This is something I’m struggling to figure out—how can I avoid sowing hurt in people’s lives while also trying to meet a potential partner for a long term committed relationship?

In my case, my NPD is mostly shame-based vulnerability and compensatory intellectual grandiosity. I struggle to distinguish between my own grandiose self-assumptions of what it’s like to have been involved with me vs what others might have to say about it, but for what it’s worth basically all my relationships have either petered-out or ended on good, mature, respectful terms.

My “illness” consists in (best way I can describe it) “holding myself hostage before God,” and my relationships tend to fray because my own toxic shame gets in the way of “meeting” my partner as a peer.

I’m slowly but surely learning how to manage that shame by keeping it on “my plate”, but fuck it’s hard. Stuff triggers my childhood memories of unreliable mixed-signals, emotional incest and neglect and it’s like the “walls” go up.

They cannot be negotiated-with, at that point. It’s almost like I need to be punished like a child and made to sit in a corner because of/about my shame, so that I’m conditioned away from it. But the problem is I simply don’t trust that my partner will “be there” to have me back.

It’s a really counterintuitive thing to try to communicate in dating—“When I get like this, I need you to scold me like a child for being unkind to myself and having no faith in you/holding you to unreasonable expectations.” Because, thing is, if I have to ask for that, it doesn’t count; it’s just someone “reading lines” as though from a script. Like no—I want you to reach inside my soul and “beat up” my childhood parents; I want you to be angry at my pain like a tumor. I want my partner to assert her boundaries against my insecurity, so that I can finally feel “allowed” to erect my own against my neurotic parents’ introjects. Then again that might be much too much to ask.

How can I navigate this like a grown-up?

Thank you in advance.