New psychobabble episode. Watch on Youtube or listen on Anchor below.

Show notes

What is a narcissist

• Technical- NPD, DSM, official text used to diagnose people

• Can have narc traits without technically being a narc, other similar disorders like antisocial.

• DX doesn't matter beyond treatment. What are they doing about it? Can't trust therapy. If they do get better it will only give them more options

• What are the traits? They all have the same playbook

• Unhealthy relationship with themselves. Will do anything to get their needs met, don’t care who it hurts. 

• Like having fearful-avoidant attachment, dissociative identity, substance use, sex addiction but with no internal locus of control. Everyone else is the problem.

• Ego defense mechanism. Multiple personalities and no personality

• Like vampires but they don’t feed on your blood. They feed on fear, guilt, shame, power, control, sexual coercion. Make up for feeling powerless.

• Jealous. The people who try to bring you down are scared of being left behind. They are also ensuring it.

• Don’t respect you because you’re with them. Why it’s called a disorder.

• The cure is vulnerability. Their ego won’t let them be vulnerable long enough. Blame shifting. Blaming works because there are grains of truth, but they’re twisting it.

• No foresight. Can’t see that being selfish makes their life worse and caring about other people is self-serving. It’s about control.

• Triangulation to make you look like the bad guy. Flying monkeys.

• Don't feel shame except in their body and they will blame you or even kill you. You remind them of their shame.

• Dangerous ones, 10% chance they get better 75% chance they will kill you

• Stuck at 10 years old. Terrible taste in food and TV. Act the worst with the people they are closest to

• Fragmented, over-active protector fragment. but ego is their core self

• Don’t yawn, rarely sweat, barely cry. Bad teeth- body is just a puppet

• Don’t feel love like we do. Possession, Like a toy. You might be their favorite toy. But you're not their only toy. Stop working and they toss you. Love you at first, stop as soon as they see you as imperfect. Love you when you love them. It's not about you, they are colorblind. Model for love looks like abuse.

• Master manipulators. The strongest trait of manipulation is giving hope. Hope is your downfall

• Deeply insecure, project onto others

• Think they’re smarter than us but just more ruthless

• Possessed by demon. Eyes black, lights flicker.

• With-hold what you want because they think it will make you stay and keep fighting for it.

What causes it

• Nature vs nurture. Hesitant to say nature.

• Won't admit parents are abusive- stockholm syndrome

• Creepy enmeshment

• Did not have a good mother

• Don't remember

• They play the victim in dysfunctional ways because their ego won’t let them admit to the valid ways

• Sympathy feeds them. They logically know right from wrong.

• On some level, it was a choice. They chose to be villains so they wouldn’t be victims. There are people who have been through worse things that don’t hurt other people

• Maybe being a narc isn’t a choice but acting like one is. They are in control

• Narcs and empaths have shared trauma, fractured into different extremes and they chose the coping mechanism that hurts others.

Why do we attract narcissists

• Because we’re awesome and being around awesome people feeds their ego

• We don’t attract them, they target everyone. We let them stay.

• Why do we let them stay

• Magnetic familiarity. Empaths and narcissists. Our trauma fractured us into different extremes. They show us the missing pieces of ourselves. Our lost duality. What we’re repressing.

• Shared trauma but we internalize blame and they externalize it

• Sides of the same coin. We both wear costumes. We both live on the fringes of society. Ego is core self wearing dead mask. Both codependent Side of the same coin, But we betray ourselves, they betray everyone else. We doorslam, they discard. We manipulate to get people to like us.

• We have trouble unpacking our trauma because we’re future oriented, trouble remembering the past.

• Learned the best way to get by is by meeting other peoples needs, emotionally immature parents, modeled codpenency, were not taught boundaries, needs that went unmet. Not always what happened, what didn’t happen

• Not given the freedom to make mistakes, trust radar is broken

• Slow processors take a long time to give up on them. Trauma bonded by the time we figure out what’s happening.

• Abandonment wounds. Don’t want to give up on other people. Trying to give them the love that we needed. But they don’t need love they need consequences.

• We care more about why someone is hurting us. You cheated because…

• We want to be deeply seen and known, but we don't want to let anyone in. Narcs look deep and they push their way in, plow through walls.

• Empathy makes us easy targets and easy to manipulate. We believe that love has the power to heal. They are genuinely suffering and we do feel that. But it’s their fault.

• We see abuse as a sign that we need to do more. Deep capacity for all emotions, including pain.

• No one personality type can give us everything we need. They pretend to. They have multiple personalities. We love to narrow down and we can’t with them.

• We are open-minded. We like people who don’t hide their darkness. We don't care where someone is at, we care about why, we care what they’re doing about it.

• Addicted to stories. I could tell you some stories. Know the ending we want to write.

• We are missing things because we’re in our heads. Don't focus on what's observable. There’s things we’re not fully picking up on. Fear of being blindsided.

• We narrow. Miss model for covert vs overt.

• We are also missing things because they obfuscate and we’re obsessed with filling in gaps. It’s like crack.

• We do see straight through them on some level, we just don’t want to believe it. But we see how insecure they are. We’re not as naive as they act or as we think. We are picking our battles while they are mistaking our kindness for weakness.

• Highs and lows cause releases of cortisol and adrenaline which become addictive. Trauma bonded by the time we figure out what’s happening.

• We didn’t get to have a childhood, they are immature. Living vicariously. We have a lot of self-doubt because we were invalidated. Because we saw things we weren't supposed to.

What can we do about it

• Give up on the dream, see them as pathetic instead of a diamond in the rough

• At a certain point, it doesn’t matter if they can get better. They don’t even deserve the chance to hurt you again.

• If you can’t love yourself enough, see it as an act of love for them. "I love you so much that I will not allow you to wreak havoc on someone who cares about you".

• Toxic people don't change because other people are suffering. They change because they're suffering. And as long as they have supply, attention, enablers, emotional reactions, they're not. They do what they do because it works. Don’t trust therapy.

• The more help you have, the more you dilute them. If helpers don't see the potential you can't trust them

• There is something unsolved you are trying to answer, maybe don't remember

• The narcissist's facade shows you who you want to be. The revenge is to go be it. Integrate your shadow. We are scared of our own darkness

• If they loved me enough they would change. I need to earn it. If they change it is proof that we’re lovable. Love can't fix brain damage- we think the healed version of them is compatible, might not be. INFP vs ESTP

• Grieve, get angry, get selfish

• Find the meaning. Look for clues. You are meant to heal people, but not them. They are getting in your way. Find people who want it. Equal energy exchange. Narcs are takers. Give to other givers. The ones who need help are the ones going unnoticed.

• Opportunity to treat this as baptism by fire. They are here to teach us lessons. Antagonists. On a spiritual level, they are landmarks. Assume they are conspiring to help you. Imagine that your souls conspired to challenge you in this lifetime. Look for the lesson and master it. To learn the lesson and leave is to honor their purpose. Render them obsolete.

• How to end their existence- heal your self worth, practice boundaries. They will stop showing up when we stop enabling/supplying

• Give it back to them, literally.

• Stop them when they’re young. Report child abuse. Maximum consequences.