Narcissistic Personality Disorder

The Three Times You're Most in Danger with a Narcissist

This is a dangerous mental disorder: it’s not just about ego.

Before I committed to studying cluster b disorders to understand myself and my family, I often considered narcissism to simply mean someone who was self consumed, egotistical, arrogant, belligerent, lacking morals, and delusional. It was well known that they were frequently cheaters and pathological liars.

As I began to awaken to my own toxic family upbringing and trauma bonding patterns, I was able to spot narcissists much easier using my knowledge, my empathy to feel their feelings, and my trauma responses to parse them out. There are tests you can throw out to people that narcissists will always fail, and I learned how to navigate and avoid them.

However, my problem was this:

I severely underestimated the danger.

For example, I was able to figure out that my apartment maintenance man had NPD within a couple months of knowing him and with the help of my therapist. I followed all the advice and decided to grey rock him.

What I DIDN’T anticipate:

That he had installed a microphone on me and that he heard me unmask him and reject him.
That this would trigger the WORST part of his disorder: rape.

I was drugged and raped for three weeks.

I didn’t see it coming.

I saw him as a narcissist, yes — an egotistical man with a desire to cheat — but I didn’t see him as his REAL dark truth behind the mask.

People often sidestep the fact that a lack of empathy and narcissism lead to some of the most severe horrors in our world: from genocidal politicians to serial rapists to school shooters.

NPD is on a spectrum, and luckily not all narcissists are going to turn a gun on their family or a school — those dangers are reserved for the most severe of narcissists afflicted with ASPD.

However, having trauma bonded to narcissists exclusively as a borderline starting in childhood, I can attest that they’re all VERY DANGEROUS when their disorder is triggered.

Be mindful and take all precautions when you are entangled in the following scenarios with a narcissist.

1) When You Leave Them

Photo by Priscilla Du Preez 🇨🇦 on Unsplash

This is when you’ll see who the narcissist really is behind the mask.

Don’t forget this person: it’s their TRUE SELF.

This is usually when people start awakening to the reality that the person they thought they loved was a fraud, because this is when they see the truth of what they’re capable of.

When you leave a narcissist is when their mental health is MOST dangerous.

A narcissist’s brain cannot process shame: it cannot grieve. It never developed the capacity for that due to brain damage that stunted development. It can only redirect shame and project it.

When you leave a narcissist, even if the relationship is so clearly making both of you miserable, they suffer such a blow to their fragile ego that it triggers a NARCISSISTIC COLLAPSE.

In this state, you see the narcissist break down: they’ll often cry uncontrollably, and they’ll seem very childlike.

It can be difficult not to feel empathy for them in this state.

They ARE children emotionally, so the collapse state is what the narcissism is always protecting them from: the grief of a broken-hearted and confused child who was cast off and rejected by their parent(s) who golden childed them.

If you stay committed to leaving them, however, you’ll then experience NARCISSISTIC RAGE.

Photo by Leonardo Baldissara on Unsplash

This is when the narcissist has resolved their collapse state by plotting REVENGE — a projection of shame.

When I told my therapist I was going to ignore my maitenance man, I was told the next day that he had Covid and he was out of work for two weeks (narcissistic collapse). The next I saw him is when I got raped (narcissistic rage).

I don’t think it is unreasonable for a person to 1) avoid toxic patterns in their past; 2) refuse to cheat with a married man; 3) expect privacy in their own home…

…But I was told I DESERVED to be raped.

This is how delusional they are. (Pro-tip: when people victim blame you for sexual assault, those are also narcissists, and they’re often rapists. It’s how they deny feeling guilt over their past actions).

I’ve experienced this rage with many narcissists, from my ex-husband to my sister.

There’s a no-holds-barred when it comes to narcissistic rage. They have no limits, and because they feel you’ve done the worst crime imaginable in rejecting them, they’ll have a wildly disproportionate response.

The hardest part is that this is when it becomes as clear as can be that the narcissist never loved you at all and has no empathy for you whatsoever, as the things they can do to you are so stunningly hurtful to a person with empathy that they’re unimaginable.

Part of why it’s hard to see it coming when you have empathy is because empathy causes me to NEVER think in those terms. Hurting others hurts me and feels revolting. Hurting someone I loved, even if we are no longer together, is so agonizing that I’d rather die and I become suicidal if I reactively abuse.

Narcissists don’t have those emotional responses.

Things that happened when I left narcissists:

They beat me
They ruined my belongings
They stalked me — following me, putting trackers on my car, hacking my phone or computer, even following me with a drone
They broke into my home
They sexually assaulted me
They stole my money and credit cards, maxing them
They sent all my nudes to my boss and their entire email list
They told everyone that I did the things that they did
They called my therapist
They slept with my friends
They told my friends lies about me and tried to get people to join in harming me
They broke restraining orders and got arrested
They threatened to kill me
They banded together with people who they knew had traumatized me in the past and began to stalk/harass me together
I caught them on camera snooping my belongings
They threatened and fought men I was dating
They attempted to kill me

2. When They’ve Lost Power in Some Way

A reason why they rage so badly at being broken up with is because they’ve lost power, but power in a relationship is not the only type of power that a narcissist clings to.

You’ll also see them become very dangerous if they lose other types of power, such as losing their job due to being unmasked.

Any loss of power, loss of superiority, or public shame and humiliation is so horrifying to a narcissist that they often become very deluded in these scenarios.

For example, as a restaurant manager, I saw narcissists get fired who then kept trying to show up for work as if they didn’t get fired. I also saw this with students who failed classes.

With one narcissist, I found his cheating messages to another woman, and he lied to both of us, so she and I chose to confront him together with both of our text messages to force some truth out of him.

He plopped his head onto the table with a BANG and then began to wail like a little child….

It was SHOCKING for everyone. I felt I didn’t know this man at all.

We both gave him the boot and I went home. Later that night, I woke to a man at my window, taking a key to cut out my screen — my ex.

He was screaming, “She’s a liar! I never cheated! I told her I loved you! I told her to leave me alone!”

I was wide-eyed and genuinely terrified. His delusion was so severe. I asked, “Do you not remember any of what just happened? We read your texts…”

“NO. YOU. DID. NOT! You’re a liar! She’s a liar!”

Like the Incredible Hulk, he began to break everything he could in my room.

Unfortunately, this triggered my own trauma response, and I punched him in the face before I called the police.

When they arrested him, he began to cry saying I punched him, and I, too, had my Miranda Rights read to me and was arrested. I was released shortly after, a judge having determined it was self defense.

So, not only will they be extraordinarily dangerous and deluded to lose power: they’ll also believe they are the victim and try to frame it that way.

I couldn’t believe how much punishment I had to receive when I was the one who got cheated on and had my heart broken.

When the narcissist loses power in terms of losing a job or losing power over a friend or co-worker or the like, they’ll take that out on whatever supply is close to them. They just need to project the shame somewhere.

3. When You Have Achieved Something

This one got me in the most trouble in my life.

As the scapegoat child, I was told that I’d receive love once I could prove myself worthy or good enough.

I worked very hard to figure out what was good enough and how to be good. I wanted to follow all the rules to a T, please everyone I could, achieve at the highest standards of perfection possible.

I fretted over perfection from everything to my appearance to my intelligence.

I kept thinking, perhaps if I did things that those I loved were PROUD OF, then I’d earn love.

I ended up, like many family scapegoats, becoming a people pleasing perfectionist and high achiever with Borderline Personality Disorder who trauma bonded to cluster b’s and self harmed.

IT NEVER EARNED LOVE.

In fact, it was the opposite: it’s when I got abused the worst.

In my senior year of high school, I was excited to earn the Journalism Award: I’d served on the school newspaper all four years, and I was editor for the last two. I was incredibly proud of this award, as writing was my dream.

The night of the award ceremony, I came home from school to get ready, and as I was putting on my dress, my mom came into my room in a rage and began to beat me mercilessly. She said that she heard me playing rap music in my car, which was forbidden, because black people were evil, according to her.

I had to accept the award with bruises on my face and a truly broken heart.

My mother arrived, but she came late. She cried as I accepted my award.

Her tears perplexed me for a long time until I understood her disorder. I thought, how can she cry as if I matter to her when she just beat me as if she wanted me dead on my special night?

The reason she was crying wasn’t because she was proud of me: it was because she was…ASHAMED FOR HERSELF.

The problem with NPD is they must be THE BEST — anything else makes them feel like THE WORST. That’s the trouble with split thinking, not being able to see nuance, and having a phobia of emotional attachment.

They also have low emotional development, so what someone with empathy experiences as pride and admiration, a person afflicted with narcissism experiences as jealousy.

At best, a narcissist sees your good qualities and accomplishments as the following:

Traits to mirror/copy in your identity
Reasons to befriend you because you have status/power/clout

But they’ll ALWAYS turn on you for your accomplishments eventually, even if they pretend to be supportive to keep you as supply for a while.

And they’ll devalue your accomplishments in a variety of covert ways if they don’t overtly cause you physical harm when you accomplish something.

Things they’ll do:

Sabotage your accomplishments
Ruin your celebrations
Come late or refuse to attend your celebrations
Refuse support (Most the narcissists in my life, for example, never bought my books or spoke to me of them, making me feel they thought I was a bad writer)
Mock you (My family called me “Rain Man” or “retarded” for my high achievements. It turns out that I am autistic. I don’t feel shame around that now, but as a child, I was deeply ashamed, and I kept trying to perform BETTER so I’d pass as “normal.”)
Compete with you
Make you feel guilty
Make you feel it’s not quite good enough
Remind you that you’re still lacking in other ways (When I graduated college, it was the only time I ever got a handwritten card from my dad. I was ELATED because he didn’t even sign cards himself. When I read the note it said, “Congrats, even though you got a divorce this year.” My heart broke and I felt unlovable.)
Drug you against your will or pressure you to be medicated to dull your abilities
Smear you
Recruit flying monkeys to attack/harm you

The list goes on…the more you seem capable of achieving things, and the higher your achievement or status, the more in danger you are.

They may benefit from your status as supply — if you have wealth, for example — but they’ll still be so agitated that they’ll set out to emotionally, psychologically, and physically destroy you.

Even if it causes them harm to lose your supply, a narcissist would rather blow up their entire world than see their supply happy, because, to a narcissist, another person’s happiness always means their misery, and another person’s misery always means their happiness.

There’s no such thing as mutual happiness with a narcissist.

That requires empathy.

Your happiness, growth, or genuine achievements are always going to put you in severe physical, psychological, or emotional danger.

This is why they say your haters are your biggest fans: if they hate you that much, then you must really be a threat to their grandiosity, which means you have a lot to be proud of in yourself.

But it can be hard to feel this is true when the people you love most in the world aren’t happy for you and when people try to censor you, sabatoge you, or kill you.

A major life lesson from narcissists is that your worth should NEVER come from those around you. You must be able to determine a GENUINE self love that exists regardless of what those around you do, think, or say.

Whenever you’re looking for outside validation, you’re in your ego, which narcissists teach us is always false, so you have to turn within and find the divine truth beyond the illusion.

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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.