Converting the Narcissist: The "Key" to Our "Cure"

Too often, we try to convert the narcissists that hurt us into the people we wish they were. People that will see us as worthy. People that love us. We want them to heal our wounds. However, we cannot rely on our hurters to heal us.

What Makes a Narcissist?

If we examine the characteristics of Narcissistic Personality Disorder, it is clear that seeking healing from someone with NPD is not the healthiest choice. People with NPD often have a lack of empathy that goes hand in hand with a false self. Since they are not genuinely empathic towards other human beings, they use false charm or manipulation to get their needs met. They often become this way because something in their life broke them long ago. As a result of their trauma, they mistrust people and and only use and abuse people. In the case of narcissistic parents, it is a system gone wrong. The parents use their to children to satisfy their own needs and put their children's needs behind their own.

Why can't the hurter be the healer?

If a narcissist is hurting you, then they are not in a healthy place of life. Because of their own hurt, they do not have the ability to give you the psychological ingredients you crave. You keep going back to the empty vessel for deliverance.

In order to right the wrong, we go back to the people who reject us, name call us, abuse us. We hope that through loving them more, we will convert them to the loving, empathic human beings that we want them to be. But, we cannot convert apathy into empathy. It is not our fault, it is not us who created them. We are engaging with a person who is injured and expect more from them than they are able to give. We would pay any price to feel better, and we believe they are the only ones who can cure our pain. It is our need for closure that drives us to do this.

Closure

To demonstrate the effects of closure, psychologist Bluma Zeigarnik ran an experiment. She took two groups of students and gave them nonsense tasks. The first group finished their tasks, but the other group was interrupted before they could finish. She then surveyed both groups to discover who remembered their tasks after weeks had passed. Far more people who did not finish their tasks remembered and the people who finished their tasks were more likely to forget. This evidence points to the significance of the incomplete file. Unfinished business sticks out like a sore thumb in our minds, so we chase the people who have hurt us. We feel like we need them to complete us since our emotional wounds are still open.

From a Mind Map Perspective

It all starts with a childhood wound. When you've been injured at the causal level, you will have reactions appropriate to the wound. Reactions can include body aches, shutting down, and feeling lonely or depressed. When we have a system of parenting gone wrong, it shows us a bad blueprint for the way we are supposed to be treated. This becomes the operating system by which we live. Beginning with our reactions to the wound, we encode negative core beliefs into our view of the world, ourselves, and other people. These beliefs infect every aspect of our lives. Once the psychovirus sets in, we crave healing. There is an insatiable need to make things ok. We try to rescue our sense of self and make right what was made wrong. We entertain dreams that they will do better the next time around and finally see that we are lovable.

But they cannot be our healers. This need descends us into the What The Freud system of chaos. In a never ending cycle, we chase and chase healing from people incapable of loving us how we need them to and never reach what we seek. We often gravitate to destructive relationships that mimic the dynamics of the broken system. The only way we do this is by attracting the same dynamics into our lives. Once we connect the dots from the injuries of our dark pasts, we can flip the narrative so that instead of being at the mercy of our hurters, we will be able to paradigm shift out of it. We can break the cycle so we don't knock on the doors of people who will hurt us. We can Be The Cause of healing the holes in our souls.