How can I help a narcissist to heal? (2023)

Can anything help a narcissist?

While there's no one-size-fits-all treatment for narcissistic personality disorder, therapy with an experienced mental health professional can help a narcissist reflect on their feelings, come to understand their history, and develop new skills to cope with their condition.

Many people naively believe that they can cure the narcissist by engulfing him with love, acceptance, compassion and empathy. This is not so. The only time a transformative healing process occurs is when the narcissist experiences a severe narcissistic injury, a life crisis.

Criticize them.

Keep an even and polite tone like you would for anyone else—they'll still be irritated by it. A narcissist will probably lash out to defend themselves against the criticism. They'll try to criticize you back or blame their shortcomings on something else.

Bottom Line. Narcissists can sometimes be helpful and caring. However, more often than not, they only pretend to have these qualities. Moreover, even when they act giving and helping, they are not motivated by empathy because they severely lack it, and as a result, their help is often not very productive.

There are no medications specifically used to treat narcissistic personality disorder. However, if you have symptoms of depression, anxiety or other conditions, medications such as antidepressants or anti-anxiety drugs may be helpful.

It's important to remember that a narcissist can change if they are genuinely dedicated and open to growth. Some individuals may have more insight into their behaviors and have a greater desire to change. Unfortunately, research on if (and how) narcissists change is limited.

For a narcissist to be happy, you'll always have to accept their version of events as the truth. Otherwise, you'll be on the receiving end of their narcissistic rage. Even if you do everything they ask, a narcissist will still try and undermine you at every opportunity.

According to psychologists, therapists and neuroscientists, narcissists can never change.

If you're wondering what happens when you hurt a narcissist's ego, it's called narcissistic injury, and manifests in narcissistic rage and/or passive aggressive behavior.

How do you know a narcissist is hurt?

5 Signs You Have Hurt the Narcissist - YouTube

Attention-seeking behavior—positive or negative—is referred to as narcissistic supply. Narcissistic supply is a form of psychological addiction where the narcissist requires, and even demands, limitless special treatment, admiration, importance, or validation to feed their sense of entitlement and self-centeredness.

Narcissists do feel the trauma bond, but not in the same way that the people that they abuse feel it. A trauma bond makes narcissists feel remarkably well because the dynamics of a trauma bonded relationship are designed to help them regulate the painful thoughts, feelings, and emotions that they've suppressed.

Narcissists are brimming with self-love and they need their partner to be feeling that same love towards them. Not only that, they need that partner to express that love to the fullest whenever they're around, and especially when anyone else is around.

Narcissistic Personality Disorder Treatment

There is no cure, but therapy can help. The goal is to build up the person's poor self-esteem and have more realistic expectations of others. Treatment usually centers on talk therapy. Sometimes people call this psychotherapy.

Narcissistic abuse changes your brain

But, there is hope. There are reparative activities you can do to restore and rebuild your hippocampus and stop the hijacking of your psyche by your amygdala.

Mood stabilizers, as the name implies, can be prescribed to help even out dramatic mood swings and impulsive narcissistic behavior in people with NPD. Commonly-prescribed mood stabilizers for NPD might include: Lithobid (lithium) Depakote (sodium valproate)

The mainstay of treatment is individual psychotherapy—specifically, psychoanalytic psychotherapy. Other therapeutic modalities used to treat the disorder include group, family, and couples therapy, as well as cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) and short-term objective-focused psychotherapy.