A Question of Trust
We are able to do what we do because of a particularly fundamental trait that we look for in the people that we target; trust. We look for those who place particular reliance on trust and then we abuse that trust. Most people operate on a basis of trust. If they did not, the world would grind to a halt. Trust lubricates so many transactions between people whether those transactions are social, financial or emotional. When somebody tells you,
“I like your shirt it suits you.”
You trust them to be telling you the truth. If you did not do so, you would stop and cross examine them as to why they like it in order to evaluate whether you believe their comment to be a true one or not. You trust the company from which you make a purchase to deliver when they say they will and that the product will be fit for purpose. You trust your colleagues to do their jobs effectively so you can also fulfil your obligations.
You trust the police to maintain law and order, if you did not, there would be anarchy and rife vigilantism. It is axiomatic that there has to be trust otherwise everything would be slowed down or stopped as people evaluated, analysed, questioned and verified. Trust is evident everywhere and there is no greater trust than that which is expected in an intimate relationship.
People trust their partner to have their best interests at heart, to trust them not to do something to hurt them, to trust them to be faithful and loving. We know that in order for you to love in the way that you do, that deep and unconditional love, there must be trust. You approach your relationships with this trust held out in front of you, a symbol of good intent. You presume that everyone else that you will engage with will also adopt a similarly trusting stance. You expect them to reciprocate this trust. You trust that they will trust.
You are not a cynic. You do not operate in the realm of suspicion and mistrust. To do so would be admitting defeat and would tarnish the ideal of love that you are committed to. You accept much at face-value. That is not to label you as naïve, that would be unduly harsh, for as I have mentioned, many people operate on the basis of trust and so they must. You apply this trust to your dealings with those that you fall in love, led to believe by us that this trust will be reciprocated, that it will not be breached, betrayed or damaged.
You are a truth seeker. You apply honesty in all your dealings and the taint of lies and dishonesty offends you considerably. The stench of our deceit, the rank odour of our mendacity is great but the perfumed veil we cast over such dark and dangerous deceptions is such that the malodorous warning never nears you. You are conned into believing that we tell you the truth when we first encounter you.
We behave with such conviction, the air of confidence we exude, seemingly unquestionable and unimpeachable. We look you in the eye, those unseen mirrors reflecting back at you your earnest trust so that you see what you require. You look upon supposed honesty, apparent openness and this maintains your sense of trust.
By trusting you believe that you will get the truth. That our love will be true, that our intentions are truthful, that our fidelity is real and we govern our interactions with you under the mantle of truth. You trust that all of this will happen because we make you think you can trust us.
We will reference those who have let us down, those who have betrayed us and in so doing we hold up our own reliance upon trust in order to receive your trust. See how we have trusted others and they let us down? We have always trusted beforehand and so you can be assured that we want to gain your trust and you shall have ours. It is all carefully orchestrated to channel one of the fundamental tenets by which you abide.
When we gain that trust and we do so easily, you enable us to take this valuable commodity and apply our own veneer to it, reinforcing it and demonstrating to you just how much we value it. As a fellow disciple in trust this enables us to conduct ourselves in a way which ensures we are above suspicion. When we meet with a member of the opposite sex and explain she or he is just a friend and it is a friendly drink you have no reason to think otherwise. You trust us. When we tell you that we are working late. You trust us. When we borrow money from you. You trust us. When we tell you that we are using the contraceptive pill. You trust us. When we tell you that we love you and have never loved anybody like this before – you trust us.
Trust equals the truth. We then abuse your trust by carrying out our treacherous acts. We court other partners and shatter your trust. As you sit at home watching television thinking we are working hard for our future we are philandering and sliding our tendrils around a fresh prospect.
When you are making that dinner for us both, looking forward to an evening together, I am showering in a hotel as I seek to wash away the scent of the person I have just coupled with. When you check your bank balance and consider what you will do with the return on the investment that I talked about so you lent me the money, your hard-earned money is being used to impress someone else so that they fall into my clutches. We take this very thing that is of such central importance to you and we abuse it. We disrespect and we trade it just like a commodity.
When you eventually realise your trust has been shattered and this has happened repeatedly. When you finally wake up and join the dots. When you see the flagrant breaches of your trust, when the evidence is irrefutable and painful, we may well have gone. Not only have we abused your trust but we have left without explanation or reason, leaving you to deal with the aftermath alone as we move on to the next target and begin gaining their trust.
Like any confidence trickster it is necessary for us to gain trust before we are able to abuse it. Not only do we hurt you repeatedly through these actions we do so to such an extent, with so many people and with so many people aware of it, other than you until the last moment. This wide-ranging and wholesale desecration of trust, this tarnishing and defacing of the truth leaves you broken and unable to face the totality of the truth. You cannot comprehend that you have been conned so extensively and so often.
You cannot bear the sensation that arises from having been made to look so foolish. You held your trust up as something to be proud of and now you are left to rue your reliance on this as you hear the repeated comments of “Told you so”, “Didn’t you notice?” and “You are too trusting.” You equate trust with the truth. Our abuse of your trust causes you to not want to accept the truth of what we have done.
14 thoughts on “A Question of Trust”
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This article makes me think of a song that I love, especially one line that could translate as:
“You know already, she whispers to me, that you need to seduce – all the better to destroy”, even though I understand that destroying is not the aim of the narcissist.
(“Les ombres du soir” (Evening Shadows), by Hubert Félix Thiéfaine, if anyone’s interested. I find the melody mesmerising and soothing. He’s one of my favourite singers/songwriters).
Accepting the truth means that it makes it hard to trust again, if not impossible.
We have been robbed of the thing that binds us to others – the ability to accept their good intentions.
We cannot exist without trust. We cannot be in relationship without trust.
One of the fundamental fallouts for me resulting from my interactions with narcissists.
Lickemtomorrow,
You’re right. He did take your trust and squander it. I’ve struggled with a similar issue but more to do with the preceding step. I let him in in the first place. How did I not sense what he was? Or rather how did I disregard what I saw? The answer really is simply, I didn’t recognise it. I was unaware of narcissists and my link to them. Now, I’m not.
I do not confide. I have done on here, but that is rare. There’s nothing sinister about my not confiding. People tend to confide in me, there isn’t then time for me to do the same. But really, I don’t confide because I know, people don’t see things the way I do. They won’t feel what I’m saying, so there is no point for me. I’m better solving my own problems myself. People here do feel what I’m saying. Therefore there is a point to my confiding here. This place is an anomaly though.
I do confide in partners eventually. But it takes time and even then I don’t confide all.
I made one exception. The narc. I did feel that he understood me better. He asked questions during our discussions that only someone who understood me would ask. He might well have mirrored myself and my own approach back to me. But it wasn’t solely that. His questions were not mine, his challenges to get me to look at things differently were in the context of understanding what made me tick.
So how do you trust again going forward?
You play the odds. Narcissists are in fact a minority. In your average bar there will be a maximum of six. Assume two are attached. Then from the four remaining age and attraction has to be right. Then you have to bump into them. Bear in mind there are 94 people in the bar that are not narcissists.
We have all found ourselves with the minority. We are also a minority. How many other empaths do you know? See my point here?
We will draw and be drawn to narcissists, fact. They have to find us first. To my knowledge they have no invisibility cloaks or mind reading abilities and they aren’t around every corner.
Your judgement will be extremely good in every other instance and in every other interaction with anyone other than a narcissist. So don’t think you can’t trust again. You can. We are already far wiser and know far more what to look for. If it’s a romantic interest, I would run it by HG. Just at the start, maybe more than once, who knows? But by being aware, by using the resources made available here, by checking in with HG, our odds are looking better all the time.
These experiences rock our world and get us to question so much of what we rely on. Insinct, connecting, trust, boundaries, intimacy, self worth. We review it all. Really though, my narc is just a man. That’s all he is. A lost man, but just a man all the same. Do you think the narcissist is wondering if he can trust again? What he did wrong? If things could have worked? Is he bollocks. Neither should we.
Ah, truthseeker, you not only seek the truth, you speak the truth 🙂
I have been on more than one rollercoaster ride with a narcissist (including my mother) and you would have thought that would give me the ability to see through it. But all it probably did was provide me with a template I knew and recognised well. It’s what relationships had always been for me … full of manipulations, game playing, gaslighting, etc. I never knew anything different. Much like you, now I do. That should provide a big confidence boost going forward. I was beginning to see the signs with my narc some time before I left. I teased it out to confirm and also in the process of going Supernova. I can’t imagine being blindsided so easily the next time. Not with the information i now have at my fingertips.
I am with you on the not confiding in others for the most part. Generally I am the listener, not the talker. And much like you, my narc also had me convinced to open up. Little did I know it was for more nefarious reasons. But open up I did, and that was used against me. So, I’ll be looking for the red flags early on before I go down that road again. I am an open person, but I’ve been bitten more than once now and should know better. I’m learning. Also, who we are is part of what we have to give to the world. So being open is important. That helps to provide validation, which we get a lot of here, and I can see why you feel more free to open up here. We’ve all found ourselves in similar situations and it’s cathartic. We can’t begin to heal until we’ve exposed the wound narcissism creates. Now we’re getting bandaged up and occasionally might need a shot of antibiotics if an infection (of emotional thinking) begins to take hold. I think I’ve been getting my shot over the last couple of days!
And checking in with HG is always on the cards as well. I’m so grateful he makes himself available to us in that way. I’m also the kind who won’t rely on others unless I’m at my wits end. Hasn’t happened yet, but it’s good to know that we have the best sounding board around in order to do that. I know HG has helped many many people by making himself available in that way.
Also understanding I am an empath now and how that relates to narcissists and the dynamic which operates between the two has really been a God send. I can feel better about myself, know that others are likely to take advantage of that, and find ways here to shore up my defences.
It’s taken me a long time to understand what has been happening in my life, how I have been taken advantage of, and how I have been hurt. This last experience has opened up the doors to a very different future for me. At least, that’s what I hope.
Lickem
The future is in the power you give it. Don’t hope – DECIDE.
Ha, NA! I’m being given lots of direction today and have moved decisively to remove/delete both contact number and txt msgs of my narc-ex. I am on the right track and looking to continue moving forward. Such encouragement as yours and HGs has given me the impetus I need to do that. Firm direction is sometimes required and it has been noted and applied. Thank you for that.
Lickemtomorrow,
I’m glad you can see the benefit of the experiences to date.
If it hadn’t been for the narc I wouldn’t have gone searching for answers. I didn’t know what an empath was really. I knew that I read people too well and relied on it. I knew I was sensitive to certain things, crowds etc. I knew for some reason I wasn’t getting through to the narc. That was unheard of for me. That was pretty much all I knew.
There is so much garbage on the internet. Professional looking sites filled with glamourised rubbish. I stumbled on one site. Judith Orloff. I have pondered that she might be Dr O. She was less airy fairy, had more substance but it was still very top line stuff in my view. She mentioned narcissists on her site. Energy vampires. So I reset the search criteria to narcissism and eventually landed here.
There is so much conflicting information out there. I announced myself as a Super Empath on arrival here for example. To me, that meant an aware empath. I had cobbled together enough broken info to figure out I likely fell into the Empath group. I didn’t refer to the term as it is used here on the blog. The crazies on the internet glamourise it and muddy the waters. I find it strange that given there are more empaths than narcissists so little is understood about us and information is so inconsistent. Apparently we have more mirror neutrons than most. That would make sense. Information is patchy and I don’t believe I experience mirror touch synesthesia, though I have never tested that. Essentially this site and blog has given more consistent relevant information about empaths than anything else I’ve found.
I find it ironic that it is a narcissist who has collated this information. Of course, we learn here about narcissism and the narcissistic perspective. Greater understanding of empaths furthers the Prime Aims. I’m aware of that also, but even so, all that considered, there is still a huge emphasis placed on empaths within the site. The fact that the Empath and Trait Detectors have been constructed in the way they have shows huge understanding. Yet they are created by a narcissist who does not feel for himself much of what is evaluated. I don’t have to be an artist to appreciate art. But neither could I comment on the brushstrokes or the composition of the paint used. It’s remarkable what HG has recognised and collated.
Narcissists are researched. They appear in scientific journals. This is likely due to the fact that their behaviour is outside the normal range but probably more down to the fact that their behaviours are viewed as negative or damaging. We should still as empaths have more time and research allocated to us too though. We should at least be in the public domain without being just a Star Trek character. De glamourise it, give it proper terminology and then at least we can better find each other in the real world.
To my point. At least your narc brought you here. You can now find out more about yourself than you can anywhere else on the internet. Believe me, I have looked and continue to do so. This is indeed a turning point for you and for us. It is far more valuable than anything our individual narcs could have brought to the table.
Understanding The Empath
Understanding The Narcissist
Understanding The Addiction
That is where my focus now lies. My MMR pales into insignificance at the side of what is still to be understood.
Excellent post.
Thank you for another very insightful post, TS. I can relate to so much of what you say and while I understood myself to be a ‘sensitive’ person, I also knew there was more. I couldn’t put a finger on what that was, but feeling and being different certainly came into the equation. Probably much like HG has described knowing somehow he was different, he just didn’t know how. So here we, narcissist and empaths, find ourselves together and in many ways also find ourselves. Well, at least the empaths. HG already has a great awareness of himself and his narcissism.
It was only a few weeks in for me when one of you suggested taking the empath detector test might be a good idea. I chose that over the narc detector because it was time to take the focus off him and put it back on myself. That was a first step in understanding myself better and how the two, empaths and narcissists, rub up against eachother. And for the most part in all the wrong ways.
And as for finding myself here, I like to ponder that sometimes, too. I took a few backroads to get here, watched quite a few YouTube videos and discovered a lot of good material to help give a basic understanding. Also to create a thirst in me to know more. Probably because I was beginning to recognise this was an issue that had impacted me my whole life, but I had been totally unaware. And had no way of dealing with it – no defences, no logic, no name, no understanding, no peace.
When I first clicked one of HGs videos the first thing I noticed, of course, was his very cultured speech and way of talking. Then, as I listened, it became obvious he was talking as the narcissist, not about narcissists! That intrigued me. It didn’t bring me here directly as I didn’t realize there was a blog associated with the videos, but I do remember how unusual I thought it was and how very commanding his voice and manner were. And what he said made sense.
But, I went back to the ‘ordinary’ people and experts who I now find very dry in some respects, partially misguided and without the ability to touch and reach that place deep inside of me with the understanding HG has. It’s like we’re talking to eachother. If that makes sense. HG is my narcissist, in the sense it’s like those people who damaged me talking to me and I am talking back to them, but it’s HG who is creating the opportunity for me to do that. I speak to him sometimes here like I am speaking to my narcissist. Because he is my narcissist. And I am the empath whose ruin he constantly seeks.
I guess that brings me to the end of my tale. I am here. That’s what matters.
We do not seek your ruin, we seek The Prime Aims, this may result in your ruin as a collateral consequence.
Lickemtomorrow,
That’s interesting. The fact that you talk to HG as if he is your narcissist. I can see how that would happen and how it could be beneficial. His responses do remind me of my narc on occasion. I put that down to confirmation of lack of emotional attachment on the part of my narc.
I see HG as being very different to my MMR as he is entirely unaware of what he is. HG is very aware and more importantly, can verbalise it. I’m now very interested in understanding the way narcissists view the world. HG holds the answers to my questions. I’d like to sit him in a chair and just interrogate him. I’d get my honest answers, which with every other narc would never occur.
“We do not seek your ruin”
I ask this purely to try and understand :
Would the purpose not be to “ruin” when someone deletes a hard copy of a major project at work ?
Logically the only way to deduce that action is that it was malicious and meant to ruin ones hard work. To embarrass them. And to try and elevate themselves. Nothing about that action is not with Intent to ruin… at times, narcs do seek to ruin. With specific actions and choices they make while trying to gain control over a situation.
I am a believer that no one can actually ruin us… we do have to exercise choice in the matter. For example in the example above, is there computer log ins we can check ? Is there camera footage of this happening ? Are we able to get an extended deadline ? If this narc is our boss are we able to quit ? Is there an HR department we can speak too ?
I advocate for finding solutions. But narcs can be petty and jealous competitive people who would love nothing more then to see their perceived opponent as ruined.
No, the intent is control, a downside which comes from that -physical injury, the loss of employment, financial loss, the loss of a major project – is a collateral consequence.
TS, I have not been able to respond to your post further down, but thought I might try. I just want to clarify around this point:
“That’s interesting. The fact that you talk to HG as if he is your narcissist. I can see how that would happen and how it could be beneficial. His responses do remind me of my narc on occasion. I put that down to confirmation of lack of emotional attachment on the part of my narc.
I see HG as being very different to my MMR as he is entirely unaware of what he is. HG is very aware and more importantly, can verbalise it.”
HG does not remind me of my narcissist (although they have many things in common). I was not comparing the two. HG is my narcissist in the sense that the experience of narcissism is central to my being. I cannot escape it, much like HG cannot escape his narcissism. There is a core or foundational element to what I am expressing here. It is a recognition. I recognize you. I fundamentally recognize your essence and my essence is pitted against that. Or in league with it.
It’s kind of existential and philosophical and spiritual all at once.
But, I am not comparing my narcissist to HG, and he is fundamentally at my core still in some ways, too.