Most narcissists don't know that real empathy requires constant eye contact, even when you are crying.
And they don't know that lectures aren't helpful and can traumatize you more when you are going through a tragedy.
And most narcissists don't know that most people aren't like them. They think everyone projects and fakes the way they do.
But then there are those narcissists who do understand on a lot of levels that they are different from other human beings, especially when it comes to empathy. And they understand on an intellectual level the difference between cognitive empathy and real empathy. They even understand that in order to portray empathy the right way they have to keep constant with the eye contact, with attentiveness and soothing, and not to say anything too self-serving while this is going on - until they want to, of course, when they realize some ultimate goal in power and it seems ironclad. In other words they wait much later than most narcissists.
They actually diligently study how people empathize. And they can even fool on empathy tests at times as well.
These particular narcissists are called "dark empaths". They usually have many Dark Triad markers in their personality (a mixture of narcissism, psychopathy, and Machiavellianism) with scheming and planning. Their main mode of operandi is to fool others that they are empaths and then when they get into a position of overwhelming power over others, lower the boom on their victims in terms of taking complete control over them; i.e. trapping them in ways that the victims would find extremely difficult to get out of.
These people create much more trauma in their victims than your usual run-of-the-mill narcissists because run-of-the-mill narcissists are simply too self involved to study empathy to that degree. They are not really interested in empaths beyond what an empath can do for them. They know what empaths say, and they think that is all there is to it. And they aren't entirely convincing to most of us when they say they care (there is just enough looking away or a nose in the air, lecturing, and coldness in their delivery to make most victims suspicious of their real intentions). So they tend to over-play their hand early when an empath can still escape the relationship without as much trauma as victims of dark empaths.
A few cult leaders are dark empaths, especially the ones who want to kill all of their followers. They find ways to manufacture the idea that the whole cult is in danger
from outside because of their beliefs or religion, when the real truth is that they are in danger from dying from inside the cult (dark triad cult leaders can and do insist that their followers willingly commit suicide as a sign of loyalty).
Dark empaths can create the kind of trauma where victims want to jump from a high building, who tell others they no longer want to live, who feel inexorably trapped (the ultimate in trauma bonding in other words). In fact, the trauma they feel is often so bad precisely because they could not detect that the person was
not an empath at all (
so convincing): the leader turned into this horrific, abusive, threatening, paranoid, murderous authoritarian monster practically overnight. And many kinds of narcissists do tend to switch from nice to horrifically abusive overnight, so that is where dark triads who show empathy have something in common with run-of-the-mill narcissists.
Beware of these dark narcissists. Resist the thinking that you will find an idealized significant emotional and spiritual connection and community (especially in cults). This is especially a warning to
scapegoats and
lost children who generally are the ones to be discarded by narcissistic parents, and are on a journey to find more genuine connection and empathy than the cold cognitive empathy they got from a parent or parents.
If you are supposed to give up your past, all of your past relationships, and be isolated within the cult, or in the personal relationship, that is a sign of narcissism at work. Some cult leaders live "high off the hog" with lots of money and cars while their followers live barely scraping by (which is the usual sign of narcissism too), but dark empath narcissists can live like their followers, in poverty, giving and giving, and sacrificing, just to get followers' undying devotion.
Trust should only be metered out a little at a time, and depending on how a person is behaving. Being aware that real empathy is expressed mostly with continued eye contact, with feeling your feelings, and soothing is definitely useful to know, but like anything, only up to a point. While dark empaths aren't very common, also remember that narcissism is on the rise in the Western world, which means more dark empaths, even if the percentage of them isn't higher.
Most of all, any relationship (aside from a boss at work) that requires lots of submission is not healthy and probably will hurt you greatly in the end. Which, of course, means resisting forgiving and forgetting to the extent where you are back in a relationship with them, resisting fawning and submitting when people are raging, demanding, abandoning, cruel, and commanding, and where it is obvious that they only want power, control and domination over you. The relationship is just a "throw-away" in those cases, for them.
All of this, of course, means resisting being a fawning submissive follower of their dubious and diabolical authority.
REAL EMPATHY CREATES LONG LASTING RELATIONSHIPS
HEALTHY RESPONSES, AND CONTENTMENT
Narcissists tend to discard empaths and prefer other narcissists be their main personal relationships (they love mirrors), and
now there is research to back it up (and
another link).
I'm not sure how that works long term, but perhaps with no one bothering them about ethics, which empaths would speak to them about, and hold them accountable for, perhaps on their own they lie to each other, stab each other in the back, and somehow tolerate it all as long as they are loyal to one another and there is a prize? It's something I do not care to study, frankly. In survivor forums I hear the worst stories, primarily of elder care, but maybe the rest of the time they are having a ball, living it up, idealizing each other in the most syrupy ways imaginable?
So where do the narcissists discarded empaths go?
My feeling is that they end up with other empaths. This is what happened in my own life. I became educated in the Cluster B Personality disorders (at the suggestion of a domestic violence therapist), and to some degree I can see them a mile away and avoid them.
However, I was almost fooled by a construction worker (who was working for a friend at the time). I wanted to hire him. But something did not seem right about him, or his proposals, and he was shutting down my voice and insisting that I needed to trust in him. Most of my experiences with construction workers is that I ask questions, and they answer. If I had concerns, they'd explain in detail how they tackled the project. This guy was, in his own polite way, telling me constantly to shut up, to just put my faith in him and to stop questioning him. One evening I just wasn't feeling right about how I was being treated and I looked him up on the internet and found that he had an arrest and prison record a mile long. Good thing he didn't have an alias too. And my friend fired him once he found out what I found out.
So, my ability to sense narcissism or psychopathy is not full proof. But apparently it is enough in terms of my close personal relationships. My relationships now are with the kinds of people I always wanted to be around and with. I always had really close girlfriends growing up, and that is what I modeled in seeking other relationships. I was fooled a bunch of times (especially
the love bombing stage), because I was
not studying narcissism enough.
I only knew the basics - narcissists get enraged when criticized; they are preoccupied with fantasies of power, success and money to the exclusion of other things; they believe they are granted special entitlement (while other people have to follow rules and laws); and they act grandiose. However I didn't know about covert narcissism, the very common brand of narcissist who isn't particularly grandiose outwardly, and that's where I messed up in my life. I also didn't know about gaslighting (even when I was experiencing it constantly), and I didn't know that the silent treatment was pretty exclusive to them if it lasted longer than 24 hours. In fact, I didn't know much about any of it, certainly not enough to make a difference in my life. And so narcissists slipped under my radar quite a lot, and created a great deal of havoc, messed with my head, messed with my career and my life, and even stole from me.
Had I studied it as diligently as I do now, my whole adult life would have probably been like it is now. I regret that I didn't study it much earlier.
I knew my closest girlfriends and my father were very different people from the kinds of aggressive personalities I was dealing with, but I didn't understand what made them different, and I was under the wrong impression that narcissistic personalities were actually more in the majority instead of in the minority. In other words, I thought that empathetic people were in a crushing minority, barely hanging on, barely heard, barely considered, being replaced with people with much darker traits.
So the fact that I was able to get out of the company of narcissists and their power trips entirely could be luck, or it could be that their personality types are in a significant minority, and maybe it is just the same "birds of a feather flock together" phenomenon that happens when "like" people come together.
One thing about empathy is that you are understood on a deep level. I do think and feel that it can create intuitive or perhaps even a psychic connection with others. A deep understanding of how others feel, respond and what they are going through in their lives means that you won't hurt each other. What hurts them hurts you too, and not just on some sort of
psychic feeling level.
One of the big ways you can destroy relationships is by breaking the trust between you. Undermining someone's trust who you deeply care about is a nightmare for you. I'm of the opinion that trust can never be repaired once it is broken. No person can change enough of who they are to ever be a reliable "person of trust" again.
So when you are in a mutually trusting relationship, you understand that. You do everything you can to keep the trust alive so that it can continue to be a deep relationship that you both can rely on. It is probably built in to our DNA to some degree so that we can survive as a tribe, or raise crops together, or hunt together.
Narcissists don't do that. When narcissists break the trust and hurt you a great deal, as much as they possibly can hurt you, with knowledge they have gleaned about you and your vulnerabilities, and in ways they know will garner the most pain for you, they are also hell-bent on destroying the trust between you. They make it very, very plain that they don't care about you a bit. And, of course, they destroy the trust over the most
inconsequential things usually - however it's usually not about the thing they are raging about; it is really their insecurity that you are not being submissive enough to them, doing what they tell you to do, that you are not seeing them as "the boss" or in an elevated way, and saying what they tell you to say (another thing you learn when you study narcissism).
It's easy to get in a retaliatory mindset when they attack you so many times in an egregious unprovoked way and are willing to lose the trust entirely that you used to have in them. They care a great deal of keeping up a public image that is not even true to who they are in private (common), but have no trouble smashing up your image even if they are using lots of lies to do it. It's disgusting. Unprovoked attacks do the opposite of what they want: it shows very little integrity such that you don't respect them and definitely do not want any part in idealizing them or "following them" again.
They throw a lot of rage-bombs at you that you don't deserve just because they are having a crisis about their image. They devalue you, insult you, destroy the bond between you, destroy the trust that you used to have in them, for no apparent reason you can understand (unless you study narcissism). And in an impulsive retaliatory mindset you might throw some bombs, or counter manipulations, back at them to get them to stop, that break their trust in you too. It's called the
war at home for a reason. What it accomplishes in the end is that you don't trust them and they don't trust you. You could have just as easily have achieved the same end by walking away from each other and agreeing never to bother each other again.
In truly empathetic relationships
the war at home simply doesn't happen. That means relationships can go deep. It is because you aren't trying to protect yourself from narcissistic attacks, which, as I said can be so small and ungrounded that it is impossible to tell what narcissists will do next. That means with true empaths you can be your authentic self. Self defense isn't necessary. Trying to figure out the next head game or blame game isn't necessary either.
Roles aren't required which is very freeing and feels boundlessly loving, peaceful and appreciative.
Gaslighting doesn't happen because no one is trying to control the other person (what they say, what they do, and how they behave is up to the other person - and empathy always turns them towards intimacy and empathy rather than domination and control).
Boundaries of ethics and morality also keeps you respecting each other, which is something you can never, ever experience with narcissists no matter how hard you try because they are continually sacrificing ethics and morality to get narcissistic supply.
It's really a night-and-day difference.
What it has created in my own life are meaningful long lasting relationships, some that date back to high school and have evolved over the years, and most of all peace. I feel I can open my heart more too, and be vulnerable because empathy allows it. Being vulnerable used to frighten the hell out of me with the exception of my father and the friendships I made along the way. In the present day, being vulnerable means being able to tell the truth - people who want to live in the truth want you to speak the truth.
Narcissists who want to keep a lie going about themselves or about one of their henchmen or about one of their cherished beliefs, will punish you or rage at you for telling the truth.
In contrast, perspectives with empaths are often open rather than closed. In other words, it's about exploring each other's perspectives rather than fighting about whose perspectives are right or wrong. Confirmation bias is a lot less of an issue.
I remember asking my husband what he thought the world would be like if narcissists had no power to invade nations, to do school shootings, to rob other people, to rape land for personal gain, to become the abusive Mr. Hyde with their families while spending most of the day outside the home being nice to strangers, and so on ...
And he said, "The world would be a paradise." In other words: nothing ugly, nothing sclerotic, no drivers cutting you off, no mates having sex on their spouses behind their back, no more child abuse, no more senseless shootings, no more invasions, probably no need for mind altering drugs because your mind would be content with the paradise you were living in.
What I'm about to say next may seem a bit "far out" for some people, but many of us in the world who have been beaten down in life still get out of bed with hope, grace, and dreams of a better future.
Here it goes:
I have been blessed to have gotten so many of my inspirations for art and writing from dreams. In fact, most of my inspirations come from dreams. I wake up in the morning and get to work on what I've seen or heard in these dreams.
It would seem that J.R.R. Tolkien may have been inspired by dreams too. There is a lot of wisdom in his books, especially from Gandalf, Galadriel and some of the hobbits, and a lot of fantastical happenings and beings as well (which are what dreams are made of: fantasy is inevitable in dreams, and to some extent hope too). And then there is even some seeing into the future which may be the hope part of the subconscious: some warnings about the mechanized world (Mordor) taking over the natural world (Lothlorien, Rohan, Hobbiton, Gondor, and so on). The push into the mechanized world are largely made possible by not-too-intelligent, and largely self serving Orchs. Orchs run machines all day, and are fodder for Sauron's war, and so they don't have good lives and no one is promoting their intelligence to improve their lot. Thus in wars they get killed with more frequency. They don't even have good dental work if we look at how they are portrayed in moving picture series. They are kept stupid for a reason, and they can always be defeated even when their numbers greatly out-number the elves, dwarfs, hobbits, and men. And then of course, there are a lot of references to addictions in Tolkien's work: addictions to powers, to revenge and sadism, to the thought of everlasting life, to substances and even to jewelry (the rings). And of course, submission has a role in the story too, and how submissive should you be to rulers who are focusing on issues that are leading kingdoms astray, and are destructive in all of the ways I mentioned in this paragraph.
I have had dreams about Tolkien's Middle Earth myself, dreams that altered the story slightly, or that continued after Galadriel left with Frodo, or where I am a character in the story. Not of my own choice, mind you. The most lucid dreams have a life of their own.
But I also have dreams that are entirely my own, or are just ever so slightly influenced by someone else's art or perspectives.
Anyway, one of the dreams I had was during the height of experiencing narcissistic abuse - I was being tortured over not being submissive to a series of lies. This was the dream:
The dream concerned two very tall beings that I met in the forest. One was female and the other a male. They looked sort of human except they were twice as tall as I was, with long white hair cut in a "V" streaming down their back, past their waist. Some other differences: they had very wide flattened foreheads, where their foreheads did not slope back like present day humans. In other words, there was quite a bit more brain-matter than present-day humans as well. Their eyes were also big, and somewhat slanted.
When I looked at them, I could feel more empathy emanating from them than I felt in my entire life. I felt a relief that I had never felt in my life also, and I started to cry, thankful that they were there, and the male said, "You are worth saving. Follow us. We have some medicine that will take care of that."
So I followed behind them in a wooded forest where the trees were quite substantial, larger than the usual forests I visited during my waking day time hours. As I said, these human-like beings were huge and it was hard for me to look down at the path because I wanted to study them like an artist would, to look thoroughly at their features, and to know who they were as beings.
They had me sit in an organically styled chair that had a big red cushion for a seat, and they gave me the medicine in my arm - it was a shot. As I was waking up, I could actually still feel the shot on a physical level for quite awhile, a minute even.
In my grogginess when I first knew I had exited a dream, I thought, "Is that medicine to help me from feeling sad? Is that what humans are evolving to? Can we please just evolve into that sooner rather than later? Are we capable of it?"
Anyway, I still have a tendency to discount my dreams as "just dreams" even though they have given me so much inspiration. I should always be grateful that I have them, right? Not everyone has them, and certainly not everyone has, or remembers, so many lucid dreams. But then the "lower thoughts" roll in: "Oh, it was just a dream. Now I have to deal with the real circumstances, as awful as they are." But on the other hand, like Tolkien, I had a dream of what humans could be, given enough time, and generations, and wisdom enough to give up on anything that runs contrary to empathy.
As in Tolkien's Middle Earth, we are at a crossroads. We can keep going in the direction we are going with thick low black clouds rolling in (something I really saw: they were the result of fires burning in the west, and looked other-worldly, not anything I ever saw before, very ominous and acrid, effecting my lungs, something that the fantastical realm of Mordor might produce, but was real instead, something that alarmed me greatly and made me realize that we are on the brink of disaster with climate change and creating an earth that may not be inhabitable to us any more). But we are also at a crossroads with the other things that Tolkien brought up: over-building, over-mechanization, greed, invasions, wars, how we treat each other, narcissistic concerns, addictions to things and people who are unhealthy, etc.
Whether we decide it with a war as all-involving as the Siege of Gondor, or solve it by slow evolution, or just die in what we have created, is the gargantuan issue of our day.
I also look at Putin's invasion in this light too. It could turn into a world war, and if Belarus and China get involved, it is likely to end up that way. There is not a speck of empathy in invading a country, none, and it is pointless too, because as soon as fossil fuels start to be in short supply, or another type of energy takes over, Russia will lose then, at that later time. The bombing of people's houses and businesses, the raping, the intentional killing of children, the atrocities, the forced evacuation of citizens to Russia, it's all a devolution away from empathy and our higher selves. And even if Russia, China and Belarus manage to overtake Ukraine, the Ukrainians will be trauma bonded to Russians. That's the worst possible outcome for Ukraine, and for the world (the tolerance of slavery will be an issue again), and even, in the long run, for Russia. They will not be able to win the minds of a people who have been terrorized, tortured and robbed to this extent.
That's pretty much all I have to say today on why I'm convinced that empathy is the only road out of this mess. I got a little off-track with this post with the inspirations of dreams, but I hope I have inspired some people who read what I have to write, that empathy is the main path forward if we are to survive as a species.
As for how to deal with the parts of the population who have very little empathy or who have none at all, I don't know how to deal with that problem except to avoid them. If we all avoid them and they can't get into positions of power, maybe that helps move our evolution forward? That's where I am in my personal journey with this problem.
But what if they are invading you and bringing a war to your home?
I do have some ideas on how to deal with
school shootings and other mass murders, most of which are largely perpetrated by young men with significant narcissistic traits and who are also consumed with paranoia and prejudice (that is an upcoming post).
