Transcription
Have you ever been in any relationship, but certainly a narcissistic relationship, and had the question to yourself, "Do they even care about me?" And you might go on to think, "Well, they must not care about me, or they wouldn't be doing X or Y." Some people will ask, "Do they even notice me in this relationship?" These are understandable questions. They're also tricky questions. But in a way, they are the wrong questions.
What's difficult is that in many narcissistic relationships, if not most, the narcissistic person isn't in a relationship with you. They are in a relationship, for lack of a better word, with a narrative. So, what does this mean? What it means is the narcissistic person is in a in a relationship with the idea of a spouse and the idea of what marriage is. That they are in a relationship with the idea of what a family is supposed to supposed to be, or idea of what a son is supposed to be, or daughter, or a child, or an I the idea of what a mother is supposed to be, or father is supposed to be, or parent, or child. You understand what I'm saying, right? That they're in a relationship in that sense with a story. The story that they have written about you. A story about what they want. A story about marriage, a story about family, a story about work, or vacation.
In this way, you, who's in a relationship with someone, basically become like a character in the story. The entitlement of narcissism is that, as far as the narcissistic person is concerned, there's a way things are supposed to be for them. And it's supposed to be that way. Listen, we all have a little of this, even if we're not narcissistic. Of course, we want things to be a certain way, right? You want it to be sunny on the day of your picnic. You want families to be nice and attuned and fun and safe and pleasant. We would want a marriage with a to be with a person who is our person and who is also a friend and wants to do stuff with us. We want to be a friendship to be fun and open. Like, yeah, those I guess those are narratives. We want them to be realities and they can be, should be. We even have this around circumstances in our life. Like, we want our vacation to have nice weather or that we'd get to sit in a fancy French cafe or see certain monuments. And there can be a bit of a bummer when we get to the vacation place and it's crowded or the weather is atrocious or the prices are extortionate. Life, people, most of us, the vast majority, we have expectations. And when those expectations are dashed, we don't like it. That's human. And that's where this thing of emotional regulation comes in, right? Healthy people regulate when they're disappointed.
Well, with narcissistic folks, this is all quite different because narcissistic folks are, as I said, in a relationship with a narrative. If you don't show up the way that they want, the way that they want the narrative to be, they'll get angry. And sometimes it's not even your behavior. It's just life not working out the way that they want it. The rainy day, the crowded cafe, the not being able to get the house they want, the thing not turning out the way they want, right? Think of it as an angry film director who is upset at the actors for not turning in the performance that they want, but at least there the actors have a job. And that's why it doesn't feel good when it's your own life, cuz you don't feel like your job is to be an actor in someone else's film.
Now, sometimes the narcissistic person gets bored with the story. Marriage is a or long-term committed relationships are a great example of that. For narcissistic folks, marriage is a great story until it isn't. I mean, the whole thing, right? The courtship, the engagement, ooh, I got someone I'm I'm not going to be abandoned. They're not quite aware of that one, but that does feel good inside of them. The optics of marriage and anniversaries, maybe kids and a new house and vacations and holidays. It's all the narrative of marriage, right? But then it solely comes into the stuff like, who's picking up the kids and I need to work this weekend and you forgot the milk and can you bring in the trash cans and why the hell won't you put the toilet seat down? That part doesn't really work with the grandiosity and the selfishness. It's too ordinary. The narrative shifts. And either way, for many narcissistic people, they get bored or frustrated or their demands are relentless and unrealistic or they just find a new narrative, whatever it is. They no longer want to be in a relationship with the existing narrative, which might be you. They weren't in a relationship with you. It was a story. They were in a relationship with the story in many ways, that's where it comes from. It's not you. They just weren't down with this story anymore.
This narrative thing actually is often why holidays and special events are so fraught with narcissistic folks. It could be classical family holidays like Thanksgiving, special events like weddings and birthdays or anniversaries or Mother's Day, Father's Day, commercial holidays like Valentine's Day. There are strong, visible narratives for narcissistic folks. And either they have a grandiose attachment to the holiday, right? How it has to look, rigid rules, the perfect photos, how it has to be. Or there can be utter contempt for these kinds of rituals. And the narrative is, "This sucks. You suck. This is all a capitalist cabal set up to make me feel guilty for not getting you stupid flowers." Either way this day, this event, this holiday gets ruined. You either don't meet the unrealistic unrealistic perfection bar that they set, or real life happens, or a kid gets sick, or a snowstorm cancels flights, or the oven stops working, and then they become incensed. Or they moan and groan and behave like a victim at your birthday dinner cuz it's not about them. The holiday or special day or special event can't just happen or be spontaneous. It's a narrative. So they either come in with an unrealistic, self-centered agenda, which is bound to fail, and everyone is going to face the wrath, or they simply, like I said, have contempt for it and ruin it with their moodiness, their grievances, and their anger. The narrative, the story can mean that the expectations are unrealistically, grandiosely high, or that nothing goes right and you don't plan well enough blame shifting or you are simply not delivering the story that they wanted.
Now bosses narcissistic bosses might do this if you're the bringer of bad news. If you come in and say hey I just saw the message the funding isn't coming through or we're not going to be able to keep that location or the the group of that particular hotel won't take you know take let us do the event or we won't make our sales quota. The bosses narrative may be that this is actually a success and they may gaslight you or dismiss you like I'm not listening to any of that la la la if the reality of the situation doesn't line up with their narrative in most cases they kill the messenger.
Now obviously nowhere is this more clear than in narcissistic family systems. Narcissistic parents harnessing their children as part of their narratives and frankly the family sort of stuck in a big play playing parts and roles that feed that narrative we're a close-knit family we're a play hard family. When it doesn't sort of work or feel safe to anyone except the people most wedded to that narrative who are often either narcissists or enablers. But in all fairness and this has gotten exponentially worse in the era of social media. Again all of us are guilty I guess in some part for holding agendas narratives if you will the perfectly curated Instagram pictures keeping up with other people the fairy tales we tell ourselves. And we may not only get disappointed when these narratives aren't met, we get so lost in them that we want them to sustain. And this can become a part of phenomena such as betrayal blindness. So, that the unsafety that comes from encoding the bad stuff, so we don't encode the bad stuff. Well, that allows the narrative, and again, the safety that comes with that narrative, to persist.
People aren't perfect, okay? But narratives and stories can be. But stories are stories. They're things that happen in our heads. They're things that we're knitting in our heads, but that are not connected to the realities of life. But back to the original question. Don't they care about me? Can't they see what they're doing? Can't they see what they're doing and how it's affecting other people? No. Your feelings are not part of their narrative structure. At best, your feelings are inconvenient. And when you can see it as a they're actually in a relationship with a narrative, which doesn't account for me as a person, it can loosen it up and make it feel a little less personal. It doesn't feel good, but it can feel less personal. You see it more like you've been recruited to be in a production where you can be cut from the cast or recast in a different role or be told you're not playing the role correctly whenever it works for the angry director. All to say, the best we can do is to keep an eye on our own narratives and how we get pulled into them and the misery our narratives can bring. And in narcissistic relationships, especially when we are thinking about narratives and wondering, what is it about me? Don't they care about me? You got to remember, really, it's not you. Thanks again.