There is a painful double bind that exists when you’re in relationship with a narcissist. Many feel trapped in a dilemma of feeling powerless to leave, yet unable to stay. The narcissist’s ploy is to provide just enough love and attention to lure you in, followed by large doses of mistreatment or abuse. This lethal combination is called intermittent reinforcement, which is an extremely addictive psychological bond. There are good reasons why those involved with narcissists feel as if they’re sleepwalking through some bad horror movie and feel crazy much of the time. The following provides some explanation about why it’s so difficult to extricate yourself from this type of relationship as well as tools to cope with the narcissist in your life.

FEARS OF ABANDONMENT

Abandonment fears are not unfounded in relationship with a narcissist. Although a narcissist desperately needs to be in relationship, the exposed shame and painful wounds that are triggered around abandonment become intolerable. In addition, narcissists sense that their partner will inevitably see how inadequate they are and leave for someone else. Rather than wait for that reality, they’d rather control the inevitability and leave first.

For a narcissist, abandonment is triggered by two illusions: that exiting the relationship will stop his anguish, and that somewhere out there is the ideal partner who really knows how special he is. What ensues is a painful, repetitive cycle. The narcissist leaves. Then he often returns, expressing feigned remorse and promising more effort and commitment to change. The abandoned partner feels a renewed hope for a better future, only to be set up for abandonment again.

Naturally, partners of a narcissist want to know how to prevent this cycle. The answer is that you cannot. Once a narcissist has reached this point of escaping the pain by exiting the relationship, the prognosis isn’t particularly hopeful. The problem for those in relationship with narcissistic partners is that you spend so much of your time either thinking about leaving, or trying to avoid being abandoned, that you lose track of who you are. This erosion of spirit happens day by day until you don’t even recognize yourself. The first step to your own healing is introspection. Turn your focus inward and contemplate the reality of your situation.

In order to face the reality of why you’ve stayed in an empty relationship, it may be time to face the fears that have been buried deep within you. Abandonment fear alerts us that our hearts need to be healed if we’re to grow in our capacity to give and receive love.

Many people suffer painful relationships because they fear being alone. They’d rather give themselves away than face an empty house or apartment. They’re willing to accept leftover attention, the status of mistress, or rage and abuse rather than face their deeper fears of abandonment or aloneness. This is a fear most humans face no matter what kind of family background exists. For those who were emotionally or physically abandoned as children, however, this fear plays a major part in their motivation to stay connected to someone despite the cost.

Are you tired of walking on land mines and using all your energy just trying to avoid issue after issue? Do you wonder what happened to that person within you who used to feel confident, free, and joyful? Are you fretting about the next time you’ll make a mistake and set your partner off on a rampage or days of silence? Are there so many topics that are forbidden to discuss that you find yourself desperately searching for things to talk about—ironically, to the one who is supposed to be closest to you? Is fear of abandonment eroding your spirit? Are you in the hideous position of not being able to stay in this relationship, yet not being able to leave? If so, it may be time to look at your abandonment issues. (Skerritt, 2004)

Can you imagine what it might be like to speak your truth with dignity, to express your opinion without repercussions? Wouldn’t it be wonderful to feel the delight of give and take rather than, “I’ll give and you take.” It is our birthright to be free, to express our opinion, and to live without fear. But remember this caveat: honesty without sensitivity is called brutality. With the gift of freedom comes the inherent responsibility of respecting the boundaries of others. This is something that a true narcissist cannot do. However, through long-term therapy a narcissist can modify his or her behavior.

Dr. David Berenson, a physician and family therapist, has a quote I’ll never forget: “If you don’t come to terms with your fear of abandonment, you will never be able to act with abandon.” (Berenson, 1998) How true this is! If we don’t face our abandonment fears, we’ll never be free. We’ll always be walking on tiptoe, making sure that no one leaves us. We’ll squeeze the life out of our relationships as well as ourselves. In this way we attempt to control others so that we don’t have to confront our darkest fears of abandonment.

THE PARALYSIS OF BLAME

Blaming has always been one of the top ten tools for propaganda and can keep a victim paralyzed with fear. In wartime or periods of financial hardship, there is always a scapegoat. The vicious treatment of particular racial groups was used to unify communities against a common enemy. In fact, years ago Russian President Gorbachev said something curious to President Reagan. He said, “Mr. President, we’re going to do something terrible to the United States. We’re going to take the enemy away.”

As long as there is someone to blame for our hardships, we can direct our anger outward. If there is no enemy, then anger and shame implodes. It’s been hypothesized that the rise in violent crime and abuse in our culture began to seriously increase after the detente with Russia. Perhaps you can see that when it comes to a narcissist, the need for an enemy, or a few enemies, is crucial to keeping shame at bay.

Narcissists are adept in manipulating and brainwashing people close to them so that the victims will take on the guilt. They blame the victim unjustly for causing them distress as a way of avoiding taking personal responsibility. It’s a slick, convenient way to demoralize a subject, while making the narcissist look superior. For narcissists, this particular mind game is honed to an art form.

The narcissist is adept at mind games. The term “mind game” can be used for any strategy or tactic where mental manipulation or intimidation of another person is a goal. One mind game occurs when a narcissist engages you in a battle by blaming you, coercing you to attack until the narcissist finally ends up in the victim role. Then it is your opportunity to feel sorry for this victim and begin to rescue him from his despair. The Karpman Triangle shows this dynamic that is so common in narcissistic relationships. (Karpman, 1974)

In working with narcissists, I find that the only motivation for them to cease the blame-and-attack games is the potential loss of supply, which is always looming over them. It’s possible for narcissists to see how this blaming defensiveness takes away from the things they long for most—love and acceptance. If this narcissist ever chooses to get help, the challenge to a therapist would be to find the deep hurt underneath the blame and to redirect each attack back to the narcissist’s underlying vulnerability.

BUT I LOVE HIM

Loving a narcissist can be extremely addictive and leaving him very difficult. Say whatever you’d like about narcissistic relationships, they are not boring. Of course, the conflict, sarcasm, and loneliness get old, but narcissists stir up drama in every relationship.

When I hear partners of narcissists say how they love their spouses, I must delve into their interpretation of that love. It’s not that I disbelieve them, it’s that in a narcissistic relationship there’s a profound confusion between intimacy and intensity. For example, if the relationship contains a high level of fear, betrayal, abandonment threats, passionate reconciliations, or sexualized affection, then one is referring more to intensity than to intimacy. After all, attachment often deepens with terror and this intensity is so absorbing and addictive that it can feel just as powerful as true intimacy. The danger then becomes that although they know the relationship is causing them harm and that they should leave, they are not psychologically or neurochemically prepared to do this.

Dr. Robert Sternberg, author of The New Psychology of Love (Sternberg, 2006) writes that love is painfully paradoxical; it’s the only thing that matters and it’s absolutely not enough to make a relationship work. This realization for those who are in love with narcissists is a bitter pill to swallow. The torture of loving someone who is hurtful to us, added to intense feelings of obligation and self-doubt, keeps us locked in situations no one else would endure. Suffice it to say that waiting like a puppy for a sign of loving behavior from a narcissist is a setup for starvation.

Generally, our disappointment and hurt in another is rooted in unrealistic or thwarted expectations. (Brown, 1999) If, after repeated difficult and cruel behaviors, you say things like, “I’m sure this will never happen again,” or “If I just work a little more (give more, do more, be more), I’m sure things will change,” then you are clearly blinded by the nostalgia of earlier days when your narcissistic partner was loving, romantic, and caring. Perhaps those memories are sacrosanct to you because that’s all you have left to cling to. Today, you’re spending your life trying to please a partner who cannot be pleased.

The problem is, even though we might be excruciatingly aware that a partner is harmful to us, the feelings of love continues to draw us back to this person. This dilemma produces such shame and helplessness that it not only diminishes our joy, but what’s worse, damages our integrity. This awareness keeps us isolated, afraid, and in a perpetual state of despair. We become so hungry for scraps of affection that we’re willing to sacrifice our soul, our friends, our jobs, and sometimes even our children. We become constricted and singularly focused in the presence of our narcissistic partner; each action we take and each word we speak becomes measured.

This is the oppression of loving a narcissist. Clinging to your love for a narcissist as a rationalization to avoid setting boundaries, staying safe, and practicing self-care is a huge barrier to healing. Love doesn’t mean putting up with someone’s destructive behavior, and if this is something you recognize in your relationship(s), then the first step is to have compassion for yourself. Only then can you begin to reverse the one-way valve of attention and admiration that’s sapping your life’s energy.

Asking some individuals who have been ravaged by their relationships to have compassion for themselves is like telling the homeless to “just buy a house.” It makes sense why compassion for self is so difficult in a narcissistic relationship.

When you’re involved with someone who is unable to show empathy, your capacity for self-empathy becomes lost. (See cycle of isolation, depression, page 185.) Starved for understanding, you have become brainwashed; your internal voices of

inadequacy and self-doubt drown out any possibility of your having self-compassion. When empathy isn’t displayed in a ­relationship, you feel as if you’re unlovable, undeserving, and at fault. Not because of some action that causes you to feel guilty, but because you feel you are defective or flawed in some essential way. Gradually, shame begins to sit where your soul used to be. And shame cannot exist with self-love. (Kaufman, 1992)

COMPASSION VERSUS SELF-PITY

“Whining is anger coming
through a very tiny opening.”

—Mary Lee Zawadski, author

There is a difference between compassion for yourself and feeling sorry for yourself. Feeling sorry for yourself is very closely related to feeling anger. In fact, some would say that self-pity is really “anger in a party dress.” And while it may feel safer for some people to engage in self-pity rather than anger, rest assured: they are two sides of the same coin.

No one likes the term self-pity, and there may be reasons why this emotion is familiar to you. Perhaps you’ve inherited a legacy of self-pity or bitterness from your family. If you grew up with a martyr and have taken on his or her posture toward life, then your intense anger at yourself (and later at your partner) has gone unexpressed. Now it comes out in self-deprecation and whining. If a parent consistently played the martyr role in your household, you may have promised yourself that self-pity is something you’ll never resort to. However, the early patterning may be engrained and will most likely emerge in your adult life. Whatever its cause, your anger can be expressed in responsible and life-giving ways rather than in passive-aggressive, half-hearted ways. Self-pity connotes victimization and martyrdom, and even though you may indeed feel victimized, this attitude will prevent you from taking action and will inevitably drive people away.

Compassion is a form of nurturing self-love. It’s not abusive, manipulative, or angry. Compassion doesn’t involve self-pity. Rather, it involves tenderness, mercy, kindness, warmth, and love—in short, everything you’ve offered up to your narcissistic partner that you’ve denied yourself. When you practice compassion it’s as if you’re becoming the loving parent to the part of you that feels wounded, small, and insignificant. In this way, you learn to love yourself into taking action, voicing your truth, and breathing life back into your soul.

In order to move from self-pity to compassion, you must take a serious look at the painful cycle in which you’ve been living. Many who are in relationship with narcissists today have felt trapped their entire lives. When you finally realize how powerless you’ve felt with a narcissist and/or with mothers or fathers that were narcissists, your internal despair and anger toward yourself and others is understandable. Although knowing why you’ve felt these emotions will not bring about solutions, it can clarify your perceptions and reassure you that you’re not crazy. The following diagram explains the tragic cycle that may seem familiar to those whose lives have revolved around a narcissist:

A painful cycle of shame, isolation, and depression occurs when you’re in relationship with a narcissistic partner. When, time after time, you receive responses of indifference, injury, or denial of your experience, you gradually begin to dismiss these important aspects of yourself. You agonizingly come to the painful realization that there is no possibility for connection or empathy in your primary relationship. Because most of us can’t consciously accept this fact, many face a horrible dilemma. On some painful level you know that this situation isn’t going to change, yet you continue to hide integral parts of your being in order to keep the relationship going. Systematically, you conceal your feelings, your opinions, your successes, your failures, and your truth. After a time, you don’t recognize the person you’ve become. You turn into a creature so irrelevant that it seems impossible that you ever had a voice at all.

As humans, we have a basic need to make sense of our lives and make some order out of chaos. When we can’t make sense of the way we are being treated, we wind up distorting our view of ourselves and our relationships. Instead of directly addressing the pain, we try harder to please the narcissist; in fact, the anxiety over trying to “do it right” is so overwhelming, that we can’t possibly be present for our family, our friends, or even ourselves. Ironically, because of this anxiety, we are more prone to making mistakes, mixing up our words, and feeling as if we’re small and inept—thus manifesting a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Since we are under the spell of a narcissist, we assume that we are the cause of our partner’s unhappiness. If we were just smarter, more attractive, sexy, or worthy, things would be different. In other words, since we are brainwashed into thinking the problems are about our deficiencies, we believe we can fix the relationship by fixing ourselves. This is a desperate attempt to control the uncontrollable.

When we feel incapable of making the situation better, we go into hiding. Out of hopelessness and despair, we become convinced that any opportunity for a meaningful interaction with our beloved is impossible and we lose the ability to reach out. The helplessness of the situation leads to an internal sense of humiliation and we begin to distrust our ability to connect with others. It’s then that we begin isolating ourselves from the support of friends and family. Ironically, it’s the very tendency to pull away from others to protect ourselves that most locks us into shame. (Jordan, 1989)

By the way, the powerful purpose of shaming people is to silence them. The modus operandi of a narcissist is to stop anyone who gets in the way of his illusion of power and grandiosity. His tactics are actually rooted in shamelessness and a lack of conscience. Shaming is a sinister mode of oppression, in many ways more effective than physical tyranny. Indeed, shame has always been a potent use of dominance to subdue expressions of the truth. In narcissistic relationships, the self-perpetuating cycle of shame leads to isolation and then to a profound and deep depression where you feel immobilized to take action, to get help, or to save yourself.

This cycle applies to ongoing relationships with narcissists and, to a great degree, to living or working with people with borderline, antisocial, or histrionic personality disorders.

There is one important factor that needs to be considered regarding shame, hopelessness, and depression. Perhaps these emotions are haunting, repetitive, and familiar echoes from your family of origin, where as a child you felt trapped in a similar cycle. If this is true, then chances are you feel like a child in your adult relationship with absolutely no alternatives available to you. When this occurs it’s difficult to stand up for yourself and feel empowered because you’re seeing the present through the eyes of your past. Delving into your history and recovering your lost inner child may be the next important step. The following chapters provide strategies that will be helpful in removing yourself from this cycle in order to find a way of being in a relationship that is life giving.