A clinician explains why empathic people get stuck with narcissists: empaths seek purpose by trying to heal them, while narcissists demand constant validation. Breaking free requires feeling anger toward the toxicity and using embodied practices like movement and EMDR to process the wounds keeping you trapped.
In working in the clinical field for over 10 years as a licensed clinician, I can tell you that empathic people and narcissistic people have relationships for two primary purposes. The first is that the empathic person, they get a sense of purpose because in that relationship they're in the constant pursuit of the— to their desire to help the other person. Because they see the flaws in that person or the aspects that are unhealed, and they find purpose in that relationship in an attempt to help that person heal. That's why the empathic person always, always ignores the present moment and what's happening with the narcissistic person— the gaslighting, the manipulation, the cycles of abuse and toxicity. They ignore what's happening in the moment. They dissociate from it. And they idealize, they romanticize, and they fantasize about a version in the future of the relationship or the person that doesn't exist. So they fall in love with a fantasy of what the relationship could be. And then the guilt that they feel, because empathic people have a tendency to take on more guilt than other people, they second-guess themselves, so they feel responsible when other people are upset. So that empathic person They see the areas that, that person needs to grow in, and they feel responsible to help them get there because they recognize the negative behaviors that they participate in and engage in inside the relationship. So it's easier for them to take ownership and recognize their part. That's why oftentimes they take toxic ownership, more ownership than they should. The narcissistic person— the empathic person gets their needs met to in finding a sense of purpose in the relationship, trying to help the other person heal. The narcissist gets his needs met inside the relationship because they get their needs met for validation, affirmation, recognition. And they're always able to, inside that relationship, have a person that is willing at any, any moment to meet their emotional needs. So they both find a sense of purpose inside that dynamic. And that narcissistic person The empathic person is like the perfect recipe for meeting all of that narcissistic person's unmet needs, especially if this empathic person hasn't done some work on themselves, hasn't truly looked inside themselves and understood, like, why am I in this unhealthy relationship? What keeps me here? Right? It's, it's the sense of purpose they get from it, which is also connected to them trying to relive their childhood. And potentially tying up loose ends from the past in order to control a different outcome, to remain in control, which is called repetition compulsion, which is in another video that I talk about. But I want to talk about something. So these empathic people and narcissistic people are very commonly in dynamic because it's literally the perfect relationship. So that's oftentimes why narcissistic people don't get along with other narcissistic people because it's like a, they do like sword fighting, I call it. When they're out in public, they like, they kind of like see who's who. And because they're not confident in themselves, they don't really embody authenticity. They're just ego-driven and they project a false illusion of who they are through grandiosity, charisma, right? They're charming, they're the center of attention. They attract attention to themselves. So yeah, what I want to say is I'm speaking right now to the empathic individual. You're in a relationship with a narcissistic person. The only way out of that relationship is to feel a little bit of anger, because you're probably not going to do anything unless you start feeling angry. You're not. You're going to settle for less. You're going to settle for breadcrumbs. You're going to remain in something toxic. So you got to get angry, first of all. No one's probably told you this. You got to get angry. You got to get pissed off. You've got to get intolerant, frustrated, overwhelmed, and just sick of all the toxicity. All, all of it, whether they're malignant, covert, or grandiose, doesn't matter. Then what you need to do is recognize your emotional needs and recognize what unmet needs are not— what needs are not being met inside that relationship. Your unmet needs. What you'll find is pretty much all of them. Then you got to ask yourself why you're in that dynamic and what is unhealed inside of you that's keeping you there. Because it wasn't until I did this and really did some deep soul searching that I realized that my first marriage was already doomed, wasn't meant to work. My second relationship where I got engaged and then she cheated on me wasn't meant to be. Why? Because there were components inside of me that I had not dealt with. And I'm learning on a daily basis. I'm a work in progress, still learning how to deal with those things. So I'm out here right now And it's beautiful. This is a part of the way that I deal with it. It's the relationship that I have with my physical body too. It's moving your body, letting your mind go. That's how EMDR was even created. EMDR was created— EMDR therapy was created by Francine Shapiro. And what she did, what she did was just look at the sky and look back and forth, right? And just process. And then she realized that it reduced the emotional distress that she felt from her breast cancer diagnosis. She had some form of cancer. Maybe it wasn't breast cancer, some form of cancer. And so what I want to say is sometimes you got to move your body, you got to let your eyes wander in nature, clear your head, and start to really take some time for yourself to self-reflect why you stay there. Because maybe the reality is that you're getting something out of it that you don't want to admit. As unhealthy as that might be, it's because you're getting something out of it. A lot of times for us empaths who haven't done some work and understood the relational dynamic and why we're in it, What happens is we tend to settle for a toxic relationship that's far below the relationship that God called us to be in. Think about that.
