How to Reach the Lost Inner Child of a Narcissist
Yes, you can reach the inner lost child of a narcissist with love.
You can reach the inner lost child of a narcissist and touch them with love.
And it'll be the most dangerous endeavor of your life—for both of you.
It’s extraordinarily hard to do, though most narcissists have at least one or two in their past who managed to do so.
People who actually do it never SET OUT to do it. They’re simply the type of people who easily see the inner child—and therefore sees the best parts—of everyone.
They’re people who deeply love all of humanity—flaws and all.
We love it so much that we think it’s worth saving.
We love people so much that we hope our love can balm their wounds, if not heal them.
We’re people who can FEEL THE PAIN of others as if it’s our own.
And no one is in more pain than a narcissistic sociopath.
The vast majority of people cannot reach this part of a narcissist, because it requires real emotional empathy that’s overly sensitive.
Even their partners they live with for decades usually never touch it. (They often choose to cohabitate with other narcissists or histrionics for the SAFETY of their inner child: their real self can never be seen or touched).
The reason why so many can’t get there is because the vast majority of people only THINK they love a narcissist.
But it’s really a selfish love: they didn’t love the narcissist.
They loved the shared FANTASY.
They loved getting high on the drug of sex.
They loved how the narcissist made them feel in lovebomb.
They were codependent on the narcissist's attention to feel happy.
That’s not love. It’s a wound from childhood.
The type of person who can get to a narcissist’s inner child has to be the rare type of thing the narcissist lacked in childhood:
- Empathetic
- Selfless like a parent to a child
- Capable of unconditional love
UNCONDITIONAL.
That’s not just: “I’ll love you and forgive you even though you cheat on me and treat me like dirt.”
Narcissists have many people in their lives like this. Those are flying monkeys. They’re often the type of people who are like, “I’ll help you bury the bodies. I’ll punish and silence the child you’re abusing. I’ll ignore every sin.”
Enabling isn’t love—it’s a way to protect the shared fantasy. The narcissist never respects their flying monkeys and supply who enables them.
Narcissists don’t like themselves at their core, so even though they NEED enablers, they don’t respect those without any authentic morals, because it shows that those people are bereft of real love just like they are.
However, it gives them people to project on and abuse with little consequences, so it’s valuable supply.
Unconditional love means this: “I’ll weep even for Jeffrey Dahmer. I’ll try to understand the shape of the wound.”
That takes a lot of strength.
In addition to having those traits, you need something else that most people lack: the ability to break through denial as a trauma response.
Denial is the first stage of grief and many of us enter it in childhood.
Most of us operate through life in various forms of denial to survive. You deny that your government or politicians are out to hurt you or others. You deny that one or both of your parents didn’t love you. You deny their darkest secrets and shames. You deny your own mental disorders or trauma responses.
The brain does what it does to protect us so we can survive.
Most people, even if they can look a person’s narcissism in the face, are not strong enough to confront the full extent of the shames a narcissist covers, such as histories of child predation, sexual abuse, closeted sexualities, homicidal ideation etc.
And if you can’t face those things, then you aren’t EVER touching their INNER CHILD.
The vast majority of people only see the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the narcissism of those they enmesh with.
Mostly, they only see their own pain, so they’ll bemoan being cheated on and lied to. They aren’t strong enough to face the narcissist’s deeper shames. And they may be too self consumed to care or denial simply makes them block out the obvious.
So…..you think you have what it takes to touch a narcissist’s inner lost child?
You love them enough to want to save them?
You think your love is pure enough to stir the dying embers of love inside their soul, to ignite a flame that illuminates and warms?
Let me tell you how it goes down.
It’s a journey to the Underworld, and if you make it back, you’ll be lucky.
If it doesn’t kill you—you’ll wish it did.
The first step is being an empathetic person who the narcissist becomes comfortable confiding many of their traumas to. This will be the spark that ignites the trigger of love inside of them, their deepest fear. Empathy is something they’ve always hungered for since childhood, so it’s as irresistible as blood to a vampire. And it’s also going to TERRIFY them and cause them to start abusing you.
The next step is recognizing the abuse as narcissism and naming it, breaking the denial, and realizing that the false self isn’t who they are; it’s only who they want to be, which is usually a parody and performance of YOUR best traits.
This is the unmasking.
If you want to save yourself, then after the unmasking is when you should make a plan to SAFELY EXIT. If you can do so without them knowing you unmasked them, even better. They’ll be triggered and they’ll be enraged, but it’s safer than seeking to find their inner child.
But maybe your love is that pure. Maybe you’re brave. Maybe you were raised by monsters so you have little fear. So…now for the descent.
In this metaphor, don’t think of the lost inner child as hiding under a MASK: think of it as being in a CHAINED COFFIN.
It’s not enough to rip off a mask and say, “narcissist, I love you unconditionally;” you need to unleash what’s in that coffin.
So you wander through a mausoleum of their psychology with a crow bar until you find their crypt.
You walk bravely inside.
You’re here to confront the TRUTH of the narcissist. All their shames. The roots of them. Everything.
You must have NO FEAR—NOTHING you won’t face.
You have to be prepared to STAKE the vampire to save the CHILD in the coffin with them.
You approach the coffin with quiet reverence and a prayer, and you heave off the chains; you pry open the lid.
AND THAT IS WHEN YOU’RE GOING TO REGRET IT.
Because you’re not going to find a vampire in that coffin.
You’re going to fall to your knees in despair.
What’s inside is more gruesome than anything you could ever imagine.
It’s a murdered child.
There—you found it.
You found their lost inner child.
It reeks and is covered in maggots.
The whole inside of the coffin is stained with blood.
And you’ll scream—the grief is so painful you turn feral.
You rage at God. You rage at the Devil. You want to know: who did this unforgivable, unspeakable crime?
And you’ll turn around: AND THERE IS THE NARCISSIST.
He’s alive?
How can he be standing there when his inner child is dead in front of you?
HE IS THE GUARDIAN OF THE CORPSE.
THIS is what the narcissism was designed to protect all along—this truth, this horror.
Is the vampire here to feed?
No, not a vampire now—the vampire was who you loved, the mask, the seductive one who glamoured you enough so that you wouldn’t smell the rot and he could FEED.
This is worse.
Much worse.
The man in front of you turns into a WOLF.
The full moon beckons behind him like the undeniable TRUTH and he HOWLS.
You’ve seen it. The horror he can’t bear for anyone to see.
And now….the narcissism must do what it’s designed to do.
PROTECT THE CORPSE.
You must be punished—you’ve stirred the DEAD.
The term for this is narcissistic rage.
The vengeance you face will be wildly disproportionate to your crime of love.
Suddenly, your survival defenses will kick in, and you’ll realize you made a grave error and you’ll try to flee.
But there’s no escaping it now.
You came to pray at an altar that was desecrated long ago.
The wolf takes you by the neck and drags you to the scene of the original crime. You’re transported into the past, to the age the child was murdered.
You see the child, the blood—and then…then….
The corpse begins to weep.
You think, “It’s still alive! There’s hope! Come to me!”
You rush to its side to comfort it, to nurse its wounds.
And as the child looks up at you, you notice that something isn’t right. Something is wrong with its eyes.
Oh God, Oh God, Oh God.
This is a GHOST. This is a HAUNTING.
This is a CHILD WHO NEVER GOT JUSTICE FOR WHAT HAPPENED TO IT.
It rises. It looks at you. It calls you mother, father, God.
You open your mouth to scream, and its spirit enters your body.
It possesses you.
You’re paralyzed, sprawled out in its pool of blood.
And there he is again: the wolf.
He’s here for justice.
The child is in you now, so the next thing for the wolf to do is…TO KILL IT AGAIN.
TO PUT IT BACK IN THE COFFIN YOU FREED IT FROM.
Which means the wolf must KILL YOU.
You think I’m being metaphorical here: I’m not.
People UNDERESTIMATE the danger of this disorder, and I did too, and I paid the price.
The narcissist is going to recreate the death of their inner child with you, and this time, they’re going to be THE MURDERER.
THE ONE IN CONTROL.
For me, this looked like the narcissist drugging me every day for several weeks as he came into my room at night and raped me over and over again, just like his mother did to him as a child.
Because THIS….
….IS THE ONLY TIME
….THEY CAN GRIEVE THEIR OWN DEATH.
They can only do it if they feel safe, and in control, and in the moment of trauma again.
And that’s why this narcissist collapsed on top of me as he raped me and CRIED and called me “mama.”
That’s why—when I sought answers to resurrect myself from this soul murder, the scholarly literature revealed that rapists OFTEN cry when they rape and that they recreate the circumstances of their own rapes in childhood as closely as they possibly can.
That’s why—when psychologists in Great Britain tried to engender empathy in violent inmates by recreating their crimes and putting them in the positions of the victims (without the violence), the perpetrators found it UNBEARABLE—they curled into fetal position just to have their hands tied; they shivered and cried and begged for mercy and called out for a mother even without anyone being the slightest bit violent towards them.
Because what happens when you touch their dead inner child with authentic love is you unearth a HUNGRY ZOMBIE.
And the narcissist must punish you to protect themselves from what grief love stirs inside them, because they can’t metabolize grief or shame. And their grief was too big to survive when they were small and vulnerable.
When you manage to touch a narcissist’s deepest wounds and stir real love in them, that is the recipe for a trauma trigger so catastrophic, it’ll be ATOMIC.
This is how people get murdered, raped, tortured, beaten to a pulp.
The narcissist suffers from split thinking, so there are only two extreme options they’ll be seesawing between when you touch their dead inner child with love.
Kill you or kill themselves.
Ever since my own most brutal near death experience with a narcissist, I’ve poured over accounts of people who experienced the kind of extreme trauma I did. The most unsettling part: most don’t survive.
Most of them got murdered.
Sometimes, the narcissist killed themselves too after.
On occasion, the narcissist killed themselves first to save their partner, like my first love did at 15 years old, the first narcissist whose lost inner child I found dead, whose ghost I genuinely credit with my miraculous survival and recovery.
I pray every day that the afterlife offers him real peace and happiness that he was denied in life.
And the victims who did survive these attacks ended up either committing suicide later or falling into extreme drug addiction and poverty, like the sole survivor of Jeffrey Dahmer, a man who Dahmer said he “maybe could have loved, if I was capable of love.”
I’m still on the fence if it’s more merciful for the narcissist to kill you or to maim you and leave you half alive/half dead. I’m not sure if the fact that I lived was his mercy or hatred, knowing what suffering I’d carry for life.
But that’s also a part of the point: the child in that coffin was ABANDONED.
The narcissist recreating their death in you means that you are now BOUND TO THEM. FOR LIFE.
It’s a SICK MARRIAGE to a DEMON.
It’s a way for you to ALWAYS BE TOGETHER.
You’ll walk through the world, doing the tasks that the living must do, but you’ll spend half your life in Hell too.
And a trauma like that is its own form of twisted intimacy. Their ghost rattles your ribcage, knocks on your walls, demands attention, wants to FEED.
So, what do you do after you meet the narcissist’s lost inner child?
You must do what the living do with their dead.
You must bury the child.
You must honor the child.
You must grieve the child.
You must remember the child.
You must tell the child’s story.
This past anniversary of my trauma, I went to a graveyard. I found a grave of someone who had the same last name as my ghost. It was, fittingly, a very untended grave. I brushed away the leaves. I laid a cross and flowers at the stone. I buried a letter. I left gifts.
I told it I was sorry I couldn’t save it.
I still love it unconditionally.
And I wept for hours until I felt I’d cried a river that washed away the evil of this world.
It’s what the living do.
The work of unconditional love is the work of unbearable, catastrophic grief.
If you ever reach a narcissist's inner child, it'll transform you into a living, breathing sarcophagus.
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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, a Douglas Preston Travel Grant recipient, and a Barbara Deming Memorial Grant recipient. She has degrees in Behavioral Psychology and Creative Writing.