What do you want to change in your life? What gifts would you like to develop? What fantasies do you need to give up in order to create a more fulfilling reality? Healthy relationships are based on mutual respect and caring. Because of this, narcissists regularly violate the boundaries of others. Narcissists think nothing of going through or borrowing your possessions without asking, snooping through your mail and personal correspondence, eavesdropping on conversations, barging in without an invitation, stealing your ideas, and giving you unwanted opinions and advice.
They may even tell you what to think and feel. Make a plan. Set yourself up for success by carefully considering your goals and the potential obstacles.
What are the most important changes you hope to achieve? What is the balance of power between you and how will that impact your plan? How will you enforce your new boundaries? Answering these questions will help you evaluate your options and develop a realistic plan.
Consider a gentle approach. If preserving your relationship with the narcissist is important to you, you will have to tread softly. By pointing out their hurtful or dysfunctional behavior, you are damaging their self-image of perfection.
Try to deliver your message calmly, respectfully, and as gently as possible. Focus on how their behavior makes you feel, rather than on their motivations and intentions. If they respond with anger and defensiveness, try to remain calm. Walk away if need be and revisit the conversation later. You can count on the narcissist to rebel against new boundaries and test your limits, so be prepared.
Follow up with any consequences specified. Be prepared for other changes in the relationship. The narcissist will feel threatened and upset by your attempts to take control of your life. They are used to calling the shots. To compensate, they may step up their demands in other aspects of the relationship, distance themselves to punish you, or attempt to manipulate or charm you into giving up the new boundaries. To protect themselves from feelings of inferiority and shame, narcissists must always deny their shortcomings, cruelties, and mistakes.
Often, they will do so by projecting their own faults on to others. But as difficult as it may be, try not to take it personally. Refuse to accept undeserved responsibility, blame, or criticism. When attacked, the natural instinct is to defend yourself and prove the narcissist wrong. But no matter how rational you are or how sound your argument, they are unlikely to hear you.
And arguing the point may escalate the situation in a very unpleasant way. Simply tell the narcissist you disagree with their assessment, then move on. Know yourself. The best defense against the insults and projections of the narcissist is a strong sense of self. Let go of the need for approval. You need to be okay with knowing the truth about yourself, even if the narcissist sees the situation differently. Learn what healthy relationships look and feel like.
If you come from a narcissistic family, you may not have a very good sense of what a healthy give-and-take relationship is. The narcissistic pattern of dysfunction may feel comfortable to you. Just remind yourself that as familiar as it feels, it also makes you feel bad. In a reciprocal relationship, you will feel respected, listened to, and free to be yourself.
Spend time with people who give you an honest reflection of who you are. Some narcissists isolate the people in their lives in order to better control them. Look for meaning and purpose in work , volunteering , and hobbies. Instead of looking to the narcissist to make you feel good about yourself, pursue meaningful activities that make use of your talents and allow you to contribute.
It is then that they will start criticizing you. They will compare you to other people — always to your disadvantage. When you try to talk to them they will give you the silent treatment and make sure you know how gravely disappointed they are with you. You will then come to believe you are at fault and you will make attempts to deserve their former sweetness again — to push the relationship back to the honeymoon phase.
Your desire to win them back will lead to the narcissist calling you needy, jealous and suffocating. Occasionally, the narcissist will bathe you in the loving behavior they demonstrated in the beginning of the relationship. And then they will go back to stonewalling, disinterest and inconsistency. Gaslighting makes you believe you are the one that endangers the relationship with your claims, questions, and neediness.
You will somehow always seem to be the one that has to behave better and understand them more. You know how much it hurts when somebody says somebody else is so much better than you in this and that. The person who the narcissist will compare you to can be anybody — a friend, a mutual acquaintance, a parent, a mistress, even a complete stranger. Nevertheless, most often they will compare you to someone of your own gender making sure you feel not only humiliation and sadness but also jealousy.
For the narcissist it is very important to keep you second-guessing their affection for you. This is because their manipulation works best when they make you compete with a third party for their attention and approval. How to save yourself? Simple but painful. You will never be able to beat the narcissist at their own game as you stay in the relationship waiting for them to change their behavior. Therefore, narcissists make most of their decisions based on how they feel about something.
They simply must have that red sports car, based entirely on how they feel driving it, not by whether it is a good choice to make for the family or for the budget.
If they're bored or depressed, they want to move or end the relationship or start a new business. They always look to something or someone outside themselves to solve their feelings and needs. They expect you to go along with their "solutions," and they react with irritation and resentment if you don't. The narcissist's personality is split into good and bad parts, and they also split everything in their relationships into good and bad.
Any negative thoughts or behaviors are blamed on you or others, whereas they take credit for everything that is positive and good. They deny their negative words and actions while continually accusing you of disapproving. They also remember things as completely good and wonderful or as bad and horrible. They can't seem to mix these two constructs.
A few examples of a narcissist's splitting behavior in action: Marty labeled the whole vacation ruined and the worst ever because the hotel room didn't meet his expectations and the weather wasn't perfect.
Bob was blamed for 20 years because he wasn't there when his wife had their first child even though he was stranded in Chicago in a snowstorm. Narcissists aren't able to see, feel, or remember both the positive and the negative in a situation. They can deal with only one perspective at a time—theirs. The narcissist's entire life is motivated and energized by fear. You wouldn't initially pick this out as a sign of a narcissist though because most narcissists' fears are deeply buried and repressed.
They're constantly afraid of being ridiculed, rejected, or wrong. They may have fears about germs, about losing all their money, about being emotionally or physically attacked, about being seen as bad or inadequate, or about being abandoned.
This makes it difficult and sometimes impossible for the narcissist to trust anyone else. In fact, the closer your relationship becomes, the less they will trust you. Narcissists fear any true intimacy or vulnerability because they're afraid you'll see their imperfections and judge or reject them.
No amount of reassurance seems to make a difference, because narcissists deeply hate and reject their own shameful imperfections. Narcissists never seem to develop trust in the love of others, and they continually test you with worse and worse behaviors to try to find your breaking point.
Their gripping fear of being "found out" or abandoned never seems to dissipate. Anxiety is an ongoing, vague feeling that something bad is happening or about to happen. Some narcissists show their anxiety by talking constantly about the doom that is about to happen, while some hide and repress their anxiety. But most narcissists project their anxiety onto their closest loved ones, accusing them of being negative, unsupportive, mentally ill, not putting them first, not responding to their needs, or being selfish.
All this is designed to transfer anxiety to the loved one in an attempt to not feel it themselves. As you feel worse and worse, the narcissist feels better and better. In fact, they feel stronger and more superior as you feel your anxiety and depression grow. Narcissists don't feel much guilt because they think they are always right, and they don't believe their behaviors really affect anyone else. But they harbor a lot of shame. Shame is the belief that there is something deeply and permanently wrong or bad about who you are.
Buried in a deeply repressed part of the narcissist are all the insecurities, fears, and rejected traits that they are constantly on guard to hide from everyone, including themselves. The narcissist is acutely ashamed of all these rejected thoughts and feelings.
Keeping their vulnerabilities hidden is essential to the narcissist's pretend self-esteem or false self. Ultimately, however, this makes it impossible for them to be completely real and transparent. Because of their inability to understand feelings, their lack of empathy, and constant need for self-protection, narcissists can't truly love or connect emotionally with other people.
They cannot look at the world from anyone else's perspective. This makes them emotionally needy. When one relationship is no longer satisfying, they often overlap relationships or start a new one as soon as possible.
They desperately want someone to feel their pain, to sympathize with them, and to make everything just as they want it to be. It's a form of codependency , except they have little ability to respond to your pain or fear or even your day-to-day need for care and sympathy. Thoughtful, cooperative behaviors require a real understanding of each other's feelings. How will the other person feel? Will this action make both of us happy? How will this affect our relationship?
These are questions that narcissists don't have the capacity or the motivation to think about. Don't expect the narcissist to understand your feelings, give in, or give up anything they want for your benefit. It's useless. There are many types of narcissists , but these are some qualities they all have in common.
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