Narcissists are (already) in hell – From a secular to a Christian perspective

Scroll to the bottom of the page for the audio version of the article.

A few years ago, I suddenly had to deal with an onslaught of attacks from people with a personality disorder that psychologists call pathological narcissism. Even if you are not familiar with the scientific literature on the subject, you should have an idea of what kind of person it is referring to. If not, let me try to explain.

What is a narcissist?

Narcissists are those toxic people in your life that will repeatedly commit inexplicable acts of bullying, emotional manipulation and gaslighting, causing waves of suffering wherever they go. Their snarky remarks, their gossiping and their outright lies may have pushed you over the edge, and suddenly you found yourself exploding in rage and in tears. When that happens, they use that reaction as an opportunity to twist the knife and say to people witnessing the scene: “See? I was right, this person is clearly unstable”.

Does that sound familiar to you? If not I must say that you’re very fortunate. If an environnent, whether a family or a workplace, is healthy, narcissists will not be able to thrive in it, and the more reasonable people will be able to contain them or drive them away. In almost all environments, you always get glimpses of it of course, attempts from narcissists to poison the well so to speak. But if your environnement is properly sheltered against corruption from narcissists, it will not spread and turn your surroundings into hell on earth.

You don’t need to be a religious person to be able to say that unironically. Recovering victims of narcissistic abuse of all kinds, religious, agnostics and atheists alike will describe a relationship with a narcissist as going through hell, and they truly mean that. It is not an allegory or a metaphor for “something really unpleasant”, it is more akin to how people feel when they suffer from depression or chronic anxiety. They feel trapped and there seems to be no escape.

No secular solution

Why does there seem to be no escape? Victims of abuse often end up there because narcissism is either unknown or deeply misunderstood in our society. When someone is first confronted with a narcissist, they understandably feel compelled to get help from a relative or a friend. And for most people, what happens is that the attention is shifted to them, especially because of the state you find yourself in after suffering your first intense onslaught of narcissistic abuse. Some people will uncontrollably cry and show deep resentment for what has been done to them. So other people wonder if their current unstable state is causing them to distort reality. Some of the actions performed by narcissistic people are so vicious and so insane that many people have trouble believing that they even happened.

So the person you’ve come to for help tells you: “Why would they do that? Are you sure that you didn’t do anything to provoke them? Are you sure that you’re not imagining things? You don’t seem to be thinking straight.” And to give the devil his due, on a purely rational level, they would not be wrong. If we assume that humans are purely rational beings who act only in their best interests, to say nothing about the interests of others, describing some of the behaviours that narcissists engage in does not make sense.

At some point in my experience with narcissists I realised that the the solutions offered by the secular world, like science, rationality and therapy were largely insufficient to either explain or fix the problem. It is not a realisation you come to easily, as the actions of the narcissist in your life back you into a corner, you are kind of forced to accept this reality. The longer you refuse to make that leap, the more pointless suffering you will be forced to endure as you try to tackle this problem with the tools of our secular world.

In the following video by The Little Shaman, someone I deem to be one of the world’s leading experts on pathological narcissism, she explains that nothing can cure narcissistic personality disorder. That’s right, scientists, psychologists, psychiatrists all admit that this is a problem for which we currently don’t have any viable treatment or cure. In the second part of this article, I’m going to try to show why I don’t think there will ever be a secular solution to the problem of narcissism. Give it a listen to realise the seriousness and the hopelessness of the problem.

Narcissism is a spiritual problem

A few years ago, I was facing narcissistic abuse at work on a daily basis. I was suffering defeat after defeat despite all my efforts to tackle the problem head on with the tools that I had at my disposal and that reasonable people should positively respond to. My job then required a lot of meticulousness, but of course mistakes are human and inevitable. But not to a narcissist. My work would be 99.99% flawless, well above the quality produced by some of my coworkers, but somehow, only my mistakes were deemed unacceptable. The narcissistic colleague would insinuate that I was actively trying to cause harm to the team, the company, and most importantly to her personally. “If you truly cared and truly took your job seriously, you would not be making this 1 mistake (out of 10000 instances)! Why are you doing this to me?”.

And like that she would twist the knife over and over again, questioning my character, my competence, even my intentions. I would try to defend myself, and become so destabilised by her attacks that I would often start choking up, or get angry. One of her remarks even triggered a panic attack. I was backed into a corner, nothing I was trying had any effect, whether it was giving her reasonable arguments, trying to be nicer to her, trying to meet her insane demands, trying to ignore her remarks, none of it was working.

This is where most people will say: “Why didn’t you just leave?” Unfortunately, things are never so simple when it comes to narcissistic abuse. I had been working at that company for two years and before I joined the team of my narcissistic boss. I was in another department in which I had built a solid reputation as a reliable and hard-working employee. But it seemed that my great track-record in the company all but vanished as soon as I made my first mistake. All of a sudden, I had always been this incompetent employee in the eyes of my manager.

I was convinced that this is all just a big misunderstanding, and if I tried hard enough, my boss would finally give me the recognition I deserved. But that recognition never came. Even when there was a lot of progress, and I could complete several projects flawlessly with the congratulations of other managers, as soon as I made one mistake again, my narcissistic boss would tell that I hadn’t even made any effort to improve myself from the beginning. At that point, I didn’t know what to do anymore, at least from a purely rational and materialistic point of view. That’s when I came across the idea that narcissism may be a spiritual problem.

The Christian answer

As I was battling the narcissists of my workplace, I was taking my first baby steps into a more spiritual life, namely Christianity, after decades of staunch atheism. The game-changer that it brought into my life was the ability to frame reality through clear categories of good and evil. As I was reading the scripture and listening to commentaries given in church, I was slowly realising that the patterns of being I had witnessed in narcissists were the exact same as the ones described in the demons or the ennemies of the holy people in the Bible.

A whole new world suddenly opened up to me. And so I started applying Christ’s teachings to try to get me out of the madness I was stuck in. And to be frank, at first sight, they didn’t make any sense to the remaining atheistic part of me that had yet to die. Don’t retaliate? Turn the other cheek? Respond with kindness? Pray for the narcissist? Endure your suffering and do not complain? As I clumsily and reluctantly tried to apply these behavioural patterns to my life, secular people around me would kindly (and some of them harshly) tell me that I was being a fool, that I was letting people walk all over me, that the Christian message of loving one’s enemy was very nice and idealistic but also impractical, dangerous and irrational.

But since I was backed into a corner already and suffering needlessly, there was no harm in trying it out. So through blind faith I applied the above-mentioned behaviours, to the best of my ability. I would try to endure, I would refrain from complaining and most importantly, I would not retaliate. On my lunch breaks, I would go to the church nearby to pray for my tormentors, while still being attacked and smeared by them. Make no mistake, I was still deeply suffering through it all. I would cry for help, beg for it to stop, tell God that I just couldn’t do it on my own.

You might say, that doesn’t sound very efficient. And you would be right, it doesn’t. But despite the abuse not stopping, something in me had changed. Yes I was still suffering, possibly even more than before I turned to Christ for help. But all of a sudden that suffering was somehow more bearable, even though it still felt unbearable at the same time. It is hard to explain and I guess it’s one of these many paradoxes found in Christianity.

During this period, as I was focused on feeling my suffering without reacting to it, praying for my ennemies and asking for the help of Christ and his saints, I had many mystical experiences which by definition are ineffable and cannot easily be put into words. Let’s just say that they were little oasis of peace and protection amid the storms of narcissistic abuse that I was going through. From then on, my life would never be the same.

To make a long story short, as I was trying to embody the ways of being offered by Christianity, the periods of peace and protection would keep getting longer and the moments of hopeless suffering would keep getting shorter. It was clearly working, so at that point, there was no going back. Christianity had managed to do something for me that all the solutions found in the secular world couldn’t.

The Christian framework

I will do my best to keep it simple for people who are not familiar with Christian theology, or are only aware of it through the caricatures that our society makes of it, that it’s about obeying God’s arbitrary rules so that we don’t go to hell. The true Orthodox Christian theology goes much deeper than that. Christians are called to create little spaces of heaven around them, by doing good deeds, by purifying themselves of the evil inside of them. It is especially important that they turn inwards and make sure they look for the causes of evil inside their own heart.

As victims of narcissistic abuse know, narcissists do the exact opposite, all blame for any situation is externalised and projected onto others. Any suggestion, any hint that anything bad that’s happening is even partly because of them is met with extreme anger, what psychologists have officially labelled as ‘narcissistic rage’. By doing so, they create even more chaos and suffering around them.

This is why Christians, at least in Catholicism and Orthodoxy, have something like confession. If you’ve had a fight with someone, you have to look back to see how you may have provoked them, to think precisely about how you may have contributed to making things worse in that situation. Some saints even command us to regard everyone else as a blameless angel and to only concentrate on what we have done wrong. Notice how it’s all about doing the exact opposite of what narcissists do all the time. For them, everyone else is always at fault, and they are always the blameless angel.

When I talk about narcissistic evil taking root in a place, it is about the same as saying that they create a little hell around them. And from a traditional, Orthodox Christian perspective, that’s not meant to be taken as an analogy or a metaphor. It is actually what is happening. Experts in the narcissistic abuse community say that if you spend enough time in that toxic space created around the narcissist, you will catch what they call ‘narcissistic fleas’, you will be contaminated with their patterns of behaviour, and that is understandable. In an attempt to defend yourself, you will meet their rage with more rage, creating a negative feedback loop that can lead to physical violence in some cases, even murder.

Christians believe that sin is a disease, you could see sins as harmful behavioural patterns we have become addicted to. And on some level, we believe those personal behaviour patterns will infect the people around us and then ripple out to the edges of our society. This is easily observable on a secular level, you do not need to be a Christian to make that assessment. People who have lived in a narcissistic family know this to be true. Only one member of the family being narcissistic is enough to contaminate the whole household. Its members then take their narcissistic fleas with them and spread them in the environments they regularly attend, like their workplace for example.

So in that manner, narcissists really do create their little corner of hell, rife with demonic influence. I know that as a secular person, it’s easy to roll your eyes at this, but here too, even atheists will unironically say that when their ‘narc’ flew into a rage, it really looked like they were demonically possessed, and it scared the living hell out of them. They will see this way of describing it as a useful metaphor at best, but we Christians believe that it is an accurate description of what is happening.

We Christians believe that narcissists have made a deal with we we call evil principalities, invisible patterns of being that govern human behaviour. I’m now going to use very imagistic religious language to get my point across, if you’re a secular person, try not to get hung up on it and you should see what I’m trying to convey. As the narcissist is deeply suffering, because they are almost always victims of abuse themselves, these spirits come to them to offer them comfort. It is of course a deception. The demon wants them to believe that none of their suffering is caused by their own sin, it is all the fault of other people, and if only they submit to the demon’s will, they will never have to suffer again.

And on some level, it is exactly what happens to the narcissist. From then on, any evil they cause is caused by other people. You’re probably familiar with the term ‘projection’. That is probably the most common word used in narcissistic abuse support groups. All their faults will now be externalised, projected onto the other, they will mercilessly attack anyone who dares to criticise their actions, and when it is pointed out that they are abusive, they will immediately turn it around and say: “No I’m not, you are the one abusing me! This is all your fault!”. And then they often engage in what we call ‘word salad’. They stitch together an incoherent narrative and with it, they attempt to rewrite reality to try to defect the blame on you at all costs. In some sense, one could see this act as something akin to an ‘anti-confession’.

The question that The Little Shaman was addressing in the video above was whether something could be done to save a narcissist, to free them of the hellish space they’re imprisoned in, and she answers negatively. On one level, she’s right. I of course believe that through Christ all is possible, but if you encounter a narcissist, it is best to follow Gandalf’s advice from the Fellowship of the Ring when he encounters the Balrog, the demon from the Ancient World. Unless you’re someone who’s very advanced on the spiritual path, this foe is beyond you, and your best bet is to flee. In the narcissistic abuse community, this is called ‘going no contact’.

If for some reason, you are unable to do that, then you have to tread very carefully and make sure you are on the path of becoming a spiritual warrior. For a Christian, that means praying regularly (especially for your narcissistic tormentors), participating in the sacraments of the Church, namely going to the liturgy, going to confession and taking communion regularly. It is the only way you’re going to create a little ark of heaven around you that will allow you to safely navigate the fiery rivers of hellish narcissistic spaces, whether it’s a household, a school or a workplace.

What it means to be condemned to hell

I will end this article by trying to align the idea that narcissists are stuck where they are with the Orthodox Christian conception of hell. You see, Christians ultimately do not believe that God is the one condemning people to hell. We believe that narcissists are doing that to themselves, that they are wilfully condemning themselves. The door is locked from the inside and they hold the key as C.S. Lewis put it.

Another way to see it is that they’ve wandered too far from the beacon, the source of all goodness that is God and they now have forgotten what it means to be a good person. And they don’t want to know what it means to be good. Even if you carefully explain to them why they’re hurting you, they simply will not be able to comprehend it. Well, actually, on one level, they will, research has shown that narcissists are perfectly aware that they’re committing acts of evil, otherwise they would not try to hide them.

But despite of that, they cannot see their sins and say that they’re sorry, because the demons that enslaved them have made them believe that doing that would cause them unbearable suffering that would lead to their death. And so narcissists cling to the idea that they are always blameless like their life depends on it, because from their perspective, it is actually the case.

On the other side, you have the people who have not made a deal with the devil to put it plainly, and they don’t necessarily need to be Christian. People who are really trying to do better and that are still able to recognise that if they want to become better people, holier people as Christians would say, they primarily have to look inside themselves. By doing so, their inner transformation will create ripples around them and for a brief moment, create a little heaven around them.

We Christians believe that at the End of Times, the whole world will be consumed by God’s purifying fire. This does not have to be seen in a negative light. For the righteous, that holy fire will be experienced as light, it will cleanse the remnants of evil within them, and at the end of that process, they will be in heaven, or in the Kingdom of Heaven to be accurate, where evil will be finally vanquished once and for all. But what happens to the people who were mostly made of evil, like narcissists? They will experience the fire as torture, as torment, and still in that moment, they will say, they will scream in rage that there is nothing wrong with them and it’s all other people’s fault. They will even curse God Himself. And they will be stuck there, they will have condemned themselves to hell for all eternity.