Are You Carrying Something That Isn't Yours?
How hurt people hurt people — and how to know if that includes you
This post asks you to look at yourself. That’s harder than looking at what was done to you. If the last post is still landing — if you’re not ready to turn the mirror around yet — that’s not failing. That pacing is the work. Come back when you’re ready.
In Why the Wrong People Feel Like Home, we looked at the narcissistic wound — the developmental injury that hollows out the self when we grow up in the rat tangle.
If that post landed, something in you may have said: “Yes. That happened to me. I was wounded.”
That recognition matters. It’s real. And nothing in this post takes it away.
But there’s something else to look at now. Something harder.
The wound doesn’t just hurt us. In some cases, it changes us. It can create patterns that — unless interrupted — pass forward to others.
Not everyone. Not automatically. But often enough that we need to look at it directly.
The Extraction Loop
When the self gets hollowed out, a hunger remains. A hunger for what should have developed naturally: stable worth, genuine connection, internal ground.
And because we can’t generate these from within — because the wound prevents exactly that — we learn to extract them from outside. From achievements. From being needed. From controlling others. From being special.
This extraction loop isn’t evil. It’s adaptive. It’s what we learned to do when the real thing wasn’t available.
But extraction has a cost. And not just to us.
The Two Branches
The wound creates two main strategies — two branches that look opposite but grow from the same root.
The Grandiose Branch: Inflate to fill the void. Demand attention, admiration, special treatment. Extract worth by being above others.
The Collapsed Branch: Disappear into others to escape the void. Become needed, helpful, indispensable. Extract worth by being useful, by being the one who holds it all together.
These look like opposites. The “narcissist” and the “codependent.” The taker and the giver.
But underneath, the same hunger drives both. The same wound. The same desperate need for something external to fill what should have grown from within.
Most people aren’t purely one branch. We use different strategies in different contexts — grandiose at work, collapsed at home, or vice versa. The wound is flexible. It uses whatever works.
The Collapsed Branch Is Not Off the Hook
If you recognized yourself in the collapsed branch — the helper, the giver, the one who disappears into others’ needs — you might feel relieved.
“At least I’m not hurting anyone. At least I’m not like them.”
This is where we need to be careful. And honest.
The collapsed branch extracts too. It just extracts differently.
When we need to be needed, we may unconsciously keep others dependent. When our worth comes from being helpful, we may subtly resist others’ growth. When we can’t tolerate not being the one who holds it together, we may crowd out others’ agency without realizing it.
Here’s what this can look like: your adult child is struggling, and instead of letting them figure it out, you step in — again. Not because they asked. Because you can’t tolerate their discomfort. Because being the one who fixes it is how you know you matter. And each time you rescue, you communicate: “You can’t handle this without me.”
That’s not the same as overt cruelty. But it’s not nothing. It extracts something — their confidence, their autonomy, their chance to develop their own ground — to feed our need to be needed.
This isn’t moral equivalence with the grandiose branch. It’s pattern equivalence. The same wound, expressing through different strategies.
And some people move between branches depending on context, depending on what works, depending on who they’re with.
The Off-Ramp
Here’s what’s important: not everyone with narcissistic wounding becomes a carrier who transmits it forward.
Some people turn the wound entirely inward. They collapse, they suffer, they struggle — but they don’t extract from others in ways that wound.
Some people do the work. They find therapy, practices, relationships that help them build internal ground. The loop gets interrupted.
Some people were wounded less severely, or had enough counter-experiences, that the pattern never fully took hold.
If you’re reading this with genuine curiosity about your own patterns — if you’re willing to look honestly at whether and how you might extract — that willingness itself suggests the wound hasn’t calcified in you. The people most captured by the pattern can’t reflect on it at all.
So this isn’t about discovering you’re a monster. It’s about seeing clearly enough to have choice.
When Cruelty Becomes the Point
In the last post, we named something most people can’t say out loud: that sometimes the people who wounded us took pleasure in our pain.
Now we have to look at where that cruelty comes from. And why the wound can create it.
There’s a stage where something shifts.
At first, cruelty tends to be defensive. We devalue what we couldn’t possess. We diminish what made us feel small. The cruelty serves to protect a fragile self.
But the loop can progress. And when it does, cruelty stops being a defense and becomes the supply itself.
The suffering of someone else starts to feel good. Not just justified — actually satisfying. The nervous system learns: making someone smaller makes me feel bigger. Their pain is my gain. Dominance feeds.
Mammals are built to register something when they establish dominance — it’s part of how social hierarchies organize. In most of us, that circuitry is checked by empathy, by conscience, by the capacity to see the other as real. What the wound can do is disconnect those checks. The pleasure of dominance runs without brakes.
We’ve all felt a version of it. Maybe just a flicker — the satisfaction when someone who wronged us suffers. The small pleasure when a rival fails. That’s the circuitry. In most of us, reflection and empathy keep it in proportion.
In late-stage wounding, those regulators go offline. And cruelty becomes its own reward. It has to escalate — because like any source of supply, tolerance builds. What satisfied last year doesn’t register this year.
This is one lens for understanding what happens when extraction patterns become normalized across whole systems — why cruelty can become not just a means to an end, but the end itself.
The Contagion
Here’s what makes this more than individual psychology:
The wound spreads.
When someone deep in the extraction loop tries to fill their void through us, they often create the same wound in us. The parent who needs their child to manage their emotions creates a child who can’t develop a stable self. The partner who extracts validation creates someone who loses their boundaries. The culture that celebrates extraction as success creates populations of people starving for something they can’t name.
The wound reproduces itself. Generation after generation. Relationship after relationship. System after system.
This is why individual healing is never just individual. Every time we interrupt the pattern in ourselves, we’re refusing to pass it forward. We’re breaking a chain that’s been binding people for generations.
What Becomes Possible
The wound can’t be healed by trying harder. It can’t be healed by extracting more successfully. It can only be healed by learning to generate worth, connection, and satisfaction from within — from Self.
This is what the Dominant Mindset makes nearly impossible.
This is what becomes possible when we see the pattern clearly.
The healing isn’t about becoming someone different. It’s about uncovering what was always there beneath the wound — the self that existed before the tangle taught you to disappear. That self is still there. It was never destroyed, only buried.
What does this actually look like? It starts small. Noticing when you’re about to extract — about to fish for validation, or rescue someone who didn’t ask, or make yourself indispensable — and pausing. Not to judge yourself, but to ask: What am I actually hungry for right now? Can I give myself even a fraction of it?
Sometimes the answer is just placing a hand on your own chest and saying, internally: I’m here. I matter. I don’t have to earn this moment.
It sounds simple. It’s not. The wound screams that self-generated worth is fake, that it doesn’t count, that real validation has to come from outside. That’s the wound talking. Learning to generate from within is the slow, unglamorous work that actually interrupts the loop.
This isn’t a life sentence. With the right support — therapy that understands these patterns, relationships that offer something different, practices that build internal ground — the wound can heal. Not overnight. Not by trying harder at the same strategies. But genuinely, actually heal. The extraction loop can be interrupted. The contagion can stop with you.
A moment before you go:
Bring your attention to your body right now. Notice where this material landed — what’s tight, what’s numb, what’s activated. You don’t have to fix anything. Just acknowledge: some part of you recognized something here. That recognition, uncomfortable as it might be, is the beginning of interrupting the pattern.
Place a hand wherever the recognition lives in your body. That’s enough for now.
The Unveiling Self Assessment maps where the extraction patterns — and the capacity to generate from within — show up in your own life.
It’s free, it’s private, and most people sit with their results for days.
New here? How to Read This Substack — three doors in, depending on where you’re starting.