissistic supply.If, however, they refuse to back down, then they must prepare for verbal battle. They need to muscle their way into the conversation, wrestle with the narcissist’s ideas and judgements, and ultimately ‘win’ the exchange. If you bring forth enough emotional resilience and wit, the narcissist will feel themselves being ‘defeated’. Hooray for you.
But what of those who have known a narcissist for years? Who have been subjected to a constant barrage of attack? What is their fate?
The Glass Ceiling Of Worth
To maintain their sense of superiority over others, a narcissist uses various tactics. They might roll their eyes or use condescending stares. Snicker at your perceived weaknesses. Ask rhetorical questions that put you in a negative light, such as “Why did you do your hair like that?”. If you want to contribute to plans, the narcissist wrestles the final decision from you. They will incessantly compare you unfavourably to others to make you feel small. They might also speak about you in the third person while you are there, casting you as the ‘object of concern’.
A Narcissist Deserves Empathy — But Not Yours
Narcissists are becoming notorious as an evil beyond redemption, undeserving of our pity or empathy. Since dropping your boundaries with a narcissist only encourages them to weaponise your attention and energy, firm boundaries and relaxed vigilance are necessary at all times. No exceptions.
Many targets of narcissism have been seduced into the idea that if they show just enough love and empathy, the narcissist will discover the path back to their own heart. A painful lesson awaits such people.
If we were to look at possible healing modalities for narcissists, we are presented with a chicken/egg scenario. In childhood, a narcissist was not seen, valued or loved for who they were, and therefore developed a grandiose false self to survive the pain. The way toward healing is through love. Many of us know this. Yet the narcissist only avoids and abuses love.Which raises the question: If someone was not given or shown love, how can they heal without love?
The answer, as crazy as it may sound, is for the narcissist to love themselves.
Why You Secretly Love Narcissists
The title of this article may be triggering to some, and for good reason. Nonetheless, it is a topic that must be taken out of the shadows and given its time in the sun.
Enlightenment entails looking within our own personal shadow, where landmines hide, ready to explode. It means risking being emotionally triggered, so that we can access our core wounds and heal them.
Perhaps that is the allure of a narcissist. With their glittering fantasy world which transcends reality, we feel we can escape the consequences of our past, which includes difficult truths, as well as the repressed pain deep in our unconscious.
Yet the mind is a cunning trickster.
The narcissist’s realm, at first, is seamless, pleasurable, childlike and alluring. It lowers your boundaries, washes away your doubts, and unleashes your vulnerable, authentic Self. Eventually, however, the dysfunction arrives.
While the narcissist’s behaviour is well-documented, the target’s is not. You may begin the relationship rather happy, but eventually you notice yourself growing clingy, anxious, possessive even. It is not only until much later that you realise that the narcissist aggravated those feelings by shaming and gaslighting you. They may have even played exes and other people off against you via triangulation, which spiked your insecurity.
As the relationship progressed, you grew more erratic, sometimes pulling away, sometimes clinging, and sometimes growing suspicious and paranoid. You alternated between the heady romantic days, and dystopian games and misery. Your emotional attachment grew stronger at the same rate that the relationship devolved into craziness. Eventually, you began to question who you really were.
Real Love Vs. The Narcissist’s Love Bombing
Every great relationship has a spark. A moment when the world grew brighter and more consequential. For too long you had a sense that you were merely wandering. Existing. Floating in space. Surrounded by people, yet unable to reach out and touch them. Until they came along: Your soulmate.
Suddenly your world became imbued with meaning. You felt infinite purpose emanating from within. Anything was possible. You were finally ready to take on the world, and you had your soulmate to join you for the ride.
Sinister Motives
We are all high during those heady first months. This is not a figure of speech. We are literally being flooded with dopamine and norepinephrine. We might as well be on drugs.
When in this state, it is nearly impossible to see the reality in front of us. Who the other person is beneath the surface, what their true intentions are, what dynamics are developing between you and them; none of it matters. And even if it did, you have no way of gauging the truth. You are high. Except rather than your hands looking weird, it is your entire life.
If in reality you have met a psychopath, then you are being groomed to give sex, money or status to them, to serve their cold-blooded agenda. You are being instrumentalised so that the psychopath can get what they desire. There is no ‘love’ on the psychopath’s side. You are being used, plain and simple.
If you have met a narcissist, then you are being lulled into their fantasy world. The narcissist seeks perfection, and they have projected that perfection onto you. The narcissist is recruiting you as a co-conspirator who will feed their grandiosity. The narcissist is on the run, not from the law, but from their internal reservoir of toxic shame. They have been looking for the Bonnie to their Clyde, and you gladly step into the role.
Debating A Narcissist Is Bad For Your Health
Two phrases you rarely hear from a narcissist are: “I’m sorry” and “I don’t know”.
A narcissist may apologise when they are at risk of losing narcissistic supply. But ultimately, they are sorry because their supply is slipping through their fingers, not because they hurt someone.
However, narcissists never do not know something. To admit a lack of knowledge is to admit lack. To admit lack is to be in touch with one’s shame. And when a narcissist touches on the repressed shame of being neglected, abused and/or instrumentalised throughout childhood, they step on an emotional landmine.
As a result, narcissists never deepen their self-knowledge or wordly wisdom, because truth and reality rarely touch the narcissist’s True Self. To help avoid the risk of admitting a lack of knowledge, the narcissist creates an aura of all-knowingness via their false self. The most comical way they achieve this is by simply declaring ‘I knew that’. Even when our gut tells us otherwise, we avoid petty arguments and just take their word for it, or brush it off.
A more insidious way a narcissist protects themselves from a lack of knowledge is to draw you into an argument or debate. While your primary interest in debating might be to get to the root of truth, the narcissist is looking for the following:
They want to avoid being exposed to their shame.
They want narcissistic supply.
They have negative emotions they wish to be rid of.
Healthy vs Narcissistic Debate
A debate is the perfect playground for the narcissist to achieve all three of the above goals. To begin with, the narcissist will never accept your ideas or build on them. For every statement you make, the narcissist will counter with another statement which has little relevance to the thread you are discussing, or will reframe what you said and appropriate it as their own.
Can You Have A Healthy Relationship With A Narcissist?
For those caught in a trauma bond with a narcissist, unable to tear themselves away, staring down the barrel of years with this person, the inevitable question arises: Can you have a healthy relationship with a narcissist? In short, you wonder whether you can redirect the relationship toward smoother waters.
To answer that question, first we have to define what a healthy relationship is. Everyone will have a different set of expectations, but a basic list will do for now. A healthy relationship involves:
Intimacy: Two people who see each other, as in, truly see each other, including each other’s shame, negative emotions, hopes and dreams. Such a relationship calls for a basic sense of mutual-respect, dignity and boundaries. In a healthy relationship, each person sees the truth behind the mask, or at least tries to see it, understand it and work with it. This requires vulnerability, empathy and patience.
How To Cope While In A Narcissistic Relationship
The narcissist is incessant in getting you to focus your attention, time and energy on them. Above all, they are incessant in their psychological attacks.
The narcissist is hyper-vigilant, constantly scanning you for any signs of dissent, indifference, or abandonment. Because they have a paranoid core, it takes immense effort to convince them that they are safe with you. Just to be sure, they inflict an all-out assault to get you where they need. They ridicule and judge you to keep you feeling small. They threaten and blow up at you to keep you afraid. They question every move you make to keep you in a perpetual state of self-doubt, walking on eggshells and second-guessing everything you do.
What You Should Never Do To A Narcissist
A narcissist is the ultimate test of your spiritual practice. Your desires can get you burnt, over-identifying with the narcissist can get you incinerated. And like the frog in slowly boiling water, you won’t even know it is happening.
Grandiosity is not unique to narcissists. We all carry grand visions of a bigger, brighter future. Life wants to evolve, and grandiosity is the fuel which propels us toward that. We imagine the perfect relationship. The ideal home. Prosperity. Connection. All the things that make life worth living.
We also tend to over-value things. The classic example is the child who sees their parent as the ultimate authority, full of infinite strength and wisdom. They see the parent as boundlessly loving and supportive; the ultimate manifestation of a human being.
Psychological Tricks To Use Against A Narcissist
To assert control over you, convince you of their grandiosity, and keep you in a shame-riddled state of inferiority, the narcissist must first engage and colonize your mind. Yet you have deflection tools at your disposal. The following tricks should be useful when dealing with a narcissist’s cognitive attacks:
Changing The Topic
The narcissist is playing victim, trying to gaslight you, is dragging your attention through a series of mind-bending concepts, or directing focus on you and your ‘hopelessness’.
Halfway through the narcissist’s monologue or rant, simply change the topic to something completely mundane. Do it shamelessly and without warning.The weather. What colour t-shirt would look better, black or green? What time do the shops close? What was the score last night from the game?
The key here is to de-personalise the conversation, to short-circuit the charged topic a narcissist is leading and bring your interaction back to the surface. The narcissist will sense the shift, but likely will not say anything about what you did because that would disrupt the ‘game’ you are playing.
How To Go Toe-To-Toe With A Narcissist
When a person is centered, they feel at home in their body, confident in their intuition, and able to adapt and grow into the future. They remain ‘in flow’, and seem to have sixth sense for the ‘right’ way to approach life. A centred person is truly a force to be reckoned with, and cannot be easily manipulated or controlled.
A narcissist knocks you off centre using various methods: ridiculing you, judging you, questioning you, flattering you, ignoring you or pressing your sore buttons. All of these strategies aim to create spikes of emotions which challenge your homeostasis.
If you have childhood wounds around specific triggers, the emotional intensity will hit you like a Category Five storm. Your ability to reason, to observe and to be conscious is lost. You are in a reaction mode, jumping out of your skin because your emotional state is so uncomfortable.
If you do not catch on to what is going on, you will be vulnerable to manipulation for a painfully long time. Worse still, each ‘episode’ stacks onto your already existing core wounds and makes it easier to manipulate you in the future.
The Tools For Immunising Yourself From Narcissistic Abuse
The first step is awareness. You need to understand what being in a calm state is like, and then you need to feel the transition from this state into one of being triggered. You need to notice the emotions arising in real-time. Oh, that’s shame. That’s doubt. That’s anger. That’s sadness. That’s confusion. That’s dysregulation. That’s neediness. And so forth.
The next and most difficult step, however, is to create a container around those emotions. Can you relax your body and welcome the feelings? Can you remain aware and calm, even though every cell in your body is screaming in agony? Can you observe without reacting, even though your entire being is telling you to do something!!? If so, then you are becoming skilled in creating a container.
Why Empaths Struggle To Let Narcissists Go
In pop psychology, the idea of an ‘Empath’ is alluring on a wide scale, while also being hotly debated. There is even an assertion that Empaths are themselves narcissists. So what is really going on with Empaths, and why do they struggle so much to let narcissists go?
Seeing The Bigger Picture
After years of contemplating this topic, I still believe that the idea of an ‘Empath’ is a useful concept, especially for people who are newly awakening from narcissistic abuse.
Empaths are known as the deep feelers and sensitive creators who attract narcissists like flies. The Empath, often being unboundaried, chaotic and over-energised, tends to make for rich and easy narcissistic supply — until they wisen up.
Narcissists, as complex as they can be to understand, ultimately only want narcissistic supply. If someone is rigid, closed-off and emotionally unavailable, they would make for a lousy source of fuel for a narcissist.
Regardless of the nuances in every narcissistic relationship, there is always a ‘dominant’, more rigid person, who stands in comparison to their ‘submissive’, more flexible other. In many cases, a person can be emotionally giving in one relationship, but then fall into a rigid, narcissistic role with someone who is more codependent than them. It is almost a law of psychological physics, where trauma-bonded people balance their codependency with one person leaning avoidant, and the other growing progressively more anxious. It is from such a relationship that an ‘Empath’ emerges.
Why A Narcissist Has Committed To Others — But Not You
A narcissist commits to one thing in life, and that is the pursuit of narcissistic supply. If you submit fully to the narcissist with no strings attached, providing attention, service, sex, adulation, mirroring and selfless cooperation, then you will be in their good favour.
Yet no strings attached is the key to this arrangement. If you frustrate the narcissist with your needs or demands, then they will pull away and invest in someone more useful. You must be wholly subservient to their need for narcissistic supply. Everything else is secondary, including you.
There is one minor exception. If it ensures ongoing narcissistic supply for the narcissist, then they will reluctantly ‘compromise’ to give you what you need — yet with harsh limits.
They Love Me, They Love Me Not
During the initial idealisation phase, the narcissist is wholly available and eager to get to know you. This quickly wanes, however. The narcissist may continue to make some effort, but never quite goes far enough for you to feel secure in the relationship. Above all, the narcissist never discusses the future with you. Commitment is a no-go zone.
Many people grow addicted to the narcissist’s fantasy world, as the narcissist provides just enough breadcrumbs of attention and ‘love’ to keep you hooked. When your demands get too high and your supply too low, the narcissist is out of there. You may sense this subliminally, and act with care not to rock the boat.
Why Your Narcissistic Ex Discarded You
The sad reality is that your narcissistic ex was always going to discard you. It is a cycle that was set in motion the second they laid eyes on you. The nature of the discard, however, depends on how they have classified you.
To bolster their grandiose realm, the narcissist must recruit people. Yet not anyone can qualify. This club is exclusive, and has two entry requirements:
A willingness to provide narcissistic supply.
Proof of perfection.
For this reason, anyone the narcissist associates with must be useful and/or high value.
How The Narcissist Categorises You
The narcissist conditions their target to admit weakness. They will pounce on an admission of inferiority, or a stutter, or you waking up late compared to them. On the other hand, when the target brags or achieves something great, the narcissist puts it down. As the target then feels shame and admits weakness, the narcissist grows amused and reinforces it.
This is how the narcissist manipulates the shame/grandiosity continuum, which is a paradigm; a set of psychological glasses that affect how we see the world.
Why The Narcissist Disappeared Like You Never Existed
Authentic relationships form when two people connect via their core. In intimacy, each person sees the other person for who they truly are, flaws and all. Each person feels the other and empathises with them. They become emotionally invested in each other. Their deeper Self weaves with the other person. Layer by layer, strand by strand, experience by experience, day by day, the relationship is built on realness. It is a spiritual fortress built of strong stuff.
Getting rid of it is extremely difficult.
In the case of the narcissist, all you were to them was an idea, all your relationship with them ever was, was a source of supply. They idealised you, and ‘fell’ for your perfection. They never saw you, or felt you. They projected onto you what they wanted you to be, and interacted with you via that projection.
Why It’s So Difficult To Communicate With A Narcissist
Because of their personality structure and relational paradigm, a narcissist makes communicating with them feel like a treacherous, uphill climb — or even downright impossible.
In a personal relationship, healthy communication involves the following elements:
Open-Heartedness: When speaking with someone, you should welcome their emotional experience into your heart, empathising with and truly absorbing the experience they are conveying through their words.
Shared Humanity: Through channeling empathy and allowing space for the other person to express authentically, you find opportunities to share in their humanity. Good communication involves deep attention paired with emotional attunement. Sometimes it involves simply sitting with the other person’s heavy emotions for a moment. Other times it means taking delight in the other person’s experience and being happy for them without needing validation.
Mutuality: Nobody dominates the floor. Each person is afforded the emotional space and attention to share, yet possesses the emotional intelligence to know when to stop and invite the other person to contribute. Ultimately, this achieves far more than balancing who gets to speak. By allowing the other person to contribute, your perspective is enriched, which awakens new insights and ideas, which then feeds into the other person when their turn comes. This form of synergy spirals upwards, creating a bountiful exchange which evolves each person’s way of thinking, widens their perspective, and enriches their soul.
Are Narcissists Impulsive?
Like holding a beach ball underwater, a narcissist can never take their eye off the ball (pun intended), lest their shame and grief bounce to the surface for all to see.
Holding down a proverbial beach ball full of toxic shame, rage and prolonged grief is an exhausting, full-time job. The narcissist achieves this in a myriad of ways, including indulging in grandiose fantasies of how amazing they are or will be, convincing others of how amazing they are or will be, and of course, coercing others to give them adulation and attention. All of this creates narcissistic supply, which is the force holding the beach ball down inside the subconscious.
Are Narcissists Powerful?
When Toto pulls back the curtain in The Wizard of Oz, the ‘Wizard’ is revealed to be an ordinary man, who the whole time was projecting out a ‘powerful’ version of himself using a machine.
How many targets of narcissistic abuse were mesmerised by the narcissist’s world, by their unshakeable conviction, confidence and seemingly endless reserves of energy? How many then peeked behind the curtain of the narcissist’s false self, shocked to discover an inner child filled with shame, fury and desperation?
It would be easy to dismiss narcissists as grifters of the soul, people to be identified and avoided. Yet their impact on the current zeitgeist is undeniable. Endless books, articles and videos have flooded the market, aiming to shed light on this phenomenon. For many targets of narcissism, the focus has become an obsession. Narcissism has preoccupied the minds and destroyed the lives of millions, mobilising a significant chunk of humanity. Is that not power?
Why Narcissists Flip-Flop Between Wanting & Not Wanting You
Narcissists feel empty inside due to extreme emotional neglect. They were never seen or mirrored for who they authentically were. Every time they expressed an authentic part of themselves, they were either shamed, ignored, ridiculed or attacked. Eventually, their True Self, at first gushing with life, dried up. This brought them face-to-face with death, with the abyss inside. Nobody can connect with someone who is dead inside. So the narcissist created a false self, which was fuelled by their imagination. That is, the narcissist dissociated from reality and dwelled in a fantasy-induced world.
The reason a narcissist flip-flops between wanting you and not wanting you is because you are a part of that fantasy-induced world.