Let me give you an example from my own life. My mother always blamed the house, no matter where we lived. She always thought the problem was the home. In the first house, she said it was possessed, so we left it. In the second house, she said it had a demonic spirit, so we tore it down and rebuilt a new one from the ground up. Still, it didn’t satisfy her. Then came the third and the fourth. Do you see what I’m trying to say? It was never the house; it was the inner chaos projected onto the walls. It was the emptiness trying to find something external to fix what was broken inside.
So what happened? The houses got replaced, but it wasn’t the houses’ failure; it was hers. And now she is in another one, which I doubt will be the last, because nothing is ever enough—not for a narcissist. The same thing happened with my grandfather, in a different way. During his last years, I saw something in his eyes—a kind of stare into the void, a frown that wasn’t about sadness, but about disappointment. Not in anyone else, but in life itself. For the first time, he could not control it anymore. He could not scare people, he could not give commands, he could not lift things or make things move.
The words he said broke something in me: “I do not understand how I got this old.” He told me once, “It feels like yesterday I would shout and people would listen, and now I can’t even lift a leaf.” What I saw was not just aging; it was the collapse of the fantasy. The fantasy that power is permanent, that dominance means respect, that people will stick around forever if you yell loud enough. But when age takes away the body, the truth is all that is left. And for a narcissist, that truth is unbearable.
That is when the grandiose ones become covert; that’s when the aggressive ones become helpless. They start saying things like, “Oh, you’re the only one after God who is left to take care of me.” They weaponize guilt, create forced dependency, and pretend to be fragile and alone so that you feel obligated to serve them. But don’t get confused; this is not love; this is manipulation wearing a softer costume.
The Narcissist’s Ultimate Realization
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