Why do I have some good memories involving my narcissist?

We've established that narcissists think only of themselves and never the happiness of others. That would suggest that narcs are incapable of making others happy.

But chances are you can think of plenty of examples of times when you were happy in the presence of your narcissist partner, parent, child, sibling or friend. You had a good time, or you felt connected, or you believed they loved you and approved of you. Does this mean you were living in a dream world, deluded and confused? Or did you truly derive something positive from being around the narcissist?

I have plenty of "fond memories" of times with my narc ex-husband. There were moments of giddy romance, hours of interesting and fun conversation. Likewise, there were occasions with my narc father that I will always remember as joyful: learning from him, laughing with him.

I don't look upon these times in a negative way. That is, I don't so much think of them from the narc's perspective, as times when I was manipulated into seeing a happy, loving reality that just wasn't there. Sure, it's true that on those occasions the narcissist in my life wasn't motivated by wanting the best for me. These were not acts of selfless love, but rather were situations when the narc was seeking the ultimate benefits to himself that would result from treating me kindly at that time. But that doesn't invalidate my happiness in those moments.

Rather, I look at those pleasant occasions from my point of view. I think about my innocence, my trusting nature, my positive outlook on life as the true source of those good times. We truly create our own realities and are ultimately the most responsible for what we take from what happens to us. So I look back with fondness not for my narc father and husband, but for my younger self.

I smile at the childlike wonder I felt when my father taught me things or shared experiences with me, and I warm at the thought of my believing I was worthy of love and protection, even though those things were false. I'm proud of myself for thinking well of the world around me, for being innocent and trusting.

Likewise, I treasure my memories of how I believed in love, romance, and intimacy. It's to my credit that I had faith in my narc husband, even though he proved to be faithless. I'm happy I was capable of love, and that I was trusting and forthright and devoted, and saw my husband as a much better person that he was. I gave up those dreams eventually and embraced the much less happy reality that was actually there, but I'm not sorry for the original outlook I had that brought me joy while it lasted.

So if you have good memories of experiences with your narc, take the credit for those happy moments yourself. They are a reflection not of any good in the narcissist, but of all the good in you, of how your soul naturally seeks the positive and rejoices in the positive things it perceives, regardless of what motivation lies beneath.

There's no need to cast aside your happy memories. Just let them be a reminder of what a good person you are, and encourage you to love and believe in yourself and your ability to make the most out of life.

Why am I still in love with my narcissist?

There is no question in your mind that your narcissist spouse/partner/lover is ruining your life. He's manipulative, cruel, abusive, controlling, horrible in every way. You are miserable with him. Perhaps you've even left him, broken up with him already.

But you still love him.

You dream of being back together. You fantasize that he will beg you to come back. You think about him all day. You just want him to love you.

It's quite likely that you also feel like the world's biggest fool, that you are still holding a candle for someone who has done nothing but hurt you. You alternate between pining for him and beating yourself up for being an idiot. Your emotions don't make sense but you can't make them stop. You wonder if you've lost your mind.

Well, you aren't crazy, you aren't stupid, you aren't a fool. You're simply being the exact person your narcissist has spent months and years molding you into. This situation is less about you and any shortcomings in your personality or sanity, and more about the amazing talent your narc has for molding and shaping other humans into what he wants them to be.

Over the course of your relationship, the narc has subtly, craftily convinced you that he is the true judge of what makes a woman desirable. If you can make him love and want you, then and only then will you have proven your worth as a human being. Meanwhile, he has rewired your brain into abject devotion to meeting his needs. Maybe he used the approach of making you want to be the only one who truly understands him, or the only one who will put up with him, or the only one who can make him happy. So now without that purpose to your life, you feel meaningless. Or maybe he used a more negative approach, punishing you with ridicule, anger, or criticism whenever you failed to devote yourself to him and let him have his way. So now you're terrified that you've rebelled in heart or in action, and wish you could escape that fear by being obedient again.

Whatever the technique the narcissist has used on you, the result was some form of this: he trained you to stay in the relationship. So now, of course, you find yourself wanting to stay in the relationship. You think it gives you purpose, proves your self-worth, keeps you safe from retribution. Loving him, even though there are so many reasons to hate him, is safer and easier and can in fact seem like the only solution.

This is exactly how the psychological condition called "Stockholm Syndrome" works. Wikipedia explains the syndrome thus:

Stockholm syndrome, or capture-bonding, is a psychological phenomenon in which hostages express empathy and sympathy and have positive feelings toward their captors, sometimes to the point of defending and identifying with them.

There are logical reasons for why victims of abuse experience these feelings that seem on their face to be so illogical. As Wikipedia states, "Identifying with the aggressor is one way that the ego defends itself. When a victim believes the same values as the aggressor, they cease to be perceived as a threat." In other words, you coped with the narc's abuse by perceiving it as a kind of affection. If he was cruel to you, it was because you mattered enough to him that he chose to give you that intense attention. No matter that the "attention" was negative and abusive--in order to bear up, your mind found ways to look at it as acceptable, deserved, positive.

The result of this is that your brain has been trained so that you no longer have normal means of protecting yourself. If another woman who hadn't been abused by a narc was dropped into your place, she would dump your narcissist within a day of experiencing how he treats you. Family and friends may have been telling you for a long time to leave him because they look at his behavior clearly. But your psyche is your narc's life's work...he put his whole effort into making you into a creature that takes what he dishes out and is happy to come back for more.

So you do still feel love for him. But you shouldn't. That love is not coming from your heart but from your programmed brain. The only way to get yourself free is to break through the fear, anxiety, and shame and look what has happened to you right in the face. Strip the mask off your narc and let yourself feel genuine emotion over what's been done to you. That can be very scary, but after you've processed that real emotion, trust me, you'll come out a whole person on the other side. Figure out his games, unravel the lies. Do not have any contact with him, including cyberstalking and following him on social media. If he tries to get you back, DON'T DO IT. And recover your self-worth not by caving and going back to a hellish existence with him, but by seeing clearly the great person you are and all you have to offer the world.

Lean on anyone in your life who understands, supports you, believes in you, and thinks you are a good person. Have patience with how hard it can be for others to understand what narcissistic victims go through, and look for the well-meaning behind their actions. Do things you enjoy--revive old hobbies, find the things that used to engage you before life became all about him. Choose to do what's right for YOU...this is the time for that.

There is one other thing that I personally believe can make a huge difference to narc victims who are trapped in feelings of love and stuck in their efforts to change. I will talk all about that in the next post.

Will a narcissistic father make it hard for me to judge potential mates properly?

If you are a female raised by a narcissist father, there is a strong risk of your dating and marrying another narcissistic man. I fell into this trap and it cost me a lot of years of happiness, so I want to try to help other girls and women like myself to avoid doing what I did.

Young girls naturally learn a great deal about the nature of males by watching their fathers. They also learn how husbands treat their wives by watching how their dads treat their moms. Narc fathers demand that their wives and children cater to them. They don't show empathy. They are always right and no one is allowed to refute or disobey them. The mother of the family typically cowtows to the N-dad because he has successfully crushed her will, so she usually encourages the children to do as she does, even if on some level she resents her husband. Thus, both by mimicking the mom and according to her instruction, a daughter follows in her footsteps and fears and obeys Dad.

Knowing nothing different, a little girl will assume her narcissist father is simply a normal adult male. She may even feel uncomfortable around "nice" adult men, not understanding their behavior. And certainly when it comes to attraction, she will be drawn to males who are like what she knows: demanding, self-absorbed types.

There is another key factor at play which makes matters even worse. Undoubtedly the daughter of a narc father has been taught to please the man at all costs, and probably made to feel she will never quite succeed in pleasing Dad. This is especially bad in a situation where there is a "Golden Child" in the family, and the father uses triangulation... treating the Golden Child like she is perfect, while constantly putting down the Victim Child for not measuring up to the sibling. As this daughter grows up, she will be desperate to prove herself by being desirable to and loved by another difficult male figure.

Along comes another narc guy, seeking a female victim, especially one that will be driven above all to please him. He can show this young woman the slightest potential for love and admiration, and she will be eating out of his hand. Before long he can lapse into the same abusive behaviors as her father, and since she only expects that kind of treatment, she won't even dream of leaving him.

Next thing you know, the narcissist/victim relationship repeats itself.

How can you, as a narc's victim, break out of this pattern? Can you ever trust yourself to fall for a decent guy?

Well, of course you can. The first step has already been taken: you recognize that your father is a narcissist. If you break down his behaviors and understand how he was manipulating you, you can easily learn to recognize how these sorts of men operate. You may still find yourself attracted to narcissistic men--guys that are showy, self-confident, haughty, and controlling--but you know now that they absolutely can't give you what you are really looking for. All they offer you is more pain.

You may find yourself feeling a bit like the nice guys are "too easy to please," and therefore their affection doesn't have value. But this is just your training talking, telling you that the thing you most desire is to appeal to the man who is tyrannical and has impossible expectations, and ultimately meet those expectations and prove yourself. You can escape that training, and see this as the Impossible Dream it always was. You can substitute for that Impossible Dream the hope of receiving real love from a kind, empathetic man who wants to care for you and make you happy.

You may also have been made by your narc father to feel like you are undesirable, you don't deserve to be loved. You may feel hopeless or desperate or unwilling to open yourself up to other men. Again, this is all your training talking--it isn't real. The more you recognize and understand what has been done to you, the more you will see reality. That includes recognizing you are a good person, someone desirable, someone who deserves to be loved. Don't listen to the voice of the narc in your head. Find your own voice, the voice of truth, and give yourself time to get in sync with reality.

The fact that you have survived a narcissistic relationship actually makes you better equipped to choose a good mate. You have an intimate knowledge of a whole array of bad relationship techniques and experiences, so that when you encounter them again, alarms will go off at once. It will not be your first rodeo, and you can apply what you know from experience to help you act wisely.

And remember that narcissists are an aberration in human society, and there really are plenty of good men in the world. You truly will recognize them when you get to know them...I did, and I was only a couple months out of a 15 year marriage to a narc. The utterly refreshing character of my new guy was easy to spot: his honestly, guilelessness, and genuine desire to love someone were crystal clear to me, and I married him two years later. We've been together now for 22 years and counting.

Getting over a childhood of narcissistic abuse is not easy, but it most certainly can be done--you can do it. Take the time to recover, and you will learn to make fine choices, regain your confidence, and recognize people you can trust...even someone you can trust to love you for many years to come.