Why Didn’t The Narcissist Love Me?
By: Stephanie Lyn Life Coaching
Tags: Breakups, Relationships, Relationships Love Dating, Narcissism, Narcissist

Here are 2 reasons why.

When you are in a relationship with someone who suffers from Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD) and the relationship ends, especially if it ends badly, you will ask yourself this question, “Why didn’t the narcissist love me?”. To ask yourself why this person did not love you means that you feel disappointment. Maybe they were not able to be who you wanted them to be. Perhaps they promised you the world only to ghost you or abandon you. They probably came into your life playing the role of your soulmate only to be your worst nightmare.

Regardless of the reason, when you are coming out of a relationship with someone who has Narcissistic Personality Disorder, it is traumatic, heartbreaking and hard to recover from.

Sometimes it is not just our romantic relationships that affect us in this way. It can be the parent who was not able to love you the way you needed as a child. It is the narcissistic mother who always put herself first and the wound she then created in you growing up.

It is the abusive father who was emotionally or physically unavailable. It is the constant behavior you received as a child that created the program you would go off to play as an adult that you are the problem. As the old saying goes “most people in therapy are recovering from the people who should be in therapy.”

Since your past involved these unhealthy people and situations the wounds and programming you formed then caused you to attract unhealthy friendships and partners into your life. When you grow up with these deep wounds, you go out into the world still attracting what is familiar. Only until you hit enough pain do you wake up to the disfunction you have endured throughout your life.

As you begin this journey, you may logically understand all of this, but it is a matter of clearing out the old tape and creating a new one. It is about establishing a healthier inner self and forming habits that model your beliefs that you are healthy, a good person and deserving of love. This is what I teach my clients to do for themselves, to begin rebuilding and creating a new tape. It takes time but it can be done.

To ask the question “Why didn’t this person love me?” there are a few particularly important things you must remember.

THIS IS NOT ABOUT YOU

It is easy to go to the place of fully blaming yourself because that gives you a sense of control. It is also what you did as a child, you blamed yourself for what mom and dad were not able to give you. You internalized their behavior or their lack of being able to give you what you needed because of this wound your default is to go within first.

Why do we want control?

If you can blame yourself for someone not loving you and you live in the story that you “did something wrong” then that means you can fix it. You have control. That control will allow you to avoid pain. You can try harder or you can change to become what the other person wants you to be so you can get the love you are searching for.

Also remember because of your past, upbringing, parents, how you were programmed and the abusive you have endured your default setting is to blame yourself.

Why do you automatically blame yourself?

When you did not get the love you needed as a child, you internalized this. You began forming a story that something must be wrong with you because you were not getting what you needed. You also formed this story when you were verbally told time and time again you were wrong, bad, or not good enough. This message could have been sent to you verbally or in other ways such as the adults around you ignoring you, not allowing you to have a voice and trying to control you.

A child’s ability to internalize what they are experiencing is because they have not yet fully developed their logical cognitive abilities yet. Their minds are quite simple. A child is not able to see a situation for what it is, and logically understand what is happening. They cannot see that their dad is codependent and mom is narcissistic and that is why they behave the way they do. All they can do is blame themselves for everything and the program begins

“You are not enough.”

“Something is wrong with you.”

“You are unlovable.”

“You don’t deserve this because you have always received that. That is what is familiar to you.”

Aside from these tapes begin created you still craved all of the love, validation and approval that you did not get from your parents which means you went out into the world searching for people to give those things for you. No one showed you how to do it yourself, no one taught you how to have standards and raise the bar so here comes all of the toxic relationships you attract into your life.

A NARCISSIST DOES NOT KNOW HOW TO LOVE

Now it is time to dive into the narcissist and why they have an inability to love.

Someone who fully has NPD is not able to love anyone because they do not love themselves. We all know this and have heard this before but let’s go deeper into it.

As we are growing up, we learn some fundamental aspects of being a human being. We learn empathy, and boundaries. We learn how to handle not getting what we want, and we learn how to give and receive love. For a narcissist they did not learn any of that. Their models were either one narcissistic parent and one codependent or two narcissistic parents.

A narcissist growing up either received too much attention or not enough attention.

They learned that status matters. They learned that they only received love when they did something well. They learned that love is based on conditions and they learned how to manipulate others to get what they want. Since all humans need certain things, when the narcissist did not get their needs met, they labeled themselves as flawed. Most of us put these labels on ourselves growing up, which created all of our “I am not enough stories.” Where you are different from a narcissist is that you never disconnected from yourself to create a false self, whereas a narcissist did.

The love a narcissist received was based on achievement, money, power, status, and selfishness. Since the traumas runs so deep in a narcissist, they now cannot access their true self and begin healing.

A narcissist will always look at relationship as supply because they are unable to give themselves what they need in life so they need others to do it for them.

They will never be able to have a real deep connection with people because in order to do that you must be vulnerable, and vulnerability is hard for most people to do.

A narcissist never wants anyone to see the real them because they are not even connected to that part of themselves let alone be ok for you to see it.

Whatever your relationship is with this person dealing with the questions of “why didn’t they love me” or “why couldn’t they give me what I needed” all have to do with them and not with you. Start working on your inner wounds that crave these answers, that want to just blame you and not put any of this on the other person who has the personality disorder is toxic or unhealthy.