Many abusers, are also narcissists who are also characterized by an incapacity for empathy, and who often exhibit grandiose thinking and/or behavior, mood instability, gross selfishness, and amongst other qualities, a belief that they are special, entitled to recognition and reward.

Their interpersonal difficulties in the world encourage an often angry and hostile outlook. Sexually, they tend to demean sexual intimacy -most are misogynists and have a thwarted, and conflicted relationship with their mother - or can be promiscuous, and flauntingly so.

In either case, the narcissist usually avoids and dislikes physical and emotional intimacy. To be involved with a narcissist is an appallingly toxic and bewildering experience.

Practitioners in psychology and mental health more often find themselves caring for partners of narcissists, such is their destructive nature.

Moral injustice is among the cost society pays for failing/refusing to identify such individuals while they inhabit educational institutions, political offices, and other positions that enable their exploitation of position, privilege, power, and status.

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 their childhood) was rendered helpless. It is about re-asserting one's identity, re-establishing predictability, mastering the environment human and physical.


Understanding does NOT imply acquiesing to them, but it is, as always, the critical step to arming oneself to both protect and to fight.

The narcissist is never whole without an adoring, available, and possibly self-denigrating partner. Their very sense of superiority, indeed their False Self, can depend on it. A sadistic Superego switches its attentions from the narcissist to the partner, thus finally obtaining an alternative source of satisfaction.

It is through self-denial that the partner survives. Often denying their wishes, hopes, dreams, aspirations, sexual, psychological and material needs, choices, preferences, values, and much else besides. She can perceive her needs as threatening because they might engender the wrath of the narcissist's God-like supreme figure.

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 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. 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.

The narcissist often does not keep agreements, does not adhere to reasonable expectations laws or social norms, and regards consistency and predictability as demeaning traits.

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 hurts 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 also be (erroneously) labelled "pathological".

Why is it that the partner then sometimes seeks to prolong her pain? On the break-up of the relationship, often it is the partner (but not the narcissist), who usually is unable to find closure and can engage in a tortuous and drawn out post mortem.

Repeated abuse has long lasting pernicious and traumatic effects such as panic attacks, hypervigilance, sleep disturbances, flashbacks (intrusive memories), suicidal ideation, and psychosomatic symptoms. Victims of abuse can also experience shame, depression, anxiety, embarrassment, guilt, humiliation, abandonment, and an enhanced sense of vulnerability.

But the question who did what to whom (and even why) is eventually irrelevant. What is relevant is to begin to stop mourning oneself, and to learn to start smiling again and to one day find love in a less hopeless, and pain-inflicting relationship.

Thus, to invest in a narcissist is a purposeless, futile and meaningless activity.

To the narcissist, every day is a new beginning, a new cycle of idealisation or devaluation, a newly invented self.

There is no accumulation of credits or goodwill because the narcissist has no past and no future. He occupies an eternal and timeless present. He is a fossil caught in the frozen ashes of a volcanic childhood.

(A very good resource support site is: NPDR Helping you identify, escape, recover and rebuild from life with a person who you think has a Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD). It also provides an online help forum.)