This article is mainly concerned with how this relationship turns from excessive love and even reverence to hatred and pursuing revenge. This process prevails mainly among those with borderline personality disorder and narcissists.
A narcissist is a victim of their parents, so they unconsciously victimize their partner in order to feel safe. A narcissist—just like psychopaths who lack empathy—turns people into victims no matter what they do for them.
When the narcissist transforms their partner into a carbon copy of themselves, they believe that they are doing them a favor by making them rise to their prestigious level, but what drives them to narcissistic anger is the victim’s denial of their bounty after they chose them from among all. They believe that their victims are stupid for denying the divine bounty. Thus, great love enters the stage of war.
Childhood, narcissistic characteristics, and the beginning of close relationships
For a logical explanation of this phenomenon, it is necessary to return to the narcissist's childhood and the reasons that made them acquire their pathological behaviors. According to Randy Krieger, a specialist in psychology, one of the ways narcissism forms in a child is through excessive coddling and praise, making them feel that they are superior and better than everyone else, which makes them so demanding.
Professor Sam Vaknin, who stated that he is a narcissist, confirms that narcissism results mainly from his neglectful mother, who did not pay much attention to him at his birth and childhood, which made him stuck at the age of eleven.
Vaknin confirms that the narcissist is a religious fanatic. In this religion, there is one God and one worshiper. This religion is the only one in the entire world where God is both the object of worship and the object of worshiper.
The narcissistic religion is a missionary religion, just like Christianity. The narcissist tries to convert those around them to this religion to gather more subjects who praise them and glorify their name. In order for the individual to live with the narcissist, the narcissist must be the leader of the religious group. If this individual commits disobedience and heresy, they will be expelled from Providence.
When an individual lives with a narcissist, it is necessary for them to show reverence for this religion, submit to it, and not transgress the divine sanctity by avoiding criticism or highlighting the faults of the Gods. Otherwise, a fatal crusade will be imposed on them. Additionally, since God is all-knowing and whole, it is important to refrain from questioning His titles and qualities. Vaknin stresses how crucial it is to approach narcissists as religious fanatics because they are fanatics in their love of themselves.
Vaknin diagnoses himself that there is no difference between being made of carbon and artificial intelligence. A narcissist, he continues, does not feel the same emotions as the rest of us because they experience negative emotions like grief and psychological distress while their pleasant emotions, like happiness, are waning or nonexistent. Additionally, because they are empty and are as empty as a ghost, they do not pay any heed to what is stated about them.
According to Japanese robotics specialists, narcissists are the future of humanity because they represent the human reflection of a computer. To fill this emotional void, the narcissist builds close relationships to feel the motherly love that they did not get in childhood.
The narcissist's mother caused them horrendous suffering and unbearable pain to the point where they destroyed their real selves, which they despised, and created false selves based on characteristics that are summed up in their narcissistic selves. Their mother is the source of all their emotional suffering. For this reason, they change themselves and their partner into the likeness of other individuals and their mothers, respectively.
According to Ibrahim Zaidan, a specialist in narcissism, a narcissist only clings to sympathetic and self-sacrificing people who admire, praise, applaud, and fascinate them until they receive the narcissistic momentum they need.
A narcissist prefers certain personalities, such as empath, super empath, hyouka, and especially the borderline personality. That is why the narcissist always praises and glorifies the partner at the beginning of the relationship. The narcissist is in a state of addiction to the narcissistic momentum, which is like a drug to them.
The beginning of the relationship with the partner
When the relationship begins, the narcissist's behaviors are mainly sarcastic, as they use pranks and manipulation, material exploitation, control, triangulation, and threats to leave. This is the first stage of narcissistic abuse.
The narcissistic devil who bears the face of a peacock, as Dr. Ibrahim Zaidan describes them, always assumes that the opposite party is competing with them. They try to convince themselves that they are greater than others and that they are at the highest moral levels, despite all their shortcomings and their dependence on others. They delude themselves into thinking no one is superior to them in morals.
The moral aspect is sacred and untouchable for them. The narcissist lives in ontological insecurity, so they expect their partner to be perfect and complete, just like a tender mother. They want their partners to give them maternal love and to take the place of their mother, who neglected them as children. This is why problems arise between the narcissist and their partner when the latter demands more commitment and respect.
Thus, the partner deviates from their unlimited giving—their maternal role. They start demanding to be an equal partner in rights and duties. All of these demands reopen the narcissist's old wounds, which they carried because of their mothers.
After that, the second stage of narcissistic abuse begins through emotional coldness, punitive silence, marginality, neglect, blaming the other, blurring the scene, and physical violence. They might start calling the partner with the defective descriptions that they carry themselves, like saying, “Take away my mental illnesses. I do not want them.”
All these disorders that happened to them because of their mother make them hate their mother unconsciously. That is why we find that most narcissistic men are haters of women and consider them inferior to men. The opposite is also true, as the narcissistic woman, in turn, is a hater of men. This is what we can see today in the radical feminist associations of narcissists who underestimate men and their roles.
The breakup with the partner
Sam Vaknin confirms that the narcissist humiliates, insults, and neglects their partner by refusing physical intimacy when they get out of their control. Blaming the partner for the failure of the relationship is one of the narcissist's foundations in their close relationships, as the narcissistic immune system within them will not allow the other party to make them seem unjust at all. That is why they rewrite the history of the relationship.
Sam Vaknin notes that the narcissist suffers from dissociative identity disorder. They forget 80% of their memories, so they fabricate imaginary stories to fill the void. This is called falsification, which pushes them to always rewrite history and blur the scene.
As they must increase their greatness by eluding the partner they perceive as undervaluing them and their transcendent value, this method enables them to transcend the deteriorating nature of humans and transform into what Nietzsche calls Superman. The narcissist does not consider themselves a normal human, but a developed human being. They believe that their partner tries to delay their development, so they will never allow themselves to degenerate because of the human ignobility of their partner.
The narcissist needs to preserve their greatness, so they do not make any mistakes at all because they are perfect and flawless. They put themselves in the position of God, so it is impossible for them to admit that they misread the partner at the beginning of the relationship. They convince themselves that the partner is the one who changed and deviated from the usual track because the person who previously glorified them is not the same person who is degrading them now. This is called plastic self-defense.
The narcissist needs narcissistic momentum through fascination because their mother did not applaud them in their early childhood. Therefore, they need to be a very popular social figure. It is necessary for them to possess charisma and the art of speech or to be distinguished in a certain field, as all these methods guarantee their narcissistic survival.
This masked personality guarantees them praise and admiration, which they use as a flimsy testimony to defend themselves when they commit all kinds of manipulations and psychological and material deceit on the victim. They believe that people's praise of them makes them complete human beings who do not commit mistakes. The narcissist uses all these narcissistic techniques to push the partner to abandon them by placing all the blame on them, thus recreating the same scenario that they lived with their mother in an unconscious way.
According to Professor Fatima Arafa, when divorce or separation occurs, the narcissist does not regret the loss of the person but rather misses all the services that the partner used to provide them, such as fascination, money, and so on. They view the partner as nothing more than a tool or a means.
Vaknin did a great job of portraying this scene, confirming that the narcissist expresses their love for their partner just as they express their love for eating rice. The narcissistic relationship is based on this arbitrary cycle: glorification, then humiliation, then ostracism, then destruction, then hoovering (an attempt to retrieve the victim). If this process does not succeed, the relationship ends.
Post-breakup and seeking revenge
The purpose of the relationship with the partner is to turn them into a scapegoat who will be sacrificed at the altar of the narcissistic God. This is a metaphor for their successive sacrifices and services. The partner must die for the desires of the divine to be satisfied. One of the two people in the relationship with the narcissist must die, either physically or psychologically. Narcissist victims, particularly those with borderline personality disorder, describe leaving their partner as dying inside.
Therefore, most of those who reach the point of revenge have borderline personality disorder, which is characterized, according to Dr. Ibrahim Zaidan, by kindness, sympathy, and sacrifice, but they do not tolerate criticism and cannot control their borderline anger. It is likely for them to become irritated at the end of the relationship. They feel abandoned after all the sacrifices they made for the narcissistic exploiter. Here, their journey of revenge begins, as they would be ready to destroy the narcissist and themselves at the same time for revenge.
Ibrahim Zaidan adds that a person with the third degree of borderline personality disorder destroys the narcissist and themselves at the same time. He presented the example of Sherine Abdel Wahhab’s borderline relationship with the narcissist Hossam Habib, which ended with Sherine exposing herself and the narcissist. The borderline personality bursts and flashes its fangs at the narcissist in response to criticism.
Professor Sam Vaknin asserts that the borderline personality turns into a secondary psychopath when angry, acquires other characteristics such as violence, cruelty, recklessness, defiance, and impulsiveness, and makes decisions based on this set of psychopathic characteristics. They consume narcotics, drive recklessly, gamble with all their money, and even take violent revenge on their partner, which can lead to murder and then suicide.
Dr. Kholoud Al-Dimashqi shows that when a person with a borderline personality is abandoned, they enter into a fit of rage that lasts for hours or days, in which they attack and bombard with very harsh words to humiliate and insult. They carry out many types of punishment and revenge, like using hurtful words with all their severity.
They might engage in a campaign of defamation, demand the recovery of their money in any way, and physically attack and destroy the property of others to recover from their bloody wounds. They may also threaten to commit suicide, cut themselves, beat themselves, burn themselves, or engage in other forms of self-harm.
Perhaps the best cinematographic portrayal of the borderline personality's dramatic revenge is the movie "Fatal Attraction," which is based on real-life events. Alex could not bear the separation of her married lover, Dan, and cut her hands' arteries, threatening him to commit suicide if he left her. She convinced him to visit her regularly. She even threatened him to tell his wife of their secret relationship, but Dan did not comply. The movie ended with an indescribably dramatic ending.
In Conclusion, A relationship with a narcissist could be a living hell.
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