Before reading: If you’ve ever wondered whether you might actually be the narcissist—a fear that’s especially common among people who have been hurt by narcissistic abuse, or have anxiety or OCD—you can read more in the companion piece, Am I a Narcissist (or Am I Just Anxious)?

“Narcissist” has become a household word. Many people understand that being around someone highly narcissistic feels draining, confusing, or even destabilizing, but few understand why this is and how to deal with it.

Let’s start with what narcissism is.

What Is Narcissism?

People with Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD) have high levels of self-importance, require consistent, excessive admiration, and have great trouble handling anything they view as criticism. These traits exist on a spectrum. We all want to be seen and appreciated for our unique traits and strengths, and most of us don’t like to be criticised. When flexible, this is healthy self-regard. For people with NPD, these traits are extreme, rigid, and harmful to themselves and others. To meet the criteria for NPD, narcissistic behaviors must dominate how someone functions across multiple types of relationships, work, and daily life. 

Worth noting: Some people have higher levels of narcissism, but do not meet the criteria for NPD. In these cases, their narcissistic traits or behaviors are less intense or only present in certain relationships or situations. Occasionally, narcissistic features like grandiosity, entitlement, or impaired empathy can appear in other conditions such as bipolar disorder, borderline personality disorder, substance use disorders, or antisocial personality disorder. In those cases, narcissism can be situational or secondary. 

What Drives Narcissistic Behavior and Why It Hurts

At its core, narcissism can be looked at as a way to survive unbearable shame. Somewhere along the line, the person with NPD or high levels of narcissism learned that being ordinary, flawed, or emotionally exposed was dangerous. Looking inward would mean confronting deep pain, so they built narcissistic defenses to avoid it.

In NPD, these defenses become a kind of armor, designed to keep them feeling powerful and in control. This armor is so pervasively used that it becomes core to their personality.

Common narcissistic defenses include the following. Not all are always present.

  • Grandiosity: Telling stories that magnify success or importance so that both they and others believe it.
  • Superiority: Consistently positioning themselves as the smartest, most successful, or most enlightened person in the room. Narcissism doesn’t always look flashy. It can hide inside “do-gooder” roles: the selfless volunteer, activist, healer, etc., who needs to be seen as uniquely virtuous. In some cases, progressive language or social-justice identities become a kind of armor used less for connection or accountability and more to assert moral dominance, silence challenge, and remain above reproach.
  • Control: Keeping others “in line,” often psychologically. This can look like direct threats, charisma, guilt, coercion, or even consistent, subtle correction or “training” on how to treat them. 
  • Passive Domination (a symptom of Covert Narcissism): These individuals may not brag and make demands. Instead, they train you to mirror them, obey unspoken rules, and avoid upsetting them. You may find yourself editing your thoughts, doubting your perceptions, and working hard to please them—not because they demanded it directly, but because you’ve learned that keeping them comfortable keeps you safe. 
  • Victimhood (a core symptom of Vulnerable Narcissism): Consistently using helplessness or self-pity to maintain control and secure emotional caretaking from others.
  • Projection: Attributing to others the very traits they cannot tolerate in themselves. This way, they can take the thing they are ashamed of outside of themself, and try to control it via projecting it onto you and controlling you instead of regulating themselves.
  • Idealization, Devaluation, and Discard: People with NPD often put someone on a pedestal (this phase can involve “love bombing”), and then devalue them. Sometimes this happens back and forth in a never-ending cycle. Sometimes, each phase lasts longer, and often ends with the person with NPD “discarding” the person they once pedestalized. This cycle tends to occur because the narcissistic system is built on securing admiration without tolerating complexity; once a partner’s full humanity (needs, limits, boundaries, differences) threatens the fantasy of “perfect supply,” the narcissist protects their fragile self-image by devaluing and ultimately discarding to restore a sense of control and superiority. Discarding is not about the partner’s worth, but about defending against shame, vulnerability, and dependency.
Because narcissists regulate their own fragile identity through others, your emotional stability can become contingent on meeting their needs, anticipating their reactions, and avoiding anything that threatens their self-image. This dynamic takes hold because attunement, empathy, and conflict-avoidance are often rewarded at first, training you to equate care-taking with safety, approval, or love.

Why Narcissistic Abuse Creates Trauma Symptoms

Living in proximity to narcissism, whether with a parent, partner, or boss, gradually erodes your sense of safety and self-trust. Because narcissists regulate their own fragile identity through others, your emotional stability can become contingent on meeting their needs, anticipating their reactions, and avoiding anything that threatens their self-image. This dynamic takes hold because attunement, empathy, and conflict-avoidance are often rewarded at first, training you to equate care-taking with safety, approval, or love.

Over time, this trains your nervous system to stay on alert for danger and can engender:

  • Chronic Self-Doubt: Gaslighting and subtle invalidation make you distrust your own memory and perception.
  • Hypervigilance and Anxiety: When love and approval are unpredictable, your body learns to scan constantly for cues of rejection or anger.
  • Shame and Collapse: Internalizing consistent blame creates a sense of unworthiness. You may apologize reflexively or feel you’re “too much.”
  • Emotional Numbing or Dissociation: When the stress is chronic, the body’s only escape is to shut down.
  • Loss of Self: You learn to survive by molding to the narcissist’s expectations, eventually forgetting what you like, believe, or need.

These symptoms are often present in Complex PTSD (C-PTSD), a form of trauma that arises from ongoing relational harm rather than a single event. Children raised with emotionally inconsistent, critical, or self-absorbed caregivers—not only narcissistic ones—often grow into adults who struggle with hypervigilance, guilt, and emotional collapse. Developmental trauma isn’t just about what happened; it’s about what was missing: safety, repair, and consistent attunement.

Why Victims Often Feel Sorry for the Narcissist

Many survivors of narcissistic abuse describe feeling deep empathy for the person who hurt them. They can accurately see that the narcissist’s defenses were built out of pain, shame, or neglect. Understanding why someone behaves as they do can feel compassionate and even empowering, but it can also become a trap.

This empathy trap keeps survivors stuck because they start managing the narcissist’s pain instead of healing their own. It’s natural not to want to give up on someone you understand and love. But empathy doesn’t heal narcissism, and understanding doesn’t create reciprocity. Ultimately, healing revolves around focusing on oneself and reclaiming one’s energy, agency, and boundaries.

Healing From Narcissistic Abuse

Recovery from narcissistic abuse isn’t about diagnosing or blaming others; it’s about returning to yourself. Survivors often need to rebuild three capacities that were disrupted by the relationship:

  1. Self-trust: Believing your perceptions again.
  2. Boundaries: Recognizing that someone else’s anger or disappointment is not your responsibility.
  3. Regulation: Helping your body relearn that safety exists even when you’re not scanning for danger.

Therapy can support this process in deep and practical ways:

  • Somatic Experiencing (SE): Works directly with the nervous system to gently discharge the survival energy that built up during chronic stress. It helps you track sensations and impulses in the body, gradually restoring a felt sense of safety, agency, and wellbeing and the capacity to feel without becoming flooded or numb.
  • Parts Work:  Helps you identify and heal the “parts” of yourself that had to adapt to the narcissistic environment, for example: the pleaser, the protector, or the self-blamer. By building compassion and dialogue between these parts, you begin to unblend from their old roles and recover an inner sense of leadership and self-trust.
  • Relational Psychotherapy: Uses the therapist–client relationship itself as a corrective emotional experience. Many survivors have learned that closeness equals control or shame. In therapy, safety and attunement are rebuilt slowly through genuine connection and repair, showing the nervous system that relationships can be safe, mutual, and grounding.

Together, these approaches don’t just help you understand what happened; they help your body unlearn the survival patterns that once kept you safe but now keep you stuck.

Working Together on Healing from Narcissistic Abuse

If you’re beginning to recognize yourself in these patterns, whether in your current relationships or from your upbringing, therapy can help you return to yourself. My work integrates somatic, relational, and parts-based approaches to help clients rebuild trust in their perceptions, calm an overactivated nervous system, and feel in charge of their mind and body again.

Learn more about my approach and reach out for a complimentary consultation here.

If you’ve ever wondered whether you might actually be the narcissist — a fear that’s especially common among people with anxiety or OCD — you can read more in the companion piece, Am I the Narcissist (Or Am I Just Anxious)?