Narcissists – Ascended Master Answers

About co-parenting with a child’s narcissistic father

Question: My situation is that I have not long ago become a mother and I am raising my daughter as a single mom. Ever since the start of the pregnancy, I have felt burdened with heavy energy to such an intense degree that I felt that I had lost my attunement with you, my spiritual guides, altogether. I have worked hard to reestablish my connection, attunement, and I have made good progress. But the whole process of being pregnant, giving birth, and now raising my little girl on my own has been and is greatly challenging. What I do is try to see all of this as an opportunity to look at myself, identify patterns, and resolve my psychology as well as I know how.

But at times I feel greatly overwhelmed and do not know how exactly to handle some things. One particular outer situation that I find very hard to deal with is this. The relationship with my daughter’s father was emotionally and mentally abusive, and I terminated the relationship while I was still pregnant. Later I sought therapy because I needed help to understand what exactly I had been through in the relationship with this person. I had a strong feeling that I was dealing with a narcissist, and through therapy and also group therapy, I learned beyond doubt that he is indeed a narcissist. Now the situation is that this person has legal rights to have my daughter. I feel very strongly that it is not in my daughter’s best interest to be with her father. I am afraid that in the long term he will damage her psychological well-being. As a mother, I want to protect my daughter, and I feel so conflicted with this situation because there are so many people telling me just how important it is for a girl to have a father and that I am being selfish to not let him see her as much as he wants to. There are so many argumentations for and against this, and I really am at a point where I do not know what to do. My inner voice that at this point is basically screaming says that I have to keep my daughter safe and try to withhold her from her father as much as possible. But then I am concerned that if that which is screaming within me is my own unresolved psychology, and I really just need to raise my consciousness to receive a higher vision, then I would perhaps see things differently. May it be in my daughter’s Divine plan that she is raised by a narcissistic father? I can, by the love of God, not see how that would be constructive for her. What my inner guidance is telling me is that I have to shield my daughter from her father.

Am I wrong? Because I also know that much of what I am feeling about this situation springs from fear. I know I cannot have Christ’s discernment in being in fear. How can I know to trust my inner guidance?

Answer from the Ascended master Mother Mary through Kim Michaels. This answer was given during the 2023 Kazakhstan Conference.

Well, you are certainly not alone in being in this kind of a situation. Many, many people can recognize this pattern where you have a difficult outer situation and you are being pulled in two different directions. You are being told one thing by other people, you feel you have a certain inner guidance, but you are wondering if it is the right inner guidance. What we can start by saying in these situations is that whenever you have something in your mind that is ‘screaming at you’ as you describe it, then this is not really your inner guidance because what have we said many times? The inner guidance from your Christ self, from your I AM Presence, from the ascended masters is the still small voice within. We can also say that if you are in doubt about what is your inner guidance, you have not yet received the highest possible guidance that you could get.

And why have you not? Because you are not neutral about the situation. I know this is not very comforting, but I am not seeking to comfort you. I am seeking to help you see that regardless of how such a situation seems for all of you, there is always a way out of it. And that way is to go into as neutral of a state of mind as possible so that you are not reacting from fear or other things that can only come from separate selves. One thing you can do in this situation is ask yourself: “Why did your daughter choose to be born into this situation?” If your daughter did not want to have any contact with her father, she could have chosen a mother who had been artificially inseminated so there was no physical father in the picture. There is a reason why your daughter chose to be born into this situation. And it is that she needs to learn something from the situation, both from you and from her father. And it may be that you can help her learn what she needs to learn about her father or from her father, but you cannot do it if you are in fear or if you look at the situation in black and white terms.

In other words, you talk about protecting your daughter, but the only way to protect your daughter is not to keep her physically from her father. You can make calls for your daughter. You can, when she gets older, talk to your daughter, help her see certain things. But in order to do this, you have to resolve in yourself what is unsettled about your relationship with your daughter’s father or with that type of person. Because, again, you can ask yourself, why were you attracted to this kind of person? Because you wanted to learn something. Well, what was it? Have you fully learned it? I commend you for going into therapy and for working on yourself. And you just need to keep doing this and realize that there is something you have not seen. And when you come to see it, you will see that the situation can be dealt with in a different way than what you are thinking right now. Basically, whenever you feel stuck in a situation, the sense of being stuck comes because there is something you have not seen, something in your own psychology.

You can look at yourself, you can look at your life. I am talking here generally about all of you in similar situations and say: “Why did I put myself in this situation? Why did I choose the parents I had? Why did I choose the life I have had? Why did I do this in my life or do that in my life? What is the lesson I wanted to force myself to learn by putting myself in this situation where there is something in my own psychology that I cannot ignore, that I cannot cover over?”

You are doing the right thing. You just need to keep going further until you see what you have not seen yet. This is not just one thing for most of you. For most of you in these situations, it is not so that I could just give you one simple answer that would clear this up. Many people come and ask for advice, and they are hoping that: “Oh, an ascended master must be able to give me this one little key that will resolve everything.” But in most of these situations, there is a complex psychology involved, and there is not just one key. There is not just one separate self. So it is a process you must go through of gradually uncovering these selves until you come to that point where now you can make a decisive shift in how you look at the situation. Again, try not to look at it in black and white terms, that it has to be either this or that. There are always other scenarios and focus on what is best for the growth of all people involved.

How do people become narcissists?

Question: Can the masters comment on if childhood trauma is a major link to narcissism or fanaticism later in life, whether in politics, religion or any other sphere.

Answer from the Ascended Master Mother Mary through Kim Michaels. This answer was given during the 2022 Webinar for America – The Resurrection of Democracy.

Well, you cannot look at a person’s current lifetime and say what happened to that person in childhood is the reason why he or she is now a narcissist or a sociopath. You do not become a narcissist or sociopath in one lifetime. No matter how severe of a trauma you might experience in childhood, it simply does not happen. Many of the most prominent narcissists you see in the world, or have seen in history did not have a particularly traumatic childhood.

You become a narcissist or sociopath over many lifetimes by consistently making self-centered choices that deny the humanity of other people and make you insensitive to the consequences that your actions have for other people. This has to be built over a long period of time. For the fallen beings it is built, even over a longer period of time when you talk about past lives on earth. It goes back to previous spheres. Of course, a childhood trauma in this embodiment might trigger certain narcissistic tendencies that the person had built in past lifetimes. But still, you have, of course, many examples of people who experienced childhood trauma without becoming a narcissist or a sociopath.

Are we sensitive narcissists?

Question: There is a term called vulnerable narcissist used to describe people who are hyper-sensitive to rejection, negative emotions, social isolation, a distrust of others and increased levels of anger and hostility. Can the Masters comment on how this type of narcissism can possibly relate to ascended master students? It seems that narcissism is something that can affect everyone at various levels, although not as intensely as it does with the fallen beings.

Answer from the Ascended Master Mother Mary through Kim Michaels. This answer was given during the 2022 Webinar – Democracy and Christhood.

As the term ‘narcissist’ is used broadly or generally today, it refers to people who are very, very sensitive because they are very focused on themselves. There can be people who have no consideration for other people whatsoever and they are willing to harm other people and feel no empathy at all. But there is also a type of narcissist who has a need for validation or recognition. And they have a need to be right, they have a need to feel superior and they are very sensitive towards any challenge of this fragile equilibrium. And they can become very angry and hostile when it is challenged. These are not normally people that you would say are serial killers or dictators like Hitler, although Hitler was also very sensitive towards rejection.

You can see that many, many narcissists have a need to feel right. Many leaders who have been narcissists have a need to feel right. This is the case for some of the narcissists that are not, as we might say, evil, or aggressive in a physical way. But they are very sensitive towards rejection or a challenge of their viewpoints. Basically, you could say that Donald Trump is an example of this, he has a tremendous need for validation and recognition and being right. But he is not as physically aggressive, as, for example, Putin, who also has a tremendous need for being right, and is very sensitive in a certain way, but also is able to deny it more than Trump is.

In terms of how this relates to avatars or ascended master students, well, you could say that when you come as an avatar to this planet, and you experience this very severe persecution by the fallen beings, resulting in the birth trauma, you do actually go into this state of mind of being a very sensitive narcissist. You are not willing to kill other people, in most cases, and you certainly do not do it out of malice. But you can become very, very focused on yourself —very, very sensitive. You are seeking validation for why you came here. You are seeking a sense that you are an important person that is doing something worthwhile, maybe even a sense that you know better than people on earth. And this can cause you to become very, very sensitive and very, very self-focused.

Basically, our books and our tools for healing your spiritual traumas, and making peace with being on earth and so forth, are all aimed at helping you overcome this. But it can certainly help you acknowledge this consciously, consciously see the patterns and say: “I have just got to get rid of this self that is so sensitive about everything that happens to me, I have had enough of living this way. I have had enough of being so overly sensitive, always feeling rejected, always feeling like I am not good enough, or I have made a mistake, always being so concerned about other people criticizing me or hurting their feelings or whatever. I have got to overcome this sensitivity.” And this will help you make a tremendous step forward and attain much greater peace with being here, and being in your own mind.

Question about narcissists, sociopaths and psychopaths

Question: The term narcissist, sociopath and psychopaths refer to a particular set of personality disorders that many people seem to be more consciously aware of today. Can the masters comment on how these disorders develop in certain individuals, why they are so dangerous for anyone dealing with them and how we can protect ourselves from them?

Answer from the Ascended Master Mother Mary through Kim Michaels. This answer was given at a conference in Holland in 2019.

Well, we have already given various teachings on this both in terms of fanaticism, but also in a previous answer. But what I will say is that these kind of what you call “disorders”, it’s very, very important that psychologists and psychiatrists and other people concerned about mental health become a more aware of these concepts and that they develop their understanding of them. Because it can really bring forth a new awareness of what we have talked about with fallen beings, where without knowing the term fallen beings, understanding where they come from, they can at least identify that they are certain people that have a different approach, that do not have empathy, that do not care about the consequences for others.

Therefore, you can see how this can help people who are victims of such people, identify what’s going on see that there’s a problem and free themselves from it on a personal level. It can help society come to a point where they realize we cannot have a democracy, if we allow people with these personality disorders, to gain any kind of prominent position in society. How they develop is as we have talked about, it can be through a trauma that causes beings to be completely focused on themselves and of course, when the fallen beings fell, they became completely self-focused.

But there are as we said, also avatars who can become very focused on themselves and therefore gradually over several lifetimes become so self -focused that they fit these categories that are now being used. These categories that you have now are not necessarily the final understanding of the psychological conditions. It will be refined over time, other categories will emerge because it is not possible to give a static definition of anything in the psyche. It needs to be an ongoing process, where you gradually reach for deeper and deeper understanding.

Spiritual perspective on narcissistic personality disorder

Question: This is question is about narcissistic personality disorder. Psychology distinguishing narcissist from psychopaths, calls a narcissist a person who among others, has a grandiose sense of self importance, dreams of unlimited power, success, beauty etc., believes he or she is special and unique and requires excessive admiration, unreasonably expects special favorable treatment, exploits and takes advantage of others to achieve personal ends, lacks empathy for the feelings and needs of others. What could the masters say about this mental disorder from a spiritual perspective? Are there avatars who developed a full or extreme spectrum of this disorder?

Answer from the Ascended Master Mother Mary through Kim Michaels. This answer was given at a conference in Holland in 2019.

Well to begin with the last question, yes, there are indeed avatars who have developed narcissistic personality disorder. There are also many of the people who have narcissistic personality disorder who are fallen beings. And there are some who are the original inhabitants of the earth who have not fallen. But there are relatively few among the original inhabitants who have gone to the extremes of narcissistic personality disorder. It is mainly avatars and fallen beings who fall into this.

You could say that the fallen beings already had this disorder before they came here. Many of them have gone even deeper into what you call being psychopaths, where they are much more aggressive in controlling other people or harming other people. You could say that an avatar does not go into becoming a psychopath. It just would not be possible unless the avatar fell at the end of a particular sphere, but that is relatively unlikely to happen. It certainly has not happened so far.

When you take the teachings we have given on the birth trauma—when you are exposed to the birth trauma, what happens is that you are forced into shifting from a more global awareness that you have on a natural planet to a more self – centered awareness. On a natural planet you are much more aware that you are part of the whole, and it is this awareness that causes an avatar to look at the earth and decide to descend here in order to help raise the earth. So the avatar comes in with a global awareness that, of course, is the antithesis or the opposite or the cure for narcissistic personality disorder.

But then when you experience this birth trauma, if it is very, very deep and very, very painful, then the avatar shifts into being focused on self. It can gradually, usually over several lifetimes, become more and more focused on self, more and more focused on never again experiencing the kind of pain it experienced in the birth trauma, and this then can cause the avatar to become more and more focused on itself.

We have earlier talked about the fact that in spiritual movements there are two types of people. There are those who start looking beyond themselves and start working for the whole or realize the value of having a frame of reference that is beyond their current state of consciousness. Then there is the group that cannot make, or have at least not yet made, that transition. Therefore, they approach the spiritual path from a self-centered, self-focused perspective.

In a sense you could say that most people, when they first find the spiritual path, they are very self-centered, because why are they open to the spiritual path? Well, it is because they are experiencing great pain from being on earth. They have a sense that this is not natural or this is not right, they have their birth trauma they are struggling with, and they have been willing to acknowledge this to the point where they realize they want to do something about it. They want to get out of it. So many people have a focus on self, and then as they apply spiritual teachings and tools and grow on the path, then they gradually overcome that. When the pain becomes less and less, it does not pull them into it.

As you realize, anything that involves self-aware beings with free will has many levels of complexity. We have so far given you a certain teaching about avatars, and we have focused on the kind of people that we know we can help. As I said, you acknowledge that you have pain, you have a problem here, you want to solve it, and you want to grow. Therefore you are willing to look at yourself and what it takes, what changes you have to make in order to attain a more peaceful state of mind, instead of trying to change other people or the world.

So these are the kind of people that are open to our teachings. But there is a certain type of avatars who, after the initial birth trauma, they are so effective at denying the birth trauma and denying the pain, that they come to a point where they do not consciously acknowledge their pain anymore. Some of them go into a state of almost wanting to prove the fallen beings wrong by making themselves have some kind of special ability or knowledge. There are some avatars who have gone into a state of competition with the fallen beings in terms of developing certain psychic powers, what you often call black magic, and they feel that they want to prove that they are better at this than the fallen beings. As I said, they don’t go into the psychopathic disorder where they are aggressively willing to kill people, but they can go into this very, very clear focus on raising up themselves.

So you have these people who find a spiritual teaching, even an ascended master teaching, and they approach it not from the point that they want to overcome their pain and their limitations, not from the point that they want to learn, they want to grow, they want to change themselves, but only from the point that, how can they raise themselves up, gain some special ability, make themselves look better in the eyes of other people. They want to impress, they want to prove the fallen beings wrong, they want to prove themselves superior, and they approach the spiritual path for this purpose.

You are not seeing it as much in this dispensation, although you did see it much more in the early years of this dispensation. But you saw it more in previous dispensations—that you had these kind of people who used the teachings as a tool that basically reinforced their narcissistic personality disorder, even to the point where sometimes they would feel that the ascended masters were approving of their narcissistic tendencies and their narcissistic quest to elevate themselves. They felt the teachings had justified their sense of superiority.

What can we do for these people? Really nothing. There is nothing our teachings can do for them. Because if you are not willing to look at yourself, then our teachings will not work for you.

We respect free will. We realize that many, many people on earth are in the school of hard knocks, where they must pursue a certain experience and encounter the physical reaction to it from the universe, from the cosmic mirror, until they have had enough of it and come to the point where they open their minds to learn something new. We cannot do anything for them.

This is something you can use when you encounter such people, where you realize that: “If the ascended masters cannot do anything for these people, why should I think I could do something for them?” There are spiritual people, well-meaning spiritual people, who have had family members or spouses or have been in relationships with people who have narcissistic personality disorder, and they have felt compassion and wanted to save these people. It has often led to great disappointment and pain for these people because people with narcissistic personality disorder simply do not change, or they change very, very slowly.

So the best thing you can do if you know people like this is to not allow yourself to be frustrated, and the only way to avoid being frustrated is to not think you have to change these people. You also need to recognize that neither do you need to change yourself to accommodate these people.

You need to recognize here that you need to accept who these people are and there’s probably nothing you can do to change them. But then you also need to accept that just because you are in a relationship with these people, it does not mean that you have to change yourself to accommodate them. You have a right to be who you are and to follow the path as you see it, and if that means that you will grow beyond them, then you have a right to leave them behind because it does not help them that you hold yourself back, and it obviously does not help you that you hold yourself back. Neither does it help humanity as a whole, the cause of raising consciousness, that you hold yourself back because you know somebody with narcissistic personality disorder. You just let them be.

This does not mean that you cannot tell them certain things, but you are not telling them things in order to change them, with the intent that you want to change them. You are just expressing yourself: who you are, how you see life, what your understanding is. You just express yourself, and then you are totally non – attached to how they react to it because you do not have the purpose of changing them. You just have the purpose to be yourself and express yourself with whomever you meet.

You also can, of course, come to a point where you realize you no longer want to be in a close relationship with people like that. Then you have a right to move on, no matter what your relationship is to such people. You cannot allow yourself to feel some kind of misguided loyalty or feel that you have to stay with a person like that if you cannot help them. You have no obligation to do this. You could even say that, there is always the question people have: “Well, what if I have karma with this person from past lives? Wouldn’t I then have to stay with that person until I have resolved the karma?”

Yes, but, my beloved, you need to recognize here that a person with narcissistic personality disorder is not going to resolve the karma they have with you because they are not willing to change themselves. So you cannot wait until all of the karma is resolved. What you need to do is focus on your own growth and resolving the karma, meaning the unresolved psychology, in yourself. When you have done that, you are free of your karmic obligation to that person, and therefore you have a right to move on if you choose to move on.

You can, of course, also choose to associate with them, and you can now associate with them in a new way, where they are not disturbing your peace. They are not pulling you into a reactionary pattern, and therefore you can have a more free relationship with them. You can choose to stay in a relationship, which I would especially recommend for parents and children, not so much for spouses, but you are not obligated. You should not feel that you are obligated because if you feel obligated, then that is part of the karma that you have with such people.

This is again one of the questions that spiritual people come up with because some of you might feel that: “But what if I did something wrong to that person in a past life, and therefore I have karma, and I need to pay back that karma before I can move on?” When you are dealing with a person with narcissistic personality disorder, it is not very likely that you did something wrong to them in a past life. What is much more likely is that in a past life you went into the state of consciousness of wanting to save them, wanting to change them, and that is why you have a tie to them. So there is often nothing you need to compensate for in terms of having done some bad action, but you need to overcome that sense of wanting to change the person that you cannot change.

It is sometimes, for some spiritual people, necessary to recognize that when you are on a planet like earth, that has such a low collective consciousness, but still free will reigns supreme, and there are some people who are narcissists, thinking you can change other people can have an element of spiritual pride. Because truly when you recognize free will, when you recognize how difficult it is to make a narcissist see what they are denying, then it is spiritual pride to think you can accomplish this.

As I said, if we of the ascended masters realize we cannot help these people, but they must experience through the school of hard knocks, then if you think you could do better than the ascended masters, that is a form of spiritual pride. So it might be necessary to recognize that in yourself because many avatars have that certain sense of spiritual pride.

It could start even before you came to earth, where you looked down on earth and you thought: “Oh, I must be able to do something to help them.” You were aware that ascended masters exist, you were aware as an avatar that we were working with the earth and seeking to raise things, but for many of you it was not that you felt superior to the ascended masters. What you reasoned was: “Oh, but the ascended masters are not in embodiment, and that’s why they can’t reach people. But if I go down and take embodiment, then surely I can reach people. They will listen to me because I’m in embodiment just like them.”

There are indeed some of us who have ascended from earth, who descended to earth as avatars for precisely that reason. But it is a certain spiritual pride that you can have as an avatar because you are so used to from a natural planet, that if you show people the limitations of their beliefs, they will accept what you are saying and change. And you are not even thinking that this is not the case on earth. You cannot even fathom that this is not the case on earth. You really cannot fathom it until you experience it. That is why we of the ascended masters could not even tell you ahead of time what a shock it would be for you to actually take embodiment.

What you see here is that sometimes it’s necessary for you, when you know a narcissist, to recognize that you can have a certain element of spiritual pride that makes you think you can change these people. And you just need to see it as coming from a separate self, and let it die and realize that because of the dynamics of free will and the dynamics of the narcissistic personality disorder, you cannot convince these people—you cannot make them see what they are not willing to see. They will always be able to twist whatever you say, and change it so that they can feel justified: “Oh, I don’t have to change. I don’t have to accept what these people said.” Because for whatever reason they come up with, they can always say that they are at a higher level than you are and therefore they don’t need to pay attention to it.

A person with narcissistic personality disorder does not suffer from an inferiority complex. They suffer from the opposite: an superiority complex, but they don’t see it as suffering because they feel superior. They can dismiss anything anybody says, and feel that they are validated in not changing. And the simple question to ask yourself is: “Given what I now know about free will, why would I want to change a narcissist? If this is the experience they want to have, and need to have, why would I want to change them?”

And that’s when you can then let go and say: “Well, if I can’t change them, why would I want to be around them?” And again, if you have close family ties, you can certainly still be around them. But when you look at yourself and your own reaction to them, when you free yourself from your reactionary patterns, you are not disturbed by being around them. You’re not pulled into their games, you can be yourself and express that, and then it isn’t such a burden to be around them. And certainly you can handle that the few times a year where you have family events. I’m not saying what you should do or shouldn’t do. I’m just pointing out to you that it is quite possible to maintain a certain civil relationship to your family members with narcissistic personality disorder, without it disturbing your path and your peaceful state of mind.