Emotional Theft: How Narcissists Take More Than You Think

your comb, your seat, your wallet, items from your house

your spouse, your friends, your mannerisms

your ideas and then taking credit for it (devastating in the workplace)

your happiness, your time, your health, your life

No, that’s not really it. That’s not what narcissists truly steal from you. Those are just exterior manifestations of what they truly steal from you.

What does a narcissist take away from you?

Emotional profit.

What?

Yes, emotional profit.

What do you mean?

To explain that, I would need to digress into a longer discourse.

All things have economies. All things require inputs, and output things.

Businesses need money from paying customers to buy more widgets to place on their shelves. They fold when costs exceed revenue.

Animals need to eat more than the energy they expend. They die when that condition isn’t met.

Relationships require acknowledgement, validation, reciprocation, otherwise they flounder. It’s called anomie, indifference or contempt.

Happiness requires evidence that our actions matter, that we have moral significance, without which there is discouragement, alienation, or dysphoria.

Everything needs to make some sort of a profit.

Even God requires that.

As long as the Israelites were faithful, God fought on behalf of them. But when they ceased to be faithful, God left them to their apostasy and their enemies. After God parted the Red Sea (and other miraculous deeds) and freed them from Egypt, the Jews, instead of being grateful, faithful, and in awe of the stupendous, reality bending impossible acts, were disgracefully ungrateful and complaining (fault finding God), so instead of giving them the promised land, He made them wander the wilderness for 40 years. God might have felt cheated and degraded from doing them all those favors without getting the equivalent of deserved upvotes, and that was His likely rebuke.

Why did God do this? Because God wants reciprocity. Something worthwhile for something worthwhile. Fair exchange. God is uninterested in giving without expectations because that’s perverse and self-degrading (and fosters the evilness of entitlement).

All healthy relationships are based on healthy give and take.

Another word for emotional profit is reciprocity.

People with bad give and take do not reciprocate. They steal, defraud, and deprive others of due emotional profit. They intend to leave everyone shortchanged and worse off from having dealt with them. They only intend to create win-lose transactions. This is the number one form of hidden abuse. Healthy relationships are impossible with them. Stick with the hidden abuse of continuous theft and you will get continuously damaged, until you lose all self-worth.

What is my point?

What does a narcissist take away from you?

Emotional profits.

Why does interacting with narcissists leave you feeling diminished or devalued?

Why do you sometimes feel an unexplainable sense of being let down when interacting with certain people?

Why is there so much emphasis on removing toxic and negative individuals from your life?

Why do you often feel suddenly exhausted, frustrated, and emotionally drained after interacting with a narcissist?

Why does the narcissist shut you down when you’re excited, only to later eagerly drain your attention?

Why are narcissists attracted to loving individuals, yet remain cold and devoid of love themselves?

Why does the narcissist manipulate you into engaging with them only to degrade you?

Why do narcissists constantly take from others without giving anything in return?

Why are narcissists known for their senseless and unnecessary withholding?

Why can’t narcissists ever feel happy for someone else’s success or good fortune?

Why do narcissists selfishly flaunt their success and good fortune to gain your attention?

Why do narcissists take all the credit and refuse to share any of it?

Why is it so difficult to receive validation or acknowledgment from a narcissist, yet they drain your validation and acknowledgment?

Why do narcissists violate your boundaries while fiercely protecting their own?

Why do narcissists abuse, hurt, and avoid accountability, yet shame you for imagined or exaggerated wrongs?

Why do narcissists forget all the good things you’ve done for them, but hold you accountable for the “good” things they claim to have done for you?

Why do narcissists respond with silence or a blank stare when a sincere response would be expected?

Why do narcissists insist on having things only on their own terms and give you the opposite of what you want?

What is degradation?

The answer to all these questions is simply because the narcissist is a thief.

All narcissists are thieves.

All narcissists primarily steal one thing.

Emotional profits.

The other things they also stole that had emotional profits attached to it (e.g. your life savings, your house and home, your children) are merely incidental.

One of the best ways to steal emotional profit is to betray people. But you can enhance that further by asking them for help, getting it, and then refusing to help them later. That really burns. It’s intentional. Gleefully so.

Everything, the comb, your ideas, your attention, the money from your purse, your spouse, benefit from your answer but no reciprocal claps, never returning gratitude or favors, EVERYTHING

can be funneled into a single interpretation.

Theft of Emotional Profits.

The narcissist isn’t truly interested in your comb or your ideas or even degrading you.

What they are primarily interested in, is to steal emotional profits.

This is a marriage vow

I, ____, take you, ____, to be my lawfully wedded (husband/wife), to have and to hold, from this day forward, for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, until death do us part.

Marriage vows — Wikipedia

Notice the legalese of the language. It is actually a business contract. Here are the terms.

What are they doing here?

They are making both individuals signing the marriage contract to promise not to steal emotionally from each other.

If I married you when you were rich, but then left you because you lost your fortune, I was planning to steal from you from day one.

Why do they need to make the couple promise not to steal from each other emotionally?

Because healthy marriage cannot work out if one of them is a thief.

Neither can friendship.

Neither can a business partnership.

Neither can co-authorship.

Every negative transaction you had with a narcissist, every unnecessary degrading experience you suffered, every love bombing or future faking attempt, came with the intention to get fat on stealing emotional profits from you and everyone else (and then running, narcissists discard because thieves run after stealing, they don’t stand there and stupidly wait for the police to arrive).

And that’s why you do not give love, compassion, trust, credulity, or sympathy to narcissists.

You never believe a narcissist’s words.

You never buy into any of their labels (e.g. Christian, pastor, parent, doctor, expert, philanthropist, humanist, TED talk guest).

You only judge them by their actions.

That’s how you resolve all their contradictions. You treat them like an ongoing investigation. You collect continuous incident reports on them. You treat every contradiction or puzzling incident seriously. You rebuke them. You do not senselessly forgive them.

And if you did this faithfully, without being bamboozled by their words, by their identity labels, you will slowly, gradually see that all their actions have these things in common

take

withhold

steal

destroy

And if you investigated deeper, you will see that what they took, withheld, stole, and destroyed also all have one thing in common, and it is emotions.

All narcissists are emotional thieves.

They all steal emotional profit to get fat on it.

Get too deprived of deserved emotional profit and your happiness, your emotional equilibrium, your sanity will fold like an unprofitable business.

Guard your heart, test them, hold them constantly accountable, refuse to let them steal from you.

What do they do with all that emotional profit that they stole from you?

What does someone get from writing a comment about themselves underneath my answer?

Self-exaltation. Self-deification. Self-promotion. Crowing.

‘I win. You lose. See, I stole from you. But you can’t steal from me, because I won’t let you. See how easy it is to steal from you. But it’s impossible to steal from me because I never reciprocate. That proves my superiority.’