What Will a Narcissist Not Do?
If you have been following me for a while, you will find a lot of content on what the narcissist does that makes them a narcissist. Today, I want to change the wording a little bit and discuss what a narcissist won’t do. The topics are the same but looking at their behaviors from what they won’t do, versus what they will do, will hopefully help you better understand the narcissist and how they work.
Let’s discuss who the narcissist is before we discuss more on what they don’t do. The traits commonly seen in people with narcissism include a sense of self-importance and grandiosity, is preoccupied with fantasies of success, power, or intelligence, believes they are special or unique in some way and can only be understood by people of equal status, requires excessive admiration, feels entitled, exploits others, lacks empathy, are envious of others or feels others are envious of them, and shows arrogant behaviors or beliefs. Those are several different traits to consider in someone who might be a narcissist, however, an easy way to summarize those traits is that they involve a sense of superiority and the narcissist is self-focused on how their behaviors are better than others and others cannot compare to them. To maintain this inflated sense of self-importance, they lack empathy and cannot take the perspective of someone else. To experience empathy would have the potential to require the narcissist to look inward and experience emotions they actively work to push away to avoid narcissistic injury.
That is a short summary of who the narcissist is, so let’s use that same information to look at how those traits of a narcissist work to prevent them from doing some things.
First, the narcissist will never show who they really are. They can’t do this because it would lead to feelings of shame and then narcissistic injury. The narcissist pretends to be superior to others and all-knowing but that is all an act. They have low self-esteem and are insecure. However, to show this would cause their own act of superiority to fall apart and they will be exposed for who they really are. Nothing is ever real with the narcissist, including their true selves.
Second, the narcissist will never give heartfelt compliments. Sure, they will give compliments, but they don’t believe the compliments they say. They only say a compliment if it will somehow benefit them. If they feel like you are figuring out who they are and are pulling away, they will give compliments to try to pull you back in. The love bombing stage is full of compliments to build up your trust in them and feeling as if you are someone they really care about. The narcissist might also give a compliment to someone they want to be associated with in order to gain a higher level of connection with that person so they can say they are associated with them, and thus are the superior person they want you to believe they are. Compliments may be given freely by the narcissist, but the compliments are only empty words.
Third, the narcissist will never have empathy. This is because they can’t experience empathy. This is one of the many flaws in a narcissist. They are incapable of relating to the emotional experience of others so they can’t even pretend to give empathy. There may be times in which the narcissist says the right things, but this is because they are parroting what they hear around them and not what they actually feel. If your parent has died, the narcissist might tell you how sorry they are for your loss, but just as with the compliments, the words are empty. They are not a true feeling of concern. What you will notice is that after that initial statement, they don’t follow up with concern for the loss and will expect you to behave as if nothing ever happened.
The last item I will go over today is the narcissist will never listen in an effort to understand. While it seems like the narcissist is always clueless to your needs and wants, they actually are very much aware of what you like and don’t like. The narcissist watches your every move and knows what makes you happy and what upsets you. They are very much in-tune with who you are as a person. They need to know this information so that they can love bomb or manipulate in the future. Which option they choose depends on their needs and is often in response to a waning narcissistic supply. The narcissist listens to you for their own advantage, and never in an effort to understand you or to show concern.
The narcissist is self-centered and everything happens based on their specific needs in the moment. You will never be able to guess the next move of a narcissist because they don’t even know what their next move is. The narcissist will never do something that doesn’t somehow benefit them and what this is changes within seconds and is never predictable. It is best to leave a narcissist when you can because they, unlike you, are unable to consider others which is needed in the ability to change.
