Best 4 quotes of Sandy Hotchkiss on MyQuotes

If you find that you are frequently doing battle with or feeling seduced by such people, look to see what old problems you are trying to resolve by allowing yourself to engage in what are, essentially, impossible relationships.

Some of these arrangements involve an exhibitionist Narcissist and a partner who is “in the closet.” The closet Narcissist is an unassuming type who has her feelers out for someone she can idealize. She needs to put the love object on a pedestal in order to hold herself together, because if her partner is wonderful and she can have him, then all the insecurities inside her will go away. In the Narcissist-closet Narcissist couple, it is actually the latter who is in control, feeding the grandiosity of the love object in order to inflate herself via osmosis. These relationships can be quite successful, as long as the idealizations and illusions can be sustained. But when unpleasant reality intrudes, love implodes.

The narcissistic love match is inherently unstable. Any intrusion of reality can destabilize the relationship, leading to chronic or intermittent conflict, misery, trips to the couple counselor, or traumatic ruptures that bring the union to an end. When the narcissist can find support outside the relationship – career, family, friends, or other interests- that keep him or her feeling pumped up, the pressure on the partner may be minimal. But frustrations at work, job loss or retirement, disruptions in other needed relationships, and losses in status or rewards from other pipelines usually lead to more demands on the partner to pick up the slack. It is the nature of human beings to seek more satisfying solutions to life’s challenges over time and to strive toward a fully realized evolution of Self. Even a seed of emotional health wants to grow. Just as primary narcissism is a transient state in early childhood, so may narcissistic relationships be way stations on our journey to mature love. But sometimes the hard part is figuring out if, when, and how to move on.

We all view life through the lens of these experiences, but the Narcissist has something more, not just a lens but a prism that refracts and distorts incoming messages to avoid the intolerable feeling of shame. This means that you are never in control of how these people perceive you, or when you will be assaulted with some defensive maneuver that deflects their shame, prevents their deflation, or reinflates them after narcissistic injury. Narcissists constantly dump – or project – unwanted parts of themselves onto other people. They then begin to behave as if others possess these unwanted pieces of themselves, and they may even succeed in getting others to feel as if they actually have those traits or feelings. This is an unconscious process for both the dumper and the dumpee, but what it means is that you end up being treated like the dirt they’ve brushed off their own psyches, or feeling the humiliation, the anger, the vulnerability, and worthlessness that they cannot tolerate themselves.