Most individuals believe a narcissist places no one ahead of self. They believe the narcissist has him or herself as the start and finish of his or her world. He’s the creator, the preserver, the destroyer a god type, one who requires no one, answers to no one, and bows to no one. But what if I told you that wasn’t the whole story?
In today’s topic, we will talk about about the only individual a male narcissist secretly places above himself.
You see, there is this one relationship in a male narcissist’s life where he is unbelievably submissive, where he will humble himself in ways that he would never do for anyone else, where he won’t just bend but break and still act like it is his strength. This relationship is so inextricably bound, however, so deep, that it becomes woven into nearly every aspect of his life without him even knowing it. And it’s not with a lover. No, of course you know it’s not with a friend. It’s not even with an authority figure. It is with his mother.
The god complex of the male narcissist quietly dies in his relationship with his narcissistic mother. It is where he is no longer the world destroyer but more the conforming child who will not refuse. It is where all his masks crumble, but only behind closed doors. In public, he will always have fronts that he is powerful, untouchable, and invincible. But behind closed doors, there is a completely different dynamic at play.
Now let’s dissect it to get it correct. Look at a male narcissist, you notice a man who treats his wife, girlfriend, even his kids as inferior. They exist to revolve around him. They are objects of his false self to glorify him, to satisfy his ego. They are accessories to his persona, nothing more. He rejects them emotionally when they fail to serve him or his story. He punishes them when they fail to meet what he wants. But with his mother, it is different a different one in all ways.
He will take her to parties, introduce her proudly, sometimes even prouder than he would introduce his own wife. He’ll spend a fortune on high-end gifts for her on holidays and when he forgets or won’t do the same for his partner. He will bend over backwards to suit her food preferences, her health phobias. Heck, he will even defend her to the nth degree. And the crazy thing is, he’ll feel no pity at all for his partner while doing it all. He’ll laugh at a joke his mom makes that is not even half- humorous, tolerate her grouching with grace, and let her boss bits of his existence as if he were some boy who has to be told everything.
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All this leaves you wondering, what is happening? When he is with me, he must control everything. He must despise me for loving her. But when he is with her, he does not have any autonomy. He does whatever he is told and says no to nothing. What is happening? Well, this is enmeshment. This is what golden child fawning looks like. But the twist is that he hates her for all of it in secret. He is trapped. He resents the authority that she has over him because she treats him like an equal and not a child. He desires on an internal level to rebel against her authority, but he never does because the relationship that they share is one of authority and not one of love. It is built on what I’ve described: enmeshment, guilt, fear, and this kind of unhealthy loyalty coerced upon him from the time he was a child.
He’s the golden child of the narcissistic family. He was selected to serve, groomed that’s the word taught to be the mirror who reflects her grandiosity. She put onto him all the feelings she couldn’t feel with his father. In return for her conditional consent, he learned to lose his own self at an early age. That is how he became a narcissist. Now, therefore, he does not regard her as a separate individual. She is part of him, and he is, in a very warped, mad manner, part of her ego. We call this narcissistic symbiosis, whereby two narcissists live on each other’s ego. But then again, of course, there’s always the tug of war. There’s no real relationship, but two strangling leeches.
She never cuts the emotional strangling umbilical cord because, you know well enough, he nourishes her. He treats her the way her husband should have treated her. And all of that is interesting to see because the same narcissist who loses his mind angry with anyone else who attempts to dominate him becomes strangely submissive when he is with his mother. He is the compliant soldier, the boy child who needs a pat on the back, the man matured who has constructed an entire kingdom of deceptions to get the world to believe he doesn’t need anyone but him, but in secret, he needs her approval more than he needs oxygen. Let that sit.
Now, I will give you some examples from life so that you can comprehend this phenomenon more clearly. Imagine a narcissistic man hosting an extravagant birthday party. You would imagine the party is all about him and his success, wouldn’t it? No. Observe closely, and you will notice that it is planned to impress his mother, to please her, to prove to her that her big son has achieved success.”. He will place her in a position of honor. He will consult her opinion regarding the guest list. He will show her off like a trophy, even as he ignores his wife, standing stiffly in a corner.
Or picture him doing some gift shopping. His wife’s birthday is approaching, huh? He gets her a careless perfume kit from the mall. But when his mother’s birthday is imminent, he wrestles with it for weeks, picking something opulent, something sentimental, something that will prompt a gasp of admiration from the queen, from the matriarch. Or when he enters a new relationship, his mother’s disapproval is the actual deal-breaker. If she doesn’t approve, he will destroy it not in the obvious way, not in the overt way, but in the covert way. The mother’s whisper will overrule the partner’s scream.
This is the defining paradox of the male narcissist: he adoreth himself in public but secretly adoreth his mother. She has the leash, and although he fantasizes about throwing it off, he never does because without her, he doesn’t know who he is. It’s kind of pathetic when you think about it, but it’s also extremely, extremely dangerous because the same hurt that keeps him bound to her is the same hurt he inflicts on everyone else. I just like to refer to it as “mother revenge.”
Now, let’s get to know golden child-narcissistic mother a little better. The golden child is taught to feel special, okay? But only as long as they live up to her expectations. They are there for her use. Their success is her success. Their failure is like personal treason. So the golden child is instructed early on, “I am loved only when I perform.” And this instructs the male narcissist that there is no love only bargains, only manipulation, only image management.
So, as he matures, he seeks others not for emotional closeness since he has no idea what that’s all about so much as for the use of his emotions. He persists, bullies other individuals so that they will not bully him, but in the mother relationship he contentedly remains subordinated, although seething with anger beneath.
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And one more interesting feature of this entire phenomenon: the political leader phenomenon. Male narcissists admire political leaders who embody their own grandiosity. They idealize dictators, dysfunctional leaders who embody the fantasy self of the narcissist. They live vicariously through these individuals, admiring their ruthlessness, worshipping their power. Same formula. They leave their agenda to the political leader the way they surrender to their mother’s control. And in this case, it’s not only for a man narcissist but narcissists, period male, female, other, doesn’t matter. They worship the leader as the only one who can “make things great again” just as they worship their mother as the only one who ever loved them.
They kiss the rear ends of such leaders, forgetting all crime, all cruelty, because they identify their own survival with their power. They will defend that leader from all attacks, as they defend their mother’s image from all resentment in them, because unconsciously, they are scared scared of abandonment, scared of solitude, scared of confronting the void that their mother occupied with love conditions.
What do they do? They serve, they bow, they grovel. And whereas the world witnesses the narcissist as an unmovable mountain, the reality is that beneath it all, they’re still a quivering boy at the feet of a throne that they can never depart from. That’s what’s behind so much of what they do. Their grandiosity isn’t confidence; it’s insurance against a lifetime of hidden and unrecovered wounds. Their conceit is not power; it is the mirror they constructed in order to survive a childhood where the penalty for losing popularity was emotional ruin.
And the punchline? Most male narcissists never quite escape. They have a ghost in their heart throughout their life, bound to a rejected form of maternal affection. They wreck marriages, isolate their own children, devastate friendships, and incinerate bridges, and carry around a ghost in their heart. And if they won’t confront the reality, if they won’t recognize that their admiration for the maternal figure is trauma bonding, not love, then they’re doomed to be locked up forever—continuously grasping for the unattainable, continuously denied validation which never quenches, continuously hard on the outside and soft on the inside.
And that, right there, is the not-so-secret that anybody keeps from you: the one person a male narcissist loves more than himself is the same person he secretly wishes he could eliminate. And that’s a wrap for this episode. Thank you ever so much for watching and listening. I’ll see you in the next one. Until then, as always, let the healing begin.
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