Can Narcissists Change?
The Short Answer
Narcissists can change, but meaningful change is rare and slow. It requires a disruption to the defensive structure, genuine internal motivation, and years of consistent therapy. Progress depends on psychological capacity — especially the ability to tolerate shame, vulnerability, and dependency — as well as the skill of the therapist.
Why People Ask This Question
Most readers ask this not out of curiosity, but because someone in their life — a partner, parent, sibling, or friend — is causing significant emotional distress. They want clarity:
• Can this person change?
• Is there hope?
• Should I wait, leave, or revise my expectations?
This article offers a grounded, clinically accurate answer:
hope without fantasy, realism without fatalism.
Why Narcissistic Change Is Rare — But Not Impossible
Many people with narcissistic traits see little reason to change. The defensive structure of their personality protects them from confronting their own fragility, shame, and dependency. If life is functioning adequately — career, relationships, reputation — the motivation for deep therapeutic work is minimal.
Change usually emerges only when the narcissist’s defences fail.
Explore all my eBooks, workbooks and courses →
What Can Trigger Change?
1. Collapse of the Defensive Organisation
A major setback, humiliation, relationship loss, or professional failure can destabilise the scaffolding that protects the self. When grandiosity no longer holds shame at bay, the underlying vulnerability becomes harder to deny.
2. Ageing
Ageing confronts the narcissistic personality with limits, declining capacities, and dependency needs. This loss of control can create distress — and sometimes, openness.
3. Loss of a Central Identity Anchor
The end of a marriage, a career collapse, or the loss of a role that provided narcissistic reinforcement may trigger a reckoning the person can no longer avoid.
4. Emotional Exhaustion
For some, the ongoing effort of maintaining the façade becomes unsustainable. Collapse may be quiet but internally overwhelming, prompting a search for help.
These moments are painful, but they create the psychological conditions where a narcissistic person may finally seek meaningful treatment.
What Change Actually Looks Like
Transformation does not mean becoming self-sacrificing or unusually empathic.
Real change involves developing:
• a more stable internal sense of self
• less dependence on external validation
• improved tolerance of shame and criticism
• capacity to reflect on one’s impact
• reduced entitlement and reactivity
• more reliable empathy
• the ability to apologise and repair
• behavioural consistency over time
These shifts occur gradually as the inner world becomes less organised around defence.
Can Therapy Help a Narcissist Change?
Yes — but it is demanding work, and it takes time.
Therapy for narcissistic personality dynamics involves:
• loosening rigid defences
• approaching early relational injuries
• tolerating shame without collapse or attack
• learning to depend in small, manageable ways
• developing a more cohesive and grounded sense of self
Change is relational, slow, and often uncomfortable.
The Realistic Therapeutic Timeline
Based on long-term psychodynamic literature and clinical experience:
• 1–3 years
to dismantle the defensive organisation, access vulnerability, and begin restructuring the personality.
• 2 further years
to consolidate gains, stabilise new relational patterns, and ensure changes hold under stress.
Total: approximately 5 years of weekly therapy with the same therapist.
If the therapist confronts the client too soon, they will generally leave therapy.
The therapist must be able to hold narcissistic dynamics without retaliation, withdrawal, or over-accommodation — a difficult balance to get right.
Finding the Right Therapist
As Craig Malkin writes in Rethinking Narcissism:
“Someone who does not get overwhelmingly triggered or easily charmed by the narcissist — this is hard to find — who can set limits, empathically confront and hold the narcissist accountable while acting as a type of attuned parenting agent for the vulnerable part of them.”
Why Many Narcissists Don’t Change
Not because they are incapable, but because:
• their defensive structure feels essential for psychological survival
• shame is overwhelming
• vulnerability feels dangerous
• dependency evokes fear
• insight threatens identity
• the internal cost of change feels greater than the cost of staying the same
Without crisis or internal motivation, most do not even enter long-term therapy.
Explore all my eBooks, workbooks and courses →
If You Think You Might Have Narcissistic Traits or NPD
Some readers may recognise narcissistic patterns in themselves. If that is you, the fact that you are reading this is meaningful. Even partial insight represents psychological movement — a trajectory towards health.
Unconscious Fears
People with narcissistic traits often hold profound unconscious fears about change. On the surface, this may look like scepticism, avoidance, or minimising the value of therapy. Beneath these reactions are early relational dynamics that have never been consciously processed.
These fears operate outside conscious awareness and form part of the defensive system that has protected the person from overwhelming shame from early attachment trauma. These are not experienced as ‘fears’ but as the felt necessity to keep the defensive structure intact.
As a result, loosening the defences can feel like:
• losing control
• collapsing internally
• exposure or humiliation
• dependency that feels unbearable
• loss of identity
• encountering emotions long disavowed
Good therapy does not dismantle who you are without helping you stabilise.
It provides a secure relationship where the defensive system can soften gradually and where early trauma can be processed and integrated, allowing a more stable, cohesive self to emerge.
A Symbolic Reflection from Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
Near the end of the final book in the series, Harry is brought to a confrontation with Voldermort in the forbidden forest. After Harry’s apparent death, he finds himself in a luminous, dreamlike version of King’s Cross station with Dumbledore. The space is bright and strangely peaceful. In the film, we hear painful, inarticulate cries. A small, monstrous, misshapen creature, neither child nor adult, struggles under a bench. Its distress is unmistakable, but it cannot be reached. It is “Something beyond our help.”
I have always felt that this striking image captures the frightening inner world revealed when narcissistic defences collapse.
What emerges from the rubble is not a soft or innocent child-self, but a repudiated, developmentally arrested self-state carrying unbearable need, shame, and dependency — a part of the person that has been left alone for a very long time. To the adult personality, it feels grotesque or alien because it has been banished from consciousness for decades. Its “monstrousness” is not moral; it reflects the pain of early relational injury.
These self-states hold a kind of wordless terror:
• the fear of annihilation
• the grief of not having been known
• the shame of dependency
• the emotional pain that had to be pushed out of consciousness to survive
This is why loosening the defensive structure feels so dangerous.
Why vulnerability feels like collapse.
Why therapy, at first, can feel like exposure rather than relief.
Therapy does not destroy this part, but it also does not sentimentalise it.
Over years of steady relational work, a person with narcissistic dynamics may slowly develop the capacity to approach this traumatised self-state without recoiling. They can begin to tolerate its need, its shame, and its fear — and recognise it as theirs.
The “creature under the bench” is not beyond help in the absolute sense.
It is simply beyond immediate or direct rescue.
The helpless traumatised self must be approached slowly, carefully, and relationally.
This is the work of psychological integration: making space for what was long disowned, so a more cohesive and grounded self can emerge.
For Partners, Adult Children, and Family Members
If you are seeking clarity, the grounded truth is:
• you cannot force another person to change
• insight cannot be argued into someone
• your suffering does not increase their motivation
• behavioural promises mean little without consistent action
• observe the pattern over time, not the apology
To understand these dynamics more deeply, you may find these helpful:
• Narcissistic Mother Symptoms
• Why Narcissistic Families Resemble Cults
• Scapegoat vs Golden Child Dynamics
These help to orient you without the risk of falling into denial or hypervigilance.
Explore My Narcissism and Recovery Resources
Final Thoughts
For most narcissistic people, change is possible — but it is rare without a triggering crisis. Characterlogical transformation requires long-term commitment, as well as a psychodynamically oriented therapist capable of tolerating shame, defences, and relational rupture. Meaningful transformation takes years, not months, and involves confronting experiences the person has spent a lifetime avoiding.
For some, this work opens the door to a more stable inner world and more authentic relationships. For others, the defensive organisation remains too rigid or too essential to relinquish.
Knowing what is possible—and what is unlikely—can help you decide how to move forward in your own life.
READY TO START HEALING?
