What is marital counseling with a narcissistic person like?

Little or no empathy, an incredible sense of entitlement, manipulation, lies – these are just some of your partner’s behaviors that may make you think you are involved with a narcissist.

This person once declared that you two were soulmates and promised that you would live happily ever after. Now, you’re desperately hoping that couples counseling will bring back the magic.

Don’t count on it. Marriage counseling usually doesn’t work with a narcissistic partner, and it may backfire on you.

Related: How To Recover From Being Raised By A Narcissistic Parent

Here are 3 key reasons why couples counseling with a narcissist is doomed to fail — and can cause even more damage.

1. Narcissists have no desire to change.
   The term “narcissist” has become an umbrella term for anyone who engages in abusive behavior in relationships.

If your partner has a diagnosable condition, it may be narcissistic personality disorder. Or it could be antisocial personality disorder (ASPD), or in extreme cases, psychopathy.

People with these personality disorders engage in exploitation and manipulation, especially with partners and family members. In relationships, they are emotionally, psychologically, financially, sexually, or physically abusive — or all of the above.

According to the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM-5), personality disorders are enduring patterns of internal experience and behavior that are pervasive, inflexible, and stable over time.

If your partner has a personality disorder, it’s an integral part of his identity — and that’s unlikely to change, unless he seeks intensive individual therapy himself.

For therapy to work, you have to want to change. People who already suffer from narcissistic personality disorder often see no reason to change. In fact, they sometimes consider themselves superior to the rest of us.

2. Narcissistic partners may try to control the treatment and ally the therapist against you.
   What happens when people in abusive relationships seek treatment? This is exactly the question that my colleagues and I explored in the Love Fraud Therapy Satisfaction Survey.

A total of 544 people completed it. Among them, 281 participants, including 26 men, described their experiences with one or more couples therapy sessions.

The data was presented at the National Domestic Violence Health Conference in September 2017.

So, if you’re going to couples counseling with a narcissistic partner, what should you expect?

Among survey participants, 30% reported that their partners were cooperative, while 28% said their partners were not.

65% said their partner was a witch, while 51% said their partner blamed them. 53% said that their partners tried to control the session.

We also asked whether abusive partners attempted to ally with the therapist against survey participants.

13% said “no”, 19% said “sometimes”, 17% said “moderately”, and 52% said “very often”.

Narcissists, people who display antisocial traits and, in rare cases, psychopaths, are manipulative, and that’s exactly what they do in therapy. They charm the therapist, blame you, try to control the session, and work to get the therapist on their side against you.

Unfortunately, it is often unsuccessful.

“I was very unstable during the sessions and he was very calm and charming, and it was easy for him to make the therapist think I was the problem,” one participant wrote.

Why do some therapists fail to see manipulation?

Related: I’m A Self-Aware Narcissist And Here Are 18 Truths About Loving People Like Us

3. Many therapists don’t really understand the traits of an abusive personality.
   In the same survey, participants were asked whether their partner exhibited traits of antisocial personality disorder (ASPD) or psychopathy, as defined in the initial draft of the DSM-5 Alternative Model of Personality Disorders (AMPD).

Traits measured included callousness, aggression, manipulation, hostility, deceit, narcissism, irresponsibility, recklessness, and impulsivity.

Survey participant ratings indicated that partners were often high in these disorder traits.

But only 20 percent of participants said their therapists “got it” — identified the disorder — and another 24 percent said the therapist identified somewhat or somewhat with their partner’s disorder.

Fifty-five percent of participants said their therapist did not recognize their partner’s disorder.

Additional analysis showed that when therapists were knowledgeable about narcissistic personality disorders, survey participants felt more positive about the treatment they received.

“The fact that the therapist identified the behavior was very helpful,” one participant wrote.

If you are considering couples therapy, there is likely conflict in your relationship. You want to be more harmonious and loving. You want change in your relationship.

But people with narcissistic personality disorders don’t want to change. The evidence is in the following survey questions:

“Obviously I was the problem. He didn’t need to change,” one survey respondent wrote.

Another revealed: “My partner would walk with the therapist into our meetings, then go back to usual behavior as soon as we walked out the door.”