Is It Possible to Have a Relationship with a Narcissist?
People often ask, can you have a relationship with a narcissist? I think this is one of the questions everyone asks themselves shortly after discovering that a person is indeed showing the predictable patterns of narcissistic abuse.
The short answer is yes you can. But at a tremendous cost.
The better question is, how much are you willing to pay in order to maintain that relationship? That question brings the power of choice back to you.
In this episode I am going to address 3 parameters of this topic on trying to maintain relationships with abusers and manipulators:
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No Contact is ideal.
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Respond vs. React when 100% No Contact isn’t possible or you’re not ready yet.
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You’re not a failure if you can’t manage the boundaries. Refer back to #1.
1. By now you’ve surely heard about No Contact and why it’s so important to set this boundary after abuse.
In case you’re just hearing about No Contact, check out the playlist I made on No Contact. You’ll find it on the main page of my YouTube channel when you scroll down.
Now, while most people have heard that No Contact is ideal, not everyone wants to take that advice. I often hear people say “I can’t go No Contact” when they are actually in situations where they could set that boundary.
The only situation where you absolutely can’t be 100% NC is when you have children with the narcissist or other manipulator because the law usually requires you to have at least one open channel of communication in order to manage the sharing and wellbeing of your children. In that situation, you’re always going to have some contact with the abuser so it’s important to understand this means the absolute most minimal contact possible. This means you end the personal relationship and instead you have a business relationship where you only discuss the sharing of custody, the children’s needs and expenses. Any attempt the abuser makes to talk about anything else, to meet up and chat, to bring up past personal issues, you completely ignore.
When your ex is making that really difficult, I would recommend using Our Family Wizard or asking your attorney how you can hire a third party in your area to manage the contact so you don’t have to be directly in contact with the abuser. Kim Saeed has a lot of valuable resources for people in that situation and she understands it from personal experience. I don’t have kids so this isn’t something I have to deal with and it’s also not a topic that I can speak on in depth because I don’t have personal experience raising kids with a narcissist. So for those of you who have kids, whenever you hear me or other experts in the field talking about NC, remember for you that’s a modified form of NC which means the very least amount of contact possible simply to manage the needs and wellbeing of your children, and no personal relationship. Period.
Now some people who aren’t co-parenting with a narcissist say, “But Meredith, you don’t understand. I can’t just cut off my ___.” Oh I get it. I said those same words to myself a few years ago.
People usually learn the hard way. I did too, I ain’t gonna lie.
It’s much easier to go NC with a partner of a few months or years than a family member who’s been there your whole life, whose relationship with you is so laced with guilt, obligation and fear that your mind maybe can’t conceive of a reality in which you’re not in contact. If you’re trying to break free from abusive family members, you will likely need to move through layers of experimenting, lessons and growth until you finally decide to go NC.
From the first moment I realized my mom is a narcissist in Jan 2014 when my cousin came to visit and told me that she had been to therapy and realized her mom is a narcissist, to the point when I finally went NC with my mother in Aug 2017, those 3.5 years were full of trial and error, going in and out of denial, building more and stronger boundaries every time another breech and setback occurred, continually feeling poisoned by her energy even when our relationship was down to just a few text messages per month toward the end. There were a lot of painful experiences and struggles in between.
From my perspective now, I would say I put myself through unnecessary suffering by not cutting her off sooner. However, maybe that’s how I needed to learn the lesson once and for all.
I even had to get stung by a scorpion to learn about the story of the frog and the scorpion. In case you haven’t heard it, the story is about a scorpion who asks a frog to take him across a river because he can’t swim and the frog can. The frog says no way, you’re a scorpion and you’ll sting me! The scorpion says no no you see, I won’t sting you because then we will both die. So the frog believes the scorpion’s promise because it makes rational sense and he agrees to carry him across the river. Of course the scorpion stings him halfway across because that’s the nature of a venomous creature.
The moral of the story is don’t expect people to be something they’re not unless you want to risk your life. When we know we are dealing with an abuser, we have to protect ourselves with No Contact. I learned the hard way through many abusive relationships and the scorpion sting before I finally accepted that my mother’s influence in my life was toxic and putting my life at risk. Every contact I entertained from her was risking my health, sanity, wellbeing, peace of mind, success and everything else good I worked for in my life.
Maintaining even a little bit of personal contact with her kept reinforcing to my nervous system that this is acceptable behavior so naturally I kept falling into new abusers, even if for a short while. I had to own the responsibility of actively participating in my own demise by maintaining that minimal relationship with my mother. In doing so I was training my nervous system to keep recognizing abuse as “love” and “home.” Of course other abusers felt comfortable and familiar. That was what I always knew.
Going NC is a boundary and also a reprogramming of your nervous system to stop confusing abuse as love. The only way to teach your subconscious this important distinction, is to cut off relationships with people who abuse you. Have a zero tolerance policy for use, abuse and manipulation. That creates a new neural pathway as you retrain your brain and subconscious mind to stop choosing the same thing over and over again and to move toward that which is healthy.
It doesn’t make you strong and tough to keep abusive and manipulative people in your life. It makes you a serial victim. Keeping just one manipulative, abusive person in your life is still training your nervous system to tolerate abuse. Being a martyr has no benefits and it’s toxic to your wellbeing. There’s no award for martyrdom. It doesn’t make you a saint or a good person when you keep tolerating an abusive relative just because they’re family, or an abusive friend because they don’t have anyone else, or an abusive partner because they can tell a good pity ploy. When you know you’re dealing with a manipulator or abuser and you choose to maintain the relationship, that makes you an enabler.
It’s a relationship of inevitable harm when:
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someone has no self-responsibility
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someone is using blame-shifting
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someone is stonewalling important conversations and feelings
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someone makes you feel small so they can feel bigger
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someone sucks the life-force energy out of you, when even a simple conversation leads to exhaustion
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someone undermines and undervalue your joy and success
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someone transfers their insecurities to you through triangulation
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someone is constantly emotionally provoking you because they want your reaction (narcissistic supply)
When you’re trying to maintain a relationship like that, you’re doing so at the expense of your self-worth, health, sanity, peace, success, sense of self… At a certain point you’ve gotta get real and ask yourself: How much more of your life will you sacrifice?
Now if you keep thinking that one day you can finally have that breakthrough conversation with the abuser when your rationale and logical points will finally convince them something is wrong with their behavior and they’ll change, you’re fooling yourself. That’s the trauma bond leading you to put yourself in harm’s way again and again.
NC is ideal so you stop re-traumatizing yourself. The more abuse you endure, the more complex the PTSD becomes and the longer it takes to recover. I’m speaking from personal experience. I had to learn that the hard way through 9-10 abusive relationships over the last couple decades of my adulthood, and on top of that the bosses, coworkers, business partners, friends, and other random abusers that showed up in my life because I still hadn’t learned the lesson, that actually originated in my family. I wish this information was available to me then. I could’ve saved myself a lot of trauma and a lot of years of recovery. That’s exactly why I put this information out for you, to help you save yourself from going through that.
If you want to go NC but something is still blocking you, ask yourself: How much more of your life will you sacrifice for someone who clearly doesn’t care about you or worse yet pretends to care about you but their patterns of behavior reveal just the opposite?
Going NC is empowering because it helps you own the responsibility of your choices in life. When you know you’re dealing with a manipulator or abuser and you choose to keep maintaining that relationship, you’re actively participating in your failure, your illness, your powerlessness, your loss of self and your suffering. We are willing to do that when we don’t love and value ourselves.
If you can relate to that, then your job is to work on radical self-care so you can rebuild self-love, self-worth, self-trust and self-esteem. If you need help with that, you’ll love my course, the 12-Week SANA Series. It will take you on a journey through the next 3 months of developing important foundational self-care practices and healthy mindsets that set yourself up for success in your recovery after abuse.
2. Respond vs. React when 100% No Contact isn’t possible or you’re not ready yet.
If you haven’t gotten the courage yet to go NC or you’re coparenting with a narcissist or maybe you're planning on leaving your job because you work with a narcissist but you need to hang on a little while longer until you line up your next gig, then meanwhile you need to master the art of responding instead of reacting. Even when you have the option to go NC, it’s really hard to make that decision so most people start with learning how to manage manipulators and abusers better. That’s where respond vs. react comes in.
Narcissists and other manipulators want your emotional reaction. This can be positive or negative, either way this emotional, energetic currency called narcissistic supply feeds them and makes them stronger.
The strategy of respond instead of react is going to be very important if you’re coparenting with a narcissist.
You might think that by reacting and yelling or throwing something, making some other grand gesture of aggression or desperation, or even using passive aggression like slamming a door, that this makes you look strong and tough, but actually just the opposite is true. Abusers know that. They know that when they can push your buttons to react and you make yourself look crazy, unhinged and abusive, it’s a double win for them.
This is the trap of Reactive Abuse. Abusers will get you to focus on your reaction to the abuse instead of the abuse itself. They will use your lack of self-control and integrity against you. You are not responsible for the abuse however you are 100% responsible for your actions and that includes the way you respond or react to the abuse. You can blame the narcissist all you want for “making you do that” but now you’ve lowered yourself to their level and you’re using the same excuse they use when they say, “you made me hit you” “you made me cheat on you.”
Responding instead of reacting is about stepping up to another level. It’s about taking the high road. It’s about owning 100% of the responsibility for how you show up. It’s about self-control even when you want to lose control. It’s about standing 100% in integrity with yourself when someone else invites you to step out of integrity and get yourself in trouble. It’s about showing up with your power and not giving your power away to anyone else. The moment you react, you’ve given your power away. You’ve lost self-control. You’ve stepped out of integrity. That path will lead you to have deep regrets and will require a lot of self-forgiveness work after you realize how wrong you were and how much of your power you gave away.
Responding instead of reacting is about setting boundaries with YOURSELF that stop you from internalizing what the narcissist does or says and prevent you from carrying out their agenda. You’ve got to understand that they want you to lose control. They want you to look crazy, unhinged and desperate and the more people you do that in front of, the better you make the narcissist look and the worse you look to others.
If you absolutely have to deal with a narcissist, learn to master your response so you can save yourself a lot of emotional turmoil and energetic exhaustion. It’s still going to be emotionally provoking and draining to deal with manipulators and abusers, to maintain these boundaries, but you’ll lose a lot less if you can master your response.
So what is it exactly? It’s much like the Gray Rock technique. You start acting boring, uninteresting, uninterested, unopinionated, uninvolved in the drama. You stop taking responsibility for their feelings and problems. You stop entertaining their provoking conversations by going on the defensive. You stop giving them an emotional reaction, whether positive or negative to anything they say or do.
Maybe you’re thinking OMG how am I supposed to do that? You have no idea the lengths they will go to to get me to react! Oh I know. And that’s why this isn’t easy. If it was easy everyone would be doing it. This work is about mastering yourself and that’s hard work.
Keep in mind that when you suddenly take away the narcissistic supply they were used to getting from you in your reactions, they will hate this. They’ll call you cold, abusive, uncaring, condescending and other names. That’s okay. Act like you don’t care. You don’t even notice. Their statements don’t reflect who you really are. They are simply saying those things to try to provoke your reaction. They will likely escalate their attempts to get a reaction out of you so you’ve got to be on your A game. Stay the course and don’t give in.
Sometimes you can use deflection phrases like: hmm, that’s interesting, could be, that’s possible, maybe, “I’m sorry you feel that way”, etc. If they’re unleashing havoc on you, you might say something like, “I can see you’re very upset and I won’t tolerate this treatment so I’m leaving now/hanging up and when you are ready to have an adult conversation, we can discuss this.”
Sometimes dropping the ball entirely with silence, ignoring it, hanging up or walking out of the environment is the best solution, especially when they won’t stop or listen to your boundary.
Sometimes you may want to redirect the responsibility back to them when they’re playing victim about a situation not related to you: “That sounds frustrating. What do you think you’ll do about it?”
Maybe it’s someone who always complains about their life, vomiting up all their drama and toxicity at you in order to extract narcissistic supply in the form of sympathy, which is incredibly draining so you can say to them: “I’m sorry you’re suffering. I need to get back to work now, I hope you feel better!” You’ll need to be willing to walk away or hang up if they ignore your boundary and keep whinging trying to get you to stay there and take it like a garbage bin.
Or maybe it’s someone in the family who calls you to gossip about family members or share their embarrassing medical issues in great detail so you can interrupt them and say: “I really don’t want to hear about this. If you’d like to talk about something else that’s fine and if not then I need to go.”
Keep in mind that your ability to master responding vs. reacting doesn’t mean the abuser or manipulator will stop doing those things that they do. They’ll keep trying tactics to try to find something that presses your buttons. You’ll always be having to manage these boundaries, playing a form of energetic and verbal taichi in order to maintain the relationship, which is exhausting. It’s inevitable that one day they’ll catch you off guard and you’ll slip and react. That’s okay. Forgive yourself and strengthen your boundaries right away. Use those experiences to remind yourself how toxic that relationship is to your life. Let it be a wake up call that maybe it’s time for you to set more definite boundaries like NC.
Even though you’re learning not to internalize the things they say and do and not to react to those things, you’re still going to feel it. You’re going to master the poker face where you don’t let them see the emotional upset in the moment. But as soon as you get to privacy and safety, you’ll need to make time to process those emotions.
You’ll have a lot of emotions to process so this will entail a lot of work and if you’re still in regular contact, you’re going to be constantly having to set aside time and energy to do emotional processing. At some point hopefully it will dawn on you that all that time you’re wasting, all that emotional energy, you could be using to enjoy life, to learn something new, to explore something new, to love yourself and others, to reach another level of success you never thought was possible for you.
It’s important to remember that unless you are forced to have minimal contact by law in the case of coparenting, this is a choice you’re making by maintaining contact. The boundaries of responding instead of reacting will help a lot, but you’ll always be on the gerbil wheel, expending a lot of time and energy and not getting anywhere. This is why responding vs reacting is best for managing short-term, temporary situations until you can go NC.
3. You’re not a failure if you can’t manage the boundaries.
This is a hard realization to come to. What will likely happen if you choose to maintain contact with someone abusive that you could go NC with (again that means anyone who isn’t the coparent of your children who by law you must remain in contact with), is an eventual breakdown. This is normal because you’re human.
Abusers will push you to your edge and even when you’re doing a great job managing the responding vs reacting boundary, most abusers will eventually cross the line of no return. This isn’t always a direct action they take or something they say, it might be more of a life crisis that happens to you that rips you out of your daily grind and forces you to look at the ugly truth you didn’t want to see. Like a scorpion sting.
You’re bound to fall at times trying to manage the boundaries with abusive people because you’re dealing with boundary bulldozers. It’s their superpower, it’s what they do best. They are always cooking up new, creative ways to get you. They’ll catch you when you’re down or when you’re feeling weak, or even in moments of non-mindfulness when you’re distracted with life’s other stresses. When you fall, not if but when, remind yourself, you’re not a failure if you can’t manage the boundaries. When you get to that point, I recommend you refer back to #1: No Contact is ideal.
I’m going to play for you a 4min clip of a voice note I recorded late at night while laying in bed on June 10 2017, just 2 months before I went NC with my mother, and toward the end of my recovery from the scorpion sting. This clip is raw and vulnerable and I’m sharing it with you because I’m sure you’ll relate.
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You’re not a failure if you can’t manage the boundaries with a toxic person. Sometimes you can’t. Sometimes you get to a point where you realize you’re powerless to fight that and you’re done fighting that.
You have a different fight. You have a purposeful fight. A meaningful fight. Something worth it versus wasting all your energy and time fighting something that you’ll always lose. You’re literally powerless in front of that. That’s what you realize when you try and try to manage the boundaries and it’s not working.
There’s all kinds of collateral damage. Usually. Unless that person had no ties to anyone else in your life. But if you’re talking about family members there’s definitely collateral damage. It’s going to send tidal waves out. It’s the point of no return. It changes everything.
Other people might try to convince you that you’re a failure or something is wrong with you. You didn’t fail.
You won because you took the reins of your destiny back in your hands. You redirected your fight, you redirected your energy toward something that’s worth it, toward something that’s going to bring you joy.
Instead of more pain and struggle and exhaustion and confusion and feeling beaten down. Enough of that. Sometimes we just get to this point where we’ve got to stop fighting that.
Is there something in your life that you’re fighting that’s a losing battle?
There’s the fights that we need to fight and then there’s the fights that we waste our precious energy on. Then we don’t get ahead in life, we don’t better and move forward because we’re wasting all our energy in this bottomless pit black hole thing that’s a losing battle. You can’t fight the nature of the blackhole. You certainly don’t want to get pulled into the event horizon. There’s nothing you can do at that point.
Don’t waste your fight on something that’s not worth it any more. Save your energy. Ask yourself, is this worth it?
Before you get all wrapped up in it physically, mentally, emotionally or spiritually. Is this really worth it?
Is this the fight I want to fight every day? Or am I done with this?
Because it only works if you participate. But if you opt out, there’s no more fight over there. The person is just going to fight themselves or find someone else to fight with. Meanwhile you can conserve your energy for the good fight.
The good fight.
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Is it worth it? Is this the fight I want to invest in?
I couldn’t quite see at that time that I was painting my own prison bars. They weren’t real. I could walk out at any point. I was keeping myself stuck there. I even saw the door open at points but instead of walking out, I closed the door on myself. I participated in my own imprisonment. I continued to reinforce the feeling that I was a failure, something my mother would love for me to feel because then I wouldn’t live my true potential and purpose. If it were up to her, instead of doing this for a living, I would be working a job at the mall.
Now if you’d told me that 4 years ago I wouldn’t have believed you because I couldn’t possibly imagine that my life would turn around like this since I was still living in that prison then. But now looking back I can reflect: What if I’d stayed in relationship with her? What if I’d surrendered to the life she wanted for me and the failure of a person she believed me to be? What if I never took a stand against the abuse and never invested everything I had into living my purpose? If I had surrendered and gone to the mall to work for minimum wage in some kind of soul-sucking job, how many people wouldn’t have been helped?
Now you gotta ask yourself that same question. What is the cost of you not taking action to cut off the toxic people in your life? How many people are not going to get help if you don’t take action now? If not now, when? What would your future self say to you right here and now listening to this podcast?
There’s a debate about “they make me feel” vs. “I feel”. This really it comes down to your responsibility. If you’re with someone who does things that make you feel insecure, anxious, uptight and hypervigilant, you are choosing to feel that way by keeping that person in your life. You can’t just force yourself not feel the way you do. So stop hanging out with that person if you don’t like how you feel when you hang out with them and after. It’s your responsibility to remove yourself from that environment. It’s not your responsibility to try to change them by teaching them how to be a decent human being.
If you’re sticking around, you need to ask yourself why. If you’re still telling yourself “I can’t leave. I can’t not be in contact with that person.” and if this isn’t the coparent of one of your children, then I ask you, “Really? Or are you just painting your own prison bars?” It doesn’t have to be today, tomorrow, this week. Maybe you need time. You need a plan to get out. You need to take actions and that might take time. Okay, so set a deadline and take action toward it, which is very different than just staying in a situation and telling yourself that you can’t leave. So this debate really comes down to asking yourself, "are you painting your own prison bars?” When you can own the responsibility of your choices, you’re no longer a victim. That’s when you become a survivor.
I know my advice can be tough love. I’m sure it’s hard to hear sometimes. I also think this is what draws certain people to my content, because they know that what I say is not sugar-coated, it’s not going to coddle people into remaining victims, it’s not going to commiserate or help you indulge in narc-bashing without owning your own self-responsibility. My advice is served straight, no chaser so you can get directly to the heart of the issues, so you can take decisive action to transform yourself and your life after abuse.
After you go NC, you still need to unsubscribe from the narcissist’s reality because their distorted reality, their false beliefs and all the degrading things they said and did to you remains programmed in your subconscious mind. This will happen even if the abuser is dead and gone from this earthly plane. If you’ve been NC with the abusers in your life but you’re still struggling with self-sabotage due to the old abuse programming, check out my new course: Ending Self-Sabotage After Narcissistic Abuse so you can learn how to reprogram your mind like a mental ninja!
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