Is a narcissist capable of love?

My instinct when presented with this question is to respond with a firm and emphatic "no". But, as with everything else when it comes to trying to fully get to grips with the nitty gritty of NPD, it really isn't that simple.

While I know my mother doesn't (cannot?) love me, that doesn't mean she cannot feel love at all, or at least something very much like it. She has many friends, some of whom she has known for at least half her life (and that's a long, long time), and I do not doubt she cares for them deeply. After all, they are all appreciative mirrors of her false self: the dedicated, busy, compassionate and endearingly zany woman who embraces everything good and true in the world. Suffice to say, there were times during my childhood and adolescence when, in company, I would observe (with some awe or possibly thinly-veiled scepticism), this wonderful, vivacious and irresistibly warm and gentle woman who I knew wasn't really my mother 'acting out' for the benefit of her assembled esteemed friends and acquaintances.

I observed the way she postured, spoke, presented herself: everything so jarringly at odds with the unconscionable demon who inflicted me with her draconian 'discipline', disgust and indifference behind closed doors.

And I do not doubt that my mother loved my dad. In fact, I think at one point she probably loved him more than she has ever loved anyone else in the world. Right up to the point his own mental illness got the better of him, and he baled out of what we had always blithely assumed was a 'happy' family unit in a hideous maelstrom of usurious debt, deception, successive betrayals of trust, and chronic alcoholism.

The divorce awakened something primordial and horrifically ruinous in my mother. Perhaps it had been there all along, this grotesque monster, and just needed one massive trauma to bring it to the fore. It is clear to me that this episode was utterly, utterly devastating for her. I have experienced betrayal in my life, for sure, but nothing like this. It must have felt as if the previous 15 years had been a complete lie. My dad did spend the rest of his tragically curtailed life - the proceeding 20 years - in a state of miserable, grinding penance as a result of the marriage breakdown, which was of course seen by EVERYBODY as entirely his fault, but however much his ex-wife was going to mercilessly haul him over the coals for what he did to her, the forgiveness he craved was never going to come. Never.

At the same time, the divorce killed off something inside my mother; something precious and soft and warm that she needed in order to rise to the daunting challenge of being a strong, loving single mother to her two shell-shocked daughters. That sounds kind of paradoxical, doesn't it? Needing something 'precious and soft and warm' in order to be 'strong'? If you're a mother, you'll know what I mean.

In my mind, the divorce was the point at which my mother's feelings toward me soured. (I believe she 'loved' me, in her own detached and dysfunctional way, when I was a baby and an infant. Indeed I do have a cherished few, fond and happy memories of my mother during the first half of the 1980s.) Not only had she been left high and dry with two daughters who she didn't even want ("it was your father who wanted children! Not me!"), but one of those daughters - i.e. me - had the temerity to LOOK LIKE the man who had just betrayed and abandoned her. Having to suffer looking at my face every day and being reminded of the only man she had ever truly loved; a sick shell of a man who she had lost to addiction/mental illness (just like her first daughter), must have been pretty tough. So her reaction was to construct an impermeable defence system: a reinforced steel wall between her and anyone who might possibly have the ability to hurt her again.

Thus, my mother the Malignant Narcissist was born. I would never again see my mother as 'mum'. She made sure all her soft edges were sharpened and serrated into razor-sharp spikes, and I would never hear the words "I love you" or "You're beautiful" or "I'm proud of you" from the woman who gave me life.

Note: there are essentially two 'types' of narcissistic mother - the 'ignoring' one and the 'engulfing' one (many narcissistic mothers are a terrible combination of the two). My mother is an 'ignoring' mother, and the video "The Ignoring Narcissistic Parent" describes exactly what this means, using excerpts from Dr Karyl McBride's excellent book, Will I Ever Be Good Enough? (See resources.)

Also take a look at the Huffington Post article, Can a Narcissist Love Me?

And this article: Narcissistic Love Versus Unconditional Love

And my blog post: Relationships with narcissists: Sisyphean undertakings