I’m reading a book at the moment by Robin Norwood called Women Who Love Too Much, it’s very good and equally applicable to men. Someone I know recommended it to me so I bought it for the Kindle app on my phone. Two chapters in and there are stories highlighting the subject, those folks who overdo the love in relationships and end up torpedoing their own happiness. Over willingness to please and to meet the needs of the partner makes them excuse certain behaviours that others wouldn’t and put up with the sort of treatment that would have the average individual running for the hills.

Why this book is so pertinent is that I was a bit lonely in 2007, I didn’t have anybody in my life at the time and I certainly hadn’t had anybody special for quite some time. Yes I’d loved before and yes I’d had my heart broken a couple of times, but in very normal ways I think, a few tears and some upsetting reminiscences – we all go through it I’m sure. Id had one really bad breakup before, but she was young and she changed dramatically during a summer of drugs and bad influences. What I hadn’t combined with before was the personality type of the exploiter, the narcissist. It made for the perfect storm.

So I read up on what this person is…. What the narcissist has is a fragile ego, a need to be fed validation and a deep need to feel in control – they may not actually be in control of everything or anything at all but it is their inner will. Powerlessness is poison to them, resentment their weapon against resistance. Apparently each of us has this within us and for the most part it’s healthily checked by the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, the child knows validation and disappointment in mostly equal measure. Why do I mention children? Because the root of this is right there (according to the experts), I’m intending to find my own root issues through my therapy – why I have been the willing victim of the narcissist.

The combination of the narcissist and the enabler is a toxic one where both traits are accelerated. One tries harder to please while the other becomes harder to please, spiraling toward destruction. The narcissist is helped by the passive partner toward an unhealthy and total domination of that partner through deferred will. The passive party puts aside those things that are important to them so as to concentrate on the needs and desires of the narcissist, this is not a good idea, enabling such an ego only drives that ego to feel justified in expecting compliance as a norm, and anything as a norm must then be exceeded to be pleasing and so on until pleasing is a superhuman endevour. I imagine this is very like the boredom of the super rich in that when you can buy anything you like you may not value things at all other than the accumulation of more wealth – why does Richard Branson still get up in the morning and do deals? Two lifetimes wouldn’t spend the money he already has.

The passive will suffer the greatest damage in this relationship in that they keep losing rather than gaining. They defer their gratification to a future time that never comes, the hope all the time being that if they please their dictator they may get crumbs from the table. Most folks reciprocate care but in some cases it becomes a one-way street. In my own story we, my partner and I, were reduced to a single shared interest – persuing her happiness. Our relationship started on the premise that I would offer something (ego wise) to somebody who was having trouble getting what they needed, namely a high amount of attention, validation, financial support, control and emotional support, I was okay with this, initially believing that the result of it would yield a good partnership. It ended with complete indifference and disappointment on the part of the narcissist – no longer satiable, and the complete destruction of the self-worth of the passive – no longer sufficiently capable of pleasing and trying so hard that it made the body ill with anxiety.

On the loss of the relationship, the passive has an ego to rebuild, the narcissist has only to find a suitable replacement for the enabler, and it is likely that they may already have started this process long before the relationship ended (remember that the passive has been a disappointment and is getting more disappointing every day). The narcissist shifts their attention to those who will give it, new hero figures who are seduced by a pretty one with a story of woe emerge to possibly make the same mistake as our passive partner has, the knight in shining armour complex we might call it. Projecting vulnerability is the honey trap, the seduced wish to “fix” what is missing, I had fallen into that trap many times with my narcissist. And the result? Inevitably it’s nature is one of an impossible journey of escalating needs being met, escalation to the point of failure because the demand increases as the supply tries harder to meet it. And so the cycle repeats itself and breaks again. Only those with infinite resources can keep the narcissist satisfied as they seek a bottomless well of money and care. I remember the song by TLC, no scrubs, this an example of where, on the surface, it looks like the lady wishes only to pursue relations with a man who has achieved something in life, but a more close examination might reveal the desire to be “looked after”. There should be no mileage in this attitude, love is not a cost-benefit-analysis based decision; it is for some people though. I suspect that my attractiveness to my narcissist was based on my ability to provide and that the diminution of that ability over time eroded that perspective so as to cause resentment and indifference to replace the initial excitement, sexual openness and willingness to compromise. These traits disappear during the relationship in an almost polar opposite relation to the ever dwindling ability to provide and respond to the narcissist’s wants.

The narcissist responds to the needs of the passive infrequently, intimacy, affection and care a rationed and used only to illicit compliance; these are the crumbs from the table I mentioned earlier. In a normal relationship sex is a normal expectation for both parties, not always in equal measure of course but there is an unproblematic dynamic of power and provision of this activity, almost as if it is a duty but not a burden to give to the other person; the assumption being that both benefit from it. Narcissists like sex too, they just prefer the power of withdrawing it over the seemingly powerless aspect of providing it. Withdrawal of intimacy is a cruelty, it harms the self-worth of the other party and a lack of intimacy in a relationship is a red flag to a therapist I’m told. I read that one of the first things couples councilors ask when meeting new clients is “How’s your sex life?”. Apparently this is a very important question.

The problem is two-fold, when the narcissist uses intimacy regulation to control the passive party the passive party then may respond initially by trying to please the narcissist so as to gain intimacy, however if too much damage is done by this tactic the passive may, by a process of becoming worthless to themselves, accept this status and give up actively seeking intimacy. The narcissist loses a tool of manipulation then and will have to entice the passive back into their search for intimacy, so the narcissist then becomes overly sexual and for a short time meets all the needs and desires of the passive. With newly acquired confidence and with renewed vigour the passive senses a breakthrough, but it is a false one and leads to a return to the previous situation quite quickly; this is a bait and switch tactic and it works, it worked. The other side to this is that the passive will, as in all things, take responsibility for what is happening. A way is found to be more than complicit in this treatment, for the passive they try to solve issues with themselves such as their attractiveness or their attitude. Neither of these things might be at fault but the passive will have a tendency to internalise blame and introspect, this is wonderful for the narcissist as their tendency is to externalise all problems, sort of a what somebody did to me attitude rather than what I did one.

Which do you pity? Well it should be both, faults in their personalities caused the issues they had. These faults could have been corrected, that is the goal of therapy, but persons must be first aware of a problem to want to solve it. These traits might not manifest in other company, narcissists get no mileage out of strong willed people, passive types don’t get exploited by stronger type personalities. I suppose it depends on what each seeks to get from a relationship, whether it be to be cared for or to care for.

Paul Simon Wilson