Why Narcissists Attack Beautiful Souls
People who have empathy have stories from narcissists that they barely lived to tell about.
Narcissists enmesh with anyone for supply, but they are often much kinder to other narcissists--who they purport to hate--than they are to genuinely loving people.
People who have empathy have stories from narcissists that they barely lived to tell about.
Why do narcissists chase and then maim people who love them authentically and unconditionally?
The problem is that they both do and do not see those souls as beautiful.
They see their beauty in the sense that they know they want to copy them and they feel the benefits of the supply.
But mostly, their entanglements with people with deep empathy causes them to see them as AN EXISTENTIAL THREAT.
Narcissists, personally, do not have souls.
Something I’ve noticed narcissists I’ve known to project frequently is calling people “soulless.” The things they accuse are always their own denied shames.
What does it mean to not have a soul?
It means they have no identity.
And no conscience.
This is, in fact, one of the criteria of the disorder. They have no stable sense of self. And no emotional empathy.
Their masks will change shape throughout their lives depending on who they're enmeshed with.
This happens because they were golden children in toxic families: their narcissistic parent impressed their own identity onto them.
Except their parent also had no identity. They only had a FALSE SELF.
So they were tasked in early childhood to perform a mini-me version of their parent’s false self.
The problems:
1) they were babies
2) they were imperfect humans
3) their parent’s false self was a fraud. Their real self was actually very cruel and abusive.
So, whenever the baby acted like an ordinary baby, made mistakes, or differed from the parent’s fantasy, the parent responded with SHAME and punished the child.
Every time this happened, the little child had a mental collapse, a SUICIDAL BREAKDOWN.
And after the parent had tortured the child enough, they were instructed to go back to performance.
Individual Selfhood became very dangerous to their survival. So did love. So did empathy. They had to keep PERFORMING.
And so the trauma and cognitive dissonance caused brain damage and stunting.
Sometime in early childhood (and this can be VERY early, even just a couple years), their parent got BORED of their golden child and SPLIT THEM to all black.
Narcissists have split thinking: things are all good or all bad, and this applies to people too. There’s no room for nuance or imperfections or mistakes.
At that point, the child had their whole identity and existence taken away from them. TOTAL ANNIHILATION OF SELF.
They often still experienced breadcrumbs of favoritism and manipulation, but nothing like early childhood, in which they were ROYALTY sitting beside their sick parent.
But they LONG for that treatment of royalty. They LONG to be seen as ALL GOOD.
Because ONE FLAW means ALL BAD.
ALL BAD MEANS SUICIDE.
This is why shame becomes a terror for them they can’t face.
But…there’s the problem that since their parent has abandoned them emotionally or physically, they have unprocessed grief and they have NO IDENTITY.
So they must find others to copy, people they admire, people who they WANT TO BE.
They may start with the scapegoat or invisible sibling. Or they find friends at school.
Who they enmesh with dictates WHO THEIR FALSE SELF IS. It tells them how to dress, what activities to enjoy, what their beliefs and opinions are, even things like religion.
They’ll have a period of euphoria when they think they love that person: this is the lovebomb phase, and it reminds them of early childhood, the bliss of being GOLDEN and ALL GOOD.
But below that is unprocessed DESPAIR.
And trauma holds them hostage, because their emotional stunting means grief is too dangerous for them to feel.
So everything is repressed and denied in favor of the false self.
As they parody supply, they RESENT supply, because it becomes a COMPETITION, and they can FEEL their fraud and their loss of that competition.
And they’re only children internally, with unprocessed RAGE, so they begin to see the person they are mimicking as their ABUSER. THEIR SURROGATE PARENT.
AND THEY WANT REVENGE.
If you happen to be an authentic person (they do not always enmesh with authentic people), then you’re going to constantly remind them that they LACK several things:
LOVE, EMPATHY, ACCOUNTABILITY, HUMILITY, HONESTY, GENEROSITY.
This brings them shame.
It makes them feel SUICIDAL.
So, their brain’s trauma defenses take that shame and project it back onto their supply:
SUICIDAL FEELINGS TURN INTO HOMICIDAL FEELINGS.
They enter delusion states and have frequent fits of rage; they become obsessed with plotting how to hurt or unalive this person who others see as having a good soul.
Because getting rid of that person or breaking that person allows them to win the competition they have for their identity.
Those who were scapegoats in toxic families develop BPD, which gives them DEEP empathy, one that doesn’t even turn off for predators.
In toxic families, scapegoats are always the minority, and they’re the minority in our cruel, sick world as well.
And when a narcissist meets one and enmeshes, NO ONE ANGERS THEM MORE.
NO ONE SCARES THEM MORE.
They are who they’ve always wanted to be, and their existence obliviously throws a mirror up to them that says, “you’re a fraud. You’ve done bad things.”
So, this reminds them of the shame of childhood. And they also realize that when any of their truths are discovered, this empath will abandon them in horror at their true monstrous nature.
So, to prevent abandonment, they LASH OUT.
It’s an anger that really belongs to their narcissist parents. But they tend to fear, or even revere, their parents lifelong.
So, revenge on a loving person becomes a substitute to temporarily quell their shame and rage.
After I was drugged and assaulted for several weeks, I found my stalker’s social media a year later.
And it was INCREDIBLY disturbing.
It had all my interests: my hobbies, my favorite things to learn about, and it was even heavily focused on mental health awareness. He even pretended to have BPD and to love poetry (narcissists mask as scapegoats).
Over and over, there were these animated photos of women who looked like me, and had pink or purple hair as I did at that time.
This baffled me, because he tried to kill me. He broke me and gave me lifelong trauma. It’s a miracle I’m still here. For a year, I FOUGHT suicidal thoughts with everything I had.
With that hatred, why was I all over his page?
Because that’s the identity he wanted to perform: the one in which he had a soul, in which he could love.
Narcissism is always spiritual identity theft.
The point was to break me and then be able to WIN against my IDENTITY with his performance of my identity.
It was ENVY.
Ghosts always want what the living have:
To be alive.
To have a soul.
To feel what it’s like to love.
To be able to heal.
That’s why sociopaths and empaths will always be tragically entangled in pain in this life.
Very often, we do not survive each other.
You protect yourself from this by healing your trauma, becoming self aware, learning your own pathology, learning how to spot them, and developing boundaries that drive them away early on.
You’ll be MUCH lonelier when you do: NPD is a crisis and it affects many.
But you’ll have peace.
When you try to speak about what happened, narcissists will do everything to silence you and dominate narratives in which they center their own victimhood, so you carry and nurture your wounds a lot in silence, as the one tasked to grieve and heal things they can’t, or won’t, face.
It’s its own kind of afterlife.
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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.