Are You Living with a Narcissist? by Laurie Hollman

Author:Laurie Hollman
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781641702799
Publisher: Familius
Published: 2020-03-07T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER SEVEN

The Wish and Fear of Exploiting Others—The Use of Empathy with a Narcissistic Man

Rio

Rio was a retired older man who was struggling with the decision to leave his young spouse of fifteen years for multiple sexual liaisons. In his sixties, he was not interested in exploring his whole life (as is common in psychotherapy) but in my helping him make a decision about whether to leave his long-term partner, whom he found deficient in buoying up his sense of self. His belief that multiple sexual conquests would benefit him is certainly in line with any definition of narcissism. However, that he was coming to me so that I could tell him such a plan was okay proves that he was an example of a man whose narcissism was not all empowering. Otherwise, he would have simply gone about his plan to leave his spouse and have sexual affairs.

When I realized he was not interested in examining his life to better understand the predicament he was finding himself in—that he only wanted me to validate the decision to leave his spouse for a lineup of younger women—I decided to simply focus on my empathy for him in the hope that he would struggle forward to a better sense of who he was. This older man’s aging and retirement from work were, in themselves, narcissistically wounding, so my empathy became an indispensable tool—enabling him to see his true self partially expressed and safeguarded at the same time.

Rio had a fifteen-year-long marriage with a previously divorced woman, Eli, who was ten years younger than he. She had two grown children. Eli was of Swedish origin, physically stunning in his estimation and smart, but she spoke English with a Swedish accent, which unsettled him. He trusted her because she was kind and giving, but the relationship was largely platonic; he was not sexually attracted to her, due to her accent and mediocre work life. These characteristics made him feel somewhat foreign and superior to her, which meant that she couldn’t fulfill his needs for fully mirroring and aggrandizing his self-absorbed sense of self. He held no interest in her two adult children.

What was of total concern to Rio when he came to me was his indecision about leaving Eli. On the one hand, he felt he was exploiting her because he was not leaving her at a time when she did not love him; he was taking advantage of her kind and giving nature. In truth, she cared for him deeply.

What had prevented Rio from leaving her, however, was not some moral compunction; rather, he feared how others would view him for leaving his wife to have sexual relationships with other young women. He did not want to appear to be exploitative—although that indeed was what he wanted to be, in that he hoped for multiple relations with other women whom he did not have to care for in any deeply intimate or reciprocal way. Any attempt on my part to help him

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