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

by Ramani Durvasula

Many narcissistic relationships get their momentum from a sense of pressure.

you have had a history of trauma, you may judge your reactions and gaslight yourself (I think I am overreacting to a person yelling at me) instead of recognizing that the way the body and mind hold trauma and emotional pain means that the rhythms of a narcissistic relationship can take an even more profound toll on you.

The golden child is the favored child, the narcissistic parent’s favorite familial source of supply.

If you were the golden child in your dysfunctional family, be aware of how this role has affected your siblings and may still be playing a role in tense relationships with them. Don’t gaslight them when they share their experiences of your parents or their childhood, which may be different from yours. There may also be survivor guilt if you were well provided for and your siblings or other parent were not; therapy to explore that guilt and grief is also essential. Also be mindful that you do not perpetuate this intergenerational cycle by anointing one of your own children as a golden child.

Narcissistic people use and abuse other people to regulate their behavior and emotions, and that is where the scapegoat comes in.

The role of the scapegoat can carry a lot of pain and even complex trauma, and that’s when trauma-informed therapy becomes essential to address these impacts. If you were the scapegoat of your family, work on finding your voice separate from your family system, cultivate new sources of support, develop a chosen family, and engage in activities that are self-affirming and allow you to develop

In healthy larger families, families with single parents, or families in financially precarious situations, helping out may be required, but it may also be recognized and appreciated, with the child feeling safe, loved, and supported, instead of feeling they must do these things to be loved.

If you were a helper as a child, start practicing saying “No” and don’t feel like you always must help with the dishes, drive people around, or get it all done. I recognize that not “doing” may raise anxiety, but that is simply the process of letting go of the identity of this role. Start with small Nos and slowly work your way up.

The fixer/peacekeeper role is the child who is the de facto diplomat in the narcissistic family system.

Working through the fixer role you acquired in childhood means allowing yourself to experience the anxiety that surfaces when you don’t fix or keep the peace. A great place to start is to give yourself permission to set small boundaries with your family of origin; for example, take a break from that group text where everyone looks to you to continue ironing out the conflict and managing your narcissistic parent.

The invisible child is almost entirely psychologically abandoned.

Moving beyond the invisible role means being very discerning, because not all attention is good attention. Find your way of being seen that is authentic to you. Stop sharing your achievements, joys, and experiences with your family of origin; it dampens the joy of these experiences to have them unacknowledged and risks replaying that cycle of wanting to be noticed by people who can’t see you.

There is almost always an insightful and wise child in every narcissistic family system who, with tremendous insight and wisdom, sees the narcissistic patterns as toxic and cruel (even if they do not know the words to describe it). This

But as you get older, you may become the proverbial “black sheep” who sees the family dynamic with clarity and whom the narcissistic parent will be glad to discard.

However, you may also thrive. You may be quite good at boundaries, have good instincts, and be able to see unhealthy situations, step back, and not engage. If your family discards you at the behest of the narcissistic parent, there can be tremendous grief, which is when therapy to manage these feelings as well as cultivating healthier sources of social support (a “chosen family”) becomes essential. You have a gift. Value your ability to see toxic patterns and act accordingly.

Whistleblowers may feel silenced or gaslighted if they try to raise awareness of bullying or other abusive behavior.

Narcissistic people do not like being left. They are highly sensitive to rejection, so as a result, if you leave, they may become punitive, vindictive, manipulative, and rageful. They also don’t like giving up control.

One of the most helpful lists in your radical acceptance tool kit is what I call the Ick List. This is a list of all the awful stuff that happened in the relationship. Write down the terrible things this person did: cruel things they said, insults, invalidations, betrayals, lies, manipulations, special events they ruined, and all the gaslighting. This process can take days, weeks, or even a few months or years, and the recollections will keep coming to you.

Most of us don’t have just one toxic person in our lives. Once you pull back the curtain on the more compelling or demanding narcissistic people in your life, you will see that there are more people like this in your world than you initially recognized.

A narcissistic relationship is also a loss of innocence. Many survivors feel that they grieve that belief in goodness, and that it has been replaced with cynicism. Cynicism is not a bad word, and in fact it can help protect you if it makes you more discerning.

The grief of narcissistic abuse is consistent with something called disenfranchised grief,[2] which is grief that is not acknowledged by others or socially sanctioned and supported as a loss or grief experience. Imagine that someone close to you dies and the people around you deny that the person is dead and say there is no need for you to be upset. It would be unsettling to say the least. But that approximates the experience of a person who is enduring narcissistic abuse or the end of a narcissistic relationship. People may deny that you are experiencing a loss, especially if you do not end up leaving the relationship. The ambiguity and the marginalization of your grief experience or hearing that you are simply having “relationship problems” only magnifies the experiences of shame, grief, guilt, and self-blame. Because the people around you may not recognize what you are experiencing as “grief,” you may feel completely alone.

In my experience as a psychologist working with people recovering from narcissistic abuse, I have observed that it is the injustice raised by these relationships that has the most profound impact on healing.

Narcissistic people rarely genuinely apologize, face meaningful consequences for their behavior, take accountability or responsibility, or meaningfully acknowledge your pain.

Gaslighting is a buzzword these days, and many people don’t understand it. As we learned earlier, gaslighting is a form of emotional abuse that involves the gaslighter denying reality and dismantling a person’s sense of self by denying their experiences, perceptions, emotions, and, ultimately, reality. Gaslighting isn’t lying, nor is it just a difference of opinion. It’s designed to confuse you and undermine your autonomy and sense of who you are. It

To become more narcissist resistant, you also need to become more gaslight resistant.

The more contact you have with a narcissistic person, the worse you feel.

Never Call Them Out as a Narcissist

If you do engage with them about their narcissism, you will be served a large bowl of word salad with gaslighting dressing on the side.