When the Healer Becomes the Haunter

How the Covert Narcissist Uses Spiritual Language to Entrap Partnership

Spirituality can be a beautiful pathway to healing, connection, and truth. It teaches us compassion, presence, and the art of listening deeply to the soul. Yet in relationships with a covert narcissist, this sacred language can be turned into a tool of control. The covert narcissist often appears gentle, enlightened, and emotionally aware. They speak the words of consciousness and awakening, yet behind those words lies a manipulation that can be both subtle and devastating.

The covert narcissist does not simply speak about love; they perform it. They talk about energy, vibration, healing, and divine union, but these concepts become a stage for self-glorification. Their version of spirituality is not about mutual growth but about influence and dominance disguised as emotional depth. Over time, the partner begins to confuse spiritual connection with emotional control, and what was once sacred starts to feel suffocating.

Understanding how spiritual language can be used as manipulation is essential for reclaiming your clarity, your intuition, and your power.

Why the Covert Narcissist Uses Spiritual Language to Control

The covert narcissist thrives in spaces where empathy and emotional awareness are valued. These qualities create the perfect environment for them to appear profound and wise. They study what others long for—belonging, meaning, transformation, and mirror it back with convincing sincerity. Their talk of divine timing, soul contracts, or twin flames provides a sense of safety that disarms healthy scepticism.

At first, this can feel like a meeting of souls. The covert narcissist’s words seem to awaken something deep inside you. They tell you that your connection is cosmic, fated, and spiritually significant. The problem is that these words do not point to truth; they point to fantasy. The covert narcissist uses spiritual rhetoric to create hierarchy. They position themselves as your guide, your teacher, or the more evolved partner. Whenever you question them, they reframe it as your ego acting out or your shadow being triggered. This effectively silences your intuition and keeps you doubting your own inner wisdom.

Spiritual language becomes the mask that hides emotional immaturity. What sounds like enlightenment is often entitlement. What sounds like awareness is often avoidance.

The Nervous System Impact of Spiritual Manipulation

When love and manipulation are intertwined, the nervous system becomes deeply confused. The body longs to trust the one who speaks the language of safety and light, yet something within feels unsettled. You may find yourself feeling anxious in their presence but blaming yourself for not being evolved enough. You may experience exhaustion or numbness, but interpret it as a need for more meditation, more surrender, more inner work.

This confusion keeps your nervous system trapped in a loop of activation and collapse. Each moment of idealisation floods you with oxytocin and dopamine—the chemistry of bonding. Each moment of criticism or withdrawal activates fear. The system swings between elation and depletion, seeking stability in someone who uses instability as a form of power. Over time, this can lead to symptoms such as hypervigilance, emotional fatigue, and self-doubt that resemble trauma responses.

Your body begins to tell you the truth long before your mind can. It whispers through tension, headaches, and sleeplessness that this is not harmony. The distress is not a failure of spiritual growth; it is your body’s innate intelligence alerting you to danger disguised as devotion.

The Emotional Message Behind Spiritual Control

Every form of spiritual manipulation carries an unspoken message: “I am the authority on truth, and your reality is secondary.” The covert narcissist uses their version of spirituality to maintain dominance. They may claim to be teaching you about awakening, but their lessons always lead back to their superiority.

When you express pain, they might tell you that you are projecting, that you need to heal your triggers, or that you are stuck in the ego. What they call teaching is actually gaslighting. It distorts your sense of self and makes you responsible for their emotional regulation. Over time, you internalise the belief that spiritual love requires self-silencing, that true enlightenment means tolerating disrespect.

This is not spirituality; it is spiritual abuse. It replaces mutual respect with hierarchy and replaces love with submission.

Trauma-Informed Ways to Respond and Regulate

Healing from this kind of manipulation begins with returning to your own sacred centre. You cannot dismantle illusion by analysing their words; you must return to your body, where truth still lives.

1. Name what is happening.
Say to yourself, “This is not a spiritual connection; this is control.” Naming the pattern brings you out of confusion and into awareness.

2. Reclaim your intuition.
Place your hand over your heart and breathe slowly. Remind yourself that your intuition is not broken. It was overridden by fear, not lost. Trust begins to return when you listen without judgment.

3. Separate their beliefs from your truth.
You are not obligated to share their interpretation of spirituality. A healthy connection allows two truths to coexist.

4. Ground your body in reality.
Spend time in nature, move your body, feel your breath. Each grounding act teaches your nervous system that safety can exist outside illusion.

5. Seek supportive relationships.
Isolation strengthens manipulation. Connection with grounded, trustworthy people restores perspective and reminds you of what genuine empathy feels like.

6. Reconnect with sacred practices that belong to you.
If your spirituality was used against you, it is time to reclaim it. Pray, meditate, create, or walk among trees—not to escape your pain but to anchor your truth.

7. Find trauma-informed support.
Therapies that integrate body and mind, such as Internal Family Systems or somatic approaches, can help you release the internalised shame and confusion this pattern creates.

A Final Reflection

The covert narcissist’s spiritual performance is an illusion of love that feeds on your openness and goodness. But your empathy is not a weakness. It is sacred. What was used against you can become the very source of your healing.

As you begin to see clearly, the spell breaks. You learn that true spirituality does not silence your truth, it honours it. It does not demand blind forgiveness; it invites accountability. It does not glorify one person’s awakening at the expense of another’s peace.

Healing is remembering that you do not need to earn love through enlightenment. You are already worthy of relationships that meet you with honesty, equality, and respect. The language of light cannot harm you when you live in your own truth.

IFS-Informed Journal Prompts: Meeting the Parts that Believed the Illusion

1. When I think about the early stages of the relationship, what parts of me were drawn to their spiritual language?

2. Is there a part of me that still longs for the version of love they promised? What does that part need from me now?

3. How does my body respond when I recall the moments that felt both spiritual and confusing? Can I hold those sensations with curiosity rather than judgement?

4. What younger part of me might have equated self-sacrifice with love? How can I speak gently to that part today?

5. When I listen inwardly, what does my true Self know about authentic spirituality and partnership?

These reflections invite you to listen, not to fix. Each part that believed in the illusion was only trying to find a sense of belonging. As you meet these parts with compassion, illusion loses its hold, and truth begins to take its place. Healing does not come from rejecting what happened, but from welcoming yourself home to the wisdom that was always there, waiting to be heard.