Intimacy is essential for healthy, mutually fulfilling romantic partnerships. Yet for those with narcissistic personality disordered (NPD) partners, true closeness remains a distant oasis rarely reached. Behind their magnetic charm lies profound difficulty genuinely connecting and prioritizing a partner‘s needs. This manifests as intimacy avoidance – deeply ingrained defenses obstructing vulnerability to fortify their disordered egos and fragile self-worth.
Defining Intimacy Avoidance
Intimacy avoidance refers to attitudes and behaviors restricting emotional availability and closeness within relationships (Arabi, 2017). While avoiding intimacy can stem from past relational wounds, narcissists take this to an extreme degree.
Psychiatrist Dr. Craig Malkin (2015) explains that narcissists “feel that they’re above the need for intimate connections, or that they can fill their inner emptiness with external things like attention and sex.” They dismiss such bonds as “more trouble than they‘re worth.”
Thus intimacy avoidance is a hallmark of narcissistic relationships, characterized by manipulation, aggression, deflection, and obstruction of a partner’s needs for the disordered individual’s self-serving ends. This leaves the non-disordered partner continually longing for care, understanding and validation that never materializes.
Why Narcissists Cannot Truly Connect
Despite outward charisma and charm, narcissists intrinsically struggle to form genuinely close emotional bonds (Hartmann et al., 2015). Their excessive need for validation governs all behavior – making reciprocal self-revealing dialogue impossible. Partners ultimately feel invisible and drained.
Relationships Revolve Around Their Needs
According to psychologist Dr. Ramani (2020), narcissistic personalities “lack the skillset to have real relationships” as they view partners as “objects to be used in regulation of self-esteem.” Rather than mutual caretaking, their sole priority is managing their intense insecurity and fragility.
Clinical researcher Dr. Ni (2019) found narcissism strongly correlated to lower long-term relationship satisfaction. Narcissistic concerns like entitlement and grandiosity predicted eventual emotional or physical withdrawal.
Suspicious of Emotional Closeness
The naked vulnerability intrinsic to intimate bonds overwhelms those with NPD. Psychiatrist Dr. Foxhall (2021) notes, “Narcissists equate intimacy with extinction. To be intimate means they’d stop existing as they are.”
Exposing suppressed insecurities feels dangerously threatening, overwhelming and shaming (Gordon & Bornstein, 2018). Emotional conversations are avoided to conceal fragility. Over time, they “slowly start to remove vulnerable emotional intimacy” from the relationship entirely, relays therapist Dr. Carter (2021).
An Insatiable Emptiness Inside
Despite haughty posturing, narcissists harbor an inner sense of worthlessness and deficiency (Vaknin, 2015). Needing continual external confirmation protects against confronting profound internal hollowness.
No amount of praise can ever fill their cavernous inner void, though they insatiably seek perfectionistic overachievement. Criticism immediately ruptures their tentative self-concept as special, eliciting defensive rage (Ronningstam, 2016). They yearn for someone to “shore them up and make them feel perfect” yet simultaneously perceive emotional intimacy as an ego threat (Malkin, 2015). It is a torturous paradox.
Exploitation Instead of Mutuality
All narcissistic relationships revolve around meeting their emotional needs, rather than reciprocal nurturing. Melanie Tonia Evans, relationship coach and survivor, stresses that narcissists lack “the ability to understand feelings beyond their own.” Their partners merely serve as props, existing solely for others’ affirmational needs.
Relationships as Narcissistic Supply
Lacking core identity outside admiration, narcissists require endless praise and validation, termed ‘narcissistic supply’ (DeWall et al., 2011). They feel entitled to partners bolstering their egos, asserting superiority and accommodating mistreatment without protest. Their paramount priority is regulating fragile self-worth rather than growth through relational honesty.
When narcissistic supply wavers, rage, manipulation and aggression resume control. “It’s intimacy on their terms only,” explains Dr. Malkin (2015). Their seeming investment in the relationship obscures an underlying exploiting, objectifying orientation.
Manipulation Governed Interactions
Narcissists dynamically shift between showering affection and withdrawing emotionally or physically to control partners’ behavior (Sarkis, 2015). Tactics like gaslighting, verbal abuse, threats to end relationships or have affairs, sulking, and guilt-tripping manage interpersonal power dynamics.
Over time, this conditioning brainwashes partners into disbelieving their own perceptions and succumbing to coercive control. Researchers Park and Ferrero (2020) found those partnered with narcissists demonstrated heightened cortisol reactivity to stress versus non-narcissistic couples, reflecting chronic anxiety.
Sex as a Power Tool
Transforming sex into a power tool further exploits vulnerability. Therapist Shahida Arabi (2018) explains narcissists wield “their own performative sexuality as sources of ‘narcissistic supply’, rather than as a way to connect meaningfully.” Partners feel pressure to perform sexually on demand, their role framed as servicing narcissistic virility versus mutual pleasure or bonding through erotic intimacy.
The Traumatic Impact of Chronic Deprivation
The cumulative impact of chronic emotional starvation, sabotaged belongingness needs and lost identity undermines psychological health (Dorpat, 1996). Symptoms of trauma like nervous system dysregulation, chronic anxiety, low self-worth, and blocked intuition manifest from ongoing intimacy deprivation (Shaer, 2021).
Feeling Fundamentally Flawed
When narcissists attack qualities like emotional sensitivity as weaknesses or communicate indifferent devaluation, partners internalize profound shame. “Narcissists cause feelings of frustration, anger, sadness, confusion, and emptiness in their partners,” notes psychologist Dr. Shaler (2021).
These painful emotional flashbacks echo attachment wounds from emotionally unavailable primary caregivers. Narcissistic partners rarely provide needed comforting, instead weaponizing vulnerabilities identified through past self-disclosures. This retraumatization and projection of negative traits overwhelms partners’ already fragile self-concept.
Loss of Identity and Autonomy
Partners excessively attune to narcissists’ moods while suppressing their own needs to prevent destabilizing their mercurial partners. Communicating differently risks provoking aggression or rejection. Over time self-expression numbs, intuition dims and identity erodes.
Psychologist Dr. Malkin (2015) notes, “If you’re going to stay with a narcissist, you’re going to have to give up a lot of the emotional intimacy you yearn for” at incredible sacrifice to integrity of selfhood. Losing emotional autonomy and self-concept proves profoundly annihilating psychologically.
Healing Requires Boundaries and Self-Reliance
Therapist Dr. Carter (2021) stresses essentialness of boundaries and cultivating self-sufficiency instead of expecting caring reciprocity. This demands focusing inward on understanding suppressed needs, disengaging during conflicts and directing nurturance towards meaningful relationships beyond the narcissist.
Though arduous, escaping chronic intimacy deprivation ultimately catalyzes blossoming self-love. Recovering survivors emphasize centering self-validation and self-compassion gradually liberates one’s authentic vibrancy and quells corrosive self-blame that previously filled inner emptiness. There is hope for renewing capacity for mutually emotionally attentive bonds.
References
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Carter, L. Les Carter Phd. (2021, January 4). 5 Ways to Emotionally Protect Yourself from INTIMACY AVOIDERS [Video]. YouTube. https://tinyurl.com/4rmvns7c
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Dorpat, T. L. (1996). Gaslighting, the Double Whammy, Interrogation, and Other Methods of Covert Control in Psychotherapy and Analysis. Jason Aronson, Incorporated.
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Ronningstam, E. (2016). Pathological narcissism and narcissistic personality disorder: recent research and clinical implications. Current behavioral neuroscience reports, 3(1), 34–42. https://doi.org/10.1007/s40473-016-0060-y
Sarkis, S. (2015, October 13). 11 Ways Narcissists Use Shame to Control. Psychology Today. https://tinyurl.com/yckbt9ux
Shaer, M. (2021). Healing Developmental Trauma: How Early Trauma Affects Self-Regulation, Self-Image, and the Capacity for Relationship. North Atlantic Books.
Vaknin, S. (2015). Malignant Self-love: Narcissism Revisited. Narcissus Publications.