There are several types of narcissists:
The Bullying Narcissist
Builds up his or her self-image by persecuting you and making you feel like a loser.
The Seductive Narcissist
Makes you feel good about yourself, as if you’re a winner, in order to secure your admiration … then dumps you.
The Know-It-All Narcissist
Constantly demonstrates superior knowledge in order to make others feel ignorant, uninformed, and inferior.
The Vindictive Narcissist
When challenged or wounded, will do everything possible to destroy the perceived cause of shame.
The Addicted Narcissist
Seeks fulfillment of an idealized self through drugs, sex, or fantasy, in ways that are often invisible to outsiders.
Narcissism is a defense against core shame, defined as an internal sense of damage, defect or ugliness. Core shame takes root in the earliest months and years of life and results from gross failures in parenting and attachment: a severely depressed mother, a physically absent father, drug or alcohol abuse, violent parental discord, etc.
Because the experience of core shame is unbearably painful, the growing child may develop a false and idealized self-image to ward it off, a “winner†self-identity meant to deny and disprove the experience of being ugly, damaged, or defective – that is, a “loser.†Defending this winner self-image often depends upon identifying someone else as the loser. Just as a comic depends upon a straight man to support his identity as the funny one, an Extreme Narcissist exploits other people as losers to carry his sense of defect or damage.
Our protagonists, each of them exploits other people to sustain a defensive and idealized self-image.