Narcissists don’t feel guilty for manipulating you.
In fact, some of them don’t even notice they’ve been manipulating you.
Why? Because manipulation, that’s what a BAD person does! And they are NEVER a BAD person!
The narcissist is always perfect, makes no mistake and certainly isn’t a bad person – they think.
You however? You are all of the bad stuff the narcissist doesn’t want to acknowledge within themselves. Especially not towards you. Because that’s the game. Making you feel WRONG and GUILTY, so you cater to them or they can leave you behind in the dust – feeling better about themselves.
Once you understand that everything a narcissist does is exploitative of others and serves nothing but their feeding of the false self, you will learn to lower your expectations.
No, the narcissist won’t apologize. And if they do, it’s only to make you shut up and be open to more abuse and/or exploitation.
At some point in their life, when a big trauma happened to them or they experienced a lot of pain/guilt/shame, they created a false self so they wouldn’t have to experience the pain/guilt/shame anymore – so now they are professionals at lying to themselves about their own vulnerabilities.
As a result:
They don’t know when they are lying to themselves.
They don’t know when they are lying to you.
When they are aware, well, it’s serving a purpose – their false self – so lying to you is totally okay to them. (Exploitative “relationships”, remember?)
They don’t care when or if they are manipulating you.
They don’t care what that does to you and your mental-emotional-psychological well-being.
They don’t care about you.
The ONE and ONLY thing they care about is sustaining their false self – and that false self requires lies, manipulation, deflecting, blame-shifting etc…
In essence, narcissists have misplaced the pain from their original traumas.
Now the center of their existence revolves around sustaining and defending the false self – so that they don’t need to experience the pain that made them split off from their true, vulnerable self.
This applies to vulnerable narcissists, too.
Vulnerable narcissists will be deeply, pathologically defensive – maybe less offensive than an overt, malignant narcissist, but they can switch roles very quickly.
A vulnerable narcissist is the eternal victim.
You can see in all kinds of narcissists that every conflict revolves around the image they have about themselves – and that they want to sustain at all costs.
They will become irrational at times, telling you things like:
“Your emotions are wrong.”
and other things that are not only gas-lighting, but destabilizing to your mental health.
I believe that a narcissist isn’t even intentionally harmful.
They’re more like a virus, parasite or mold.
A narcissist simply doesn’t care about you or any aspect of you.
They don’t care about truth, either.
ALL they care about is sustaining their false self – once I really understood this, I was finally able to acknowledge that there will never be any kind of healing, cooperation, closure, hope, love, peace, logic, wisdom coming from an attachment to a narcissist – whether that relationship is ongoing or over.
There was never anything real in the relationshits with these individuals.
It was all about their false self.
There was no relationship at all.
There was no mutual common ground, no real understanding, no “we”.
It was never you and me against the problem.
It was always the adversary role – you against me / me against you.
They need that adversary role in order to sustain a reason to defend their false self against you – even if you’ve been WONDERFUL towards them.
They will ALWAYS turn you into an adversary, because they can’t afford authenticity, because they can’t afford vulnerability – they are incredibly scared that the truth would annihilate them. — And it’s true; it would.
Their true, vulnerable self, if it still exists somewhere deep down there, in the pits of hell, would annihilate their false self.
So when a cute, kind narc suddenly comes at you with their claws and harsh words – remember, they are not even fighting you. You are just a replacement.
What they are truly fighting is their true self.
Their own vulnerability.
They are fighting the memories of how betrayed, used, exploited, belittled, neglected and HELPLESS they felt.
If you treat them well and in a loving way, they will start dropping the mask BECAUSE they will want to be vulnerable with you, but they can’t.
So they will turn you into an adversary.
They will provoke and hurt you until you actually BECOME their adversary – or leave them.
Even if the last thing on the planet that you might want would be being their adversary – they will turn your into their adversary.
Simply because they need to.
They have to.
They have no other option.
There is no other ending in this script.
Your authenticity, your kindness, your realness, your generosity – all of your good qualities – remind them of their true self.
You are causing pain to them by being good to them. You are activating a mental cacophony they don’t want to listen to. You are triggering memories of their own vulnerable, true child that they have buried deep within themselves.
They will not allow themselves to go back to a place of vulnerability.
They’d rather destroy you. They’d rather turn you to dust. They’d rather sabotage the relationship and never see you again — even though you may actually be their soulmate and the only person in the world they MIGHT have let “too close”.
Even if you are that person with a never-ending supply of coolness, comfort, not letting their bad words get to you…
Nothing will help them.
Because, again, they really don’t care about kindness and healing.
They don’t think anything is wrong with them – it’s you.
They turn you into the adversary, because to them, in their warped paradigm, you really are the problem.
You are an intruder.
I believe that narcissism is like an auto-immune disease (the defense system is not working correctly anymore) or an allergy towards authenticity and vulnerability.
If you were allergic to human relationships, you would probably react like a narc.
If you point out to such a person that there is a dynamic between you two… They will disagree or deflect or change the topic.
They will say something along the lines of: “No, it’s you. You are the problem because you tell me XYZ.”
or
“I called you (names) because you said XYZ.”
or
“If I said the bunny is brown, you’d say the bunny is white. That’s the problem.”
They will rationalize their own toxic behavior instead of looking for a solution to the problem so that both of you benefit, and they will blame you and make you wrong.
They have to be right and you have to be wrong – because admitting that they can be wrong would injure their false self.
Their false self is not going to give ANY inch or millimeter to their own true self – or yours.
Authenticity and cooperation THREATEN the false self.
Love and genuine care THREATEN the false self.
Therefore:
If you love a narc, the narc will destroy you.
And no, you cannot help them, because they will not allow you to love them.
They will not accept help.
They will sabotage everything that could bring them closer to vulnerability.
And that’s why loving a narc doesn’t work.
Love requires that the two lovers can be vulnerable and their true selves with one another.
A loving relationship is a safe space for both connection and autonomy.
Narcs can’t handle that.
Narcs have to consume you and spit you out.
Narcs are addicted to and allergic to other people’s vulnerability.
They need your vulnerability to serve their ego – but they will not allow themselves to become vulnerable themselves.
Hell, no.
They will turn your love into poison and you will realize that they tricked you into loving them – so they can poison you.
It’s not even that they want to poison you.
It’s that they want to protect their false self at all costs, because doing so, ironically, makes them think they are actually protecting their own kindness and goodness.
In their mind, the problem is that no one can really see how good and kind they actually are – and they’re right about that.
Ironically, no one sees the narc as competent and good and kind-hearted as they see themselves, because no one knows the real self underneath the narc mask.
That real self is only known to the narc, or not even to them.
It’s more like the myth of the unicorn you will always hear about, but never actually see.
The narc thinks they’re a unicorn, a true treasure.
They are protecting that imaginary self from everybody.
Everyone is too stupid for them. They think.
They are being inauthentic with you in order to protect their own authentic self – a self they are not letting out anymore. They are hiding that real self under lock and key, from the big bad world – and you.
Someone, at some point, probably a care-giver, broke the narcissist’s trust so thoroughly, that they will not allow themselves to be truly emotionally intimate and authentic with another person.
All the are doing, no matter how painful it is, is misguided self-protection, but still, it’s self-protection.
They don’t intend to be assholes. They just are.
It’s possible to have compassion with a narcissist without being in their life.
They don’t appreciate you – because they can’t.
They can’t make use of your authenticity.
And they can only abuse and betray your vulnerability.
They have no lock for your key.
In the beginning they were attracted to your realness, but then it triggered their self-defense programs.
These “demons” are stronger than their will to have a healthy relationship with you ever was.
These “demons” are their main software, maybe even part of their hardware. Their operating system is not compatible with yours and you can’t install a virtual machine to trick them into health and sanity.
They are lost.
But this is where they feel safe.
No one will be able to help them — unless they realize all of this about themselves, without anyone trying to tell them (because no one can teach them anything; they are perfect), and seek help on their own.
And when we think about it, we actually understand why a narcissist is already perfect and never wrong and never needs help.
What are they actually defending?
In all of their crazy-making behavior, what are they defending?
They are defending their own innocence.
Literally.
Therefore, you will always be the guilty one.
Even if they do come to the conclusion that it’s not all you, they will give up on the relationship entirely.
They will not seek help, mutual understanding or growth, because that would imply that they were the guilty one in some sense.
They can’t accept that.
They won’t say they’re sorry.
They won’t feel guilty.
They’d rather manipulate you into feeling sorry and guilty – and they have to do that, in order to “establish” (actually: fake) their own innocence.
A narcissist lives and breathes for their false self.
They are interested in relationships in order to “establish” a higher social status (“Now I have a woman/a man.”) or in order to “establish” authority – over you.
They want you as an object, not an equal partner/human being.
They want deference from you.
They want you to justify their unjustified arrogance – which is an impossible task.
If you enable the narcissist and turn into a doormat for them, sacrificing your own mental health, you are not helping their healing, either.
A narc cannot be helped, because they are convinced they don’t need any help – all they need and want to do is maintain their position of self-defense, power, domination, control.
Why?
Probably because they felt too helpless as a child.
If a person is always defensive, they automatically turn situations into conflicts, even where there was absolutely no room for a conflict. They always fit it in there somewhere, somehow.
Their modus operandi IS conflict.
This means that living with a narcissist means living in conflict, THEIR suppressed trauma (which will traumatize you), guilt-tripping and shame.
You will lose trust in yourself because you are allowing this to happen to yourself – for the love of them.
You are sacrificing yourself to a person who really doesn’t give a damn about you.
(Sure, you’re an interesting toy sometimes, but not a real person to them. They don’t take your emotions seriously.)
If children are in the picture, you are exposing these children to psychological abuse that will have long-lasting, negative consequences for them. Get out ASAP.
Give up and leave.
Free yourself of your love for the narcissist.
Ask yourself how much of that love is really love and how much is guilt – a guilt they installed in you by claiming they love you, need you, they can’t survive without you, making you angry and reactive, bringing out the worst in you, making you question your own sanity etc.
It’s okay to be damaged by a narcissist. You can heal.
You can, in contrast to the narcissist, acknowledge that injury and get help.
How much of this nasty attachment is love?
In my case, I came to the conclusion that my attachment to the narcissist I had dated for a short time had been 30% real, genuine love and care. Agape, philia, eros, the whole package.
But 70% was nothing but gut-wrenching guilt.
Concerning my relatives, it was even less love and more guilt.
But all throughout this noise, I can still hear the voice of sanity:
You cannot save them.
It’s okay.
You cannot save them and it’s not your fault.
It was never your responsibility to reparent your parents.
It was never your responsibility to relive your lover’s childhood trauma for them. They should be doing that on their own, with a therapist.
And only they can.
The only way they can return to their own true self is by themselves
– and only, if they choose to.
They need to meet and reconcile with themselves, not you.
They need to face their own injuries instead of injuring you.
You cannot help them and they don’t even want your help.
True love does not hurt.
True love uplifts, inspires, comforts and nourishes.
True love is care, without enabling abuse or for the sake of self-promotion.