What if I told you that the narcissist doesn’t just struggle with happiness but is actually offended by yours? Yes, offended. You see, one of the most brutal and overlooked consequences of walking through the valley of narcissistic abuse is the slow, quiet erosion of joy. It doesn’t come all at once. Nope. It’s chipped away, word by word, glare by glare, guilt by guilt, until one day you wake up and realize you’re surviving but you’re no longer living. That spark, that laugh, that light you used to carry—gone.
And let me tell you, this isn’t a coincidence. This is by design. Because the narcissist isn’t just uncomfortable with your happiness; they are threatened by it. Why? Because your happiness is freedom. And to a narcissist, freedom is dangerous.
Let me explain something to you that changed how I see the world: the narcissist isn’t built to handle their own storms. They don’t have the inner scaffolding to hold up their own soul. So what do they do? They reach outward. They grab onto others—people with light, people with peace—and they make them responsible for carrying their weight, for regulating their emotions, for absorbing their chaos. They don’t process their pain; they outsource it to you.
That’s why the narcissist doesn’t celebrate your joy; they sabotage it. Because when you are joyful, you’re no longer a puppet. You stop being useful. When you laugh too loud, when you smile too wide, when you start finding color in your world again, they see something terrifying: you slipping from their grasp. They can’t handle that.
So what do they do? They push back, subtly at first—a snide remark, a cold shoulder, a coincidental oversight. Then, when that doesn’t work, they turn up the volume: a tantrum, a storm, a silence so loud it drowns out your song. Why? Because if they can’t own your joy, they’ll do everything they can to destroy it.
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