When a narcissist discards their victim, they are really good at making them feel inadequate and worthless by quickly replacing them with a new supply. It often causes the discarded victim to ruminate about the narcissist, the abuse, and all of the unanswered questions that they may have. A common rumination that discarded victims of narcissistic abuse have is about whether or not the narcissist actually cares about the new supply. 

Narcissists do not care about the thoughts, feelings, emotions, and needs of their new supply because they lack the emotional intelligence that is required to do so. When it comes to their new supply, all they care about is how much validation, admiration, and reassurance they can get from them.

This article is going to guide you through the complexity of the relationship that a narcissist has with their new supply. With that being said, the information that you’ll learn may make you want to warn the new supply about the forthcoming abuse they’re likely to experience so we’ve created a short video about the reason why warning the new supply may not be in your best interest.

A Short Video With Advice About Warning the Narcissist’s New Supply

Why Don’t Narcissists Care About Their New Supply?

In our articles Do Narcissists Enjoy Intimacy and Are Narcissists Scared of Commitment we wrote about this thoroughly but the emotional closeness that is required to truly care about someone else represents everything that a narcissist is fearful of. It is this fear that makes them incapable of achieving the fundamental requirements of caring for another person which is protecting their thoughts, feelings, emotions, and needs to the best of one’s ability.

The reason for this can be found in a narcissist’s origin story. It is believed that narcissism originates from an abusive upbringing where they didn’t have their thoughts, feelings, emotions, and needs mirrored because their primary caregivers were emotionally unavailable, unresponsive, and inconsistent with them. 

This means that they never got the validation, admiration, and reassurance that they needed to have a healthy cognitive development and a realistic sense of self. To make up for the neglect they were experiencing from their primary caregivers, these narcissists turned to their external environment for the validation, admiration, and reassurance to develop a realistic sense of self. 

This is problematic because it teaches the child to prioritize what they can achieve in their external environment over developing the emotional skills one would get from having available, responsive, and consistent primary caregivers.

Over time, the child will develop a deeply rooted hatred for their true identity because they think that it prevents them from being acknowledged, loved, and respected by others. They believe that they are to blame for their unavailable, unresponsive, and inconsistent primary caregivers. 

The negative emotions that they have attached to their sense of self are really dangerous because they’re too emotionally inadequate and immature to manage them with healthy forms of emotional regulation. What they do instead is they suppress it deep within their psyche with their false sense of self that they construct out of the validation, admiration, and reassurance of others.

This is why narcissistic supply, the validation, admiration, and reassurance of others, is so important for a narcissist. It protects them from all of their suppressed negative emotions. When they have enough narcissistic supply they are able to maintain a false sense of self that is designed to be validated, admired, reassured, accepted, acknowledged, and loved by others. All of the things that they didn’t get as a child. 

a child being neglected by their parent

The problem is that this falsified sense of self that is protecting them from their emotional stability is extremely fragile because their negative emotions are intense and constantly trying to break out of the psychological box that the narcissist trapped them in. 

So narcissists spend every waking moment getting as much narcissistic supply as they can and avoiding things that could contradict or damage their false sense of self and release all of their negative emotions. 

One of the most common things that contradict or damage a narcissist’s false sense of self are the thoughts, feelings, emotions, and needs that are expected in a healthy relationship. When they are expected to be emotionally close with someone, it triggers their sense of inadequacy, fear of abandonment, and self-hate.

It is for this reason that narcissists can’t truly care about their new supply. They are terrified of the emotional closeness that comes with truly caring about someone else because deep down past all of the grandiosity, vanity, charm, charisma, and good looks, they are a scared child who still feels inadequate, weak, and worthless. 

What Do Narcissists Use Their New Supply For?

If you want to grasp a comprehensive understanding of what narcissists use their new supply for, you have to first understand what narcissists want in a relationship. The two biggest things that narcissists want in a relationship are narcissistic supply and repositories for their negative emotions. This is a really important part of narcissism and narcissistic abuse that you should understand because it sheds light on just how selfish, abusive, and parasitic narcissists are.

To get the most validation, admiration, and reassurance as possible, a narcissist will subject their victim to a cycle of invalidation, devaluation, minimization, degradation to manipulate them into neglecting their own thoughts, feelings, emotions, and needs. 

You can learn a lot about this cycle in our articles What Do Narcissists Do During the Love Bombing Phase and What Is the Devaluation Phase but narcissists have an infamous ability to manipulate their way into becoming the victim’s only known source of happiness. 

Their manipulation and abuse is so intense that they destroy their victim’s sense of self to the point where they are almost living vicariously through the narcissist’s thoughts, feelings, emotions, and needs. Meaning that if the narcissist is happy, the victim is happy. If the narcissist thinks the victim is worthless, the victim believes that they are worthless. 

The victim becomes dependent on the narcissist to construct a sense of self and to conceptualize their own version of reality. This much power and control over the victim allows the narcissist to manipulate them into being a viable source of validation, admiration, and reassurance and it allows them to transfer their emotional instability to their victim by projecting all of their negative emotions onto them.  

Narcissists will continue to do this until their victim can’t give more narcissistic supply or take on more of the narcissist’s negative emotions. When this happens, the lack of empathy and sense of superiority that a narcissist has allows them to simply move onto another source of narcissistic supply without any hesitation or remorse. 

When they get a new supply, the feeling that a narcissist gets is exhilarating because they all know that they have a new source of narcissistic supply and a new repository for all of their negative emotions. They do not care about their thoughts, feelings, emotions, or needs. They only care about how much narcissistic supply the new supply can give and how much negativity can they take because narcissists use their new supply to preserve their emotional stability. 

A narcissist with his new supply being selfish and arrogant

With that being said, there is a secret way that narcissists use their new supply to preserve their own emotional stability and that is by publicly invalidating, devaluing, and degrading their old supply that they discarded. 

When a narcissist is able to use their new supply to publicly humiliate, devalue, invalidate, minimize, and degrade their old supply, it helps them further suppress their negative emotions because it makes them feel like they “won” or came out on top. 

It allows them to quite literally point their finger at the person that they ran into the ground, both physically and emotionally, and say to themselves, “I’m not the one who is unlovable, unwanted, inadequate, and alone, they are.” 

This behavior is one of the clearest manifestations of a narcissist’s emotional immaturity and inadequacy. We talk about this a lot in our article Will a Narcissist Come Back After the Discard but they rely on abusing their victims so much that if they see the victim that they discarded healing, rebuilding, and moving on with their life, it will contradict their sense of self and cause them to try to weasel their way back into the victim’s life to regain power and control over the victim’s perception of themselves.

What Should You Take Away From This Article?

A narcissist is incapable of truly caring, committing to, or being intimate with other people. The emotional closeness that it requires terrifies them because it triggers all of their suppressed negative emotions that they are too emotionally inadequate and immature to manage on their own. All they care about is how much narcissistic supply they can get from their new supply and how much of their negative emotions they can project onto them.

About the Author

Hey, I’m Elijah.

I experienced narcissistic abuse for three years. 

I create these articles to help you understand and validate your experiences.

Thank you for reading, and remember, healing is possible even when it feels impossible.


References:

Vaknin, Sam. “Narcissistic Disorders of the Self as Addictions.”

Edery, Rivka A. “The traumatic effects of narcissistic parenting on a sensitive child: a case analysis.” Health Science Journal13.1 (2019): 1-3.

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