It's Not You: Identifying and Healing from Narcissistic People

by Ramani Durvasula

Narcissism is termed a maladaptive personality style because it often puts a person at odds with other people. However, the more maladaptive the personality, the more resistant it is to change. People with this personality have little desire to change, especially since many narcissistic people are thriving financially and professionally, and because they have little self-awareness or self-reflective capacity, they don’t take notice of other people’s experience and their contribution to it. Instead, they blame everyone else when something goes wrong and are firm in their self-righteous resolve that they are good.

So he learned to avoid his father while also craving his attention.

This behavior is called narcissistic abuse.

Narcissistic abuse can be defined as the interpersonally harmful, deceitful, and invalidating patterns, behaviors, and alternation between disruptions of safety and trust and periods of normalcy and even enjoyment observed in any relationship with a person who has a personality style characterized by narcissism or antagonism.

These harmful behaviors allow the narcissistic/antagonistic person to assert control and dominance in the relationship and maintain a grandiose and distorted appraisal of themselves—which protects their vulnerability, insecurity, and fragility and suppresses their shame—while resulting in significant psychological harm to the other person or people in the relationship.

In other words, narcissistic people make you feel small so they can feel safe.

Gaslighting is a centerpiece of narcissistic abuse and operates through a systematic pattern of generating doubt about your experiences, memory, perception, judgment, and emotions. Sustained gaslighting causes you to question reality, and it qualifies as emotional abuse.

Gaslighting also allows narcissistic people to maintain their narrative and version of reality, which serves an ego-protective function for them while harming you. Over time you may accept the gaslighting as reality, making it more difficult for you to get out of the relationship.

Gaslighting isn’t a disagreement, nor is it lying. Anyone who has ever tried to show a gaslighter “evidence,” such as text messages or video footage, knows that it doesn’t lead the narcissistic person to take responsibility. Instead, they deflect the focus from the evidence to question your mental fitness, or they keep repeating the distorted narrative. The gaslighter may say to you, “I don’t want to waste my time talking with someone who chooses to spy on me and look at my phone; you are a petty person.” Or they may twist the situation by making it a reality smackdown. “Well, maybe that’s your reality,” they might say, even when you are holding the signed document or the email that undermines what they are saying.

Ultimately, for a narcissistic relationship to last, you must submit to their reality.

DARVO stands for deny (the behavior), attack (the person confronting them about the behavior), and reverse victim and offender (the gaslighter positions themselves as a victim—e.g., “Everyone is out to get me”—and the other person as the abuser—e.g., “You are always coming at me and criticizing me”).[3]

The DIMMER Patterns Dismissiveness, invalidation, minimization, manipulation, exploitativeness, and rage

To be in a narcissistic relationship is to have your needs, feelings, beliefs, experiences, thoughts, hopes, and even sense of self be dismissed and invalidated.

Dismissiveness

invalidation

Minimization

manipulation

Exploitativeness

rage

The Domination Patterns Domination, isolation, revenge, and threats

Hell really hath no fury like a narcissist scorned.

The Disagreeable Patterns Arguing, baiting, blame shifting, justifying, rationalizing, criticizing, being contemptuous, humiliating, speaking in word salad

Arguing gives them another way to get supply, let out some steam, air their grievances, and remain dominant. It’s like the aphorism “Never wrestle with a pig—you end up dirty, and the pig likes it.”

Narcissistic abuse always entails blame shifting. Nothing is ever their responsibility or their fault because for a narcissistic person to take responsibility or accept blame means having to accept that they are accountable and imperfect.

Narcissistic people can argue like lawyers, finding cold and logical justifications for behaviors that hurt you just so they can win the argument.

Other sparring patterns that characterize narcissistic abuse include criticism of just about anything you do. The criticism can reveal itself as contempt for you, your habits, your life, or your mere existence, and can also go a step further with humiliation.

A classical element of the disagreeable aspects of narcissistic abuse is to overwhelm you with word salad.

They aren’t quite as skilled as psychopathic liars, but they are in the ballpark. Narcissistic folks lie to maintain their grandiose narratives, get attention, and sell an image to the world and they lie as a hedge against their shame.

Love bombing is an indoctrination into a controlling and manipulative relationship.

True romance is respectful and empathic; love bombing is a tactic. While classical love bombing is often depicted as more grandiose and enthralling—dancing until dawn, elaborate gifts, expensive dinners or nights out—it doesn’t always look like that. With a vulnerable narcissistic person, love bombing may be about hearing their disappointment and wanting to rescue them; with a malignant narcissist it may be about constant contact, possessiveness, and isolation framed as “I can’t bear the idea of anyone else having you”; with communal narcissists it may be about being inspired by their plans for saving the world or their spiritual “awareness”; with self-righteous narcissists it may be about the appeal of a highly organized, fiscally responsible “grown-up.” Each of us is attracted by different things. Every fairy tale we are raised on ends with lovers walking into the sunset. The narcissistic relationship is everything that happens after that sunset.

The key to remember about love bombing is that enjoying it or even wanting it is not foolish or a bad thing. Do not devalue yourself for “falling” for love bombing; it is human to want to be desired and to enjoy romantic gestures. The harm of love bombing is that it gives you the ammunition for the justifications you make when the relationship becomes unhealthy.

Charm. The narcissistic person is often the most charming and engaging person in the room.

Charisma. When the charm seems magnetic, compelling, or everyone is drawn to it, that is where you see charisma.

Confidence. Narcissistic arrogance, entitlement, distorted self-esteem, and validation seeking can all combine to produce a person who seems very comfortable and self-assured about their abilities.

Credentials. Narcissistic people seek status and may pursue it through “credentials,” such as elite educations, exclusive addresses, fancy jobs, great connections, intelligence, wealthy or powerful families, or just being really “hip.”

Curiosity. Narcissistic folks may be overwhelming in how interested they are in you.

Part of understanding why some of us get stuck in narcissistic relationships despite the abuse isn’t just about unpacking the narcissistic personality but about acknowledging some universal responses to these kinds of dynamics. I am tired of people calling those of us who get stuck in these cycles “codependent” or “addicted” to the narcissistic relationship. It’s not that. If you have any empathy, have normal cognitive functioning, and were shaped by societal and cultural norms and realities, it is not surprising that you would get stuck.

One of the great traps of the narcissistic relationship is that the narcissistic folks actually believe they are nice people. They really do. It’s part of their system of delusional grandiosity, self-righteousness, and moral rectitude.

Narcissistic people are often so resolute in the belief of their goodness, warmth, empathy, and all-around awesomeness that if you already have a devalued sense of your own worth, you are more likely to take the blame (They are saying they are awesome, and I don’t see myself as awesome, so maybe it IS me?).

Your body is a more honest scorekeeper of the toll of narcissistic abuse than your mind. Your brain and mind are engaged in the trauma-bonded justifications and rationalizations, while your body feels and holds pain, grief, trauma, and loss with less censorship.

Narcissistic folks are more likely to feel inconvenienced by your health issues—they do not like infirmity or other reminders of human frailty or mortality, and they are too selfish and impatient to engage in compassionate and sustained caregiving.

Narcissistic people are noisy storytellers, and they tend to infect you with their limiting narratives for you. Ultimately, healing is about taking yourself back, revising the stories you were told, and rewriting them on your own terms.

Empathic people are magnificent, and I wish all of us lived in a world full of them.

But the narcissistic folks often exploit this goodness.

Rescuers are people pleasers who fix, problem solve, and try to make things better.

You find the silver linings, turn lemons into lemonade, and see those half-full glasses. You genuinely believe everyone has potential and anyone can change. You believe in fairness, justice, and everything working out.

Do you forgive everyone?

Growing up in a narcissistic family system is a form of indoctrination.

So what is the downside? You don’t learn how to walk the mean streets of narcissism. With

Transitions can be traumatic (loss) or they can be aspirational (new job, a move), but either way, they can be destabilizing.