Why Victims Reunite with their Narcissistic Abuser
Understanding the mechanics of trauma bonding, Stockholm syndrome and strategic narcissistic maneuvering
When a victim of narcissistic abuse perpetrated by a significant other, finally bottoms out and is either degraded and discarded by the narcissist, or has been confronted with one too many infidelities, beatings, financial ruin, and surreal forms of emotional and psychological abuse, she may be ready to leave the relationship.
If she leaves, to heal from the resultant trauma and manage the upheaval of navigating through separation, the survivor of narcissistic abuse might seek professional therapeutic support.
In order to initiate a process of recovery, a no contact rule is advised so as to sever the tenacious trauma bond.
Nevertheless, after having escaped the most egregious maltreatment, the victim may return to the abuser. Even after working fervently to stabilize from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and erecting the necessary boundaries so as to liberate oneself from heinous treatment, a victim of chronic psychological and physical abuse is vulnerable to resuming contact.
How can this be?
Known as Stockholm syndrome, the victim identifies with the abuser and disowns the reality of her own perceptions and visceral truths. It is through this extreme form of compliance that she convinces herself she is safe from harm. With survival at stake, along with the desperate longing to retain the illusory stage of perfect courtship when the narcissist embodied all she ever desired in a partner, she forfeits what she knows in her deepest place of knowing what she knows. It is simply too terrifying.
Undoing the ravages of a trauma bond with a narcissist challenges the victim to embrace her instinctual appreciation for the unvarnished truth. She is challenged to exhume what has been denied and repressed. This causes profound destabilization due to withdrawal.
The duration, intensity, and type of withdrawal symptoms may be so severe that the victim seeks relief through a quick fix. To end the jarring sense of derealization, the humiliation, and the circuitous debilitating obsessions, she may indeed procure this fix from the one who is the source of her pain.
A major reason why the victim returns is due to the debilitating withdrawal that occurs when dismantling a pathological adaptation to a trauma bond.
Additionally, the emotional horror of healing from extensive relational trauma can be too much to bear if the victim was abused or neglected in childhood, or had experiences with systemic assaultive behavior prior to meeting the narcissist. The co-current presence of complex trauma, as well as addictions and mood disorders further complicates the recovery process.
Essentially, the victim who plateaus with her pain will seek to mitigate her suffering by revisiting a romanticized version of her relational dynamic with the narcissist, ‘forgetting’ or minimizing and rationalizing the sadistic cruelty and calculated lies. She cannot face the agony of accepting that she was nothing more than supply and a source of sadistic gratification, that she was not loved and did not matter.
When the narcissist unexpectedly reappears, the victim who is steeped in delusion will eagerly welcome his return.
What further exacerbates the plight of the victim of narcissistic abuse is that she is often not believed. In fact, given the surreal nature of narcissistic abuse and the narcissist’s ability to dupe others with a facade of normalcy and charisma, the victim struggles to even believe herself. Gaslighting, a form of psychological manipulation in which false information is manufactured and deliberately manipulated is regularly employed by the narcissist so as to make the targeted victim doubt reality, memory, and perceptions so as to ensure control.
Most noteworthy is that people generally scoff at notions of human evil. Given that evil calls into question our basic trust in the order and structure of our world we are compelled by our instinct for self-preservation to deny evils existence and construct a reality that offers an illusory sense of safety and predictability. We limit the intrusion of new information or thinking about things in ways that contradict our pre-existing beliefs. We simply deny that which causes us too much distress.
Along with the need to believe that the world is fundamentally just, the narcissist’s facade of normalcy and character contributes to the rationalization that egregious maltreatment must be somehow deserved by the victim.
The narcissist’s personae is crafted in accordance with the understanding that power, status, and virtue are the relevant markers for what is valued and esteemed.
Accordingly, the narcissist will deftly feign innocence or confusion and triangulate naive enablers, so as to further alienate the victim and ensure control. The narcissist will virtue signal and grandstand about their upstanding moral values and philanthropic activities so as to ensure a (false) sense of security and glean admiration and trust. This ensures the narcissist that he will be viewed as admirable and noble while the victim is stigmatized as the unstable, amoral problematic one.
The need to assure ourselves that we are invulnerable to evil compels us to collude in assigning culpability to the victim, designating her as the reason for the relational difficulties with the narcissist.
Sociologist Erving Goffman expounded on this phenomenon in his theory of social stigma. Those who are marginalized and who evidence psychological distress and misfortune are targets of stigmatization. We seek to blame a reliable scapegoat so as to alleviate the discomfort caused by conflictual feelings. This us versus them, good-bad dichotomy affords a locus of control. By scapegoating the victim of narcissistic abuse we can deflect from complex difficult truths.
As a result, the victim is branded as the unstable one, just as the narcissist hoped and planned.
As Goffman explains, stigma breeds contempt and contempt breeds blame. Following this line of reason, the stigmatized victim is ultimately blamed for the harm inflicted by the narcissist. This socially Darwinistic paradigm illustrates how the narcissist’s advantage over the victim supports a survival of the fittest template. The fittest are elevated, irrespective of their character. Signs of weakness and fragility are subject to condemnation. The victimized target is viewed as harming the narcissist, not the other way around.
Malignant narcissists are very encouraged by this absence of critical thought, and the reliance on primitive psychological defenses intended to deny unacceptable truths. It gives them the leverage and latitude they need to undisputedly destroy their target.
Ultimately the victim is deeply mired in cognitive dissonance, an intense state of contradiction in which she cannot reconcile intuitive perceptions anchored in self-preservation, with self-blame and societal prescriptions that tell her that a good person believes that steadfast love and compassion is the panacea to all relational difficulties.
These excuses along with not being believed, the fixation on the narcissist’s idealized personae, extensive brainwashing, and the torment of dismantling a trauma bond, keeps the victim tethered and susceptible to returning to the narcissist, should she actually attempt to leave.
In spite of all the obstacles, should a victim of narcissist abuse find the courage and strength to break free, the narcissist will attempt to strategically dupe the victim back into their lair. The thrill of the hunt and the irresistible power of embodying both tormenter and redeemer fuels their quest.
Even under the worst conditions many victims insist that there was a part of the narcissist that loved them, that was repentant and bonded in a trustworthy way. This erroneous assumption is the downfall of victims. They are seeking that redemptive gesture of mattering to the narcissist that keeps that door slightly ajar just in case.
Through hoovering, love bombing, and false contrition the narcissist will endeavor to re-engage. Random nonsensical text messages, sudden phone contact, slurpy proclamations of love, inserting themselves in the lives of those close to the target, and even overtures to work things out in therapy might occur. If their gratuitous efforts are not responded to they will resort to punishment. Stalking, threats, character assassination and smear campaigns will result. Threats of self-inflicted harm may be strategically employed if all else fails. The narcissist will do whatever it takes to glean supply.
Returning leads to a progression of even worse degradation and abuse as the narcissist concludes it is the victim’s weakness that has allowed him to triumph. The victim’s capitulation reinforces his sense of superiority, omnipotence, and entitlement.
As inspirational author Shannon L. Alder said, “Narcissism can’t be cured or prayed away. It is a mental disorder that turns the victims of its abuse into mental patients because it causes so much psychological manipulation.”
Escaping and staying away is the only recourse for the victim of narcissistic abuse who seeks recovery. It is through the attainment and sustainment of this victory that the once victim can progress through the stages of survival to a life of thriving.