 Every self-styled expert and his dog and his mother-in-law will tell you that the narcissist is incapable of loving, is unable to love, and for a change, rarely, they would be right. But what they forget to tell you is that the narcissist is not only incapable of loving, he also does not let himself be loved, and that is a much more painful experience for the narcissist's intimate partners, friends, family, children, and so on. The narcissist is surrounded by people who want to offer him love and compassion and affection and empathy and succor and support and advice and help, and yet, he is not there for them, he is incapable of receiving these gifts, he spurns them and rejects them and pushes them away and becomes aggressive, humiliating, hurtful, and sometimes harmful. The narcissist cannot love, but he also does not let himself be loved, cannot be loved. And the reason for this is that at the core of the narcissist, there is a bad object, and to remind you, a bad object is an amalgamation of voices, introjects, that keep informing the narcissist, how bad he is, how unworthy, unworthy of love, first and foremost, what a failure, and a loser, how ugly and stupid or whatever. So at the core of the narcissist, there is a bad object which makes the narcissist feel inferior, and to compensate for this bad object, for this incessant cacophony of demeaning, degrading, humiliating, and shaming voices, the narcissist comes up with a false self. Narcissism therefore is compensatory, it compensates for the existence of a bad object, this empty schizoid core at the heart of the narcissist. So when the narcissist is confronted with love, with appreciation, with compassion, when the narcissist is held and contained and caressed and touched physically or emotionally, the narcissist recoils. He recoils because the bad object inside the narcissist feels threatened. The bad object says, you're not worthy of love, you're not lovable, and here, there is an intimate partner who loves him, and that of course conflicts with the messaging of the signaling of the bad object. It creates what is known in psychology is dissonance. It is a very threatening, ominous feeling. The narcissist wants to avoid dissonance, all human beings by the way, want to avoid dissonance because dissonance gives rise to anxiety. To avoid all these unpleasant outcomes, the narcissist simply walks away from any hint of love, any shade of caring, any attempt to afford him, to provide him with empathy and understanding and acceptance and warmth. These are, in the narcissist world, threats to the cohesion and functioning of the precariously balanced house of cards known as the narcissistic personality, a disorganized, chaotic entity. As far as the narcissist knows, as far as he is concerned, as far as his experience goes, especially as a small child, love always ends in heartbreak, pain, hurt, loss and abandonment. Why embark on a venture that is bound or liable to end so horribly, to inflict intolerable excruciating pain? Why venture blindly or with open eyes into something that is guaranteed to decimate you, demolish you, devastate you, ruin you? So narcissists stay away from love, because the first experience of love as children was bad, was really, really terrible. They learned to connect love with performance, the love they have received, if at all, if any, was conditional, and very often it alternated with abuse and hatred. And so this intermittent reinforcement by an unstable parent or even worse an absent, emotionally absent parent, a dead mother, for example, rendered the narcissist incapable of conceiving of love as something positive. Whereas the vast majority of healthy, normal people regard love as some kind of salve, some kind of absolution, some kind of redemption, some kind of completion, some kind of transcendence and elevation, the narcissist perceives love as being dragged into an abyss of seething emotions which he had been trying to avoid all his life, most notably the shame, the shame of not having been allowed to become as a child, the shame of having been abused, tortured, traumatized, instrumentalized, parentified, but never ever simply loved the way he has been as a child, had been as a child. So with this background, where love is perceived as a weapon, where love is weaponized, where love is perceived as a power play, or a mind game, or the precursor to negative affectivity, to very hard and difficult to endure emotions. With this background, the narcissist of course, whenever confronted with a loving partner, or with a loving child, or with a loving friend, or with a loving colleague or whatever, whenever confronted with love, the narcissist reacts with paranoid ideation. He asks himself, why this so-called ostensible love? Why is it being offered to me? I'm a bad object, I'm unlovable, something is going on here, and then he projects. He says the love that is on offer is not love, it's not real, it's a fantasy, or even worse, she's faking it, she's being manipulative. This so-called love that I'm being engulfed in, this so-called love that is supposed to encompass me, and calm me down, and make me happy, and whole, this love is just a manipulative ploy, and strategy, and stratagem. There's something going on behind the scenes, because I know there's not such thing as love, and I know definitely that I am not lovable, so no one can love me. This is, a lot of this monologue of course, is unconscious, the bad object is largely submerged totally in the unconscious. And yet, this monologue has psychodynamic impacts and effects, it causes the narcissist to modify his behaviors, it triggers in the narcissist, specific of a well-made emotions, it changes the narcissist moods, vicissitudes, liability. And so, the narcissist when confronted with love, and he knows that love is going to end badly, he knows that love is fake, he knows that love is conditional, his mother taught him that, maybe his father later on. So he confronts love with paranoia, with suspicion, with doubt, with questioning. He deconstructs love, he tries to undermine its foundations to reveal the hidden tunnels under the city of love. And so this paranoia is uncoupled with projection. Because he himself is incapable of loving, he assumes that no one is capable of loving. And because he himself is not a good receptacle of love, not a good recipient of love, he assumes that no one can receive love, no one can contain love. Whether love is stronger than anyone and can overwhelm and destroy you, or it's an imitation, a simulacrum, mimicry of the real thing, intended to somehow obtain a goal, it's goal-oriented, there's some psychopathic motivation behind these displays and spectacle of love. It's all manipulative and it needs to be tested, it needs to be probed all the time. So this is what the narcissist does with the first phase of narcissistic abuse. He tests. People who claim to love the narcissist are constantly being subjected to a battery and barrage of tests and probes, probes and tests. The narcissist escalates his egregious abusive behaviors in order to see how far he can push the envelope. At what point will this so-called fake love reveal its true face and expire? Or maybe there is this unicorn, this unique partner, who really loves him and therefore she would be able to withstand any amount of torture, any extent of abuse and would still be there. She would still not abandon him and she would still love him and gulf him with her love. So there's constant testing and probing going on and of course this renders intimacy impossible. The narcissist destroys every potential for intimacy by constantly doubting and suspecting his partner. When they say partner again, could be a friend, could be a child, anyone, anyone with whom the narcissist has an interpersonal relationship involving an emotional exchange. Narcissists test everyone around him all the time. Part of this is grandiosity. The narcissist being God-like is not in need of love. You see, God is perfect. God includes everything so God cannot have a will. To have a will, you need to want something outside yourself. You have a will to eat because the food is not inside your body. You have a will to love someone because that someone is not you. There needs to be an externality for you to have a volition. So God doesn't have volition, it doesn't have a will because it contains everything and so does the narcissist. So the narcissist regards love as something very vulgar, very hoipoloid. It's for commoners. Love is for the average bloke, for the Joe Schmo, the love is not for the narcissist. The narcissist is elevated, the narcissist is divine. The narcissist is not in need of anything, is not dependent on anyone. So love is for commoners, not for the exceptionally superior. The narcissist's superiority is expressed via defiance. The narcissist defies life, defies authority, defies the needs of other people. He says other people may need it, other people may need love, other people may need many the family, other people may need compassion, I don't know. Other people may need X, I need nothing. I need nothing because I am the creator, I contain everything. Everything is in me, inside me. And this is known as hyperreflexivity. The narcissist expands outwards and contains the entire world, contains reality. And so he is not in need of anything. And for him to love and to be loved indicates a deficiency, a lack. You love someone because you need something, you need emotional gratification, you need to feel safe with a secure base, you need attachment, you need a family, you need companionship, you need, you need, there's a need there. So to love someone is to admit that you are less than perfect. You're imperfection. And to be loved also means that you're not perfect. Because love entails and involves forgiving, overlooking shortcomings and flaws. Love is a compromise, love is a dialogue, love is, love is separateness that comes together. So love implies that the narcissist is not the entire universe, is not solipsistic, is not one of a kind, sui generis. Love implies that the narcissist is in need of love and that the lover, the narcissist lover sees him as he is, warts and all, shortcomings and strengths. An imperfect being. So the narcissist rejects love because it is like a searchlight, like a projector. It amplifies and magnifies the parts of himself that are not Godlike, that are human. It triggers his humanity. It appeals to his humanity and the narcissist denies and has been denied his humanity since early childhood because to be human is to be in pain. To be human is to suffer. To be human is to endure loss and devastation. To be human is to be immersed in a miasma of hurt and the anticipation of the worst, catastrophizing. So the narcissist doesn't want to be human. And to love is the ultimate ratification, expression and manifestation of being human. Love is a dependency of some kind. Love is neediness of some kind. You need, when you're in love, you need the other partner and you're dependent on her to some extent for your well-being. This is not a dependency, like a drug dependency, but still there are some elements of dependency and need and dependency in the narcissist lexicon is risk to be dependent, is to be at risk because the narcissist as a child has been let down by the very people he needed and dependent on his parents, his parental figures and later on perhaps peers, teachers, role models and so on. The narcissist has learned to associate dependency with death, potential death. He has learned to associate neediness with the normal life-threatening risk. Neediness is also mortified because it's publicly humiliating, it's shameful. The narcissist feels extremely uncomfortable walking hand in hand with his loved one. He displays her, he uses her as a trophy the way he would use his luxury car or his iPhone 15, but that is an external display. Any hint of intimacy in the couple or outside the couple is resented and rejected by the narcissist because it's a signal holding hands signals I need this person, I love this person, I'm dependent on this person. She holds my hand literally and figuratively and the narcissist would never admit to this because it challenges the narcissist's basic theorem of self-sufficiency. The narcissist says, I don't need you, go away, see if I care, be with someone else, I don't give a damn, I'm stronger than this, I'm perfect, I'm invulnerable, I'm untouchable, you can't hurt me, no one can hurt me anymore, I've learned my lesson as a child, I won't allow anyone to hurt me anymore, I won't allow you to get close and near to me, I won't allow you the intimacy that would provide you with the weapons you need to destroy me, I will not allow you to weaponize my life or the access you gain to me. So the narcissist automatically converts anyone who tries to love him into a persecutory object. First, by attributing to her some nefarious goals and agenda, some ulterior motive and secondly by defying her, rejecting the offer of love is a sign of strength, a sign of resilience, a sign of fortitude, proof of survival. So rejecting love in the narcissist's dictionary is prevailing. Rejecting love is an assurance of strength, survival and resilience. Love is a vulnerability, vulnerability is a dangerous, they also imply weakness, if you're vulnerable you're weak, there's nothing the narcissist hates more than being weak. Narcissists perceive loving and being loved, both as vulnerabilities and weaknesses, because being loved is very addictive, it's a very pleasant experience and the narcissist is terrified of falling for it and being unable to detach and disconnect and reject and walk away. Because the narcissist treats love as one would treat fire, flame, he recoils, he runs away, he shuts his eyes because love can weaken him. Do you remember the story of Samson and Delilah? Samson and Delilah is a parable, Samson was one echo of the narcissist, one of the first narcissists described in the Bible, Delilah cut his hair, rendered him weak. Love made Samson the strongest man on earth, weak and a captive, a hostage of the enemy. So Delilah Samson's love was the enemy. So when you do want to interact via love, via emotions, the narcissist feels terrified and to overcome this terror he seeks to micromanage the partner, her behaviors, her reactions, her responses, her choices, her decisions, they all need to be micromanaged and this amounts to coercive control in extreme cases. All this is intended to avoid weakness, hurt and devastating loss. The narcissist says, you want to love me and to some extent I want to be loved but on my terms and conditions and on my turf and territory, first you will enter a shared fantasy, then I will convert you from an external object to an internal object, I will snapshot you, then I will interact only with the internal object and I will render it utterly and rigidly predictable, then I would feel safe enough to stay with you physically. So the narcissist is present physically but never emotionally, not because he doesn't attempt to love but because all his emotions, all the catechesis, all the emotional investment is directed inward at internal objects in his mind and this is why we call it narcissism. It's self-love but not self-love in the classical healthy sense, it's simply that all the emotions, all this huge energy is directed inward, the narcissist becomes his own erotic, romantic and even sexual object incapable of interacting the same way with others, he immediately converts them into a part of his mind, figments of his imagination, elements in his fantasy. Really love shames the narcissist and humiliates him on a constant repetitive, regular basis. It's like love is a permanent narcissistic injury, why? Because love requires adult skills, adult skills. The narcissist is not an adult, the narcissist is a child, used to be called arrested or stunted development, we no longer use these terms but they capture reality. The narcissist is frozen in time like Aunt in Amber is frozen at the point where he has sacrificed his true self to a new divinity, a new deity, the false self and has ceased to exist, separate from the false self. So now the narcissist is a piece of fiction and of course in the absence of reality because the narcissist has divorced reality, chose fantasy over reality, rejected life in the world, it is reality that is the great teacher, friction with reality is the engine of personal growth and development and in the absence of reality in the narcissist's life, the narcissist never becomes an adult, never acquires the skills necessary to manage a relationship. So love keeps reminding the narcissist how inadequate he is, in other words love keeps triggering the bad object, the narcissist is a perennially abused child and so love sets him up for failure because children cannot handle love especially abused children. There was a discovery by Donald Winnicott, Donald Winnicott said that abused children can handle or can manage only hate and when they're confronted with love they try to convert it to hate, that's not some vacuum, that's Donald Winnicott, the greatest child psychologist ever after Piaget. Love requires not only adult skills but also emotional maturity, a secure attachment style and a grounded center of personality, a core identity. The narcissist has none of these things, he is emotionally immature, his attachment style is insecure and he doesn't have a core identity if he has an empty core. The narcissist is an addict and like all junkies he is very very deficient in these departments. His only relationship is with his drug, narcissistic supply, his drug, the drug of the narcissist is the fantasy sustained by a constant influx of narcissistic supply, he is so focused on it, he is so invested in it, he is so committed to this fantasy. All his energy goes there, he has nothing left to give to anyone even to himself because he has no self. It's an emptiness, an absence, a void, a black hole, you can't love it, your love will be consumed, digested, gunned forever before you know it and if you get too close so will you. Love requires the recognition of the other, love requires the ability to tell that someone else is separate from you, is external to you, has boundaries, that's when you end and someone else begins, this is love, love is not merger, love is not fusion, love is not symbiosis, these are malignancies of love known as co-dependency and other issues. So narcissists are incapable of this, they are not capable of othering people, they are not capable of perceiving people as separate entities, external objects with their own needs and fears and hopes and wishes and dreams and emotions and cognitions and so on. The narcissist immediately appropriates you, annexes you, converts you into an internal object and dispenses with your externality and separateness because the narcissist has never experienced separation from the most crucial figure in his life, his mother or the maternal figure. The narcissist feels very threatened by the fact that you are separate and external, your personal autonomy, your agency, your self-efficacy, they threaten him and so he must eliminate them, he eliminates them via coercion, manipulation, abuse but he also eliminates them by self-deceiving, he lies to himself that you're not separate, that you're not external, that you are his extension, that you're merely an internal object that you will never ever abandon him because you're inside his mind and he is in full control of you and so whenever you display any signs of independence, a new friend, you travel on your own, you have a job or whatever, the narcissist regards you as an external object, a gun, a muck, as a threat to the inertly perfect universe of his internal objects and he redoubles his efforts to render you non-existent, as non-existent as he is, to make you into an absence, from a presence to an absence and that's an excellent description or encapsulation of the shared fantasy. Shared fantasy is intended to transition you from a presence to an absence. Narcissists blindly devour and consume their predators but they're not predators in the psychopathic sense, malevolent, cunning, scheming, premeditated, no, the predators in the instinctual reflexive sense, now like Pac-Man, you remember that very early video game, you know, with the teeth, they devour and consume because they devour and consume, not because it's part of any sophisticated scenario which is essentially goal-oriented, there's no goal there, the goal is to reduce anxiety, the narcissist anxiety, by killing you metaphorically the narcissist anxiety is ameliorated and mitigated and under control because your independence coupled with your love are the greatest imaginable threats, the last time the narcissist has come across an independent person who offered him love was his mother and that has been a harrowing super traumatic experience. Narcissists mimic, they're mimicking parasites suspended in a sempitonal symbiotic fantasy, they feed, they're feeding frenzy, they frenzily feed off their successive hosts, I'm gonna read this sentence to you again because it's really a good simile of the shared fantasy. Narcissists are mimicking parasites suspended in a sempitonal symbiotic fantasy frenzily feeding off their successive hosts, you. Narcissists push you away, they resist any attempt to love them, their approach is acquisitive, their avoidance preordained by their need to reenact the unresolved conflict with their dead mother, the original frustrating figure, the original persecutory object, the trauma that never leaves them and that compels them, compulsion compels them to repeat the same cycle again and again and again, repetition compulsion and in this sense, narcissists are automata, they're robots programmed with their own shame driven compulsions, they're dummies to a self-conjured ventriloquist known as the false self, narcissists are a heat-seeking homing device with an algorithm programming gun or eye, how can you love, how can you love something like that, the answer is you can't, do not waste your love on the narcissist or the psychopath, all the psychopath for this matter, do not waste your love because if you waste your love you will end up being wasted