From Charm to Harm: Understanding Why Narcissists Vilify Their Former Partners

The Dark Psychology of Narcissistic Ex-Smearing

Afshara
2 min readJul 28, 2023
Photo by MART PRODUCTION from Pexels

How the narcissists will treat their ex-partner after their breakup, depends on the situation. They might say all the negative things about their ex if they are concerned that their ex-partner would expose them to others. On the other hand, if they want to make their current partner jealous and insecure, they would positively portray their ex.

Apart from these, narcissists also might say positive things about their ex if they want to keep up their facade and fake public image. Conversely, the narcissist will say negative things about their ex-partner if they wish to undermine, belittle and devalue them. The narcs will use this tactic to gather sympathy from mutual friends and people who know them basically to get people to believe their side of the story instead of their ex-partner’s.

The other reason the narcissist would engage in vilifying their former partner is that they know their ex is the one who can see right through their facade and can expose their narcissistic abusive behaviour.

This is why, narcissists will make sure that other people do not see their true nature.

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