This week we are going to look at narcissistic injury. A few weeks ago, I shared with you how my mother looked at me and said, “I wish you had never born.” At first, her comment validated what I knew to be true: she is a narcissist. Then, the pain of what she said crept in, and I found myself believing her caustic words. It sent me back to my childhood when I would ask myself, “If my mother can’t love me, who can?”
After a few days of pain and tears, I decided that I didn’t want to feel this way going into 2021. It wasn’t easy, but I stepped out of my situation and analyzed myself. What she was doing was martyrdom with another narcissistic injury.
In 2018, I finally reached my breaking point and wrote my best-selling book, Ugly Love. There are 16 chapters in the manuscript, and only one is about my mother. But guess what? She focused on that chapter about my childhood and how difficult it was to please a narcissistic mother. I spoke about emotional damage and ramifications that can carry over into adulthood. It was 100% my truth. Yet, forget the pain I survived didn’t matter. My mother was injured more and disowned me from the family.
Two years later, after therapy, she wanted to reconcile. I welcomed a reconciliation because my greatest fear was that I wouldn’t see my parents until I buried them. My father is my rock, and I missed him much during those two years of no contact.
Once we established communication and connection, I thought I had learned to navigate the relationships by keeping everything surface and unemotional. However, when my father had triple-pass surgery, my brother and I realized that mom wasn’t capable of the amount of care my father would need the first week during his recovery. We hired nurses to come in and check on Dad daily.
Our choice to hire help didn’t go over well. Mother was furious that no one checked in with her about the care. (We knew she would say no, and it was glaringly obvious Dad needed baths, proper dosing of medication, among other things she didn’t have the time or patience to do.)
That’s when Mom told me she wished she had never given birth to me. First the book, now the nurses, she said. She was disgusted with her daughter.
If you’ve felt rejection from a narcissist, it may be the result of a narcissistic injury. The term narcissistic injury, according to psychecentral.com, is when narcissists react negatively to perceived or real criticism or judgment, boundaries placed on them, or attempts to hold them accountable for harmful behavior. This behavior can present as verbal, emotional, physical, or psychological abuse. Some narcissists yell while others may quietly go about hurting you for injuring their fragile egos.
A narcissistic injury can manifest like this:
Passive-aggressive behavior – The narcissist may give you the silent treatment or embarrass you in front of your friends, family, or peers. The silent treatment is a way of the narcissist telling you that you don’t matter enough to be spoken to. When the narcissist embarrasses you in front of others, the narcissist wants to solidify that you are the perpetrator. When you call them out on it, they may say something like, “You’re too sensitive,” and “What you did to me was way worse.”
Gaslighting – The narcissist may try to alter your sense of reality about the narcissistic injury, making you think that you did injure them deeply and irreparably.
Rage – The narcissist can become extremely angry, lashing out verbally, throwing things and harming those in their path. The words they say can cut deep and stick with the alleged perpetrator for years or decades.
Threaten – The narcissist may do nothing but threaten punishment. Sometimes the anticipation of punishment can wreak more havoc than an actual reprimand or consequence.
There are some things you can do to protect yourself from a narcissistic injury:
- Go to therapy. A counselor or therapist who understands narcissistic abuse can help you determine the best approach to handling the narcissist when there is a narcissistic injury. It’s good to have a sounding board if things get out of hand and you need to make an exit plan.
- Make an exit plan. It is a smart, safe move to have an exit plan, even if you hope you never need to use it. Narcissists can become violent if pushed far enough, and you need to protect yourself and your kids.
- Remember that the injury is mostly projection. The fragile self at the core of the narcissist has been injured. Then the narcissist transitions to the grandiose, egotistical, and entitled self and lashes out because they think that’s what you deserve. Inside, the narcissistic is covering up for the shame that was put inside that person, for whatever reason, years ago.
- Don’t personalize it. It would help if you remembered not to personalize the narcissistic injury. You likely did nothing to hurt that person. But we do hurt the most when we receive rejection from people closest to us. It may seem like s slap in the face, but the narcissist is rejecting themselves.
Finally, do your best to see the situation for what it is. When you see the truth that you deserve more, that truth can set you free. That freedom can be establishing more boundaries with this toxic person or leaving the relationship altogether. For me, that is taking a break from visiting my parents for a bit. I need that scab to heal. Then, with boundaries in place, my visit will be short and, hopefully, drama-free.
Don’t forget to sign up for our webinar on managing the malignant narcissist coming up on February 10th! You can sign up here:
“When you see the truth that you deserve more, that truth can set you free.” This reminds me of the time (during the ending of my nearly 30 year marriage)
our daughter asked me for something, R and I were separated and I was still living in the family home. I think she was 21, certainly an adult. I told her ‘no’ and she looked directly at me and said “I don’t know why I’m asking you, you don’t matter.” It was the truth and I knew it. Nobody has understood how hearing that truth, set me free. And here, right now, Dr. Carter says it in no uncertain terms. How validating to be finally understood 👏He gets me!
This one was written by Laura Charanza.
Yes, I remember vividly the moments when I realized the truth of how my sister, my ex-husband, and my mother really thought of me. These were all separate incidents, years apart, but when you finally REALLY HEAR and understand the depth of how someone really despises you, it is like a hard slap in the face! It woke me up to the reality that no matter what I did, I would never “measure up” to what they wanted me to be (nobody could!), and it was time for me to walk away. It has been sad at times, but my life is so much more peaceful now, and I am finally FREE of the abuse. It is my heartfelt wish that all of us can come to know our true worth and value as the beautiful human beings we are, and to never again settle for an abusive relationship, of any kind 🙏
THANK YOU. Yes. It’s that simple, isn’t it. I mean, really. Someone says or acts in a way that clearly communicates their feelings and when it gets through – it feels like a hard slap in the face! All they’re doing is conveying how they feel or what they think BUT I HAVEN’T BEEN ABLE TO HEAR/SEE/ACCEPT this. I couldn’t. This inability to accept what is, has been the biggest of my lifelong struggles. It isn’t that others haven’t communicated – it’s that I couldn’t accept what they were communicating. My need to and my fear of, filtered all decisions.
“Rage – The narcissist can become extremely angry, lashing out verbally, throwing things and harming those in their path. The words they say can cut deep and stick with the alleged perpetrator for years or decades.” Wow, back in 2009, my eldest daughter’s surprise 40th birthday party. A number of us flew in for this occasion. The following morning, while doing dishes with her husband, in their home, for no reason other than she wanted a reaction, she turned to me and said “I like to hurt you – I like to see you bleed.” I was dumbfounded. It was that ‘slap in the face!’ truth. Sadly, I allowed this child to continue the abuse for many years afterward.
Thanks Christine and to all the others that know what I’m describing and the heartache that accompanies same…until one day, lightening strikes or that slap in the face is the last one because WE GET IT. No more abuse. Not to ourselves and not from others.
Great big hugs to everyone here and still on the path. XO
When I read this article, I could put real-life situations to every bullet point in here and there are SO many!
Have you ever heard a speaker give a crystal-clear example to a point and thought to yourself, ‘That’s easy for you, but how does that apply to me?’ Well – not this time!
Reading this article, I went back into the mode of questioning my reality. Am I the real narcissist in my relationship?? I go silent and avoid him when hurt. I can’t seem to speak. It feels like anything I say will be flipped around and projected right back into me. Or just ignored.
I had a profound moment of insight a few years ago, during a discussion that turned into a fight that I didn’t even know what it was about. The insight was so mind-opening that I spoke it aloud; my fogginess of mind (I have ADD for one thing) and my inability to focus, get a lot done, take proactive steps towards concrete change in my life, was a fog of despair in response to the constant judgements I receive from him. I said words to that effect aloud, as it dawned on me, and he has not forgiven me. For three years, he’s been punishing me with distance, silence, withdrawal. I know this because he said so when we went to therapy last winter. I hadn’t know that this was what was going on.
For me, that moment of realization three years ago, was when I realized that I actually wanted out of the marriage. More than anything, I just wanted out. For him, he said, it was the moment that I broke his heart, hurt him unforgivably deeply. When he said that in the therapist’s office, part of me felt like an abuser. Later, the other part of me spoke up and asked the guilty part, is it possible that a person could respond to a statement like the one you made to him, with compassion and curiosity? Could he have asked me what I meant? Could he have taken an interest in my pain? Realizing that this wasn’t even on my landscape of possible responses was eye-opening. Realizing that yes, there are people who could and would respond in that way, was even more eye-opening. And yet…
I’ve been second-guessing that, questioning myself, questioning my reasoning. I’ve asked myself over and over if there isn’t more I could do to make the marriage better instead. Maybe if I could find the right thing to do, change my perspective in some way so that I could see how I’m creating the problems, invisibly (to me), and learn to do differently, then the marriage could be a different marriage, one that I would want to be in. I question the wisdom of throwing away twenty-plus years of relationship, of shared experiences, of family. And reading this article, I am questioning if I got it all wrong, maybe I’m the narcissist, because I go silent, and withdraw, offering polite kindness but no more. Is there a passive aggressiveness to me, in how I do this? Am I the narcissist?
Is The Narcissist an unfair label to put on him, or anyone? Am I imagining that what I hear from Dr Carter is a perfectly accurate portrayal of my life? Isn’t that what the narcissist would think of me, if he listened to Dr Carter? It’s so confusing sometimes.