The first thing I want to mention is how you give up your power to a narcissist. You can repeatedly push against their judgments toward you. Let’s pause right there. It’s no secret that narcissists are highly judgmental. They have their agenda and their ideas about who you’re supposed to be or what the correct opinion is supposed to be. How many times have you gotten into nonproductive discussions with them, if you want to call it a discussion, talking about how your opinions or your preferences or your ways make a lot of sense, and you just push back, saying, “Quit judging me like this” or “Quit pronouncing me as being a nobody”? You know what the narcissist is thinking when you do that? It’s like, “Ah, got you going, don’t I?” And they actually take delight when they sense that you’re pushing against their judgment. It’s like, “Well, I must be a pretty important person because my opinion matters quite a bit.” And so they don’t back off; they double down and try to become even more overpowering, as evidenced by their stubbornness and their argumentative nature.
The second way that you can hand over your power to a narcissist is, and this kind of goes right along with it, you feel the need to justify who you are. I want you to think, how many times have you felt like, “Well, I’ve got to come up with a real good explanation for why I do the things that I do and why I feel and react.” So you explain, “Well, here’s my reasoning and here’s what I’m all about.” How many times does that narcissist come back and say, “Well, based on your justification of who you are, I guess I’m just going to have to reorient everything I do with you again”? They’re thinking, “This is great news. You’re working really hard to make yourself look good to me. That must mean that you think that my opinion is necessary.” And it feeds their egotism. The more you overly justify who you are, now, this takes us into a third pattern that you can get into where you’re handing over your power to them, and that is it’s kind of a mindset that you carry, and that is you just hope against hope that you can, in fact, gain some understanding from the narcissist toward you.
The Eight Common Lies Told by Narcissists
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