1. “I’ve decided to go to counseling”
After numerous silent treatments, disappearing acts, and bait-and-switch schemes carried out by your toxic partner, you tell them you can’t live this way any longer and give them the much-needed boot. They come back later, look at you with a straight face and all sincerity and announce, “I’ve been thinking about what you said. I know it’s important to you and I want to make this work, so I’ve decided to go to counseling.”
Reality – The illusion that they are willing to “make it work” and go to counseling is one of the narcissist’s favorite tricks. This may be in regards to their anger management issues, alcoholism, excessive jealousy, infidelity, or sex/porn addiction (often, a combination of all of the above).
It’s nothing more than a way to buy time. They have no intention of being honest in the therapist’s chair and, in fact, will use the opportunity to make you look unhinged, using their trip to the Dr.’s office as a way of learning the lingo to make you look like the unstable one, which causes you to further believe you’re the one with problems and feel lucky that the Narcissist “has agreed to stay with you”.
As a person who loves the narcissist, you may deeply want to believe that your toxic partner is being sincere because you hope they’ll finally go back to being the person they were in the beginning of your relationship. They may even secrete a few tears in an attempt to drive home the point, but the unfortunate truth is that a large population of narcissists employ this trick and in no time, it’s back to business as usual – and the abuse is much worse.
You’ll be hard-pressed to find a single documented case where a victim of narcissistic abuse has seen a happy ending due to the narcissist’s humanitarian, soul-searching “decision to go to counseling”. In fact, it usually ends in the victim needing his or her own therapy because of the tricks and mind-games that ensue once they are deceived into giving the relationship another chance.
2. “I met them the last time we were broken up!”
How The Narcissist Views Your Silence
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