This article is part of an ongoing series on behavioural psychology, exploring personality, scarcity, social dynamics and the ways our environments shape behaviour.
Why narcissistic relationships become extractive, and what breaks the attachment
For years, work was the one part of my life my ex-wife could not really get into.
She had gradually isolated me from a lot of the people around me, or at least made those relationships harder. There was always a reason – someone was interfering, someone else was a bad influence, another person had behaved badly towards her. None of it looked like isolation when you considered each incident on its own.
Work was different. She could not easily interfere with the people I worked with or control what happened there, so it remained a kind of safe space. Unfortunately, I later managed to get myself tangled up with people displaying remarkably similar behaviour at work too, and that was when I started noticing the larger pattern I wrote about in Hiding in Plain Sight.
I have written before about scarcity and abundance because I increasingly think scarcity explains a surprising amount of human behaviour. Narcissism appears to be almost the perfect inversion of it. From the outside it looks like abundance – confidence, entitlement, certainty, status and an apparently limitless belief in your own importance.
From the inside, my experience has been almost exactly the opposite. There is never enough attention, reassurance, money, admiration, influence, or evidence that they are cleverer, more important or more powerful than the people around them.
Once I started looking at narcissistic behaviour as scarcity rather than confidence, relationships that had seemed contradictory began to make considerably more sense.
They were extractive.
The parasite cannot kill the host
Calling somebody a parasite is deliberately provocative, but the metaphor is useful because a parasite does not simply attack its host, it depends on it.
That distinction explains something I struggled with for years. Some of the people who treated me worst could also become remarkably supportive when I was genuinely struggling. On the surface that seems contradictory. If somebody is selfish, manipulative or exploitative, why would they suddenly become generous when things get really bad?
Because a parasite cannot afford to kill its host, and there is another part to that which I think matters just as much – it cannot afford to let the host become independent either.
So support can arrive at strangely convenient moments, when you are close to collapsing, when you are pulling away, or when the relationship has become so obviously unequal that even you are beginning to question it. Suddenly there is affection, practical help, reassurance or generosity, enough to stabilise things, remind you that this person is not always awful, and make you wonder whether you have misunderstood them.
And perhaps sometimes you have. Human motivation is messy, and I do not believe every act of generosity is secretly strategic. The pattern is more useful than the motive.
Does somebody’s support leave you stronger and more independent, or does it mostly restore your ability to continue supporting them?
That is a much more interesting question.
Strength is useful
We tend to imagine manipulative people looking for weak victims, but that has never fitted my experience particularly well. Strong people are useful. A capable person solves problems, earns money, makes connections, provides reassurance, absorbs chaos, stays loyal and forgiving, and keeps functioning when things become difficult.
If you are looking for somebody to attach yourself to, those are valuable qualities.
The strange part comes afterwards, because the same qualities that made somebody attractive can gradually become things that need to be diminished. Confidence becomes arrogance, independence becomes selfishness, professional success becomes neglect, friends become interference, and generosity stops being something freely offered and becomes something expected.
The strength is still being used, but the person providing it is progressively persuaded that it is actually a defect.
That sounds contradictory until you look at it through scarcity. If you need somebody else’s strength but cannot tolerate the idea that they might actually be stronger than you, the obvious solution is to keep using it while undermining their confidence in it.
This is why I have become deeply suspicious of the idea that intelligent, capable people should somehow be immune to abusive relationships. Their capability may be part of what made them attractive in the first place. They did not necessarily walk willingly into a cage, the cage was assembled around them.
Narcissists travel in packs
I sometimes joke that narcissists travel in packs. I obviously do not mean that every difficult group of people is secretly a narcissist convention, but I am interested in the way certain personalities can become mutually useful.
I saw versions of this professionally. One person’s grievance would be validated by somebody else, another person would repeat the interpretation, someone else would add a slightly different complaint, and eventually you were no longer dealing with one person’s view of events but with what appeared to be a consensus.
That is enormously powerful because most reasonably self-aware people are capable of doubting themselves. If one person says you are the problem, you can disagree with them. If four people say it, the sensible response is to at least consider whether they might be right.
Sometimes they are, but four voices do not necessarily represent four independent judgements. Sometimes you are hearing one story travel through a network and come back amplified.
That becomes particularly dangerous when the people providing a different perspective have already been pushed away. The target loses the people who might say, actually, no, that isn’t what I saw, while the people reinforcing the dominant version become louder.
The effect is not simply isolation, it is replacement. Your independent support network is gradually replaced by a social environment in which the narcissistic person’s version of reality has become disproportionately powerful.
Scarcity hoards
This is where the link to scarcity becomes more interesting, because scarcity hoards more than money.
Information can be hoarded, credit can be hoarded, relationships can be hoarded, attention can be hoarded, decisions can be hoarded. Even somebody else’s independence can start to feel like a resource disappearing out of reach.
A secure person can generally tolerate another person having friends they do not particularly like, somebody else being more successful at something, or sharing information without needing to retain some tiny advantage. They can give somebody credit without feeling diminished themselves.
Scarcity makes those things harder because somebody else’s gain starts to feel suspiciously like your loss.
That is why the grandiosity can be misleading. Someone who genuinely feels powerful does not usually need to win every microscopic contest, they can afford not to.
The person who constantly needs to establish that they know more, own more, control more or matter more is revealing something very different.
There is never enough.
Recognition is not victory
My instinct when something goes wrong is to identify the problem, name it and try to fix it. That works reasonably well when everyone involved is trying to solve the same problem, but considerably less well when the problem you have identified is another person’s need for control.
I learned that in about the most extreme way available to me. When I directly confronted my ex-wife about her behaviour, she came at me with a carving knife.
That inevitably colours my view of confrontation. There is a powerful temptation when you finally understand a manipulative relationship to announce the discovery, to tell the other person that you know what they are doing, expose the mechanism and demonstrate that it no longer works.
I am not convinced that achieves very much.
If somebody’s security depends on maintaining control over how they are perceived, being exposed may be far more threatening than an ordinary disagreement, so winning the argument can be completely beside the point.
You do not need them to confess, accept your interpretation, or even agree that anything is wrong. You do not even need to be completely certain that your interpretation is right.
You need to look at what the relationship is doing to you.
Stop being nourishment
Breaking this kind of attachment is less dramatic than defeating somebody. It is mostly about restoring everything that became asymmetric – rebuilding relationships that have weakened, recovering independent sources of information, making decisions without automatically passing them through somebody else’s approval process, and becoming less available as an unlimited source of reassurance, money, attention, professional credibility or conflict.
Most importantly, perhaps, it means giving up the idea that you need to understand the other person completely before you are allowed to change your relationship with them.
That was a trap I fell into repeatedly. Contradictory behaviour is intellectually fascinating. Why would somebody undermine you and then rescue you? Why would they need you while constantly telling you that you were inadequate? Why would they isolate you from other people and then accuse you of being dependent?
You can spend years trying to build a model that makes every individual behaviour coherent.
Scarcity gave me enough of a model to stop needing the rest.
If somebody constantly needs resources from the people around them, a lot of those contradictions begin to line up. They can need your strength and resent you for having it, support you and undermine you, be generous and extractive, depend on you while working very hard to make you feel dependent on them.
Eventually, the precise diagnosis matters less than the direction of travel. If the relationship is making you more isolated, more confused, less confident in your own judgement and increasingly occupied with somebody else’s needs, you already know the important part.
You do not need to understand the parasite perfectly. You need to stop being the host.
That leaves a larger question. If scarcity can shape behaviour this profoundly inside a relationship, what happens when the same logic becomes embedded in the environment around us? I explore that next in The Ecology of Scarcity.
