Today I want to talk to you about the six most devastating tactics of narcissistic abusers. These are tactics which destabilise you, make you feel like you are going crazy, cause feelings of loss and literally tear your Soul and life to pieces.
These aren’t just “clumsy” tactics or things that accidentally happen, and this is why they are so damaging. These are things that narcissists do because they have no ability to see you as a flesh and blood human being. Rather, you are an object, a tool, to manipulate, mine, exploit and dump their damaged self all over to try to release their unattended-to inner pain.
To add insult to injury, the narcissist is amoral – they believe that they are entitled to do whatever they want to do. They don’t suffer guilt, don’t think that these following six tactics are wrong (unless other people do it to them), and have zero comprehension regarding what has happened to other people as a result of their behaviour. They are only “sorry” if they got exposed or were not able to fulfil their intended agenda.
Let’s start by looking at these six devastating tactics that are narcissism personified.
Tactic Number One – Lying
There are soooo many ways that narcissists lie. They tell you what you want to hear, such as in the Love Bombing phase when they proclaim that they are exactly “who” you are looking for in a relationship, business or friendship sense.
They pretend to care, be attentive, flatter and appear interested in you. This is an act – it’s a lie. It’s a tactic to charm you into getting what they want out of you. People may argue that “everyone puts their best foot forward” yet narcissists take it a BIG step further.
Narcissists, over the years, have bragged on social media about how they question people to find out “what has hurt them or what is missing” and then pretend to fix it or be it – complete with fully feigned empathy and kindness. Narcissists state how easy it is to disarm easy targets who fall for it, trust them quickly and let them in.
Narcissists also lie when they are hoovering you back in for narcissistic supply. They tell you they are sorry, they will do anything to keep you, you are the love of their life, they know there is something wrong with them and they will get help.
Yet, in the time it takes to boil egg and you will see how flimsy this is. If you let a narcissist know that you can’t just flick a switch and believe and trust them, you will see the narcissist’s validation for you disappear. The narcissistic monster appears, “I’m sorry!” they angrily proclaim. “What more do you want from me?” And then come all the accusations about you, and every other defensive madness they want to throw at you.
Narcissists lie with gaslighting tactics – telling you a different reality to what really happened. They may tell you that you did a certain thing when you were intoxicated, that you didn’t, or you said something in your sleep that you didn’t, or that certain people “saw” you do something, but they can’t tell you who that was.
“Why bother with distorting reality?” most people would think. The reason a narcissist does this is to make you doubt yourself, strip you of your sanity and self-esteem, and keep you confused in order to control you. The more powerless you are, the more superior the narcissist feels and the more you can be manipulated to hand over sex, money, resources and whatever the narcissist has decided they want from you.
One last thing about narcissists and lying. They lie about big things, small things and pretty much everything. Narcissists are a False Self, a fictious character having a fantasy life in their own head. They lie to themselves. They twist facts to fit into their narrative of life and believe their own lies. They don’t cover their tracks well with lies. They change their stories and don’t remember the old lies and it’s easy to note the discrepancies in their stories.
Point this out and the narcissist will deny having ever said that! They just double and triple down with more lies!
Tactic Number Two – Isolating You
A narcissist will strip you of your interests and connections outside of them in order to monopolise you and make sure they regulate what they can get from you. This is not a compliment, and it has nothing to do with love – this is about harvesting you and taking your Life Force to feed their own parasitical self.
The narcissist is pathologically envious of you getting any attention, happiness and energy from anything or anyone else other than them. They may kick up a fuss citing that you are selfish, non-caring, non-loving, not to be trusted and conspiring against them. Maybe they feign helplessness or drama or being sick to keep you from escaping their clutches.
The narcissist will discredit the people, friends, contacts and interests around you to such an extent that you will start doubting them yourself, or it just gets too difficult and tense (or even outright abusive) to try to maintain these relationships.
The narcissist will also triangulate and play divide and conquer games, telling you that people are saying things about you and aren’t true friends, or don’t deserve you – yet you may be horrified to find out that the narcissist is telling them things about you to try to make them walk away.
It’s likely you won’t know who to trust!
Nobody is off limits with these types of tactics, as the narcissist may try to isolate you from your nearest and dearest friends, family and even children. This could be manifesting as the result of a brutal smear-campaign against you to others.
The narcissist may be playing the victim, telling people close to you that you are the perpetrator or crazy … stating that you are doing the things that the narcissist is in fact guilty of themselves. Maybe you know this is happening because you have caught him or her out in such a disgraceful and untruthful betrayal.
It’s horrifying that the narcissist “plays” this out so convincingly that they really do believe it themselves.
As the isolation intensifies for you, so does your shame. As time goes on, you become more and more trapped in your enmeshment with the narcissist, losing contact with your support networks.
Tactic Number Three – Cheating On You
Narcissists cheat, emotionally at the very least and very often physically. How can they do this after stating how much they love you and care for you? Because you don’t matter. They are not loyal to you, they are only loyal to their internal False Self.
Narcissists are an empty black hole on the inside always looking for narcissistic supply – ways to stroke and feed their ego and fill up with self-importance. Everybody and everything are tools, mere props to do this with.
Emotional and sexual infidelity is a common way that narcissist’s feed their empty, damaged Inner Self.
A narcissist has to spin (to themselves) a narrative that makes this okay. An example may be as simple as – they walk in the door and you don’t greet them immediately, so they start an argument, walk out the door and go and have sex with someone else – because according to their rationale – you don’t deserve them.
If cheating is discovered, they will tell themselves and others that you are the unfaithful one and drove them to it.
The narcissist may flirt with, get attention from others and start grooming them sexually, telling them how they don’t love you, how you do terrible things to them and so on and so forth. Often in a triangulation situation they are telling you exactly the same thing about the other person, who is their ex, friend, or work colleague. Maybe tragically and horrifyingly this is one of your close friends or even a family member.
They may tell you about this person’s advances and how they told them they are loyal to you, when they were the one instigating this all along. Because you are a kind person who doesn’t want to rock the boat you accept the narcissist’s narrative and don’t investigate and talk to this person. Rule of thumb – what the narcissist tells you is the exact opposite of the truth. It’s likely this person who knows you has been resisting the narcissist’s advances, whilst the narcissist is trying to convince them to give in.
Often when you find out the truth you will look back and think – where there is smoke there is usually fire. A part of you suspected that this was going on, but you just didn’t want to know.
Some narcissists are literal sex addicts – not fussy or particular where they get sex, or from whom, and often don’t use protection. Many a person has suffered awful STD’s from narcissistic partners.
Tactic Number Four – Invalidating You
The sad truth is this – the narcissist does not care about your feelings because they don’t have empathy. They don’t recognise you as a human being, you are an object. Narcissists are abusive; they are entitled, selfish, dismissive, and derogatory. A narcissist steps on your toes by invalidating your existence constantly. You say “ouch” and tell them what they have done is not okay.
No one is perfect and we can all make mistakes, yet people who are empathetic care about other people’s feelings. They can validate that they hurt someone and express that they don’t want to hurt them again.
People who get abused by narcissists are not people who are demanding, selfish and nasty. It’s likely that you are not getting angry about a dish not being washed, a top on a container not being closed properly, or this person not showering thousands of dollars on you lavishly every weekend, or this person being home five minutes late. In other words, you are not some screaming banshee who is always complaining about something ridiculous!
Rather, it is likely that you are upset about highly abusive behaviour. And it’s usual that you have been trained into not having rights or speaking up with boundaries and not valuing yourself. You may have become so numb to bad behaviour, or fearful of inciting more abuse, that the abuse has to be quite significant for you to even react.
If this was happening to someone else, you would immediately recognise it as abuse. Yet, when you try to have a conversation with the narcissist about it, they accuse you of being the abuser – saying it’s you who is argumentative, causing trouble, have it wrong, and can never be pleased.
These are the narcissist’s defence mechanisms, making sure they are not held accountable for bad behaviour. Here is the bottom line – the narcissist protecting their False Self (I am superior and can’t be wrong) is the only marriage the narcissist is committed to.
The False Self wins and everyone else loses and you and your feelings come last.
Tactic Number Five – Discarding You
One of the most shocking behaviours a narcissist will display, is their ability to cruelly discard you like you don’t and never did exist. This is not personal in the sense that you were a “person” to them, you weren’t. It’s simply that the narcissist has decided you are no longer required for narcissistic supply.
This happens for a variety of reasons – they have found fresher more fertile supply that has more to offer than you (in their eyes). This is because they have exhausted you and emptied you out, or you are standing up to them, meaning they have started devaluing you and see you more like an “enemy” now. The new supply is all shiny, idealised and a part of the narcissist’s fantastical version of “look how wonderful you are!” (This happened originally with you too.)
You may say, “But Melanie the narcissist came back and hoovered me!” Yes, they often do, and this is not about “love”, “care” or “missing you” in the terms of you being a “person they miss”. This is only ever about their False Self, their ego and filling the empty void. It’s likely the new supply has pulled away, is out of town, or has challenged the narcissist and now they are toggling you to punish that person covertly.
Maybe the narcissist has suffered the ego injury of you detaching and getting on with your life, and they need to suck you back in to get control of you again – only to set you up for the next cruel discard. The narcissist may come back to you after an extended period of time, because no one else took up their offer at the time of their empty desperate search for a feed!
(Please know it is NO compliment to be hoovered by a narcissist).
One thing is totally for sure, in the “cycle of violence” with a narcissist – idealise (honeymoon period), tension, abuse, discard (or you pull away), reunite (idealise) …. Then back through the cycle again … the abuse and the discards get more frequent and more brutal. If the narcissist had to suck up to you to get back in with you, he or she will not be able to help themselves and will ultimately resort to punishing you for this afterwards. Their False Self is setting you up to exact revenge and hurt you horribly.
A narcissist upon discarding you and replacing you with new supply may rub your face in it – parade this person all over social media and to friends and family – introducing them straight away to the kids and punish you with telling you how bad you are, how wonderful they are, and that this is the love of their life.
They may move in with this person, get engaged and even marry them immediately. The reason is to punish you and to try to prove to themselves and all and sundry that they are the healthy one, you were the defective one and that they are totally capable of creating a real relationship.
Nothing could further from the truth. The narcissist has simply moved their False Self from one “movie set” to the next – as if the old one doesn’t exist. Yet, there is no escaping their own dysfunctions. The new person, sooner or later, is going to go through exactly the same cycles as you did – idealise, all the way to devalue and discard.
Tactic Number Six – Going After What And Who Matters To You
After a discard, a narcissist will usually be invested in completely dishonouring, demonising, and punishing you. This is the narcissist’s vindication that they were right, you were wrong, the relationship was all your fault, they were the victim and you deserve to suffer for all of the horrible things that you supposedly did to them.
As the victim, the narcissist has decided “you owe them”. They firmly believe (within their skewered distorted thinking) that they deserve the compensation of the property, money, your superannuation fund, cars, furniture, the kids and everything and anything else that they can get their hands on.
What is really sick and twisted is they really have convinced themselves of this. The real truth is this is the unfettered tantrum and childish cruel revenge of, “How dare you try to stand up to me or not agree with me or not want me no matter what I did to you!”
What and who you care about are the targets. The narcissist may phone your place of employment with complete and utter lies to get you sacked. If the narcissist does have any “dirt” on you (that you shared in good faith with trust) they could unleash these secrets and send them to people you love to try to destroy your credibility and relationships.
The more you get triggered into despair, rage, or injustice the more this feeds the narcissist’s resolve to keep hurting you – like blood sending a shark into a feeding frenzy. The more you reach out to plead, or try to acquiesce, or through anger fight back or try to expose the narcissist, the tighter and harder the narcissist circles, plots, and strikes.
You are in shock, and so traumatised (understandably) with the horrible violation, threats and even theft of what and who matters to you. It’s completely Soul-shattering.
In Conclusion
When you break it all down like this, is it any wonder that narcissistic abuse feels like a Soul rape? Of course, people come out of these experiences with narcissistic abuse syndrome – symptoms such as Complicated Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and so much more.
If you relate to this article, I hope you know you are not alone, all of this has happened to more people than you could ever imagine – and I’m so pleased that you have found your way to this wonderful Thriver Community where we understand because we went through all of this too.
I also want you to have faith and hope that you can heal from this. We have. We know how to for real.
Please know you don’t have to try to recover alone, here we have a global community of people who have not just got free and recovered but are now living their best lives.
If you want to know how to heal from these insane levels of abuse, so that it becomes only a distant memory, I’d love to invite you into my free 2-part Masterclass, where you will discover how this can be your new life going forward as well.
As always, I look forward to your comments and questions.
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