Question:
What kind of a spouse/mate/partner is likely to be attracted to
a narcissist?
Answer:
The Victims
On the face of it, there is no (emotional) partner or mate, who
typically “binds” with a narcissist. They come in all shapes and
sizes. The initial phases of attraction, infatuation and falling
in love are pretty normal. The narcissist puts on his best face
– the other party is blinded by budding love. A natural
selection process occurs only much later, as the relationship
develops and is put to the test.
Living with a narcissist can be exhilarating, is always onerous,
often harrowing. Surviving a relationship with a narcissist
indicates, therefore, the parameters of the personality of the
survivor. She (or, more rarely, he) is moulded by the
relationship into The Typical Narcissistic Mate/Partner/Spouse.
First and foremost, the narcissist’s partner must have a
deficient or a distorted grasp of her self and of reality.
Otherwise, she (or he) is bound to abandon the narcissist’s ship
early on. The cognitive distortion is likely to consist of
belittling and demeaning herself – while aggrandising and
adoring the narcissist.
The partner is, thus, placing herself in the position of the
eternal victim: undeserving, punishable, a scapegoat. Sometimes,
it is very important to the partner to appear moral, sacrificial
and victimised. At other times, she is not even aware of this
predicament. The narcissist is perceived by the partner to be a
person in the position to demand these sacrifices from her
because he is superior in many ways (intellectually,
emotionally, morally, professionally, or financially).
The status of professional victim sits well with the partner’s
tendency to punish herself, namely: with her masochistic streak.
The tormented life with the narcissist is just what she deserves.
In this respect, the partner is the mirror image of the
narcissist. By maintaining a symbiotic relationship with him, by
being totally dependent upon her source of masochistic supply
(which the narcissist most reliably constitutes and most amply
provides) – the partner enhances certain traits and encourages
certain behaviours, which are at the very core of narcissism.
The narcissist is never whole without an adoring, submissive,
available, self-denigrating partner. His very sense of
superiority, indeed his False Self, depends on it. His sadistic
Superego switches its attentions from the narcissist (in whom it
often provokes suicidal ideation) to the partner, thus finally
obtaining an alternative source of sadistic satisfaction.
It is through self-denial that the partner survives. She denies
her wishes, hopes, dreams, aspirations, sexual, psychological
and material needs, choices, preferences, values, and much else
besides. She perceives her needs as threatening because they
might engender the wrath of the narcissist’s God-like supreme
figure.
The narcissist is rendered in her eyes even more superior
through and because of this self-denial. Self-denial undertaken
to facilitate and ease the life of a “great man” is more
palatable. The “greater” the man (=the narcissist), the easier
it is for the partner to ignore her own self, to dwindle, to
degenerate, to turn into an appendix of the narcissist and,
finally, to become nothing but an extension, to merge with the
narcissist to the point of oblivion and of merely dim memories
of herself.
The two collaborate in this macabre dance. The narcissist is
formed by his partner inasmuch as he forms her. Submission
breeds superiority and masochism breeds sadism. The
relationships are characterised by emergentism: roles are
allocated almost from the start and any deviation meets with an
aggressive, even violent reaction.
The predominant state of the partner’s mind is utter confusion.
Even the most basic relationships – with husband, children, or
parents – remain bafflingly obscured by the giant shadow cast by
the intensive interaction with the narcissist. A suspension of
judgement is part and parcel of a suspension of individuality,
which is both a prerequisite to and the result of living with a
narcissist. The partner no longer knows what is true and right
and what is wrong and forbidden.
The narcissist recreates for the partner the sort of emotional
ambience that led to his own formation in the first place:
capriciousness, fickleness, arbitrariness, emotional (and
physical or sexual) abandonment. The world becomes hostile, and
ominous and the partner has only one thing left to cling to: the
narcissist.
And cling she does. If there is anything which can safely be
said about those who emotionally team up with narcissists, it is
that they are overtly and overly dependent.
The partner doesn’t know what to do – and this is only too
natural in the mayhem that is the relationship with the
narcissist. But the typical partner also does not know what she
wants and, to a large extent, who she is and what she wants to
become.
These unanswered questions hamper the partner’s ability to gauge
reality. Her primordial sin is that she fell in love with an
image, not with a real person. It is the voiding of the image
that is mourned when the relationship ends.
The break-up of a relationship with a narcissist is, therefore,
very emotionally charged. It is the culmination of a long chain
of humiliations and of subjugation. It is the rebellion of the
functioning and healthy parts of the partner’s personality
against the tyranny of the narcissist.
The partner is likely to have totally misread and misinterpreted
the whole interaction (I hesitate to call it a relationship).
This lack of proper interface with reality might be
(erroneously) labelled “pathological”.
Why is it that the partner seeks to prolong her pain? What is
the source and purpose of this masochistic streak? Upon the
break-up of the relationship, the partner (but not the
narcissist, who usually refuses to provide closure) engage in a
tortuous and drawn out post mortem.
But the question who did what to whom (and even why) is
irrelevant. What is relevant is to stop mourning oneself, start
smiling again and love in a less subservient, hopeless, and
pain-inflicting manner.
The Abuse
Abuse is an integral, inseparable part of the Narcissistic
Personality Disorder.
The narcissist idealises and then DEVALUES and discards the
object of his initial idealisation. This abrupt, heartless
devaluation IS abuse. ALL narcissists idealise and then devalue.
This is THE core narcissistic behaviour. The narcissist
exploits, lies, insults, demeans, ignores (the “silent
treatment”), manipulates, controls. All these are forms of abuse.
There are a million ways to abuse. To love too much is to abuse.
It is tantamount to treating someone as one’s extension, an
object, or an instrument of gratification. To be
over-protective, not to respect privacy, to be brutally honest,
with a morbid sense of humour, or consistently tactless – is to
abuse. To expect too much, to denigrate, to ignore – are all
modes of abuse. There is physical abuse, verbal abuse,
psychological abuse, sexual abuse. The list is long.
Narcissists are masters of abusing surreptitiously (“ambient
abuse”). They are “stealth abusers”. You have to actually live
with one in order to witness the abuse.
There are three important categories of abuse:
Overt Abuse – The open and explicit abuse of another person.
Threatening, coercing, battering, lying, berating, demeaning,
chastising, insulting, humiliating, exploiting, ignoring
(“silent treatment”), devaluing, unceremoniously discarding,
verbal abuse, physical abuse and sexual abuse are all forms of
overt abuse. Covert or Controlling Abuse – Narcissism is almost
entirely about control. It is a primitive and immature reaction
to the circumstances of a life in which the narcissist (usually
in his childhood) was rendered helpless. It is about
re-asserting one’s identity, re-establishing predictability,
mastering the environment – human and physical. The bulk of
narcissistic behaviours can be traced to this panicky reaction
to the potential for loss of control. Narcissists are
hypochondriacs (and difficult patients) because they are afraid
to lose control over their body, its looks and its proper
functioning. They are obsessive-compulsive in their efforts to
subdue their physical habitat and render it foreseeable. They
stalk people and harass them as a means of “being in touch” –
another form of narcissistic control. But why the panic?
The narcissist is a solipsist. To him, nothing exists except
himself. Meaningful others are his extensions, assimilated by
him, they are internal objects – not external ones. Thus, losing
control of a significant other – is equivalent to losing the use
of a limb, or of one’s brain. It is terrifying.
Independent or disobedient people evoke in the narcissist the
realisation that something is wrong with his worldview, that he
is not the centre of the world or its cause and that he cannot
control what, to him, are internal representations.
To the narcissist, losing control means going insane. Because
other people are mere elements in the narcissist’s mind – being
unable to manipulate them literally means losing it (his mind).
Imagine, if you suddenly were to find out that you cannot
manipulate your memories or control your thoughts… Nightmarish!
Moreover, it is often only through manipulation and extortion
that the narcissist can secure his Narcissistic Supply (NS).
Controlling his Sources of Narcissistic Supply is a (mental)
life or death question for the narcissist. The narcissist is a
drug addict (his drug being the NS) and he would go to any
length to obtain the next dose.
In his frantic efforts to maintain control or re-assert it, the
narcissist resorts to a myriad of fiendishly inventive
stratagems and mechanisms. Here is a partial list:
Unpredictability
The narcissist acts unpredictably, capriciously, inconsistently
and irrationally. This serves to demolish in others their
carefully crafted worldview. They become dependent upon the next
twist and turn of the narcissist, his inexplicable whims, his
outbursts, denial, or smiles.
In other words: the narcissist makes sure that HE is the only
stable entity in the lives of others – by shattering the rest of
their world through his seemingly insane behaviour. He
guarantees his presence in their lives – by destabilising them.
In the absence of a self, there are no likes or dislikes,
preferences, predictable behaviour or characteristics. It is not
possible to know the narcissist. There is no one there.
The narcissist was conditioned – from an early age of abuse and
trauma – to expect the unexpected. His was a world in which
(sometimes sadistic) capricious caretakers and peers often
behaved arbitrarily. He was trained to deny his True Self and
nurture a False one.
Having invented himself, the narcissist sees no problem in
re-inventing that which he designed in the first place. The
narcissist is his own creator.
Hence his grandiosity.
(continued)