Tags
Abuse, family, healing, help, hope, narcissism, recovery, relationships, toxic
I found this interesting post on the Facebook page Recovering from a Relationship with a Narcissist. The post was speaking to a partner of a narcissist but for this summary I made it generic – partner, sibling, child. I recommend you read the whole post.
HOW TO LIVE WITH A NARCISSIST…. if you decide to stay or go back
- The narcissist won’t change. To change you need to acknowledge your issues but narcissists don’t have issues – only other people have issues.
- Forget about trying to have boundaries. If you try to enforce your boundaries, the narcissist will pout generally make your life miserable because narcissists are all about power over you and having control. Note that the narcissist NEVER apologizes, at least not sincerely
- You will live in a “no win” situation. Narcissists are not about “win-win” but sees the world in terms of winners and losers.
- The narcissist will begin or continue to bad mouth/gossip about you to their friends to create “flying monkeys” – people who take their side – and destabilize your support systems/self-care/recover
- You’ll need to develop a high tolerance for toxic behaviour AND THEN, watching the narcissist fool everyone, in public, into thinking how nice they are.
The author concluded with this: “The question we all face is whether we are up for all this. It’s important to honestly face the truth when you make a decision. When I finally did, 20 years in, and I realized the narcissist would never change, I made the decision to get out.”
cultural atheist 
What a hard decision and a very personal one. One can only imagine the difficulties of loving someone but finally realizing and evaluating your ability to tolerate or move on. These are the decisions which I often hear in my quiet reflective moments.
I suspect that loving oneself and/or seeing our worth is fairly key.
Yes, I believe you are correct. Is it me or do you know of any stats suggesting if this is on the increase or decrease? My first thought would be its on the increase. I base this on people seeming to be more “I” focused.
Not sure what you mean by “this.”
In your travels and work in the communities are you encountering more individuals that display narcissistic traits. I am seeming to find in my community work and travels that this type behavior is becoming more prevalent among the younger generation.
I see what you mean. Have we discovered if we are both familiar with Brené Brown? In “Daring Greatly” she notes:
“And while laypeople are using narcissism as a catchall diagnosis for everything from arrogance to rude behavior, researchers and helping professionals are testing the concept’s elasticity in every way imaginable.
Recently a group of researchers conducted a computer analysis of three decades of hit songs. The researchers reported a statistically significant trend toward narcissism and hostility in popular music. In line with their hypothesis, they found a decrease in usages such as we and us and an increase in I and me. The researchers also reported a decline in words related to social connection and positive emotions, and an increase in words related to anger and antisocial behavior, such as hate or kill.
Two of the researchers from that study, Jean Twenge and Keith Campbell, authors of the book The Narcissism Epidemic, argue that the incidence of narcissistic personality disorder has more than doubled in the United States in the last ten years.”
I’m not familiar with Brene Brown but am going to learn now. Wow, these are some great and staggering facts revealed. Thank you for turning us on to these studies. I will be placing another Amazon order, lol. So, I guess my observations are real in that this disorder has more than doubled. One can only imagine 5 to 10 years from now. Some scary times ahead. Thanks again for making the time to share these details.
I am an Audible subscriber and I have extra credits I use to give gifts to people. There is a Brené Brown audiobook called “Men, Women and Worthiness.” It’s about an hour long I think. I will gift it to you if you want to try it out.
For a really short intro to her work, go to TED.com and search for her couple of talks.
This is so kind of you but I had just pushed the send order button on Amazon, lol. That book sounded really informative. I’ll check out the TED video. Thank you for your kindness!!!!!
I don’t think I’ve seen lots of NPD but then this is fairly new to me. There are two people that I’m pretty sure have NPD but they could be just really self-centred with really poor relationship skills and unconverted hearts.
Yes, I believe you have a point. There is a subtle difference between self-centered and narcissistic and so much truth to the unconverted heart issue.