Can a Covert Narcissist Love You? A Therapist’s Honest Answer
Can a covert narcissist love you? The honest clinical answer is: they experience something they call love, but it’s filtered through profound impairments in affective empathy, organized around their own emotional regulation, and unable to sustain the reciprocity that secure love requires. This post explains what that means for you, what the neuroscience shows, and what healing actually looks like for driven women who have been trying to earn a version of love that was never fully available.
Last reviewed: June 2026 by Annie Wright, LMFT
- The question you’re still asking at 10 p.m.
- What is covert narcissism?
- What does love actually look like for a covert narcissist?
- What does the neuroscience say about empathy and covert NPD?
- How does this show up for driven women?
- Love, selfobjects, and what you’ve been asked to be
- Both/And: He may love you in his way, and that way is still harming you
- The Systemic Lens: why “but he says he loves me” keeps so many women stuck
- How to heal and reclaim your own capacity for love
- Frequently asked questions
Psychoeducational note: This post is educational and clinical in nature. It’s not a substitute for therapy or a formal diagnostic assessment. If what you read here brings up significant distress, please consider reaching out to a licensed mental health professional. If you’re in crisis, contact the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline by calling or texting 988.
The question you’re still asking at 10 p.m.
In my clinical work with driven, ambitious women over fifteen years, specifically those healing from covert narcissistic relationships, I’ve noticed one question that arrives so consistently I’ve stopped being surprised by it. It comes late at night. It surfaces in the car. It ambushes women in the middle of otherwise ordinary Tuesday afternoons. The question is: Does he really love me?
Mireille is a 40-year-old appellate attorney. She has a Yeti travel mug she never quite finishes and a signet ring she turns around on her finger when she’s landed on something important. She arrives at our session on a Thursday in early autumn, the low light coming sideways through the blinds, and she tells me she spent the previous night re-reading four years of texts. Looking for something that would settle the question. She didn’t find it.
“He says all the right things when it’s going well,” she tells me. “He tells me he loves me. He says I’m the only one who understands him. And then something shifts, I can never tell what, and suddenly I’m invisible. Or worse than invisible. I’m the problem.” She pauses. “I need to know if the love is real. Because if it’s real, then I’m losing my mind. And if it’s not, then I’ve been living inside a lie for four years.”
What I’ve learned from sitting with women like Mireille is that the question itself is the right question. Not because the answer is simple, but because naming the question honestly is where the clarity starts. Can a covert narcissist love you? The clinical answer is layered, and it matters. This post is for the woman who has earned the right to hear it plainly.
What is covert narcissism?
Covert narcissism is a subtype of narcissistic personality disorder characterized by hypersensitivity to perceived criticism, defensive self-withdrawal, and a quiet but persistent need for validation, rather than the overt grandiosity of the classic presentation. The DSM-5 defines narcissistic personality disorder as a pervasive pattern of grandiosity, need for admiration, and lack of empathy. In the covert presentation, grandiosity is expressed through victimhood and moral superiority rather than through visible dominance. Elsa Ronningstam, PhD, psychologist and clinical researcher at McLean Hospital and Harvard Medical School and one of the foremost researchers on NPD subtypes, has described the covert presentation as organized around shame avoidance rather than praise-seeking, making it harder to name and harder to leave.
In plain terms: A covert narcissist doesn’t take up all the air in a room. He takes the oxygen out of the room quietly, with sighs and silences and subtle reframings that leave you wondering whether the problem was you. The harm is just as real. It’s just harder to point to.
The term gets applied loosely, so grounding it clinically matters. Not every emotionally unavailable partner is covertly narcissistic, and not every covert narcissist has a formal NPD diagnosis. What matters clinically is the pattern of behavior over time and its impact on the partner’s psychological functioning. Ramani Durvasula, PhD, clinical psychologist and researcher at California State University, Los Angeles, and author of It’s Not You: Identifying and Healing from Narcissistic People (2024), identifies vulnerability and hypersensitivity as the defining features of the covert presentation, differentiating it from overt narcissism’s entitlement and dominance.
The covert narcissist’s relationship with love is shaped by several interlocking features: an impaired capacity for affective empathy, a fragile sense of self that depends on others for regulation, intermittent reinforcement that keeps the partner attached, and a communication style that makes harm invisible from the outside. Partners of covert narcissists frequently report feeling like they’re losing their minds, not because they are, but because the dynamic is specifically designed to obscure the source of the distress. For a deeper look at the full clinical picture, see the complete guide to covert narcissism.
What does love actually look like for a covert narcissist?
Narcissistic supply is the term for the attention, admiration, validation, or emotional energy a narcissistic individual requires from others to maintain their sense of self-worth and emotional stability. The concept originates in Heinz Kohut, MD’s self psychology framework, developed in The Analysis of the Self (International Universities Press, 1971), in which Kohut described selfobjects: people who function as psychological resources rather than independent beings. For the covert narcissist, a partner often functions as a primary selfobject, providing the mirroring and idealization that stabilizes an otherwise fragile self-structure.
In plain terms: Narcissistic supply isn’t about using you consciously. It’s about needing you the way a body needs oxygen. The covert narcissist doesn’t think of it as a transaction. He simply can’t tolerate the internal state that arrives when you’re not providing what his self-structure requires. You experience it as love with invisible strings. That’s because it is.
When we ask whether a covert narcissist can love you, the answer depends entirely on how love is defined. For most people in secure relationships, love means something built on mutual visibility: two people who can each be seen as distinct, needy, imperfect, and still chosen. That kind of love survives your bad days, your ambition, your grief, your independence.
For a covert narcissist, what registers internally as love is something closer to what Kohut called selfobject need. The partner is loved insofar as she mirrors, soothes, and stabilizes. She’s idealized when she’s reflecting well on him. She’s devalued when she’s not. The intermittency, warmth followed by cold, closeness followed by withdrawal, isn’t randomness. It’s a direct readout of whether the selfobject function is being performed satisfactorily. Women in these relationships often describe feeling like they’re constantly auditioning. They’re not wrong. On some structural level, they are.
This is also why the love in covert narcissistic relationships can feel so confusing and so real at once. The warmth is genuine. The idealization is genuine. What’s impaired is the part of love that can hold you as a person with your own interiority. If you want to understand the broader relational context, the guide to being married to a covert narcissist is a useful companion to this piece. If you want to explore what Clarity After the Covert covers as a healing path, that course walks through these specific patterns in depth.
What does the neuroscience say about empathy and covert NPD?
Covert narcissistic relationships impair a partner’s capacity for love through specific, documented neurobiological mechanisms, not through general emotional unavailability or personality conflict.
The most significant research I’ve encountered on this is a 2023 review in Frontiers in Psychiatry by Di Giacomo and colleagues (PMC10097942) that describes what researchers now call affective dissonance in narcissistic personality disorder. Cognitive empathy, the ability to understand intellectually what someone else is experiencing, is largely preserved in NPD. Affective empathy, the capacity to actually feel moved by what someone else is feeling, is significantly impaired. In plain clinical terms: the covert narcissist can understand that you’re hurting. He can’t let that understanding change what he does.
Earlier work by Baskin-Sommers, Krusemark, and Ronningstam (2014) in Personality Disorders: Theory, Research, and Treatment confirmed that this dissociation between cognitive and affective empathy is a core structural feature of NPD, not a chosen behavior or a situational response. A neural model by Jankowiak-Siuda and Zajkowski (2013) in Medical Science Monitor (PMC3829700) maps the underlying circuit: dysfunction in the anterior insula keeps the default mode network locked on the self, preventing the emotional sharing that affective empathy requires.
Affective empathy is the neurological capacity to be emotionally moved by another person’s internal state, to share in their feeling rather than simply recognize it. Allan Schore, PhD, clinical psychologist and neuropsychologist at UCLA, has extensively documented in The Science of the Art of Psychotherapy (W.W. Norton, 2012) how early attachment disruptions alter the development of right-brain regulatory systems that underlie affective empathy. In people with narcissistic personality structure, these regulatory systems show measurable differences from secure-attachment baselines, meaning the deficit is neurobiological in origin, not simply a matter of motivation or care.
In plain terms: Affective empathy is the thing that makes you wince when someone you love is in pain, the thing that moves you to change plans, to stay up late, to say the hard thing because you can’t stand watching someone you love suffer. The covert narcissist can observe your pain. He simply can’t be moved by it in the way that produces behavior change.
What this means practically is that the covert narcissist can perceive what you’re feeling. He often can. He may be exceptionally attuned to subtle mood shifts in others. What he cannot reliably do is let that perception move him into sustained attunement that overrides his own self-regulatory needs. So when you describe feeling seen in some moments and completely invisible in others, you’re not imagining both experiences. Both are real. The visibility is genuine perception. The invisibility is where affective empathy fails.
Of course you’re confused. You’ve been experiencing two genuinely different things that don’t cohere. That incoherence isn’t a reflection of your perception. It’s a reflection of the actual neurobiology of the relationship you’ve been in.
Clinical Vignette. Composite, details changed.
Priya
It’s March. A Tuesday, late afternoon, the kind of grey light that makes everything feel slightly unreal. Priya is a 42-year-old pediatric intensivist. She arrives wearing her hospital badge still clipped to her coat, a cup of cold brew she bought three hours ago and hasn’t touched. She sits down and says, without preamble: “Last night I came home and I told him I’d had a terrible day. A kid didn’t make it. I just needed five minutes.” She stops.
“He said, ‘I’ve been dealing with a lot too, you know. You’re not the only one who has a hard day.’ And then he went to his office.” She turns the cold brew cup in her hands. “He wasn’t wrong that he’d had a hard day. I know his work has been difficult. But I’d just watched a child die. And somehow we were having a conversation about his feelings within thirty seconds of me telling him that.”
Sitting with Priya, I felt what I’ve felt many times in this work: the eerie precision of the pivot. The covert narcissist doesn’t disappear during her pain. He relocates the center of gravity. The conversation about her grief becomes, within a sentence or two, a conversation about his needs. The pivot happens so quickly, and with such apparent reasonableness, that by the time she notices it, she’s already in a different conversation.
“I went to our room and cried by myself,” she says. “And then I felt guilty for being upset with him about it.” She looks at the cold brew. “That’s the part I can’t figure out. Why do I feel guilty?”
Priya left that session having named something she hadn’t had language for. She didn’t leave with the question of love resolved. Those resolutions take longer, and they’re rarely tidy.
How does this show up for driven women?
Driven women navigating covert narcissistic relationships consistently describe a particular exhaustion that their professional accomplishments can’t explain or fix.
In my clinical practice, the women I see in these relationships are often among the most functionally capable people I work with. Surgeons. Partners. Founders. VPs. Women who can manage extraordinary complexity at work and who arrive at therapy unable to trust a single one of their own perceptions about their marriage or primary relationship. That specific erosion of self-trust, not burnout, not imposter syndrome, but a fundamental inability to believe their own experience, is the most consistent clinical signature of what long-term covert narcissistic relationships do to driven women.
The particular vulnerability of driven women in these dynamics has a clinical logic. Ambition and the capacity to manage complexity are frequently adaptive responses to early relational environments where love felt conditional on performance. A woman who learned early that earning is safer than receiving is also a woman who will work very hard to earn love that shouldn’t require earning. She’s patient with inconsistency. She’s skilled at managing moods. She makes sense of contradictions. These are survival strengths. In a covert narcissistic relationship, they become the mechanism by which she stays long past the point her body has been telling her to leave.
Some of the specific patterns I see consistently:
- Self-doubt that is impervious to evidence. Her professional record is excellent. She still doesn’t trust her own read of the relationship.
- Apologizing before he’s expressed displeasure. She’s learned to track his micro-signals so precisely that she’s already in repair mode before any explicit conflict begins.
- Compulsive monitoring of his mood. The emotional labor is enormous and nearly invisible, including to herself.
- Difficulty imagining his love as incomplete. The moments of warmth are so vivid and so real that they keep the hope alive even when the pattern is clear.
The relational trauma underneath these patterns isn’t abstract. It lives in the body as a chronic low-grade state of readiness. The shoulder tension before he comes home. The stomach that drops when he goes quiet. These are nervous system responses, not emotional overreaction. If you recognize yourself in this description, the guide to signs you’re in a covert narcissistic relationship may offer useful context.
Clinical Vignette. Composite, details changed.
Diane
Diane is 38. She runs a regional division for a commercial real estate company. She carries a very battered leather portfolio that she’s had since business school, the kind of object that tells you something about a person: she doesn’t discard things lightly. She’s been with her husband for seven years. In our third session, she says something I’ve heard different versions of in this work more times than I can count: “I just need to know if I’m making this up.”
“He was so wonderful in the beginning,” she says. “He was the first person I’d ever met who actually seemed interested in my mind, not just my competence. He’d ask me follow-up questions. He’d remember things I mentioned. I thought, finally, someone who actually sees me.” She clicks and unclicks her pen. “And now I feel like the stupidest person I’ve ever met for having believed that.”
I sat with her in that for a moment before I said: the seeing was real. The interest was real. Covert narcissists in early stages of a relationship can be genuinely attuned because idealization serves their self-esteem. The attuning isn’t performed. What shifts is that the relationship naturally moves from idealization into the ordinary complexity of two people building a life, and that complexity requires the very affective empathy that covert narcissism structurally impairs.
“So the beginning was real,” she said slowly, “and the rest of it was also real.” She put down the pen. “That’s somehow worse.”
It is worse, I agreed. And also, it’s more accurate than the story in either direction. Diane took that and carried it with her. Where it took her, she decided for herself.
Love, selfobjects, and what you’ve been asked to be
Covert narcissistic relationships ask their partners to function as a psychological resource rather than a person, and that request is made so quietly that most women don’t realize they’ve accepted it until years in.
Heinz Kohut’s concept of the selfobject is the most clinically precise framework I’ve found for this. Kohut, a Viennese-American psychiatrist who developed self psychology in the 1970s, argued that all humans need selfobjects, people who function as part of our self-regulatory system. Healthy relationships involve mutual selfobject functioning with room for both people’s needs. In narcissistic relationships, the selfobject demand is one-directional and absolute. The partner functions as a mirror, reflecting back the narcissist’s worth, and as an idealized other, whose admiration and closeness stabilizes his sense of self. When the mirror doesn’t reflect what he needs, what he experiences isn’t disappointment. It’s something closer to a structural emergency.
In the covert presentation, the selfobject dynamic is particularly hard to name because it arrives wrapped in apparent vulnerability. He needs you because he’s had a hard life. He needs you because no one else understands him. He needs you because the world is hard and you’re the only soft place. The framing is relational. The actual structure is instrumental. You’re not being loved as a person. You’re being used as a function, and the moment you assert needs that interfere with that function, the warmth withdraws.
Intermittent reinforcement is a behavioral conditioning pattern in which rewards are delivered unpredictably rather than consistently, producing stronger and more persistent attachment than consistent reinforcement does. First established in B.F. Skinner’s operant conditioning research in the 1950s and extended into the clinical literature on trauma bonding by Patrick Carnes, PhD, in The Betrayal Bond (Health Communications, 1997), intermittent reinforcement is the mechanism that makes covert narcissistic relationships so difficult to leave. The unpredictable alternation of warmth and withdrawal produces an anxious pursuit of the warm state that can persist long after the person knows, intellectually, that the relationship is harmful.
In plain terms: The good moments aren’t fabricated. They’re real. And they’re real in exactly the right pattern to keep you returning, working, trying. That’s not a coincidence. That’s what intermittent reinforcement does. The slot machine that pays out sometimes is more compelling than the one that pays out every time.
Understanding the selfobject dynamic doesn’t make the love less painful to grieve. But it does change what you’re grieving. You’re not grieving a relationship in which you were seen and then abandoned. You’re grieving the relationship you believed was happening, which was always adjacent to the one that actually was. That’s a different grief, and it’s an honest one.
“Tell me, what is it you plan to do / with your one wild and precious life?”MARY OLIVER, The Summer Day
Both/And: He may love you in his way, and that way is still harming you
One of the hardest thresholds in recovering from a covert narcissistic relationship is the moment you let two things be true at once.
Claudia, a 36-year-old design partner, described it in a session this way: “My therapist before you kept saying he was just a narcissist, full stop, like that explained everything. But the good parts were real. He remembered my coffee order for three years. He drove four hours in a snowstorm when my father was in the hospital. I don’t know how to make those things fit with everything else.” She looked at her hands. “I feel like I have to pick a story.”
The both/and is this: he may love you in the way his psychological structure allows, and that way is not sufficient for your flourishing. Both are true. Neither cancels the other. The warmth was real, the idealization was real, the moments of genuine connection were real, and they coexisted with a structural impairment in affective empathy that made sustained, reciprocal love impossible. You don’t have to choose between “it was real” and “it was harmful.” Both are accurate. Both are necessary.
The survival strategy you’ve been running in this relationship was genuinely brilliant, and it is now costing you. The capacity to read his moods before he can articulate them, to smooth conflict before it surfaces, to be the steady one when he’s dysregulated, all of that was adaptive and intelligent. And it is now keeping you from the thing you say you want most: to be known rather than performed for, to rest rather than manage, to receive care that doesn’t come with invisible conditions. The adaptation was wise, and it is now its own kind of cage.
Letting both things be true is the work. Not sequentially, not with one replacing the other, but simultaneously. He loved you. It wasn’t enough. You adapted brilliantly. You’ve paid a price. The relationship had real beauty in it. It was also genuinely harmful. All of that can sit in the same room.
The both/and is not resignation. It’s the beginning of clarity. And clarity, not closure, is what makes the next decision possible. For a deeper look at how relational trauma affects narcissistic abuse recovery, that guide provides a thorough clinical companion.
The Systemic Lens: why “but he says he loves me” keeps so many women stuck
The belief that declared love is self-validating, that “I love you” means the relationship is fundamentally sound, doesn’t arise in a vacuum. It’s produced by specific cultural structures, and understanding those structures is part of what makes it possible to stop being organized by them.
The structural force at work here is a particular form of patriarchal normativity: the cultural project of making women the bearers of relational continuity. In this project, women are socialized from early life to prioritize relationship preservation, to interpret relational harm as relational failure, and to locate the cause of relational distress inside themselves rather than in the dynamic. When her partner says “I love you” and the relationship still feels harmful, the culturally available explanation is not “he may love me in a way that’s insufficient.” The culturally available explanation is “I must be the problem.”
What this looks like on an ordinary Tuesday: it looks like a woman who knows, in some clear part of herself, that the relationship isn’t working, sitting at her kitchen table at 7 a.m. trying to figure out what she’s doing wrong. It looks like her parsing his words for evidence of his love rather than attending to the evidence of her own experience. It looks like her telling friends “but he loves me” as a conclusion rather than as a piece of data. The system has trained her to weight his declaration over her own body’s record of what this relationship costs.
There’s an additional layer worth naming for women in communities where relational loyalty is tied to cultural or family identity. In those contexts, leaving or even naming a covert narcissistic relationship can feel like a form of cultural betrayal, as though naming the harm dishonors something larger. The shame and isolation that this creates is real, and it deserves acknowledgment. Recovery in these contexts may require support that specifically understands how to hold both the individual harm and the cultural weight simultaneously, without collapsing one into the other.
Understanding the systemic dimension doesn’t excuse his behavior or erase personal accountability. What it does is name the conditions that made the harm easier to perpetuate and harder to see. You weren’t naive. You were operating in a system designed to make exactly this kind of harm invisible. That’s not a personal failure. That’s a structural condition.
You’re not broken. The cultural script was never designed to prioritize your accurate perception over his stated feeling. Now that you can see the script, you can choose whether to keep performing it.
How to heal and reclaim your own capacity for love
Healing from a covert narcissistic relationship is real work, and it’s genuinely possible. What it doesn’t look like is resolving the question of whether he loved you enough. That question is a detour. The work is internal, and it’s yours.
Step 1. Name what happened, precisely and without minimizing. Many women in covert narcissistic relationships have spent years under a gaslighting dynamic that systematically undermined their trust in their own perceptions. The first and often hardest step is developing accurate language for the experience. Not dramatic language. Not a clinical indictment. Precise language. A relational trauma therapist can provide the consistent, attuned presence that helps you reestablish your own perceptual authority.
Step 2. Grieve the relationship you hoped for, not just the relationship you had. The grief in covert narcissistic recovery is often layered. There’s grief for the harm. Underneath it is usually grief for the person she believed he was in the beginning, the idealized version that felt so real because, in that phase, it was. And underneath that, often, is the older grief of having believed, again, that this time, finally, someone could see her all the way through.
Step 3. Rebuild trust in your body’s signals. Covert narcissistic relationships are sustained in large part by the disconnection from somatic evidence. Your body knew before your mind did. Part of healing is learning to listen to it again. Bessel van der Kolk, MD, psychiatrist and trauma researcher and author of The Body Keeps the Score (Viking, 2014), has argued that early relational trauma is encoded not only in narrative memory but in the body’s regulatory systems. Healing requires working at that level, not just at the level of understanding. EMDR therapy has strong evidence for processing stored relational trauma. Somatic approaches address the bodily dimension directly.
Step 4. Renegotiate the relationship, or choose not to. For some women, healing includes renegotiating contact. For others, it means no contact for a period. Neither is inherently correct. What matters is that the choice comes from your own needs rather than from fear, obligation, or the hope that he’ll finally understand. Distance changes your exposure. It doesn’t automatically heal the attachment wounds that were created in the relationship. That work happens regardless of where he is.
Step 5. Rebuild your proverbial House of Life™ on a different foundation. What the proverbial House of Life™ model names is that the internal architecture built in response to early relational patterns, and in response to patterns in an adult relationship, can be rebuilt. Not repaired back to what it was. Built into something sturdier and more genuinely yours. The proverbial Fixing the Foundations™ is exactly this work: identifying the foundational beliefs and nervous system patterns that were installed by relational harm, and doing the structural repair.
You’re not starting over. You’re building forward from where you actually are, which is much further along than this question might make it feel.
If what you’ve read here resonates, individual therapy and executive coaching are available for driven women ready to do this work. You can also explore self-paced recovery courses or schedule a complimentary consultation to find the right fit.
Q: Can a covert narcissist truly feel love?
A: Covert narcissists experience something they experience as love, but it’s organized around their own emotional regulation needs rather than genuine care for you. Research on NPD (Di Giacomo et al., 2023) shows affective empathy is significantly impaired even when cognitive empathy is intact. What they feel is real to them. It simply can’t sustain the mutual reciprocity that secure love requires.
Q: Why does a covert narcissist say “I love you” if he doesn’t mean it the way I need?
A: Saying “I love you” often serves selfobject functions, a concept from Heinz Kohut’s self psychology. The phrase can maintain a sense of connection that regulates fragile self-esteem. This doesn’t mean it’s calculated. It means his “I love you” is doing different psychological work than yours is, which creates the maddening mismatch so many partners describe.
Q: Is it possible for a covert narcissist to change and love authentically?
A: Clinically, meaningful change is possible but genuinely uncommon. It requires long-term, intensive psychotherapy and a willingness to tolerate sustained vulnerability, which narcissistic personality structure is specifically organized to avoid. Most partners are better served by focusing on their own healing rather than waiting for change they can’t control and may never see.
Q: How do I know if what he feels is love or just narcissistic supply?
A: The clearest signal is what happens when you’re not serving his needs. Secure love tolerates your bad days, your successes, your independence. Narcissistic supply doesn’t. If his warmth consistently correlates with your compliance and withdraws when you assert yourself or set a limit, you’re likely watching supply dynamics rather than love.
Q: Can therapy help me stop asking whether he loves me?
A: Yes, though perhaps not by resolving the question directly. Trauma-informed therapy helps rebuild enough internal security that his version of love stops feeling like the only one available. When you can feel held inside yourself, you become less dependent on decoding whether he means it. That’s not avoidance. That’s recovery.
Q: Why do I feel so confused if he says he loves me?
A: The confusion is accurate, not a sign of your instability. Covert narcissistic love genuinely is contradictory: warm one moment and withdrawn the next, generous in public and diminishing in private. Your nervous system is correctly registering that the message doesn’t match the experience. That’s data, not pathology.
Q: What does the Clarity After the Covert course cover?
A: Clarity After the Covert is Annie Wright’s course for women healing from covert narcissistic relationships. It covers how to recognize the specific patterns covert narcissism installs, how to rebuild trust in your own perceptions after gaslighting, how to interrupt the fawn response, and what it feels like to move from confusion toward genuine internal clarity.
Q: How can I start trusting my own feelings about love again?
A: Rebuilding trust in your feelings after covert narcissistic abuse requires both somatic and relational work. Somatic approaches reconnect you with body signals that gaslighting systematically disconnects. Relational trauma therapy provides the consistent attuned presence that rebuilds self-trust. It takes time. It’s a nervous system repair, not a mindset shift.
References
Peer-Reviewed Research (Vancouver)
- Di Giacomo E, Andreini E, Lorusso O, Clerici M. The dark side of empathy in narcissistic personality disorder. Front Psychiatry. 2023;14:1074558. doi:10.3389/fpsyt.2023.1074558. PMC: PMC10097942.
- Baskin-Sommers A, Krusemark E, Ronningstam E. Empathy in narcissistic personality disorder: from clinical and empirical perspectives. Personal Disord. 2014;5(3):323-333. doi:10.1037/per0000061. PMC: PMC4415495.
- Jankowiak-Siuda K, Zajkowski W. A neural model of mechanisms of empathy deficits in narcissism. Med Sci Monit. 2013;19:934-941. doi:10.12659/MSM.889593. PMC: PMC3829700.
- Schore AN. The interpersonal neurobiology of intersubjectivity. Front Psychol. 2021;12:648616. doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2021.648616. PMID: 33959077.
- Grenyer BFS, Townsend M, Day N. Living with pathological narcissism: core conflictual relational themes within intimate relationships. BMC Psychiatry. 2022;22:8. doi:10.1186/s12888-021-03660-x. PMC: PMC8751322.
- Bowlby J. Attachment and loss: retrospect and prospect. Am J Orthopsychiatry. 1982;52(4):664-678. doi:10.1111/j.1939-0025.1982.tb01456.x. PMID: 7148988.
Books & Cultural Sources (Chicago Author-Date)
- Durvasula, Ramani. It’s Not You: Identifying and Healing from Narcissistic People. New York: Open Field/Penguin Life, 2024.
- Kohut, Heinz. The Analysis of the Self. New York: International Universities Press, 1971.
- van der Kolk, Bessel. The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma. New York: Viking, 2014.
- Schore, Allan N. The Science of the Art of Psychotherapy. New York: W.W. Norton, 2012.
- Carnes, Patrick. The Betrayal Bond: Breaking Free of Exploitative Relationships. Deerfield Beach, FL: Health Communications, 1997.
- Shaw, Daniel. Traumatic Narcissism: Relational Systems of Subjugation. New York: Routledge, 2014.
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Annie Wright, LMFT
LMFT · Relational Trauma Specialist · W.W. Norton Author
Helping ambitious women finally feel as good as their résumé looks.
Annie Wright is a licensed psychotherapist and trauma-informed executive coach with over 15,000 clinical hours. She works with driven, ambitious women, including Silicon Valley leaders, physicians, and entrepreneurs, in repairing the psychological foundations beneath their impressive lives. Annie is the founder and former CEO of Evergreen Counseling, a multimillion-dollar trauma-informed therapy center she built, scaled, and successfully exited. She is currently writing her first book, The Everything Years, with W.W. Norton.
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