The Relationship Between an Empath and A Narcissist

When it comes to human interactions, we always seek to classify people. We try to place them into these neat little boxes that contain labels which will later be used to help identify people along with their accompanying personality traits. This type of classification makes us feel like we can predict how people are going to act and thus we can prepare ourselves for the various interactions that we may have on any given day.

Two of these labels have become very important of late. These being empath and narcissist. It is very limited to think of people in such a black and white manner. But, we can say that a certain person’s personality has more qualities of one label or another.

What is an empath?

The label itself is derived from the word empathy. This label has been used because people who are called empaths are thought to be very empathetic people. When they encounter people, they do not simply listen to people problems with only one ear. They listen fully and even start to feel the other person’s emotions. This connection can be so strong that at times an empath is not able to distinguish their own feelings from the feelings of another.

This would not be a problem if empaths only picked up on positive emotions, but in an imperfect world where negativity runs rampant, empaths tend to absorb more negative emotions than positive. They then try to take these feelings of another person and then fix them. This could set up a scenario where empaths are vulnerable of being drained of all energy and motivation. This means that they should, in theory, be very careful who they choose to associate with.

More specifically, they should be incredibly careful about who they enter into a relationship with. If, for example, and empath begins a relationship with a narcissist they could find themselves being systematically drained, degraded, emotionally and psychologically destroyed.

What is a narcissist?

The word gets flung around far too liberally on the internet. People are all too quick to call their ex or their boss a narcissist when things are not going their way. This is not to say that there is not some validity in these statements, but a true narcissist is a far more complex creature than your average person who is being selfish or self-absorbed at the moment. A narcissist is a person that has been truly damaged by their upbringing.

At some point in their youth, be in when they were a child or when they were a teenager, they were made to feel useless. They were denied of all love, admiration, and protection. This meant they were forced to seek or even create validation elsewhere. The thing that makes this kind of behavior so damaging is that narcists find their validation by putting other people down. It is not enough to receive admiration, they need the other person to walk away less valued if they are to fully feel elevated by the experience.

When you combine an empath and a narcists

It is quite obvious after evaluating the personalities of each type of person that these two people are opposites. On the one end of the scale, we have the empaths who seek to heal people while on the other side narcists need to damage people to feel healed.

When these two people find themselves in a relationship with each other, a never-ending cycle begins. The empath offers over all their energy, love and admiration to the narcists. Who in turn willing and voraciously accepts without any thought of the wellbeing of their partner.

There is no cure to this situation. A narcists cannot be healed in this way. All that will land up happening is that the empath will get to a point where they are so damaged that they will start to show narcissistic tendencies. The only option is to get out and get out now.