Transcription
Let's talk about the kinds of friendships that narcissists have. It's often said that narcissists don't have friends, but the reality is that narcissists don't have deep and meaningful friendships. But they often have very shallow, peripheral friendships; people who they act around, people who they pretend to be a good person around, people that they can employ as flying monkeys, who are easily manipulated or who are similar to them; people who enable them and their bad behavior.
So some narcissists may never have friendships that last very long, or they may have longstanding friendships with people from their childhood, for example, but who again enable them and aren't deep and meaningful. They also tend to love bomb, devalue, and discard their friends. At one point in time, they idealize this friend and spend a lot of time with them, then they get bored, discard that person, and then go to this friend, use that person for a while, get bored with that person, go to this person in the friend group, etc. And then they'll go back around; they'll re-idealize this other friend and then get bored and discard them, and they jump around like this.
It's also common for narcissists to put their friends before their partner, and this is for a few reasons. It's a further devaluation of their partner; it's a further layer of gaslighting where the partner is like, "But they have these friends that they love and they're so good with, but not me. I must be the problem." But also, because narcissists will literally treat strangers on the street better than their partner, and often their friends and family and peripheral people better than their partner, because it's part of the mask. And also because, once that mask has come off and the partner has seen them for who they really are, they're not getting reflected back to them how they want to be seen, which is that they're amazing, no matter how they actually act. And for that reason, they literally get more supply out of being a really good friend, being a loyal friend, acting like this ride-or-die for their friends, because their friends aren't seeing the monster that they really are and what they're actually like behind closed doors. And so their friends are giving them better supply than their partner. And it's the same with strangers; strangers on the street are reflecting back to them that they're amazing. And so it's like, in the narcissist world, they may be actively abusing their partner and treating them so bad, and their partner is not happy and is upset and reflecting back to them how they really are, but to the rest of the world, to their friends or strangers, they look like a great person, and everyone's buying the mask, so that's all that matters.
Let me know in the comments what kind of friends, if any, that your narcissist has. Welcome to the Clar podcast.