How to Distinguish Love From Control in Narcissistic Relationships
If you’ve worked with narcissistic dynamics for a while, you’ll know this: the line between love and control can get astonishingly blurry. Clients will often say, “But they love me—they just want to know where I am all the time,” or “They get so jealous because they care so much.” And it’s not just clients—seasoned clinicians can get caught in the seductive web of narcissistic charm.
Narcissistic relationships run on a unique emotional fuel: narcissistic supply. What looks like deep affection may, under the surface, be an attempt to secure admiration, loyalty, and control. This manipulation isn’t always conscious. The narcissist may truly believe they’re acting out of love, making it even harder to untangle intent from impact.
So today, I want to dig deeper—beyond the surface markers—into how narcissistic control gets dressed up as love, and why it’s so compelling and confusing to those on the receiving end.
How Narcissistic Control Gets Mistaken for Love
The emotional engine: narcissistic supply
At the heart of these dynamics is the relentless pursuit of narcissistic supply—a concept I’m sure we’ve all discussed in supervision more times than we can count. But I want to emphasize this: the pursuit of supply is fundamentally incompatible with genuine love, because it centers the narcissist’s needs, not the partner’s well-being.
When a narcissist showers their partner with affection, gifts, or attention, it’s often aimed at eliciting a particular emotional response: adoration, gratitude, dependency. Think of a client who describes their partner sending dozens of texts a day “because they miss me so much”—what they’re often seeing is a demand for constant validation.
Love bombing: the opening act of control
We all know about love bombing, but let’s go beyond the buzzword. Love bombing isn’t just about intensity; it’s about overwhelming the partner’s capacity for critical thinking. The goal isn’t intimacy—it’s colonization.
One client of mine said, “I thought I had finally found my soulmate. They wanted to spend every moment with me, meet my family, talk about our future.” In hindsight, this was a strategic flood of attention designed to collapse boundaries and foster dependency. The moment she asserted a need for space, the dynamic flipped—withdrawal, punishment, and emotional volatility followed.
Idealization and devaluation: maintaining control through instability
One of the most destabilizing aspects of narcissistic relationships is the idealization-devaluation cycle. It’s not enough to capture the partner’s affection—they must also be kept off-balance.
When in the idealization phase, the narcissist appears loving, generous, even self-sacrificing. But any perceived threat to their control—say, the partner asserting independence—triggers swift devaluation: criticism, withdrawal of affection, passive-aggression.
This is the moment clients often describe as confusing: “I don’t know what changed. Last week they were planning a vacation with me. Now they say I’m selfish.” What they’re experiencing is a controlled system of rewards and punishments designed to reassert dominance whenever the narcissist’s sense of power feels threatened.
Conditional love: the hidden lever
Perhaps the most subtle and dangerous form of control is conditional love. The narcissist may say all the right things—“I love you no matter what”—but their behavior tells a different story.
When a partner’s choices align with the narcissist’s needs, they’re met with warmth and connection. When they diverge, they’re met with withdrawal, hostility, or contempt. Over time, this conditions the partner to self-abandon in order to maintain the illusion of love.
I once worked with a client whose narcissistic partner insisted on choosing her career path, framing it as support: “I just want you to be happy and successful.” But when she expressed a desire to pursue a different field, he responded with days of icy silence and undermining comments about her abilities. Love, in this system, is earned by compliance—not offered unconditionally.
Why it’s so hard to spot
Here’s the kicker: narcissists often believe they are being loving. Their need for control is so fused with their fragile self-esteem that genuine acts of love are inseparable from acts of self-protection. They aren’t twirling their mustaches plotting domination—they are desperately trying to shore up a shaky inner world.
This is why clients (and sometimes clinicians) can get stuck in the fog. When control is wrapped in affectionate language and gestures, it takes a trained eye—and a lot of therapeutic work—to help someone see it for what it is.
Red Flags: How to Spot Genuine Love vs Narcissistic Control
When we’re sitting with a client who’s deep in the fog of a narcissistic relationship, one of the hardest things is helping them get clarity about what’s happening. Because if they think they’re being loved, they’ll excuse just about anything—and narcissists are masters of keeping that illusion alive.
I’ve found that giving clients concrete markers helps. It helps us too—as clinicians, we need to stay attuned to the subtle cues that distinguish real love from covert control. Below are some of the key differences I look for, and I always encourage clients to feel into these, not just think about them. The body often knows before the mind does.
Signs of Genuine Love
Mutual respect and support for autonomy
This one’s foundational. In a genuinely loving relationship, both partners feel free to be their full selves. They can pursue hobbies, spend time with friends, and make choices without fear of punishment. A partner who truly loves you wants you to thrive—even if that occasionally means doing things they’re not directly involved in.
Emotional consistency
Healthy love doesn’t involve wild swings between worship and disdain. Yes, we all have bad days, but in a secure relationship, your partner’s basic regard for you remains steady and dependable. You’re not constantly guessing where you stand.
Empathy-driven interactions
Genuine love involves an authentic interest in the other person’s internal world. There’s curiosity about your feelings—not just when it serves their agenda, but as a way of connecting. If a partner can sit with your pain, celebrate your joys, and respect your differences, they’re operating from a place of love, not control.
Secure attachment patterns
In relationships grounded in real love, both people can tolerate closeness and separation. There’s no constant surveillance or panic if one person needs space. Interdependence—not codependence—is the norm.
Willingness to tolerate and repair conflict
Conflict is inevitable in any intimate relationship. But here’s the key difference: a loving partner engages with conflict with the intention to understand and repair—not to dominate, punish, or win. They don’t weaponize your vulnerabilities or use conflict to reassert control.
Signs of Narcissistic Control
Surveillance and hypervigilance over the partner’s behavior
If a partner insists on knowing where you are, who you’re with, or what you’re doing at all times—and dresses this up as “caring”—that’s a red flag. Love doesn’t require constant monitoring. In narcissistic dynamics, this need for control stems from deep insecurity and the desire to monopolize attention.
Emotional manipulation and guilt-tripping
When expressions of need or boundary-setting are met with guilt, tears, rage, or stonewalling, you’re seeing control, not love. A healthy partner wants to understand your needs; a narcissistic one wants to override them.
Undermining the partner’s sense of self or reality (gaslighting)
Gaslighting is one of the most insidious tools of narcissistic control. If a partner routinely denies or distorts your experiences—making you doubt your memory, perceptions, or feelings—that’s about maintaining dominance, not fostering connection.
Isolation from supportive networks
A common pattern I see is narcissists systematically cutting their partners off from friends and family. It starts subtly—“They don’t really understand us,” or “I just want to spend more time with you”—and escalates into emotional or even logistical isolation. Genuine love supports external connections; control seeks to sever them.
Conditional love based on compliance or admiration
If affection and approval are doled out in response to specific behaviors—and withdrawn when the partner asserts independence—you’re looking at conditional love. Over time, this trains the partner to prioritize the narcissist’s needs over their own, creating profound dependency.
I always tell clients: real love expands you; control shrinks you. If they feel smaller, more anxious, less sure of themselves, or increasingly isolated, that’s not love. And as clinicians, helping clients name these patterns is one of the most empowering interventions we can offer.
Helping Clients See What’s Really Happening
So once we’ve spotted the red flags, what do we do? For many clients, this is a terrifying process. The realization that what they thought was love is actually control can destabilize their entire sense of self and reality.
I’ll share a few strategies I’ve found helpful in clinical work.
Normalize the fog
First, it’s critical to normalize the confusion. I often say, “Of course it’s hard to see clearly—you’ve been trained not to.” Narcissistic relationships condition partners to distrust their own perceptions. Validating this experience helps soften shame and opens the door to new understanding.
Use somatic awareness
Clients can often feel in their bodies what their minds can’t yet accept. I’ll ask, “When you imagine asserting that boundary, what happens inside you?” or “When they say they love you, what’s the sensation in your gut?”
Authentic love feels safe, warm, expansive. Control feels tight, anxious, heavy. Helping clients attune to these signals is a powerful way to bypass cognitive defenses.
Map the cycle
Drawing out the idealization-devaluation cycle with clients can be revelatory. We’ll map out times when the partner was incredibly loving, times they withdrew affection, and how the client’s behavior changed in response.
When clients see this pattern laid out visually, it often clicks: “I’ve been managing their moods so they’ll keep loving me.” That’s not love—that’s survival.
Address trauma bonds
Many clients caught in these dynamics are experiencing trauma bonding—a biochemical attachment fueled by intermittent reinforcement. The highs of love bombing followed by the lows of devaluation create an addictive cycle that’s neurologically difficult to break.
I’ll explicitly educate clients about this process, often referencing the work of Patrick Carnes or Pia Mellody. Understanding that their pull toward the narcissistic partner is a trauma response—not a sign of true love—can be enormously freeing.
Reflective questions
Finally, I use reflective questions to gently challenge the love narrative:
- “Does this relationship make you feel more like yourself—or less?”
- “How much freedom do you have to make your own choices?”
- “When you’re happy or successful, how does your partner respond?”
- “What happens when you set a boundary?”
These questions bypass defensiveness and invite clients to access their own wisdom. Over time, they begin to see the truth they’ve been protecting themselves from.
Supporting clinicians
And here’s a quick side note for us: working with these dynamics is tough. Countertransference can run high. It’s easy to feel protective of the client—or enraged at the narcissist. Staying grounded, curious, and compassionate is essential.
I also think we need to support each other in this work. Narcissistic abuse is still under-recognized in many clinical settings, and clients often leave therapy re-traumatized when clinicians minimize or misread these dynamics. Let’s keep building a community of practitioners who can name this stuff clearly and compassionately.
Final Thoughts
Distinguishing love from control in narcissistic relationships is some of the most delicate and vital work we do. It requires helping clients reconnect with their own felt sense of truth, map out confusing dynamics, and rebuild a sense of autonomy and worth.
I hope this exploration has given you a few new angles, a few fresh questions to bring into your practice. And most of all, I hope it reminds us of the incredible resilience of the human spirit—because time and again, I’ve seen clients emerge from these relationships stronger, wiser, and more fiercely connected to their own aliveness.
And isn’t that what real love should do? Expand us—not shrink us.
