Your entangled relationship with a narcissist is littered with lies, broken promises, shame, guilt, blind alleys, and perhaps even moral and legal obstacles. You’ve thought about leaving so many times, you feel like an emotionally shattered soldier fighting to survive, and, perhaps also, to help your kids survive.

In your most honest moments, you also may crave your partner’s intensely seductive attention and attraction, qualities of the narcissist that are classic hooks.

Your relationship with the narcissist is hell in a hamster wheel. You keep running to stay alive and avoid the daily abuses, but you never actually get anywhere, only more trapped and exhausted.

That is because you are caught in the narcissist’s alternative reality, a distorted place built around his/her need to feel superior, omnipotent, far and above the little people like you.

The Narcissist’s Developmental Deficits

Narcissists as children experience disrupted attachment with their caregivers that is rarely repaired. As a result they have developmental deficits in emotional connection and regulation that leave them in a childlike state as adults—intensely insecure and needy while also lacking in self-awareness, self-control, and empathy for others.

The narcissist needs you far more than you need her/him, but s/he will never let you know that. Narcissists are so defensive, so fearful of being vulnerable, and so invested in their self-aggrandizing narratives that they will dismiss, deny, blame-shift, unleash rage, and/or possibly abandon others if feeling judged, rejected, or simply not accorded sufficient adulation.

The Narcissist’s False Allure

It’s easy to get in thick with a narcissist. They are masterful at turning on the charm faucet with premature intimacies and promises, adoring attention, sexual interest, and big dreams.

Narcissists study you to identify your needs and vulnerabilities, and they work to deliver what they think you want. Often this is because they are infatuated, caught up in unrealistic idealization that will inevitably collapse under the weight of reality. Afterward, you will be inevitably treated to mounting criticism, and perhaps outright rejection and discard. It’s not personal. It’s the narcissist’s way.

The Bottom Line

Narcissists have profound cognitive distortions and a simplistic view of themselves and others. Through their eyes, things exist in extremes of perfection or worthlessness. One day you’re the apple of their eye, and the next you’re the discarded core on the compost pile.

Narcissists really just don’t give a damn about you or anyone else, while at once demanding acceptance and love for themselves. In the relationship with a narcissist, there is no genuine intimacy, reciprocity, compromise, or fairness.

You can do what the narcissist can’t: Love yourself enough to stop spinning the wheel and break out of the cage you’re living in.

Helpful? Buy me a coffee.Helpful? Buy me a coffee.

Julie L. Hall is the author of The Narcissist in Your Life: Recognizing the Patterns and Learning to Break Free from Hachette Books.

Need support? Julie provides specialized narcissistic abuse recovery coaching to clients around the world.  

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Image courtesy of Benny Lin and Mylius.