Folie à deux Among Narcissists? Or Sycophants? Or Maybe Not Either?

 So what is Folie à deux?

Here is a definition from Google AI in red (and you can search other articles about the phenomenon):

"Folie à deux," which translates to "madness of two" in French, is a psychiatric syndrome where two or more individuals share a delusional belief. This shared psychosis is also known as shared psychotic disorder or induced delusional disorder. The term "folie à deux" was first used in the 19th century to describe this phenomenon, according to Wikipedia.

Key aspects of folie à deux:

Shared Delusion:

One individual (the "primary" or "inducer") develops a delusion, which then influences another person (the "secondary" or "induced") to share the same delusion. 

Close Relationship:

Folie à deux is typically observed in individuals with a close relationship, such as family members or intimate partners. 

Influence and Suggestibility:

The primary individual's delusion can influence the secondary individual, who may be more suggestible or impressionable. 

Treatment:

Treatment typically involves separation of the individuals, antipsychotic medications, individual and family therapy, and potentially psychotherapy. 

Types of Folie à Deux:

Folie imposée (induced psychosis): The primary individual's delusion is imposed on the secondary individual. 

Folie simultanée (shared psychosis): The primary and secondary individuals share delusions independently but become very similar. 

Other Terms:

While "folie à deux" is the most common term, other terms like "shared psychotic disorder," "double insanity," or "psychosis of association" are also used, according to Merriam-Webster. 

In the context of the movie Joker: Folie à Deux:

The movie uses the term "folie à deux" to reflect the shared madness and delusional beliefs between the Joker (Arthur Fleck) and Harley Quinn (Lee Quinzel). The film explores their shared delusion and the impact of their relationship on each other. 

Pronunciation:

The term "folie à deux" is pronounced as "FOH-lee ah DEU".

In addition, a Wikipedia article claims that the Diagnostics and Statistics Manual that psychologists use will not legitimize Folie à Deux, and therefor no psychologist can diagnose a patient with it.

However, the Wikipedia article classifies two sub-divisions of Folie à Deux in these passages (also in red):

Various sub-classifications of folie à deux have been proposed to describe how the delusional belief comes to be held by more than one person:[9]
Folie imposée
Where a dominant person (known as the 'primary', 'inducer', or 'principal') initially forms a delusional belief during a psychotic episode and imposes it on another person or persons (the 'secondary', 'acceptor', or 'associate'). Normally the latter, described as "un malade par reflet", does not suffer from a true psychosis. If the parties are admitted to hospital separately, the delusions in the person with the induced beliefs are typically abandoned.[10]
Folie simultanée
Either the situation where two people considered to independently experience psychosis influence the content of each other's delusions so they become identical or strikingly similar, or one in which two people "morbidly predisposed" to delusional psychosis mutually trigger symptoms in each other. Due to the lack of a dominant partner, separation of patients might not improve the condition of either.[10]

So while it is illegitimatized by the writers of the Diagnostic and Statistics Manual so that no one can get a diagnosis of it, can it still be discussed and researched a bit?

My feeling about it is that "of course it can." 

I have often wondered whether people can pick up narcissistic traits from long term exposure to a narcissist. Can psychopathic traits be picked up from being around a psychopath? Can Machiavellianism be picked up from being around someone who has the traits of a Dark Triad?

Then there is the phrase "narcissistic fleas" where people who engage with a narcissist might pick up some narcissistic traits. It is heavily used in forums for victims of narcissistic abuse. I found the phrase being repeatedly used in this one and here.

Dr. Ramani Durvasula, a psychologist and expert on narcissism denies that it is possible in some of her videos that discuss this, and in my mind she has a lot of clout because she studies this subject so diligently. 

But I also can't help noticing how sycophancy is being embraced in politics, in political parties, in wars, between nations, and how so many people are willing to parrot the ridiculous false narratives of someone else. Are these sycophants actually a mini-me or have they lost their minds to the point of being an almost-puppet, or an almost-robot, spouting the phrases of narcissists and dictators without being influenced by them a bit to think like a narcissist (hard to believe they are generating this "stuff" in their own mind) or are they just lazy thinkers and adopt someone else's thoughts, opinions and beliefs? Or is something else going on?

And is it folie à deux or something else? 

And how responsible are we if we "go along to get along", if we adopt sycophancy to keep a job or to keep being a member of a family, or if we adopt another person's perspectives ala folie à deux?

The reason I think it deserves some consideration, even if it can't be a diagnosis is because of a narcissist's incredible pressure to get people to enable them and to be sycophants for them - and it is often so highly successful even when it is clearly not advantageous to the person who has decided to support, enable and submit to what ever a narcissist wants.

So many enablers take up the narcissist's perspectives too even if the narcissist is lying, spreading false narratives, is clearly out to exploit and benefit from his powerful position (grifting or other means), is telling people he is very popular when he's not, is telling people he invented something when he did not, is telling people that most people agree with him when they don't - these sycophants and enablers seem to stick with the narcissist and what ever he says even as his life and their own lives and autonomous decisions are being unraveled and eroded away constantly. 

in terms of politics:

Politically, this happens all of the time: Why does a population believe in the lies of a politician? 

They often do believe in the lies politicians tell. And as we know, a population can go much further than believing lies are the truth, and help to enact policies which hurt themselves, their families and communities, giving too much power over to a leader who is more interested in his own power than the people he diabolically serves. Some of them will even go to war and die for a narcissist when they know that the spoils from the war will mostly go to the leader and his oligarch grifters. 

We know how a combination of threats, punishments and rewards are used to get people to enable and submit to despotic leaders. That's usually in plain sight. If it's so plain that you are following a person who threatens to get his own way, why do people do it so willingly, with so much loyalty and fervency. 

It's been branded as "the cult mind" all over the internet these days. You've probably seen it yourself. People who are not submitting, who don't believe in the lies and false narratives, constantly shame these enablers for "joining a cult", for giving credence to a leader who "takes away more than he gives, and if you can't see that, then you have been anaesthetized with fantasies and hopes rather than reality" - the obvious stigma of what a lot of cult followers get from outsiders. 

Then there are the voters who voted for the tyrant but who complain constantly about what he is doing. They'll say, "I didn't want to pay more taxes and I don't like socialism, so I went for him and I hope we can all live through what he's doing", or "I didn't want an authoritarian right wing government, so I went for him and cringed the whole time he was in office." They certainly can't be branded as sycophants, but are they enabling "a mad leader" if the leader is indeed truly mad and producing crazy-making policies? 

And by the way, that is how Jekyll/Hyde personality types are often created: reluctant sycophancy, alternating between being enraged by the actions of an abuser, tyrant or silencer behind their back, calling them names, swearing up a storm, then being fawning and sweet to them in their presence.

Then this kind of sycophancy becomes a way of life for them: they vacillate wildly between being scary and nice depending on the person they are relating to, the situation they are in, what they get out of the situation to the point where they can be two-faced with every person they meet. And it can have extreme manifestations, their violence constantly being corrected by their sweet-talk afterwards, over and over and over again via the cycle of abuse. 

I had to separate from one of these types myself. It was no longer safe and it made for an unpredictable, extremely chaotic, "walking-on-eggshells" type of environment. 

It tells me that reluctant sycophancy over years, or starting in childhood, is not in the least bit healthy, for anyone, least of all them, or even particularly valued by most people, even the tyrant, and I bet it can have an impact on the brain as I've never seen or heard of cases where it can be abated in any significant way except with borderlines. For folks with heavy narcissistic or antisocial personality disorder traits in addition to pronounced Jekyll/Hyde traits, these traits seem hopeless to correct. Maybe it can be "modified" somewhat through DBT therapy and CBT therapy. I don't know. Although it might be best not to change these people especially since narcissists and psychopaths are consummate actors looking at how to exploit situations with new-found tools, and "politeness tools" in the hands of people like this may not be a good idea as far as society goes. "Better to see it and flee it" I'd say.

Anyway, for now it seems that reluctant sycophancy to despotic tyrants would be just as unhealthy as the all-in sycophants. 

Can folie à deux manifest among followers of despotic tyrants? Can some of those followers peel off from an adoring crowd if these tyrants fall from power? I bet they can via folie imposée. Can Jekyll/Hyde personality types go more Hyde on a despotic tyrant as the tyrant is falling from grace? I bet they can and do.

crime families and accomplices: 

Then there is the advent of crime families. If two parents are criminals is it likely their children will become criminals too? Research suggests that yes, a child of criminal parents is likely to commit crimes themselves. Not only are they being taught criminal behavior through a parent setting an example, but I'd bet they are being pressured in some way to be accomplices. Criminals usually pressure other people. They want to get away with unlawful acts and if the consequences for those actions can be put on others, so be it. So children grow up in situations where crime is normalized at the very least, and they are coerced to commit some of them themselves at worst. 

Children are either going to please the parent by being an accomplice, or condoning what their parents are doing, or keeping quiet about it, or they are going to disapprove of the criminal acts and usually suffer severe consequences from the parent. If their criminal parent has delusions the child may very well have them too, right? Or at least puppet those delusions. 

Children are assumed to not have much of a free will, so they are usually put in detention homes instead of prison. "My parent made me do it." Not exactly, but to disobey a parent like this might have a very dire outcome for a child. As for the thought processes they might have adopted from the parent maybe it goes like this: "My parent can be scary. I guess he steals so that makes him more scary, right? I believed in what he believed in because it made him happy. I felt I was more a part of the family if I believed everything he said. If I didn't I felt alone, shivery, cold and scared. Being so alone and cold made me realize I should believe him. It makes me happy to see him happy and he is happy if he is believed. I can tell the difference between a lie and the truth when I'm away from him, but when I'm with him my mind tends to go where his goes. Is this my fault?" - I think this is possible for children, yes? So we could say it is a case of folie à deux and folie imposée ... maybe. But not quite because the child can think for himself (mostly? sometimes?) outside the presence of a parent. Still, his free will is compromised by being dependent on a parent, and possibly societally ("obey your elders"). 

But what about when it comes to adults committing crimes under peer pressure?

Folie à deux doesn't typically work because a free will, the ability to come and go, the ability to make your own decisions and know the law, and follow the law, and an ability to be and act in an autonomous manner is assumed after you turn the age of 18. You'd have to make a pretty iron-clad case that these things were restricted all or most of the time for you by someone. If you were able to leave the house, walk the dog, go to the grocery store, talk on the phone, and go to a job every day, then it shows you don't have the kind of restrictions that would keep you from making a lawful choice. Still defense lawyers sometimes try to legitimize folie à deux anyway. 

This link tells why the defense typically doesn't work. 

No wonder psychologists don't want to give folie à deux much credence. "Your honor, my client has folie à deux and was unduly influenced to commit crimes because of it." - Thank God this is not happening and that no doctor can diagnose it. 

But the law about being pressured also means that you must resist sycophancy. That might be harder to do in a country where sycophancy to a leader is extreme and expected to the point of worship, and where there is also a double standard about it: sycophancy to others besides "the leader" is punishable, like if you follow a father into a life of crime, or if you follow the leader of your troop out of the battlefield and all go AWOL, or if you try to escape a country like North Korea. 

It is notable to me anyway, that sycophancy is so popular when it comes to people with no empathy, who start wars (whether killing wars or trade wars or silent civil wars), who bully others, who lie their way through life, who harm lots of other people, who make rash irrational decisions, who often show a disregard for the law, and whose main goal in life is to get as much attention in life as possible (narcissistic supply), get as much money as possible even if it's done unethically, and to get ever more power, control and domination.  

Why would anyone want to be a sycophant to someone like that? Why wouldn't they opt for a free mind instead, a mind unfettered with worry about a tyrant's disapproval every time they had a thought that was different than the tyrant's? Wouldn't it be better to be out of the tight confines of sycophancy? Wouldn't it be better for your mind to go free than to be deemed, under pressure and tyranny, to be no more important than having a lock or silencer on your free-roaming investigations, ideas and perspectives? 

Is it possible for folie à deux to be more common among a group of narcissists, or is it more common for sycophants to adopt it?

In a lot of ways, sycophants and narcissists are kind of alike. They both are looking for rewards in relationships and with each other, and they both tend to give up on ethics to do so. 

The sycophant is looking to be rewarded by the narcissist either monetarily, or through position, or through reputation, or through membership, or attention. Something is going on where they want something from the narcissist and are willing to prostrate and sweet-talk to get it. They wouldn't need to be a sycophant if it wasn't for something they value and want. They could speak their mind, not worry if the narcissist approves, not care if their thoughts or opinions on a matter match the narcissist's - they'd be their own individual and not be afraid of being their authentic self. 

There is usually something in the sycophant where they feel they cannot be their genuine self, to be self aware, and self accepting. In a way, it's about giving into a narcissist via shame. And sycophants give into narcissists a lot and often find themselves so deep into doing and saying things for a narcissist, even evil-doings, that they can lose sense of who they really are beyond what the narcissist wants them to be. 

Some sycophants are expected to be the fall-guy for the narcissist so much so that they eventually reach a point where they can go no further into immoral actions and places that the narcissists comes to expect from them. They then have to give up on the rewards and being in the good graces of the narcissist. 

This isn't a relationship based on compromise.

The narcissist won't hear the sycophant's ideas and thoughts, and the narcissist won't really care about the sycophant past what the sycophant can do. It's also usually based on how much and far the sycophant will go to please the narcissist. How much will the sycophant give up on themselves, their dignity, their safety, their dreams, their authenticity, their own thoughts and feelings, their own experiences, for the narcissist?

The narcissist will always be testing the sycophant to take on more of this too. 

The narcissist, in contrast to the sycophant, is looking for admiration, attention, domination, power and control, and in order to get it, they have to have sycophants who will constantly promote them, bring in people the narcissist thinks are important for their self image and reputation, call them a genius, make admiring gestures, say what the narcissist tells them to say, speak in the way the narcissist wants them to speak, do what the narcissist wants them to do and generally "follow" them. They will also be expected to have the same enemies as the narcissist. If the narcissist bullies an individual, the sycophant is either expected to enable it or to go along with it, and sometimes even take on the role as the main perpetrator.

For the sycophant it is a job of servitude, and if there are few or no rewards, a kind of slavery. Unfortunately the vulnerable, the disabled, the sick, the traumatized, the prejudiced against, and children can be lured into slavery for a narcissist. There isn't much power and control to achieve for a narcissist without a sycophant, or two, or ten, and narcissists think it is easier to find and keep  sycophants among the disadvantaged or children. 

Sycophancy might not be so bad if narcissists weren't cruel and didn't use blackmail, threats, manipulations, fake grand-standing, lying, punishments and coercive control to get sycophancy out of others, if it was totally a volunteer job where you could get a good recommendation if you wanted to quit. 

But narcissists often get enraged when you quit. They want you to suffer. They want to punish you. Only they are supposed to do the firing. Most of them attack you for quitting the sycophant role. They look at it as a grave disloyalty. They look at it as a deep betrayal. But is there really any loyalty in sycophancy since it is based on rewards? And is there really any loyalty when narcissists only look at people as potential sycophants? In other words, isn't it co-disloyalty?

"Will this sycophant be a good one or a bad one? How will they compare to others? Do I need to run a competition between them all to see who is best at it? Do I need to throw away the sycophants who aren't doing enough of what I want them to do?"

And they love the competition. One of their sycophants can be dangerous to another one of their sycophants, and the narcissist will insist they still need to compete for narcissistic rewards and approval. 

That's just sick. If this is being done to children it's especially sick.

You'd think they would make exceptions for their children in this regard. Like: "No, honey. You can't be a sycophant. You're too young for that job. You should spend your childhood playing, laughing, learning, and being healthy. You can't handle it at this age. If you grow up and really want to be a sycophant, then that's up to you. But not even over my dead body will I want you to be a sycophant." - but no, a narcissist will traumatize a child, bully them, threaten them, lie to them, wreck their self esteem and play abandonment games to prime them for a sycophant job for parental use!

And then they will especially seek revenge on a child who no longer can work in that capacity. Richard Grannon talked in one of his videos about narcissists who wouldn't even take care of or visit their young child dying in a hospital, because these narcissists thought the child was a disappointment to them. There is no getting around the fact that most of them are too transactional and very cold-hearted individuals.

So in that way they are worse than a lot of their sycophants.

However, there are usually a lot of sycophants around a narcissist unless the narcissist is old, and because of the numbers of sycophants, and because they want "the rewards" mostly to themselves (there are already too many sycophants vying for those rewards), so they can be quite a bit more menacing for that reason than one lone narcissist. 

And the other thing to take into consideration is that sycophants can be other narcissists. Maybe even most of them are. They want power and control too, but have to work their way up the sycophancy ladder. 

Granted children, even adult children, the disabled, the traumatized, etc. don't necessarily know what they are getting into. This is especially true if they are relating to a covert narcissist. 

For instance, let's choose a child who was rejected in childhood and adolescence for not being enough of a sycophant as our example. Perhaps this child doesn't know they were rejected for those reasons. They just knew they weren't loved and that's about all they know. Perhaps they also know their parent wasn't like other parents. 

So they don't have a very strong connection with the parent afterwards. Maybe they don't have any contact with their parent when they reach adulthood. If they see the parent, the parent puts them down which reinforces, in the child's mind, that they aren't loved. But nothing is new there and let us say there is radical acceptance of this fact by the child even though it is not what the child wants. 

So time goes on and the parent spends most of their time with the golden child while the rejected child scraps together a life for themselves. They are learning to live autonomously from the parent while the golden child is not. The golden child is called upon a lot and there is a lot of parentification and infantilization in their relationship. 

But then the golden child is not producing enough sycophancy and not enough narcissistic supply. Most narcissists do reach a point where sycophancy and narcissistic supply is not good enough in any relationship. They also get sick of relationships they are in because they are novelty seekers. 

So the parent wants the rejected adult child back. It'll rock the golden child's world, but narcissists typically don't mind if it does. This is very common, by the way. Because of the love bombing and future faking the child is receiving, they think that their parent has had a change of mind and heart and found that they actually loved their rejected child after all. No, but the child doesn't know that because the love bombing is convincing them that the parent's intentions are sincere: to love. 

Often the child doesn't know they are being groomed to be a sycophant and source of narcissistic supply at this point until they are near rejection again from the parent or just after they've been rejected again. 

Another example is a person who comes from a highly functional loving family. They, and everyone else in their family takes good care of each other and "goes to bat" for each other, just the opposite of a narcissistic family. It is all voluntary. The members have a lot of empathy for one another and were taught to have empathy through example by empathetic elders.

If a person is sick, or has had an accident, the family wants that member to recover and to be their best individual selves. They love and respect individuality because it means the help and expertise is diverse.

So this kind of person enters a relationship with a narcissist thinking that this is going to continue with them, only to find out that sycophancy, impolite undignified conversations peppered with insults is the standard fare, as well as the narcissist's insistence they get their way all of the time and that there will be no compromise. 

So these are the un-intentional sycophants who didn't know that they were supposed to be in a sycophant role, or were even called upon to be a sycophant. They thought the intentions of the narcissist were love and compassion. 

By the way, love and compassion are the two things you will never find with a narcissist (though they can pretend). The discard and torturing you over not supplying enough sycophancy, enough narcissistic supply, enough mirroring and mind-slaving is proof of it. 

In terms of narcissists, they are sycophants themselves in enough situations until they gain power over others.

If you have had narcissists in your own life, you know they can be beating you up in a car, or dropping you off on a road in a rage to walk home by yourself, or throw food at you and not talk to you for days at a time, and then turn it all off in an instant when someone who is rich, or famous, or has a lot of clout, or is popular, or who they want to impress, walks in the door. They are sticky sweet to these people who come to see them; they fawn all over them and compliment them endlessly; they do things for them that they'd never do for you and you live with them! And you think, "Who on earth are they?! Are they the mean person or the nice person, and how come the mean person and the nice person aren't anything alike, that they are too drastically different from one another, like two different people?"

If a sycophant goes out of the realm of the narcissistic cult and no longer has this kind of Jekyll/Hyde personality where the cruel side of them is exceptionally cruel, and the nice side of them is so sticky sweet that they might as well put a big shining yellow lollipop in the mouth of people they idealize, then they probably aren't a narcissist. If they keep up with the Jekyll/Hyde treatment of other people, then they are probably a narcissist, or at least a Cluster B. 

No one who has an authentic self wants or needs to be Jekyll and Hyde. 

So the answer to "Is it possible for folie à deux to be more common among a group of narcissists, or is it more common for sycophants to adopt it?" It's both. It's both because sycophants can be other narcissists and often are. They, like the narcissist they are "following", often expect rewards for "thinking like the narcissist", otherwise they'd just be themselves and let the chips fall where they may when they speak. If an authentic person is rejected or punished by the narcissist for not being a sycophant, so be it; they still have a personality, interests, perspectives and inner strength to weather the storm. Whereas for someone who has put a lot into sycophancy, and given up a lot to be a sycophant, and they are narcissistically inclined themselves, they can go through a major narcissistic collapse from their leader's discard, making themselves out to be horribly betrayed victims. But that is also the price for being in relationships for rewards, and the price for being the sycophant of a "discarding narcissist" since most narcissists discard, and the price for giving up yourself to please someone who could care less about other people (especially sycophants because it is a user-ship type of relationship for them). 

The fact that narcissists feel they need to reward to get people into relationships with them speaks to their hidden shame and agendas. If they stopped giving out rewards or promises, or idealizations and flattery, would people walk away from them?

Probably. Usually who they have around them are reward-driven people, so yes, people would walk away from them.

No one should be in a close personal relationship for the purpose of rewards (rewards are about having extrinsic value to another person, not intrinsic value - so no, it's not a good relationship because of that).

The fact that narcissists feel the need to punish and hurt people (and children!) because these people no longer want to be a sycophant, or can't deal with it to begin with, also speaks to the folly of trying to punish people for not being sycophants. The purpose of the punishments, I take it, is to get these people to submit to further sycophancy out of fear. That just doesn't work unless they are trapped! And trapping people to serve you is against the law. And it's kind of a disgusting reason to have a relationship with someone to begin with.

Whether a narcissist is flattering, pedestal-ing and rewarding,  or whether they are punishing, threatening, and trying to destroy someone else in a pre-adolescent name calling way because the other person isn't a sycophant enough, none of these are ever going to make a good relationship full of realness, lovingness, care. It's a desperate mimic of a relationship, a junkie relationship, and a limited one at that (as in "any relationship will do, even a bad one where people are after rewards from me or they are kicked to the curb by me because they are willing to sacrifice the rewards to get away from me"). - makes a lot of sense, doesn't it - said facetiously, of course. 

FURTHER READING

Folie à deux and the Sycophant - Google AI article followed by other articles on the topic

 
Folie à deux and the Narcissist - Google AI article followed by other articles on the topic

Folie a deux among a narcissistic group of people - Google AI article followed by other articles on the topic

Folie à deux and Antipersonality Disorder - Google AI article followed by other articles on the topic

Folie à deux and Psychopaths - Google AI article followed by other articles on the topic

The Malevolent Side of Human Nature: A Meta-Analysis and Critical Review of the Literature on the Dark Triad (Narcissism, Machiavellianism, and Psychopathy) - professional study by Peter Muris, Harald Merckelbach, Henry Otgaar and Ewout H Meijer for Research Gate

How Do Dictatorships Survive in the 21st Century?
Early in the twenty-first century, the number of democracies surged past the tally of authoritarian states worldwide. By 2019, dictatorships outnumbered democracies. Why do they keep rising from the ashes? - by Sergei Guriev and Daniel Treisman for Carnegie

The dictator who got away - by Adam LeBor for The New York Times

Should you go "no contact" with an abusive parent or partner?

This is a personal decision.

However, in making the personal decision there are some questions you may want to ask yourself.

These are questions I personally found invaluable about how much to withdraw from a person. It is a rather simplistic formula, so I have included psychologist, Judy Rosenberg's videos below to give you some other perspectives on it, and a video by popular life coach, Lisa Romano, as well as some articles at the very end.

With partners, or friends (or potential partners, or friends):

I ask myself does this person care about my feelings? Do they care about how they effect me? If the answer is "no", then I conclude they don't love me or care about me. Note: I also conclude they don't care about me even if they switch to concern and care later on. In other words, I don't believe that love bombing and hoovering to be authentic love. Love and caring does not switch on and off; if it is real it is a constant (Jeckyll and Hyde traits are common among abusers, and not common at all among the rest of the population).

The next question I ask is whether they seem to want to dominate me. Do they interrupt? Do they listen, or are they more concerned with responding, in making come-backs, persuading, lecturing, patronizing, in giving advice or demands? Do they get in my face when they try to talk? Are they more concerned about their feelings, than about both of our feelings? Is there any shame-talk going on? To me this is a bad sign of them wanting the relationship to be about them, and their agendas, rather than about us, as a team. Domination also shows they probably don't love or care.

The next question I ask myself is: Does it matter that they don't love me or care about me? The answer is usually yes, I care that they don't care or love me. It's a one-sided relationship in that case, which can never be close, and is likely to be painful. If it is clear that their relationship agenda is about them dominating me, they will be in pain over the fact that they cannot dominate me, and I will be in pain because I believe that love, caring and respect is not about domination. The course of action I take then, is to at least disengage enough so that they are not part of my life in any real sense of the word. I can see them at a party, or function, be polite, very occasionally be helpful, or keep out of their way, but that is about it.

The next question is are they kind? Usually a lack of kindness points to some kind of abusiveness.

If I see clearly that they are abusive (and particularly if they practice rounds of idealize, devalue, discard in their relationships, display overbearing behavior, perspecticide and invalidation, shaming, verbal abuse and excuses which don't add up), then that becomes the deal-breaker for which I go no contact, or at least do my my best at avoiding them (note: that wasn't always the case when I was young and groomed to feel that abuse was normal, but it is now).

These days I want to do my utmost to not become attached to people who, from the beginning, cannot love me or authentically connect, cannot care about me because they want me in a role submitting myself to their will, cannot be kind to others. So before any kind of significant connection starts, if I see a lot of signs of perspecticide and invalidation, teasing (chiding) and haughty-know-it-all behavior, I disengage at that point. One reason I do this is because I feel I don't have any more time to invest in relationships that have a potential to be filled with rancor, triangulation or disturbing issues.

However, if you have children with an abusive partner, going "no contact" will prove to be very difficult, so my best advice is to go to a domestic violence counselor to help you set up boundaries and keep a record of infractions to those boundaries (note: abusive people do not like boundaries, and keep trying to side-step them, but they will also most likely, unless they are violent, respect boundaries if the law is involved ... Domestic violence counselors are usually up on all of the laws within your county). In the meantime, here are some good boundaries to start with:

1. No talking about personal issues other than the children's welfare and schedules. If your partner starts in on personal subjects, or attacks you verbally, or wants to argue, disengage.
2. If your partner insults you, remind him that you will not be responding to insults, and that he needs to stick to the subject of the children.
These are just examples. You may have to keep a list of things that you expect your ex to say and do, and have a plan in action in terms of how you will respond.

With parents:

As far as parents go, the deal breakers should be the same for them too. A parent who does not love you, or care about you is not a good parent. If they are abusive too, they are a nightmare parent. A parent who is not kind to others (or your siblings, other parent, their siblings, or is someone who disposes of, or derides others) will probably eventually not be kind to you either. However, it is sometimes impossible to avoid your parents altogether, especially at family functions. Some abusive parents can be super invasive, goading, taunting, laughing derisively at you, and triggering to be around. They can make family times miserable. You can avoid them by not going to family functions at all (which is what a lot of survivors find themselves doing in the end), or you can do your best at setting boundaries before or during the event so that you have the most minimal contact.

If the parent is dangerous, threatening, sending their flying monkeys (bullying partners) your way, then the answer should be self explanatory in terms of whether you should have contact.

This is not to diminish the pain of the realization of what they are about, or of having to separate yourself from them, but many people survive going no contact with a parent who has spent a lot of time in their lives inflicting emotional wounds, and come out, after an intense grieving process, with flying colors. There are steps I will recommend to make the transition as smooth and healthy as possible, ones that I found that helped me, but for now I will just say that abuse almost always escalates (gets worse over time), and there is usually always a cyclical pattern of love bomb, denigrate, dismiss and destroy (Dr. Judy Rosenberg's words). Also, it is imperative with abusive parents to get financially independent of them. They use money as a weapon, and to justify constant erroneous guilt trips and punishments (abuse).

However, children of abuse do not always see abuse as awful because they were groomed by the parent to normalize abuse as a child. Children who have been abused a lot often become trauma bonded to an abusive parent, making the separation more painful. The second-guessing of whether you are doing the right thing by disengaging from your parent, becomes another huge hurdle along with the grieving process. All child abuse victims have been taught at a young age to feel guilty for any and all actions that do not meet their parents approval. However, my thought on this is that they have lost their rights to approve or disapprove of what you do, period, if they abuse or condone the abuse of others who have hurt you.

To get a good sense of whether you are a victim of child abuse, see this post.  For general information on what abuse is and who perpetrates abuse, see this post.

videos of psychologist, Judy Rosenberg, discussing about whether
to go "no contact":

PART I:

PART II:

PART III:

from life coach, Lisa Romano:

further reading:

The one thing Narcissistic Abuse victims never seem to regret: going no contact -- from the Narcissists, Sociopaths, and Flying Monkeys -- oh My! blog

What to expect after leaving your narcissist and going “no contact” -- by Sharie Stines, Psy.D. for Psych Central
Recommended: Recovering from Narcissistic Abuse, Part II: The No-Contact Rule -- by  Andrea Schneider, LCSW

Recommended: Narcissistic Parents: Contact or Not? Making Decisions About Toxic Parents -- by Karyl McBride, Ph.D.

Recommended: 7 Signs It's Time to Cut (Toxic) Family Ties -- by Genevieve Shaw Brown for ABC News

Recommended: Signs You Need To Go No-Contact With Your Family -- from the Rebel Circus website

Recommended: What does going no contact mean? -- from the Narcissists, Sociopaths, and Flying Monkeys -- Oh My blog

Recommended: No Contact – The Scapegoat’s Last Resort -- by Glynis Sherwood, MEd, CCC, RCC

Recommended: 5 Ways To Escape An Abusive Relationship -- by the staff of Your Tango for Psych Central

Navigating "No-Contact": When Estrangement from Your Mother is the Healthiest Choice -- by Bethany Webster

The Myth of “It Takes Two to Ruin a Relationship” -- by Sharie Stines, Psy.D. for Psych Central

Why "No Contact", Intentional Detachment and Support Help the Trauma Bond-- by Rhonda Freeman, PhD

'Life Without My Mother Is a Joy': Women Talk About Divorcing Their Moms -- by Samantha Ladwig

Reddit forums: Raised By a Narcissist -- long discussion among many members about going "no contact" with their abusive families.

When No Contact as an Adult-Child Is Necessary -- by A.J. Mahari (tells of his life with a father who is alcoholic diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder and Narcissistic Personality Disorder)

Recommended: Letting Go of Toxic People, Even If it’s a Family Member -- for The Pragmatic Parent website

Why I Stopped Talking to My Family -- by Ashley Davison

No Contact -- by Danu Morrigan from the Daughters of Narcissistic Mothers website

How To Achieve No Contact With A Toxic Or Abusive Person -- from the Femsplain website

What does going no contact mean? -- from the Narcissists, Sociopaths, and Flying Monkeys -- Oh My blog

5 Reasons Why Adult Children Estrange From Their Parents -- by Kim Bryan for We Have Kids Magazine

Recommended: Letter From a Narcissist’s “True Self” -- by Lauren Bennett

How To Deal With A Narcissist: The Only Method Guaranteed To Work -- from the Conscious Rethink website (it has a lot of ads, but it is a good, worthwhile article to read)

Found on Facebook (author unknown):

love bombing by narcissists and sociopaths

Note: when I talk about narcissists and sociopaths (Antisocial Personality Disorder), I am talking about the clinical condition in the DSM. See my post on what abuse is and who perpetrates it HERE.

Here is an excellent article about how narcissists groom people to believe they are soul mates.

In this post, author Alex Miles describes the love bombing manipulative tactic as:

... initially carried out through excessive phone calls, text messages, emails, the constant desire to be in close contact whether virtual or physical and the desire to be connected almost every moment of every day ...

... Love bombers are masters at flattery; they will constantly be telling their target how much they adore them, how beautiful they are, how funny, talented, special, precious and any other sweet nothing they can think of. Love bombers will make their partner feel as though they are the only person in the world for them, telling them how grateful they are to finally be understood, what terrible previous relationships they had, how they have found the love of their lives and that they are for-sure certified soul mates ...

Love bombing by narcissists and sociopaths is fraudulent because it is designed to draw a person into a loving, trusting relationship without the intentions of making the relationship loving or trustworthy. Love bombing for narcissists is about obtaining narcissistic supply (attention, flattery and power and control over people) and for sociopaths it is about obtaining IOUs (guilt trips, control, exploitation, extortions, blackmail, and either brutal shaming kinds of discards or vengeful retaliations over the sociopath's need for absolute dominance and sadism in the relationship).

The fact that it is a fraudulent set-up can deeply wound and shock its victims.

You will know that the love-bombing-idealizing-"can't-live-without-you" person is a narcissist or sociopath if they suddenly switch off the love, i.e. stop the behavior without warning and become hyper critical, rejecting and prickly instead. In addition, the reasons for stopping the flow of love with silent treatments and criticisms won't make sense, as most people with normal constitutions know that genuine love cannot be so easily turned off like a faucet. In fact, the person who professed to love you so madly becomes cruel, edgy, dismissive and sometimes even seething. At its core, love bombing is about psychological splitting.

Narcissists and sociopaths do this to see if you will try to please and placate them (i.e. the victim giving the perpetrator what they want).

In fact, the cruelty gets worse and worse over time (sometimes in a short amount of time, sometimes over years) to see how many and what kinds of excuses, lies, gaslighting, degradation, bullying and dodging the victim will endure before backing away and breaking free from narcissistic or sociopathic bonds. In that way, victims are treated like lab rats where the scientists amp the voltage on the electricity on the rats to see how much pain they will withstand while still accepting bonding with their electrocutors.

In fact, real life (without the rats) reveals that victims of child abuse will typically endure the pain the longest and at the higher levels with their partners because they were taught by their abusive parents to normalize abuse. That is a classic textbook fact that has been studied extensively. It puts them in considerably more danger than people who come from normal supportive families.

If the victim came from a very protective normal family with a lot of inter-generational support, the victim will exit the relationship early on, much earlier than the victims of child abuse, thereby surviving the incidents much better.

Narcissists and sociopaths do not necessarily know these facts, so their experiments with amp-ing up the pain and cruelty on their victims, and figuring out when to enact their discards are purely for self serving, trauma bonding purposes.

The cruelty of love bombing followed by a discard feels very much like date rape. The trauma from the experience is extremely similar in duration and in terms of how it feels for victims. In other words, they accept the relationship (or date), and are brutally treated and abused (or raped) by their perpetrator.

However in terms of society's attitudes, date rape is taken much more seriously where an arrest can made, and where the staff at a hospital can help intervene to get the victim the help she (or he) needs.

With brutal love-bombing-idealization, devalue, discard treatment from a narcissist or sociopath, the victim has no real support from any kind of authority unless he or she goes searching for it. Traumatized victims tend to self-isolate, so it is often very hard to get the help needed. This puts victims at an extreme disadvantage in terms of feeling safe from their perpetrators compared to date rape victims.

If the love-bombing-idealization, devalue, discard treatment came from a parent, the trauma is even more pronounced than it is between partners because it is in a children's DNA to trust a parent to care about them, at least when they are still a child. Love bombing and idealizations from previously abusive parents should never be trusted. Parents love bomb their children out of their own insecurities: this is very common when the child is not sticking to the role the narc parent prescribed (highly successful scapegoats and failure criminal addicted goldens are highly challenging for a narc parent and love bombing gets them back into their children's lives to get the roles straightened out, or so they hope). Children who are in the public eye may make previously abusive rejecting parents highly uncomfortable where love bombing seems like the perfect antidote to avoid the fall-out of being exposed. Children who are highly successful in law or law enforcement may also make abusive parents uncomfortable enough to love bomb. These are all highly manipulative and untrustworthy, but many children fall for love bombing (at least once), if only to have a relationship that they have never had with their parent, a loving relationship. Most will eventually find out that the love was not real at all.

Why narcissists use love bombing:

The love bombing maneuver is the first move in a narcissist's bag of awful tricks and one he (or she) is most comfortable with and provides the most satisfaction in terms of obtaining narcissistic supply. It is gratifying to the narcissist that it often works, and that victims are so easily susceptible to it.

It most resembles seduction, but it is more insidious if only because there is a brutal ending to the seduction.

The targets chosen for love bombing tend to have low self esteem, are uneasy about their own decision-making capabilities, are susceptible to being talked into things, are highly empathetic, seem gullible, and were most likely groomed in childhood to believe they deserved abuse and/or abandonment (and are therefore love starved). They might have also been taught as children that they didn't deserve boundaries of privacy either (therefore were/are open to inappropriate interrogations and enmeshment). They may not, as children, had any true ownership and decision-making power over their own toys, projects or clothes.

The narcissist can find that indecisive, insecure empaths bend to his will a lot more easily than other types of people, so that is why they are chosen. Adult children of child abuse are hand-picked by narcissists and sociopaths as soul mates because they seem like the easiest targets to persuade -- in all kinds of ways. One reason why narcissists and sociopaths feel that victims of child abuse are their soul mates is that they think that the victim of child abuse will put the narcissist at the center of their world and attention, just like the target put their abusive parent at the center of their world when they were growing up. The narcissist slowly inserts the power and control into the relationship, like a poison, including making decisions for the victim. They try out making their "soul mates" walk on eggshells first, then perhaps a little love starving or silent treatment here and there, taking away friends and family slowly and deliberately too (isolation), testing gaslighting strategies and trauma bonding strategies after that, and eventually when they have their victims into a state of bondage and confusion, they explain away the abuse with blaming, blame shifting, confusing flipped tales, deflections, nit picking, projection, lectures and dodging (in other words, word salad arguments). This strips the victim of autonomy, thinking for himself and control over his own life, the same way the parents took these things away from the victim when he (or she) was a child.

In fact, the abusive partner tries to groom his lover into a child-like marionette for himself.

Effective cult leaders love bomb in order to obtain new recruits and getting people to worship them.

Why sociopaths use love bombing:

Sociopaths use love bombing in order to get what they want from the other person. They don't demand flattery and adulation so much as exploitation. They want to get as much as they can for as little as they can. They use what ever power they have at their disposal to get more out of a situation than they give.

Sociopaths are notorious for price bargaining and expect IOUs over any kindness or mercy at all. In the movie "Shelter", about the homeless in new York City, a man lets a homeless woman sleep on a hard concrete boiler room floor in a building so long as she provides him with sex (the sex is demeaning and sometimes brutal as well). There is a power imbalance, and the man uses his power over the desperate homeless woman who is caught outside in a raging snow storm with nowhere to sleep for the night, and exploits the situation for his own gratitude: it is typical sociopathic exploitative behavior with a degrading IOU attached to it.

Obviously this scene has nothing to do with love bombing, but a sociopath may think love bombing is necessary if he wants something from someone with more wealth or social prestige. Love bombing is also used on people who can get him out of jail or prison. He might feel love bombing is necessary to get co-operation for a revenge of some sort. Love bombing might be necessary to take advantage of a situation which the sociopath thinks will provide him with a life of little work, more relaxation, more leisure, more wealth. Power is sought for its own sake, not for the sake of an empathetic vision, though the sociopath might pretend he is an empath to get into a position of power (and later try to stage things, trump up conspiracies, create confusion and chaos to solidify his power).

While sociopaths can try to work up the same kinds of gaslighting and trauma-bonding strategies over their victims that narcissists use, sometimes they take control right away, making a person hostage.

Sociopaths take the path of least resistance to get what they want and love bombing is used only when the sociopath feels it must be used to obtain one of his desires (usually at the expense of the other person).

Love bombing is used for conquest only.

Sociopaths tend to work alone as much as they can. They rarely trust others. They also tend to think that everyone is too stupid to pull off the effective manipulative maneuvers that they deem they are superior at.

How to tell if the love is real or not real

It is sometimes really hard to tell if the love and soul-mate pronouncements are real or not real. The best way to tell is to study the traits of Narcissistic Personality Disorder and Antisocial Personality Disorder (another link) to see if the person love bombing you has any of the traits of these personality disorders, though it is hard to tell in the beginning.

In the meantime, you may want to figure out if all of the love-of-my-life pronouncements are for-real or a scam (before you get hurt). Here is one way to tell:

On narcissists:

Narcissists can't stand any kind or amount of criticism:

The love bombing will stop for narcissists if they feel at all criticized by you, or if they feel slighted in any way, or you want to take the relationship really slow. Love bombing is also likely to stop when you are comfortable with them, and under their control. If you really want to find out whether you are having a whirl-wind romance with a narcissist, criticize them over something minor (perhaps about creativity, boundaries, respect, empathy, anything that narcissists tend to lack) and see if they blow up at you, or get distant, insulting and rejecting. They cannot stand to be seen as a regular person with flaws. While normal people will bristle over being criticized, and can feel hurt, narcissists will either go on the attack, or feel so wounded and hurt that they will withdraw from you and try to make you feel insecure about their love. You will quickly get the feeling that they cannot handle criticism at all, in any kind of normal way.

Narcissists tend to lack creativity. They tend to be very formulaic. So, if you are going to criticize them, how they could improve one of their projects with creativity, would be the area to try out the experiment. Watch their expressions.

Narcissists can't stand boundaries and the fact that you think about other people or things other than them:

The other thing that narcissists hate is boundaries. One of the reason they love bomb you and appear to have the greatest sympathy for you is to break through your boundaries and get to know what makes you tick.

Narcissists have a track record of idealize, devalue, discard cycles in their relationships and they pretend they are victims in their past relationships:

Right off: real victims go to therapy, and they are usually in therapy for a long time, and often with other survivors, and they usually get diagnosed with PTSD. They usually read a lot about abuse and have an understanding of the subject. Note: do not confuse therapy with couples counseling which narcissists are sometimes willing to do. We're talking domestic abuse counseling, narcissistic abuse counseling or trauma-related counseling.

Narcissists almost never go to therapy unless their reputations are on the line from public exposure, or they don't want to lose narcissistic supply from a lover or spouse, or they are court-ordered. Narcissists blame others and try to suck in others (empaths) for sympathy for their pretend-victim status.

Narcissists also tend to take up other relationships (especially with their victims' rivals or best friends -- anything that hurts the target) very quickly after a relationship has broken off. They also tend to take extravagant vacations and cruises, or go on expensive shopping sprees, or buy luxury items after the dissolution of their relationships, whereas normal people tend to isolate themselves and get depressed. Real victims also tend to get very skittish about getting into new relationships after they have been victimized and tend to want to go very, very slow: in other words, they are generally NOT the love bombing types of people.

So, if your date (or new friend) has a lot of victim stories, find out if they have gotten treated in therapy for it and how long (get proof). Find out if they just left a relationship (big red flag as real victims don't go hunting for a new relationship or love bomb a new person right after a breakup). Dig into their past to find out if they leave victims behind or if they were victimized because they were groomed to take abuse as a child (child abuse). Are they a scapegoat of their family, or are they a golden child? If they are a scapegoat, they are more likely to be real victims. If they are a golden child be aware that over half of golden children grow up to be bullies with entitlement issues (making them primed to be a narcissist).

If there are also signs of idealize, devalue, discard in their past relationships, you are probably dealing with a love-bombing narcissist who manipulates people.

Narcissists are glib and arrogant:

Most narcissists pretend they are experts and superior at everything and that you need to listen to their expertise, advice and lectures. They also tend to be charming. They give a little too much advice. They pretend to be interested in all of the same things you are interested in (mirroring), but they act as though they have superior knowledge of those interests.

They ask way too many questions of you while not revealing even a tiny fraction of those same subjects about themselves. Do not mistake this manipulation tactic as their being interested or enthralled with you.

On sociopaths:

They are also a Cluster B like a narcissist, so there are some similarities, but the difference is that they don't necessarily go into a rage when you criticize them, they don't have the kind of abuse cycles that narcissists do (they tend to discard you for good and move on to other prey), they don't like societal attention or detection, they tend to fib quite a lot more than narcissists, and they tend to be even more exploitative than narcissists.

Sociopaths look very uncomfortable when a conversation topic turns to empathy.

Watch their facial expressions or boredom when this topic comes up. Rarely will they look engaged or look people in the eye when this topic takes a dominant place. Mostly they look away. If they do engage, they will not be in agreement with an empathetic view-point. Sociopaths are into punishments, retaliation and they make "they deserve what they had coming to them" kinds of statements.

Sociopaths hate it when you want to slow things down

That is because they want what they want, and they want it NOW! The more you slow things down, or show them that they aren't any more important than others in your life, the less they can overtake you with their own agenda. Sociopaths are not good at wait ... and wait .... and wait.

Sociopaths aren't attracted to you when they feel that knowing you is of no benefit to them:

If you think that the person you just got to know is a sociopath, and you want him to disengage, appear really boring, to have nothing that will be of interest to him (finances, connections, compassion for his plight, sex, anything you can think of). Giving back any gifts is also a pretty good idea. Dressing down is another good idea. With sociopaths, you have to appear confident in yourself and your boundaries. They like easy prey, and if you make it clear that your boundaries are firm, that you are surrounded by protection, and that you have nothing to offer them, they usually go away unless they are totally obsessed with you.

If you are an empath, pretend NOT to be an empath. They target empaths by the boatloads for abuse.

If they are obsessed with you, or keep trying to contact you when you have said "no", or they want to make an example of you, call the police (with evidence). Sometimes criticizing them and/or exposing them will usually make them back off too. They may want to retaliate because of the actions you take, but they usually won't if you make it very clear that there is absolutely nothing about you that is of any use to them, including any ego boosts or reciprocity of feelings, and that you are surrounded by other people who love you and protect you.

Also making it known that you don't keep secrets, especially theirs, can work too.

Sociopaths generally insult others a lot (it is their favorite pastime), and especially behind their backs in long cynical, if sometimes humorous condemnations, so if you insult them a little in return, especially if you are the opposite sex, that is a language they understand. Make sure not to get taken in by their escalations of bigger and bigger insults: you just want to send them the one-time message to back off and leave you alone.

Generally, it is not a good idea to insult anyone (it is a form of verbal abuse), but if done right, and once, it can also be one of the few ways sociopaths understand that there is nothing in the relationship for them. Contempt, disgust and disapproval are emotional-type boundaries that tend to work so much better on sociopaths than, say, telling them how hurt you are by their actions and their complete lack of empathy, why you need to be left alone, why you can't seem to tolerate their particular personality or ways of doing things. The former usually gets them going off in another direction, whereas the latter keeps them coming back at you.

Making it very clear that you won't be taken in by ANY love bombing at all, no matter how much they try, and showing disgust about it and them may be a good idea when it comes to the sociopath.

Sociopaths leave a trail of victims who no longer want to associate with them.

That is because the wounding, threats and betrayal that sociopaths do is great.

If you talk to the sociopath's victims, they usually complain of the sociopath's need for pathological control. Sociopaths don't give up on a "punishment" or other sanction/maltreatment unless they have what they want from you. Sociopaths are also noted for using medications, mind control, cult-like persuasion, brainwashing, forced addiction to alcohol or drugs on their victims, threats, staged incidents, re-telling of the events or feelings of others, scare tactics, or some other penance to control their victims.

"You should never have done that" or "said that" is a typical phrase of the sociopath if and when you look into their past, tell of a past incident you don't like that they were part of, or even contact someone from their past.

If the sociopath has children, most of them try to get out of child support payments at some point during their lives whether they are rich or poor, so that is another sign. In general, sociopaths like to break agreements, promises and boundaries.

All sociopaths tend to be sadistic in some way. They get off  on hurting or punishing others who do not go along with their agendas. They particularly enjoy the punishment of animals and small children. So look into their past for these signs.

Sociopaths have very few, if any, close friends.

Love bombing of a child after the child has been discarded (estranged, shunned, punished by ostracism by a narcissistic or sociopathic parent for a few years):

When narcissistic and sociopathic parents love bomb their estranged children to try to get them back in the family or back into a role again, it is called hoovering. I have yet to do a post on hoovering, but basically it comes down to love bombing with the idealize, devalue, discard cycle of abuse (the idealization stage being the love bombing stage).

Children are often not especially valuable sources of narcissistic supply. Most children do not idealize a parent beyond ten years old. The reason why is that they were meant, by biology, to grow up and move away to start their own families. They are also not good supply because they know too much about their parent, and are usually onto them even when they don't say so. Information within a family is so porous and leaky that the narcissist is more likely to be dealing with shame and depression in the long run, especially in old age, if they try to turn their children into narcissistic supply.

But narcissists are bold and brazen, and most try to make their children into supply anyway, just for the hell of it. They overwhelmingly use triangulation, gaslighting, trauma-bonding, parentifying, infantilizing, perfectionism and word salad arguments as their main on-going weapons against their own children.

Estranged, ostracized, shunned, rejected children are very, very common for narcissistic and sociopathic parents. It is usually the family scapegoats that are left out of the family. In contrast, it is so extremely rare for the rest of the population to treat children the way that abusive parents do. If narcissists or sociopaths are ever exposed about their abuse, they can meet with dismissal and derision from society (and this is when the tear-soaked "I have sinned" public displays come out, along with the love bombing of the children they dumped).

So, as you can see, making children into narcissistic supply for the narcissist has many drawbacks.

Some of the reasons why parents hoover (love bomb) has been talked about earlier, but if you are trying to look for signs to keep from getting into a relationship with a narcissist or sociopath, the following are better tell-tale signs of hoovering children:
* one sign of narcissists and sociopaths is that they are estranged from at least one of their children. This is usually the scapegoat child. They absolutely need a scapegoat to keep the bad deeds they do to others from being exposed and attributed to them, so they adopt one of their children to take all of the blame for their deeds instead. This is the big reason perpetrators pretend to be the victims of their scapegoat estranged children. However, children who are estranged don't make very good garbage cans for blame. Cluster B disordered parents cannot blame someone who is so far outside of the family that no one knows where he lives or what he is doing, has no contact with anyone in the family, so hoovering here and there becomes the way of continuing to effectively scapegoat, especially if there are any eyes on the situation.
* when the golden child is not satisfying them enough, isn't giving them the narcissistic supply they demand -- and they demand A WHOLE LOT, so it is not uncommon for friction to arise with the golden at some point and for an ostracized scapegoat child to be hoovered back in to challenge the golden
* when the golden child dies and all that is left is the scapegoat, so even if the scapegoat has been discarded for years, the narcissist will usually try to hoover the scapegoat back in to take the golden child's place
* the narcissists or sociopath are publicly exposed or they feel they are in danger of being exposed and rush to love bomb their estranged child to keep the child "from talking" (hoping the child will display loyalty to his parent in return for parental love bombing)

Love bombing sentences to estranged children:
* "I always loved you. You are my child, but you didn't see it, so we spent all of those years apart."
* "I really wanted to know you better, but you seemed more comfortable not having a parent in your life."
* "I wanted you back in my life, but you never came back to apologize like I expected you to."
* "I'm not a perfect parent. I make mistakes. So, I asked you to leave and not contact me. Big deal! Get over it! Now I love you! So accept it!"
* "I made a mistake. I really wanted to know you, but (golden child) was so much more persuasive and loving towards me."
* "You and I weren't getting along then, but I loved you the entire time you were gone, so we should just forgive and forget the past."
* "We didn't have the same perspectives. But sometimes perspectives change. And now I see value in you where I didn't before."
* "I thought our relationship was too damaged to fix. So I didn't try. But now I see that it wasn't damaged because my love for you carried on through the years when you were absent."

This is all manipulative B.S. and word salad by the way, and indicative of the honeymoon stage in the cycle of abuse. Narcissists and sociopaths so rarely change their behavior or views that they cannot be counted on to be trustworthy. These kinds of statements show absolutely no awareness, empathy or love of any kind. The only sign of them wanting to really change into a loving human being instead of an abusing or rejecting one is their desire for total rehabilitation (i.e. a commitment to learn about their condition from professionals, reflection into their past and the childhood abuse they endured and genuinely wanting to stop it from continuing down through the generations, on-going therapy with a domestic violence counselor, anger management classes, a commitment to child abuse causes and the healing of its victims, etc). Even if they do all of this, which is extremely doubtful, they can never entirely be counted on in terms of telling the truth about loving their children in any on-going, promise-laden, empathetic way (or their grandchildren either). "A leopard never changes its spots" should always be heeded, I believe, and if they totally surprise you that they have changed (it takes years and years), then they have done themselves a service whether the people around them can put stock in it or not.

With sociopathic parents therapy doesn't make sense because they will take what they learned for more abusive "tricks and tactics". I'm not a believer in sociopaths transforming into anything other than double-trouble sociopaths, with even more sadistic games up their sleeves.

Children of abuse or abandonment should always have their guard up at all times -- my philosophy. If you have PTSD, trying to have a relationship with your abusive parent again or even seeing them, may make your PTSD soar and get so much worse. It's a case-by-case basis. I personally would never share intimate personal details about your life with them under any circumstances.

For more on how narcissists and sociopaths treat their children, you can go to the following posts:

* Narcissists and Children -- my own post
* Sociopaths and Children -- my own post
* Psychopaths are unable to love their own children — here’s why -- by Lindsay Dodgson (this is a good article, however the research on the role of the Golden child is from only one source, and woefully inadequate and inaccurate -- from all of my own studies and research the conclusion is that half of golden children become ultra-empaths and half become bullies/Cluster Bs: see favoritism in the family ... in another post I address why there are two drastically differing Goldens: the empath golden child and the bully golden child).

* The Dysfunctional Ways a Family Protects a Narcissist -- by Christine Hammond, MS, LMHC, for Psych Central (note: this article has to do with narcissists who stay in one marriage. Cheating narcissists, huge enmeshed families, and broken families with step parents change the dynamic Ms. Hammond talks about quite a bit -- there is actually more hope for breaking the tradition of domestic abuse being passed down the generations when step parents and inlaws enter into a family like this).

Following love bombing by a narcissist or sociopath, there is usually a discard phase, as I have mentioned:

The reasons for discards are spelled out by Dale Archer, M.D. in this Psychology Today article:

1. The devalued partner no longer supplies what attracted the love bomber in the first place. Seeing his partner as exhausted, broke, depressed, or less attractive, the bomber discards her for someone shiny and new.

2. The devalued partner gets fed up and starts pushing back, demanding reciprocity for sacrifices or defending boundaries, making it clear she refuses to be manipulated anymore. Feeling exposed, the love bomber discards his non-compliant partner for one who doesn’t yet see behind his mask of phony perfection.

3. The love bomber uses the discard as part of the manipulation, fully planning to reconnect in the future. Think of it like devaluation on steroids. He disappears, sometimes without warning, leaving the victim feeling devastated and confused. Then days, and sometimes months later, he reappears, out of the blue, professing undying love and promising to change. Curiously absent in many cases is an apology. Instead, the return is a test of his power and control, a challenge to see if his discarded partner can be conned into another round of abuse. If so, the cycle repeats.

Whether the discard is followed up with a honeymoon phase, largely depends on whether the partner can be honeymooned back into the relationship. If there have been a lot of rounds of the abuse cycle, most partners realize it is a bad habit and start to separate, at least emotionally first. Love does not mean a cycle of idealizations and discards, and most everyone knows that.

For children, the situation can be quite different. While disordered parents expect a round of idealizations and discards with children too, their plans for a cycle of abuse go awry in a way that they don't for partners.

For young children who are discarded, it means going off to live with the other parent or guardian who will have quite a lot more influence than the narcissist (the narcissist can find that love bombing does not work at all on children they want back, that children feel high levels of anxiety and distress with a parent who discards, leading to life long estrangement).

For adult children, a parental discard means spending a lot more time with their own families or peers, which is the natural order of life anyway. The difference is that in normal families, parents have some input, and their input is welcomed and appreciated. Adult children of rejecting narcissistic parents do not want the input of their parent because the adult child does not want their own children to be exposed to experiencing idealizations and discards. This is the main reason for permanent estrangements (note: this does not come from a professional study; it comes from my own observations in forums for survivors of child abuse. Protecting their kids from grandparent discards or watching the grandparent discard is by far the predominant and overwhelming reason for permanent child-parent estrangements).

Children also experience the love bombing/discard experience differently than partners. Most adult children state (from forums again) that they felt that the experience resembled being brought up a mountain (love bombing stage) and then being shoved off of a high cliff once at the top (discard phase). In other words, it was just too painful to repeat again. Many children of narcissistic parents experience discards during the worst points of their lives too (major surgeries, major illnesses, being diagnosed with a life threatening disease, the death of their other parent, losing a child, etc). Parents like this do their discards during traumatic times for a reason: it has to do with the parent trying to get their child to trauma bond with them and trying to grab more power when you are vulnerable, which I will cover in another post.

For more on how narcissists apologize in order to love bomb discards, you can read the following post by psychologist Alexander Burgemeester: The Narcissist and Apology.

Always remember that love bombing is abuse!

Author Dale Archer, M.D. spells out the reasons why love bombing is abuse in the same Psychology Today article:

The important thing to remember about love bombing is that it is psychological partner abuse, period. When one person intentionally manipulates and exploits another’s weakness or insecurity, there’s no other word for it. Love is not about controlling who you see or what you do.

Healthy relationships build slowly, and are based on a series of actions, not a flood of words. Love bombers are experts at talking, but when held accountable for their words, they tend to lash out. It’s normal to feel confused, or betrayed, and the urge to make excuses for the love bomber is strong, because they’ve worked hard to tie your self-esteem to their good opinion. And that’s what makes this cycle of idealization, devaluation, and discard so devastating. Love bombers exploit the natural human need for self worth, and turn it into shame, regret, and self-loathing.

Further reading:

Love Bombing: Have You Ever Been the Target? - Spot the Warning Signs of Love Bombing Early and Recover Faster with These Tips -- by Dale Archer M.D. for Psychology Today

Love bombing -- from Wikipedia

** recommended: What It Means When a Narcissist Says “I Love You” -- from the narcissist's point of view (posted by Athena Staik, Ph.D.)

Love Bombing: A Seductive & Manipulative Technique. -- by Alex Miles

** recommended: 5 Ways to Disarm a Love Bombing Sociopath -- from the True Love Scam Recovery website

The Secret Language of Narcissists: How Abusers Manipulate their Victims. -- by popular author, Shahiba Arabi

** recommended: How to Tell the Difference Between Narcissistic Love Bombing and Healthy Romantic Interest -- by Angela Atkinson from the Queen-Being website

Exposed! 11 Lies Love-Bombing Narcissists Tell -- by Kim Saeed

Love Bombing – When It’s Too Good To Be True -- by Melanie Tonia Evens

The sociopath’s “discard” is soul destroying — you learn your “soul mate” is pure fabrication designed to con, exploit, and hurt -- by O.N. Ward from the Love Fraud website

Love Bombing -- from the Dating a Sociopath website

5 Reasons Narcissists Can’t Have Intimate Relationships; No. 3 Is The Main Reason -- by Amanda Greene

What it is like to date a narcissist -- by Kerri Sackville


How and Why Narcissists Are Highly Skilled Abusers -- by Julia Hall

10 Signs You’re Putting Other People on Pedestals -- by Lenora Thompson for Psych Central

Avoiding Toxic People: Gas-Lighting & Love-Bombing -- by Támara Hill, MS, LPC for Psych Central

11 Things NOT To Do With Narcissists -- by Dan Neuharth, PhD MFT

5 Scientific Secrets to Handling a Narcissist -- by Eric Barker (note: the first bit of advice is NOT about how to handle them). The real crux of how to deal with them comes later: it means walking away, starving them of narcissistic supply, not hiring them for jobs, not listening to their "expertise", not getting involved in romantic relationships with them, not trying to parent with them, not getting involved in projects with them, not believing what they have to say, not trying to be close to them, not interact with them, etc -- in conclusion: just walk away).

One trait or behavior does not make a sociopath – look for a pattern of traits and behaviors -- by Donna Anderson

How Cults Work -- by CultWatch (discusses Love Bombing -- a very similar technique to narcissists and sociopaths in terms of how they try to isolate you from family and/or friends)
 
Sex and Aural Energy ("I always say, never sleep with someone you wouldn't want to be" -- part of the article)

How To Tell If Your Partner Truly Loves You -- by Katie and Jay Hendricks

NEW ARTICLES SINCE PUBLISHING

recommended: What Is ‘Love Bombing’? (Grand romantic gestures in the early days of a relationship could be sweet — or a sign you’re dating a narcissist. Here’s how to tell the difference, according to experts.) - by Gina Cherelus for The New York Times 

from SwanWaters.com: