Neurodivergence

Why Narcissists Often Target Neurodivergent People As Supply

Narcissists often target children, animals, the elderly, people with disabilities, and other neurodivergent people.

As a person raised scapegoat in a toxic family system who has BPD as a result, I began trauma bonding to pwNPD in childhood, and my people pleasing, my willingness to internalize abuse, and my honesty about my mental health made me both a trigger and a target for much trauma.

I’ve also seen them take advantage of or bully people with autisim, people with Downsyndrome, and other disabilities.

Why are narcissists so attracted to vulnerable people who are already suffering?

Because narcissism is also a neurodivergence, so they attract to people who feel familiar, like family.

They are also looking for people to project their shame onto with little consequences: a kind child with autism (maybe their own child who got brain damage from their abuse) or a trusting elderly person who can't function on their own fit the bill just right.

They can belittle and abuse the vulnerable with fewer consequences.

Cluster B’s are personality disorders, but within those disorders comes a whole host of neurdivergence due to genetics and the extremely traumatic and toxic environments we were raised in.

Cluster B families also have autism, ADHD, addiction, cPTSD, bipolar disorder, and a whole host of other trauma responses and brain chemistry adaptations.

I've never met a person who was a child of one or two narcissist parents who didn't have a whole host of trauma responses as long as a CVS list: I simply met people who deny that they have any trauma responses at all.

Fantasy thinking.

Many of the narcissists I knew liked to mock people for intelligence, including my parents. They called us “retards.”

Narcissists confess via projection, so deep down this is what they feel about their own brains. They will frequently call people stupid as well. And when they meet an intelligent person who intimidates them, they'll begin blinking the gaslights furiously in an attempt to belittle that person or make them doubt themselves.

People with autism come on a spectrum, and narcissists are one part of that spectrum, because they have alexythymia, stunted emotional development, a lack of empathy, and an inability to process shame or grieve. Autism doesn't affect intelligence, nor do Cluster B disorders: people come in a wide variety of intelligence levels for both. We are as diverse as any other group of humans.

I knew I had mental problems since childhood, so I was always upfront about them. I was suicidal from a young age, and I began therapy at 18 and majored in psychology to seek answers. The narcissists I'd bonded to seemed nonjudgmental about my quest to improve my mental health and heal my childhood initially, but as the relationship wore on, they began to use my mental health against me and do everything to WORSEN my mental health and then blame my mental health for my abuse.

It would plummet me back to my childhood, in which my parents also blamed me for my abuses, and I didn't know what to do to be lovable enough for them. I didn't know how to make myself as perfect as they were.

When a narcissist attracts to someone who knows and admits to their disorders, it props up their grandiosity and reinforces their denials and delusions about their superiority.

They can feel better than you because they would never admit to any imperfections. Through you, they can congratulate themselves for being “normal and smart.”

They can tell you that everything is your fault, and you’ll believe it, because you know you have a disorder.

Therefore, you help them to justify in their mind that all their abuses are warranted and deserved.

But they also get agitated by your honesty, empathy, kindness, and innocence. A common thing narcissists accused me of was “being too perfect.” I’d bend over backwards to give them a list of all my sins, mistakes, and imperfections, which I think are many.

I’ve never met a perfect human in my life. I think we all have flaws and trauma responses: this is a traumatic world.

It was never enough, and it made them angrier, likely because my sins don’t match theirs. With empathy, I have limits that they don’t have. I can’t do a lot of the things they do to others--they're repulsive to me.

Empathy is designed to protect a person from hurting their own kind, because we need each other to survive as a social species.

But some narcissists, in good moments together, confided to me that they never met anyone so not judgmental or jealous.

Many of them, from friends to family to sexual partners, called me their angel.

Nearly all of them became my personal demons through abuses like rape, physical violence, or shocking betrayals.

The cognitive dissonance of who they said I was and how I treated them lovingly vs. how they treated me often took me to the brink of suicide.

And it confused me a lot.

WHO AM I?

Am I the love that I feel in my heart for people or am I fundamentally unlovable and deserving of rape and beatings and murder?

Do my disorders and autism not warrant compassion? Do they erase my humanity even though I don't hurt others?

And why do I still feel sorry for the people who hurt me?

Am I dumb?

Am I a retard as my parents said?

I must be or this wouldn’t be my life.

A self aware narcissist on Tik Tok said something that struck me.

He said that when he was most infatuated with a girl, the love he experienced for her he described as follows:

“She felt like a mercy in a world designed to hurt me.”

That hit me like a pin in a voodoo doll.

Then he said, “And because that mercy didn’t feel possible, I didn’t think she was real, so I was cruel to her, and I proved there’s no mercy for me in this world, fulfilling my own prophecy.”

That explains A LOT.

To me, the love bomb stage from a narcissist also felt like a mercy in a world designed to hurt me.

My life as a scapegoat has been abuse and neglect and constant grief and anxiety that my brain is fundamentally “all bad” for being imperfect.

So, when I get a lovebomb, I typically feel so overwhelmed. They feel like a miracle.

Then it all crashes down and I feel very dumb again.

This is why I went celibate years ago. I accepted love was not for people like me, no matter how much love I have to give.

My maintenance man, who I never dated who drugged and raped me, came to me in a time when I’d just moved to a new state, when Covid hit and I was very isolated, so his friendship felt like oxygen.

I genuinely still miss it.

I know I’m not being crazy now when I say that he and I confided some very dark traumas and truths to each other.

He kept a lot from me and was clearly plotting on me from day one by breaking my appliances and snooping my belongings, but we had some emotional conversations that were very real. It was hard to grieve over those memories while coming to terms with my rapes, his stalking, and his hatred and malice.

A conversation that stands out is when he told me he’d been to prison as a teenager.

Most people didn’t know that about him. When I reported my rapes, people were shocked when I said he’d already been to prison for deadly intent, but I was able to find the case and prove it: it happened as he explained it to me. He was honest.

And when he told me, he was very ashamed.

He said, “People say, he’s a bad guy; he’s been to prison.”

“You’ve been to prison?”

He quickly shook his head no, said he was just kidding, said that’s just what people say about him.

Then he hung his head in shame, and he lurched forward and grabbed my oven to steady himself.

I could feel that this really affected him, so I moved closer towards him.

“I don’t judge. I have friends who went to prison. I’m a prison abolitionist. I have penpals in prison.”

Then he slowly nodded his head. He couldn’t even look at me. He looked so ashamed. He began to tell me the details.

He said, “I wish you’d been my penpal in prison. I needed that.”

I moved closer to him because he felt to be in such extreme agony.

Then he leaned into me and our arms touched.

And I flinched.

HE FELT LIKE AN ELECTRIC SHOCK.

Then I felt bad for flinching and I leaned back into him.

ZAP.

Again.

I said, “Prison as a child sounds terribly traumatic. You deserved mental health care.”

He said, “I think I was most butthurt to lose my girlfriend. I still have her name tattooed on me.”

(Narcissists can’t talk about feelings due to alexithymia, so it’s notable that he only describes it as being “butthurt”).

I told him he could get his tattoo covered and he got immediately defensive, saying prison ink is too hard to cover.

But I knew the truth behind his defensiveness. I wrote it in my journal: “He’s possessive. He still loves that girl from middle school. He never processed the hurt. He’s the type of guy to get obsessed.”

These were some of my earliest clues to his NPD, but I had no idea he was installing a microphone on me that day.

When he raped me, his body on mine felt like more than a shock: it felt like DEATH.

My BPD and autism cause me to have a highly sensitive empathy, and I’ve never met anyone who hurt as badly as him.

I imagine that when he heard me say to my therapist that I thought he had NPD, it hurt very bad: the mercy in the world designed to hurt him proved false: anyone who knows who he really is flees.

His prophecy was fulfilled.

He collapsed, but he said he had Covid for two weeks. When he returned from the collapse, he had a plan for his revenge.

In stalking me, he was looking for proof that I wasn’t the angel I felt to be with him.

He would’ve never been hurt by what I said to my therapist if he didn’t have a microphone in my apartment to begin with, if he didn’t have NPD. The microphone PROVED the NPD.

But, in his mind, it was necessary, because pwNPD are constantly seeking proof that you are not what you seem to be: a fraud, like them.

The narcissist’s baseline is: “Where is the predator?”

The borderlines’s baseline is: “I am worthless.”

If they find anything that they dislike about you, anything in which you have questioned their perfection, they feel they have all the reason in the world to give you all the suffering they can give you.

YOU become the predator they were looking for. The one who has love and will take it away, just like their parents did. YOU are the threat to their false self, which feels like death.

After I found the microphone and escaped my rapes, I beat myself up over what he heard me say as I wondered if he had NPD.

I wished more than anything I could explain to him that I don’t judge that, that I deeply love people with NPD, that I, too, have trauma responses from my childhood, that I still had so much to learn and that I learned it through him.

I want to explain to him that it wasn’t personal: I just know that if a pwNPD seeks to enmesh with someone with BPD and autism, or cheat on their partners, it doesn’t end well, and I can’t repeat that cycle anymore and survive. That was the only reason I was trying to parse it out and see if I should avoid him.

Just like him, I was trying to protect my heart.

But I still want to soothe him and be his mercy, even today.

At the same time, I wish people would have mercy for me too, as a rape and stalking victim. It still feels that this world was designed to hurt me, and that there’s no mercy for the pains I carry projected into me by the most hurt people in this world.

These aren't easy traumas to survive.

The thing I’ve had most in common with every narcissist was trauma.

It’s what draws us together, though our brain defense mechanisms work in heartbreaking opposition, so that it causes us to repeat our childhood wounds over and over like ghosts who don’t know they’re dead.

The other thing we have in common is we have neurodivergent brains that we did not choose and cannot help.

This is why that while narcissists always end up hating me something vicious, I cannot hate them back.

They may not be able to admit it or process it, but we have so much in common.

We have common pains, trauma responses, a need for love, and an imperfect humanity.

Maybe, stupidly, I still want to be their mercy in the world designed to hurt them.

Maybe that's my version of fantasy thinking to survive the pain of it all.

I know that, stupidly, I’m still looking for my own mercy in a world designed to hurt me.

But, in a way, I do think that my rapist was that mercy.

I had a dream of him in which I was a deer, wounded, bleeding, screaming and twisting in agony in the road.

He came and kneeled down, took my face in his hands, looked at me in anguish, and then swiftly snapped my neck.

That’s what I feel his rapes did for me.

They woke me up from an endless agony by proving to me that no amount of kindness, self harm, or self deprecation will ever be enough blood for narcissists.

He killed me, and he killed the illusions and hopes I had for loving people in this world in doing so.

He showed me there is more than one way to die: you can die in spirit before you die in body. He projected his own childhood death into me.

And that death was so horrifying that it’s broken me into song like the ancient legend of Orpheus: I couldn’t leave Hell without looking back on all I’ve loved.

So now I sing, disembodied, without even the limbs to reach out and hold those who hear me and weep.

In order to survive, I had to cut off a part of what made me and all of what I love: people with NPD.

Without them, I can never be whole; I can only mourn for my lost loves and my family.

But I have to believe the song has purpose.

It’s the only way to process the tremendous grief, to transmute the darkness into light, to let it all go and grow…

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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.