Did the narcissist ever genuinely care? Do they have the empathy to care on a genuine level?
If the person you’re dealing with is NPD, the quick answer is. No, they do not care for you.
This can be somewhat confusing, though, as they can treat you better than anyone has, especially a narcissistic partner in the idealisation stage. They can all offer those intermittent play nice. They tell you they love you, while through their gaslighting, projection and blame-shifting, we end up doubting reality due to the cognitive Dissonance their behaviour causes within our minds, doubting our thoughts and doubting our own behaviour, often leading to us blaming ourselves for their toxic behaviour towards us when they mistreat us.
A narcissist is extremely good at luring people in with false promises of who they say they will be, often leaving people falling in love with the narcissist’s potential rather than the narcissist’s true character and real behaviour, the fact they can treat us right, and then they treat us so wrong.
Can a true narcissist genuine care? You can not give what you do not have. Therefore no, they don’t care, as they are lacking the empathy to do so.
People often debate as to whether a narcissist has empathy, lack of empathy, or no empathy, no compassion to low empathy, as they can treat us so well while saying they love us. Still, they can also treat us so wrong while claiming they love us. If the narcissist was our parent, it’s incredibly confusing to hear someone angrily shouting at you. ” don’t you know I love you?” We learn to accept love for all the wrong reasons, often leading us to a narcissistic partner in adulthood.
When it comes to narcissistic people that have the disorder, they lack in emotional empathy, meaning they can not put themselves in another’s person place and genuinely feel how that person might be feeling; however, as they have a cognitive understanding of empathy, they can think about how someone would feel about or would perceive their behaviour they just don’t have the emotional side to connect and truly feel how someone else might be feeling.
With their ability to think empathetically, they can use our empathy against us, so they can make us feel like it’s not them. It’s us asking too much of them. They can guilt trip us and make us question ourselves with words like.
” I did it for you.” Or “I didn’t tell you because you wouldn’t understand.” ” If only you’d, then I’d.” “After all I’ve done for you. You’re so ungrateful.”
They use these words most often when they have done something to hurt us, yet they want to twist the story and try to use our emotions against us, make us feel grateful for them doing us a favour, make us feel happy they didn’t burden us, make us feel guilt that we’ve expected them to do something for us. So we end up ignoring how we feel and trying to understand how we’ve made them feel, even though they are the ones who did something to hurt us in the first place. With their twisted stories, we feel like we hurt them. Most often, we are the ones trying to make it up to them and justifying their behaviour with. “If only I’d, then they wouldn’t.” Narcissistic parents often do this by telling children, “It’s for your own good.” Yes, healthy parents can do things believing it to be in the best interest of their child. Narcissistic parents do something for the best interest of themselves and then gaslight the child to cause us that self-doubt. Often we then grow to believe and accept this behaviour as normal from partners, friends, and bosses. That is not normal and is damaging to who we are.
If someone does something that hurts your feeling, they are your feelings. They are never for another to tell you how to feel, recognising you don’t deserve to be hurt by someone. Just because they don’t care for you doesn’t mean you shouldn’t care for yourself. You are important. No response is always the best response when people come at you with these kinds of toxic words, yet if you feel a need to, and someone says, “I did it for you.” Something like.” If you did it for me, you’d have asked me first.” Although you don’t have to take part in every argument, you’re invited to, and sometimes it’s best to recognise their manipulative ways and walk away.
When they’ve hurt your feelings, and you speak up for yourself to, get the response of ”You’re insecure.” or ” you are too sensitive.” This is when a narcissist might have done something to hurt your feelings. Yet, instead of validating your feelings and having a two-way conversation to see where the miss communication happened, that those of us who care for others would do, as no one is perfect. We can make errors in judgment and unintentionally hurt someone. Yet, we’d want to understand and work with them as we have the emotional empathy to care if we’d hurt someone else’s feelings, a narcissist doesn’t they want to gaslight us into believing we are the problem and question our own feelings, and a narcissist will repeat the same hurtful behaviour time and time again, to accuse us of having the problem, which is in one aspect they are correct, we do have a problem just not what they’re making it out to be, our problem is putting our trust in those who keep showing us they are not trustworthy.
With the narcissists,” you’re too sensitive.” or ” you’re insecure.” they are gaslighting us to feel ashamed and even guilty to having perfectly normal feelings to their toxic and hurtful behaviour towards us.
You don’t have to respond to this. Just recognise those who are unwilling to think about how their behaviour affects you and continue their toxic hurtful ways. They do not care for how you feel.
Narcissists will gaslight with ”You’re crazy.” or ”You’re not in charge of me.” which, no, we are not in charge of their behaviour. However, we are in charge of ours, we are allowed to speak up for our feelings, and we are allowed to walk away from those who make us feel bad for doing so.
People who care, like you, wouldn’t want to do something that would potentially hurt the feelings of others, and if you made a mistake, it would be a case of apology and changed behaviour, not blame-shift, gaslight, repeat hurtful behaviour as a narcissist will do.
The narcissist’s mindset of. That never happened, and if it did, it wasn’t my fault, and if it was, I didn’t mean to, and if I did, that was your fault. When they come at us with more gaslighting of “That never happened.” Or “you made me do it.” Yes, when provoked, even the best of people can react. Most people can only be pushed so far. However, we are still solely responsible for our own actions, not other people’s. When we react badly to things, we can admit the mistakes and learn from them. Often we blame ourselves a little too much as a narcissist will downplay or deny how they provoked us, and exaggerate our reactions to gaslight us, and again use our emotions and empathy against ourselves, so we feel bad or guilty for what we’ve done, we are left feeling ashamed of our behaviour and doing all we can to make it up to the very person who doesn’t care for us and is the very person that’s taking us down, yet because the can play nice now and again because they can offer that intermittent reinforcement of the potential of who they could be, we slowly lose who we are to please them, we walk on eggshells to please them, we lose our minds to try and understand theirs.
With a narcissist, they will provoke us to get that reaction from us to blame it all on us and gaslight us into believing we are at fault, as they think they are entitled to do as they please, and they don’t have the emotional empathy to care for how we feel. They try to justify their toxic behaviour by blaming us, and we question ourselves. As we have the ability to emphasise with others and learn from our errors in judgment, a narcissist simply doesn’t have this capability. They are only capable of thinking about themselves and what they would gain or lose.
A narcissist has double standards, they expect you to care for them and take care of their needs, yet they don’t have the empathy to care for you or yours. They can only think about how you or others would look at their behaviour, which is why a narcissist will play the hero or the victim to those around them. Yet, they will never admit to being the villain, only a false apology, usually an “I’m sorry you feel that way.” And that’s only if they believe they have something to gain for doing so. They are not sorry they hurt you, they are not sorry they abused you, they are not sorry they conned you, and they don’t have the emotional empathy to care for how they’ve made you feel. They only care for if your response is a response that they don’t like.
Why don’t narcissistic people care?
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Elizabeth Shaw is not a Doctor or a therapist. She is a mother of five, a blogger, a survivor of narcissistic abuse, and a life coach, She always recommends you get the support you feel comfortable and happy with. Finding the right support for you. Elizabeth has partnered with BetterHelp (Sponsored.) where you will be matched with a licensed councillor, who specialises in recovery from this kind of abuse.
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