Loving ‘narcissists’
An intro guide to unconditional love and how we can extend it to ourselves, and then others (including our abusers)
The discussion around ‘narcissists’ is one that brings up a plethora of emotions, experiences, and perspectives to the surface. If you have experienced abuse, domestic violence, or are looking out into the world and identifying these traits elsewhere, there is often a deep pain surrounding this issue. For some, the pain pertains to an eroded sense of self-confidence, and for some, it has been a physically and psychologically traumatic path. Every experience on the other side of a narcissistic dynamic will give you a good amount to chew on as you process your experience down the line.
I want to provide a trigger warning, as in talking about abusive dynamics, it’s important to pace yourself, take breaks during triggering moments or leave if the material is not relevant for you on your journey right now.
Through wisdom built through my own personal and spiritual experience, I want to explore together how we can apply unconditional love in honouring the core of the collective, including our abusers. This writing will apply narcissism and abusive dynamics through a non-pathological and anecdotal perspective. It can also be used to understand general pain as we move towards forgiveness together.
I see the presentation of behaviours classified as ‘narcissistic personality disorder’ and associated disorders as a spider web of constructs (constructed false beliefs). These beliefs inhibit one from seeing both the loving core of themselves and others. I do not see it as a pathological condition or disease, but rather an often insurmountable (in this life) density of false beliefs and cycles that we are often drawn toward in the name of learning some big lessons about self-honouring love, respect and developing a robust sense of self. For the purpose of this guide, I’ll use the word narcissist to refer in shorthand to this specific web of constructed beliefs and misunderstandings.
If you come from a place of personal experience with the narcissistic dynamic, I trust with full certainty it hasn’t been a painless one. Forgiveness here is not about bypassing your experience, your pain, and your well-being. It is the complete opposite, and toward the end of this experience you’ve had, forgiveness will be one of the last gateways that truly sets you free. The kind of freedom that has you crying tears of joy and love, with a heart that is open and bulletproof against those who seek someone to play their counterpart in the narcissistic dynamic. After forgiveness has run it’s course, you will simply have nothing to feed insecurity and fear-based attachment with.
We start by honouring you, which unfortunately cannot be done completely within the timeframe of reading this text. But it can start now if it hasn’t already. Your core, that beautiful, loving childlike spirit within you, who stomps barefoot in mud and says whatever honest thought comes to their mind. Who squeals and shouts with their friends and mashes gels and lotions together out of pure curiosity. That is the same soul who experienced the pain you remember from both childhood and adulthood alike. They (and you) are learning, are beautiful, are inherently innocent, and are so damn keen to figure out the mechanics of this place! In the same way they touched a stove to learn the pain of extreme heat, you may have chosen in this life or before it began, a relationship with someone unloving. There is absolutely no moral, structural, or theoretical difference. Regardless, it probably fucking hurt (to put it lightly).
I like to think of the pain on the receiving side of a narcissistic relationship as a few physical sensations. One, like a misfiring electrical current in the brain. The chaotic rattling of every wall where gaslighting and deflected accusations have made a home. This feeling of instability, a loss of self-trust, paranoia, and a fried nervous system. “Who am I, do they mean what they’re saying, am I safe, and who do I need to fight/ flight/ or fawn from to get out of here alive?” Secondly, a well of bruising in the chest cavity. Purple and blue, with bile rising to the surface, the sensation of opening your heart to receive arrows when you thought you were going in for a hug. A deep sadness, loneliness, a sense of betrayal and a loss of belief in people’s intent. Even kind words from new people can feel like a golf ball being dropped into this well. When these bruises haven’t healed through self-compassion, recognition, and emotional processing, words, both kind and hurtful, hit them the same. “You’re safe and welcome here,” from a new relationship doesn’t hold a comforting weight when the same words have come days before an attack by another person you trusted.
If this self-compassion work is new for you, try to sit with this one. I find a way to be present with my emotions without feeling controlled by them is to get still, and feel it. Feel that rage, that despair, the firing fear, and anything in between. Importantly, to do it in a way where you hold that sensation wherever it physically manifests in your body. For me, for example, anger manifests in my chest, stretching from one shoulder to the other and burning a patch of my forehead. To hold anger, I shut my eyes, place mental focus on these areas, and then extend it progressively to every other part of my body. My consciousness then, is not on “ANGER IN CHEST, ANGER IN CHEST.” alone, but on “anger in chest, bottom of left foot, right elbow, anger in chest, back of my head, where my skirt touches my leg, anger in chest, side of my nose.” This has been very powerful for me in allowing emotions to exist without intellectualising them, repressing them, or being controlled by them. The urgency of an emotion leaves and is simply replaced with presence.
Self-compassion and recognition of your experiences will take time to settle in your system as the baseline, and this could be any stretch of time conceivable. Beyond natural latency, it depends on what contradictions and negative self-beliefs you may hold as obstacles to free-flowing self-love. Therefore, dissolving these constructs through recognising the contradictions they carry can reduce latency time and is a worthy exercise to repeat iteratively. After an experience like the ones we are referencing, it is important to question every notion you hold about yourself and your life; not every piece of conditioned faulty code will be noticeable to you. If it’s not loving and doesn’t make you feel expansive, take a microscope to it.
When we have set this fundamental basis of truly anchored self-love, compassion and recognition, it is possible to extend it to abusers in a way that doesn’t cause collapse. There are layers to processing, and through my eyes, forgiveness of a narcissistic abuser without self-compassion and recognition is trying to swim in the deep ocean wearing snow gear (you’re not equipped to enter challenging territory with all that baggage). The step of walking towards forgiveness can both set you free and confuse you into further spirals if done by bypassing self-love. Regardless of whether you have set this fundamental yet, reading the following may still help you in setting a conceptual framework for forgiveness and understanding. When the time comes, you can have a template for your thoughts and feelings to be understood through.
Forgiving others starts in a similar place to acknowledging your own pain - the core. Each one of us has a core of light, a beautiful, sparkling fragment of the universe’s totality here to experience itself. With each one of us having varying degrees of experience, it is precisely the intention that we will use one another as mirrors, and not without pain nor learning, eventually fall into perfect loving unison. To bypass the pain would be to bypass the magnificent journey and the very structural nature of our paced expansion.
With this will come failing an exam to show you how your life carried on beautifully regardless of your academic performance. It will come with seeing through your old patterns and holding the tension of newness to create something you haven’t experienced before. With this will come losing your first dog, and a hug that warms you from the inside out, and a really good coffee, and a slight from someone who you thought supported your goals. We experience pain to push us out of stagnant unconsciousness and into recognition and sight. It is iterative, it takes time, and it cannot happen all at once.
There will likely have been a time in your life when you ‘shot a mockingbird’, as my English teacher once said. You misfired a bullet at the innocent because you hadn’t yet truly gained the sight of their experience or the power of your actions to prevent doing so. Perhaps your constructs blocked the way, you may have spoken harshly to a child, thinking it was ‘the only thing that works’, or dismissed a friend’s pain because you were distracted. Moreover, it’s most likely to occur in the way you speak to yourself, as you, too, are a mockingbird.
I have a mockingbird moment that I’ve reflected on for years when I think about how disregulation, inexperience, disconnection from ourselves, and construct can hinder our lens to the point of complete obstruction. I was living in a home I was not held in, and my nervous system was fried. It was the last couple of months before high school graduation, and I hadn’t been sleeping. I came home, walked through the front door and toward my bedroom to fall into bed with my uniform on. When I came in, our family dog was on my bed, and had vomited on my duvet. I broke into tears, pointed at the door and shouted at her to leave. The look on her face snapped me out of my rage, because all I saw was pure fear. I saw in her what I felt every day with the people I lived with, and I’ve grieved that moment over time. I’ve responded in a different way in this incarnation to those whom I’ve learnt from in the narcissist dynamic, but where awareness is not present, ignorance takes the wheel. In that moment of pain and rage, I could see nothing except my response as the template through which to respond to inconvenience. Those who operate as established abusers are no different, though the density of their construct may be higher.
One of the hardest things to acknowledge has been how hard a ‘narcissist’ is trying. Often, what we call evil, decrepit, and even demonic is someone doing what they think is logical, right, and true. In fact, it is not possible to act against what you truly know, not what you know at a cognitive level, but at an integrated one. These individuals are looking at the world, often with one thousand backpacks of unprocessed and unmetabolised pain, and seeing how they can make this experience work for them. It is one of the reasons you may have truly beautiful memories with them, moments where you felt seen, celebrated, accepted, and safe. These individuals are not exempt from the concept of nuance; they perfectly exemplify it. What does not challenge their construct, they will not retaliate against. Supporting you during your successes may not have challenged them, and they were better able to express truth and reflect a portion of the love that you are back to you. You honestly expressing pain or places you didn’t feel held or safe, may have felt for them like a lightning bolt to the fragile structures their entire life was built on; hence an attack.
For a narcissist, honesty and truth are perceived as a direct attack on their existence; they may have a survival-code based signalling that aligns with a feeling of impending doom when they are communicated with honestly. If they cannot perceive their own core as pure, eternal, unbreakable, and beautiful, this incarnation and the material pleasures they have access to are all that is worth protecting. You cannot change this, and it wouldn’t be loving to try. Fundamentally, unconditional love is unconditional acceptance. If survival code based aggression and fearful narrative is the sword they raise when you approach them, you honour them by honouring their path without interference or judgement.
The process of forgiving through seeing neutrality is one that I liken to braiding and weaving. Oftentimes, you may have memories that felt so light, so loving and fun with these relationships. Then others that can have your heart racing through memory alone. When recalling these memories, it is important to remember they aren’t necessarily a reflection of structural truth, but a video through the lenses you were wearing at the time. For me, those fond memories carry a past lens of “this person is safe, this person cares about me,” that may have informed the lightness of the memory. While this is worthy of note, those memories are just about all the material you have to process with, so holding the light and the dark without dropping one is still a powerful exercise in expanding your capacity for holding truth.
A practical way I have chosen to integrate this concept at the later stages of forgiveness is to sit down, get slow and quiet. Picture a moment of fun and sincerity with this person, hold it. Picture one that felt hurtful or unsafe, picture another that felt light-hearted, where you saw that beauty in them, and another where all you could see was malice. A shape that appears grey from far away can be created by placing thin black and white lines next to one another repeatedly. Though these two colours are polar in nature, by braiding them in such a way, you don’t see black or white, but a neutral representation of what they both depict when held together. I’ve found personally that this is helpful (only when you are ready, which will not necessarily be early on.) in literally weaving together all you see, instead of flip-flopping between “You’re beautiful, I see the love that you are and I want to hold you regardless of whether you can hold me!”, and those thoughts that carry only your anger and pain. This may help you find a truer place of neutrality, whereby you honour their core with your sight, and honour your heart by keeping your distance and refusing to engage in their cycles.
This process is not linear; allow yourself instant forgiveness if you fall back into judgment. Your system can be seen as a brilliant, hyper-intelligent quantum machine that has received code that is sooo.. sooooo.. so wrong. If your conditioning follows narratives of deserving abuse, feeling unworthy, self-doubt, struggling with self-trust, and having to learn self-love, you are already having to purge and process things that are at complete, 100% odds with reality. Allow it to be difficult, allow it to be frustrating, allow yourself to feel like none of this is true, and maybe that person just sucks. Then get back up again and keep loving. Think of it like riding a riptide, you don’t fight it once you’re in it, you gently swim parallel to the shore, or you let it take its path until it inevitably releases you, and you walk back along the shore. You can remind yourself of the love that we all are, but ultimately, you can try to consciously hold those emotions, and when the emotion has passed, you can walk yourself back to knowing.
The trick of this work is that we often wonder during the throws,
Do they deserve forgiveness for the pain they caused?
Why do I feel unsafe every time I try to forgive them?
Am I dishonouring myself by forgiving them?
Did I make the right choice when I left them?
Do they need my help?
What if, through forgiving them, I open up the door for them to come back through, or others who operate like them?
Yet it was forgiveness that freed me from the pain and the suffering, swinging wildly between the split of black and white thinking. It hurt me so much more than it ever affected them to hold that baggage, and I see these questions hold so many of us from metabolising our pain and opening our hearts. In truth, an open heart to self and others is a safe heart. A closed one will operate off fear-based narrative and insecurity, and cannot see the difference between love and attachment. You cannot betray yourself, abandon yourself, or dishonour yourself by seeing the truth. You can only bring a sense of levity, ease, and love to your life that cannot nestle in without that scary (at first), radical, beautiful openness. You are competent, wonderful, and this wisdom is the juice you were intended to squeeze out of these trying experiences. Hold to your core, and trust in what you know. I trust you.
Love you!
