A relationship with a narcissist feels personal, but their mental illness prevents them from ever seeing or loving the real person in front of them.
The Illusion of a Real Bond
People recovering from narcissistic abuse often torture themselves trying to make personal sense of what happened. They want to fit the relationship into their life story. They wonder how they could have loved someone so deeply only to be discarded so completely. If the narcissist was a real person in a genuine relationship, the cruelty must say something terrible about the victim. But that entire struggle rests on a false premise. The painful truth is that the relationship was never real in any normal human sense.
Of course, real events occurred. Time passed, conversations happened, and physical spaces were shared. Yet the narcissist lives inside a mental illness that functions like a total filter. Information moves between you, but it never registers as coming from an independent person. The narcissist did not love you in the past, does not love you now, and will never love anyone in the future. They are mentally incapable of knowing another human being. Accepting this feels jarring at first, but it ultimately provides immense relief from unnecessary self-blame.
The Crazed Fan and the Celebrity
To explain this dynamic, Ades draws on the work of author Sam Vaknin, who notes that a narcissist sees others as internal objects. The narcissist does not see someone standing outside in the world. Instead, they act like an obsessed fan running up to a major movie star. A crazed fan does not know the celebrity as a real human being who feels pain and uses the bathroom. The fan interacts entirely with a manufactured, idealized snapshot. The narcissist does the exact same thing from the very first moment they encounter you.
When you behave in ways that match this snapshot, the narcissist showers you with praise. You happen to align with their mental picture like a screen catching a movie projection. This creates the illusion of genuine love. But the moment you express ordinary human needs, flaws, or pain, the fantasy collapses. The narcissist cannot tolerate the real you. They go blank, dismiss you, or punish you for refusing to play the idealized role. To stay in the relationship, you must erase yourself entirely, because the narcissist only wants their mental snapshot.
Smoke Inside the Hall of Mirrors
Attempting to connect with a narcissist is like walking through a hall of mirrors. When you try to hug their physical body, you end up grasping smoke. When you try to hold them accountable for bad behavior, they shift immediately and claim they were never standing there. Tell them they are bullying you, and they insist they were only teasing. Tell them your feelings are hurt, and they claim you hurt their feelings worse. They rewrite what happened on the spot, constantly insisting your memory is broken.
In a healthy relationship, two people can clarify a misunderstanding and reconnect because both possess an inner core. Psychology calls this the true self, while spiritual traditions call it the soul. It is the steady essence of a person. The narcissist never formed this inner constellation. Behind their shifting reflections, there is no solid person to hold, reach, or resolve conflict with. Chasing them through their maze of excuses will never lead to a stable reality.
The Toddler and the Dead Mother
This profound mental disorder takes root early in childhood, usually between the ages of two and three. At that developmental stage, a toddler relies entirely on the mother's gaze to learn who they are. Psychoanalyst André Green coined the term 'the dead mother' to describe a parent who is emotionally unresponsive, neglecting, abusive, or blindly idealizing. When a mother fails to mirror the baby as an actual human being, the child's true self cannot form. A developmental window opens and shuts, leaving the narcissist trapped in toddlerhood forever.
In adult relationships, the narcissist unconsciously hires you to play out this unresolved childhood drama. They hand you an impossible script. You are cast as the perfect mother who will finally help the toddler grow up. At the exact same time, you are cast as the neglectful mother who suffocated or abandoned them. You cannot win this setup. No matter how loving you are, you inevitably trigger the toddler's deep internal rage. You are trapped playing a double image in a nightmare you did not create.
Returning What Does Not Belong to You
The gravest danger of this dynamic is that you eventually start identifying with the internal object in the narcissist's head. When the relationship inevitably ends, you collapse into existential confusion. You wonder who you are after pouring so much energy into a role. You walk away feeling heavy with shame, guilt, and worthlessness. But Ades stresses that none of those feelings belong to you. You were simply standing inside a shared fantasy where the narcissist offloaded their own unresolved trauma.
The worthlessness you feel is the narcissist's worthlessness. The rage is their childhood grief. Recognizing that they never truly knew you allows you to drop this heavy baggage. You are a real human being who survived a profound psychological catastrophe. As Sam Vaknin notes, separation and individuation is the ultimate antidote to narcissistic abuse. You must separate your true identity from the narcissist's sickness, push their disorder out of your life story, and reclaim your reality.