Why Narcissists Underestimate Empaths

Narcissists are doomed to continually underestimate empaths throughout their lives because they lack that very trait: empathy.

EMPATHY IS A TRAIT THE BRAIN DEVELOPS THROUGHOUT CHILDHOOD.

It gets stronger the older a person gets, and it isn't fully developed until the frontal lobes fully develop by mid-20s.

Empathy is a major tool of human survival.

We survive as a species because we work together in large numbers. Thus, empathy helps us protect our kind. It makes abuse feel REVOLTING.

But the emotional part of a narcissist’s brain is stunted to toddler years due to experiencing golden child narcissistic abuse and not properly bonding.

Their first mental collapses were in those years of early childhood.

So they never properly develop the ability to feel the feelings of others due to brain damage.

Because they lack empathy, they can never do the following:

Genuinely bond with others
Feel appropriate empathy that will foster survival of a group by dictating the instinct to save others, not harm them
Experience romantic love
Experience genuine self love (narcissists have a self love dependent on others around them feeling bad to regulate their emotions--they also love a FALSE self)
Cope with boredom
Complete the grieving process after experiencing loss
Feel wonder and awe
Get people to genuinely like them for who they are behind the mask
Be authentically admired
Be creative and original to the full extent of their abilities
Be a mature adult

Therefore, they have only two tactics to survive:

PRETEND TO HAVE EMPATHY BY FINDING SUPPLY TO MIRROR AS A MASK

Enter: the swathes of people they copy and destroy.

BELIEVE THAT EMPATHY IS A “WEAKNESS” AND DEGRADE THOSE WHO HAVE IT

Enter: all the ways narcissists pretend they are “stronger” because they “aren’t emotional.”

Anyone who knows a narcissist knows that not only are they emotional, THEY ARE AS WILDLY INAPPROPRIATE WITH THEIR EMOTIONS AS CHILDREN.

They’ll pitch a hissy fit not to get their way.

They can cheat on you with everyone from the babysitter to that leg lamp and make it clear they never want to orgasm anywhere near you ever again…

…but try to leave them and you’ll have a toddler on the floor with a diaper full of 💩 needing to be changed, cooed, and coddled to sleep.

They'll say,

I've just never been that emotional.

I’m just emotionally strong.

You're just so sensitive.

They say these things and sit on a 🌋 of rage that threatens to erupt at any minute.

But, for some reason, they don’t think rage is an emotion.

Emotions=crying.

Emotions=shame.

So, they live in DENIAL.

They suppress all access to the emotion of love, deny they have any emotions, deny this is a problem, and project all the shame they feel about anything onto their scapegoats through rage.

They abuse to ensure that other people around them feel the negative emotions they can’t process instead.

As those emotions are absorbed by a person with empathy, they feel RELIEF.

When they have made someone hurt, they feel powerful and grandiose, and it reassures them that EMPATHY IS WEAK.

And they are strong, smart, SUPERIOR.

But…..

THEY'VE LITERALLY NEVER FELT EMPATHY.

THEY DON'T KNOW THE FIRST THING ABOUT IT.

Deep down, it terrifies them.

WHAT IF…IT MAKES THEM BETTER THAN ME??

Their brains cannot bear the thought.

So they get triggered the most by…

LOVE AND INNOCENCE.

It's what they must destroy to survive.

It has the POWER to implode their entire fantasy of perfection and superiority.

Two things they fail to understand as they attack borderlines who have empathy is this:

REAL EMPATHS EXPERIENCE SEVERE PAIN AND GRIEF.

Narcissists tend to envy empaths because they see us as "normal," given that they design their masks after us. They seek to destroy us because they think we seem too loving, meaning we haven't suffered enough in life.

But a true empath was a narcissist family scapegoat: we have suffered. Suicidal ideation will be an empath's baseline, because it doesn't feel GOOD to feel the horrific pain in this world.

Empaths are just masters at covering up our true pain because we've been trained since childhood not to burden our caretakers with our feelings, since they had no access to feelings or the ability to provide love.

EMPATHY IS THE KEY TO HEALING.

If narcissists had empathy, all their suffering would end.

They’d be loved and lovable and in love.

They’d be able to face shame and process it.

They’d be able to develop self love.

They’d be able to create far beyond what they can with their disability.

They’d feel peace and wonder and awe. They’d seek to protect others and the world.

They'd be able to see our inherent equality and stop competing for some unattainable fantasy of being "the best."

They'd understand how nuanced and imperfect we all are.

They’d be…ADULTS instead of traumatized and confused children in adult bodies.

The thing any borderline can tell you, having developed an overactive empathy from lifelong abuse is this:

EMPATHY CAN DAMN NEAR BE A SUPERPOWER.

We question if we're psychic, at one point or another.

Long before my borderline diagnosis, I had some special powers:

I can spot a narcissist in just a few interactions;

I’ve had predictive dreams about how narcissists were abusing me;

I’ve known secrets about dangerous people simply from watching the ways certain words trigger them and feeling their emotional reactions as they did;

When my life was most in danger, I was given what I needed to escape or survive.

The only reason I can write about trauma responses that are so opposite to what I experience as a borderline is because I've spent so much of my life intimately enmeshed to sociopaths since childhood.

As a scapegoat child– the family prey--you develop keen senses to survive your predators. You develop survival instincts that tell you when to fawn, fight, freeze, or flee.

WHEN I'M AROUND A PERSON, I CAN FEEL THEIR FEELINGS.

When I first read that lucid dreaming and visions are common experiences for people with BPD, it made another puzzle piece of my life make sense.

Narcissist men have always accused me of being a WITCH 🧙🏻‍♀️

Now I know why: my empathy is truly LIKE MAGIC to them — one that COULD DESTROY THEM.

And it gives me other things that make them jealous:

My creativity and ambitions are so rich and rewarding that art feels like a deeper spiritual practice than prayer, and my empathy in my art has made it stronger for its authenticity.
I experience deeply intimate friendships and have been showered with love and gratitude by people I give my empathy to.
I am independent and can care for myself.
I am resilient and able to cope with the gnarliest shames given to me through abuse.
I'm always healing and growing.

Narcissists love to mock empaths, because narcissists target what they're jealous of. If they weren't envious, then why design their masks after loving people?

They make us feel alien for having properly developed brains and emotional maturity.

They shame love for humanity because it's the only power in which people can SURVIVE.

Narcissists, deep down, are denying their own death wish: in its place, they have a wish to see all of humanity burn.

And themselves, the sole survivor:

God’s chosen and favorite, finally.

The winner 🥇

BUT…

Imagine a world in which we ALL had properly developed empathy.

Imagine the senseless wars and genocides that would end.

Imagine the school shooters finally relieved of their despair that causes them to kill.

Imagine the ways we’d rewrite our laws,

…or combat climate change,

…or ensure that everyone could eat.

Imagine all the things we could create if our brains could work at their full capacity together…

Imagine if we didn’t keep electing toddlers to run whole countries.

Imagine if we stopped allowing greedy toddlers to amass an imaginary number next to their name and call it “wealth” or “worth.”

Imagine if we finally could love our partners and our children in a healthy way and healed our rotted out branches of our family trees by breaking the cycle.

Imagine if we finally focused on what mattered in life, if we stopped being loyal to pain and started being loyal to REAL love.

Imagine if we woke up from the narcissists’ nightmare fantasy of their power and their right to make anyone they want suffer….

IMAGINE IF WE WOKE UP TO…OUR POWER.

Imagine if we HEALED and EVOLVED...

Imagine what that could do…

I imagine that NOTHING SCARES A NARCISSIST MORE.

My memoir, This is a Story About Ghosts: A Memoir of Borderline Personality Disorder, is now available on Amazon.

I’m blogging about mental health & true crime, popular culture, and personal essays on my new blog, Blooming on the Borderline: check it out at the links below.

For individual coaching to recover from narcissistic abuse, BPD, or sexual assault, visit https://am-champion.com

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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, and a Barbara Deming Memorial Grant recipient. She has degrees in Behavioral Psychology and Creative Writing.