Narcissistic Personality Disorder

All About Stalkers: A Survival Guide

They never said survival would be a haunting.

If you're a victim of stalking, the most common thought you likely have is WILL THIS EVER END?

Thankfully, it’s not that common that predatory stalkers stalk for years, and stalkers do tend to lose interest, though it’s such a dangerous mental health disorder that the physical danger can’t be understated.

It is common, however, that predatory stalkers and intimacy-seeking stalkers stalk much longer than other types of stalkers, such as the rejected narcissist stalker who’s mad at an ex, which is the most common type of stalker. Those cases usually last a few months.

First, let’s look at the common pathologies of stalkers. Here are the subtypes:

“Rejected Stalkers:

Rejected stalkers are the most common typology. They’re primarily ex-partners, however, can extend to other groups whereby there has been a loss of a deeply significant relationship.

Resentful Stalkers:

Resentful stalkers fit into the ‘stranger’ category. However, often they will have had contact with the victim or their work at some point to initiate their obsession and resentfulness.

Intimacy Seekers:

Intimacy stalkers are understood to be ‘stranger’ stalkers. Although they can be a complete stranger to the victim, they can also be known through casual contact or as an acquaintance. They do not identify as a perpetrator or having a ‘victim’, as they see nothing wrong in their intentions or actions.

Incompetent Suitors:

Incompetent suitors are also ‘stranger’ stalkers, usually consisting of genuine strangers, but also casual acquaintances. They’re also motivated by loneliness, but dissimilar to the romantic nature of intimacy seekers, they have a stronger sense of lust.

Predatory Stalkers:

Predatory stalkers are usually strangers. Their victims are perceived as vulnerable, most frequently consisting of women, young people and children. Predatory stalkers are rare and considered highly dangerous due to their deviant desires.” (Source: Veritas Stalking Advocacy).

The predatory stalker, like their subtype, the celebrity-seeking stalker, is considered to be the most dangerous because they suffer from erotomania: this mean they have fantasy-driven sexual compulsions.

The predatory, intimacy-seeking, or incompetent suitor stalker gets genuinely confused between reality and fantasy, because their fantasies exist as trauma-defense mechanisms to protect them from loneliness and unprocessed despair from their childhood.

Being sociopaths, however, they do have a grasp on what behaviors from their fantasy world they need to keep secret.

They also know how to mask and behave in public, so even though they are severely ill and dangerous, they can seem incredibly normal.

BUT THEIR MINDS AREN'T ROOTED IN REALITY.

I had a predatory stalker: it was my apartment maintenance man. We had no kind of relationship other than being neighbors and him fixing my appliances. We were casually friendly to each other. He was handsome, funny, smart, charming, and well-liked by people in the apartment, including me.

On his past social media posts, he was deeply obsessed with love, relationships, and defining himself as a “good man looking for a good woman.” At the time I knew him, he was married (the majority of stalkers are) and he spoke poorly of his wife.

He stalked me starting on the day we met when he installed a faulty water heater so that he’d have reason to keep coming to my apartment.

The stalking lasted 8 months before I got attacked.

The majority of stalkers end in violence, but the violence impacts women more than men. 81% culminate in violence and 31% culminate in rape (NCASV).

My stalking increased over time. It began with broken appliances, then he began coming into my home and reading my journals and snooping belongings. (I found places he wrote in my journals and he stole underwear and my childhood home videos).

After three months, he installed a microphone in my apartment.

Eventually, he put a GPS tracker on my car.

He began to randomly show up places where I was, like being outside my apartment right when I got home, or I’d run into him at the gas station.

He eventually heard me say to my therapist that I thought he was a narcissist looking to cheat on his wife.

He collapsed and disappeared from work for a couple weeks. He told people he had Covid.

The next I saw him was after he put GHB in my Brita water filter while I was at work.

He drugged me and raped me for three weeks.

However, when I was drugged, he shared my phone settings to his, and I still didn’t know about the GPS tracking.

So, when I went to police and then fled the city for safety, he found me.

He sent gang stalkers after me to threaten me and harassed me from burner phones for two more months. He even contacted my most abusive exes to threaten me. (The possibility of pressing charges is when a rape or stalking victim is most in danger for murder).

After 10 months of stalking, he eventually stopped.

This event happened two and a half years ago.

All together, I was stalked for a year, but the effects of my stalking are still very persistent, and it never actually feels like it’s over, because you're always looking over your shoulder. You're always praying they don't have another mental collapse in which they snap and decide you should die.

I write about the event a lot because there are never the right words to explain the descent into hell of stalking and what it does to your mind.

It’s one of those things you think you can imagine but you can’t, something you think could never happen to you when you’re actually the perfect victim.

I spent a lot of time educating myself on stalkers to learn how to shake him: he was so thoroughly enmeshed in my life that I didn’t know if he’d ever give up.

Their fantasies of you can be based on love or hate, sex or murder — often both. They may believe you secretly love them or believe you are the world’s greatest evil. It’s disorienting to get entangled in the crosshairs of their delusions, but they believe them fully.

At the same time, my stalker discussed You as his favorite TV show and would look spooked if I talked about mental health, so he knew exactly what he was.

And it turns out the show is pretty accurate, only…real life is a lot uglier.

HERE ARE SOME OF THE MOST USEFUL FACTS ABOUT STALKERS:

89% of stalking victims are no longer stalked after 5 years.
The average stalking lasts 14 months.
Stalking events escalate over time because the victim is a drug to the stalker: they need more and more over time to achieve the same high. Stalkers suffer from CHRONIC boredom and compulsion issues.
Losing the victim causes mental collapse, rage, and severe physical withdrawls. They'll have what's called "an extinction burst event" when their ego collapses, and it's the most dangerous time for the victim. They'll regress to the deepest recesses of their childhood trauma.
The average predatory stalker is in his 30s and married.
The majority of stalkers commit rape in the victim’s home. The most frequently reported reason for rape is “access.”

(My stalker used a crow bar to my screen door to break in while my deadbolt was locked).

7 million people are victims of stalking in America a year.
Half of the victims experienced at least one event per week.
About half of stalking victims report their stalker to police. 76% of female murder victims were stalked and had reported. 85% who survived murder attempts had reported.
75% of victims knew their stalker in some way.
Over half of victims lost their home, jobs, or more than five days off from work due to the stalking.
86% of stalking victims say it changed their personality.
Half reported severe PTSD and suicidal ideation or attempts.
The average victim is female, 18–24. Divorced women are stalked at much higher rates. Maternal and innocent-seeming women are the most vulnerable to attack, as stalkers are motivated by child trauma and neglect.
The vast majority of both stalkers and rapists don’t believe they’re stalkers or rapists. Narcissists survive their childhood trauma by extreme denial. They blame victims for their behavior and engage in cognitive distortions.
Perpetrators most commonly have Narcissistic Personality Disorder and the majority are men. Victims can be anyone, but women with Borderline Personality Disorder and/or autism— who seem childlike, trusting, without boundaries, or empathetic — experience both rape and stalking at higher rates from the rest of the population. Perpetrators with ASPD often tend to be on the autism spectrum as well.
Aside from fantasy, three common motivators of stalking are 1) a need for control and power — (something they didn’t have in childhood), 2) paranoia — The narcissist is always looking for evidence that the people they obsess over are frauds like them due to pathological projection. When they don’t find that evidence, they experience shame, which they then redirect into anger, increased stalking, and increased abuse of the victim, 3) jealousy — they think the victim has a better life or traits than them.
80% of stalkers will reoffend after prison.
Sodomy of victims is most often done by stalkers who have been to prison before. It’s used most often for humiliation and power, not pleasure for the stalker.
The famous stalker Jeffrey Dahmer said that he favored drugging victims mostly because it was easier: it allowed him to do whatever he wanted and have total control. He saved souvenirs and ate his victims because he "didn't want them to ever leave him."
Souvenirs of victims are common. This happens due to the stalker’s objectification of the victim due to lack of empathy and their attachment anxiety. Trophies remind them that they have secrets from others (power) and they feel ownership over the victim.
Stalking laws vary by state: less than half classify it as a felony. The average sentence is 5 years, but, like rapists, the majority of accused never go to prison. 70% of victims reported bad experiences with police that included victim blaming, humiliation, or disbelief.
In prison, convicted stalkers are viewed as only slightly better than pedophiles. (Pedophiles often stalk the children they assault also).

(Sources: Antidote for a Stalker by Mike Proctor and NCASV).

While I have thankfully not experienced anything from my stalker in a year, it’s also because I did everything advised to shake him.

I’m sure he still checks up on me from time to time online. I’d be pretty surprised if he didn’t do the same to me and his other past victims. He still has his middle school girlfriend’s name tattooed on his body.

BUT THE DRUG OF YOU DOES WEAR OFF.

Stalkers can be very smart, but they’re not emotionally mature.

They think they love or hate the victim, but they become easily distracted by new people.

The victim, really, is only ever a toy they play with, a drug they abuse.

We're a fantasy they take shelter in until the nightmare of reality and the ways the world rejects them, just like their parents did, returns.

So, while it may seem like a stalker is so deeply parasitic that you’ll never lose them, they get bored of you.

Eventually, they have access to as much as they can and they still aren’t satisfied. When they lose access, they're forced into withdrawls to go clean against their will.

Sociopaths suffer from ADHD, so once a new target comes along that fits the bill, you're free. They’ll act like you never existed.

The ending of it is also disorienting, as your nervous system is out of whack. You can never be sure it ended and it also feels a total shock that it could end, like blinking awake from a vivid nightmare.

I suffered from agoraphobia in a functional freeze state for two years after I was stalk. I just started coming out of it a few months ago. I also moved repeatedly and eventually left the state, as a smaller percentage of stalkers will continue to stalk the victim by traveling long distance.

The best advice I can give for anyone dealing with a stalker is to BECOME AS BORING AS POSSIBLE.

MOVE AND GET WEAPONS AND CAMERAS.

LEARN ALL YOU CAN ABOUT THEIR MENTAL HEALTH.

A good predator studies its prey.

So, the prey that survives must know its predator.

Nothing makes a narcissist flee faster than you knowing exactly what’s under the mask.

When you see it in its full truth, it’ll break your heart so profoundly that you’ll never be the same.

You’ll want to put the mask back on for them.

You’ll wonder if you can ever get over what you know now that you wish you didn’t.

That understanding, however, gave me a deeper compassion for people and it allowed me to find forgiveness, which is not for him, but me, because anger is a very painful emotion for me.

Empathy gives me an emergency exit out of suffering.

But the event also gave me PTSD and suicidal thoughts.

I feel like his soul and his pain has infected me. It’s just something I’ll limp through life with forever.

So, even when it stops…it doesn’t ever really stop.

I feel like I died in those three weeks, and, like a ghost, every day my mind wanders back to the same place I died and tries to fix it, to make it end differently. I even dream of him often, and in the majority of the dreams we are either friends or lovers.

It never ends differently, however– I always wake up to the truth that he drugged me and raped me--and no kind soul has came to inform me I’m dead and usher me to the light.

They never said survival would be a haunting.

My memoir, This is a Story About Ghosts: A Memoir of Borderline Personality Disorder, is now available on Amazon.

I’m blogging about mental health & true crime, popular culture, and personal essays on my new blog, Blooming on the Borderline: check it out at the links below.

For individual coaching to recover from narcissistic abuse, BPD, or sexual assault, visit https://am-champion.com

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Anne M. Champion is the author of This is a Story About Ghosts: A Memoir of Borderline Personality Disorder (KDP, 2024), Hunted Carrion: Sonnets to a Stalker (KDP, 2024), 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. She has degrees in Behavioral Psychology and Creative Writing.

“Rejected Stalkers:

Resentful Stalkers:

Intimacy Seekers:

Incompetent Suitors:

Predatory Stalkers:

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