Narcissists & The Substance Abuse Excuse

Let’s talk about narcissists and addiction since we tend to give narcissists a free pass on many things…alcohol, drugs, cheating…because the poor things just can’t help it. As usual, I have my own perhaps unconventional theory about this but, believe me, it’s taken me a few years to come to it and I base it on all the stories from people I’ve spoken with and also my own experience with a narcissist and my theory is this: narcissists CAN’T be addicts because they can’t become attached to anything. We can’t have it both ways. We can’t make the claim that narcissists can’t become attached to people (and this is why they don’t “love” us) and at the same time call them alcoholics, drug addicts, and sex addicts. This doesn’t make any sense to me.

The good news, relative to my theory, is two fold: 1) we can stop giving narcissists what I call the Jesus Pass (forgive them for they know not what they do) because a narcissist knows EXACTLY what he or she is doing, drunk/high or not (a narcissist knows right from wrong, they just don’t give a shit), and 2) we don’t have to feel bad that we couldn’t sober them up when they appear to be sober with the next person. If he or she is nothing else, a narcissist is a chameleon and he/she will be addicted or not addicted according to the immediate situation. If a narcissist can manipulate a person in the expert fashion that they do, it seems logical that they can manipulate addictions as well. Everything in a narcissist’s life is self-serving and a means to an end. This we already know.

I really began to think about the relationship between narcissists and drugs and alcohol when I started to see a pattern in the stories people were telling me during coaching sessions. One woman’s husband was a full-on narcissist who started doing heroin about five years in. You can imagine the nightmare this caused for the woman and also the amount of times his narcissistic behaviors were blamed on his “addiction”. Because EVERYONE knows how horrible a heroin addiction must be, she felt guilty about kicking him out and forgave him numerous affairs. It wasn’t until his well-paying job became jeopardized, though, that he decided to quit and quit he did – cold turkey – without one day of withdrawals. Not one! How is this even possible since heroin is one of the hardest drugs to quit due to the person’s physical – as well as psychological addiction to it? Could it be that narcissists don’t “feel” that kind of addiction – or attachment – to anything? Hmmm…

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Another woman who I still speak with has been married 27 years to a full-on narcissist. Both she and her husband had a history together of hard-drinking but she decided two years ago that it was time to stop and she did. It wasn’t easy, however, and she still goes to AA several times a week to keep herself in check. Her husband, however, continued to drink heavily and it was soon discovered that he had been having a three-year affair with a co-worker and she was naturally devastated. This is where I came into the picture.

It took me three months of talking to this woman before she gained the courage to ask for a divorce. In the meantime, the affair had ended but he continued to drink heavily and to blame the wife – and his drinking – for all of it. Like the previous story, it wasn’t until the narcissist lost his job that he put himself into rehab. And what a star of rehab he was! It was as if he’d gone on vacation and when he returned 30 days later, he was still a narcissist only now he was sober. He didn’t need AA and could have cared less if he ever drank again. Moreover, he became pompous about it and more narcissistic than before, condemning his wife about the fact that she still felt like she needed support, etc. Both of us were thinking…what the HELL is going on here?

My own ex-boyfriend narcissist of 12-years claimed to have a drug and alcohol problem and used this many, many times as the excuse for his behavior, silent treatments, and seasonal disappearances. Since, for the most part, I was engaging in the party, I also got blamed and used as his REASON for the above even though he was the one usually pushing the party. He would say “Come on, let’s do it!” and then, when all was said and done, he’d cry, “See what you made me do!” and off he’d go to wherever it was that he went.

What I did notice, though, was that my-ex could always just “quit” whenever he wanted (all the while claiming to be addicted) and I always thought this very strange. I also noticed that his quitting times seemed to be quite convenient and always coincided with whatever he had going on in his other life. I’m not saying he would lie about quitting because he really would “quit”…I’m just saying that he could do it on a dime, sometimes for months at a time, and then, one day, he would just start up again because “he felt like it” and the pattern would repeat without any real fanfare. While this may be the pattern of “normal” addicts (and I’ve known plenty), something about the way a narcissist does ANYTHING just feels contrived…and that’s almost always because IT IS.

I hear stories like this all the time and the more that I thought about it, the more I realized that OF COURSE a narcissist can simply “quit” their substance of choice and go on about their business…they’re narcissists. I also realized that narcissists always seem to have an “addiction” and they will always use this as their excuse to do whatever they want at the expense of others and to gain sympathy. They will also blame everyone else for his or her addiction even though, at many points, everyone else is more than willing to quit the party.

While normal addicts can certainly have narcissistic qualities because of an addiction they are not narcissists is the true sense of the word. A ‘normal’ addict does not typically have an easy road to recovery and he or she certainly can’t just quit on a dime after years of intoxication. There’s work to be done and narcissists – as I have heard and seen time and time again – do not have to work at recovery. In fact, they fly through it which tells me that these people truly are narcissists because narcissist are incapable of attaching – physically OR mentally – to any thing at all. Why should drugs or alcohol be any different? To me, this makes PERFECT sense.

So, when someone calls to say that their alcoholic narcissist boyfriend/girlfriend is suddenly in a sober relationship with someone else and why wasn’t he or she enough of a partner to keep him or her sober, I have to respond with because your partner’s a narcissist, that’s why. It’s not logical to think that a life-long hard core alcoholic can just quit cold turkey from one girlfriend or boyfriend to the next without having a single glitch whatsoever…it just isn’t. The narcissist FOOLS us by using the “the drinking make me do it” or “I just got too high – I’m so sorry!” excuse. He or she has been fooling us all along.

In a narcissist’s world, substance abuse becomes just another excuse for atrocious behavior. It’s possible that we, as the current partner, are nothing more than the party partner and the other partner is not…it’s as simple as that. I’m pretty sure I was the on/off party partner for 12-long years! Which partner we become at the beginning of the relationship is the luck of the draw. He might be sober with her and a drinker with us. That’s just the way it works. Once the narcissist puts us in a relationship category, there’s no way of getting out. Does that make the other partner or new partner any luckier than we were? Does that mean the narcissist is happy? No, because a narcissist is a narcissist and a narcissist never changes. A narcissist simply adapts his or her behaviors to the new relationship and strikes up another addiction to put in the infamous bag of lies and excuses. I’d even go so far as to say a sober narcissist is capable of being far more evil than a drunken one because he or she has a clearer head.

It’s twisted, I know but it is what it is. This is just my theory and I’m sticking to it…:)