In my many years of counseling people who have had to live with highly narcissistic individuals, one of the things I’ve come to terms with in my counseling office is what to do when they reach a point of saying, “I’m done. I’m finished. This isn’t working. I’m going to have to move on to something else.”
You see, one of the things these people rightly surmise is that when they declare they no longer want to be with that narcissistic person, the narcissist is going to interpret that in a severe way. One of the things they despise is being rejected. Let’s go back and remind ourselves what is primary to the mind and the heart of the narcissist.
Well, the narcissist wants to be extra special. The narcissist wants to be admired; they feel entitled. And when I say they feel that or they want that, that’s probably not a strong enough way to put it. They crave it. They’re like an addict going after their drug of choice. The narcissist’s drug of choice is your supply. You exist to build me up. They want to be superior. They want to be the best and the finest, and they want to be told how terrific they are. They always have to be right, and it’s your job, as far as they’re concerned, to prop that up. And so, when you’re associated with a person like this over a long period of time, it creates misery in you. You know what I’m talking about?
You feel defeated. You get tired of the arguments, the put-downs, the insults, the scorn, and the tense standoffs, and the rejection that comes from them. And so you finally conclude it’s time for me to move on. And I want you to be very aware of what you’re going to face once you’ve drawn that conclusion, so that you don’t get pulled off your game, because they will, in fact, try to throw you off your game.
Now, many times, if a narcissist already senses that you’re pulling away from them, they may actually do the rejecting toward you first as a matter of just kind of doing the first strike. But either way you look at it, when you’re in the place of saying, “I’m going to reject that narcissist mindset, their manner of life. I no longer want to participate,” I want you to have an awareness and an alertness, if you will, to what that person is capable of doing.
Now, first, let’s acknowledge that when you make it clear that you’re finished, you’re done, you need to move on to something else, it’s not going to trigger introspective thinking inside that narcissistic person. You’d like to be able to sit down and talk with that person and say, “You know, there’s some things that do and some things that don’t work in a relationship. Let’s talk about what that might mean.” They can’t think that way with you. So there is no sense of introspection that they’re going to bring to the equation. Instead, they’re going to have a type of shock.
Continue reading on the next page
Sharing is caring!
