The next trait that a narcissist can have is a need for control. And the reason for this intense need is that they want to keep this facade of being perfect and superior. And if they don’t have full control, they can’t do that. And so they’ll use a lot of different forms of manipulation. One of those is gas lighting, right? You’re not remembering it correctly. That’s not what happened. Or love bombing. When they shower us with attention and affection, they can make it confusing. We can think, you know, but they are great people and they do these things as a way to get us to do what they want. And if that doesn’t work, then they bring in what a lot of people online call the “flying monkeys,” which are essentially people who participate in their smear campaigns.
These will be kind of what I would call casual people in their lives that haven’t realized who they are yet, but they will listen to their side, agree with them, and then participate in shaming and blaming other people for the issue. And why do people do this? It’s because people with narcissistic tendencies are really fragile, right? It’s often born out of trauma. And so we put up this fake facade to kind of protect that squishy inside part. And so if things aren’t playing out the way that we want, it can feel out of control, and that can be scary. It could reveal that soft inside, right? And so we’ll manipulate and try to control in order to keep up that facade so that we feel safe and okay.
Another important trait is a complete lack of boundaries. Again, because a narcissist is going to need a lot of control and wants to have everything just perfect, they’ll struggle to see where we end and they begin. And this can happen a lot when our parent is a narcissist and we’re the child of one. They can feel like we are just an extension of them. We’re not independent. Anything we do is representative or reflects poorly or well on them, right? And they’ll want to get in on and turn the attention to them when we have a success, and they’ll want to disown us, call us disrespectful, and all sorts of names when we do something they don’t want.
This lack of boundaries makes it really difficult to be in a relationship with a narcissist because, again, there’s no independence there. And if you try to uphold boundaries or put them into place, they will usually lash out, throw a tantrum, or at the very least push back against them and act like you never had that conversation with them in the first place.
11 Signs You’re In A Relationship With A Narcissist
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