Let’s begin with a question. As I ask this question, you may feel a certain kind of confession is required from you: How many times have you looked back on an interaction with a narcissist and thought, “I got hooked”? You might even add the word “again.” I got hooked by their manipulations, attitudes, and condescension, and I was pulled into the game. Does that ever happen to you? It can happen so easily without you realizing it until after the fact.
Typically, you can reflect on your engagements with narcissistic individuals and recognize that we had yet another bad argument that escalated far too quickly, and I participated in it. You might say something like, “I cooperated with them and their desires against my better judgment,” and sure enough, it didn’t play out very well. Or you might think, “I got hooked; they were stonewalling me, and there I was, pleading my case, trying to justify why it was okay, asking them why they had to be so difficult.”
Perhaps your decency and goodness were called into question so strongly that you thought, “I have to make them think well of me,” and you went too far in trying to prove your worth. There are all sorts of ways this can happen, but let’s keep in mind that the goal for narcissists is empowerment. They want to be empowered by you; they love it when they get you hooked into their dysfunction. The more you react to them, the more dysfunctional your responses become, and they think, “This proves I’m the better person in this equation.” Meanwhile, you find yourself wondering, “How did I let myself get pulled in again?”
One of the things I hope you recognize is that narcissists love to bait you. They want to hook you like a prized fish. The more aware you are of their techniques and styles, the more empowered you can become.
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