When Narcissists Use Insecurity to Keep You Feeling Sorry for Them

I spent a long time calling it his insecurity. Two years of it. And when I left, that word came with me like a piece of furniture I had forgotten to leave behind.

Everyone helped me carry it. Friends, mostly. He was insecure, that’s all. He had a wound. He had been hurt before. And I nodded, because the word made the apartment legible. It turned every silent Tuesday into something I could hold. Something soft. Something that belonged to him and not to me.

That word did a lot of work.

Here is what took me a long time to see. Marcus was never insecure with his boss. He was never insecure in the meeting where confidence would have served him. He was never insecure with the friend who owed him money and might owe him more. He was never insecure at the bank.

He was insecure with me.

And the insecurity arrived on a schedule. It arrived the week I started asking about the messages. It arrived the night before I was supposed to see Adaeze. It arrived the day after I set something down and called it a boundary. The word came out of his mouth at the exact moment it would cost me something, and it stayed away at the moment it would cost him anything.

A wound does not check the room before it bleeds.

I want to be careful here, because I spent years being careful. I told Dr. Amara — the trauma specialist I saw in the months after I left Marcus, flat and precise, her version of emphasis — that I understood where his insecurity came from. His mother. His ex. The years before me. She let me finish. And then she said something I wrote down in the car park afterward, on the back of a receipt, because I thought if I could hold the sentence I could hold the truth of it.

She said the reassurance was never treatment. It was supply.

I had been supplying him for two years. Every you’re good, every I’m not going anywhere, every night I stayed up past the point of tired because leaving him alone in that mood felt like abandoning a person. I was healing nothing. I was confirming that the mechanism worked. A mechanism that requires proof is a system seeking input, and it was never designed to be satisfied. It was designed to require.

That distinction, honestly, is a mindfuck.

Because the whole time, I thought I was being kind. I thought kindness was the assignment. I thought if I loved him steadily enough, the insecurity would settle, and the man underneath would come forward, and the apartment would become the place I had been promised. And it never did. He became more skilled. He learned which version of his sadness made me stay longer. He learned which sentence softened my face. He learned.

Let me tell you about the night that names it. There was a night in the second year — I was holding a wooden spoon I wasn’t using — when he came in and went quiet in the specific way that meant I had done something. I did not know what I had done. I never knew. So I spent the evening looking for it. I apologized for things I had not done. I reassured him about a version of himself I did not actually believe in. And at the end of it, when he finally softened and let me back in, the relief that came through me was so total, so physical, that I mistook it for love.

The relief. Not the love. The relief.

That night I told Bisi — the friend who had listened most patiently through all of it, who asked me the same three questions approximately forty times — that he was just insecure and needed me to be patient. She looked at me for a long moment. She said nothing. I changed the subject.

She was right. I was not ready to hear it.

Here is the sentence I have been answering slowly ever since. Dr. Amara asked me once, not long after I left, whether I had ever once seen his insecurity show up in a place where being insecure would have cost him. I said yes. I changed the subject. Because the answer was no. And the no was the whole thing.

And I don’t think anyone in this space wants to say the next part out loud. So I will.

The insecurity was the doorway the behavior walked through. It arrived first, ahead of the thing he actually wanted, dressed as pain instead of control. I’m not controlling you. I’m scared of losing you. Same room. Same Tuesday. One of those sentences gets him your sympathy. The other gets him your exit.

He knew which one to use.

And the culture handed him the script. That part took me longest. The church that called my patience a virtue. The Nollywood film where the difficult man is the deep man and the woman who stays is the woman who is rewarded. The family that taught me a man’s moods were weather and my job was to dress for them. And the recovery language itself — hurt people hurt people — which is true, and which is also the truest sentence that has ever kept a woman in a relationship. Understanding his hurt became my assignment. Nobody told me the hurt was a license. Nobody told me I was allowed to leave a wound.

I want to be honest about what I got wrong. I got the wrong thing for a long time. I thought understanding him was the same as loving him, and that loving him was the same as helping him. And that mistake cost me the version of myself who did not rehearse conversations in the shower. There was a period near the end when I was preparing a counter-verse for three weeks. Arguments. Reasonable ones. Structured ones. I never said any of them. He never gave me the opening, because an opening was the one thing he was careful never to give.

That was the system. Running correctly.

So when I look back at the word, I understand why I held it so tightly. The word was kind. The word made me the compassionate one and him the wounded one, and that story had a shape I recognized, a shape I had been handed long before I met him. The word did something no behavior could do on its own. It moved the moral weight off his conduct and onto my leaving. As long as he was insecure, walking away was abandonment instead of discernment. As long as he was wounded, my boundaries were cruelty instead of boundaries.

Insecurity is the most efficient piece of public relations the mechanism ever received. It made the woman holding the exit door feel like she was holding the knife.

And the last thing I let go of was not the love. It was the idea that somewhere under the behavior there was a small, frightened man I had failed to reach. I let go of that idea slowly, in pieces, over three therapists and a lot of Tuesdays. What replaced it was quieter and less flattering and much more useful: there was no man under there. There was a mechanism, and a face, and a script, and a woman who kept reading her own tenderness back to herself as proof that something worth saving was still in the room.

His insecurity was real the way a key is real. It fit a lock. And the lock was me.

I keep returning to one question, the one I couldn’t answer when it arrived. If the wound was real, why did it only ever show up where it cost me something?

I have been answering that question for a while now. Not neatly. Not completely. But honestly.

The answer is that I was never married to a hurting man. I was inside a system that had learned which room to bleed in. And the moment I could say strategy instead of wound, I stopped feeling like the one who walked away from a person who needed me. You can abandon a person. You can only walk out of a system.

The relief I felt that night was the system working.

This is the thing that finally let me breathe. Not the leaving. The naming.

If you are the woman who has been calling it his insecurity, and the word has been making you the cruel one in a story you didn’t write — I wrote something for the part that comes after you stop calling it that.

Why You Still Think About the Narcissist — and Why Nothing Is Wrong With You is for the looping, the self-blame, and the confusion that stay long after the relationship ends.

Most people try to heal before they understand. This does the opposite.