How To Handle a Family Narcissist

Image by Vitolda Klein

Some Grey Rock Life Hacks for Handling the Devil You Know

We are all pretty familiar with the phenomenon of women who move from one abusive relationship to another, or return time and again to their abusive partner. If you’ve been trawling the net searching for understanding about your own hidden abuse, you will find many case studies of women who have experienced psychological and emotional abuse from more than one person. And if you’ve reached the stage of awakening where you start to see narcopaths everywhere, you will be searching in your past for why you have been victimised – an answer to the “why me?” question.

And many of us recognise that we were raised by a person with a high degree of narcissism, much as we get all tangled up about not wanting to blame our parents. We relate to people who say they ‘parented themselves’, having emotionally absent or self-obsessed caregivers who refused to offer adult guidance at critical growth stages in our lives. We also relate to the idea that we grew up tolerating much higher levels of toxic behaviour like intermittent reinforcement or automatic negative regard, which made us susceptible to staying in fraudulent, unhealthy relationships longer than others would.

Many of us still have the negative influence of a toxic caregiver in our adult lives. Every interaction might have left us feeling torn and confused for days or weeks after visits with family narcissists. But now that we’ve woken up to this kind of behaviour, are there healthier ways of relating to a family narcissist aside from the ‘no contact’ that the experts advise?

My point is this: the narcopath disorders (narcissist, sociopath or psychopath) all occur along a spectrum of disorder, and it behoves us to remember this. They are not each as harmful as the other. The online rhetoric  of anguish and rage tends to tar all narcissists with the same brush, and we can fall into the trap of black and white thinking. As we integrate the early horror of discovering that there are truly evil people in the world - (those of us who hooked up with sociopaths or psychopaths) - we can lump all narcopaths into one basket.

Theresa Jackson, (2017), teaches us a simple algorithm for distinguishing one narcissistic type from another.

• Unprincipled or malignant (antisocial, fraudulent, exploitative)

• Amorous or sexual (including attention-seeking behaviour such as exhibitionism, womanising, being seductive and sex addiction)

• Compensatory (passive aggressive or avoidant)

• Elitist (superior, entitled, obsessed with status symbols and keeping up appearances)

• Acquired situational (develops after childhood in response to wealth, success or fame)

• Destructive (frequent and persistent presence of extreme narcissism traits but at lower levels than NPD)

In long-term recovery, we wake up to narcissism in ourselves and in others. We see how perfectly sane, ‘normal’ people can get stuck in defensive self-denial so that they don’t have to admit, apologise or atone. We see how crisis, trauma or sudden catastrophic change can make the most stable of people desperately self-focussed and deprive them of empathy for a season.

Once this season has passed, narcabuse stimulates great compassion in survivors.

Here are my Grey Rock life-hacks for compassion for an elitist or amorous family narcissist with full-blown NPD:

• Listen to their self-aggrandising stories, and instead of fuming at the falsehoods, wonder at the inventiveness of their imagination.

• Contain yourself during their explosive rages, and stick with them until they settle down enough to discover what it is they are really angry about. Like most of us, they just need their pain to be acknowledged in order to feel better.

• Don’t take the bait when they goad you. Learn from them and develop skills to deflect their aggression away from you and your values.

• Learn a way of letting go of the personal insults and drip-drip of devaluation and take the time for self-compassion and affirming your own self-worth. This skill will help you deal with anti-social media and an increasingly hostile world.

• Use your empathy to understand their lack of it. Practice compassionate breathing as you listen to their rants – breathing in compassion for yourself and breathing out compassion for them and others who are stuck in a place where they can’t relate to other people in the most basic human way.

• Refrain from self-disclosure. Keep your sharing of core values, political and social beliefs and precious relationships to a very superficial and humorous level. If they know what you really value, they shoot arrows into those places. Seek intimacy elsewhere, never with them.

• Decline as much ‘generosity’ as you can and keep your independence. You know they will use gifts and kindness as emotional blackmail.

• Refrain from disclosing your attendance at important occasions, as you know they will sabotage them. Do this in an adult way, and see it as keeping your power rather than giving in to deceit or dishonesty.

• Refrain from spending too much time in their company. Daily exposure wears us down after a while.

• Swallow your pride and apologise for ‘upsetting them’, since they can never apologise but an apology settles their narcissistic rage.

• The hypervigilance of PTSD has some positives. It will alert you to subtle signals of the narcissist building up to any of their toxic behaviours. This gives you an opportunity to quietly leave the room or excuse yourself to attend to something urgent.

Yes, these hacks make us focus on the narcissist’s perpetual need to be at the centre of the universe, but instead of ‘pandering’ or ‘co-dependent’, they are based in mindfulness of keeping a healthy distance from a person who cannot help but try to manipulate and control everyone around him/her.

References

Jackson, Theresa. (2017). How To Handle A Narcissist. Independently Published.