Reflection

Narcissistic Abuse: The Hold, the Victim, and the Way Out

Let me begin with the caution, because it has become necessary. Not every difficult person is a narcissist. I receive many women, and men, who arrive in my consulting room saying: my partner is a narcissist, a manipulator, what French clinicians call a pervers narcissique. Sometimes it is true. Often it is a difficult partner, immature, selfish, hurtful, which is painful but something else. The word is now thrown at every complicated ex, and that dilutes a clinical reality which is precise, serious, and destroys lives. Here is what the clinician means by it.

How it begins: the idealisation

You almost always meet the abusive narcissist inside a love relationship, and the beginning is the opposite of a warning. Intense attention, flattery, the feeling of having met your soulmate: a connection that seems to resemble nothing you have known. Then, slowly, it turns. The person feels devalued, criticised, confused. Affection is withdrawn, returned, withdrawn again. They are blamed for everything. And there is the gaslighting: the manipulation that makes the other doubt their own perception of reality.

The sign I see in almost everyone who comes to me is this: they no longer know whether the problem is them or the other person. That confusion is the signature. A merely difficult partner makes you angry; a narcissistic abuser makes you doubt your own mind. And it ends in one of two ways: the brutal discard, or a control that settles in and never ends.

One more precision: the abusive narcissist is most often described as a man, and I will write him so here, but there are women who abuse in exactly this way, and their male victims are among the least believed of all.

What the partner lives

The experience of the partners I receive is strikingly consistent. Chronic, growing confusion. Collapsing self-esteem. A loss of the sense of identity: they no longer know who they are, and they lose even the capacity to undertake new things, which makes them depend more on the narcissist, who can then extend his control. The feeling of walking on eggshells, for fear of criticism. An anxious hypervigilance, the sense of being trapped by someone who can destroy the little self-esteem that remains. Stress, insomnia.

And the isolation. A woman once told me: since I have been with my partner, I have lost all my friends. That is not an accident. Cutting the person off from every network is how the power is extended. In time, many of these partners present what some call narcissistic victim syndrome; it is not a formal diagnosis, but clinically it looks remarkably like post-traumatic stress, like complex trauma.

The perfect victim

Something must be said that is not said enough: the abusive narcissist chooses. And the perfect victim has a profile. She, or he, is very often emotionally dependent: that need for the other’s love in order to exist, which I have written about elsewhere. Highly empathic. Self-esteem low, or fragile. Often a history of trauma. Very strong values of loyalty, which hold them in place when everything says leave. And a high tolerance for emotional pain, precisely because they are not in touch with their body: the alexithymia I describe elsewhere, the body that can no longer report what it feels. The person who cannot feel their own pain stays for years where another would have left long ago.

Where an abusive narcissist comes from

You will say: what a monster. I understand. But the clinician knows this: at the root there is almost always early childhood trauma. Someone who was severely emotionally neglected, humiliated, rejected, treated as an object or as an extension of the parent. What he does to the other is, to a large extent, what was done to him. Before, I was the victim; now I control the game. He reverses the power dynamic and attacks in the other exactly what was attacked in him: the identity, the sense of self.

I have seen in my consulting room a narcissist whose own parent was one. The apple does not fall far from the tree. Lack of empathy in the family system is a constant. One client told me that, as a child, when he was ill and could not go to school, he was allowed only his bedroom, in the dark, with a bowl of soup: if he was not well enough for school, he was not entitled to any pleasure. Sometimes there is also a sexualisation that destroyed the healthy boundaries of the family system. In analytic terms, one can speak of a failure of mirroring, in Winnicott’s sense: the mother does not mirror the child, and the child is never seen. As an adult, he makes others feel what he felt.

To understand is not to excuse. But it is the only way to see the thing as it is: not extreme selfishness, but a pathological organisation of the personality. A serious problem.

Can he change?

It is the question every victim asks, and the honest answer is: with great difficulty. In twenty-five years, I have never seen someone walk into my office saying: I am a narcissistic abuser. They do not see the problem, and what is not seen cannot be treated. To sit in the patient’s chair is to be in the position of lesser power, and that position awakens precisely the trauma of their childhood: they flee it. When they do come, it is because a major crisis compels them: pressure from the partner or those around them that has become untenable, or a collapse of health. The work then requires specialised, long-term psychotherapy, and something rarer still: the willingness to face their own shame.

The way out

There is no magic wand. You leave by leaving. But that simple sentence is the hardest one to live, because the hold has destroyed exactly what leaving requires: trust in your own perception, self-esteem, a network, energy.

And this must be said clearly: where the hold includes violence, threats, or fear for your safety or your children’s, leaving is not improvised. The moment of separation is statistically the most dangerous. In those situations the departure is planned, with specialist domestic abuse services alongside the therapy. And it is worth knowing: in the UK, coercive control is a criminal offence in itself, even without physical violence.

That is why one generally comes out of the hold with the support of therapy. The process is slow, and the slowness is right: the person begins by putting words on what they are living, and discovers, little by little, that they are not entirely wrong, that their perception was not mad. Then, nourished psychologically and emotionally by the therapeutic space, they recover what the relationship had emptied: the energy to leave. The day of leaving is not the first day of the work; it is its fruit.

I see people under this hold, and people coming out of it, in English and in French, at Harley Street in London, in Paris, and by secure video. See also emotional dependency and codependency, the fear of abandonment, alexithymia, and the work on trauma. Book a consultation.

When the way out runs through a bottle: addiction therapist in London.

Download the free guide: this essay is part of the book The Hold: Recognising Narcissistic Abuse, Understanding the Fear of Abandonment, and the Way Out, with seven art therapy exercises. Download it freely (PDF). No sign-up, no email: it is a gift.

And when it is painful without being a hold: The Toxic Relationship, recognising it and the way out.