Unpublished chapters from “Masculine & Feminine Polarity Work” by @elliottsaxby
“Inside every narcissist there is a suppressed empath, and in every empath a narcissist forced to balance life through ill behaviour”
This post is slightly controversial and hard to swallow in places, but I think it’s worth it. Sorry if you get offended.
Recently I had two clients within days of each other who had similar issues. One had lots of money but found it hard to have deep loving or sexual relationships without feeling that she was buying people or sex. The other had just left a toxic relationship, and she described him as a narcissist and herself as an empath. In both cases they needed to deal with deep unconscious guilt and shame to help change their behaviour, which is best described by looking at the empath and narcissist relationship.
Using the laws of polarity and duality to understand life, we can see that some narcissists really do love and accept ‘themselves’ completely, but most accept what they love about their ego and project what they do not onto others (or opt into total denial). The work for most people who show strong narcissistic traits is developing mature Masculine qualities such as, interdependence, co-operation and selflessness: selflessness in relation to seeing beyond individuality and living from a sense and knowledge of oneness.
A narcissist dating an empath who is not working on themselves in a healthy and balanced way (example: shadow work) is very likely to make the narcissist more narcissistic!
Laws of polarity and duality (and attraction and resistance), teach us that we are most attracted to people who are good representations of our own inner Masculine and Feminine dynamics, good mirrors, our perfect opposite. But because most of us do not judge ourselves as “perfect”, and because our own integration of the different polarities and dualities that make us up often have a lot of unhealthy immature characteristics in them, then it means that our “perfect” partner is often bad for us!
If we are more empathic, and fall in love with someone who is more narcissist and end up hating them later, it would be wise for us to to look into the unhealthy immature quadrants, and shadow of the polarity framework to help us identify where we need to change instead of blaming them, blaming our reflection.
Most empathic people identify with being nice, loving and caring, so where they reject their shadow their partner balances it out and in an empaths case, massively amplifies it. The more an empath has deep hidden guilt and shame then the more the narcissist will display ‘negative’ behaviour to balance out the emotions that the other is not able to accept internally.
Ever noticed, or asked your self why evil/bad people often look sexy?
Unfortunately, most empaths will disagree and say they have done their shadow work and have very little guilt or shame left and consciously this is most likely true. BUT if we look deeper into the unconscious mind most of us will find a different truth.
Western society is narcissistic to the core, it’s self-centered, ego driven and materialistic. It is the pinnacle of the immature Masculine and Feminine combined. Unhealthy competitiveness with a strong victim mentality: creating victims for financial success or protecting victims in court with legal proceedings, we are a society that is dependent on and supports an unhealthy victim mentality.
Deep down in the West we all know that our life is still being built on the backs and the suffering of people in poorer countries, it is getting better in some cases, but unconscious guilt and shame is still heavy in our collective. Many (but not all) positive affirmation and abundance practices teach us to ignore and deny this if we want success, their logic is if good people focus on the good in themselves then the world will become a reflection of this goodness, so it really is okay to ignore blood diamonds, the arm trade, living and working conditions of people growing our food, sweat shops, child labour, this list goes on but I’ll stop here as I think you’ll benefit if you read all the way end to the end. The approach of personal transformation before planetary has merit and is where we should start, but we have to work on the global too which includes our unconscious guilt and shame for it, by correcting it. And believe it or not, doing this will reduce the amount of narcissists and narcissistic behaviour in our world 🌎!
To check if you feel guilt and shame around these issues just see if any defensive thoughts come up into your mind as you read this, yes but I……., or I give so much of my time to…. my money to…. etc. If the mind is becoming defensive then it is likely trying to hide from the unconscious guilt and shame.
So to heal narcissistic behaviour in our partner, or to attract a partner who will not abuse us in this way, first we need to accept guilt and/or shame for being privileged, for living in a society where we don’t suffer so much but others really do, we can only really heal this by changing it, and the first step is to accept it is there.
Personal shadow work, sexual and non sexual is so important to stop us pushing someone else into the role of being bad because we are attached to being loving and kind. And collective shadow work, embodying the mature Masculine principle can also do so much and is essential to heal our subconscious guilt and shame for which the most part is simply inherited by being born privileged.
Narcissists and empaths are not by default more Masculine or Feminine, they are both integrated mixes, and better viewed as archetypes than traits, but understanding the Masculine and Feminine Polarity Framework, and shadow work is a great tool to heal this dynamic.
I’ve tried many ways to write this post, and decided to move away from the version that dealt more with our sexuality on issues and desires: for slave and slave master relationships, and for other people to do bad things to us, or for us, or forcing us to do bad things against our will. In my opinion the unhealthy manifestations of such actions come from unconscious guilt and shame and our bigger desire to either be good in the world, or to bring balance to it.
Related to the book “Masculine & Feminine Polarity Work”, by @elliottsaxby link in bio
#empath
#narcissistic
#dealingwithanarcissist
#balance
#elliottsaxby
Image credit “unknown”