Within Narcissism there are various "types" of self-love. Many involve the love of objects as well as seeing people other than themselves as objects and themselves as the only "real" person. These people can derive sexual stimulation and even orgasm just from proximity to these objects or from touching them. These disorders are called Paraphilias and take many forms (Abnormal Sexual Behaviors, Deviant Sexual Behaviors, Deviant Sexual Arousal, Perverse Sexual Behaviors). Some examples of better known objects and/or activities that are commonly used as sexual fetishes would be animals, shoes, feet, cross dressing, dead people, sleeping people, children and becoming children themselves.

I found this last one especially creepy since my friend had just told me that her now ex boyfriend has a diaper fetish. This is called Infantilism. This manifested in my friend's ex as the desire to wear diapers and actually use them like a baby would and to be able to achieve an orgasm simply by wearing a diaper and stroking it. She said he also liked to make her wear a strap-on and do him from behind so there is obviously another "different" component to his particular mental makeup and I am not sure how that fits into the whole scenario.

I noticed that quite a few sites on Parafilia are written by sufferers of these disorders and they seem to try to lessen the severity of the disorder. I found a book titled Sex Crimes and Paraphilia (available from this page), which seems to contradict the "harmless" nature of these disorders. If you go to the Table of Contents of that book and scroll down through it, you will see Infantilism listed under the classification of "Harming Children" right along with incest and Pedophilia.

I showed this information to my friend and she was stunned. She has escaped at this point, but predictably her "boyfriend" had their child grabbed before she left and has subsequently demanded that she return, threatening that if she didn't she would never see the child again. She held firm though and he refused her access to the child unless she agreed to come to his house to see the child, alone. Since he was also sexually abusive and used forced sex as a "punishment," she again held out and refused.

He used this to point out to everyone the couple knew, including his and her families that it was evidence that she had "abandoned" their son. Kidnapping of a couple's children and controlling visitation is another common method used by abusers to maintain control of their victim. Another is using the friends and family of their victim against them.

In a recent development my friend finally got up the courage to refuse to speak to her abuser, even over the phone. She instead tried to make him go through a third party. This was on the advice of a domestic abuse website. His reaction was to again withhold her son from her even though doing so was a direct violation of the court approved custody agreement the two had. His response was to have his mother call the state police to try to force her to speak to him. She finally relented after he and his family agreed to treat her decently when they called.