When a narcissist comes into your life it is like being hit by a freight train.
One day you were going about your everyday life, and within a very short amount of time, before you could even catch your breath you were swept up into an entirely differently reality.
Gary Zukav makes reference to a Hindu poem “Destruction never appears weapon in hand. It comes slyly on tiptoe, making you see bad in good, and good in bad”.
Narcissists come in hard, they come in fast, and once a narcissist has decided that you are a target, he or she doesn’t waste time.
The process almost all narcissists know how to use very well is known as ‘love-bombing’. It is a powerful tool.
Wikipedia describes ‘love bombing’ as this:
Love bombing is an attempt to influence a person by lavish demonstrations of attention and affection. The phrase can be used in different ways. Members of the Unification Church (who reportedly coined the expression) use or have used it themselves to mean a genuine expression of friendship, fellowship, interest, or concern. Critics of cults use the phrase with the implication that the “love” is feigned and the practice is manipulative. It has also been used to refer to abusers in romantic relationships showering their victims with praise, gifts, and affection in the early stages of a relationship.
In this article I will explain how narcissists use love bombing throughout a relationship (especially in the early stages) in order to hook you, as well as how to CLEARLY identify the signs of love bombing and RUN AWAY before it’s too late.
The Narcissist’s Reality Before You Came Into the Picture
Let’s start with the background of where the narcissist has come from before he or she begins to plot how to get you into their world.
The narcissist is likely to have had narcissistic supply dry up, or is in the process of devaluing and discarding a former source of narcissistic supply. This means that the narcissist is looking to build new sources of supply.
Narcissists have no True Self – their inner self has been completely engulfed by the False Self. Therefore any reverence for life – love, compassion, empathy, integrity and genuine connection is null and void.
Because of the narcissist’s barren and internal emptiness he or she needs mirroring to survive. His or her flagging and erratic self-worth and self-value is precariously balanced on the need for outside attention.
To be without narcissistic supply (attention) is the difference between emotional life and death for a narcissist. The narcissist’s internalised wounds often resulting from the unhealed wounds sustained from the mother (or sometimes the father or other authority figures) are relentless. These are the ‘voices’ that continually tell the narcissist ‘you are no good’, ‘you are worthless’, ‘you are a total failure in life’, ‘you don’t deserve to exist’.
The narcissist does not have the resources to deal with, process or heal this inner terminal self-degradation, because he or she dismissed the True Self and created a False Self in its place.
This False Self is pathological – it is false. And through this faux self which requires constant stimulation and reinforcement of the narcissist’s grandiose version of himself (to escape inner constant torment) people are needed to feed this fake construction.
Normal life disappointments can be processed by people who are non-narcissists with relative ease. A narcissist does not have the inner mechanics to deal with ‘disappointments’ ‘set backs’ or the confronting of his or her ‘reality’ – that he or she is in fact imperfect and not the grandiose false version that is presented to the world.
Constant narcissistic supply is necessary to avoid him or herself, as a bottomless and never-ending quest to escape dealing with the emotional annihilation of what the narcissist really feels about him or herself.
A narcissist low on narcissistic supply needs to secure narcissistic supply as soon as possible. This will be his or her all-consuming focus.
And this is where love bombing comes into play…
The Difference Between Neediness and Pathological Narcissism
You must understand that the narcissistic emotional ‘love’ model is not the normal human one we know. Narcissists are insatiably needy. We know there are ‘needy’ people in the world – but the normal human version of ‘needy’ bares very little resemblance to a narcissist’s neediness.
Needy people are needy people, and have low self-esteem and deficient self-emotional resources, but they are not the pathological, relentless and lethal version of ‘neediness’ that the narcissist is.
Needy people are often very unskilled at the art of persuasion and romance, and may be very off-putting in their advances. It has often been said neediness is the worst cologne – and this is very true. ‘Normal’ needy people often don’t secure love relationships quickly because people are repelled by their shaky advances.
The narcissist is a completely different ball game. He or she is the most needy of all the needy people (requiring narcissistic supply like a heroin addict requires heroin), and his or her literal emotional survival has depended on acquiring narcissistic supply.
Therefore the narcissist has been able to intricately learn and perfect the craft of how to secure narcissistic supply – quickly, flawlessly and expertly. Narcissists appear to be very confident, and very much ‘in their power’ when romancing and wooing you.
