She will deliver generalized barbs that are almost impossible to rebut (always in a loving, caring tone): “You were always difficult” “You can be very difficult to love” “You never seemed to be able to finish anything” “You were very hard to live with” “You’re always causing trouble” “No one could put up with the things you do.” She will deliver slams in a sidelong way – for example she’ll complain about how “no one” loves her, does anything for her, or cares about her, or she’ll complain that “everyone” is so selfish, when you’re the only person in the room. As always, this combines criticism with deniability.
A narcissist creates an image of yourself that she then uses to guilt you into submission. Here is how the process works:
1. “You are unsociable, taciturn, and melancholy by mature,” the narcissist informs you and keeps repeating the message until you believe that this is what you are really like.
2. When you start behaving in accordance with this image of yourself, the narcissist sighs, “Why do you have to be so unsociable, taciturn, and melancholy? I so wish you were different.
3. The message you take away from this is that you are, by your very nature, a profound disappointment.
She minimizes, discounts or ignores your opinions and experiences. Your insights are met with condescension, denials and accusations (“I think you read too much!”) and she will brush off your information even on subjects on which you are an acknowledged expert. Whatever you say is met with smirks and amused sounding or exaggerated exclamations (“Uh hunh!” “You don’t say!” “Really!”). She’ll then make it clear that she didn’t listen to a word you said.
The most crucial feature of this is, once again, deniability. Nothing is easier than making one feel completely insane by saying, “What do you mean? You are imagining all this. Of course, I supported you.”
Clarissa's Blog 
The problem is when they put an idea about you into currency and others glom onto it. For instance, in my case I was genuinely confused about how Westerners saw me, because it would be like if they saw Clarissa solely in terms of a Russian stereotype, but with an identity that had everything to do with their own natures and what they felt it necessary to transcend. For instance, “Yes! (sigh!) We ALL used to be vodka swilling drunkards, with little scarves like babushkas, but we are so over that now. We raised ourselves up out of deneracy and we embrace a modern ideal where we no longer drink or commit evil and we take care of our appearances.”
In the same way, I had this false image projected onto me from the moment my family migrated — that I was something to be overcome. And I had to be put in my place so I could be properly overcome, or otherwise people would think they were still Russian and lose their self-eteem and take up alcohol.
So I was constantly getting the impression that Western people were snooty and exaggerately superior about their power and inclined to penalize me for stepping over small, invisible lines — lines that were mostly in their head.
And then my father put into currency that I was a feminine flake, which made the whole world seem to have gone mad.
It became very, very difficult to correct this — although I tried to purge any possible madness out of myself.
Still, it wasted a lot of my intelletual energy and was a confusing time for me, for a long time.
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My understanding of verbal abusers (a broader category than just narcissists) is that they’re addicted to causing emotional reactions (especially negative ones).
The process is roughly
abuser: open or veiled attack
you: emotional reaction
abuser: (satisfaction)
It doesn’t matter how badly it might seem to end for the abuser. Screaming at them for 15 minutes until they break out crying and run out of the room still fulfills their need to provoke (negative) emotional reactions.
Starving their hunger for emotional reactions seems to work better than anything else (but is far easier said than done, of course).
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It’s a little bit more complicated than that, I think – for narcisists at least. It’s not ever simply an attack, it’s weaving a story about how they’re poor, misunderstood, and constantly being hurt by their target. If no one protests, then the story goes unopposed, and they get the enjoyment from that.
If you oppose it like it warrants – with a big no and a fat swear, then that is immediately used as proof that every preceding statement was also true – you’re being an asshole to me right now, so you’re always being an asshole to me. “What I do to you is justified by what you will do in response to me doing it” is the play here.
If you oppose it politely, calmly pointing out factual inaccuracies, then there will be a swerve – the topic immediately changing to some other past wrong of yours. You can carry on with your half of a polite conversation from there, pointing out the factual inaccuracies in the new complaint as well, but then they’ll just make a new one. But sooner or later, they will either wear you out – jumping between false accusations is far less emotionally draining than disproving them – and you’ll give them the reaction they want, or arrive at an actual wrong you have done to them at some point. You will not be able to disprove it, and so the general case of you always being an asshole to them will be proven again.
Finally, you can simply choose to be silent and weather the storm. In this case, they will try to provoke you in increasingly obvious ways. If you remain silent, by the end of it it will simply be too obvious that they are not the victim here. At that point, you can expect a very specific kind of apology. They will sit you down and provide a narrative that explains what caused their attacks – a bad childhood, a bad spouse, a bad life. They will likely end with a version of “and now you understand how what you did or are triggered me. Don’t do it again and we will be fine!’ They will then ask you to rubberstamp the whole explanation with your approval. If you do, then they have your approval to be the victim. If you do not, then you are being ‘cold and uncaring’ after they ‘laid out their heart’ to you, and they are a victim yet again.
The goal is to provide an accepted narrative of “they made me do it, that’s why I’m like this.”
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I wonder if this is why Nietzsche was so caustic about those who have (something to the effect of) a causal drive, or drive to look for causes. I was always confused about that passage, as I thought he was suggesting we should just live in the present and a-scientifically. But then one has to at last notice that Nietzsche’s area of speciality was almost exclusively the subterranean levels relating to psychology. Which is also why he counsels against “pity” — not to be a monster, but because the narcissists tend to appeal to pity. Also when he speaks about the danger of taking the hump away from the hump-back lest one deprive him of his solitary meaning and pleasure, he is not going all Ayn Rand and demanding that the poor remain poor, but referring to the fact that many people cannot make themselves fully whole, and due to this incapacity they need their injury to divert their attention away from other areas of paucity in their lives and thus give life meaning for them.
Anyway, that is a weird thing, that idea of a causal drive or instinct to find a cause, that somehow is supposed to alleviate the pain.
I actually do maintain that it is critically important to find the causes of one’s suffering, if at all possible, but it seems that many people are more likely to create a cause in their minds, rather than to actually determine what the real cause is for anything.
I think if one understood real causes, one would see oneself like an atom or a small stick going down a river, bumping into things and being deviated from one’s course, but all in all participating in life and having pleasure. Maybe, by contrast, the search for a moral cause is much more problematic, because you introduce false causes into the explanation when you look around for those who may be particularly “sinful” to blame for how you are feeling. Then we have a whole paradigm relating to false causes, and the idea that some people harbor evil, which makes other people justifiably angry at them.
This moral paradigm might therefore create and protect narcissistic accusations, for all I know, whereas the shamanic paradigm is impersonal and yet also pleasureful.
In the end blaming people is not good because it emotionally energizes or juices up the false paradigm. You have to have the shamanic coldness that doesn’t react except impersonally. That way those seeking to power themself up on other’s reactions get nothing at all and the better, more scientific paradigm begins to dominate.
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“In the end blaming people is not good because it emotionally energizes or juices up the false paradigm. You have to have the shamanic coldness that doesn’t react except impersonally. That way those seeking to power themself up on other’s reactions get nothing at all and the better, more scientific paradigm begins to dominate.”
– Yes, this makes a lot of sense. Behind a narcissists weeping, hysteric outbursts and all this fake emotionality, there is always an icy desert. They don’t really feel, so engaging with them in the realm of feelings is useless, appealing to their emotions is useless. Cold detachment seems to be the only way.
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“It’s not ever simply an attack, it’s weaving a story about how they’re poor, misunderstood, and constantly being hurt by their target. ”
– Exactly!
“They will likely end with a version of “and now you understand how what you did or are triggered me. Don’t do it again and we will be fine!’ They will then ask you to rubberstamp the whole explanation with your approval. If you do, then they have your approval to be the victim. If you do not, then you are being ‘cold and uncaring’ after they ‘laid out their heart’ to you, and they are a victim yet again.”
– THIS IS SO TRUE!!!! Thank you, this was a clear-sighted and profoundly meaningful description. It really, really helps. What we need to remember is that a narcissist concentrates exclusively to honing these strategies of control. In the meanwhile, we live, love, work, think about a multitude of subjects. We can’t dedicated our entire lives to working out strategies to deal with a narcissist. Ergo, we will never win this battle.
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Yes! That is exactly it. Narcissist make you constantly feeling confused about whether THEY are actually the victim, especially since they are so skilled at making outsiders pity them. ‘But why is everyone so mean to your poor Mom/dad sister…’ and then it is so hard not to doubt your own perception… even if you point out that said poor victim has been dominating the conversation all evening.
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Emotional detachment, even when you’re physically present, does help a lot (for abusive people more generally, not only narcissists).
In the past, when an abusive person would scream in my face or try one of many emotional manipulations (poisonous tone of voice, cold shoulder, etc.), I would feel like I was stumbling around in a storm, without direction and no clear sight of myself. One thing that helped me was taking an appraising approach towards the other person and in my own mind labeling what they’re doing in real-time (like, “oh, now he’s trying to make me feel guilty… and now he’s stomping his foot in a tantrum… this is his problem, not mine”).
The storm then becomes much less a storm and much more like a movie set, where you can see the wind and rain machines cranking up to make a small, artificial-looking rain shower.
However, to get to this point, I first needed to understand what was going on in myself. What was this constant guilt, for instance? For years I didn’t question it because it felt so very much a part of me; I couldn’t conceive of life without it, because it had been in me from a young age.
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