evile

What impact do narcissists have when they mirror their significant others’ traits back to them?

The time that the narcissist usually mirrors or mimics their target is during the ‘love bombing’ stage of a relationship; their target is high on endorphins and ‘new relationship energy,’ this new person in their life (the narc) is telling them everything they’ve wanted to hear, agrees with everything they say, has the same priorities in life, likes the same things, has the same passions, and it is absolutely intoxicating to meet someone you feel is a soul mate, so in sync with every heartbeat and every feeling.

This creates a strong bond, and perhaps may even be called an addiction—the target is becoming addicted to the endorphins and oxytocin and other ‘feel good’ ‘bonding’ hormones that their own brain and body is producing in response to this person’s presence.

The target may then spend the rest of their life chasing that high, trying be “the person s/he fell in love with” so that the narc will once again lavish them with attention, praise, amazing sexual acts, and all those things that felt so good at the beginning of the relationship. During the cycle of abuse[1], there may be more ‘good times’, aka ‘the honeymoon phase, and the human mind is very good at rationalizing and minimizing harmful things in order to cope with an abusive situation. The person may feel that those times of intimacy and ‘making up’ are worth the abusive rage-outs and other poor treatment by the Narcissist. They are unfortunately quite addicted, trauma bonded, and will have a lot of difficulty seeing things as they are and doing the very difficult work to free themselves from the narcissist and ‘bug proof’ themselves so that they don't fall for another psycho later on down the road.

Footnotes

[1]

Cycle of abuse - Wikipedia

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