Number two, your empathy for them gets you worse treatment, not better treatment. The very quality that can make us so special—our empathy, our compassion with people, our ability to truly see behind what’s going on with the person or to understand them at their core, not just blame or judge on the surface—can actually be the thing that gets weaponized against us. Think about how often you end up forgiving someone in a relationship like this. Well, empathy is often the horse that forgiveness rides in on. Empathy is the thing that ushers in forgiveness. When we understand someone, when we know their story, when we are able to see the hardships they’ve endured in their life—the things they’ve been through that maybe feel like they uniquely predispose them to this bad behavior or treating us this way—it breeds a kind of sympathy, maybe even a kind of pity. We think, “God, they’ve had it hard, they’ve been through a lot; they can’t help themselves.” That empathy is what allows us to keep forgiving someone, to keep making allowances for their terrible behavior in the present. And of course, when we finally say enough is enough, that person will often shame us, shame the part of us that wants to feel compassionate, by saying, “How could you leave me? How could you judge me? How could you not forgive me? You know me; you know what I’ve been through. I thought you of all people would understand.” In those moments, their story and all the reasons we should see them as sympathetic can get weaponized against us. Using our empathy, which is something we pride ourselves on, is something we have to be extremely careful about. The real insidious part of this is that one would think that the person who lives on this island with the narcissist, who gives them the most sacrifice, the most compassion, the most empathy, would be the person they treat the best. Sadly, the person living on that island with them is usually the person they treat the worst. For a narcissist, our empathy isn’t seen as a beautiful quality that signifies our value. Our empathy is seen as their ticket to doing whatever they want. It is seen as their perpetual “get out of jail free” card any time they want to get their needs met in any disrespectful or terrible way. They know that at the end of any terrible behavior, they can always rely on us to forgive them because of their entitlement.
They Are Able to Move on Impossibly Quickly
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