Were You a Narcissist's Dirty Little Secret? 6 Common Archetypes

A person with Narcissist Personality Disorder, or commorbid Antisocial Personality Disorder, is a person carrying a mountain of secrets.

If you were enmeshed with one, you likely are still unaware of the true scope of betrayals that occurred against you.

They are incredibly painful to face, so shocking they will cause massive cognitive dissonance.

You likely left them because the abuses became too extreme, or you uncovered some of their shameful secrets, or they suddenly discarded you, but the truth is that for every betrayal you pulled back the veil on, you likely only saw THE TIP OF THE ICEBERG.

In fact, their shocking truths actually insulate them in a way, because they operate in ways that make it incredibly hard for anyone to believe they could be true.

For a person with empathy, the things they do are simply unimaginable.

And, when you are used to interacting with their carefully constructed fantasy self, you really don’t want to believe it, because their mask is so lovable.

Their mask is designed after YOU.

Often, if you had childhood trauma yourself, the only way you could love yourself was through loving their mask.

They also exhibit behaviors of smearing and projecting that make it impossible to believe that they could do the things they do, because their projections and accusations of others make you think that their morality or value system would highly conflict with how they behave.

For example, they demand loyalty, but are disloyal people. They are homophobic, but they have closeted affairs.

This is precisely WHY they smear and project: so their supply will never suspect them.

I have been the narcissist’s dirty little secret more than once.

As I went back through my journals to trace my patterns of trauma bonding, I paid careful attention to the things they accused and projected. In doing so, I uncovered more astounding dirty little secrets that I had to grieve over.

Here are some examples of some common narcissists’ “dirty little secrets:”

1) THE AFFAIR

This is the most commonly discovered “dirty little secret” of a narcissist. They cannot be faithful.

If they are faithful, it is only because they lack the charm and seductiveness of attaining supply. And, in that case, you’re going to see a lot of daily RAGE in your relationship with them.

The affairs are ways for them to quell their rage and regulate their emotions.

The reasons that narcissists cannot be faithful are the following:

• LOW EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE:

Because their disorder causes them to be stunted emotionally to the age of toddler years to early childhood, they experience emotions as if they are those ages.

This means that every person they enmesh with is perceived like a TOY. At first, the toy brings them great joy. But very soon, they are BORED with the toy.

They still do not want you to take their toy from them, because they are selfish and they believe they own it. But they want NEW TOYS.

And they want as many toys as possible.

• LACK OF EMPATHY AND INABILITY TO EMOTIONALLY ATTACH:

This may hurt to hear, but young children do not really love adults. They develop that ability as they get older and as they develop empathy.

As toddlers, adults are a means to an end. Adults are merely survival.

Young children also do not really care for the suffering of others. They cannot even comprehend it.

They only care for their own emotions, because they are too vulnerable and sensitive to care about the needs of others.

A narcissist has never experienced empathy for others.

They may perform empathy, if they see that doing so will get them something they want, especially power or supply or attention or praise.

But they don’t genuinely FEEL empathy as something that would prevent them from hurting another.

The idea of empathy as a FEELING is really quite foreign to them. It is why they will call people who feel empathy crazy.

They also don’t FEEL love in the sense that they feel attached to another or protective over their emotional responses.

• THEY WANT TO HURT YOU:

Narcissists regulate their emotions through supply, and they need a steady dose of both positive and negative supply to function.

If your love of them has triggered their shame, if your success has triggered their shame, if your beauty has triggered their shame, they see you as a POTENTIAL THREAT.

You are a threat to their grandiosity, which is to say that you are a threat to their FANTASY SELF.

A narcissist needs to believe they are THE BEST IN THE WORLD to survive, so they will need to believe that their partner is THE WORST IN THE WORLD and deserving of any abuse to survive.

This is due to their split thinking.

They see their relationships as a competition, and if you have triggered their shame, even by loving them or empathizing with them, then they feel a need to RUIN YOU.

They often don’t want to lose you, because they fear abandonment, so they operate on DUPER’S DELIGHT.

They delight in knowing they did something to hurt you, and they think you are a fool for not knowing it too.

This gives them a hit of negative supply. They feel smarter than you.

The affair also gives them more positive supply, because it makes them believe in their superior sexual prowess.

2) THE HOMOSEXUAL OR TRANSGENDER AFFAIR

This is a very common experience when dating a narcissist, and it’s nearly a guarantee for dating a sociopath, as the research suggests they are universally bisexual, though frequently severely homophobic.

In Confessions of a Sociopath by M.E. Thomas, she explains her bisexuality through her lack of emotional attachment.

Sex, in her mind, was simply power and manipulation, not love. She got supply from anyone — any age, any gender.

The other reason for their homosexual attractions are due to the fact that the narcissist finds NO ONE more attractive than THEMSELVES.

Narcissists hate themselves at their core, but they don’t spend time self reflecting or looking at their core: they can’t survive that.

They spend time in their FANTASY DELUSIONS OF GRANDEUR.

And in that state, they believe themselves to be THE SEXIEST PERSON ALIVE.

And they are extraordinarily jealous of people who might have any sex appeal or power that they don’t have.

They tend to be misogynists and misandrists (though they may be covert about this). They use people of the opposite gender for negative supply, but those people also reinforce their sense of “perfection” and “normalcy,” so they want to marry them or date them for their mask.

But who they are REALLY attracted to is themselves, so they enjoy having sex with people who look like them.

A narcissist, no matter who they have sex with, is always having sex with themselves and for themselves.

If they could have sex with their own clone, they would.

Most of my best friends in life have been LGBTQ, and they all had sex with people who were closeted or married to the opposite gender.

All of these relationships also turned out to be extraordinarily abusive, even dangerous.

Being the narcissist’s dirty little secret means that you are their DENIED SHAME.

That makes you a trash receptacle where they are seeking to place their pain.

All the narcissists I dated were severely homophobic. It was a major bone of contention for me, as I love my friends dearly. I was always trying to educate them.

They’d snap at me angrily: “It’s not normal! It’s not NATURAL,” they’d claim…

…only for me to later discover their own homosexual affairs that shocked me.

Their homophobia was only projected self hatred.

What every narcissist REALLY fears is THEMSELVES.

But narcissists can be out of the closet too, and I’ve known some of those as well.

This is not to say that all LGBTQ people are narcissists (not at all!) or that all narcissists are LGBTQ — this is just a common experience that victims of abuse have in discovering the “dirty little secret.”

Narcissists, like all humans, come in all stripes.

3) THE FAT LOVER

Hi, it’s me! I’m a fat person. I weigh 230 lbs, at 5 foot 5 inches tall.

My relationship with a cheater in my 20s was the last relationship I ever had. After him, I suppressed my grief through amping up my sex addiction.

It was a form of self harm for my Borderline Personality Disorder.

And I was addicted to one kind of lover only: the narcissist.

They were the love and touch I lacked in my childhood. I wasn’t aware I was doing this until a lot of therapy.

I turned to Tinder. I had long, no commitment sexual relationships with narcissists. I juggled many partners at once, because I was never sure which lover would ghost or abuse me next.

I thought that giving my partners freedom was what men wanted. I never met a man who fell in love with me genuinely or who wanted to be faithful to me.

I just accepted I was unlovable. Sex was the best I could get.

And anyway, I am fat. I figured that may be WHY I’m unlovable. So I should take the crumbs I’m allotted.

However, I had NO PROBLEM WHATSOEVER finding the HOTTEST lovers.

I’m talking abs for days, beauty that belongs in magazines.

They would tell me, “I love a thick woman.”

And they had sex with me as if that were true.

But they never wanted to be seen in public with me. They never wanted to date me. They kept me as their dirty little secret.

Sometimes I’d find out they were married or had BEAUTIFUL girlfriends all along.

I remember asking one why he was cheating after I discovered his wife on social media. I said, “She’s so incredibly beautiful.”

He shrugged, “So are you.”

“But I’m fat!” I said.

“Your fat makes me feel sexy,” he said.

For a time, I couldn’t understand what that meant until I understood narcissism.

Narcissists enjoy having sex with people who are deemed unconventionally attractive by societal standards because it makes them feel more conventionally attractive.

They can easily look at you and feel they are better than you.

It also hurts their partner if they find out who they cheated with. It makes the partner feel as ugly and unattractive as you are, because they have triangulated them with a less attractive person to heighten their insecurities.

4) THE FETISH

A narcissist loves a fetish.

And a fetish is usually driven by what they HATE or their childhood trauma in some way.

A common fetish for a narcissist is a racial fetish or a disability fetish, like autism. They also will often fetishize older people.

And typically, they want to DEGRADE that partner.

They will often even use their fetishes as motivations to sexually assault people.

My father was a devout listener of white supremicist rhetoric. Our home was filled with the echoes of his rage as he flung out the n-word.

I never could understand his racism or where it came from. I had black friends at school, and he would hang up the phone when they called or yell at them.

He had a Confederate Flag in his workshop, but we weren’t even southern.

He said all black people would grow up to be rapists.

But my father grew up to be a rapist. He was projecting.

He always stared out the window obsessively at the black children in the neighborhood. One day, I remember him calling the police on them. He said they were “out in the yard having sex like animals.”

As the police came and the children cried, my father laughed uproariously.

It was a trauma that sticks with me. Why did he have to harass them? They were just kids, like me. I cried for them.

It wasn’t until I unmasked my father as an adult that I realized that what he was doing was smear campaigning them, that everything he accused those children of was actually WHAT HE HAD DONE TO THEM.

I burned his pictures and couldn’t get out of bed for a week after that. I don’t think I’ve ever cried so much in my life.

Yet, had my father ever been arrested for that when I was a child, I’d have been in complete denial. His racism was so severe that it covered up the fetish.

But, in reality, my father enjoyed black TV shows and music, and he even wore his curly black hair in an Afro style. He often mimicked their speech.

This boils down to the narcissist’s PATHOLOGICAL ENVY.

Anyone who is different from them in any way has something they do not have. This makes them fear that this person is BETTER THAN THEM.

They also are attracted to people who might be disenfranchised or oppressed, because narcissists have a supreme victim complex, so they get agitated by the thought that someone might be MORE victimized than them. They’re jealous of the empathy those people engender in others and they’re jealous of their strength and survival.

They then feel compelled to ATTACK THEM and HURT THEM to prove they aren’t strong or make them feel worthless.

This is also why narcissists love things like cults and conformity. They like careers in which everyone dresses alike, like priests or police or businessmen in suits.

They get agitated by people who buck conformity. It agitates their jealousy. It reminds them that they have no authentic identity.

And, in the case of my father, I am sure he was raped as a child, because rapists are narcissists or sociopaths who are reliving their own traumas via projection and healing them by being the abuser (in control) rather than the abused (vulnerable).

He was reliving his childhood trauma through his secret fetishes.

5) THE UNDERAGE GROOMED CHILD

Narcissists and sociopaths are notorious for grooming children.

Unfortunately, due to my father, I trauma bonded to this type of narcissist over and over. I was even groomed by my much older boss in my early 20s.

I was not underage, but he was old enough to be my dad.

And, like many borderlines, I exhibited a childlike naivety and a people pleasing nature that made me vulnerable to predatory people.

My boss showered me with gifts and praise and raises and promotions, and he made me fall in love with him. Then he took me out one day for “manager bonding time” and showered me with alcohol.

Then a lot of sex.

Then he promptly abandoned me.

His favorite book was Lolita, a book narrated by a pedophile who falls in love with a 12 year old.

When I was 18, I got married to a narcissist. A major issue within our marriage was how deeply I cared about social justice issues in the world versus how apathetic he was to all things.

We used to fight over it a lot and I’d cry, so frustrated that he couldn’t understand my passion or empathy for the pains I saw in the world, so agitated that he wouldn’t join me in trying to do things to make the world better.

He’d sit at home playing video games all day and he seemed like a zombie.

Then one day, out of the blue, he announced that he was going to start volunteering.

A surge of joy went through me: he was finally growing up! I thought perhaps our marriage could be saved.

He wanted to join Big Brothers, Big Sisters to help black children.

I was in full support.

He got paired with an eight year old boy. He began to shower the boy in gifts and take him on outings. He was a real father figure to him.

It was only many years after the divorce when I began to process that I’d been abused by him and that he was a covert narcissist that I recognized that I’d essentially married my father.

My stalker and rapist also had this as his dirty little secret. And I discovered it through his projections.

He had a prison record, and I discussed with him that I was a prison abolitionist. I see prisons as traumatic, abusive, state sanctioned slavery, and I said we should invest in real healing and mental health care and research if we want a lower recidivism rates and treat people like human beings.

He replied, “Except for child molestors.”

“Why?” I asked.

He looked down at the ground, and the shadow of shame passed over his face.

“Because there’s nothing worse in the world than a child molestor.”

WHAT THEY ACCUSE IS CONFESSION.

This was further solidified when he raped me and wept: he said, “Mama, mama, mama.”

This is how I understood that this was a shame he was projecting through abuse.

It is how I knew to use the word “incest” to trigger him. Even saying it casually made his head snap and his eyes dart at me in FEAR.

Those trigger words get close to the core shames they are running from for their lives.

As a professor, I’ve had countless students detail stories about being molested by their stepfathers, about their mothers refusing to believe them and accusing them of lies, dead set in their idealization of their narcissistic partner, unable to imagine them as child molestors.

And the ones I’ve known have been successful members of the community, even handsome, charming, intelligent people.

This mystery of how people could do this to children made me deep dive into scholarly research and books about pedophiles and rapists in prison.

The most common findings were the following:

• Nearly all rapists and pedophiles reported sexual trauma in their youth
• They commonly said that they attracted to children because they FELT AS IF THEY WERE STILL CHILDREN, so they related best to children
• They were all narcissists and used severe cognitive distortions to justify their abuse, such as “the child wanted it/liked it,” “they could have said no,” or “I loved them,” or “they were bad and they deserved it.” They genuinely believed these cognitive distortions and had a very difficult time understanding why they were wrong. This is an example of how they will use delusion to escape shame.

6) THE STALKING OR SEXUAL ASSAULT OR MURDER VICTIM

If you are this type of dirty little secret, it’s because you triggered the narcissist’s REPRESSED DESPAIR.

Narcissists stalk, and they sometimes even kill when in a rage post-collapse, and when they do so, their target is typically someone deeply loving and empathetic, someone who reminds them of a PARENT.

Narcissists were golden childed, treated as perfect and spoiled, and then emotionally and/or physically abandoned as little children.

Spiritually, they died then.

They walk through the world as orphans, trying to live again in the fantasy of the golden child.

They want love instinctively, but love makes them feel vulnerable: it is the most dangerously predatory thing for them, and it triggers deep wounds of paranoia and resentment and a need for control.

They have an insatiable desire to own the person they stalk.

Stalking a loving person becomes an insatiable addiction, but the more they do it, the more shame they build up. The more shame, the more you trigger their anger.

The more their stalking reveals that you’ll never be that fantasy of love that they desperately long for, the more their fantasies turn to RAGE.

The rage is really for their parents, but they see you as an avatar replacement for them.

My stalker’s nicknames for me the first day he met me were “mama” and “love.”

The last I saw him, it was “bitch” and a sadistic smirk, reaching for a knife.

This dirty little secret is the most dangerous of all, as it’s at the root of their deepest, darkest shame.

And they will leave you processing the pain they aren’t able to process for years after, if you survive it.

The narcissist’s dirty little secrets are always a product of the shame that they cannot process and their low emotional intelligence.

Ultimately, the reason we use the term “supply” is because narcissists use people like a drug addict uses drugs.

Abuse of others gives them a feeling of euphoria and restores their sense of grandiosity.

They will obsessively and relentlessly pursue supply to survive: it is the only way they can regulate their emotions or relieve themselves of their own trauma.

They do not want to quit their addictions. And they always need more drugs to get more high. The more power they attain through careers or wealth means the worse their behavior gets. It’s why narcissists as politicians will engage in massive, devastating abuses.

That’s how much supply they need to get high from it when they attain power. Systemic power is their most dangerous drug.

But a major trait of the “dirty little secret” is that they perceive that their supply is fundamentally VULNERABLE in some way: they see the victim as “easy supply.”

But this is where the narcissist has an Achilles heel: they do not understand empathy, so they underestimate those who have it.

Narcissists are TRIGGERED by victims who tell their stories.

Even though narcissists themselves were victims of child abuse, they black out a lot of trauma and struggle to discuss their shames in detail due to shame avoidance. Only in a collapse state will you hear their true shames, and they frequently black out what they say in collapses.

The MeToo movement was an illuminating time in which I woke up to how many people around me were rapists, because I saw the way the movement made them SEVERELY AGITATED and how they resorted to word salad and victim blaming in an almost rabid way.

It is as if their brains begin to malfunction to be faced with the truth of victims.

Their worst fear is that their “dirty little secret” will someday begin to SPEAK.

When I reported my assaults, I saw this malfunction happen in people from my female doctor to the police responders to some of my coworkers.

DARVO would come at me like a boomerang to the face: “Are you sure you didn’t date him? What do you wear to bed at night? Did you leave your blinds open? Did you lead him on? Rape is a big word.”

It was excruciating to have to continue to explain myself through such gaslighting and lack of logic.

I was six years celibate and we didn’t date, but even if I had, I didn’t deserve to be drugged, have my home broken into, and assaulted for three weeks.

It was baffling that people could not confront that what happened to me was WRONG when it was legitimately against the law, much less just traumatizing and horrific.

It was like they wanted me to be punished, as if my lifelong trauma from this wasn’t punishment enough.

Sometimes they snapped in anger, “Who do you think you are? Some perfect saint or something?”

I often felt as if I had to prove some kind of perfection in order to prove I didn’t deserve the abuse. It made my trauma worse, because I am not perfect. No one is.

One of them said, “I don’t believe you so-called victims — this is actually just your karma.”

Even my father said to me, “You must’ve done something to deserve it.”

This is when his mask fell off for me, and I broke the denial I’d used to survive my childhood.

If my father, who I’d always tried so hard to please and love and praise and nurse through all his collapses, could think that of me, then he never loved me at all.

He never even knew me.

I don’t think anyone would deserve what I endured. I wouldn’t even wish it on my rapist.

Anyway, I know my rapist already experienced it and that was why it happened to me.

The narcissist HATES the word victim because something a narcissist’s mask is hiding from are their biggest fears as terrified children:

SHAME AND ACCOUNTABILITY.

So, speaking openly about my sexual assaults and trauma and seeing if people victim blame me is now one of the tools I use to detect people who may have NPD or ASPD.

Because an informed and courageous victim will make them break entirely away from logic or reality: they will enter the world of madness as if their brains are a wasp nest you just stepped on.

And they’re ready and willing to use violence against you to defend their fantasy self from collapsing.

But always remember: they fear you more than you fear them, because you have an advantage over them.

You are emotionally older than they are.

You are not a child in an adult body.

You have the moral high ground.

You have the truth.

They thought you were just their dirty little secret to cast aside, but the truth they can’t conceptualize is that you are a person with a soul, a heart, a mind.

You have your humanity. And your body carries the evidence.

That means you have an undeniable POWER.

“The victim who is able to articulate the situation of the victim has ceased to be a victim…she has become a threat.” -James Baldwin

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Anne M. Champion is the author of 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.