An excerpt from an ebook i was reading on narcissists and how much i felt it relates to me..

2) The narcissist needs to offload his or her internal pain

Narcissists have limited or nonexistent resources available in order to work through their own emotional conflicts, which are numerous. Because the narcissist struggles to be accountable and self-reflect, he or she projects emotions onto others (offloads the parts of themself they cannot resolve) in order to gain relief from internal pain. This is why the narcissist will proclaim that it is your fault and will continually accuse you of the poor behaviour that the narcissist is performing.
Projection is a strategy necessary for the narcissist to emotionally survive and retain his or her false self. Projection is an egoic created defence mechanism.

Healthy and emotionally mature individuals have the ability to self-reflect and take responsibility for their own emotions. The narcissist doesn’t and won’t.

The unfortunate side-effect of the narcissist’s projection is that you may be incredibly confused and think much of the destruction is your fault. You may have bought into the projection that you are in fact the damaged one who is causing the problems.

Just ask yourself - Am I a malicious person who operates without conscience? Yes, you may have retaliated like a crazy person and even been nasty and aggressive, but who doesn’t crack when they’re being significantly and repetitively abused?

That certainly doesn’t make you, at your core, a bad person.

I can assure you – healthy people with emotional intelligence who really believed you were untrustworthy, manipulative, controlling, competitive, adulterous, nasty and wrong would NOT be having a relationship with you. They’d leave! Yet the narcissist continues or continued to be with you while accusing you of these things...and more.
Why? Because he or she was maliciously maiming you and dumping his or her tormented self on you – pure and simple.

Decent people simply don’t do that. I don’t care how deranged or crazy you feel – you are being abused, and it’s important to
get clear about this.

Conscience verses conscienceless

Having a conscience is the defining point distinguishing the co-dependent and the narcissist. Co-dependents feel really bad about using abuse, lies and manipulation to gain attention, or the upper hand, and would feel devastated if anyone accused them of possessing anything less than decency and integrity.

I’ve had the conversation with many of my clients in relation to how they themselves could never operate like a narcissist. It would be true to say that even in your most dire times of pain and grief that you’d find it very difficult to lower yourself and literally sell your soul by performing the lies, manoeuvres, cruelty, atrocities and immoral behaviour that the narcissist is capable of. You just simply wouldn’t do it.

He or she holds a very powerful trump card over you. You’ve been hooked into wanting to prove to the narcissist that you are trustworthy, you are decent and you do love him or her.

This has been an extremely painful and difficult task because the narcissist is always insisting how bad you are (the projection of his or her disowned parts on to you).

You’re mortified about letting the narcissist prove that you are in fact a bad person, because in your human model of the world this means you’ve failed achieving what you set out to experience with this person. It’s soul-destroying because you’ve been misunderstood and lost the possibility of regaining the perfect relationship with this person who you thought was absolutely the love of your life.

Is it the relationship you’re fighting for? Or maybe really it’s the need to be validated, respected, trusted and loved – unfortunately by someone that never wanted to, and never held that as a normal human goal. It isn’t about that or you, never actually was, and never will be.

From the narcissist’s viewpoint and model of reality, it was always about you supplying the narcissist with narcissistic supply.
The interesting part in all of this is – you’ve been conditioned by the narcissist to accept the assault of the narcissist’s projections. He or she has day by day, piece by piece been turning you into another version of themselves. By confusing and diminishing you and projecting the bad parts of themselves on to you, the narcissist has created you as the tormented person.

By doing so he or she has been able to feel momentarily healthy, and temporarily spared from his or her own internal torture.
The feelings that you’re feeling – the emptiness, manic depression, fear, loss of self-esteem, helplessness and loss of faith in yourself and life, are the feelings that the narcissist feels within their real core every minute of every day.

The difference is the narcissist, in order to function, goes after narcissistic supply (attention which means stealing other people’s energy), in order to have any sense of ‘self’. The narcissist requires other people reflecting energy back to him or her, because without this the narcissist is a literal wasteland of no-self.

The reason why you appear to be an empty shell and the narcissist doesn’t, is because you cannot sell your soul in order to go out and feed off and steal energy and resources from people and life in order to emotionally survive. You’re not doing the tactics which gain the relief. In fact you’re much more likely to keep losing more and more pieces of yourself, shrivel and fall deeper and deeper into the black abyss that you’re becoming.

Narcissistically abused victims all report the feeling of having NO self left, and that their life force has been literally sucked out of them.

The physical, emotional and mental torture of being in this state is unthinkable, and unless you’ve experienced it personally, which I know you have if you’ve been narcissistically abused, you know what I mean when I say – you could not even begin to fathom what this feels like unless you’ve personally experienced it.

If the narcissist was cut off from receiving narcissistic supply, this is exactly what he or she would feel like. He or she would experience a complete and utter breakdown.

Not being a bad person is killing you in this instance. Please know, in no way am I advocating that you become bad in order to survive, therefore becoming a model of no empathy or conscience. The quick fix is not the durable answer, and you certainly can’t attack the narcissist with his own arsenal. He is a seasoned professional, whereby you’re a raw novice shackled with a conscience, and therefore the narcissist will always win.

The narcissist is a model of self-serving entitlement, and he or she believes they own the rights to you and anything else they feel entitled to take (which is most things). There is no way he or she is going to grant you the energy you require to feel better. He or she needs to take, and the narcissist is going to do his or her best to cut you off from other sources that could grant you energy, such as friends, family, children (yours or the narcissist’s), hobbies and areas of your life that give you connection and pleasure. The narcissist knows that by doing so you will be shackled to him or her so that supply can be extracted and ensured.

The narcissist is pathologically envious, often to the point of inner rage, that you can and do find ways and people to feel genuinely good. The narcissist knows this is an possibility for him or herself, and wishes to dismantle all of your sources of energy, leaving you totally at the mercy of his or her control.

You will have experienced the disinterest; displeasure and even wrath of the narcissist when you were upset, grieved or in a state of needing support from him or her, or when you were deriving pleasure and energy from sources other than the narcissist.

Now you can understand why. The narcissist after the process of giving to get (securing you as narcissistic supply) has no desire, and quite frankly no resources to genuinely give support, and certainly has no desire to support and encourage your happiness and achievements.

The narcissist may monetarily grant you positive energy, but often it’s only to prop you up so that you will remain and stay as narcissistic supply. Agendas drive the narcissist’s responses and actions.

Narcissists operate from the insidious agenda of requiring narcissistic supply like a drug addict requires heroin, and just like a high-level junkie the narcissist will sell out individuals, or trample on other people’s emotions and resources without remorse, in order to feed this all-consuming need. No-one receives immunity in the face of this compulsion.

Close intimates are the main targets from whom the greatest amount of narcissistic supply can be extracted, simply because an intimate will hang around in the game whilst the extraction continues to take place. Less intimate people that haven’t been successfully hooked won’t. They will tell the narcissist to get lost and refuse to endure the abuse.
The narcissist doesn’t fear the abandonment and punishment that comes from his or her bad behaviour. In fact he welcomes the angst and repercussions. All of this grants him the knowing he or she has the power to affect other people in extreme ways. This is A- grade narcissistic supply at its best.

What’s more, unconsciously, individuals who suffer from Narcissistic Personality Disorder have inbuilt masochistic tendencies. The narcissist knows that he or she is empty, and has no ‘self’. Self-loathing takes up the space where self-esteem, self-knowing and self-worth should reside.

There is a perverse and twisted relief when receiving punishment and failure, and narcissists seek it out time and time again. At a deep inner level they know that every significant relationship they enter into will fail, and they grind these relationships into the ground towards this conclusion mercilessly. By purposefully bringing about the end themselves, this grants them additional power and control.

The ending always comes through one of two means, they either push the partner away, or they create the complete disintegration of the partner and then discard the corpse when there’s no narcissistic supply left to gain. There’s no beating this system – it just is what it is, and the narcissistically abused victims who have tried to change this reality, and don’t want to accept the relationship is doomed all become corpses. I was a hair’s breadth from becoming one of these discarded shells myself.

It must be remembered, in amongst all of these startling and chilling facts, victims of narcissistic abuse do have the inner ability to have a self. Therefore for you, there is the hope and the opportunity to break away from this manic and soul-destroying dynamic in order to heal, empower yourself and recover. I and many other people have done so.

The narcissist, however, can’t create an authentic self, and won’t, and will meet the same inevitable conclusion that all narcissists meet – a place which he or she has been maliciously and frantically trying to avoid. The reality of having no energy left to procure narcissistic supply, and being left alone with a horrifying tortured self with no way to gain relief.

It is then that the narcissist meets his or her maker – and knows firsthand that the charade or his or her life, and the carefully scripted and constructed false self has all amounted to absolutely nothing – the wasteland of having no authentic self becomes the all- encompassing play with no exit.

It’s here that the narcissist is demised, because he wasn’t able to beat the system that we all face: Without an authentic self, nothing is real.

Generally this happens to the narcissist later in life, rather than earlier, but it does happen. Therefore don’t envy narcissists and think they have it all. None of what they have is real, or brings real feelings of fulfilment. The truth is: it is impossible for them to be genuinely fulfilled and at peace; they simply aren’t wired that way, and that doesn’t change regardless of how much material stuff, notoriety, acclaim or even fame and fortune they manage to get.

Don’t be tempted to try to save the narcissist from him or herself and this inevitable fate with the belief Love will conquer and fix all, because another truth is: the narcissist will resist all of these attempts, and in fact punish you for trying. He or she is disgusted by individuals that try to love him or her, and will detest you for it. The unconscious reason playing out within the narcissist is: How repulsive and wrong it is to try and love a ‘nothing’, an entity that doesn’t exist. This makes me despise you even more.