I have always been a trusting person. As a little girl, my father would say, “Always look for the good in people. Most people are good.” As I grew up and entered the big, wide world as an adult, I approached life with the mantra all people are decent human beings. People want the best for me. After all, that’s how I looked at the world and operated daily. It was a shock to me to realize they aren’t. And the person who taught me that lesson was the narcissist.
The narcissist was the antithesis of that. He wanted me to be his supply. I needed to be his everything. I needed to worship him, love him, bank roll him, feed him and build his confidence and ego daily. Basically, I needed to be at his every beck and call. His needs were the most important. Mine were nothing. As someone who is a giver and not a taker (most empaths and highly sensitive people are), I couldn’t understand why my actions and service to him never met his standard. My confidence and ego diminished to nothing.
Welcome to the world of living with a narcissist.
Here’s why people like you and me aren’t prepared for narcissist. We didn’t know what we didn’t know. Then we learned these lessons the hard way.
You can endure a person with one of the traits below. But when you add these characteristics together, in one human being – it’s a recipe for destruction to anyone who encounters that human.
1) The Controller
The narcissist’s goal is to control you. The narcissist needs you to be there for any need that arises. The more the narcissist can control you, the more you are under his spell and will do anything to meet the needs of the narcissist.
The control also stems from the narcissist need to protect himself against a narcissistic injury. The narcissist feels out of control and is scared to death of being emotionally injured. The more people and groups he can control, the safer he feels.
The control was something that came as a shock to me. I was taught that a relationship is 50/50. You watch out and help each other, while still having some interests of your own. Those outside interests are contingent on not hurting the other person in the relationship. With a narcissist, I sadly learned, it’s 100/0. The narcissist needs are the only needs that matter, regardless of pain and suffering meeting those needs causes.
2) The Manipulator
Manipulation is a general term for many tools that someone uses to orchestrate a situation to that person’s benefit. The winner is the manipulator. Manipulation means control. The narcissist is the expert at manipulation.
There are dozens of tools the narcissist uses to manipulate you. Some of the most common are gaslighting, isolation and triangulation. With gaslighting, the narcissist even controls your reality this way, by making you doubt what is happening around you. With isolation, the narcissist criticized your friends and family to the point that you don’t want to be round them anymore. You are punished for seeing them, and the punishment seldom fits the crime. And triangulation. You are compared to exes or friends, and the narcissist makes it seem that if you act like the third person the narcissist is discussing, you’ll win the elusive love out there for you. So, you do. And guess what? The narcissist changes the rules, leaving you scrambling. You’re out of control while the narcissist has it all.
I remember feeling like a puppet on a string, but the narcissist kept cutting the wires that were holding me up. Just when I thought I had the movements figured out; the cord was cut. I would fail, again and again.
3) The Judge and Savior
The narcissist tries to position himself professionally or personally in a position where he can criticize, marginalize or demean those around him. He wants to be seen as the know it all who can delineate what’s right from wrong. He also wants to be seen as the savior, because of his imperial knowledge.
Another personality of the narcissist that I wasn’t ready for was the judge and savior. I grew up in church, and I learned that the only judge and savior was God or Jesus Christ. I was astounded when the narcissist told me that my lifestyle, friends and colleagues were inferior and “low class” (the judge). He went on to say that I wouldn’t have been anything had I not met him and learned how to act, dress, and behave (savior mentality).
As I was writing the article, I remembered how he told me I needed to dress one evening. He didn’t like my shoes, and he told me people would laugh and know I’m a little girl from Arkansas. Before I lost all my confidence and humor, this was the same night that he asked me to iron his jeans. Like a good little wife, I ironed them. But the funny part is that I added so much starch those jeans would’ve stood up in the corner of the room on their own. They were so stiff and scratchy that sandpaper would’ve been the better choice for his attire that night.
4) The Know-It-All/Entitled
One of the main characteristics of narcissists are their abilities to know everything about any subject. Golf? Don’t ask Tiger Woods. Ask the narcissist. Cooking? Don’t ask Martha Stewart, ask the narcissist. Politics? Don’t you know the narcissist was asked to run for office, nut turned it down because people just aren’t smart enough in that voting district?
There’s another stipulation, too. You, as the narcissist’s partner, know absolutely nothing. The narcissist often denigrates the other person in the relationship or makes fun of him or her in front of others. You know nothing. The narcissist knows everything.
I remember feeling like I had stepped into a nightmare. At the time, I was a college graduate who had a great job and was climbing the career ladder quickly. I was proud of myself but not for long. The narcissist criticized my job as a tv anchor/reporter and made fun of the notoriously low salaries were paid. It was a dressing-down that I thought a partner would neve give to someone he “loved.”
5) The Liar
Narcissists lie. They like to lie. It’s the main tool in their toolbox. Their charm makes them believable. Even when you know something is the truth, they throw in a gaslighting phrase such as “I didn’t say that,” and you are captured in their snare. The narcissist can look you in the eye, and with a straight face, lie about something very important to you. And you believe it.
This is the biggest disappointment of all when it comes to the narcissist. We’ve been taught “the truth will set you free,”. Unfortunately, with the narcissist, you can’t find the truth. Most things turn out to be lies. I was taught that you always tell the truth. Those that you love deserve that. I felt like I must mean nothing to the narcissist if he was lying to me all the time. Remember, you may feel like you mean nothing to him. But no one means anything to a narcissist. It’s all about them. Always and forever.
By understanding these five faces of the narcissist, you can call it as you see it: lies and projection. Use this knowledge as power. Use your new understanding to tell yourself “It’s not me.” When you put the burden of the narcissist back on the perpetrator, you can take care of you. You can make the best choices for you. And my hope for you is for a life of peace. That’s what you deserve.
If you are interested in online counseling, Dr. Carter has a sponsor who can assist. As the need is there, please seek the help you deserve: https://betterhelp.com/survivingnarcissism
We receive commissions on referrals to BetterHelp. We only recommend services that we trust.
Dear Laura
Thank you!
Wow! Thank you so much for sharing this knowledge! This hit so close to home for me, it was like it was standing right at my front door. I have lived with all of this for over 20 years. It were as if I were reading the story of my own life. Thankfully, I was given a chance to escape the day to day life I had been enduring for all of those years. Unfortunately, I had to escape without children.
Now that I am no longer there to be my exes focus, I fear that my children are now having to endure all of my exes tactics. I have vowed to myself that I will fight with everything I have to get my children out of that daily lifestyle. However, should I lose them to my ex once the divorce is final, what can be done to protect them and their well-being? I fear for how they will be able to handle their day to day lives, their emotions, their mental well-being and grow up to be stable and positive contributors to our community and the world.
Thank you for having all the enlightening information that you give, and Dr. Carter.
I have been set free of my 40 years of marriage, and enduring every toxic, nasty, and even life threatening traitS you mention through out your plethora if videos
I escaped with only the clothes on my back, my dog, my car, and a minimal amount of money in my acct. I never looked back and kept no contact throughout my separation and divorce. It has been two and a half years that I’ve been gone, and life is just now beginning to return to normal for me.
I’m 2000 miles away from the Narcissist I was married to and so thankful circumstances allowed me to be this distance away from him. Otherwise, he was on the path to lie about my state of mental health and try to discard me by having me declared mentally incompetent!!!
I lost everything in the divorce, that I had worked so many years to acquire. I receive very little alimony in comparison to his income and ability to pay much more!
He had a very dishonest Lawyer, who aided him to take everything I had from me, but, my dog and car!
My advice for others is, if possible find an Attorney well versed about Narcissistic personalities if you must go through a divorce. My Lawyer didn’t understand much of what I tried to explain to him about my Narcissistic husband. It was a very traumatic experience for me on top of all the abused I had already endured.
That is something I would like to see more of, the availability of more Lawyers experienced in dealing with Narcissism in a divorce procedure. They are available, but not well advertised!
Perhaps this is an area that this information could be explored by you and Dr. Cárter and presented in some fashion to those who need this so very important assistance?
We’ve got to get a better handle on exposing these dangerous individuals to the public.
Thank You again, for all you do❤️
I would say that what a a narcissist wants most is power over you. Once one has your commitment to him or her, then the control and manipulation start with expectant subservience. They want you to do the major grunt work to get what they want. If you disagree or refuse to do what they want, you will either be cast out or dressed down and re-directed.
What they want comprises what they will call their vision and the things that compose this are hard to change or alter in their thinking. If you talk about a subject of interest only to you, the narcissist will have absolutely no interest, and you will feel it was a mistake to have even brought up the subject. A narcissist will eventually burn you out with his or her demands. To survive one, if you are an employee, you best need to get that person out of your life for good. If married to one, I can only say you would have to push back a lot because they will press against every boundary you have over a period of time.
A narcissist will first win you over with a display of great confidence and arrogance, charming you by telling you how important you are to them and how they see you fitting in to their activities. Once you are involved, this confidence will become more spotty and their surly under side will begin to show itself. This is their true side, the one that can erupt in white hot rage or demands in an instant.
There is little humour in a narcissist and not one word will be said without it having a purpose in controlling you.
It is important how to know how to recognize one because they are complex organisms.
Based upon my experience and the dead hollow vacant eyes you see occasionally, I think they are the illness itself, with nature taking them over with a pattern that makes up what medical people define as the illness. So if you meet one, you are dealing with a living illness that is trying to reach out and use you for its’ survival. Why would this idea not have truth? Look at the variety of life-forms in the world that prey on others in some form.
So this illness is an adaptation trying to allow the person with it, a chance to survive. The more intelligent the person, the better skilled they are in using the pattern of activities that are minimally defined in the medical descriptions of the disorder. I think they must all be a pretty high level of intelligence to do what they do. Mine seemed to have at times a photographic recall. Very hard to deal against that.
I had a harsh unknowing work experience with one, so that is the fruition of my insights. Hard experience, leaving suddenly and playing catch-up later….when I found sites about them on the web, linked from a site on bullying, which will come as no surprise to those in the know.
I had no idea such beings existed. That is the final big shock you realize, that you were that close with one.
Good luck!