The Love Fails Theory of Narcissistic Personality Disorder

Neo awakens to the Matrix. He realizes people are living under a shared illusion limiting their abilities. Because he sees beyond the illusion others call reality, Neo is free to become what they cannot. Where he has freedom, they have chains. For what limits them is not real to him. This is how narcissists perceive love: the enslaving illusion under which others live.

Narcissists can describe love to their therapists just as Neo could define the Matrix for those in it. For neither one is it real, but it must nonetheless be navigated to complete their mission. If they didn’t understand it, they couldn’t manipulate it, feign it, leverage it. Like someone playing on an Oculus, narcissists enjoy playing the game of love; they just don’t believe it’s real.

Whereas Neo has gained consciousness to see beyond others’ reality, the narcissist lost consciousness to see less than theirs. To the hero, the Matrix is the illusion. To the narcissist, the illusion is love.

Once the narcissist learns love is not real, the people feeling happy in its presence and miserable in its absence become part of the same illusion for the same reason. The narcissist won’t feel the pain he causes people because he won’t feel the love in them.

When narcissists hurt others whom they care about, they know they ‘should’ care, but treating others’ feelings as real as the narcissist’s own doesn’t work. Others’ feelings are just another feature of the Matrix. Love must fail because love is not real.

The narcissist believes love fails as a projection: to avoid the truth that it is the narcissist who is failing to love. The failure to love stems from others’ failure to love the narcissist before they became one.

For the narcissist, the joy of love and the pain of its loss were abused out of them. The narcissism that emerges from abuse is an adaptation to living in a world without empathy. Only to those who believe in love does this come across as a maladaptation to living in a world with empathy. The Matrix the narcissist lives in is a world without love.

The delusion of narcissism comprises believing everyone else has the delusion. Depressives don’t believe everyone else’s happiness is the problem, nor do borderlines pathologize others’ stability. Only narcissists project others’ lack of sickness…as the sickness. I’m not in the Matrix, you are!

To the narcissist, others operate on a mass delusion called empathy. Empathy is the reason we are kind to each other once punishment and reward have been removed from the equation. With no apparent reason to be kind, the narcissist is free…to be cruel.

When the narcissist is free to harm themselves by harming others, they see the illusion of love as comedy. People acting as if feelings matter. How restrictive! Think of how much more pleasure you could take in and pain you could give out once you shed shame. What others call shamelessness, narcissists call, freedom.

As the narcissist heals, they learn to see this as tragedy. The narcissist sees they were only ‘free’ to suffer, and to spread that suffering. The belief that love fails was the great failure of their lives. This is a true tragedy because the love they refused to believe in was there the whole time.

The narcissist then says that if only love were real, they would have acted better. They were waiting for a sign that would never come…because it was always there. Love is the universal hidden in plain sight.

The narcissist finally sees that what they believed enslaved them was the only thing that could free them. This is the transformation process in therapy. The therapeutic ethos for the narcissist is not, as they often believe at the start of treatment, how to act as though love were real, as though they could give and receive love — but to understand that love has been here the whole time.

Unlike sobriety, love is not a ‘fake it till you make it’ routine. Quitting a vice is a behavior. Quitting narcissism is a belief: the belief that love is real: real for the same reason the narcissist is real. We are real insofar as we love.

Healing narcissism comprises realizing they were the ones living under a delusion: that love is not real, that the pain and joy we transact is not meaningful, that the narcissist is not lovable. This is the secret hiding in plain sight: narcissists treat others the way they treat love: as something disposable.

The closer a person is to the narcissist, the more the narcissistic defenses against love (and all narcissistic defenses are defenses against love) go up. For the narcissist must prove to themself most of all that love fails. Hence the entirety of the narcissistic life is a ritual to break others of their experience of love. Narcissists do this by believing themselves that love fails more than others believe love is real.

I’m often asked how to therapize a narcissist. As if there were a set of techniques I could list that would induce empathy in a person who had chased it away their entire adulthood. Empathy does not heal like a broken leg because the broken leg merely needs to go back to the way it was before the trauma.

The narcissistic personality is itself a break: a break from the wholeness of love. Just as a blunt force trauma causes a leg fracture, emotional trauma causes narcissism. Narcissism is a trauma response. Hence, like any trauma patient, the goal is not to regress to the person whom they had been before the pain, but to integrate the pain, including the pain they caused others. To do this, they must let the narcissist within themselves die.

To return to our original analogy, Neo ultimately returns to the Matrix to die, resurrect, and become the One. This marks an ego death so that a more permanent, essential version of the self can emerge. What the narcissist seeks to be born again into, is love.

If this is a hard sell to you, imagine how hard a sell it is to the narcissist, who is as fragile underneath their cold shell as they are impervious outside it.

Hence, to therapize a narcissist, the therapist must be as good at not being a narcissist as the narcissist is good at narcissizing. I must believe more in my patient’s love than they do in their narcissism. This necessitates not depending on the narcissist to define their identity to me. Otherwise, the patient becomes nothing more than what they are willing to display, and in personality disorders, that defeats the purpose of therapy. What they are willing to display, after all, is their disease; they identify with it even while denying, even by denying it.

I speak to the part of my patient that wants to emerge from their sarcophagus…until it does. You see this in Star Wars as Darth Vader is hardened and lacking empathy on the outside. But Luke, the therapist/son, speaks to the good in him again and again…until it emerges.

Many reading this will object that narcissists don’t love; they abuse. Therapists who write about narcissism understand this! But this is akin to saying caterpillars don’t fly.

The caterpillar and butterfly have the same DNA; they are merely activating different parts of the ‘code they carry’, just like Neo. When the first butterfly cells emerge in the chrysalis, they are attacked by the caterpillar cells as though they were a threat. Analogously, when the first signs of compassion emerge in the narcissist, they are attacked as weakness. In therapy, we call this resistance.

The moment the narcissist starts to break themself from the illusion that love fails, they will believe they are going crazy. Relative to their narcissism, they are! The emergent defenses will tell them they are wrong to do this because they are trading control for vulnerability, pleasure for empathy, worship for authenticity. The narcissist is finally letting themself fail…fail, because love no longer will.

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Also read the twin of this article: The Love Fails Theory of Borderline Personality Disorder as well as The Mannequin Theory of Narcissism.