After a year of narcissistic abuse recovery coaching, the biggest mistake I made in that year was the same mistake many psychologists make…

…believing in the masks of covert narcissists.

I write a lot about sociopathy, because ASPD — which is a manifestation of NPD on the lower range of the spectrum of emotional intelligence — affected my family. So malignant narcissists are VERY attracted to my writing.

Then they come to coaching, and they immediately tell me they have BPD: the attempt to mirror me begins.

Do they know what they're doing?

Sometimes, they seem genuinely oblivious to the fact that they're narcissists: this is why narcissism is a disorder of pathological projection and delusion.

But often, they do know, because they panic and freeze at certain questions and they knowingly lie.

Most of them deeply, DEEPLY want to believe they have BPD.

Narcissists DEEPLY want to believe in their masks: they design their false self after empathetic people — their scapegoats.

This desire is due to their split thinking and their habits to mirror those they admire to design their false self: borderlines were family scapegoats and we have empathy, so they take this to mean "all good," but a borderline — who sees things in nuance — will be the first to tell you they aren't perfect.

Some narcissists are VERY good at masking — so good that they fooled me for some time, and I'm pretty good at detecting it.

My life has literally depended on having to detect it.

So…how can a professional and someone working to distance themselves from narcissistic abuse recognize genuine borderlines who have empathy and aren't abusers from covert narcissists who are good at performing empathy and seeming like loving people?

Here are some key clues I've learned along the way.

The vast majority of covert narcissists abandon all coaching or therapy after a few sessions for a web of common reasons, and one of them is fear of unmasking.

The fear of unmasking doesn't just come from their fear of consequences: a person with NPD never is operating from a place of their true self: they're avoiding reality.

They live in their fantasy self at all times.

They believe in their fantasy self fully. They design their fantasy self after people they admire, but they aren't emotionally mature, so admiration turns to envy on a dime for them and they compete with the very same people they mirror — who are often people who love them. As they compete, they don't see themselves as fraudulent or abusive whatsoever: they feel victimized because the envy makes them suffer and feel worthless. The supply doesn't know they're in a competition, but the narcissist knows, because they're feeling the SHAME of losing a competition.

Therefore, narcissists are avoiding unmaskings because they're avoiding suicidal collapses, which are dangerous for them and turn into rage when they survive them.

The more of those that they have in life, the worse their abusive and paranoid behaviors grow.

It's their survival instinct to avoid their true self and suppress ALL emotions: they do this to survive.

So, therapists that get close to seeing a narcissist's truths or poking at them usually get swiftly discarded. This is why it's NPD and ASPD are very resistant to treatment, and the best current advice for those who love people with NPD or ASPD is to go no contact and seek safety and boundaries.

It's a sad truth, but NPD and ASPD are also the least funded disorders for research (the people in power benefit from people not knowing they're disordered), so the field of treatment is simply not advanced enough to deal with the disorder.

Narcissists come to therapy often, however; they're plagued by the patterns of dysfunction in their lives. In the last year of coaching, narcissists have been the most common demographic I worked with, but less than half would tell me about their NPD upfront.

When narcissists are honest about their pathology upfront, I am honest that I don't feel I'm equipped to help them heal, both because I was abused by people with their pathology so it's triggering and because I have no track record of helping a narcissist heal.

If I could heal narcissists, I'd have started with the ones I loved most: my family.

I do often speak with narcissists for a single or a few sessions to sort out some of their traumas or respond to anything they have to say, but it's still true that I have no track record of helping anyone with that pathology. At most, I only help them understand their pathology a bit and how it connects to their child trauma.

A story: the most profound experience I had working with someone with NPD came from a woman who I worked with for 8 months.

In the woman's first session, she initially divulged some harrowing child traumas, and she cried over them. She admitted to cheating on her husband with a sociopath from her childhood: she was unable to tell him and she didn't know why she did it.

Cheating is always a red flag of a narcissist, but I don't generally use it as a green light that they're DEFINITELY a narcissist. Cheating and dishonesty show a lack of empathy for a partner, but I've known histrionics who have cheated, and if a person cheats and showcases honesty, real guilt, and remorse with changed behavior, it's unlikely they have NPD.

Those who are in abusive relationships are often starved of affection and prone to cheating also, so I never see it as a definitive sign of NPD, though it's a common compulsion for that pathology.

The woman I spoke to said upfront that she sometimes thought she had NPD and she sometimes thought she had BPD.

She said she wanted to figure it out, but she often felt "too scared" or felt it wasn't useful to heal to know the pathologies of herself and her family.

She said she commonly split people to think they were predators or all bad for no reason, and it caused her to violently attack them; splitting has never been something I could relate to as a borderline, but at the time I worked with this woman, I read things that said some borderlines experienced splitting, so I thought perhaps there was a spectrum. (I now don't believe that: splitting is a sign of narcissism, and too many narcissists simply design their masks after borderlines or are misdiagnosed because they are dishonest about their abuses which is why the research can be muddy).

A main way I usually look for narcissism is to see if the person was named after their parent in some way (golden child) or if they were named after someone dead or former supply of a narcissist parent (scapegoat child) or given a common or unusual name for no special reason (invisible child). So I asked that woman who she was named after. She'd read my work a lot, so she already knew about this naming pattern.

She said that her middle name was after her dead grandmother.

I thought, immediately — scapegoat child, BPD.

And based on that alone, I ignored every other red flag.

I didn't take into consideration: a malignant narcissist will pathologically lie.

8 months later, after a fight with her husband, she broke down in tears, "What would you think if I told you that my middle name is the same as my mother's?"

It was true that she had her dead grandmother's name as a middle name, but it was ALSO true that her mother was given her mother's first name as a middle name.

This would make her a golden child, a narcissist.

No matter how loving and supportive you are to a narcissist, there will come a time when they decide that YOU are THEM. And they'll begin to obsess over why you deserve abuse from them.

This happens to everyone they get close to; it's a result of their severe phobia of emotional attachment that happened due to their narcissist parent's abuse.

I do think many narcissists I've known or worked with wanted to heal, but a main issue is that they try to mirror my identity to healing, and that doesn't work: we have different pathologies and opposing trauma responses.

Narcissists operate parasitically: they don't know who they are, so they try to siphon off the identities of others to appear to be good people and mask their severe cPTSD.

But to heal, they'd need to get to the root of their PTSD.

You can't copy your way to healing: you have to face uncomfortable and painful truths, grieve them, address your trauma responses by accurately identifying your pathology, and heal them one by one.

It's difficult work that takes years, and narcissists are people who aren't patient due to their childlike mentality. They feel entitled to a perfect life and they want it NOW.

There were a multitude of ignored red flags, and I see them all over my notes now: I even got acne, which is a bodily reaction I usually get when I'm confronted with narcissistic abuse. I'd sometimes get stomach pains when I was in sessions with her.

Learning how to stop ignoring the trauma responses of my body is something that's taken me some time to adjust to. I spent a lifetime dismissing them to survive abusive situations with people I loved.

I even think that there were some ways where she seemed to be genuinely grateful for my writing or our sessions, and I was earnestly trying to help.

Still, I can't help kicking myself for being duped, even as I learned from the experience. I wish I had recognized the NPD, because the pathway to healing BPD looks very different than NPD.

First, things all cluster b's have in common: chronic depression, self-harming, fears of abandonment, suicidal ideation, cPTSD, abuse in childhood, trauma bonding to narcissists (even narcissists date other narcissists often).

This is why many narcissists will look at the DSM criteria for BPD and feel that it fits, especially since things like "lack of empathy" listed in the NPD criteria aren't things they understand; since they don't understand what empathy feels like, they convince themselves they must have it.

Narcissists tend to confuse choosing to do good deeds or feeling shame with empathy.

Empathy means you feel the pain of others like it's your own. It stops you from abusing others.

Also, narcissists don't WANT to be bad people.

They aren't choosing it. They WANT to be their mask. The mask is designed because they WANT to be loved. This is why they hate themselves at their core: their real self isn't in accordance with their mask, but they're avoiding that person and projecting them onto others.

The fact that narcissists don't want to be bad people is part of what can make their masks so convincing: they genuinely do want to be who they pretend to be.

Their trauma responses just don't allow them to FEEL in ways that ACT good.

Here are 6 Signs a Person who is claiming they have BPD actually has covert NPD:

1) Victimhood Complex & Self Consumption

This is my number one red flag.

It's very backwards and ironic.

Borderlines, as family scapegoats who continually trauma bond to people like their family, have SEVERE trauma histories.

YET THEY DON'T FRAME THEMSELVES AS VICTIMS.

Narcissists, too, have trauma histories in childhood, and they've had wildly dysfunctional relationships that have often been with other narcissists.

They ALSO have a history of ABUSING PEOPLE with NO EMPATHY or REGRET. The abuse they've received in both childhood in adulthood PALES in comparison to what narcissist scapegoats endured in childhood.

YET NARCISSISTS ARE OBSESSED WITH VICTIMHOOD.

This is a real catch-22, because both of us were siblings that were products of child trauma, and I believe narcissists deserve compassion, but what's difficult is their goal is simply to have their victimhood constantly reaffirmed, and they don't seem quite interested in shifting from a martyr mindset to a healed mindset.

Borderlines show up to therapy in two ways:

a) In severe states of grief

b) In self blame

When I first showed up to therapy at 18, I told my therapist I wanted to "learn how to become lovable." As I continued with therapy into my 20s, it became clear that I had a habit of dating abusive men.

However, I had therapists practically BEGGING me to see that.

I even left a therapist because she told me I'd end up murdered if I didn't start seeing the domestic violence patterns, and GUESS WHAT? That relationship ended in a restraining order after he broke into my home when I tried to leave him for cheating for the millionth time.

My denial made me feel astonishingly stupid.

Even as I was going through domestic violence, my instinct was to self blame and defend my abusers and forgive them. I wasn't framing myself as a victim in therapy, even as I was honest about what happened.

Therapists had to teach me about consent and abuse tactics, and I was studying psychology myself while also learning feminism, so I learned a lot to heal that way.

My scapegoat abuse was something I was INDOCTRINATED into, so unlearning it took a long time. Narcissists, too, were indoctrinated into believing in their own perfection, entitlement, and superiority through golden child abuse.

Even as I became familiar of my patterns with trauma bonding, my next step wasn't to see myself as a victim. The word victim still triggers me: I sought no pity, and I knew my pain wasn't special because I can feel the pain of others.

I simply wanted to figure out how to stop trauma bonding and stop choosing men poorly or choosing friends who would betray me or abandon me.

When narcissists show up for therapy or coaching: they aren't expressing that AT ALL.

It's like they're on a CAMPAIGN to convince you that no one has ever suffered more than them.

But, they simultaneously seem blind to their privileges or a sense of gratitude or how some of their perceived traumas aren't that bad.

Narcissists have the emotional development of young children, so they're more sensitive than borderlines. This is true in childhood too. The scapegoat child will go through severe physical violences, while the golden child gets MUCH easier punishments — like a few minutes in a corner or being locked in their room — but they have mental collapses in this time, because it creates too much cognitive dissonance in contrast to their spoiling.

So, in general, narcissists are just weaker to coping with trauma. They can dish it out, but they can't take it.

Additionally, their victimhood complex will manifest in the sense that they COMPETE with others to be the ULTIMATE victim. So, if you bring up something like, for example, systemic racism (and the narcissist is white), their knee-jerk instinct will be to tell you all the ways in which they AREN'T privileged. They need to be the BEST, MOST SUFFERING victim of all. This is a huge red flag that a person lacks empathy and has no idea how the suffering of others feels or the nuanced shades of suffering.

If a person is sitting in front of me practically campaigning for me to believe they are Jesus nailed to the cross, and the worst abuses they detail are mild in comparison to what I know narcissists to be capable of, I'll then have a hunch they possibly have an NPD pathology.

Generally, true borderlines show up with a LOT of grief, and the first part of their treatment is parsing through that grief so that it doesn't drown them. They'll have severe and persistent suicidal ideation and self harming behavior from their grief.

2) Narcissists Don't Love Their Siblings

Not all families have a golden child and scapegoat: the combinations for the family system are diverse.

But this method of detection is FOOLPROOF.

Narcissists HATE their siblings: it doesn't matter if their siblings are narcissists, histrionics, or borderlines.

They viewed their siblings as competition for their parents' favoritism (triangulation).

They project their self hatred onto siblings, and they have envy them and see them as competition lifelong.

They fear their sibling may prove they never earned their title of being GOLDEN — the best in the world.

Scapegoats and invisible children LOVE their siblings. We've always been indoctrinated to idealize narcissists, and we also understand our siblings' trauma in a personal way and have developed empathy, so we can feel their pain.

We're also emotionally mature: I'm not the same person emotionally that I was as a child, or even as a teenager. I've evolved and matured. Even healing has prompted more maturity by resolving stagnant grief from my past and coming into acceptance.

But golden children also have nearly no memory of childhood and they never emotionally mature. They're the same person emotionally that they were as a small child.

Scapegoat and invisible children remember our childhoods in an obsessive way: it's the grief we're always rehashing.

I've never met a genuine borderline who didn't love their siblings unconditionally, even knowing their pathology.

Often, our siblings are the people we try to save MOST.

In memoirs of both sociopaths and borderlines, the sibling relationship between the empathic child and the sociopathic child seemed the most charged and grief stricken.

Sociopaths commonly detailed feeling very possessive over the love of their empathetic sibling, who they often perceive as "normal" (they can't feel the pains of a person with BPD and empathy, so they base it just on the fact that we're nurturing people who don't abuse and who can grieve). Sociopathic children also felt severe jealousy over that sibling.

A common pattern I've read that helped explain what happened between my sister and I was that sociopaths often abandon their sibling because they fear they couldn't handle being unmasked by them and they knew they'd continue to abuse them.

This trend was also in memoirs by borderlines: the sudden abandonment of a sibling despite loving them unconditionally and being there for them, even knowing their shames.

My sister discarded me in our 20s very suddenly. She told me she'd gotten into college in another state (after telling me she was going to go to a local college) and she'd be moving out and leaving me with the lease to our apartment in a few weeks.

She also then said she'd decided to study the same major as me (she'd never wanted to write poetry before), and since we were in competition now, she'd never read my work again.

She stopped writing poetry after my first book got published.

After that abandonment, I'd try to call — no answer. I'd text and get superficial responses. She never once texted me again. She emailed generic well wishes on holidays. She never asked how I was doing.

I felt totally orphaned in the world by the person I loved most — and I felt that our childhood was a war we fought and survived together. I spent YEARS in therapy grieving that before I unmasked her.

After I unmasked her, I was hit with such narcissistic rage and betrayal I could've never imagined coming from her. I thought, "If this doesn't kill me, nothing will." I loved her more than life itself.

In a way, it liberated me: I had nothing left to lose. To lose her, I'd lost everything that mattered to me.

Despite ALL that pain, I LOVE MY SISTER MORE THAN ANYTHING IN THIS WORLD.

With distance, but still with compassion and unconditional love. Her childhood pain is also my own, and there's no greater grief to me. I'm still more protective over her than ANY narcissist I've known. There are things about her that I'll take to my grave.

Every borderline I know has loved their siblings and seen the injustices of their siblings' abuses, even as we saw how they were spoiled. We felt their pain, even as they heaped their pain on us. They broke our hearts, and we kept loving them.

Narcissists typically have non-existent relationships to siblings or a habit to demonize their siblings in vicious ways.

This is true no matter their siblings' pathology — another golden child, a scapegoat, or an invisible.

3. Inability to Define Empathy or Articulate Feelings

There are two huge problems in my life that made me sucepetible to narcissists (aside from my parents):

1. I assumed everyone had empathy and everyone knew what it meant.

2. As someone with an overly sensitive empathy (with BPD), I can feel the feelings of others without them telling me what they're feeling, so I don't often ask people to articulate their feelings — it's obvious to me what they feel.

The problem:

Narcissists have alexithymia: the inability to name or articulate emotions. This is the biggest red flag for detecting them: if you ask them how something feels, they struggle to answer you. They'll dodge the question or they'll answer without using feeling words, such as saying, "Not good" or "I don't know."

Sometimes, they'll mirror by using feeling words you've used with them before. For example, when I was a teenager, a sociopath I knew heard me use the word "despair."

I asked if he could feel the pain of the children we were watching on TV who were experiencing abuse (because it was making me cry), and he fumbled for a moment before saying he felt "despair." I asked what despair felt like to him and why he didn't cry, and he completely froze.

Narcissists have feelings, but most of them are heavily repressed so they're not harmed by them (love), and other feelings — such as jealousy — carry shame, so they can't admit to them or articulate them unless they're accusing others of them (pathological projection).

Additionally, they don't know what EMPATHY means: ask them to define it, and you'll see quickly that they don't experience it.

Empathy means you feel the feelings of others like they're you're own.

Now imagine: you don't even know your own feelings and can't name them.

So how can you understand the feelings of others?

You have no authentic self or sense of identity.

So how can you self reflect with no real self to reflect upon?

Such is the disorder of narcissism.

Granted, my empathy with BPD is SENSITIVE. I'll feel it even for predators, even for strangers. For a person outside of the Cluster B spectrum, empathy is a byproduct of emotional connection, so they feel it for loved ones, and it doesn't go away for those loved ones, even if their relationship changes.

Empathy PREVENTS abuse of those you've felt an emotional connection to. You can't hit someone, for example, if you can FEEL the grief and pain of it when you do so due to loving them, especially if that person or animal is weak or vulnerable in some way.

Narcissists feel NOTHING to abuse others.

They register it as a shame, but they remedy that shame by BLAMING THE VICTIM.

Narcissists have never felt empathy as an emotion, so they don't understand it. If you ask them to define it, they reply that it's simply choosing to be a good person, and they think they can turn empathy on and off. They think they don't feel empathy to abuse someone because that person deserved it.

Another common thing they mistake for empathy is SHAME and REMORSE. If you ask about empathy, they'll talk about how they feel shame over things they did in the past, so this is how they know they have empathy and are highly sensitive, but those are distinctly different emotional experiences.

Narcissists ARE highly sensitive, but it's not in the area of empathy: they're highly sensitive in the sense that they're very fragile due to being emotionally traumatized children.

4. Anger, Abuse, & Lack of Boundaries

The emotion the borderline is avoiding because they find it unbearable is ANGER.

It's the second stage of grief.

So we get trapped in another stage of grief: DEPRESSION.

The emotion the narcissist is avoiding because they find it unbearable is DEPRESSION.

It's the fourth stage of grief.

So they get trapped in another stage of grief: ANGER.

What about the third stage of grief — bargaining?

Bargaining is what we're doing whenever we're in an enmeshed relationship. We're looking for a substitute to replace for the pain at our core, the unresolved and unprocessed grief: the family who didn't love or protect us.

What about acceptance: do we ever get there?

Maybe, with a lot of work and with the strength to face and remedy difficult truths.

But for most Cluster B's, we boomerang back to DENIAL and it starts all over again.

A narcissist's baseline is either DENIAL or ANGER.

A borderlines's baseline is either DENIAL or DEPRESSION.

The narcissist abuses others (anger) all the time: it's their baseline, and they abuse anyone who's near them, from friends to family to children to coworkers to lovers to strangers.

The borderline is suicidal (depression) all the time: it's their baseline, and they empathize with anyone who's near them, because they understand the heavy weight of unspoken emotional pain intimately.

Narcissists externalize and project pain through abuse whereas borderlines internalize and resolve pain through self-harm.

When a narcissist collapses, they collapse into a borderline's baseline (I am unlovable): they become self-harming and suicidal.

When a borderline collapses, they collapse into a narcissist's baseline (Where is the predator?): we become angry and we fight back in reactive abuse. (Think of the famous borderline Britney Spears and her umbrella).

However, narcissists react to their abuse by blaming the victim, and borderlines react with GUILT, shame, and remorse — which pulls us back into the undertow of suicidal ideation.

A MAJOR problem is that narcissist's really often end up hospitalized or in therapy after a collapse state: their unusual moments of self harm and self loathing make some therapists quick to misdiagnose.

Another issue that I've also been guilty of is expecting to see NPD in male patients while BPD is more in female patients. It's true that the stats for these are highly correlational with gender, but they affect both genders. The only reason more men have NPD than women is because patriarchy has made it in which more men are prone to be deemed golden children in toxic families, because narcissists are often easily brainwashed by their culture's sick values. They're also prone to racism as well as sexist or classist ideology.

This also happens due to the common misperception that narcissists NEVER seek any help or ALWAYS dodge hospitalization or prison.

They do, however, ALWAYS avoid shame and accountability, and this leads to pathological lying to avoid full truths, even with therapists.

For a narcissist to tell you their vulnerabilities, they have to REALLY trust you won't judge them, and that usually only comes if you confide some of your vulnerabilities or imperfections to them.

They then feel like they're safer not because you confided in them, but because they know what to USE AGAINST YOU if they ever need to seek revenge.

Often, a narcissist's tale of abuse sounds just like a borderlines: they're projecting, so what they accuse is confession, so their story will sound like the story of someone who's gone through bewildering narcissistic abuse.

AND THEN….

Some details pop out:

• Their narcissist broke up with them and they became suicidal and self harming for the first time ever….(borderlines self harm all the time and we're suicidal from young ages as a chronic condition).
• They violated MASSIVE boundaries in attempting to avoid abandonment…with behaviors such as stalking, following, repeated unwanted gifts or texts or other forms of harassment (borderlines have empathy. Empathy prevents these behaviors — it makes them revolting).

Being stalked has been the most traumatic experience of my life, and it was the hardest for me to understand. Some narcissists simply begged and pleaded for me back with a barage of lovebombs, but some of them were THREATENING, and I felt like my life was in serious danger.

But this happened from people who treated me like I was the most disposable and unlovable person on the planet before I left them, so why stalk me?

Borderlines and narcissists are similar in that we both fear abandonment. Borderlines will go to great lengths to avoid abandonment, and that happens in the form of SELF ABANDONMENT: we endure and forgive and deny and self blame for repeated abuses.

But I never begged for a person not to leave me.

When I got a narcissist discard, I did feel suicidal, but that was my NORMAL feeling: I always felt unlovable. I EXPECTED people to leave me. I'd never earned my parent's love, so why should anything change?

But I could never STALK that person because some boundaries were INNATE to me: they're human rights.

I'd never want to terrorize people I'd loved, and I knew that stalking did that because I experienced it.

A huge red flag to narcissist in treatment came when they'd admit to stalking behaviors or harassment. But another common one came when they admitted to…

…abusing and feeling jealous over other victims.

For instance, their partner would cheat and they'd SLASH THE OTHER WOMAN'S TIRES.

That's not EMPATHETIC OR EMOTIONALLY MATURE.

Now, don't get me wrong: I'm no saint. It's not like finding out about being cheated on or getting a sudden discard didn't make me cry or scream obscenities or feel insecure about my beauty or worth.

It just never made me want to lash out on another person or break laws, especially another victim. (I called the women and even met with one and hugged and cried together).

Vengeance in general is repulsive to a borderline because it feels hypocritical and antithetical to the fact that we loved narcissists genuinely. Love doesn't vanish that easily (that's how you know the narcissist's love was never genuine, the ease in which it disappears).

In addition to that, while the borderline can identify narcissism in those around them, you'll find that we're able to talk about their exes and family members with authentic compassion and love — which will often manifest as grief — alongside the pain of abuse they're processing.

The narcissist, in contrast, is filled with ANGER, BLAME, and CONTEMPT towards exes, family, and old friends: a consistent hum of vitriol and contempt is the tune they sing in regards to anyone they've loved in the past.

Those people are ALL BAD.

Borderlines, in contrast, can speak in nuance — even for those who most deem as ALL BAD.

5. Intense Paranoia

For every negative thing that narcissists do to others, they accuse those things of other people: pathological projection.

They do this in part to ensure that no one suspects they're guilty of those crimes.

But they also become completely and sincerely consumed by their paranoia.

For example, when I showed up at my apartment management in tears and trauma after having been raped by my apartment maintenance man, they immediately BRISTLED despite how obvious my trauma was: why?

My apartment maintenance man had told them that he was concerned that I was obsessed with him.

But…he was the one coming into my home when I wasn't there and reading and writing in my journals. He was the one to steal my underwear and childhood home videos. He was the one to install a microphone in my apartment after breaking my appliances. He was the one to put GHB in my Brita and take a crow bar to my screen door at night to rape me.

I had the evidence and his DNA to prove it. So which one of us was OBSESSED?

When sociopaths show up to coaching, they tend to be in a PANIC about the potential of being STALKED and ASSAULTED.

As a stalking victim, I know that there's a WEALTH of evidence when you're being stalked. There are many ways to prove you're being stalked, so I always begin to talk them through how to find and document the evidence and what are best practices to shake a stalker off of you to survive.

I also give them EARNEST warnings about the need to amp up security because the majority of stalking cases culminate in violence, as mine did.

So, I always ask the person what their evidence is for their stalking, and if it's a narcissist…they have none.

They also tend to lack a PRESSING URGENCY and an appropriate FEAR response when it comes to the potential for violence.

The reason being: they weren't being stalked and they KNOW it. They're the stalkers, so they'd know if they were being watched back.

One of them even said, "He has more evidence for me stalking him than I do of him stalking me, because I showed up at his house multiple times with letters telling him I knew what he was doing, and he screamed at me to stop stalking him."

Her evidence for being stalked was that she could swear she heard his voice talking about her through walls, which made her think he was in the apartments next door conspiring with others.

Real stalking victims do wrestle with paranoia, but we can admit when we feel we may be hypervigilant and paranoid: narcissists can't discern truth from their projections, and they slip into madness, hallucinations, and alternative realties when under stress, and they recreate themselves as victims in ways that genuinely confuse and spook them.

Their REAL cause for the paranoia comes from their constant fear of being unmasked and exposed for their shames.

They'll go so deep into delusion and victim blaming that they'll stalk people in the mindset that what they're doing is protection or vigilante justice of some sort, like Batman.

6. Supportive Partners

Narcissists are frequently with other narcissists, because they attract to people with the pathology of their parents who golden childed them. However, they also frequently have very loving and supportive partners too, because all people are supply to them, and empathetic borderline or histrionic partners tolerate more abuses in a forgiving way, because we were groomed by narcissists in childhood and we're trauma bonding.

Borderlines, in contrast, will trauma bond to narcissists exclusively, as we're trying to earn the love we never earned in childhood. So, we'll repeatedly end up with abusive partners when we don't abuse back.

Narcissists will often tell you that they have loving partners who tolerate a lot, but then they'll repeatedly blame those same partners for the ways they treat them.

Borderlines, in contrast, are frequently in denial over their abuses; they'll blame themselves for their abuses and not their partners.

We persistently idealize our partners, while devaluing ourselves.

Narcissists persistently idealize themselves, while devaluing their partners.

I had multiple therapists working HARD to convince me that the treatment I received wasn't deserved.

For a narcissist, nothing hurts more than shame, so their knee-jerk instinct is to blame others to protect themselves from accountability.

For a borderline, nothing hurts more than not being loved, so our knee-jerk instinct is to blame ourselves to protect our loved ones from accountability and protect our relationships.

7. Becoming Childlike

Whenever a narcissist is challenged in some way, you'll see their MASK SLIP as they REGRESS to their TRUE SELF.

Their true self is a traumatized child.

With one narcissist, I was upfront that her pathology wasn't in line with BPD in my opinion.

She immediately started to WHINE like a child.

She even began to stamp her foot like a child and cry. It was a TANTRUM.

Later, she admitted that she'd known she had NPD: she admitted that she regularly copies others and she "glamours" them, as she described (mirroring and lovebombing). She struggled because no one would stay when they found out what she really was.

"What are you?" I asked.

"A five year old," she replied.

8. Split thinking terminology

Another major red flag is that narcissists use zero sum terms when thinking about people.

They'll say that they want to be "normal" or discuss how "normal" people behave.

There's no such thing as "normal," especially not in a world as traumatic as ours. Our very culture is narcissistic. People are diverse, and neurological studies support this idea.

They'll use terms like "evil." This means they believe in the notion that people can be ALL BAD.

I was raised by sociopaths and abused by some people who were a stone's throw from Jeffrey Dahmer: they commit shocking horrors with their lack of empathy and boundaries, but none of them are ALL BAD.

They're certainly not grandiose monsters: they're quite sad and lonely actually.

They do seem DAMNED. And the bad is often very, very bad, so it outweighs the good.

Still, people who use the terms evil are those with a tendency to DEHUMANIZE people: they'll call them "monsters," "demons," "psychos," "animals." In this way, they can justify every single bad thing they do to them, and then they can STILL see themselves as GOOD as they do so.

This is why it's a disorder of DELUSION.

In order to abuse people, you have to be able to dehumanize them so that you won't feel anything when you destroy them.

Narcissists also have a tendency towards split thinking about politicians. They'll believe their favorite politician is a SAINT — all good. They can't stand a lick of criticism for their political party. Anyone else is EVIL — all bad.

If any evidence of corruption comes up for their political party, they'll work OVERTIME to gaslight and deny that.

Likewise, their split thinking means they can only think in TWOS — things are all good or all bad and in opposition to one another. The idea that they could have more than two choices or that there's nuance is usually too much for narcissist brains to compute.

What else are narcissists like in treatment?

They aren't all bad: they do have a lot of things they'll admit to doing wrong, and they often seem to genuinely want to understand themselves and heal.

However, there are a LOT of road blocks and a LOT of blinders.

A major issue is that they spend WAY more focus outward than inward. (It should be a balance of both). They want to talk about how others abused them (and they are often victims of abuse or enmeshed with other narcissists. They have real child abuse experiences too).

But they want confirmation of victimhood more than they want self introspection and internal healing.

Another roadblock: they're in some FIRM denial and avoidance over their kids.

They were perfect parents or their kids are miraculously unaffected by their toxic relationships. They cannot stand to take accountability for what they did to innocent kids or the permanent scars they caused.

Furthermore, they're also often phobic of discussing their PARENTS in detail. If you get them to discuss their parents, there's a hot lava of grief in them over their parents that they fear will EXPLODE if they simply have a PEEK at it, so they can often tend towards being vague. (This is a common pattern, but some are able to discuss their parents).

In contrast, they may tell you their parents were "normal" and "perfect" to avoid the topic. (Ted Bundy said that too…about his unwed teenage mother and his nonexistent father. He grew up thinking his mom was his SISTER: yeah, real normal).

They'll also often admit to having patterns of trauma bonding to abusive people but they have patterns in being resistant to examining their own pathology which caused the trauma bonding, claiming themselves "normal" (there's that pesky word again).

Or, they'll say they have BPD (masking as their family scapegoats and partners who they've abused in the past) or cPTSD (all Cluster B disorders are forms of cPTSD due to child trauma).

They generally do recognize they had one or multiple parents with NPD, though only few recognize and admit that they have it too.

Do narcissists think about their exes?

This is true for all Cluster B's: we think of our exes all the time.

Our exes carry the same weight of unprocessed grief and shame that our families do.

Narcissists tend to talk about their exes almost solely negatively: ALL BAD.

They admit that they can't get over exes and find themselves "breaking no contact" all the time (really, they're hoovering).

Several of the narcissists I've spoken to said that their abuses of partners was actually masochistic: they hurt themselves to abuse others because it was a form of self harm to drive those away who loved them. It reflected how little they felt they deserved love.

Narcissists also have habitual patterns of not showing up regularly, ghosting you, or frequently being late. Those they seek help from professionally get the same treatment of devaluation or discard that any other supply gets.

They regularly admit to chronic self loathing and insecurity, but they also feel confused because they admit to genuinely believing in their superiority complex also.

A chunk of them also recognized their autism before they recognized their NPD, and their autism scared them in terms of shame and fears of inferiority.

They know they lash out at people unfairly and often and they hate that about themselves. They wish they could control it. They also are aware they have a TERROR of not being in control of those around them, and they know they're too controlling, but they're very resistant of letting go of those habits.

They often can recognize and admit to substance abuse and sex addictions. They SOMETIMES make attempts to quit these addictions. Relapse is common for all addicts.

There are a lot of things they'll admit to and even try to address in treatment, BUT…

…there are many shames they don't speak of, as if the shame has a vice grip on their tongue or they can ONLY speak of it through projection.

For example…I only had one man ever admit to me he was a rapist, and he was in a collapse state. He was crying and suicidal in our only session; he knew I was a rape victim because he found me through my writing.

I did what I've always done to narcissists in collapse, which is to try to soothe him out of it — I urged him not to kill himself.

However, he cried even harder: "How can you be so loving? How can you tell me not to die when you've been raped?"

"I sat with the pain of suicide my whole life: I wish it on no one. If I had one wish for my rapists, it'd be healing. Also, I lost a man I loved to suicide and I almost lost my father to it. No matter what, your death will hurt others. There are those who love you more than you love yourself."

I never heard from him again.

That's the fate of most the narcissists I've known, both as friends and in the professional sphere: they eventually vanish through a discard or an abusive act.

I have no miracle cure, and I've never seen them develop empathy or stop abusing.

Still, I hold onto hope that we can someday raise awareness, invest in more research, break this cycle, evolve, and heal our cultures and bloodlines.

I keep praying, keep believing in miracles, keep working on my own healing and growth, and keep hoping that writing helps others and breaks my own generational curses.

Check out my essays, memoir, and poetry at this link:

My new collection of essays, Cluster B Cluster F***: Personal Essays on Borderlines, Histrionics, Narcissists, and Sociopaths, is now available on Amazon.

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For individual coaching to recover from narcissistic abuse, BPD, or sexual assault, visit https://am-champion.com

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Anne M. Champion is the author of This is a Story About Ghosts: A Memoir of Borderline Personality Disorder (KDP, 2024), Hunted Carrion: Sonnets to a Stalker (KDP, 2024), She Saints & Holy Profanities (Quarterly West, 2019), The Good Girl is Always a Ghost (Black Lawrence Press, 2018), Book of Levitations (Trembling Pillow Press, 2019), Reluctant Mistress (Gold Wake Press, 2013), and The Dark Length Home (Noctuary Press, 2017). Her work appears in Verse Daily, diode, Tupelo Quarterly, Prairie Schooner, Crab Orchard Review, Salamander, New South, Redivider, PANK Magazine, and elsewhere. She was a 2009 Academy of American Poets Prize recipient, a 2016 Best of the Net winner, and a Barbara Deming Memorial Grant recipient. She has degrees in Behavioral Psychology and Creative Writing.