Published on HuffPost 11/19/17  Partners, children, and anyone else subjected to the narcissist’s disrespect find themselves working to figure out how to avoid it and gain their elusive respect. If we can just decode the mystery of what they respect, we reason, we will finally get the validation that is always out of reach and avoid the hurt that is so often a way of life.

Partners/Spouses

For partners/spouses, the narcissist’s disrespect often follows a period of idealization that feels intensely validating, even euphoric. Such people may stay in miserable relationships with narcissists far beyond all reason and self-respect, struggling to regain the initial “love-bombing” they were treated to early in the relationship. Frequently they blame themselves for the narcissist’s disrespect and devaluation and may even crave a return to the relationship that has ended brutally.

Children/Adult Children

To children and adult children, the narcissist parent often doles out positive attention as intermittent reinforcement interspersed with neglect and abuse, keeping them guessing and working for validation. Such children may seek approval for decades, even a lifetime, enduring excruciating indifference and/or abuse, with random-seeming moments or periods of affection or even generosity.

It is common for adult children of narcissists to carry a fantasy that someday their parents will finally see them and open their arms with the love and validation such children have sought their entire lives, to no avail. While this scenario is particularly true of scapegoated children, even so-called golden children understand that their narcissist parent’s “love” is conditional, something they must continually work to uphold or lose. Both scapegoated and favored children are not valued for their authentic selves but for how they can serve the narcissist parent’s needs, whether as negative or positive false projections.

What Do Narcissists Respect?

Maybe narcissists actually, deep down, respect integrity, kindness, truth, mercy, justice, compassion, gratitude, and love but just can’t show it. Why wouldn’t they? These are fundamental codes that define our best selves, ideals we reach toward and build relationships, families, and societies upon. We may fall short, perhaps abysmally so, but most of us recognize the importance of trying and do our best to achieve even minor steps toward these ideals.

As much as this makes sense to those of us with a relatively stable sense of identity, self-esteem, and empathic connectedness with others, narcissists see things quite differently. For them, the only thing “deep down” they are feeling is a driving imperative to uphold the narrative that they are superior and omnipotent beings. This need is essential to their emotional survival and eclipses all else. They may pay lip service to lofty ideals. They may cultivate a charming, caring, heroic, great-humanitarian image. But the reality of is that they view others as competitors to be crushed in the brutal game of life, and they use those closest to them to carry their projected shame and self-hatred so they don’t have to.

No, narcissists do not respect integrity, kindness, truth, mercy, justice, compassion, and gratitude.

The Narcissist’s Envy

So how about respecting power, wealth, fame, and influence?

The answer? Whereas narcissists idealize people and things they believe will enhance their own status, they are driven by a desire to possess and control such coveted prizes, not by respect. And if they are thwarted in getting what they want, they feel hateful envy, a desire to debase and destroy that which they cannot have. The unattainable becomes something to be outdone and defeated until nothing else but the narcissist stands tall, peerless, and invulnerable. The narcissist’s disrespect is inevitable and all-pervasive. To the narcissist, life is a war, and each moment a potential battle.

The Bottom Line: Contempt

Narcissists respect nothing. Ultimately they hold everyone and everything in contempt.

  1. They have contempt for language, which they twist and distort.
  2. They have contempt for kindness, which they see as foolish weakness.
  3. The have contempt for honesty, which is a threat they seek to discredit.
  4. They have contempt for responsibility, which they avoid and deflect onto others.
  5. They have contempt for trust, which they betray and violate.
  6. They have contempt for love, which they do not feel but use as a weapon against others who do.
  7. They have contempt for authenticity, which threatens their false facade.
  8. They have contempt for generosity, which runs counter to their primitive selfishness.
  9. They have contempt for forgiveness, which they regard as giving others power.
  10. They have contempt for remorse, which they do not feel but see as weakness in others to be exploited.
  11. They have contempt for accuracy, which threatens their self-protective distortions of reality.
  12. They have contempt for truth, which they fear more than anything and work continuously to deny, dismiss, defile, and deform.

Listen to Julie interviewed on The Addicted Mind Podcast and Narcissist Apocalypse Podcast.

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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Photo courtesy of Tim Green.

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