It did take me quite a while to see the sociopath in my former beau, probably because I didn’t want to see it. On the day of my mother’s funeral, however, it was inescapable.

I guess that I have tried to empathize with him and feel that I always did. Even on the day of Mom’s funeral, I empathized with the fear he must have been feeling. I do recall seeing a gray aura around him, almost as if he had been taken over to the dark side. And the look on his face as he spoke his cruel words portrayed an inner battle.

Ultimately, in order to reconcile everything, I had to make some decisions about the man that I once loved … I had to decide that he was a Narcissist and had to stop lingering in the land of empathizing with him in order to recover my own center of balance again and begin to heal.

The only long-lasting benefit that I received from my interactions with him was to learn what it feels to be in the presence of a narcissist. When I sense it, I immediately evacuate the relationship, whether it is business or pleasure. I will not go down that road again, believe me.

I firmly believe there are varying degrees of this condition. What often distinguishes transient n’s that have potential for healing from the permanent personality disorder variety are the two E’s: (lack of) empathy and exploitation.

To an extent someone like John Lennon exhibited some classical n traits, but found a way beyond them perhaps because people in his life brought out his capacity for empathy and allowed him to be REAL. On the other hand you have someone like Tom Cruise who is so damaged that he merely perpetuates an eternal false self. When you listen to him speak you can hear that he doesn’t care in the least bit. You are merely there as an echo pad. The degree to which he possesses and exploits those closest to him is also quite scary.

Ultimately, you must do the seemingly impossible: try to empathize with the utterly empathy-deficient. This is the only way to avoid echoing the hollow ring of narcissism’s chilling emptiness.