Don't Waste Your Love on the Narcissist (Conference Presentation)
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Published 2023-12-07
Love always ends in heartbreak, pain, hurt and abandonment.
Paranoid ideation and projection: love offered is not real (a fantasy) or it is fake and manipulative. It needs to be tested and probed all the time.
Love is for commoners, not for the exceptionally superior.
Love is dependency and neediness: dependency is risk and neediness is mortifying. It challenges the narcissist’s self-sufficiency (I don’t need you, see if I care).
Love is vulnerability and therefore dangerous and weak. It demands micromanaged and coercive control to avoid a devastating loss.
Love requires adult skills and sets the narcissist - the perennial abused child - up for failure.
Love requires emotional maturity, a secure attachment style, and a grounded center. The narcissist is an addict with none of the above: his only relationship is with his drug, the fantasy sustained by a constant influx of narcissistic supply.
Love requires the recognition of the Other. Narcissists are incapable of othering and feel threatened by the partner’s personal autonomy and agency, an external object gone amok and which threatens the inertly perfect universe of their internal objects.
Narcissists blindly devour and consume. They are mimicking parasites suspended in a sempiternal symbiotic fantasy, frenzily feeding off their successive hosts.
They push away and resist any attempt to love them. Their approach is acquisitive, their avoidance preordained by their need to reenact the unresolved conflict with a dead mother. They are automata, programmed with their own shame-driven compulsion, dummies to a self-conjured ventriloquist, the False Self. A seeking homing in algorithm gone awry.
Video presentation at the Addiction World Conference, San Francisco, September 2024
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All Comments (21)
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A narcisst I knew reacted exactly this way. If anyone showed him sympathy or even love he pushed them away. But if someone criticed him or acted cold toward him he treated them nice and respectful.
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What a curse child abuse is, the burden of the void inside plus internalised hatred, doomed to a world barren of relationships. Maybe this is a reason narcissists are successful in their fields, what else is there for them? I understand what you say. It is such a shame.
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small wonder why NOTHING you do works for the narcissist. there is always, ALWAYS, something wrong ... with you, what you think, what you do or not do, everything. Yet, we keep trying without ever realizing it was futile, from the start. thanks. doc.
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No one gets deeper into what's really going on in people's minds than Sam Vaknin.
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Some so called empaths believe they can cure narcissts with love and empathy. But this is in my opion a big misunderstanding. Only the narcisst himself can change himself if he wants to. But normaly no narcisst sees a reason to change anything because he views himself as perfect.
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I told him I loved him he said thank you 😂😂😂
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So he’s adapted his Mother’s narcissism and lives in her fake world with her. It’s the saddest life. Tragic.
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This blocking, unblocking, hot and cold, punishment is really heartbreaking. It has taken a toll on me. He doesn’t care even. I wish I knew how to forget him. I can’t be cruel to him like he’s to me.
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I think this is one of the most concise videos to sum up a narcissist.
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Do not waste your love! Amen!
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Probably one of his best videos. It really explains the condition.
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´......on my terms and conditions only.....` so true. `......love requires adult skills.....` indeed.
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In my experience, loving a covert narcissist was a self imposed, emotional and mental Sisyphus condition. I was never allowed to have a completion, fulfillment, nor validation of my love for her, nor of her love for me. I was always "this close" to it, when she conjured up some impropriety on my part that put our relationship back to the bottom of the mountain- This caused a redoubling of my efforts to successfully push the emotional boulder to the top of Mount Love. Two needles on the same album stuck in rhe same record groove replaying repetitive compulsive behaviors, ad nauseum. I have a lot of self work ahead of me to understand and remedy my emotional, mental and cognitive deficiencies that leave me partly responsible and culpable for this relationship. I have recently left the howling wind in the labyrinth of mirrors, and have kissed goodbye the dark emptiness that seperated her from me. Thank you Sam, for all the knowledgeable information you provide on this Disorder, and for all the light you shed on myriad other topics. So greatly appreciated!
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Thanks I needed to hear that because I almost was willing to do anything for her yet again. 😂 I am always forgetting to give up hope.
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It's tragedy for a child to become a narcissist - very sad that the child could not get love and is so afraid that he cannot get real connection in later life. On the other hand it's also a tragedy for the person that dates the narcissist. I think there should be more education about love and parenting, and how early years and being loved are so important for psyche and child development.
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The narcissist is the greatest victim. This video humanizes him and show how sorryful his life is.
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This is stunning commentary because its exactly what I have believed all along and often said to friends and him: He won't LET me love him. Him not loving ME was painful. . .him not letting me love HIM, is excruciating. Yes, its way worse, Vaknin. Its profoundly frustrating. He still drives by my home in the early mornings though. I catch him from time to time. 😢
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It's a self fulfilling prophecy
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Can't stop crying 😢😢😢mich love from Germany ❤
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I was with one for 2 years as a teen and he abandoned me to another country out of the blue. Then tried to get me back over 20 years several times. When he did succeed and come back to my own country he was different, he had different expectations, tested me, distrusted me, and I reacted badly going into my own psychotic break. It resulted in reactive abuse and I sought revenge. Yet he asked "why are you like this with me and no one else?". It was because I could be me with everyone else and even when he left as a teen, but his other divorces afterwards he distrusted and had the same expectations on me since they used him and manipulated him. Now I know. I am me again after I sent him back. Now I am the abuser in his mind, the one that couldn't be trusted after he said he trusted me. I know now the BS. I wasn't them. I was me but couldn't be. Thank you for explaining this. It all makes sense.
