To maintain their ‘all-good’ image, the narcissist can only feel emotions which belong to a ‘superior’ person. Shame, guilt, sadness, doubt, anger; none of it acceptable. Therefore, the narcissist must find a way to covertly syphon their negative emotions into others instead. This is a shadow-denial process which Melanie Klein labelled ‘projective identification.’
Projective identification is done in disguise, usually beginning as a harmless ‘chat’ about something small you did wrong. As the conversation progresses, the narcissist will slip in their judgements and ‘hint’ toward other things you do wrong. The conversation then gradually and casually ‘drifts’ from a reasonable heart-to-heart into a hypnotic monologue. On the surface, you are locked into a normal conversation. However, using subtext and conversational drift, the narcissist will make sweeping statements which cast you in a negative light. This is done so cleverly that you unconsciously take on the ‘all-bad’ role and its associated feelings while still believing you are having a normal conversation.
Projective identification is what typically leads to ‘reactive abuse,’ where a target takes on and acts out the narcissist’s shadow emotions without consciously grasping how it happened. They only wake up from the shock of being triggered, where before that, slowly but surely, they felt the temperature inside them rising like boiling water, before they snapped from being cornered into the ‘bad’ position. As soon as their trigger hits, the narcissist then springs up and points the finger, piling on the judgements to drive home their point that the target is bad. In this way, the narcissist:
Relieves themselves of their negative traits and emotions.
Gains the ‘moral high ground’.
Reinforces their false self as being ‘all-good.’
To top it all off, they even force the target to blame themselves for the argument. All the while, the target has no idea how it all happened, and is completely unaware that the narcissist had injected them with their poison without their awareness. It is absolutely crazy-making.