Eight Signs that Narcissists Actually Loved You
Love works very differently for a person with NPD vs. someone without it…
Was it all fake? Was any of it real?
If you read a lot of narcissistic abuse recovery literature, you’re going to consistently hear that narcissists do not love, that everything they do was geniusly calculated with malicious intent, that the person you loved was only a performance to use you, that you were a silly fool, that you likely wanted abuse and excused too much.
Sounds like split thinking and making narcissists into a grandiose, all powerful monster, doesn’t it?
These gaslights are really something.
Whenever you encounter rhetoric that is immersed in split thinking and not nuance, don’t be so quick to dismiss your reality and intuition: a lot of people who are in these recovery spaces are narcissists, and while you can learn a lot from what they are projecting, you really can only learn to an extent….
…because there’s something that narcissists can NEVER discuss, as if there’s a curse placed right on their tongue that stops it.
They cannot discuss shame.
And to a narcissist, love is a shame. Love is a WEAKNESS.
To admit they loved someone is to admit loss, to admit they weren’t perfect, to admit that someone or something was good and had POWER over them.
Love is the most powerful force: that’s why narcissists are always trying to exploit, withhold, and control it in those around them. Narcissist tend to say they favor power over love, as if the two can ever be separated. Love IS power. It’s the only real power there is, because it comes from the divine. That’s why sociopaths always attack the most loving people, triggered by the power of love and innocence. It’s also why they mask as loving people.
They want to BE those people: it’s their fantasy. Because love is power.
But narcissists are human too — they seek love like anyone else.
We’re a social species: love is hardwired into our survival.
Honest, self aware narcissists will tell the truth: they believe they’re in love during lovebomb and idealization. They don’t know why they treat their partners the way they do. They tend to believe fully that their partners deserve it, even when they have no evidence that their partners deserve it: it’s just how their brains redirect shame.
When their idealization turns to devaluation, it’s because they think that the person they loved tricked them and wasn’t actually as perfect as they are.
It’s deluded and it’s projection — because they’re the ones masking and mirroring, but they don’t know that. They believe their mask. They don’t think they’re mirroring: they just feel inspired by your excellence as they fall in love during idealization. They think they’re just changing and growing.
Then they think you suddenly became imperfect, so therefore you’re a fraud. A narcissist sees themselves as perfect and superior, not fraudulent, but the very notion of perfection is a fantasy they live in due to their split thinking. People can only be all good or all bad to them. They think like children.
Narcissists have always interacted with people by mirroring them: it started with their narcissist parent who impressed their identity onto them. They think everyone does this. That is why people who are authentic and have a stable identity agitate them by triggering shame.
Many narcissists I’ve known were obsessed with romance or hungry to be loved. They seemed to genuinely think they were loving people — despite things like lying, abuse, or cheating — which was always blamed on their partner.
It makes little sense to a person without the disorder, but narcissists, even the worst of sociopaths, actually DO WANT LOVE.
But their early childhood trauma makes love the most dangerous and unsafe thing in the world for them.
Because the first person they loved — their narcissist parent — loved them….and then….abused them, abandoned them, or turned into a malicious predator.
Therefore, anytime a narcissist feels the stirrings of LOVE, they are then TRIGGERED to remember the first time they fell in love — with their parent — and how they were fooled by a fraud and left permanently heartbroken and feeling worthless.
They become paranoid, and they begin searching for signs that this love will abandon them too.
So they test it through devaluation and abuse.
And the more you endure and stay consistent in loving them, the more they get triggered. Eventually, if you’re consistent in your love, your love will keep bringing them shame as they abuse you, so the abuses escalate and worsen, because you trigger more shame.
This is why narcissists provoke and desire reactive abuse, because your reaction proves you are JUST AS BAD AS THEM, so it relieves shame. This is also why narcissists will often date other narcissists, because the constant toxicity is a comfort to their grandiosity. They can project onto another narcissist, and their projections prove true, which relieves shame.
Love with a narcissist is a quicksand.
It’s what happens when you love the damned.
There’s no happy ending. There’s no way to rescue or heal their childhood wounds.
Narcissists don’t love all their supply. Much of their supply only serves the purpose of meeting certain needs and they do manipulate some people intentionally and without feeling.
But there are some surprising signs that narcissists are repressing love and grief over you.…
1. Their New Supply Looks Like You
When I left my narcissist husband after getting married as a teenager, I was sure he had no love for me whatsoever.
He hadn’t touched me sexually in over a year. He was having affairs with both men and women. When I broke up with him, he beat me, tore the house apart, threw all my belongings on the front lawn, and told everyone I was a cheating slut, even though I’d never cheated. He charged over $20,000 on my credit card and left me with the debt.
I thought there was no one in the world he found more worthless than me.
And then he moved on — FAST. Within a month, he had a new girlfriend.
AND SHE LOOKED LIKE ME.
It was eerie. She had my same body type, my same haircut. She also had a lot of my values and was ambitious and independent. He married her and had kids.
I couldn’t understand it: I felt so unlovable to him, yet his next big love was someone who looked and acted a lot like me. What was I missing?
Nothing. He was missing ME.
But they can’t admit that. It’s a SHAME.
When a narcissist loses supply, they feel as if they’ve lost a toy they owned, and if they really did love that toy and find it useful, they’re going to look for a toy that is a replacement…with one difference.
It’s a toy that they can CONTROL better.
That person gets much worse abuse and humiliation.
2. They Absorb Your Personality Traits for Their Mask
You may have some narcissists who gave you a swift and head-spinning discard who seem to ABSORB YOUR PERSONALITY TRAITS FOR LIFE.
I had several narcissists do this, even about things they’d criticized me for. I had a favorite person who was a sociopath for nearly a decade. After her sudden discard that blindsided me, I’d look at her social media and feel nothing but GRIEF.
She was posting pictures of herself holding my favorite book, quotes by my favorite author, poetry that I loved. She was introduced to all of those things through ME.
I kept thinking, “How can she love all these things about me, but not love ME? How can she post these things and not be thinking of me? What was I missing? Why wasn’t I enough?”
My therapist informed me that this was her disorder: sometimes they’ll take the traits they genuinely loved about you and absorb them for their mask for life.
I said, “But she hated me, so why would she even think these were good qualities when they are the core of who I am?”
She said, “It’s probably more accurate to say she was jealous of you.”
For a person without NPD, what looks like jealousy and hate to them is actually love and admiration for us.
3. They Shut Down When Asked About Feelings For You
In this video, you can see the brain process of a narcissist confronted with his broken heart.
Piers Morgan is, of course, an overt narcissist like Kanye. And he knew very well that Kanye was struggling with a devastating narcissistic collapse.
Any narcissist knows how to exploit emotions of pain, even in other narcissists: this is why Morgan kept pressing the question. (Which he continued to do even after this video clip, asking if he wanted Kim back. Kanye, in typical narcissist form, dodged the emotions behind the question and said, “Those thirst traps still be fire.”)
If you’re a borderline (an empath), you’ll be able to feel Kanye’s grief very easily in these videos. It’s bottomless. It’s dark and terrifying.
But if you’re not, you can see it very easily in his body language.
The clip begins with the narcissist enjoying his fantasy, smiling as he thinks of a cute, childlike nickname for himself and his ex if they reunited. Morgan responds with “Would you like that?”
And Kanye’s smile VANISHES.
He becomes somber. He looks down. He is in the pit of shame and despair.
But his brain cannot process this shame — it’s torture, how much he loves her, how much he lost. He has to repress it. CTRL+ALT+DEL. He carefully responds that everything is up to God, bypassing the feelings behind the question.
He presses more, flinging the shame monster at Kanye, reveling in his pain. “Do you still love Kim?”
It happens again. Kanye’s smile fades. He looks down. He can’t make eye contact. He simply responds that he’ll always love Kim.
This is a narcissist in total agony. It’s no wonder we’ve seen him transform from this breakup, embracing the monster inside of him: a loss of love that devastating is a collapse that is hard for a narcissist to return from. It’s a haunting.
4. They Abuse You REALLY Badly
When I was in my 30s, I slept with a narcissist casually for several years. He put me through the regular run-around of ghosting and returning, devaluing, discarding, and hoovering. It seemed to me like normal male behavior. I’d never known anything else.
At the time, I accepted whatever scraps of affection from the narcissists I could get, and I was addicted to having sex with them.
One night as I was getting dressed, he came up behind me and wrapped his arms around me and stared at us together in the mirror. He said, “You’re so good. You’re so beautiful and loving. You never get jealous. You’re not like other girls. You don’t give too much but you’re just a good-hearted person. Any man would want you. Whenever I am done with you, I just go home and stare at your pictures for hours.”
“YOU DO?” Half the time he said he was coming over, he didn’t come. I couldn’t imagine him OBSESSING over me.
He nodded and kissed my neck, “It’s a problem. I don’t feel for anyone like I do for you. I can’t even get rid of you. I’ve stuck around longer with you than anyone.”
I laughed, “It’s just because I let you do whatever you want.”
“Everyone else does too,” he said. “They just get mad about it and get over it. You’re different. You don’t even get mad.”
The next time I saw him, he and his cousin drugged and raped me.
I woke up to them raping me with dozens of dirty condoms flung all over my room.
After THAT rare emotional expression, his response to it was to RAPE ME.
Because their response to feeling love is to feel powerless and afraid, so they need to reassert their sense of power through devastating abuse.
After a grueling ordeal of trying to get dressed and end the assaults, I found him sitting in my room on my radiator, staring out the window.
I walked up to him and started to cry. “So this is it? This is how you really feel about me? You hate me?”
He barely glanced at me and kept staring out the window. He looked TRAUMATIZED.
“Talk to me!” I said, “I trusted you all these years. I’ve been good to you.”
He WINCED visibly. Then he stood up, his 6 foot 6 inch frame towering over me. He looked at me in disgust. He said, “You were always just some bitch I fucked.” He walked out of my apartment. I stayed in bed for a week.
When my stalker, another rapist, made a Facebook page on the anniversary of his attacks of me, one of the posts said, “When a broken person loves you, they’ll do everything to make you hate them.”
That post stopped me in my tracks. Everything a narcissist accuses is confession, and his posts all operated that way too. He posted a lot about “toxic, broken people.”
Loves you?
Love?
And do EVERYTHING to make you hate them?
Like rape you?
Like traumatize you?
YES.
Because that’s their response to feeling powerless in the face of love.
When they feel love, they lose their sense of control, and to get that back, they need to ATTACK love, to ensure the love does not take them back to that place from their early childhood.
Hatred is just a broken love that’s grieving.
The horror of the abuse upon you is a reflection of how deeply they loved you. That’s how a child’s terrified broken heart loves and ensures that love never hurts them again.
5. They Redirect Their Narcissistic Rage at Someone Else
If this one happened to you, you’re really lucky... and someone else isn’t.
Let’s look at the famous case of sociopath Gary Gilmore.
Gary Gilmore was the son of two sociopaths: he was golden child to his mother, Bessie. His father, Franklin had two golden children, Frank Jr. and Gaylen, who also became sociopaths. They had one borderline child, Mikail, who was scapegoat to his mother and invisible to his father: he wrote a beautifully heartbreaking memoir about his disturbed family called Shot in the Heart.
Gilmore was dating a teenage girl, Nicole. One night, disturbed by his violent outbursts, Nicole decided to break up with him.
When a narcissist is abandoned, this triggers a narcissist’s core fear, and they have a collapse in which they enter a borderline’s state: they feel shame, worthlessness, and suicidal.
But their brains cannot process that shame, so if they do not kill themselves, they must redirect their self loathing and project it via narcissistic RAGE. This is when their victims are most in danger.
After suffering his collapse, Gilmore started saying he was afraid that he was going to KILL NICOLE.
He said he had no other choice but to KILL NICOLE.
This is because narcissists MUST release their rage to resolve the shame. They can’t live with it or grieve it. They must give their self hate to someone else.
So what Gary Gilmore did is he went on a killing spree and killed several random people. Each time, he said, “This is for Nicole,” before firing the bullet.
Just before he was going to kill his borderline brother, he was arrested. He pled guilty and asked for the death penalty.
Gilmore’s rage was for Nicole, and he knew that, but he sought to protect her by giving that rage to someone else.
It seems somewhat rare that they go this direction, but it has happened to me too: I had it where a narcissist lashed out at another ex of mine who had abused me and attacked him in a rage instead of me.
It’s deranged, but it’s how their mental health operates in trauma.
6. They Leave You Alone
If a narcissist discards you and does not hoover, it can mean one of two things:
- You were not that special to begin with and they were using you but they’ve found better supply
- They love you and are protecting you from themselves
In the above referenced book, Shot in the Heart, Mikail Gilmore, who had good relationships to his troubled brothers, was ghosted by all of them. I, too, was ghosted by my sister and could never recover our relationship.
When Gilmore tracked down one of his brothers, he pressed him on why he abandoned him. His brother wearily said it was for his own protection, that he was the only brother that stood a chance to survive their childhood, because it hadn’t killed him yet.
He left him because he loved him.
When my sociopath FP discarded me, she sent me a long, loving message before ending our friendship. I couldn’t understand why someone who said I meant so much to them would still leave me without trying to work out whatever had gone wrong. I was understandably upset, and I argued with her via text, begging her to tell me what I’d done.
She lashed out at me, “You drive everyone who loves you away.”
It wasn’t true, but I thought she was referencing the loss of my sister, and I took it like a bullet.
Then she IMMEDIATELY apologized. “Omg, Anne, I’m so sorry. See, this is why we can’t be friends. I can’t stop myself from saying things I don’t mean to you.”
“But WHY? Why do you think those things about me? Why am I not lovable? What did I do?”
She said, “I have to save you from me. And it hurts me, okay? But it’s all I can do. Please know you meant a lot in my life.”
I nearly killed myself.
I didn’t know she was a narcissist then. I didn’t unmask her for another year. When I did, I went to her exes for confirmation, and found that they’d been cheated on, had money stolen, and were victims of domestic violence. They all told me she was a narcissist, and they were glad I was no longer her flying monkey.
Now I believe that what she said was the truth: she knew she was not able to stop abusing me, and she knew I didn’t deserve it.
So, she cut me off and left me alone rather than ever risk me unmasking her and leaving her first.
7. They Name One of Their Children After You
This is where it gets creepy.
Narcissists have split thinking, and this applies to everything. As such, narcissists operate as if they have a playbook or are computer algorithms.
The golden child is all good. The narcissist only thinks one person in the world is all good — themselves. So the golden child will have a name that mirrors or rhymes with theirs, or they will give their golden child their first name as a middle name or the same middle names. On occaision, the names will be different but have the same meaning.
The invisible child is irrelevant. They’ll be given a common name or one that is very unusual from the rest of the family.
The scapegoat child is all bad. They’ll be given the name of someone who died tragically OR FORMER SUPPLY OF THE NARCISSIST…
Supply they LOST.
Supply that broke their heart.
If I had been a boy, my father said my name would have been of his best friend from the AirForce — a friend he never once spoke to in all my life.
It’s not unusual for them to even name their scapegoats after borderline siblings they rival with either.
I thought they chose these names because they HATED that person, and in part they do: the scapegoat child is a place for them to put their unprocessed shame and need for revenge from that relationship.
But in reality, they choose those names because they LOVED that supply, because that supply broke their heart, because they still wish they could CONTROL that supply and have their love forever.
Two former lovers of mine named children after me.
One of them was the rapist I mentioned in this essay. He named his first daughter LeAnne. Another gave his daughter the name Anne as a middle name.
I shivered to realize this: it made me ill, because I know that makes them scapegoat children, and I know that life will be very hard for them.
8. They Have Anniversary PTSD
I’ve journaled obsessively since I was in middle school. Eventually, as I developed PTSD responses to traumatic events, I was able to discover that my PTSD episodes happened on the EXACT anniversaries of when traumatic events happened to me, even when I didn’t consciously know the date.
It startled me to discover that what the mind forgets, the body remembers.
But the scholarly literature validates it: anniversary PTSD is a common experience.
Then I noticed it in the ASPDs I was close to. One friend who spent most his life in prison always committed his worst crimes on the anniversary of his brother’s suicide.
When I brought it up to him, he was similarly shocked: he didn’t even realize this was happening. “You think it’s PTSD?” I said. “That would make sense,” he replied.
I started examining other cases of ASPDs and found the same pattern. One woman was strangled by a man and nearly died. One year later — to the exact date — she strangled a man and killed him.
The thing about a narcissist’s PTSD is that THEY CANNOT PROCESS IT.
Narcissists can’t GRIEVE.
So, when it happens to them — they can’t simply endure it and cry and medicate it and try not to kill themselves, as I do.
THEY ACT OUT.
THEY PROJECT IT.
THEY RAGE.
It’s a werewolf shift.
Once I understood this, I recognized that the anniversary of my assaults from my stalker could be a very dangerous time for me. I knew he’d had two narcissistic collapses — one when he heard me say he had NPD and one when I escaped — and I wondered if he’d have anniversary PTSD.
But still, I gaslit myself. I thought, “No, that only happens from collapses in which they really loved people.”
Then, during some of the worst anniversary PTSD of my life, while googling my stalker’s name to see if he’d died or been arrested, I found his new Facebook profile, and I found his wife too.
And…on the anniversary of when he attacked me…HE ATTACKED HIS WIFE. She posted angrily about it.
ANNIVERSARY PTSD.
What was the shame he couldn’t process on that day?
The loss of ME.
I vomited violently after recognizing that.
In those three weeks of an excruciating anniversary of trauma, he continually posted artwork of girls who looked like me, or projected the things he did to me (like using someone’s worst pain against them), or posted things about my interests. On the anniversary of when I escaped, his profile vanished once again. (Thankfully).
This is a picture he posted and a picture of me the day before I got attacked by him.
You can’t convince me that his posts were not in reference to what happened with me.
I interpreted this post as truth: I was the girl grieving and he was the grave.
The truth of any narcissist is their inner child is dead.
And the horror of our grief over the experience of being loved by an abused child’s ghost is no different than mourning the dead.
So, while it’s not true that narcissists don’t experience love, their inability to grieve or process shame or emotionally attach due to their brain development and trauma responses make the love incredibly toxic, even dangerous.
However, maybe it’ll help you a little on your grieving journey not to have split thinking about how love manifests in our messy, broken humanity.
Yes, sometimes they loved you.
The love, however, is very, very sick.
So you must grieve them to heal. You must heal the pains from their childhood that they cannot heal.
Don’t make the same mistakes as them and try to sidestep grief or use revenge, hatred, and split thinking as your method for coping with pain: learn lessons from them.
Or else you will find yourself right in the arms of your next excruciating heartbreak.
My new book, Hunted Carrion: Sonnets to a Stalker is now available on Amazon!
For individual coaching, visit https://am-champion.com
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A.M. Champion is the author of She Saints & Holy Profanities (Quarterly West, 2019), The Good Girl is Always a Ghost (Black Lawrence Press, 2018), Book of Levitations (Trembling Pillow Press, 2019), Reluctant Mistress (Gold Wake Press, 2013), and The Dark Length Home (Noctuary Press, 2017). Her work appears in Verse Daily, diode, Tupelo Quarterly, Prairie Schooner, Crab Orchard Review, Salamander, New South, Redivider, PANK Magazine, and elsewhere. She was a 2009 Academy of American Poets Prize recipient, a 2016 Best of the Net winner, and a Barbara Deming Memorial Grant recipient.
