You tried healing the narcissist’s inner child, but did you forget about yours?

@mygpeach says:

❤

@doctorsteph says:

Yes and it’s worse than that — they hurt you and you hurt yourself. And they let you hurt yourself. They encourage it, putting as much shame on you as possible. The hurt they inflict — when unconscious, is horrifying (what happened to them to be this way?), and when conscious (because it really is conscious so often—we’ve all caught them in their conscious choices to hurt), it is downright diabolical. Experiencing hurt does not entitle someone to unleash hell on others. At the end of the day, these people **are** so fragile and vulnerable, but our empathy never ultimately soothes them—what is “soothing” to them is **exploiting** our empathy, gaining control, maintaining dominance. The validation we give them actually doesn’t make them feel better — keeping us in a position to give it endlessly is what makes them feel better. The only empathy that would’ve soothed them was never given to them (in childhood) and will never come. It is sad, yes. Yes, they are suffering. And…they’ve adapted a psychological structure that demands they exploit others to feel any sense of OK—to the extent that this structure is locked in or until they address it concertedly, they are **built to harm**. It is horrifying that someone who was hurt so bad has to hurt others in order to get by—even worse to know that “getting by” for them is just maintaining their suffering while they entitle themselves to hurt others.

The only way out is for them to heal themselves (but nothing is ever wrong with them right? Why should they have to self-regulate, we’re the unstable ones right?). For us, the empathic ones, the only way out is stepping away, at minimum psychologically, at best physically. They can take aim on someone else (and they will)—it never ends, at least not in the lifetime of the relationship you’re in. We need to live in and love the separate beings we are—we are not on this planet to care for them, we are here for ourselves, to survive our situations and, with our healing, find a way to thrive, to make the most of our lives and this insane world. They have earned no right to our empathy—that entitlement doesn’t exist—and it is a precious thing we must withhold and issue selectively. They are in bizarro world, grandiosely self-righteous and yet so, so wrong. We need to step out of bizarro world, wake up from the nightmare and tend to ourselves. Live for ourselves, care for ourselves — it is what we are meant to do, and the basis for nurturing healthy connections with deserving others. We deserve to feel OK, to find and savor the good in people.

If we want to empathize with them, it must be from afar and never at our expense. But our inner child learned just that—many of us were trained like soldiers to give and give, pick up on every sign of a toxic person’s suffering, be unconditionally available and loyal to them, to give at our expense—and I mean this in the most extreme sense: we trained ourselves never to be ourselves so that we could be available to give (what greater expense to ourselves than our unique selves?). Now we are out here learning we are indeed people. Empathy is a gift we have to give, one that actually is not meant to be siphoned by others, but to be cherished by others and reciprocated in earnest. When empathy is practiced this way, we ourselves are nurtured.

I’ve had to learn the real rules of empathy, to ground myself in reality and observe how it works, experience that it is not an unlimited resource, that narcissists don’t actually benefit from it—it’s almost moot—when I looked closely I saw that my empathy was ultimately self-destructive. Like donating the wrong blood type every single day — they couldn’t receive that blood no matter how much I give and now life has been drained from me—I’m left having to **recover**. We’ve all been there—having to recover from trying to be there for them, recover from giving in true earnest, only to be left exhausted and bruised.

This is not how empathy is meant to work.

@mday3821 says:

The book “Hurt people Hurt people” sucks. I read half of it and called it BS. It felt like a big, long excuse for someone to keep hurting people.