Hope the Narcissist will Change: Intoxicating Effects of Hopium
In my blogs on narcissism, I talk a lot about the control and manipulation that is prominent in narcissistic relationships. The narcissist thinks only of themselves and how they can get their needs met, while ignoring the needs of others, including their partners. Anyone who has been in a relationship with a narcissist for an extended period of time can logically say they know this is true. However, they still have hope things will change and get better. They focus on the times it was positive and remain hopeful those periods can occur more frequently.
However, logic usually doesn’t win out over emotion and we often find ourselves responding to situations based on emotions and not logic. Logic comes later when we can more objectively look at a situation and remove the emotion.
In the moment when there is a hurtful event happening, we experience many negative emotions, and these can become consuming. They eat away at us and lead to more negative feelings, digging a deeper hole of unpleasant feelings. This is a terrible way to live so we try to find something else to focus on. We may know the situation is bad and will possibly never change, but we look for that silver lining to focus on to pull us out of that deeper and deeper hole.
One emotion that people often turn to in times of despair is hope. There is some debate on whether hope is actually an emotion, or a state of mind. However, I will consider it as both in this blog. Hope is an emotion that allows us to feel more positive about our situation, and a state of mind that allows us to consider positive outcomes as possibilities we can achieve.
Hope is the belief that good things can and will happen. Hope allows us to believe that those things we want to come true, will. When you have hope, you can believe that the positive emotions and outcomes can arise from this negative event your find yourself in.
So, hope sounds like a good thing, right? Most of the time hope is good, but as with everything, moderation is key. Sometimes hope can become intoxicating, as if it is a drug we need more of to push us through and this is called hopium.
Hopium is the addiction to false hope. It is an irrational optimism that is not rooted in reality. The narcissist has been abusive, controlling, and down right mean for years or even decades, but you continue to hope things will get better and change. This is a false hope, with an overreliance on hopium because there is nothing to suggest the narcissist will ever change. However, you continue to inhale the hopium to get you through.
Hopium is so powerful and addicting because you feel empowered when you have hope. You finally feel in control of the situation and focus on the things you can do to create change. If you didn’t have hope, you would fall into hopelessness and this is a place that most everyone wants to avoid. When you lose hope, you lose the ability to invite in positive emotions and the belief that things can get better. Hopium becomes your supply to replenish the diminishing hope. Hopium keeps you alive in a very difficult situation. However, it also keeps you trapped because you focus on the hope things will change versus the reality that they are unlikely to. The longer you live on your addiction to hopium, the deeper you get pulled into the chaos and abuse of the narcissistic relationship.
Giving up the hopium and stepping back to take an accurate assessment of your situation is hard, but this is needed. Hopium keeps the blinders on and you are constantly looking for your next supply to get you out of this helpless situation you are in. Continue to take in the hopium and you increase your hope, but reality remains the same. If you have been feeding off the hopium supply to get you through your relationship, then that is your cue that this relationship is toxic, and it is time to leave. While hope is a great emotion to help you through tough times, hopium only provides you false hope that things will get better when they likely won’t. Put down the hopium and ask yourself is there really any evidence that things will get better?
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