For years now, I have had many clients in my practice who are in the process of breaking away from a destructive relationship with a narcissist, or healing the wounds of such a relationship in the past.
One of the questions that keeps coming up is: how do they do it? What is that bizarre attraction of the narcissist?
Falling in love and real love
Falling in love consists largely of projection. Projection of all that is beautiful and magical; of all hope, divinity and connection with the highest, the ultimate happiness of connection with Source and your true soul-self.
That is why the feeling of being in love seldom remains—but real love does. It is eternal and can even be so pure that it transcends the ecstasy of being in love.
Falling in love with a narcissist has a lot in common with falling in love with someone you do not really know. Being in love is different from real love. Real love is based on really knowing the other, their light and their shadow side, knowing and loving their true being and soul.
Mirroring
So being in love is not the same as true love—it does not last. But there is more to the attraction of a narcissist. Narcissists are essentially empty. They do not have a well-developed self. They are hugely damaged. But they are masters of the art of appropriating everything (that you still deny) of divinity, brilliance, value, beauty, strength, etc. in yourself, and mirroring it back to you—as if it were theirs!
With beautiful words, pictures, hearts, cards and letters (sometimes literally copied from the internet), the narcissist shows you exactly the value and beauty you do not own and see in yourself, but crave, and mirrors it back to you. That is how the narcissist reels you in.
Then you become addicted to the narcissist, because they seem to give yourself back to you and then do not deliver, like a drug. It is the apparent fulfillment, which you can yearn for forever. It never lasts, but it exhausts you.
What the narcissist gets out of this is your attention, your energy, your time and the investment of your love—the love for your lost self—like a cuckoo hatchling improperly claiming and thriving on your life energy. In the meantime, you deplete yourself, but the fix of temporary fulfillment entices you to go back to the narcissist every time, like a junkie.
Shadow
You keep going back, until his or her destructive side becomes too much for you, because this will inevitably rear its head. The narcissist will not only use and appropriate your own beauty to entice you, but he or she will also project their own shadow onto you. This is a barter system that will not work out well for you.
More and more, the narcissist will start projecting their repressed wounds, their crushed and furious inner child, and the shadows of the perpetrators who injured them onto you, so they do not have to feel and own them themselves. They now have a projection screen for the pain that they themselves cannot and do not want to suffer.
You are now attributed as everything that has been dark, nasty, ugly, oppressed and humiliated in their life—by force, if necessary. This can eventually lead to serious forms of mental, emotional and even physical abuse.
Journey to healing
Unfortunately, that is often the moment that people start to detach themselves from the narcissist—when there is already psychological and emotional, or even physical abuse. But if you are able to pull yourself back from such a destructive relationship, you still have so much work to do.
The journey to healing consists of bringing back all those lost, projected parts of your beautiful, true self. Often, at that stage, people experience a tremendous desire to return to the narcissist—the drug—because he or she was the carrier of your projection of all that was beautiful and good; of love, fulfillment, divinity and ecstasy.
What you are looking for is your own magical and beautiful self, your soul. The parts of yourself that you have denied or no longer dare to own because of trauma, emotional neglect and abandonment, childhood pain and often, even past-life trauma. The narcissist has only mirrored the glamour of this back to you.
So, by reclaiming everything that is magical, beautiful and divine about yourself; retrieving it, healing the wounds that made you believe you lost it, and connecting with your own Soul and True Being and Source, you will begin the road to true liberation and self-healing.
Your sparkle and connection with your soul
In a destructive relationship, or a relationship with a narcissist, you have likely projected a great deal of what is beautiful, magical and divine within your own soul and person onto another—because of your primal wound, childhood wound or past-life wounds. The most important thing is to heal any wounds. You could even say that the narcissist served you (unintentionally) with the awareness of your wounding.
Do whatever helps you connect with your own true self, and engage whatever fear and pain you encounter, because that is the part of you that needs healing. Do meditation exercises and apply therapeutic techniques where you go to the pain by picturing it as a child in need, a wounded part of you in need of your help.
See the child in front of you. Connect with it. Ask what it needs. Go comfort it, give it attention, validate it, hug it…
And do everything that connects you with what is beautiful and magical and special about you—beautiful music, dancing, creativity, enjoying nature, everything that inspires you, everything that gives you joy and confidence—this is how you get your own sparkle and the connection with your own soul back.
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