6 Weird Ways Survivors Of Narcissistic Abuse Behave Around Kind People
The third strange behavior is that you thank people excessively for doing the bare minimum — fawning. Someone holds the door open for you and you thank them three times. A friend checks in and you send a paragraph-long message telling them how grateful you are. Someone does something small and thoughtful and you react like they just donated a kidney. It’s like being stranded in a desert for years and then someone hands you a glass of water. You don’t just drink it — you cry over it. You hold it like it’s made of gold. You thank that person over and over because you can’t believe someone would just hand you water without expecting you to crawl for it first. The narcissist made basic kindness feel like a luxury. They made you earn every crumb of affection. So when someone gives you a whole slice of bread freely, you don’t know what to do with it. You over-thank because deep down you still believe love is something you must pay for or earn. Every time someone gives it to you for free, it feels like a glitch in the system.
The fourth strange behavior is that you struggle to receive compliments. When someone gives you a genuine compliment, you swat it away immediately. They tell you you look beautiful and you say, “Oh, this old thing.” They tell you you did an amazing job and you reply, “It was nothing — anyone could have done it.” They tell you they admire you and you physically squirm, like the words are burning your skin. It’s like someone throws you a flower and you duck because in your world, things that fly toward you are supposed to hurt. The narcissist used compliments like a fisherman uses bait — dangling something beautiful just to hook you. They told you you were incredible right before they ripped you apart. They built you up so they could tear you down from a greater height. So when a kind person says something genuinely beautiful about you, your brain cannot accept it as real. You deflect. You minimize. You redirect, because something inside you still believes that if you accept the compliment, the punishment that follows will hurt twice as much.
That fear of taking up space goes even further than deflecting compliments. It affects how you exist around others entirely. The fifth behavior is that you apologize for existing. You say sorry for asking a question. You say sorry for having an opinion. You say sorry for being hungry, for being tired, for needing help — for taking up space in a room you have every right to be in. You walk through life like a guest in your own home, knocking on your own front door and asking permission to enter. The narcissist trained you to believe your needs were an inconvenience, your emotions a burden, and the very act of wanting something selfish. So you learned to shrink. You made yourself so small you could slip through the cracks of a conversation without disturbing anyone. Now you carry that smallness into every interaction with every kind person. You apologize before you speak. You apologize after you speak. You apologize for apologizing. The kind person standing in front of you has no idea why you keep saying sorry for breathing.
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