There’s a common theme you can experience when you’ve been with a narcissist for a significant period of time: you might get along with them pretty well. In some cases, you can get along swimmingly, while in others, you might sense that something is a bit off but find it manageable. Then, something can happen, some sort of tension arises between you and that person, and all of a sudden, you find yourself on their bad list. Something has happened—you’ve said something, done the wrong thing, or that person is just in a bad mood—and boom, the narcissist turns on you with a great deal of vitriol and venom. I have heard so many stories related to this.
It could be that you’ve had a strained relationship with a sibling, but you’ve gotten along okay until something happens at a key moment in your life. That narcissistic sibling can come at you with a lot of harshness, saying, “I was always distrusting of you.” They can be very mean in the way they express it. It can happen at work too; you may be on that person’s good list for a while, but then you hear people say, “I don’t know what I did or how it happened, but now I’m on that person’s bad list, and it’s ugly.”
Many individuals report, “Well, I revealed that I don’t think the same way as them, let’s say, a friend.” When I did that, the person just went off on me, telling me how stupid I was and ripping into me on social media. It’s disillusioning when you realize that you thought you had a relationship that was at least manageable, if not quite good, but something happened, and that narcissist couldn’t sustain it. It turned ugly—fast. In many cases, it’s irretrievable.
What we see here is a classic case of what we call narcissistic collapse. These individuals live with a carefully crafted image, and they can maintain it for a period of time, but they can only keep the facade up for so long. They may try their best to present themselves as decent people, but in the end, you’re left wondering where all this bitterness came from and what’s going on.
It’s interesting when you’ve had that experience where the narcissist has turned on you in a harsh way; you can look back and see some red flags that may have already been there, now magnified. In retrospect, you might realize that person was never 100% comfortable with personal disclosures. As you look back on the disclosures they shared, you may see they were really just complaining about someone else. You might recall that they were a strongly critical individual—not necessarily towards you, but towards others—and finally, it came your turn.
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