How Narcissists Make You Addicted to Them

Added: 2026-05-25

[00:00:00]So, the narcissistic abuse relationship cycle uh the most important element of it is the very, very first step, which is idealization. Why is this so important?

[00:00:10]Because it's actually uh a natural thing that happens in healthy relationships.

[00:00:15]It happens in all relationships. You first of all put the person on a pedestal.

[00:00:20]This is the first flush of romantic love, the thing that draws us in, and uh it's a adaptive evolutionary um mechanism. It's what creates bonds, not trauma bonds necessarily, just bonds. We start with idealization. This person is wonderful.

[00:00:38]They're the solution to so many problems in my problems in my life, blah, blah, blah.

[00:00:42]In the narcissistic abusive relationship, the uh idealization is pathological because the personality doing the idealizing is pathological. They can't do healthy things.

[00:00:53]And so, step one is is critical. They idealize you, and they cause you to idealize them through manipulation, so you have co-idealization.

[00:01:02]Then, once you're drawn in, you're on the hook. You idealize them, they idealize you. You're addicted to that feeling of being idealized. You're addicted to idealizing them. It feels wonderful. You're imbuing all of this um good emotion into them.

[00:01:15]Then, you're on the hook. Now, at that point, I can afford to be nasty to you because you can't live without me now.

[00:01:22]I'm very important to you, and that's critical. So, I can begin to devalue you. I can begin to make you feel unsafe. And all of this in a certain way, if you like, is um sort of a sick sick sadistic expression of my power over you. You going to leave?

[00:01:37]I just called you a in front of your friends, in front of your family.

[00:01:40]You going to leave? Are you? You'll complain, you'll cry, you'll scream, you'll shout, you'll write me a letter, you'll write me an essay, you'll write me a text. I don't care cuz you ain't going anywhere. It's the power dynamic that's critical.

[00:01:52]Over time, as you resist me more and more, this is one way the narcissistic life cycle can play out.

[00:01:58]Your resistance and your refusal to obey me creates more and more narcissistic injury and it's showing me I'm not as powerful as I thought and that maybe you've seen through me and you've seen my true face. Then I'm going to start to devalue you hard and that's because I want to discard you. I need I have a compulsion to reject you to say, "Oh, you're not the person I thought you were. You're actually worthless. You're like everybody else. You're blah blah blah." You're devalued and then you'll be discarded and the discard can be very painful because I really will throw you away.

[00:02:29]I really will and at that moment you will feel it's over. I'm done with you and you know I'm looking for my next target, my next source of narcissistic supply to feed from.