Narcissists and borderlines find it easy to zone in on people with caretaking tendencies. Caretakers tend to give love in-order-to receive love. Caretakers tend to respond with strong empathy to the BP/NP who appears to need more love, help, or caring than others. When you love someone, you often give them your all, and ask nothing in return hoping to receive the same loving energy in response. You may also easily forgive the BP/NPs' mistakes or harmful actions, while expecting yourself to be perfect every moment. This pattern may come from many factors, such as:
Caretakers often feel never good enough and continuously criticize themselves for being less than perfect. This can make you vulnerable to filling the needs of a borderline or narcissist. On the other hand, when you combine your empathy, caring, and generosity with the confidence that you deserve to receive as much in return as you give, then your relationships can become healing, restorative, and abundant.
As a therapist I have observed that recovery from being a BP/NP's caretaker goes through stages as awareness and personal healing increase. These are the stages I have identified from observing caretakers' healing process.
At the beginning of the relationship with a BP/NP caretakers find themselves in thrall with the BP/NP's needs, intensity, and constant desire to be with you 24/7. You hardly have time or energy to think of yourself. It is so easy to dive into meeting their needs. Caretakers often feel deeply involved and indispensable to the BP/NP. Your unconditional love and giving provide you with a sense of satisfaction.
However, you begin to feel tired, overwhelmed, and needy yourself because you are giving, giving, giving until you are depleted. Yet, when you ask for support and caring, the BP/NP is shocked, hurt, and even angry that you would ask them to care for your needs. Instead of giving back, they accuse you of being selfish, and even may demand that you give them more. At this stage you probably believe they are right. So, you increase your caregiving hoping the BP/NP will be satisfied enough to return your love. Eventually, you become exhausted, confused, and feel stuck not knowing how to change this imbalance.
As you try to understand the problems in your relationship, you come across information that your loved one's behaviors could be borderline or narcissistic. So, as a caretaker you read everything you can to understand how and why they are acting as they do. You start to identify their BP/NP behaviors and realize these are the things that are making your relationship unbalanced, exhausting, and hurtful. You want to help your loved one so you begin to find out everything you can about narcissistic and borderline disorders, learn psychobabble terms as you try to identify their specific difficult behaviors, change how you say and do things trying to encourage them to change, try being even more loving and accepting, ask them to go to therapy, then beg them to go to therapy, try to get a definitive BPD or NPD diagnosis for them hoping it can be cured, and become frustrated, hopeless, and helpless.
You finally go to therapy alone, research more, become depressed and anxious, and finally attempt to give up trying to fix or heal your BP/NP loved one. For many caretakers, this stage can take a long time.
You come to realize that no matter what you tried, this relationship only got marginally better now and then. You understand that BPD and NPD are personality disorders. Personality includes the inherent mental and emotional pattern of who your loved one is, how they think, and how/why they innately respond so strongly to stress, disappointment, and even small everyday challenges.
At this stage, you have learned and tried everything you know to change your troubling relationship. You finally realize that you can never love enough, convince, trick, or force the BP/NP to change their personality or who they are.
This can be a very depressing time. It feels like a terrible loss to realize that nothing you do will produce any long-term difference to make this relationship healthier, happier, or more equally loving and reciprocal. You recognize that you will always have to be a caretaker to the BP/NP, or minimize, or leave the relationship. You understand that you will have to find other ways to get your needs for caring, love, consideration, and emotional support elsewhere.
The great benefit of reaching this stage is that you can quit acting as a caretaker, because it has never made a real difference in how the BP/NP behaved anyway. Acceptance opens your eyes so you can focus on your own life—what you need, what you feel, and what you want going forward.
When you realize that your caretaking did very little to help or heal the BP/NP, you are free to turn your attention to recovering from the trauma and damage of pouring your love and energy out for little or no return or appreciation.
Now is the time to learn who you are, become emotionally whole, build resilience, and feel more self-confidence. This may take a little while or longer depending on whether you have been a caretaker for one relationship or for a lifetime of relationships. A caretaking relationship with a BP/NP may have made you emotionally, financially, situationally, and/or sexually dependent on the BP/NP's control, good will, and approval, so it can take time to separate, heal, and become more independent.
Intensive therapy, especially CBT and EMDR, can be especially helpful. Reach out to healthy friends and family. Rediscover who you are as you rebuild your identity. Spending time to re-learn what you like, prefer, and choose can also help you recover. Identify your emotional triggers, re-build your self-confidence, and decide on a new future. You have the right to be loved for who you are. Create the courage to protect yourself from being pulled back into a caretaking role again.
You are not damaged, wrong, selfish, overly needy, or not enough. You are a loving, caring, generous person who has been wounded, taken advantage of, and needing nourishment to recover and build your resilience. As you recover and regain strength, you can redesign your life into a style and pattern that is fulfilling, calm, and satisfying.
When and if you choose to seek out a new intimate relationship, the insight and healing you have done greatly pays off. Instead of looking for someone you can help, you look for someone who reciprocates your love, caring, and support. Many people with caretaking tendencies are nurses, therapists, teachers, hairdressers, child-care professionals, and others in caregiving careers. To balance their caring and nurturing, they receive paychecks, appreciation, and the joy of seeing others feel better. If this reciprocal exchange becomes unbalanced, they can end up burning out and leaving to make other choices. It is the same in your personal life. When you recover from your burn out and feel whole and worthwhile again, you can more easily find and choose who and what makes you happy, instead of believing you need to make someone happy enough to love you.
Since I retired from doing active therapy two years ago, I am now writing and passing on what I have learned and found healing to readers who are struggling to understand and extricate themselves from the caretaker role.