Games that Narc play..
Games that Narc play..
Games that Narc play
Creating camps
This is a bit like the old schoolyard dynamics. You'd have two gangs pitted against each other and each would try to steal the stronger members from the other and win them over to their own side. In many ways, narcissists have never left the school yard.
As one person falls out of favour with them, so they rush around rallying support against that person from everyone else, starting with their best source of supply and working down to the weakest. Anyone who does not fully agree with the narcissist is thrown into the bad camp with the original outcast.
This outcast state can continue for days, weeks, months or even years. It will end when the outcasts either have grovelled sufficiently or the narcissist has outcast someone else in his camp and needs to strengthen this inner circle again.
He calls the shots. He decides when you have been sufficiently punished and shown sufficient remorse and all of it is dictated by his own needs only. The king is in his kingdom.
Accusing you
The best form of defence is attack and the narcissist knows this all too well. It is one of his most widely used weapons, but he is so good at handling it that you could actually not even realise what it is.
We are accustomed to accusations being blatant, ugly assertions about us and these we recognise with ease. It is the more insidious accusations that catch us off guard and make us lose our balance. The narcissist will use either or both, depending on his end objective.
If he is trying to rattle you, hurt you, undermine you or shock you, there is a good chanc that he will come out with a blatant accusation. "You lied", "you stole", "you're having an affair".
If however he is playing the flip side of the coin, you will get the underhanded accusation that is designed to make you feel guilty and obligated and reduce you to putty in his hands. These accusations are normally said in a rather soulful way and if you breath in deeply you'll catch the distinct smell of burning martyr. Examples of this are, "you don't love me anymore", "you don't do as much for me as you used to" (or a specific variation of the theme), "your dog/cat/book/friend/family/whatever is more important to you than I am". - I think you get the idea.
These are accusations that don't feel like accusations because they are not said with aggression or anger and don't aim so much at what you are doing as what you aren't doing - namely making him the centre of your universe.
The reason that these are so effective is that instead of hooking defensive anger, they hook defensive guilt. A far more powerful behaviour in someone that you wish to control. Now, instead of insisting that he answer your question about where he was last night, you go rushing to the rescue. You feel the desperate need to reassure him that you do love him, he is important and you are so terribly sorry that your existence does not revolve around trying to make him feel good.
He has effectively achieved a few things here: made you feel guilty so that he can now manipulate you into doing for him, changed the subject competely, shifted focus fully back onto himself and made you the lesser person.
When it comes to angry projection though, we are dealing with an entirely different situation. This is the out and out bully. He is deliberately attacking you with the objective of achieving control through fear and anger. There is also a good chance that what he is really doing is manouvering you into a conflict situation. This person wants to have a go at you, but wants to be able to blame you for it afterwards. By provoking an argument, he can achieve that quite nicely.
By the time that the fight finally ends 3 hours later, the chances are that you will not even remember that it all began with you trying to defend yourself against a wrongful and probably very ugly accusation. Even if you did remember, you'd be so exhausted by the awful fight that ensued that you'd be loath to go back and address it to set the record straight.
He has now achieved a number of things. He has intimidated you, he has manipulated you, he has emotionally drained you, he has effectively used you as a verbal and perhaps even physical punch bag and, he has controlled you and further empowered himself.
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Invoking fear and anxiety
In case you think that this does not apply in your situation, answer these simple questions:
Do you ever shut up just to keep the peace?
Do you ever find yourself waiting for "the right timing" to broach a subject with him?
Do you have things that you feel the two of you need to talk about, but you're too scared to raise them because you know that there is an excellent chance of a blow up if you do?
Are you keeping secrets from your friends and family regarding your life with this person, perhaps even lying to them because you know that if he found out you had spoken about it there would be hell?
Alternatively, are you keeping secrets from your friends and family regarding your life with this person, perhaps even lying to them because you know that they would be concerned for you and think less of him?
Do you feel as if you are walking on eggshells?
Do you go out of your way to keep him happy and deliberately try to avoid angering him - even at great cost to yourself?
If you said yes to any of these, you are being ruled by fear. You are a victim of blatant abuse.
Ultimately this is one of their key strategies for maintaining control because as long as you are too scared to speak up, you have no voice. While you have no voice, you have no say. While you have no say, they can do exactly as they please and they can even legitimately claim that you never objected.
Silence is consent with any type of abuser and this is society's view as well. If you didn't object, it automatically means you gave consent. A prime example of this is with rape. When a woman claims rape, the first thing she will be asked is, "did you very clearly say no?" - the fact that there was a knife at her throat seems to not even feature in the equation. It's pretty sick, but this is a victim's reality.
Playing with history
When all else fails, this is what they do. Put them in a corner about something that happened as recently as an hour ago and they will either tell you that they have no recall of it whatsoever or simply tell you that you are wrong. At this point they will be more than happy to go into great detail about what really transpired, which can be so blatantly untrue that it leaves you standing mouth agape.
They will claim to have said or done things that they didn't; claim that you did or said things that you didn't or simply rewrite the story entirely. In extreme cases they will even claim that the incident never happened at all.
One of the most shocking things to come out of my letter to my dad was that I not once mentioned or even alluded to anything physical, even though my dad had given us serious spankings. The kind that welts and bruises are made of. He in fact prided himself on his ability to inflict physical punishment that could make a grown man cry. Well, after receiving my letter, which had been completely silent on this issue (you can read it for yourself), he went out of his way to insist to all of us that he had never once raised a hand to any of us. He actually believed that he could successfully lead us to believe that we had all imagined it.
The fact that also he denied every other point I raised somehow paled in comparison to this.
Logged
He who learns must suffer
And even in our sleep pain that cannot forget
Falls drop by drop upon the heart,
And in our own despair, against our will,
Comes wisdom to us by the awful grace of God.
Agamemnon, Aeschylus
Projecting
Closely linked to hurling accusations is the fine art of projecting. This is both an awful thing to live with and a useful tool for you. I don't mean that you should start projecting. I mean that their projecting can be used to your advantage.
Remember that you are their mirror. The things that they accuse you of are the things that apply to themselves. By stepping back and trying to listen objectively instead of getting emotionally hooked, you can get a lot of insight into a narcissist and what he is up to (or is thinking of getting up to).
It goes one step further and this is something that I discovered by pure accident with the narcissists in my life. Give them hypothetical problem solving scenarios and listen carefully to their responses. You can get right inside their heads without them even realising it. While they think they are showing you how clever they are, they are in fact revealing themselves in a way that would make them cringe if they realised it. - For goodness sakes never tell them. They will furiously deny it and launch a massive attack against you.
An example of how this works: my dad regularly rants and raves about child abusers (amongst many other things). It is extremely interesting to catch him in one of his rants, listen with rapt attention (a sure way to get a narcissist where you want him for a brief while) and ask him questions like, "what do you think causes someone to abuse children?", "why would someone do (whatever your issue) to a child?", "How do we stop child abusers". The answers are astonishing. He will explain to you exactly how an abuser's mind works, what goads them, what they are trying to achieve, what would make them stop and what the most effective form of corrective action would be.
While he thinks he is stunning you with his amazingly astute insights into the human psyche, he is in fact giving you a very clear blueprint of himself. With clever questioning and prodding, you can glean an enormous amount of useful information. - Information that could at some point be your lifeline.
Lying
Narcissists are the most horrific liars and they are outstanding at it. They can come up with the most elaborate stories at the drop of a hat and they are extremely convincing. They can also take the smallest scrap of information or the most insignificant incident and masterfully weave it into a major event.
The wierdest thing is often the kind of things they lie about. Things that are ridiculous, where everybody was there and knows it's a lie. Or things where it is entirely inconsequential and really, the truth would have sufficed.
For them the truth is however seldom glitzy enough. Nothing in or about their lives is allowed to be mundane or average. It's either awesome and magnificently wonderful or it is magnificently awful. Nothing can simply "be".
One of their favourite uses for lying is to foster this illusion that everything about them is bigger and better. The parties that they go to are the best ever. Whatever doctor, specialist, advisor or even hairdresser that they use is some sort of "guru" - until they dump them for the next one, then the person will be the most incompetent ever. If you confront them about their sudden change of heart, there is a good chance that you will hear about how this person had mislead or deceived them, or how they had surprisingly "just changed" one day.
The narcissist's children attend better schools, they shop at better stores, their neighbourhoods are better. Their illnesses are more serious and more debilitating, their woes more woesome and their successes more noteworthy. They are the best at whatever they do and generally believe that they are not appreciated enough.
In order to support all of this they will embellish, fabricate, subtly distort the truth and finally, they will blatantly lie. - Oh, and they are the worst when it comes to name-dropping.
Perhaps they attended a gathering and a famous celebrity also happened to be there. Perhaps they were even introduced to the person. By the time that you get to hear of the incident, he and the celebrity are bosom buddies and the narcissist can happily regale you with tales of all their supposed experiences together.
If you ever do discover the lie you could learn that he had related someone else's tales as if they were his own, or perhaps in a moment of great creativity he had in fact come up with a totally original story all by himself.
Their greatest moments are however when cornered with past facts.
Speaking of facts - you can try confronting them with these and you'll most likely be told that someone else lied or misunderstood or perhaps it is even a conspiracy of sorts against them. They may even end up just dismissing you and changing the subject altogether.
Never, however, will they admit to the lie or concede to having incorrectly stated facts. They would rather weave a hundred even more implausible and ridiculous stories in an attempt to prove the initial lie.
Logged
He who learns must suffer
And even in our sleep pain that cannot forget
Falls drop by drop upon the heart,
And in our own despair, against our will,
Comes wisdom to us by the awful grace of God.
Agamemnon, Aeschylus
purplehaze
Jedi Master
Saying sorry
Just because he never believes he could possibly be wrong does not mean that the narcissist never apologises. He is capable of every kind of display of remorse imaginable, from tossing out a sarcastic or casual, "I'm sorry" right through to crying and pleading with you like a devastated child.
With most abusers and particularly with narcissists, this is not a real apology, no matter how remorseful he may seem. It is a means to an end and no more.
What it really means is, "let's pretend this never happened so that I can do it to you again".
One of the talents that children of narcissists in particular tend to develop, is the ability to see what is really being done and hear what is really being said. We have spent our entire lives dodging the bullets and sheer survival has forced us to expend a lot of energy in trying to identify them before they hit. We can never dodge them, but we're a bunch of real die-hards who never stop trying. We just need to learn to trust our gut. - If it feels insincere, then it is. If it feels unbelievable, then don't believe it.
Our downfall however is that we are hopeless dreamers. We believe in fairy tales and a narcissistic parent is the biggest fairy tale you can get. We keep wanting desperately to believe.
A partner of a narcissist is not much different. You want so much to believe them because if you have to admit to yourself that it is all a lie, the dream will be shattered. The dream is all you've ever had. If that dies, you fear your very soul dying too.
The reality is that your soul won't die. The dream will. Some of your innocence and gullibility will, but so will the conflicts, the deception, the games, the vulnerability and the constantly recurring pain.
Every time that you believe his empty sorry, you are giving him permission to continue.
If you really want to give the relationship an honest chance, accepting his sorry should have conditions attached: - get professional help, stick with the programme and achieve a real change in attitude that reflects in behaviours.
If you demand or accept any less than this, you're going to keep living through the same old nightmare over and over again
Very Helpful
An Excellent Post
Greatness ;)
Wow, my life story.
Right on the money!
june09
I am having a day, when all
June09