It can be incredibly draining trying to work out if you should talk to a narcissist or stay quiet, either about something you’ve accomplished or something that’s happened. Narcissists have you trapped between a rock and a hard place. You are dammed if you do and dammed if you don’t. If you don’t speak to them, they’ll accuse you of not trusting them, not going to them, hiding things from them as they feel criticism and play the victim. If you do speak to them, they’ll take the credit, pull you down, or claim they’ve had it far worse than you.
Narcissistic people tend to do all they can to shut others down. Given a chance, a narcissist will train your thoughts into no longer believing that you are capable or that you’re good enough. Narcissists will do all they can to steal your happiness, to leave you second-guessing your emotions, your thoughts, and your opinions. Narcissists will gaslight you to the point where you fear communicating with them due to how they’ve communicated with you in the past, from their invalidation to their accusations. The narcissist shouting at you, their direct aggression to the narcissist falling silent on you, their passive aggression. Yet you fear not communicating with them due to their pity plays of “I’m always the last to know.”
When you try to have an everyday conversation about something that’s going well for you, something you’ve achieved, when you want to share your good news about others or yourself, or when something terrible has happened to you or someone you know, and you’re looking for support.
When you tell a narcissist about anything you’ve experienced that isn’t about them, they’ll go one of several ways either the narcissist will completely discredit you, they’ll discredit your achievement, your thoughts, your feelings, they’ll discredit your opinions, or they’ll play them down, minimise them and emphasis on theirs, through various gaslighting manipulative tactics.
It’s incredibly confusing and frustrating as to you. You’re sharing your good news with someone you care for and who you believe cares for you. You’re looking to share in the joy together and celebrate together. However, as a narcissist is incredibly envious of those around them, the narcissist is looking to pull you down, invalidate you, to feel better about themselves. Narcissists can be envious of you, envious of your happiness, your success. They can fear you are doing better than what they perceive themselves to be. They can fear losing control over you. Narcissistic people only want to see you do well if they can take the credit and keep you in your place.
You doing well can trigger a narcissist’s insecurities, as narcissists feel envious. This can then trigger feelings of humiliation and shame within the narcissist. To feel better about themselves, they feel a need to invalidate you, sabotage you, hurt you, to bring you crashing down to feel better about themselves. There’s nothing you can do to appease them, as it’s nothing about who you are or what you’ve done. It’s all about themselves, which most things are to a self-entitled narcissist. It’s all about them.
A narcissist isn’t interested in how you’re feeling. They are only interested in how they’re feeling. E.S.
When you go to celebrate something with a narcissist, the narcissist can go for those passive-aggressive sulks and silent treatments. They can become grumpy as they feel offended by your success, and they might Invalidate. If you’ve got a promotion at work, a narcissist will claim your job isn’t as important as theirs as they don’t recognise everyone has a role to play in society. A narcissist could start exaggerating their achievements while downplaying yours. “That’s nothing. What about when I?” They want to bring the conversation back to themselves, or they can switch the topic of conversation or completely withdraw. A narcissist will happily provoke an argument just to take control of the situation, to ruin your good mood, and once they have, you’ll notice just how calm and happy they become.
A narcissist will start an argument out of nowhere just to get you to react, break your shell down and get emotional reactions from you. Once the narcissist has your reaction, they’ll blame you for the argument they created.
When a narcissist is envious of another, they seek to either take it from the other person or destroy it for them. If they can’t take it or destroy it, they will ruin how you feel about it.
A narcissist wants you to feel weak so that they can feel strong. E.S.
Narcissistic people happily pull others down for who they are so the narcissist can feel better about who they are.
When sharing the good news with a narcissist, some will take the credit. “If it weren’t for me, you wouldn’t have done that.” Narcissists seek excessive attention, and when they’re not gaining the attention they believe they’re entitled to, they want to take it away from everyone else.
When it comes to sharing bad news with a narcissist, they’re not interested in giving sympathetic attention to help a loved one feel better. They’re not looking to support you, some will even find a way to gloat with their quiet smugness about what’s happened to you, to make you feel worse as they lack the empathy to care, or they’ll go on and on about something that’s happened to them. “That’s nothing compared to.”
Narcissists get pleasure from another’s pain.
A narcissist can watch something negative happening on t.v to someone in the present time, and they’ll bring up something they went through 10,20, even 40 years ago, that was similar or not. Yet, they’ll be claiming it’s nothing compared to what the narcissist went through, and people need to “get over themselves.”
A Narcissist doesn’t want to strike up a two-way conversation to validate each other’s feelings. They lack empathy to care for others’ feelings. They want to dismiss others while gaining attention for their own.
A Narcissist will claim they’ve suffered worse. No one ever had it as bad as they did.
Narcissists don’t see themselves as the problem. To a narcissist, someone else is always to blame. As narcissists don’t recognise their mistakes, they don’t learn from them. Instead, they keep making them and blaming all others for why their life isn’t working out for them. When people wake up from the narcissist’s brainwashing and leave, a narcissist will blame that person for turning against them, being envious of them, and being crazy. A narcissist will not take a close look at themselves. Instead, they’ll judge all others, create mass smear campaigns to discredit people’s reputations to save their own, and any success you shared with them and pain you shared with them, a narcissist will now use against you for their own gains.
Telling a narcissist how you feel is giving a narcissist ammunition to make you feel worse. They’re not interested in how you feel. They’re only interested in using your feelings to feel better about themselves.
A narcissist is a self-entitled hypocrite. They can discuss their pain, success, and feelings, and you should validate them and hang onto every word, and help them. However, you can not discuss yours without having your feelings turned against you, and when you stop discussing with them, they’ll use that against you to make you feel bad.
When it comes to dealing with a narcissist, you can not discuss how you feel with them. They’ll turn your feelings against you, turn your thoughts against yourself to serve themselves. When discussing anything with a narcissist, you have to know what you mean and mean what you say, take your feelings out of the equation, know your intent and stick with it, know you are enough, that just because they can’t validate your feelings doesn’t make your feelings invalid, your feelings are valid, narcissists are just far to hung up on themselves to have to ability to think about others on a genuine level, only on their level which is to get their needs met at all cost to you.
If you need to talk to them.
- Recognise who they are.
- Know your intentions.
- Remember, they don’t want to see your point of view.
- Take your feelings out of the equation.
- Recognise how they’re feeling insecure or envious.
- Recognise and observe their behaviour that’s on them. Don’t take it personally.
- State something once and once only. If they didn’t listen the first time, they’d make you feel worse a second.
- The best way to deal with a narcissist is walk away and no longer play, no contact or limited contact and grey rock.
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Elizabeth Shaw is not a Doctor or a therapist. She is a mother of five, a blogger, a survivor of narcissistic abuse, and a life coach, She always recommends you get the support you feel comfortable and happy with. Finding the right support for you. Elizabeth has partnered with BetterHelp (Sponsored.) where you will be matched with a licensed councillor, who specialises in recovery from this kind of abuse.
