Key Points
Many people with Narcissistic Personality Disorder are predictable and tend to follow the same relationship pattern.
Many people with Narcissistic Personality Disorder want to settle down and get married, but they tend to have unrealistic expectations of their partners.
A narcissist’s relationship pattern often ends with constant devaluation and abuse of their partner.
One of the hardest things to understand in life is how someone who claims to love you can continue to mistreat you. People feel shocked and confused after a romantic relationship with an abusive narcissistic partner ends. They wonder, “We were so in love, and yet he went from telling me I was the love of his life to treating me like I was trash. He betrayed me. He devalued me. He embarrassed me in front of our friends. How can I ever trust anyone again, if I misjudged this person?”
Anyone who has been abused by a narcissistic partner may wonder how they could have made such a big mistake—and how they can avoid making it again in the future.
The good news is that most people with Narcissistic Personality Disorder are predictable. They tend to follow the same relationship pattern over and over again. Contrary to popular perceptions of narcissists, most are not particularly deceitful. Narcissists constantly suggest that they are narcissistic. You can learn to recognize the early signs that a new partner is a narcissist by paying close attention to how they act toward you at each stage of your relationship. After that, it’s up to you to decide whether to continue.
Why Are Narcissists Vulnerable to Abuse?
When people with Narcissistic Personality Disorder, two things interact to make them more likely to abuse:
- They have low emotional empathy.
Emotional empathy is the ability to feel what another person is feeling (or what you imagine that person is feeling). Emotional empathy makes you less likely to want to hurt others because you’ll feel some of their pain. Without emotional empathy, you have less motivation to pay attention to the pain your words and actions cause your partner.
Narcissists can have “intellectual empathy” without emotional empathy. Intellectual empathy is the ability to cognitively understand that you are causing pain to another person. It requires you to stop and think about what the other person might be feeling in response to your actions. Thus, narcissists can understand that they might be causing pain to someone, but they have less motivation to care because they do not feel anything negative themselves.
- They lack “whole object relations” and “object constancy.”
One of the main reasons people are so abusive to others who claim to love them is because they lack whole object relations and object constancy. It can be briefly defined as: “Whole object relations are the ability to see oneself and others completely and realistically as having a mix of good and bad qualities, some of which you like and some of which you dislike.” If you have whole object relations, you can accept that someone is not perfect and still value that person for the positive qualities they possess. “Object Persistence” is the ability to maintain a positive emotional connection with someone you care about while feeling angry, frustrated, disappointed, or hurt by that person. Subject Persistence helps you curb your impulse to hurt someone during a fight. A lack of it makes people more likely to hurt their partner emotionally and physically.
[Note: Not all people with Narcissistic Personality Disorder are equally abusive. Narcissists range from those who put you on a pedestal and then verbally devalue you when they realize you’re not the perfect person they expected you to be, to those who physically abuse their partners and try to control their every move—who they can see, what they can spend money on [about, how often they can talk to their family, etc.]
3Stages of Narcissistic Relationship Abuse Pattern
Although there are narcissists who are “players” and not looking for a serious, long-term relationship, many people with Narcissistic Personality Disorder want to settle down and get married. Unfortunately, because they lack perfect relationships, they tend to be unrealistic about what they expect from a partner. They see two categories: perfect and flawed.
Perfect = You’re pleasing me right now.
Flawed = You’re doing something I don’t like right now.
As a result, instead of finding the perfect relationship they long for, narcissists end up repeating what I call the Narcissistic Relationship Abuse Pattern. Each stage has its form of narcissistic abuse that you can learn to spot.
Stage 1: Chasing the Unicorn
At first, you seem like that rare, imaginary creature, the unicorn. They love everything about you; even your flaws seem like endearing personality traits. Narcissists are extreme, with no middle ground. When they initially find you attractive, they’re likely to idealize you and think you’re the perfect partner. Eventually, they’ve found someone who will never disappoint them. They chase you and pursue you with attention, gifts, texts, compliments, and anything else they think will help prove their complete loyalty. At this stage, while you’re a little out of reach and they haven’t closed the deal yet, they’re completely focused on convincing you to give them a chance to prove their love. Some narcissists repeat the “chasing stage” over and over again with different people because they don’t know how to have a real relationship with someone they’ve “caught.”
Pattern of Abuse
After spending an enormous amount of time, energy, and sometimes money trying to convince you of their loyalty, your pursuer will lose interest in you the moment you stop running. You feel disappointed and confused because this person who said they wanted you so much has now “ignored” you and won’t even answer your texts.
Signs of Abuse
The exaggerated nature of their pursuit is a sign that they are unrealistic.
Unlike most people, who want to gradually get to know someone before committing to the future, narcissists may try to involve you in planning your future together after your first date. They may start talking about all the places they want to take you on vacation, or even how many kids they could have together and where they should go to school.
They worship the ground you walk on.
This may seem like a good sign, but it’s not: what goes up must come down. This degree of idealization is a sign that they don’t see the real you at all. They are simply projecting a fantasy onto you. The real you isn’t perfect and is unlikely to match every item on their wish list. Once they discover that you’re not exactly what they imagined, they may feel resentful and disappointed. And if you’re lucky, they’ll simply disappear from your life at this point.
All of their exes have ended up disappointing them.
The way they describe their exes and their peers is the way they’ll likely eventually describe you. If they’re constantly disappointed in people, that says a lot more about them than it does about those people. If you ask them why their past relationships didn’t work out, and they tell you that they discovered their lovers were very different from what they seemed at first, that’s a sign that you’ll also be described that way one day.
Stage 2: The Construction Project
Once you’ve been “caught,” narcissistic lovers begin to relax and enjoy your company. Now that they’ve had a chance to get a good look at you, they slowly begin to notice the little things about you that they think detract from your perfection. Your quirks no longer seem attractive; they’re now flaws. At this stage, you can begin to recognize the signs that this person may be a narcissist.
Pattern of Abuse
Narcissistic lovers begin to suggest ways you should change “for your good”: “If only you styled your hair differently/exercised more/dressed more attractively (or less attractively), you’d be better. Don’t you want to be better?” “Don’t you want to please me?” Think of this stage as the “construction project,” as they continue to suggest ways to make you better.
Predicting Abuse
How They Deal with Disappointment and React to “No.” Many people discover that a new lover isn’t as perfect as they first thought and feel let down; This is completely normal. What separates normal disappointment from narcissistic disappointment is how they react when you say “no” to their suggestions.
Normal disappointment: They’ll love it when you make small changes to please them, but if you don’t want to, they can accept that without devaluing you or losing interest in you. They may come back to the subject from time to time, but they’re more or less reconciled to the idea that you won’t give them everything they want. They also accept that you’re a separate person and have a right to your thoughts.
Narcissistic disappointment: They can’t understand why you want to stay this way. When you resist their suggestions, they feel insulted—as if you’ve criticized them, not the other way around. They get angry, want to punish you, and may start acting out. They start picking fights with you about every little thing you do that they don’t like. The ratio of compliments to devaluing comments changes. You find yourself wondering, “What happened to the person I fell in love with?”
Stage 3: Devaluing Others
The Abuse Pattern
One day, you wake up to realize that the compliments have stopped, and all you hear is criticism.
Signs of Abuse
Criticisms are no longer polite suggestions. They become outright insults: “You look like a clown in that.” “I hate that smell you wear. When did you become an old man?” Eventually, the insults become overt. One day, you’re out with your friends, and your partner starts not only criticizing you in front of them but criticizing them in front of you.
The verbal abuse escalates until it’s the main way your partner talks to you. Your wishes are ignored, and you’re treated harshly. Fights escalate into screaming matches, and you find yourself screaming or crying hysterically. You may be physically abused in other ways, too; unless you can find a way to stop it, it’ll become your life.
