Narcissistic Personality Disorder is one of the most difficult things for any psychologist or spiritual teacher to get around. Not only does narcissists misinterpret things of this nature every time they hear something taught to them, but they will also re-educate others into thinking that their interpretation of the lesson was the correct one.

Further, not all narcissists are overtly malicious and easy to spot; some are basically nice people who are simply completely lost as to what true love is and how it works. The worst comes from the perspective of personal gain and manipulation of others, and the little better ones come from the perspective of group gain and manipulation for the better of their friends and family members. Therefore, their interpretation of a phenomenon that is based on purely selfless love is not going to be very accurate at all. Normal people do not connect selfish motivations with true love or ANY interaction with another person whatsoever if they can avoid it.

Let’s start right there:

Selfishness/selflessness.

I have said that True Emotion Mirror love and feels selfish to the person feeling it – if that person is a non-narcissist. Non-narcissists feel that they may be TAKING something from their loved ones by even asking for their love in return. They will approach them too cautiously, as a result, not thinking that their love would be the very thing that their True Emotion Mirror’s happiness is made out of. Therefore, it is important to explain to a non-narcissist that, “dude/girl, your love for her/him means everything to her/him, I know it feels selfish to you to want her/him and to have her/him, but her/his happiness depends on your selfishness.

To a narcissist, this sounds like every excuse in the book to go after whomever they want, regardless of whether the feelings are mutual or not.

You feel proud to be with your True Emotion Mirror.

Non-narcissistic True Emotion Mirrors are VERY VERY VERY aware of any signs of ego that may drive their decisions in choosing a partner. It is absolutely an over-corrective reaction to narcissists they know and their conscious attempt to steer clear of any narcissistic motivations in pairing up. The reason being is that the last thing they want to do is to hurt this person, and narcissistic bonding motivations will hurt their loved one.

However, with True Emotion Mirrors, this becomes very problematic because every narcissistic motivation you have is flared up, yes. Still, they NEVER over-power the need to protect and care for their counterpart. A True Emotion Mirror will always put their own needs second to the needs of their counterpart, and both of them do this.

Now, if you’d feel 6-foot-tall (7-foot-tall if you are a 6-footer) to be seen with your True Emotion Mirror, you may fear you’re being narcissistic with you choice of partner. But the truth is, if your partner doesn’t make you want to arch your chest to be seen with them, that’s the wrong partner – aka NOT the True Emotion Mirror. This is to say that this feeling BELONGS into the True Emotion Mirror relationship and is not a sign of trouble in paradise… But it can be without the rest of the signs present.

True Emotion Mirrors admire each other.

A narcissist knows how being flattered changes THEIR perception of others; A target, something to suck dry. Therefore, when someone flatters them, they may think that’s a True Emotion Mirror; rightfully theirs to abuse at will. But no. This is not at all what I mean.

True Emotion Mirrors feel a natural admiration and respect toward each other, but that does not mean they are flattering and kissing each other’s asses for good effect. Sure, they’ll flirt, and they’ll say nice things to each other, but it is not flattery; it is a genuine expression of loving each other.

It may also, particularly with Hidden/Taboo True Emotion Mirrors, turn on its head: the natural admiration and respect can turn them vicious at each other: “You think you’re too good for me” (when they have never said anything to the effect.)

Wrong: High emotions = create high drama.

The narcissist also is nothing as much as a drama queen or king. EVERYTHING has to be pulled out of proportion, and they LOVE to fight and “be forgiven.” As the True Emotion Mirror description is full of expressions of heightened emotions, extreme love, and, on the odd occasion, fiery fights, narcissists tend to interpret this as an invitation to CREATE DRAMA to replace these real emotions that are natural between the True Emotion Mirrors.

Wrong: True Emotion Mirror is kind of like a master seducer.

A narcissist will easily interpret the True Emotion Mirror term to mean an individual who has mastered a seduction or pickup process. This is NOT what a True Emotion Mirror is. True Emotion Mirror is only a True Emotion Mirror in relation to their counterpart, like a woman is not a mother without having a child. A man is not a husband without a wife, and a child is not a sister or a brother without a sibling. Neither a man nor a woman is a True Emotion Mirror alone. (They can be a True Emotion Mirror outside an official relationship to their True Emotion Mirror, but they do need at least one to be called that.)

True Emotion Mirrors need to learn a lot about each other to undo the divide between them, which makes it sound like education for masters of seduction, but that’s not what this is here for. That’s one of the troubles with True Emotion Mirrors; you have to sometimes take risks that with a Trail Companion* would be completely… Weird. Also, what works with a Trail Companion* flies flat on the face with a True Emotion Mirror – and often vice versa. What keeps a Trail Companion* relationship together are partial truths and dampening of your personality to fit your Trail Companion*, but a True Emotion Mirror requires the exact opposite: total honesty and truth, even when it’s super freaking embarrassing to admit.

Your True Emotion Mirror is the coolest person you know.

Again, when a non-narcissist is trying to get their bearings at the beginning of their relationship, they are gasping at the notion that THEIR True Emotion Mirror might be THAT COOL. They feel overly lucky and are CONVINCED they are telling themselves pretty stories and having their head up in the clouds telling themselves this person might be in love with them, too.

A narcissist will interpret this as “the coolest person you know is your True Emotion Mirror” (note, different from your True Emotion Mirror is the coolest person you know). OBVIOUSLY, EVERYBODY knows someone who is the coolest person we know. That does not make that person our True Emotion Mirror. However, IF we have met our True Emotion Mirror, they will be the coolest person we’ve ever met.

In other words, everyone who has ever met Steven Tyler doesn’t mean they’re all Steven Tyler’s True Emotion Mirror even though he’s the coolest person they’ve ever met, unless they ALSO have met their True Emotion Mirror, which makes Steven Tyler, to them, only the second coolest person they’ve ever met.

Unconditional love.

There is two ways to interpret the concept of unconditional love. One is that you love a person for a reason, and you’ll keep loving that person unconditionally, regardless of how they treat you, whether you’re in a relationship or not.

The other way to interpret it is that you love a person without reason forever and with no other expectations, completely unconditionally: no matter how much of a prick you are, no matter how ugly or stupid or awful person you are…

A narcissist, who HATE the competition that they feel forced to get into for love and attention, loves this idea. They get to be the shitty person that they are, and their True Emotion Mirror will love them regardless. Then, they proceed to force a Trail Companion* they’ve decided to stick the label of a True EMotion Mirror on into this role: “If you want your honorary title of my True Emotion Mirror, you must prove you are capable of loving me unconditionally, even if you’re currently looking at me shitting on your living room carpet.”

This is the problem that we have with the narcissistic interpretation of a True Emotion Mirror bond because even though it is true; a True Emotion Mirror will love you even at your very worst, the narcissist tends to try and force a Trail Companion* to do the job, as True Emotion Mirrors are not easy to find.

The promise of a happy ending.

Sadly, narcissists are desperate for the same love that we feel toward our True Emotion Mirrors. And we sympathize. However, a part of the narcissists’ problem is their insistence in FORCING a regular Trail Companion* connection into the big boots of a True Emotion Mirror hoping that will do the trick. So they’re trying their hardest to push and prod and twist things to make themselves believe true love has finally found them, and in doing so, they’re simply pushing their own True Emotion Mirror (who does exist) away from their energies.

As the narcissist is fully focussed on making fools gold gold, they don’t notice the actual love right next to them. They’re looking for an easy way out, panicking with trying to hit on the person everyone else is in love with, thinking they’re the solution to their problem (which is a notion that will again freak out non-narcissistic Polyamorous True Emotion Mirrors, polygynists and polyandrists… But please don’t be alarmed if none of the other signs apply.)

A True Emotion Mirror theory tempts the narcissist in the idea that there’s a guaranteed happy ending (there isn’t really) and that they have RIGHTS to a person (which they still wouldn’t if this was a real True Emotion Mirror).

Even narcissists do have True Emotion Mirrors, and in fact, I believe the only thing to cure narcissism is the discovery of a True Emotion Mirror. (NAMELY a True Emotion Mirror, a Precious Soulmate simply won’t do.) It’s just nearly impossible for a narcissist to take their fearful panicked eyes off the best bet they’ve found just long enough for them to find the real thing (and ironically are more than happy to say real True Emotion Mirrors are doing this with them because they want to think that anyone who they love who isn’t focussed on them is doing this exactly to them… Which is another post in itself, I think.)

“I must teach my (narcissistic) ‘True Emotion Mirror’ to love me.”

The definition of a narcissist from the perspective of an actual narcissist is a person who will not love them back despite a) being loved and b) being still single/polyamorous. Therefore, the narcissist is always trying to teach their supposed True Emotion Mirror to love them – unsuccessfully, of course, from the normal person’s perspective.

However, narcissists are often satisfied with the outward signs of love because they don’t truly know what it feels like to be genuinely loved, so they can’t truly tell the difference. Therefore, they will be just as happy with a shotgun wedding as a real one. And as I say this now, they wouldn’t know the real difference between the two – both lead to the same place, no? (Normal person would shriek: “Not at all the same place!!”)

So, when a narcissist teaches you how to love them, they very much do it in the same manner as training a dog to behave in the desired way. They don’t think anything of natural or genuine responses; they care only about the “correct” and “desired” responses, even if they aren’t “perfect”. They give their partner points for trying.

Giver/taker runner/chaser.

The narcissist feels that in all relationships, there is a giver and a taker dynamic and that the runner and chaser dynamic sometimes visible in people in love has to do with this decision process as to which one of us is the giver and which one is the taker; submission and dominance. Normal people seek equality, where both give and take equally, but in the mind of a narcissist, this is a near impossibility because they’ve never actually experienced true love before. They’ve only ever been in relationships with Trail Companions*, which are, by definition, unions of compromise; give and take; bargain and negotiate, rather than “as you give you’ll also receive.”

They feel an unusually attractive target as an exciting person to dominate, and this is what they call “True Emotion Mirror love” if left to their own definition.

General narcissistic misunderstanding of love: Familiarity = love.

I am not entirely sure if this relates to narcissism in particular or if this is some other connection that creates this idea that love is ignited through Stockholm Syndrome, basically. In the mind of a narcissist(?), it seems to connect that if you manage to force a person into your presence for long enough, their natural response will be to fall in love with you. While psychology might call this Stockholm Syndrome, the rest of us bloody unlikely result, the narcissist may try and lock themselves into the same room or situation for long enough for the other person to develop feelings for them.

They may then believe that if you can force someone’s hand to try and have a relationship with them, it will create feelings of familiarity and stuff they call “trust,” as in “you can trust I won’t leave you even if you fight back” and that will, hopefully, then create a True Emotion Mirror bond – this is not how it works, however. True Emotion Mirror bond deepens over time, but NEVER through forced interaction with another person. In fact, locking someone into a close bond with a Trail Companion*, particularly a narcissistic one, will have the opposite effect on the non-narcissist: killing whatever love existed between them in the first place.

What you can do to help narcissists that come your way… And yourself at the same time.

Narcissists** are hanging onto false hope like nobody else. They want to take the little bit of love you feel for them and try to see if they can turn it into a roaring fire. They are, in a sense, eternally optimistic, even when it is OBVIOUS to everyone else around them that this is never going to work out for you. They will beg and plead, call you names, make sure you know you are the problem if you don’t love them, that your reluctance to see if there’s something between you is about YOUR narcissism or your callousness, your intimacy issues, your fear of commitment… You name it. Whatever they throw at you, if you can already see this isn’t going to work, just walk away. Let them figure this out for themselves, and when you see a friend involved with a narcissist, make sure they understand this same thing, too.

THAT SAID. If someone IS in love with a narcissist, let them be. Even if someone is the biggest prick in this world, their True Emotion Mirror will love them no matter what – hopefully back to health, too. Having said that… If your friend is entangled with someone narcissistic, Trail Companion* or a True one, make sure they know how to get help, make sure they’ll never lose contact with you or someone that can rush to their help in a jiffy, and DO NOT TAKE IT PERSONALLY that they’re not listening to you right now. (This is more than likely a narcissist + narcissist equation, where both are more than happy to fool themselves into believing they’ve just hit true love. One of them will figure it out soon enough.)

Borderline Personality Disorder obsession with a True Emotion Mirror theory.

The True Emotion Mirror bond is unbreakable.

Borderline Personality Disorder thinks the idea of a True Emotion Mirror is marvelous because the bond is unbreakable. That the True Emotion Mirror is not PERMITTED to leave you. That you have the right to hold onto this person by divine order.

Obviously, this is not the case.

The bond is unbreakable because you are inherently you, and your True Emotion Mirror is inherently them. Therefore, they will love each other for who they are until one or both of them change. So technically, not even this bond is a 100% certain and unbreakable, but it is as close as we’ll ever get.

Histrionic Personality Disorder misinterpretations of the True Emotion Mirror relationship

Everyone exaggerates.

The True Emotion Mirror description is filled with superlatives, supernatural elements, premonitions, visions, telepathy; you name it. It SOUNDS like a gross exaggeration of what is realistic, yet, not one word of it is an exaggeration. In fact, it is difficult to try and exaggerate it.

 

 

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*) Term changed after this post was originally written. Fractions of old terms may exist elsewhere in the post. Read about term updates.
**) Narcissists are Young Souls left alone to survive and they're doing their best. Their emotional age ranges from 3 to 17 -year old. The younger, the more severe the narcissism.

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