Why Narcissists Hate Freedom...Even for Themselves

She’d spent months talking about the program as if it were salvation. 

“I’d kill someone to get in,” she once said, half-joking but not entirely — I’d known this student long enough to see she had many narcissistic traits that were red flags. She saw everyone as her competition, and she hated them enough for it to make friendship very difficult for her. 

Another day, she laughed, added, “I’d sell my soul to Satan.” 

The intensity of her desire made it seem inevitable: this opportunity was her escape route, her golden ticket out of a suffocating home ruled by a controlling mother.

Then she got in.

The acceptance was real. Prestigious, competitive, everything she’d claimed to want. 

FREEDOM.

But instead of elation, she went quiet. 

In my office, she seemed distracted, withdrawn, depressed. When asked about it, she admitted, almost sheepishly, “I feel… bad.” (Another red flag of NPD is the inability to name feelings).

Pressed further, the truth emerged: she was terrified — of being away from her mother.

This was the same mother she had described as oppressive, invasive, unbearable. The same mother she said she couldn’t wait to escape. 

And yet, she confessed something startling: “I actually want her to control me.” 

Without her mother’s constant monitoring, punishment, and reaction to her rule-breaking, she felt invisible. Untethered. 

As if she had no edges, no limits, no self.

Her sense of self was largely defined by the cage she complained entrapped her lifelong, one that she often remarked she desperately “wanted revenge” over, seeking to get under her mother’s skin at every opportunity. 

This paradox sits at the core of narcissistic pathology. 

It’s why narcissists will stay in relationships that they’re desperately unhappy in with other narcissists, why they’ll often maintain ties with narcissistic parents despite feeling regularly triggered to rage from them.