Welcome to the Breakdown to Breakthrough podcast.
My name is Lisa A.
Romano.
I am a life coach,
Bestselling author,
YouTube vlogger,
Meditation teacher,
And expert in the field of codependency and narcissistic abuse.
I am a believer in the power of an organized mind.
My aim is to help people learn what it means to live above the veil of consciousness rather than living a reactive life.
May your heart feel blessed,
Your mind feel expanded,
And your spirit find hope as you spend time with me here at the Breakdown to Breakthrough podcast.
Today we're going to be talking about the five types of people that narcissists tend to attract.
Narcissists are the types of people that we want to be aware of.
We want to be aware of this type of personality who has high narcissistic traits.
We want to be aware that people like this exist for a number of reasons.
If you are someone who is highly empathic,
Someone who is highly forgivable,
Someone who has very strong religious beliefs,
For instance,
Then you are someone who may be a target for a narcissist.
It's important that you recognize who you are so that you understand that there may be a predator type personality out there you need to be aware of.
Now this is not a witch hunt for narcissists by any means.
It's really about understanding what is going on in the world.
It really is about understanding ourselves better.
It really is about understanding what we could be dealing with in our daily life so that we can make better choices,
Choices that empower us rather than drain us.
We're not here to be,
Like I said,
We're not here to be on a witch hunt.
We're not here to demonize anyone.
What we want to do is we want to be aware.
We want to understand what's going on and we want to make sure we're being responsible for ourselves when we're out and about and we're mingling with other personalities.
So let's talk about the first personality type that a narcissist might want to target and why,
Because once we understand the why,
It makes it so much easier to understand what's really going on.
So narcissists need to feel good about themselves.
They rely on the 3D world.
They're very attached.
They're addicted to what's going on in the 3D world.
In essence,
They're codependent,
Right?
So they need constant validation.
They need to have their ego stroke.
They need to feel that you believe that they are superior.
They need to have you compliment them.
They need to believe that you see them as brilliant,
Better than,
More than,
Highly successful.
So essentially,
We're talking about someone who absolutely cannot exist without something from the 3D world making them feel alive.
So if you are someone who is highly successful,
If you are brilliant yourself,
Let's say you are a celebrity or you do very well in your industry as a doctor or a lawyer,
You are just known for what you do.
You're a target for a narcissist.
You're someone who can boost the social status of a narcissist.
And the narcissist will target you because of a couple of reasons.
The number one reason is that they will benefit in terms of how they feel about themselves by being with someone that they feel is highly successful.
Remember,
It's all about manipulating how people see them and feeling superior.
So if you are someone who is beautiful,
If you are someone who is very handsome,
If you are someone who when people look at you and think about you,
They think there's an A plus type of person over there who's highly successful,
Makes a great appearance,
You have something that a narcissist can gleam or glom onto and almost identify with as owning.
So you make a narcissist feel good about themselves because look,
They're with you.
It's all about them feeling good about themselves.
The more you have,
Or the more respected you are in your community,
You can become a target for a narcissist.
Another reason why someone who is highly successful in their community or someone who has celebrity is well known or someone who is beautiful or someone who is very handsome,
Another reason why you might be a target for a narcissist is because you are seen as strong.
You are seen as having it all together.
And a narcissist we know is really built on this idea that they need dominance and control in order to feel emotionally stable.
And so the more in control you seem and the more out of control they can reduce you to,
Then the better they feel about themselves.
So it is the breaking you,
Breaking the strong stallion,
If you will,
Or breaking this beautiful woman who has all these men who would just die to go out with her.
Breaking her,
Reducing her to a pile of tears makes a narcissist feel empowered.
It makes a narcissist feel in control.
So it's important that we recognize that this type of a personality is very attractive to a narcissist,
Someone who is highly successful or someone who is looked up at in their community for a variety of reasons.
It could be for celebrity,
It could be prestige,
It could be success,
It could be beauty.
Someone who is very self-confident and is enjoying a certain level of success in their life or confidence in their life.
They're enjoying it.
So a narcissist,
A,
Will enjoy targeting you because being with you strokes their ego.
And B,
Destroying you will stroke their ego.
So reducing you to a pile of tears,
Making you feel insecure,
Getting you to doubt your reality is going to empower the narcissist who is seeking dominance and control over you.
So that's the type of a person that I think that we need to be aware of,
Meaning the second type of personality that a narcissist might target.
And if this is you,
You should be aware of this.
So if you have a very strong moral compass,
If you are highly religious,
If you have very strong convictions,
If you are a person of faith,
Then you could be a target for a narcissist.
A narcissist will use what you think and what you believe.
A narcissist will use your faith against you.
A narcissist might study the Bible and use Bible verses against you.
So a narcissist will use your faith as a weapon of mass destruction,
If you will.
So if you believe in God and you believe that God believes that you should do unto others as you would have others do unto you,
Then a narcissist can manipulate that language and make you feel as if you should be doing everything the narcissist thinks you should do.
Narcissists are very good at twisting language.
They're very good at blame shifting.
They make it very difficult for you to hold onto yourself.
And when there's a third entity added into the equation,
Whether it's God or your faith,
Whatever it might be,
Your moral compass,
Your beliefs,
When that is entered into the relationship that you have with the narcissist,
Your faith will be used against you.
If you're someone of faith and you believe that God is all about forgiveness and people should always give others the benefit of the doubt,
Then the narcissist will use your willing willingness to see the good in people against you.
So when you try to hold a narcissist accountable,
They might twist Bible verses against you and try to make you feel guilty for holding onto yourself.
They might say things like,
Well,
If you were a Christian,
You would forgive me.
If you were a good Christian,
You would do X,
Y,
And Z.
If you were really a good Jew,
You would do X,
Y,
And Z.
If you were really a good Muslim,
You would do X,
Y,
And Z.
So it's important that you recognize that when we're dealing with a narcissistic personality or someone with high narcissistic traits who may or may not recognize that they are narcissists.
We run across that where people are shocked to find out that they're actually exhibiting high narcissistic traits.
This is just the way they are.
The world should revolve around them.
They really do believe that you should do what they tell you to do.
They really do believe that you should forgive them and never hold them accountable for anything ever.
And they're quite shocked in some situations when you suggest that they're being unfair or they're being highly narcissistic.
And so it's important that if you're someone who has a very strong faith,
You have to know that there is a possibility that you could be targeted by someone with high narcissistic traits who will want to pray off your desire to be a good person of faith.
And it's important to recognize this because you don't want to become a victim to someone who is going to use your faith against you and your desire to do good in the world and your desire to hold yourself accountable to your religious beliefs.
You want to make sure that you don't fall prey to someone who may not realize that they're a narcissist or maybe they do,
But you want to make sure that you are understanding how someone can manipulate your belief,
Turn your belief against you,
And get you to completely forget what you feel,
What you want,
And what you need.
Someone who is highly narcissistic can manipulate the Bible,
Can manipulate any religious text and make it say what they want it to say in order to get you to do what they want you to do.
So if you are a person of faith and your faith is very important to you,
It's important that you recognize that how you feel and what you need is important and that it is possible to be taken advantage of by people who may or may not know that they're being narcissistic and who have high narcissistic traits.
If you are someone who tends to be a caretaker,
Right?
So you're someone who easily just automatically gets up and starts clearing the table at a dinner party.
You're someone who is helping the hostess.
You're someone who is helping the soccer coach coach the kids at the soccer field,
Right?
You're a mom or you're a dad,
But you just have this tendency to jump in there and just help.
You're a helper,
Right?
You see the big picture.
You are often very,
Very attuned or in tune with people who are struggling in the office or people that are struggling in a certain area.
You are the person who notices the person who just tripped.
No one else is noticing the person who just tripped and fell and has now landed behind a bush at the park,
But you notice and you are the person that runs to help that person.
You're naturally tuned in to what's happening around you.
You are someone who could be a target for a narcissist because a narcissist needs a caterer.
A narcissist needs someone who is willing to acquiesce,
A partner who is very complimentary,
A partner who is very sensitive to the needs of their partner,
Someone who is very attuned to when the partner is down and needs a little confidence booster.
You are a natural cheerleader.
You are someone who wants the people in your life to feel good about themselves.
It's just very natural for you to do this.
You want to make people feel good around you.
It's a beautiful quality,
But it's important that if you resonate with,
Oh,
That sounds like me,
I'm a natural caretaker.
It's a beautiful thing and we need people like this in the world,
But it's important to recognize that you are someone who might be targeted for a narcissist.
You are someone who is going to have the desire and the stamina to tell an aging narcissist that he's so handsome or she's so beautiful.
There's no one as beautiful as she is in the world.
You're going to have the stamina and the desire to want to make sure that your partner feels good all the time.
You won't recognize that it's not coming back to you.
You won't recognize that you're not being nurtured.
You might not recognize that your partner is taking,
Right?
And you are the one who's consistently giving because you're not checking in with the self.
Because you have this identity,
This natural identity and propensity to care about others,
Which is a beautiful thing,
Right?
I'm not even talking about codependency.
Our identity is tied up with taking care of other people so we can escape our own loneliness.
When we're codependent,
We're trying to rescue other people and we're running away from our fear of abandonment.
We hope that if we take care of people,
Then they'll never leave us.
I'm talking about a natural caretaker who generally is the person that just wants to help and it's not coming from codependency.
There are people on this planet that just have this natural calling to be the one who's making sure that everybody,
I call them the hospitality spirits.
They are the people who incarnate and who really feel like it's their calling to make sure that everyone's comfortable and that everyone has a pillow behind their neck and everybody has a pillow under their legs,
Making them nice and cozy and comfy.
And these people,
These caretaker people are not people that check in with themselves very often.
And if the rest of the world was willing to not take advantage of a natural caretaker,
Then we wouldn't have a problem.
But unfortunately,
Or fortunately,
Any way you look at it depends on your perception of reality and whether or not you feel like things happen for a reason and or that every relationship that we come to interface with is here to teach us something about ourselves,
Right?
Depending on your perception,
There are people that don't believe that and there are people who just demonize narcissists and who see no value in a narcissistic personality and that's as far as it goes.
And then there are other people that understand and recognize that narcissists are severely wounded in most cases.
And then they have personality traits that are off the charts,
Right?
So they're not in the gray zone,
They're highly narcissistic and they are destructive.
And depending on what type of a narcissist we're dealing with,
A malignant narcissist is someone who is going to wreak havoc in your life on every level.
Narcissists can be highly vindictive and it can be very difficult to have empathy for someone who is really struggling and doing everything they can to make your life as miserable as they possibly can.
So I understand why there are some people just like,
I have no tolerance.
I just can't,
Of course I get it.
So it really does depend on where you are and how you're viewing the narcissist,
How you're viewing a codependent narcissistic relationship for instance,
Or how you're viewing life and what your perception of life really is.
But for the sake of this conversation,
What we're trying to do is really identify the types of personality traits that attract narcissists.
And certainly someone who is a natural caregiver,
Someone who wants to make everybody else comfortable is a target.
And in the world we live in,
We have to be realistic.
We have to recognize that there are predator personalities and a predator personality needs prey.
And so a narcissist will target someone who is running around trying to make sure everyone's cozy because the narcissist needs that.
The narcissist needs someone who is willing to make them the center of their world.
The narcissist needs someone who isn't selfish,
Who isn't checking in with the self per se.
And what do I need?
A caretaker might be someone who needs to take care of other people,
Not because of some abandonment trauma,
Just because it's very natural.
If we think about nurses,
Nurses have this natural desire to want to help other people.
First responders want to help other people.
It's not out of codependency,
Although lots of nurses tend to be codependent as do first responders.
But there are people who just feel like it's my job to make sure everybody's okay.
And that's a beautiful thing.
And like I said,
If we didn't have predator type personalities,
That wouldn't be such a bad thing.
People who are caretakers wouldn't be taken advantage of.
They would be honored.
They would be appreciated.
They would have energy returned to them.
We would celebrate people who are natural caregivers.
We'd want to make sure that they knew that we appreciated them.
But in the world that we live in,
Especially since narcissism is on the rise,
I think in great part due to social media and the instant gratification or instant ego gratification and the desire to satisfy ego through things like Instagram and Facebook and social media outlets,
The desire to be seen and to feel important and to have our voice heard.
There's nothing wrong with being seen and feeling heard and wanting to leave your mark on the world.
But certainly when it's coming from pure ego and it's not coming from a place of wanting to really leave the world a better place than when we left it,
I think that we have to be careful about how easy it is to become addicted to that like on Facebook or that subscriber on YouTube or that follower on Instagram.
It can be very easy to become addicted to what's happening in a 3D world.
And so it's important that we pay attention to these things because we're living in a world with billions of other people,
Lots of different personalities.
And if you're prey,
If you're a target,
It's better you know that sooner than later.
The fourth type of personality that a narcissist will target is someone who is highly empathic,
Somebody who is logically empathic.
In other words,
What I mean by that is there are just people on this planet who just have empathy,
Like a lot of empathy,
And they have the ability to feel what other people feel.
They have the ability to think about why people feel what they feel.
There are people who have somatic experiences,
Somatic empathy.
They just literally their body has a response to someone else's pain.
Beautiful thing,
Right?
Empathy prevents human beings from not being able to relate to one another.
So empathy allows us to relate to one another.
So I can look at a picture of a grieving mother from Australia or from South America or anywhere else in the country,
China,
Asia,
Wherever,
Europe,
And I can see the emotions in that mother's face and I can relate to them as a mother.
I can feel what she feels or I can imagine what she feels or my body can have a response to what she feels.
This bonds me or binds me to this woman I don't even know through this experience that she's experiencing.
Through the thousand words that this image is speaking in this one picture,
It allows us to care about one another as human beings.
And it's a very important ability to have as human beings.
It prevents us from hurting one another.
It prevents us from cheating on one another.
It prevents us from really saying things that we know might hurt someone that we love.
It really prevents us from destroying relationships by using terrible language,
By being accusatory.
So empathy is a beautiful,
Beautiful emotion.
It's a beautiful experience.
So if you are highly empathic and you're logical,
Then you're someone who really sees the good in other people.
And when someone presents with an idea,
Your empathy and your logic has you wanting to understand why this person feels the way they feel.
So you immediately put yourself in this person's position and you go to work.
Your mind naturally goes to work to try to make sense out of what this person feels.
And you have a propensity to understand other human beings on a very deep level.
You are someone who wants to get this person and you want the person to know you get them.
Beautiful.
That's amazing.
If you have a friend like that,
Or if you have a partner like that,
Or if you grew up with parents like that,
That's a beautiful thing.
To know that you have someone in your life that hears you,
That wants to understand you,
That's got your back and they're in your corner,
That is a narcissist's dream.
That person is someone that will listen for hours on end to the problems the narcissist has.
This person is someone who will understand and want to understand the poor choices and the poor behaviors of the narcissist.
The empathic logical person will want to make excuses for the person who is more narcissistic.
Their mind will come up with ways to understand and forgive and really make it okay that the narcissist is the way they are.
Even if their behavior is really poor,
You may even be someone if you're highly empathic and very logical,
You might be very protective over a narcissistic person because you are so willing to understand them at a deep level and your mind is working to truly,
Truly comprehend their pain.
You have an amazing ability to make sense out of why someone might do something terrible or do something that you know that they shouldn't have,
But because you're so logical and empathic,
Your mind will really make sense out of why this narcissist did what they did.
Almost like forgive it,
But even excuse it.
If you're someone who has a lot of empathy,
You might be someone who also finds it difficult to hold someone accountable.
You might go out of your way to avoid holding someone who is presenting as very wounded,
Very shy,
Very vulnerable.
You will have a difficult time calling that person out because you have so much empathy for this person.
You need to know if you're a highly empathic person who is highly forgivable,
You need to know that there might be a narcissist looming and who is looking for an opportunity to get inside your world.
Why?
Because you're going to forgive them.
If they screw up,
You're going to understand why they screwed up.
If they lie,
You're going to understand why they lied.
If they steal,
You're going to understand why they stole.
If they do bad things,
You might understand why they've done bad things.
In this space,
You might not recognize that your good nature is totally being taken advantage of and that your world bit by bit is becoming smaller and smaller and smaller as the narcissist draws you into their world of narcissism.
The fifth person that a narcissist may target is someone who grew up with narcissistic parents.
If you grew up with narcissistic parents,
You may resonate with feeling minimized,
With being gaslighted,
With feeling trauma bonded to someone.
The up and the down relationship dynamics might be very familiar to you.
The craving of validation,
Narcissistic parents,
Depending on what type of narcissistic parent you have,
There are narcissistic parents who just overindulge their children because they want their children to feel the best because they think they're the best and they want everyone in the neighborhood to think that their kid is the best.
Narcissistic parents,
They're not all created equal.
If you had a narcissistic parent who praised you and overindulged you,
They did it for their own sake.
They did it to feel better about themselves and they needed you to make them feel better about themselves.
But the problem is if you stop pulling those A++'s,
If you stop being the prima ballerina,
If you stop being the funniest kid at the block party,
If you stop being the all-star athlete,
The narcissistic parent feels like you have failed them.
It will feel like an actual attack,
That you're not supplying them with this narcissistic supply anymore and you'll have issues.
Now another type of narcissistic parent is the parent who gaslights their children,
The parents who lie to their children,
The parents who triangulate,
The parents who abuse their children,
The parents who verbally harass their children,
Parents who are unbelievably indifferent to their children.
This is a different type of narcissistic parent.
Now if you grew up with either of these types of parents,
You have to be aware.
Hopefully if you've been overindulged,
Then you haven't taken on narcissistic traits yourself.
But even if you have,
If you can see it clearly,
You can work yourself back down to the gray zone where you're tempering narcissistic traits,
You're understanding the big story,
You're understanding where your sense of grandiosity has come from.
It makes you uncomfortable and you don't want to live this way anymore.
You want to feel like you're part of a community.
You don't want to feel like your community owes you something,
Like your children owe you,
The world owes you.
You don't want to feel that way.
It makes you uncomfortable to think that you might feel that way and you want to change.
It's a beautiful thing.
If you are someone who had parents who were indifferent to you and you experienced that type of a narcissistic parent,
A parent who maybe was jealous of you,
A parent who made you feel like it was your fault that you were born,
Made you feel like you should never have been born.
That's the reality for many of us that feel like our parents had trouble with being our parents,
That we were too much trouble for them.
Meanwhile,
We didn't ask to be born.
We didn't knock on anybody's uterus and say,
Hello.
We didn't do that.
Now we're here because of an action they took.
It can be very confusing when you are the adult child of a narcissistic parent,
But you must know that if you have parents who were highly narcissistic,
You can become a target for a narcissist.
We have this compulsion,
This repetition compulsion,
This desire to finish unfinished business.
So many of us who experienced abandonment trauma,
Attachment trauma,
Who have grown up with childhood emotional neglect,
That aching to feel connected to a narcissistic parent just doesn't disappear.
I've coached women and men well into their fifties and sixties who have struggled with letting their narcissistic parent go through death,
Through the death experience before they were able to achieve that child's fantasy of having that deep connection to their mother and or their father.
It is such a deep aching pain when you don't have that relationship with your mother and or your father and it follows you.
And so if you are the adult child of a narcissist or you're the adult child of an alcoholic,
You might have this internal drive to feel connected to someone of a similar energy.
I see it in my work all the time.
When we do our work inside any of the work that we do,
What we notice is that there is a pattern from childhood.
And so if my mother was withholding,
I tend to marry a withholding man.
If my mother was sarcastic,
Passive aggressive,
I tend to date passive aggressive women,
For instance.
And so we find ourselves through the lens of objectivity,
We find ourselves discovering these weird patterns from childhood.
And if you are the adult child of a narcissist or an alcoholic,
For instance,
Don't be surprised if you discover that you are dating or you are in a relationship with someone with high narcissistic traits that very much mirrors your relationship with your more narcissistic parent.
We see this over and over and over again.
I've had clients say that their work environment or their work family is very similar to their childhood family,
The childhood dynamics.
Now why would this happen?
So if you're someone who has this very tender,
Vulnerable abandonment trauma,
This gaping hole in your heart that has yet to be sealed up with self-compassion,
Self-compassion can heal that up by the way,
Shame gets healed up through self-compassion as well.
If you're someone who is struggling with feeling unloved and feeling as if you never gained the affection and the validation,
The attention and the nurturing that you required as a child from a parent,
You may be a target for a more narcissistic person because of resonance,
Number one.
And what will happen is a narcissist will see you and love bomb you,
Make you feel like everything is fine.
They will praise you.
They will idealize you.
You become their object of narcissistic supply.
It becomes your duty to make them feel good about themselves.
Some days they might want you to compliment them.
Some days they might need you to just stand there and take whatever it is they want to say to you.
And by you standing there and you take it,
They feel like they have dominance and power over you.
So the way that their dominance presents itself might be different day to day.
But if you're someone who is struggling with abandonment trauma,
Attachment trauma,
It's not going to be so easy for you to say,
Listen,
Mr.
Or Mrs.
Narcissist,
Enough is enough and this is no bueno.
I'm not putting up with this anymore.
You haven't developed the boundaries in childhood to be able to have protective ego boundaries.
All of us need to be able to protect ourselves,
Ego boundaries.
We need them.
But when we have felt exposed as children before we were able to form a healthy sense of self,
Before we were able to form a healthy sense of ego,
Which is me,
Oh,
This is me.
I matter.
Look,
I matter.
Oh,
My mommy loves me.
My daddy protects me.
Oh,
This is awesome.
I can feel safe.
This feels wonderful.
I can go read my books and I can go color.
I can play with Play-Doh.
I can sing in my microphone.
I can dance and I won't be made fun of.
I can cry and I'll be embraced.
This is the me,
The I,
All of my feelings,
The ability to express myself and to experiment and be a voyager.
All of this is being encouraged in healthy homes.
But when children are discouraged to share and to be explorers in their home,
When they're discouraged,
When they are embarrassed,
When they are slapped in the face,
When their hair is being pulled,
When they're being mocked,
When they're being made fun of,
Then they feel exposed on the deepest level before a boundary has been able to be created.
And that's when shame becomes infiltrated.
I just did a post recently and I said that shame infiltrates the skin of our soul and we can't escape it.
It's a condition.
It's almost like a mindset,
Like a shame mindset.
It's not so much an emotion.
It's an experience of self.
It's this perception of self.
It's a cloak that I wear.
And until I learned how to take this cloak off and identify where this mindset originated and why it was originated,
It's very difficult for me as an adult to be able to say,
No bueno,
I'm not putting up with this anymore.
I'm done.
I'm done.
You can't talk to me this way.
This is love bombing.
You're gaslighting me.
You're triangulating me.
Oh,
That's a smear campaign.
Oh,
That's guilt.
Oh,
Okay.
You're withholding.
Okay.
Oh,
You're stonewalling.
Oh,
Okay.
You're not able to do that.
And so people that don't have strong boundaries are very much targets for narcissists,
Very much targets for those with high narcissistic traits.
This is not a black and white issue.
And none of us should think by any means that these are the only five personality types or traits of people that a narcissist would be attracted to.
There are many,
Right?
But for the sake of this session,
I wanted to identify five and try to break them down to help those of you who may fall into one of these categories better understand the why.
Why do I attract these people?
Why is it hard for me to set boundaries?
What's really going on?
My life changed when I began to understand myself.
The great philosophers of all times have always been trying to encourage the human mind to understand itself,
To have the human personality understand itself,
Right?
When you understand you,
When you understand the way your mind thinks,
When you understand your personality,
Then you understand so much more in life.
You start to understand people.
Now things aren't so confusing.
Now you know,
Well,
If I'm a caretaker and I'm highly agreeable,
Then I also need boundaries because there are going to be friends and family members and partners and coworkers,
You know,
Even people in religious institutions like churches who might want to take advantage of my kindness.
Now you have an opportunity to recognize that all of these traits that I have are beautiful traits.
They make me human.
And I do want to leave the world a better place than when I came in,
But I need to protect myself,
Right?
You have to begin seeing these beautiful traits in yourself as gold,
And it's up to you to learn how to protect them.
So someone who is more of a predator type personality who may or may not even know that they're a narcissist is unable to take advantage of the precious gold that you are.
The world needs you.
The world needs you intact.
The world needs you whole.
There's a shining light inside of you,
And it's your job to get in touch with that light and to let it shine.
I know it sounds hokey pokey,
But it's true.
Imagine if you could really love yourself.
Imagine if you really,
Really valued yourself.
What good would you bring to the world if you had the confidence that you were enough?
Imagine how your life would change if you were able to protect the gold that lies within.
This isn't so much about a witch hunt as much as it is understanding the self so that you can protect the self,
So that you can honor the self,
And so that you can love the self.
That's really the goal.
And recognizing your personality traits and recognizing the types of people that might take advantage of your wonderful personality traits is important information.
We don't have to walk around being afraid,
But we do have to walk around being aware.
