Why is the Narcissist in my life “nice to me” sometimes?

By Jessica Anne Pressler, LCSW

I’ve been asked this question more times than I can count — by clients sitting across from me in my office, by readers of this blog, by friends pulling me aside at parties with that particular look in their eyes. “Why is he so wonderful sometimes and so cruel other times?” “If she really doesn’t care about me, why does she occasionally act like she does?” “What is he doing? And why does it keep working on me?”

These are not small questions. They are the questions that keep people stuck — sometimes for years, sometimes for decades. So today I want to answer them as honestly and completely as I can, because understanding what is actually happening is the first step toward freeing yourself from it.

It’s Not Random — It’s a Strategy

Let’s start here: the narcissist’s warmth is not accidental. It is not a glimpse of who they “really are.” It is not evidence that they love you the way you love them. What it is — and I say this with clinical precision, not cruelty — is a tool.

Narcissists are masterful, sometimes unconscious, practitioners of what psychologists call intermittent reinforcement — the unpredictable alternation of reward and withdrawal. Behavioral science has shown us, over and over again, that this pattern creates the strongest possible attachment bonds. It’s the same mechanism behind slot machines. You don’t keep pulling the lever because it always pays out. You keep pulling it because sometimes it does.

The tactics commonly deployed include love bombing (overwhelming you with affection and attention early on or after a rupture), future faking (making promises they never intend to keep), gaslighting (making you question your own perception of events), triangulation (using others to provoke jealousy or insecurity), and the silent treatment (withdrawing entirely as punishment). These aren’t random acts. They are a system — and that system serves a purpose.

The Narcissist Has a Traitor Within

This is where I want to bring in my own framework, because I believe it offers something that a clinical list of tactics alone cannot: understanding.

The Traitor Within is the internal voice — shaped by early messaging, modeling, and experience — that tells us we are not enough, not safe, not worthy of love unless we perform, control, or protect ourselves in specific ways. Many of us carry some version of this voice. But in the narcissist, this voice runs the show entirely.

What the narcissist does — the manipulation, the intermittent warmth, the cruelty — is not, at its core, about you. It is about them protecting themselves from a shame so deep and so intolerable that they have built an entire architecture of behavior around never having to feel it. Their Traitor Within whispers that if anyone truly saw them — if the mask came down completely — they would be abandoned, destroyed, annihilated. So the mask stays on. And you are managed accordingly.

Nature, Nurture, and the Making of a Narcissist

I am often asked: are they born this way, or did something make them this way? My honest clinical opinion is: both.

For individuals with malignant narcissism or sociopathy with narcissistic features, I do believe there is a nature component — a neurological or temperamental predisposition that shapes how they experience the world and other people. But nature alone does not make a narcissist. What gives those predispositions their particular shape is the environment: what was modeled for them, what was done to them, what they learned through trial and error in their earliest relationships.

Through messaging and modeling — observing the adults around them, absorbing the unspoken rules of their family system — they learned how to survive. Manipulation, control, emotional unavailability: these were not character flaws they chose. They were survival strategies, developed in childhood, that worked. And what works in childhood tends to calcify into identity.

In adulthood, those patterns are typically reinforced — often by other narcissists in their lives, who reward the behavior, reflect it back, and affirm that this is simply how the world works. The result is someone who has been running the same protective operating system for decades, and who has very little reason, and very little capacity, to question it.

Why They Almost Never Change

The painful truth — and I will not soften it, because I think you deserve the clarity — is that narcissists very rarely change in any meaningful, sustained way. And the reason comes back to that core shame.

Genuine healing requires insight: the ability to look inward, to tolerate what you find there, to grieve it, and to choose differently. For most narcissists, the protective structure is so complete, and the buried wound so intolerable, that genuine insight would feel like psychological annihilation. They do not have access to their own interior in the way that healing requires. And they lack the empathy — the capacity to feel what another person feels — that makes genuine change both possible and motivating.

What they do have is a powerful drive to feel in control, to feel powerful, and to hide their true self from everyone — including themselves. That drive does not care who it hurts. It is not personal. But that does not make it less harmful.

You Can Have Empathy and Still Leave

As a therapist with nearly four decades of clinical experience, I can hold genuine compassion for the wounded child who became a narcissist. Understanding how someone got here does not erase my empathy for them. It deepens it.

But I want to say this clearly: feeling empathy for a narcissist is not a reason to stay in relationship with them. You can hold compassion from a distance. You can understand someone’s pain and still protect yourself from it. These things are not in conflict. In fact, they can coexist beautifully — and that coexistence is one of the most powerful expressions of your own healing.

If you have been waiting for permission to protect yourself from someone you also feel sorry for, consider this your permission.

Radical Acceptance, Boundaries, and the Path to Healing

The single most important shift you can make in healing from a narcissistic relationship is this: stop waiting for them to change.

Radical acceptance — a concept rooted in Dialectical Behavior Therapy — does not mean approving of what happened to you. It does not mean excusing it, minimizing it, or pretending it was fine. It means accepting the reality of who this person is, releasing the hope that they will one day become the person you needed them to be, and grounding your healing in what is true rather than what you wish were true.

Radical acceptance of a narcissist means accepting that they are who they are, that their capacity for genuine connection is severely limited, and that this is almost certainly not going to change. That acceptance is not defeat. It is freedom.

From that place of acceptance, the work becomes: boundaries, grief, and rebuilding. Boundaries are not walls you build to punish someone else. They are the structure you create to protect your own nervous system. They may look like physical distance, limited contact, scripted communication, or no contact at all. They will look different for everyone. But they are not optional if healing is your goal.

And grief — please don’t skip the grief. You are not just grieving the relationship. You are grieving the version of them you believed in. The future you imagined. The past, you thought it was. Your lost self. Lost time. The love you deserved but did not receive. That grief is real and it is necessary, and moving through it is not weakness. It is the bravest thing you will ever do.

A Final Word

The narcissist is nice to you sometimes because it keeps you close. It keeps you hoping. It keeps you working for the next moment of warmth. Now you know that. And now you get to decide what you do with that knowledge. The narcissist is also nice to you in public to protect their image, to look like the hero, the amazing partner or whatever else they want others to see.

Your Traitor Within — that inner voice that tells you you’re not enough, that if you just try harder or love better the relationship will be different — is not telling you the truth. The truth is that you are not the problem. You never were.

Healing is possible. It begins the moment you stop trying to change them and start choosing yourself.

Jessica Anne Pressler, LCSW, is a psychotherapist with nearly four decades of clinical experience, a hospice social worker, and the creator of the Traitor Within™ framework. She is the host of the Your Traitor Within podcast and the author of Your Traitor Within: A Year of Journaling Prompts. Her novel, “Traitor Within: How Her Fear of Abandonment Led Her to Abandon Herself, with a foreword by Dr. Nadine Macaluso, is forthcoming. She lives on the Southern California coast with her husband and their two dogs.

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