''My story is about what it’s like to realise, in ways that make your stomach drop, that the person you have bound up your life with, the person who you love and thought you could trust, is actually a completely different person who has been pretending to be someone else all along. It’s about finding that reality as you knew it has disintegrated, and you are living in a frightening, parallel world which looks the same but feels utterly different. It’s a world in which nothing can be trusted, nothing makes sense, honesty is a pretence and love between people doesn’t exist - all that exists is people using each other for their own ends. This story is about what it’s like to find yourself dropped into that hostile world, to inhabit it for years, to learn how it operates intimately, then to step back out of it into a world where people do care about each other, people can be trusted, and love is real. It’s about throwing light on that dark world which runs alongside ours, where a shocking number of our fellow human beings live, and seeing it clearly for what it is.

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This dark, parallel world of the psyche is where narcs live. It’s where they feel at home. The toxic atmosphere is their oxygen, its labyrinthine spaces allow them to hide, and its amorality frees them up to act however they wish, without conscience or responsibility. To you and me this world looks like hell: to the narc it is the psychic space where they thrive. In fact, they can’t survive outside of it. That, as I’ll explain, is their great, overriding weakness, because you have the power to call them out at any time. You can only do this once you understand them and how they operate. To do that, you have first to enter their world and be initiated in it. This is not an experience for the faint hearted.

 

But let’s start at the beginning,

 

Narcs hide - that’s their signature. The way they show upon the early stages does not reflect at all who they actually are. It’s a performance, and usually a convincing one; although, in retrospect, once you know who they actually are, you can see that there were some things even from the start that were “off”. But you probably didn’t read these as warning signs, even though they were odd enough to register. Why not? Narcs have a huge advantage when they prey on a healthy person, which is that healthy people start from an assumption that other people think and feel in ways that are similar to them. They assume that someone who seems caring and honest probably is those things. The hard truth they have to discover is that the way narcs think and feel is wholly different to how a normal person thinks and feels - so strange is it to healthy minds, in fact, that that even when it becomes clearly visible, it remains all but incomprehensible to them. Early in a relationship, a normal person simply doesn’t give much attention to the moments when a narc ‘outs’ themselves - when just for a moment their pretence slips - as warning of something seriously wrong. 

 

Even when the healthy person later comes to see the narc’s true nature, it remains fundamentally mysterious to them. It is a negation of everything that, to a healthy person, makes life worth living. It’s important to try to see it clearly if you want to protect yourself.

 

How is a narc’s worldview different to that of a healthy person?

 

What a narc wants out of a relationship isn’t love, or closeness, or mutual support, or the emotional warmth that comes from healthy intimacy. What a narc wants is power and control, so that they can use the healthy person’s energy, attention, possessions, social networks, their very soul, for their own benefit. It’s a stealthy pillage of all that you own and an energetic rape of your deepest, most intimate self. Narcs affect love, intimacy and caring, but it’s wholly an act.

 

One of the hardest things to accept, later on, for those who have realised that their partner is a narc, is that all the time they thought they were in a loving relationship with this person, actually the narc never loved them at all. A narc doesn’t know what love is: they just mimic it to fool you into giving everything you have and everything you are. It’s the profoundest betrayal possible and I know from my own experience that it is very hard for a healthy person who has given love in good faith to accept it. However, it’s really important that you find the strength to accept this hard fact, because until you do, you remain very vulnerable to their machinations.

 

One reason why healthy people are vulnerable is that narcs don’t respect other people’s boundaries. This aspect of their nature will show up early on, but you may not see it as problematic at an early stage in the relationship when they are coming on as loving. A desire to move quickly, to have a sexual relationship quickly, to move in with you quickly, to share your deepest feelings quickly, may all appear as wonderful enthusiasm for your new relationship. It isn’t. It comes from a sense of entitlement that doesn’t respect you - and once they stop pretending to love you, the full ugliness of having shared every aspect of your life with someone who doesn’t love you at all and violates your boundaries without compunction becomes clear. 

 

The boundaries I am referring to are not just physical (such as your home) or metaphorical (such as your finances) but also, and most destructively, energetic (your inner essence, or your ‘soul’). By the time I finally called time on my marriage to a narc, left her and tried to re-establish healthy boundaries, I could actually feel her energetic ‘tentacles’ not only around me, restraining me and trapping me, but also under my skin, inside me. It felt like a malevolent intent that was able to get inside me. Does that sound hard to believe, a neurotic delusion? I am not neurotic, and I can tell you that it felt very real. When you share your life with someone malevolent who violates your boundaries, you are in very real danger.

 

Why would you make yourself vulnerable to this danger? A narc who is targeting you will charm you, flatter you, shine on you, make you feel great, and this charm offensive will probably be sustained right up until the moment when you have made a commitment and can no longer easily get away. You might have married them, or had a child with them, or gone onto business with them - in some way, you will have invested in them, to the extent that extricating yourself has now become costly, painful, or all-but impossible. Once you have made that commitment, the narc will will stop making a sustained effort to charm you, and their mask will begin to slip. You start to glimpse another person underneath.

 

For me, this moment came when the narc and I had been married for three years and had a young child. We had just moved house to an unfamiliar area after I had started a new job. After a few months in our new home my wife’s behaviour changed, with no warning and with stunning brutality. Until that moment I had thought we were close, still in love, loyal and committed to each other, totally ‘together’.

 

I discovered she was seeing a local man, inviting him into our home and our bed when I was out at work. It was a neighbour who told me. I challenged her. Reeling, I tried to talk about what was happening. She laughed, as if she was enjoying my shock and confusion.

 

Bewildered by this abrupt change in her personality, I tried for weeks to make sense of what had gone wrong to start to heal it. She was unrecognisable from the kind, funny woman I had married: now completely cold and hard, she treated me as if I was the one who had betrayed her and she was looking down on me in contempt. To be clear, I hadn’t betrayed her. She announced that I would no longer have a role in our child’s life beyond an occasional visit and this new man, a virtual stranger, would become his father.

 

My life had suddenly fallen apart, without warning and without explanation, at a time when there was no support network and no way of stepping outside the situation to regain my balance. Looking back, I realise the she chose her moment deliberately to ensure I was isolated.

 

What I saw when the mask slipped was the true ‘face’ of the person I was married to and had tied my life to in every way. Coming up against its hard coldness was viscerally repellant. Even worse was the realisation that under this face there was no-one there. Only someone who has experienced it can understand how unnerving it is to try to connect at a deep level with your life partner, only to find yourself staring into a void.

 

Once you have seen the narc’s true nature your relationship will become a relentless power struggle. The narc, knowing you have ‘seen’ who they really are, will not bother to keep up the pretence of their fake persona. Now their tactics change. Instead of charming you they will attack you, doing all they can to destroy your faith in your own sanity. They will also smear you to everyone else. Now that you know them for who they are, it’s imperative from the narc’s point of view to make you and everyone else see you as the guilty, disordered one.

 

This is the time when it makes all the difference to understand how the narc’s mind works. If you still think you are dealing with a normal human being you will find yourself in a world where nothing makes sense, and you will be both bewildered and psychologically disabled. Their signature technique is called ‘gaslighting’: a sustained attack by the narc on your view of reality and on your sanity. Unless you understand it, the effects can be extraordinarily pernicious.

 

It’s rarely as simple as the narc telling open lies which can be disproven - although bizarrely they do that, too. Instead, the narc consistently tells you things that don’t make sense or fit what you know, so you end up wondering if you have misunderstood everything and are going mad. It also comes through in unspoken assumptions, as if your guilt, or your self-delusion, or your lack of integrity, or some other invented ‘weakness’ in your character, is something that doesn’t need stating but can be taken for granted at all times. It’s as if you are assumed to be someone different from who you are.

 

This shouldn’t be effective, given that it’s a lie, but unfortunately it is. Because of the psychological mechanism by which we gain our sense of who we are partly in relationship to others and how they respond to us, when someone we are close to consistently reflects back to us that how they see us is at odds with how we see ourselves, and moreover that in their eyes we are terribly flawed, the impact on our sense of self can be profound. It’s a corrosive technique, and incredibly effective.

 

Psychologically healthy people connect with others on an energetic level, ‘read’ each other’s feelings and respond to how the others react them. A narc doesn’t engage in this way, but they know how to use this energetic linking against you. Even the sanest, strongest person soon finds their sense of self eroded, and feels they no longer stand on solid ground.

 

This is just the start: it’s the way the narc keeps you off balance while they work their hateful magic on you. You need to get out as soon as you can.

 

Of course, there may be compelling reasons for you not to leave immediately, or even for years. In my case the reason was that I loved my child and couldn’t bear to lose him. My wife made it very clear that if I did fight her in any way she would cut me out of his life, and I knew she was capable of doing this. I had also seen that she was capable of turning someone against me by lying without shame or conscience, for example by accusing me of doing things that I hadn’t done but she had. Called ‘projection’, this habit is another tell-tale sign of the psychologically disordered. Incapable of ‘owning’ their actions and faults, they accuse others of these actions - and fully believe this projection. To a healthy person it’s breathtaking in its shamelessness, until you understand that the narc’s very essence is a sham, and to a narc telling lies is as natural as breathing. Their fake existence depends on it.

 

In my case, a consequence of the fact that my wife had given up work as soon as possible after we married and I carried the whole responsibility for our security was that, if we split, she would have custody. Having regular ‘access’ doesn’t mean much if your ex partner finds innumerable ways of obstructing it, and of poisoning your child against you. So I decided to stay, and try to understand what I was up against.

 

In fact I stayed for ten years, to make sure my relationship with my son could not be destroyed. My wife didn’t ask for or want a divorce: she wanted to keep living off me so she could continue to enjoy all the benefits that brought, while also living as if she was a teenager, free of all responsibilities or commitments. During those ten years I learnt a range of survival techniques. I also watched narc behaviour up close. I became an expert at understanding behaviours that, by their nature, operate in the shadows. That knowledge is what I am sharing with you, because when you are up close with a narc knowing what you are dealing with is crucial for your sanity.

 

No matter how varied narcs may appear to be on the surface, their behaviour patterns are amazingly predictable. The underlying drive that determines everything they do is a desire for power and control. Once you understand that, and know that every interaction you have with them will be (from their perspective) a negotiation for power, your relationship will begin to make sense. Until you have that insight, while you continue to assume they have the same desire for connection and love as everyone who is healthy, nothing will add up, so this understanding is a game-changer and your only effective protection against their mind-bending, soul-sapping behaviour.

 

In a long-term relationship with a narc this struggle for power is the unspoken dynamic that seeps into everything: it’s ubiquitous and relentless, even when low-key and implicit. Every day the narc will find numerous little ways to erode your self-confidence and your self-respect, to keep the balance of power in their hands. Even if you are psychologically strong this will in time have a seriously corrosive effect on your spirit. Your best defence is making sure that your self-respect does not depend on their approval.

 

If the narc occasionally does something apparently kind or loving, it’s to manipulate you. This may sound harsh, but the truth is brutally simple: a narc doesn’t know what love is, and apparently loving actions are something else dressed up. If you don’t want to believe this strange truth, put it to the test. It’s easy to be caught in a cycle where the healthy partner reacts to an act of apparent kindness by the narc by feeling grateful, or loving, or hoping this is a sign of a change. But wait, and you will find - without exception - that an act of apparent kindness is followed by a moment in which the narc wants something. You were being softened up, coldly, for a purpose.

 

Once you understand and accept that the narc is incapable of love or even of genuine reciprocity, you can see every action for what it is - a manoeuvre which has behind it an agenda, an unannounced and self-serving purpose. The fact that the narc does not understand or feel love, and is therefore incapable of empathy or of caring for anyone else, is the key to their deeply disordered behaviour. In the absence of love between people, all that is left is a struggle for dominance, and this is what the narc craves.

 

This sounds bleak, and it is, but if there are reasons for staying in a relationship with a narc it’s critical for your own sanity that you are clear-sighted about this. That is the only thing that will keep your sense of self and your integrity intact. The narc’s principle weapon - gaslighting - no longer works when you know what they are doing.

 

Seeing their motives and actions clearly makes a relationship with a narc survivable. Nothing will make it loving or sustaining. Of course, you would leave this unhealthy dynamic and choose instead a relationship that’s genuinely loving and reciprocal if you didn’t have a very good reason to stay. For me, staying close to my son was the reason. I have a great relationship with him. Staying in a loveless relationship with an amoral manipulator was in many ways a nightmare, but it was do-able and it was worth it.

 

Being clear-sighted about what is happening while in a relationship with a narc takes real courage. What a narc ultimately desires is your destruction, because that destroys what you know about them and annihilating the truth to sustain a lie is their life’s work. You have to see them for what they are; it is a matter of life and death to them, psychically speaking, to maintain their false image; so to them you simply must be annihilated.

 

They don’t need to kill you literally. Their expertise lies on the psychic plane, where they are truly lethal. They will wage war on your sanity, your way of seeing, your integrity. Being in a relationship with a narc feels like an attack on your very essence or ‘soul’. These attacks may seem relatively minor from day to day, designed to keep you off-balance, dependent and incapable of exercising your full power (indeed, a common feeling around a narc is of being somehow and strangely ‘paralysed’ emotionally and spiritually). But be in no doubt that the endgame the narc desires is your total annihilation. That is why, if you stay, you must protect yourself.

 

I have now been free from the relationship with this narc for several years. I am in a loving and genuine relationship with a wonderful woman and I know from daily experience that love is real, happiness is really, fulfilment is real - despite life’s inevitable ups and downs. What I learned from my long excursion into the strange, hostile, bleak territory of the narc is, ironically, that the opposite of their world is the ultimate reality.

 

I also learned to heal my own vulnerabilities that let the narc in. If you are spiritually inclined, you might even conclude that the narc is a healer who creates a situation in your life so painful, so high stakes and so impossible to find peace with that you have a choice: surrender, or become more fully alive, more powerfully yourself, and more aware.''

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To anyone in a similar position, I hope these words help, Alex .