Transcription
Hello folks. Today we're going to look at the top five games that the narcissist wants to play with you to control your mind and manipulate your emotions.
The first way of doing this is by pretending not to understand. So if you spend any time on narcissistic abuse forums or online, you'll see there's a tremendous amount of attention given to the question, "Is this narcissism or is this autism?" And I think a lot of this is because many people with NPD and in the cluster B spectrum rely on a sort of fake stupidity as a tactic for getting themselves out of trouble. They simply pretend not to understand basic morality, basic cultural mores, basic societal norms so that they can shrug their shoulders and say, "Yes, you did catch me doing the terrible thing, but I didn't even know that that was wrong."
It's usually pretty easily disproved. If you're in a romantic relationship with somebody, you're having an argument with them over something they did that was morally wrong, they claim not to know that that was morally wrong. You only have to imagine how would that person respond if you two were together watching a TV show and that scene played out and they correctly sided with the good character and correctly condemned the behavior of the bad character. That would prove that they do indeed understand perfectly well what is right and wrong and what is considered normal and acceptable.
The second favorite game the narcissist loves to play: deflect and attack. Attacking the attacker, attacking the person who's caught them out, who's brought something that they've done to their attention, perhaps even has evidence of a wrongdoing. This is a good way for the narcissist to put the focus back on the person who's brought that evidence to them. It's to deflect it and to attack the attacker, the person who is attacking them.
This tactic is also known as whataboutism. This was a tactic that was developed, it's largely thought in Soviet Russia, where any criticism of the Soviet regime would be met with the response, "But what did you do? What did you do? What have you done out in the world?" You are not so perfect, and there's a finger pointing back the other way. In this way, it doesn't really matter what they do or what you've caught them doing. They can either always bring up something else that you've done that isn't that bad, or they can pretend it's really bad by using, number one, pretending not to understand, or they can simply make it up. And in your indignation at being accused of something that you didn't do, you might have an explosive response. And then the argument in the conversation gets focused on your explosive response rather than what they did. This is commonly referred to as reactive abuse. So the explosive reaction is induced in you so that they can turn around and say, "Look at you. Look how angry you are. Look how upset you've become. Look at the fact you're screaming, tantruming, crying. And your anger and your frustration, you are the crazy one."
Favorite game number three that narcissists absolutely love to use is to simply deny and then throw in a nice little distraction there to really throw you off their scent. So they will simply deny, deny, deny. Whatever you bring to them, whatever you say that they've done, whatever you accuse them of, they'll say, "That didn't happen." "If it did happen, I didn't mean it." "No, I didn't say that." "Well, we have you on tape saying it." "Okay, well if I did say it, you've heard me wrong." "No, we didn't hear you wrong. It's there on the tape." "Okay, well if I did say it and you didn't hear me wrong, that's not what I meant." And the denial will just go multiple logical levels deep until you're driven into complete exasperation. And again, it becomes a kind of reactive abuse because the person who's doing the accusation is looking to find some semblance of truth, is looking to try and reestablish balance and find some justice. And they won't because they're being denied that moment.
Also thrown into that will be a distraction. So as I'm denying whatever it is that you are accusing me of doing, I'm going to distract you. I'm going to make you look at something over there. I'm going to make this situation about something else or someone else. Another good way for me to distract you would be to use a pre-existing trigger that I know you have, a particularly sensitive subject or issue that I know you have, and raise that. And then we can start arguing, conversing, focusing on that and not what the original problem was in the first place.
The fourth game that the narcissist absolutely loves to play, we can call psychic reading. They'll tell you what it is you do and don't know. They'll tell you what it is you do and don't feel. They'll tell you what you did and didn't do in a place at a time that they weren't. They were not there. They couldn't possibly know that. This is a kind of way of binding you into their reality and to their view of reality. It becomes very hard for you then to argue your way forward to some sort of reasonable adult-to-adult conclusion in that scenario because they've shut you down by saying, "You don't even believe that. You're asking me something you don't even believe to be true. I know what you feel. This is what you feel."
Again, back to the reactive abuse issue. For people who are raised in an environment where that kind of thing was going on an awful lot, psychic reading, being told what you think, being told what you feel, not being asked, being told, could potentially take you back to a place in childhood or another period of your life where you were facing similar kinds of narcissistic abuse and could lead you into either breaking down, crying, and explosive rage, something like that. And then we're back to talking about what a crazy person you are and not talking about what the narcissist has actually done or said, which is objectively immoral and wrong.
The fifth game the narcissist loves to play is reframing. If the narcissist gets cornered, if the narcissist gets stuck... You have the evidence against them. You know absolutely what they said, what they did, and you know it was absolutely wrong. They can simply reframe the situation altogether and say, "Well, this isn't even really about that. Yeah, you have this evidence against me, but come on. Let's be honest here. This isn't about that. This is all really about your mother. This is all really about your ex-husband. This is all really about your kids and how you're failing them." Some other thing, if they can bring up some other thing and reframe the situation to be about that, it particularly makes sense if they know that that thing is sensitive and hurtful and could potentially trigger a very strong emotional response in the same way that psychic reading could. Binding people in with pretending to understand what they know and what they feel when you couldn't possibly. And telling them when they try to complain, when they try to object, "No, no, no, you don't even really feel that way. What this is really about is this other thing over here that we've discussed before, that you have a peculiar particular sensitivity or insecurity about," to induce as much emotional anguish and emotional distress as possible.
Now, with all of these games, what do we notice in the recipient when we're talking about the emotional reactions? Typically, there'll be an awful lot of anguish and also a lot of exasperation because you never feel like you're getting anywhere. And this is something that I just want to remind people of at this point. So much of what the narcissist is really about is not them. We tend to talk about narcissism and narcissistic personality disorder as though everything is about the narcissist. Sam Vaknin pointed this out, and I think he's 100% right. This is false. This is a misunderstanding. The narcissistic, the abusive relationship, whilst it seems to be all about them because they're so egocentric and they bring everything back to themselves. This dynamic, the games that they're playing with you, it's all about you and your emotional responses. Your emotional responses are key.
So in this next section, let's look at some of the ways we can deal with these games that the narcissist likes to play.
(objects swooshing)
So in order to look at some solutions, some ways of dealing with this, let's consider our own reframe. You're not dealing with an adult human being. They are not speaking and acting in good faith, and the point is there is no point. The point of all their communication is only to garner an emotional reaction from you. There's a little aphorism that I came up with a few years ago. I'm very proud of it, and I think it's useful in this context. It runs as follows: "You should abandon sincere communication when you are communicating with the terminally insincere." There's no moral imperative on you anymore to try and speak sincerely, to tell the truth, to be honest, to just get to the raw facts with this person when it's clear that they're not interested in that at all. They're only interested in inducing emotional reactions in you to create anguish and exasperation so that you submit, so that you give up. That's the point. There is no point but the emotional reaction. Abandon sincere communication when communicating with the insincere.
Another reframe for you, again, I'm proud of it. This is because I'm a bit of a sci-fi nerd. A good way of imagining the narcissistic personality disordered person is as a cloud of nanobots. And in this sci-fi horror movie, this cloud of nanobots can formulate into any shape or image or entity that they want to induce a certain emotional response in the target. The emotional response in the target that they're going for in the sci-fi horror movie would be horror, would be terror, would be fear. In this scenario, sometimes horror and terror is used, but predominantly it's anguish. It's an inescapable stress. You're just full of anguish all the time. And if you go into full-blown horror or fear, you might go into shock and you might leave. That's why I don't think they cook you at too high a heat. They tend to cook at a much lower heat than that so that you just go into anguish and then become exasperated and become exhausted, and then they can colonize you once you've given in. You're much easier to be rendered into a zombie, to be enslaved at that point. So think of that. Think of this horrifying sci-fi image. It's just a cloud of nanobots. It's going to say, do, or appear as whatever it needs to say, do, or appear as in order to induce this. This. This. This is what it's all about. Your emotional reaction.
So that being said, if the five games I just showed you, or any strategy a narcissist uses, is about your emotional reaction, what does it behoove us to do? It behooves us to reduce our emotional reactivity. Now, there are different ways of doing this. And I'm not a priest, and I don't want to invade your personal life and tell you how to live. Let me give you some pointers that I've used myself because I've been in narcissistic abusive relationships and I've used with clients over the last 10 years.
Number one is give up hope. You will be doing yourself a huge favor. And also grieve. Also, begin the grieving process. Give up hope that this person you are, let's say you are co-parenting or counter-parenting with a narcissist, and you are hoping that one day they're going to show up as a good mom or a good dad because you want your children to have a good mother or a good father to counterbalance your role. Give up hope. Begin grieving. That's never going to happen. Your hope is going to keep you in emotional reactivity, and it's going to stop you from seeing the raw reality of the situation, which is that that is not a human being, a human adult entity in the normal sense. That is a deeply damaged, deeply disturbed individual who now is only showing up to garner emotional reactions from people. Internalize it. Know it. Live it. Breathe it. Accept it. Grieve. Give up the hope. And you are in a much stronger position.
On your way to doing that, wind down your emotional reactivity. Give them less oxygen. Give them less air by using... Everybody is familiar with this one, I'm sure. The grey rock technique. So give them less responses. If you can't cut off contact, and many times it's simply not practical to cut contact with people, reduce it as much as possible. If a text is sent and you must text back, use fewer words. If they're on the phone to you, spend less time on the phone. As you're speaking, say fewer words. Any and all information you give them can be used as ammunition against you at a later date, and will be. So give them less.
Stop telling them. Here's another piece of advice that I have to tell clients all the time. Stop telling them how you feel. (chuckles) You're not doing yourself any favors. You're just giving them more data to feed into the artificial intelligence system that runs the nanobots that is there to harvest your emotional reaction. Stop saying to them, "You make me feel sad when you do this. You make me feel angry when you do this." Your therapist is telling you to do that if they don't understand narcissistic abuse. Because if you were in a normal family therapy, normal couple's therapy, that would be the correct thing to do. Speak sincerely to your partner. Tell your mother how you feel. Maybe she doesn't understand. All she sees is your anger. But actually, behind the anger, you're full of sadness, or you're full of disappointment, and she'll come to an understanding with you, and you can have a reconciliation. Reconciliation is death for a narcissist. Death! The last thing they want is reconciliation because that would cut this off completely. You'd be, "Oh, well, you know, I've had my closure. I've had my reconciliation. Ah, now I can go." They're not going to give you that. They'll be like, hold, like taking somebody hostage with a gun to their head and then pulling all the bullets out the gun and tossing the gun out the window. They're not going to reconcile with you. Stop telling them how you feel. This is terrible advice. Don't follow it. Give them grey rock.
In your own personal space... In your own personal space, give up hope and grieve. Eventually, you're going to have to come back to yourself. So come back to you. This is hard. This is a little more complicated. Here's you, you're a single-cell amoeba. Sorry about that. And you have boundaries. And in this single-celled amoeba, good stuff stays in, the nutrients, and waste products go out. The narcissist comes along and digs and digs and provokes and manipulates and provokes and gaslights and lies and reframes. And your boundaries start to break. Good stuff flows out that shouldn't. Money, time, attention, love. Crap stuff, waste goes in that shouldn't. Resentment, hatred, sadism. A lot of the narcissist enters your space through these gaps that they've created through trauma. This is, well, physical trauma, neuropsychic trauma, right? If my arm breaks, that's trauma. This is psychic trauma. So there's breaks. There's breaks in the psychic wall. They get in here and they fill you up with their resentment, their hatred, their impatience, their sadism. So you start to feel like them. You start to look like them. You start to become them. That's the colonization process. You have to start closing these walls off. You have to start re-closing this, and that's what giving up hope and grieving allows you to do. And when I say come back to you, that's what I mean. You will feel like you must find a reconciliation through them and with them. Give up hope! Cry! Despair! There's the philosopher, Danish philosopher, Kierkegaard. The power of despair. Give up hope, and then he would say, "Give up hope, despair, return to God." He saw despair as being a useful emotion, a useful state of mind because it showed the human being that they'd fallen out of alignment with God. This isn't a religious video, but say, fallen out of alignment with right living, falling out of alignment with your own values, fall out of alignment with what you want in your own life. Fallen out of alignment with yourself in a certain sense. That's self-alienated from self inside of a narcissistic relationship. You must give up on them. You must give up on them, and you must reclose these boundary walls.
Last chapter, let's talk about why it's so hard to give up on them, and I'll offer you a solution. In order to understand this concept better, I highly recommend the videos of another YouTuber, Professor Sam Vaknin. Okay? And the particular videos you want to look for are about a process that Sam calls co-idealization. It's part of his dual mothership concept of the narcissistically abusive relationship. He has a whole new, completely new, completely original model of narcissistic abusive relationships that I'm going to say right now: if you don't understand it, you will never heal from a narcissistic abusive relationship. I'll explain to you why right now.
Once you've gotten into a narcissistic abusive relationship, and your boundaries have been broken, and so there you are now receiving abuse, your boundaries are being broken during this abusive process, and the narcissist is taking from you what is called narcissistic supply. Your emotional responses, your adulation, your fear, your submission becomes their supply. Roughly speaking. This is not a nuanced description, but that's okay. It's good enough for us to understand. During this process, according to Sam, the narcissist will idealize you and put you on a pedestal. You will idealize the narcissist and put them on a pedestal. And then you'll create a relationship in which you begin to fuse, emerge. It's called the dual mothership model. Because unconsciously, you are being driven, you are being pressured, you are being press-ganged into a relationship with a narcissist where they're saying, "I will give you a mother's love and worship and adulation to you as though you are my child. It's boundaryless. I will see only the good in you, none of the bad." And you over time will experience this idealization and get addicted to it. In exchange, you will mother them. You will give them a mother's love. Doesn't matter the gender of the partners involved. Doesn't matter. This is a co-idealization process. This is the dual mothership model, and so this is the relationship we enter into.
I said I was going to teach you why it's so hard to abandon them. Leave them in every sense, not just physically, but also emotionally and spiritually, and what we can do about this. The reason it's so hard to abandon them is twofold. If you break up with a narcissist, they've become your mother in a certain sense. So you will experience the pain and anguish of separating from them as a child separating from a parent. This is not, not, not an adult-to-adult relationship. All the therapy, all of the advice, everything that you take that encourages you, that would work in a normal scenario, is backwards here. It's upside down. It's reversed. This is not an adult. And you are not an adult when you are with them. You can't be with them as an adult. Doesn't work. They're not with you as an adult. You're in some strange land. You're in a weird space here that Sam Vaknin calls the shared fantasy. You've actually entered a kind of virtual reality simulator with them of the shared fantasy. There's no adult-to-adult here. There's only child-to-parent, which if you know your transactional analysis, is pretty sick. So that means somebody has always got to be the savior in the scenario, and somebody always has to be the victim in the scenario. And these relationships wobble between savior, persecutor, and victim. That's called the Karpman triangle. We'll cover that on another day.
Why is it so hard to leave? Number one: If you split up with them, you will experience that as though you were a child being left by mother. And even worse, you will experience the guilt. Haven't you felt that guilt? When I say to you, "Oh, just grieve them and give up," you go, "Yeah, I can do that." Something tenses up inside of you. That's guilt. Why? Because you must abandon them as a mother abandons a child. And you will feel tremendous guilt and tremendous resistance to doing that. "I mustn't give up on them. I mustn't give up on them. I mustn't give up on them," will be the refrain that runs through your head when the very thing you should do to save your life is to grieve, despair, cry, scream, roll around on the floor. Do whatever you need to do as part of your grieving process and walk away. This is why. Because you've engaged in the co-idealization process of the dual mothership and you're now in a weird alternate reality. It's not your reality. It's somebody else's reality. It's a virtual reality. When we enter the narcissist space as mother, and they enter our space as mother, and we enter each other's spaces as a child, it's like getting into a matrix pod. It's like slipping inside of the matrix pod, taking a blue pill, and then being fed through the narcissistic supply symbiotic relationship a completely false reality. Don't you feel that way? Don't you already feel that? That you are living in some weird dream world, like with different rules? You're doing things you would never do. You're saying things you would never say. But you are doing it whilst you're with them. And you know it's bad, and you know it's ruining your life, but you cannot give up and leave.
I'll tell you what the solution is to all of this and all that trouble: you have to destroy the shared fantasy that you've created between the two of you and abandon that person as a mother abandoning a child and deal with those emotions. How do you destroy... I didn't write this down before, shared fantasy. Originally proposed by a psychoanalyst called Sandor in 1989. Sam Vaknin has adopted it and adapted it for narcissistically abusive relationships. This is a sick shared fantasy space. Even if you leave them, even if you never see them again, if you don't destroy the shared fantasy... So where I showed you you were two entities and you were conjoined. This space that conjoins you is the shared fantasy. If you never see them again, this continues. It lives on inside of you. (chuckles) You have to destroy this. If you don't, you'll just find another narcissist to fulfill the role again.
I have a course for destroying the shared fantasy for good. It's called "Unplug from the Matrix of Narcissistic Abuse." It's available on richardgrannon.com right now. You can do it with a therapist if you want to. If you have a therapist and you want them to contact us and get access to the course, we'll give it to them. You can also do the course on your own. It is not easy. It takes a lot of work. It takes about four months to complete.
I think that's enough for today. Ladies and gentlemen, thank you very much for your time and for your attention. And I look forward to speaking to you again very soon. If you enjoyed that, please like and subscribe and get my free e-book here. Thank you.
Okay folks, the new course, "Unplug from the Matrix of Narcissistic Abuse," is out now. And if you're interested in finding out more about that, please click the link below.