Why? Because toxic people with Cluster B symptomatically will use your candid admissions against you without hesitation or mercy. Trying to make intellectual headway with one or fleeing a persistent stalker is very much so like striving to reason with and show compassion for a robotic Terminator. Unable to control their impulses to pathologically lie, meddle, mislead, manufacture chaos, and harm others to derive their own sense of “peace”, they delight in misleading those seeking to help.
Predators will use information gleaned in therapy sessions to hurt a targeted victim with greater ease (due to insight about them they gleaned directly from a therapist who had no clue they were ENABLING). Almost all clinical or true Narcissists, Narcopaths, Malignant Narcissists, Borderlines, Histrionic, and Anti-Social Personality cases, abusive and/or narcissistic partners or family members abuse post-relationship-mortem even more aggressively than they did during the time they were with their partners.
It’s common for them to have engaged in social acts of emotional terrorism to destroy, isolate, and manipulate their devalue and discard pile targets using one, several, or all of the following systematic and abusive “torture” patterns. As such, if you choose to confide to a Narcissist about how you feel regarding your own life, any social interaction, your life history, or personal insecurities and fears, understand that the people you are essentially giving the key to your heart, spirit, and mind are the types of individuals who are emotionally and psychologically capable of betraying those who love and care for them the most.
Here are just a few things one can expect to have happen when and if an abusive person can worm their way into a counseling session:
Narcissists destroy people in the most extreme and cruel ways humanly imaginable. Their number one goal (aside from “winning” whatever illusory competition they have created as a social scenario in their head), is to emotionally, socially, physically, and financially cripple their targets, scapegoats, and even the occasional collateral damage victim as much as possible. For that reason alone, protect your rights to privacy and to seek guidance from an outside source by minimizing what you do say or share with any person who acts abusively or who openly supports your abusers. Few medical professionals or therapy-promoting people will come out this way and say it because most are profoundly uneducated about C-PTSD, Cluster B personalities (in the flesh), and have a fiscal motivation that compels them to “sell” you on the idea that family therapy or group therapy with such a subject is healthy, helpful, enlightening, or (from a safety standpoint alone) prudent.
If a counselor advises you to stage an intervention or confront your abuser even after being openly told of your suspicions, run (don’t walk) to the nearest counseling room exit. Unless they are encouraging you to do a mental exercise involving creative visualization ONLY — helping you picture saying what you want and feel you need to in order to heal from abuse by confronting your abuser(s) — they are giving you unsound advice that actually puts you at risk of being targeted for social, emotional, spiritual, mental, or physical abuse in such a way that may be lethal.
Narcissistic abuse, whether mildly inspired by cultural acceptance or extreme in nature perpetrated by criminals, is always equally wrong. Victimization happens not only to the person targeted for abuse but to every person forced to witness the trauma, as well as every person denied the victim’s presence when they withdraw or are unable to maintain the “NOW” perspective [or time-specific focus].
Mothers damaged by angry fathers are effectively estranged emotionally from their own children. Fathers damaged by angry mothers are deprived of the opportunity to connect on a full, ongoing, or functional level with their own children. Sibling rivalry manufactured by parents separates family and robs all current family members and future relatives the benefit of living under one communal family roof as something supportive. Home life has become a prison for many of the “Walking Wounded” from both this century and all that pre-date it.
Don’t be a victim of Narcissistic Abuse — but more importantly, don’t become a passive (or active) enabler. There is nothing virtuous about keeping domestic violence, workplace bullying, or schoolyard bully behaviors a secret. Keeping secrets for abusive people to protect their reputation and theirs only makes you a willing victim with Stockholm Syndrome. Or worse.