Narcissists have an apt ability to get you to doubt reality, question yourself, and not feel enough no matter what you do, Thus continuing to work harder to please them. So you do all you can to bring that person back that can seemingly treat you so well and avoid the person who treats you so wrong.
When you’re born into narcissism when raised by narcissistic parents, our mind gets programmed into accepting the narcissist’s reward punishment as normal, believing we deserve their harsh punishments, as they can reward us by treating us so right when we conform to their demands of us, often with little physical abuse and even with physical abuse, we often don’t recognise the narcissist’s psychological warfare against us as abuse, often leading us to accept similar behaviour from friends and future partners. Narcissists use positive and negative reinforcement to condition us to live on their terms.
When raised by narcissistic parents, you might feel uneasy around them. You might have just known something without knowing what you know. You often question yourself especially when they withhold attention, affection and support, the narcissist will shame you into blaming yourself. A narcissist will reinforce the belief within your mind that their mistreatment of you is your fault when they suddenly reward you for playing by their rules, often leading you into believing the narcissist’s abuse of you isn’t abuse when abuse is abuse no excuse and their abuse is on them not you.
As a child, you don’t understand what’s happening; many adults don’t understand what’s happening. When a narcissist suddenly starts treating you right, you see the good in them. Also, as they blame you when they treat you wrong, you begin to question yourself and not their abuse.
As parents do need to discipline their children and teach children the difference between right and wrong and morals and values, it’s very confusing because a narcissist doesn’t discipline a child for those reasons. A narcissist disciplines their children to condition their children into performing how the narcissistic parent wants them to perform how the narcissistic parents want them to behave. When the child doesn’t perform how the narcissistic parent wants them to perform, they neglect the child. They withhold attention, affection and support to punish the child for not living up to the narcissist’s expectations. What is so confusing is when the child works harder to please the parents, The parent starts treating them right again, reinforcing within the Child’s mind that it was the Child’s fault and not the parents.
When you’re born into a narcissistic family, you don’t know any difference. However, when you get into a relationship with a narcissist, you don’t know any different as a narcissist will love bomb you, idealise you mirror you, to sell you an illusion of what life could be like with them, to deliver you a completely different story, they might flatter you, lavish you with gifts, they might want to spend a lot of time with you, they might come along playing your hero, that fast involvement, claiming soulmate status fast into the relationship, rushing the relationship ahead, guilt-tripping you into doing things you don’t want to do. As love bombing can be mistaken for the excitement of a new relationship, the honeymoon period. As you yourself can go into a relationship wanting to help another out, you don’t see their helping you as them manipulating you, their compliments as flattery. You believe they’re coming from the same place as you. As you can get excited about the new Romance, you don’t see the whirlwind they’ve swept you into to distract you from who they are. You don’t see them rushing you into something you’re not comfortable with. You don’t see them slowly brainwashing you to their advantage. When a narcissist wants to spend all their time with you, constantly messaging you, with the narcissist’s love bombing, they’ve influenced you into believing in them.
When a narcissist feels criticism in some way, when a narcissist feels like you’re not doing what they want you to do, when you placed a Boundry on a narcissist, when you said no to the narcissist when you’ve called a narcissist out on a promise they’ve broken when a narcissist fears they might be exposed for their behaviour, A narcissist will go all out to shame you into blaming yourself for criticising them, for judging them. Hence, a narcissist seeks to punish you, so the narcissist can gaslight your reality, gaslighting is the psychological manipulation of your reality so that the narcissist can keep control over you.
A narcissist will withhold everything from you to punish you. They will withhold compassion. They will withhold care. They will withhold communication. They will withhold money. They will withhold safety. They will withhold sleep. They will withhold security. A narcissist will withhold protection. They will withhold affection. They will withhold support. A narcissist will punish you by neglecting you.
One of the most confusing things about a narcissist is they don’t mistreat you all the time.
E.S.
When one person hurts another person, The person who got hurt can withdraw from the person who hurt them because the person has hurt them, so we can recognise this, we can understand why we might withdraw from somebody, which is often why we are ones left looking for what we’ve done to hurt the narcissist to cause the narcissist to withdraw from us, so we don’t recognise the narcissist is punishing us.
When it comes to dealing with a narcissist, a narcissist will have done something to hurt you, or they will be up to something that could potentially harm you, something to exploit you, something that’s going to hurt you in the long run, and to avoid exposure they will withdraw from us to punish us for them hurting us.
We question what we’ve done for the narcissist to suddenly fall silent on us, for the narcissist to withhold affection from us rather than questioning what the narcissist has done to us.
A narcissist doesn’t come along and hurt us straight away. They don’t tell us they hate us and then hurt us. They come along to sweep us off our feet to slowly manipulate, devalue, and isolate us from support. They tell us they love us. They want what’s best for us. They’re doing it for our own good, leaving us questioning everything about ourselves and little about who the narcissist is as a person.
A narcissist brainwashes us by manipulating us to condition us to serve them to work harder to please them so that we can avoid the painful punishments towards us when we step out of their line,
A narcissist will condition you to expect nothing and give everything.
A narcissist will condition you into believing your emotional reactions to their actions are the problems to distract you from the fact that you wouldn’t be having those emotional reactions without the narcissist’s actions.
When a narcissist punishes us, when a narcissist withdraws from us, we are that busy thinking about their emotional needs, thinking about what we’ve done to hurt them, we forget about our own emotional needs, not recognising that they’re trying to punish us, while blaming us for punishing us, as to a narcissist everything that goes wrong within their life everything that’s not going their way is always somebody else’s fault, narcissists do not recognise the problem within their own behaviour and if they do they shift the blame to avoid recognising the problem within their own behaviour.
The more we ruminate, the more we question ourselves, the more we question what we could’ve done, the more we chase them, to help them, to support them, to get answers from them, The more we change ourselves to bring back the person we met, to bring back the parent that can treat us right, we learn to do everything in our power to please the narcissist, and then when we get it right by the narcissist, A narcissist will then reward us. They will then reward us by giving back what they’ve been withholding from us.
So if they’ve been causing sleep deprivation, if they’ve been keeping us awake, and they can do it in such subtle ways, a narcissist can just ask us to stop up and watch a movie with them, they can come to bed and wake us up, they can make sure they make enough noise in the morning to wake us up, then when the nice narcissist returns seeming all caring and kind and telling us to go and get some rest, go and have an early night, so to us it seems like they care we don’t recognise that they’re using that to manipulate us into believing they care about us, they might tell you to rest. At the same time, they take care of the home only. They won’t take care of the home. They will make the home worse so you are more drained after your rest by cleaning up after the narcissist mess.
A narcissist will withhold communication from you, they will fall silent on you, and when you drop the subject, or when you do something to please the narcissist when you chase them when you do all you can to make it up to them, as the narcissist has led you to believe you caused their silent treatment, at some point the narcissist will decide that they will start to communicate with you again.
A narcissist will withhold finances from you, and then they will go and spoil you. A narcissistic parent who is separated from the other parent might not pay financially towards the upbringing of their own child, yet when they pick that child up. They will pick the child up and take them on expensive days out to buy the child. They will do all they can to make sure the genuine parent cannot support the child sufficiently to try and make the genuine parent look bad, to smear the genuine parent to the child, so that the child doesn’t see what’s happening. Often the narcissist will be blaming the genuine parent to the child.
A narcissist will intimidate you by telling you they will inform people things that you don’t want people to know about you. We all have these things that we tell people we trust in confidence, believing that they’re not going to say to others, and then when you do right by them, they will tell you that they wouldn’t do anything like that to you, that you misunderstood them. It
It’s exceptionally confusing being around a narcissist because one minute they are there for you, and the next they’ve disappeared on you. They blame you, so you work hard to please them, and then they come back and reward you by being there for you, which reinforces that belief within your mind that it was your doing when it is not your doing. Their behaviour is who they are as a person.
Narcissistic people don’t think like you. They’re coming from a completely different place to you. Narcissists are self-entitled hypocrites. It’s one rule for them and another for you. Narcissists are incredibly selfish. There is a difference between being selfish and demanding that your needs get met and being self-aware to protect your values and beliefs without hurting another person.
Another manipulation tactic a narcissist will use with reward punishment is the things they withhold from you behind closed doors they will give to others in front of you. Or they will twist it even further by giving it to you in front of friends and family to confuse you, so, inside the house, they might be giving you the silent treatment outside the home. They’ll be super friendly to you. So when you speak out to people, they don’t understand you. However, they don’t know the whole story. They only see the side the narcissist wants them to see. Or when the narcissist is mistreating you behind closed doors, but the narcissist is treating others well, you can often question, “Maybe it is just me then because they’re being decent with that person. It must be something I’ve done.” It’s never what you’ve done. It’s who the narcissist is.
Survivors because they don’t feel comfortable around a narcissist, even if it’s only their subconscious that doesn’t feel comfortable around the narcissist, survivors can also treat people differently to how they treat the narcissist, survivors can either be more open with others than they are with the narcissist for fear of reactions from the narcissist, or they can slowly shut themselves down becoming more closed off with others than they are with the narcissist as they fear what others will think about the situation they’re in.
Another method a narcissist will use is by withholding something from you, like withholding communication from you. Then they will communicate with others in front of you, often accusing you of being the grumpy one. Or they’ll not be there for their children, yet they’ll make sure you find out they are there for someone else’s children. They will not be there for you as a child, but they will be there for someone else’s child.
A narcissist will withhold financial resources from their exes who are raising the children they had with the narcissist. Yet, the narcissist will shower somebody new with gifts and financial resources to bait the new person into the narcissist’s games.
The reward-punishment is confusing as you are conditioned into believing you are the one that’s causing the problems within the relationship When the narcissist is the one creating those problems within the relationship to get you to behave how they want you to.
Sometimes it’s not what a narcissist is doing to you. It’s what a narcissist takes away from you, then blaming you for being the reason as to why they took it from you.
This is why it is a must to observe people’s behaviour because, yes. Although people can act in these ways because they have been hurt, other people act in these ways to manipulate, observing how we feel around people and not how they make us feel, so that we can take back control of what our feelings are teaching us.
The silent treatment isn’t exclusive to narcissistic people. There are many reasons why people can fall silent. Often it’s what’s happened to bring on that behaviour and the intentions behind that behaviour. Just because somebody is treating you in a way that you might have treated somebody doesn’t mean they’re treating you in that way from the same intentions as you. You might fall silent to avoid the pain, to make sure you don’t say something that might hurt another person. A Narcissist goes for the silent treatment to manipulate you, exploit you, and get their own way with you.
It’s all in the intentions with good intentions there is no wrong way over right way to live your life there is only your way.
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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.
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