The Truth About Why Narcissists Violate Boundaries

Welcome to the Breakdown to Breakthrough podcast.

My name is Lisa A.

Romano.

I am a life coach,

Bestselling author,

YouTube vlogger,

Meditation teacher,

And expert in the field of codependency and narcissistic abuse.

I am a believer in the power of an organized mind.

My aim is to help people learn what it means to live above the veil of consciousness rather than living a reactive life.

May your heart feel blessed,

Your mind feel expanded,

And your spirit find hope as you spend time with me here at the Breakdown to Breakthrough podcast.

Today we're going to be talking about why it is impossible to set boundaries with toxic people and specifically a narcissist.

When you come from a dysfunctional home,

You have not had the ability to form a healthy sense of self.

In order to have a healthy sense of narcissism,

Healthy narcissism,

Meaning I feel,

I think,

I want,

I need,

I desire,

I dream,

I dislike,

And so on.

In order to have an I or to have healthy narcissism,

You would have felt attuned to.

Mother and father would have been attuning themselves to you.

But when you come from a dysfunctional home,

It's not enough to even have one parent attune themselves to you.

If you have another parent that is completely discarding you and treating you with indifference,

You will feel that parent's rejection and that will have a consequence.

When you come from a home like that,

You're attuning yourself to how they feel.

And that's the opposite of what should have happened.

So now what happens is you're conditioned to look outside of you rather than have have mommy and daddy attune themselves and look inside of you which would have taught you to look inside of you.

We should all have eyes that are able to see the true self.

But if we didn't have parents attune themselves to us,

If we didn't have our parents eyes on us attuning themselves to us,

We have missed that milestone and that's not our fault.

And so asking us to set boundaries in a relationship is nearly an impossibility because we don't have the neural wiring to do so.

We don't have the self to do so.

The idea of self is a concept.

It's an ambiguous concept.

Even though we might be the biggest mouth in the room,

We might be complaining the most.

It doesn't mean it's coming from a healthy sense of self.

It means that we're grasping at straws reacting to our emotions.

We're not regulating our emotions.

We're not thinking about our emotions.

We're simply reacting to our emotions.

And this is one of the reasons a narcissist is so attracted to people who have a difficult time honoring the self.

So let's talk about why a narcissist has to fight with you,

Why a narcissist has to argue with you,

And what are the benefits to a narcissist to make you panic?

How is it that their personality traits benefit from being able to dysregulate another human being?

If you've ever dealt with a narcissist long term,

You may have felt like your skin is crawling.

You may have wanted to react so badly and maybe even you had very bad thoughts about what you'd like to do to this narcissist,

Which is a very natural reaction to oppression,

Which is a very natural reaction to be treated unfairly.

It doesn't end well when a narcissist is able to trigger you into those types of thoughts and ego defense mechanism.

It is very natural when you feel like someone is suppressing you and going out of their way to minimize you and to lie about you and to create stories about you,

To try to bait you into conversations,

To blackmail you,

To talk about you on Facebook,

To brag about their latest relationship.

It's very difficult when you are being targeted by a narcissist to keep your cool.

But a narcissist enjoys aggravating you,

Baiting you,

And getting you to lose your cool.

So let's talk about why.

Narcissists are incapable,

Absolutely incapable of looking within and taking accountability and meaning it earnestly.

A narcissist will argue with you.

A narcissist will fight with you because they want you to assume the blame for whatever the conflict is in the relationship because they don't play by rules.

And in order for them to win,

They have to overwhelm you and keep you off balance.

They need you to be a source of narcissistic supply.

They have to wrangle you in somehow.

One of the ways that a narcissist wrangles people in and keeps them there is by confusing them,

Is by getting you to doubt your reality.

Classic narcissistic behavior is gaslighting.

Imagine you think you're being gaslighted by a narcissistic friend who says,

I told you to pick me up at seven,

You get there at seven,

And she's not ready.

And she insists,

Insists that she told you nine o'clock.

So now you're angry at your friend,

Rightfully so.

And what does she do?

She starts talking about something that happened two weeks ago.

She starts talking about the time that she picked you up from the gas station when you got a flat tire from six years ago.

Has nothing to do with now.

Has nothing to do with knowing you're lying to me,

Knowing that you're deliberately gaslighting me.

You're trying to get me to doubt my reality.

I know you said seven,

Felicia,

And now you're telling me we're not going to be able to go out till nine.

And I'm sitting here waiting for you.

And I have a conference call that I have to have at like seven a.

M.

And my whole schedule is getting pushed back because of you.

And you're telling me that I'm crazy,

That I'm supposed to be here at nine o'clock.

So they argue with you,

Right?

She stomps her feet.

She bangs her feet.

She throws her shoes across the room.

So now she's arguing with you because she wants to keep you off balance.

What happens in a narcissist's life if you say,

Bye,

Felicia,

They lose a source of narcissistic supply?

What happens if these people that have been tolerating this narcissism say,

No more,

I'm not going to allow you to make me feel less than so you can feel better than a narcissist needs to argue and fight with other people because they can't live in a world without other people.

There has to be a competitor.

There has to be someone that they're comparing themselves to.

They need somebody who is going to play this game.

They need someone who is going to let them abuse them,

Essentially.

Let them push their boundaries.

Let them talk down to them.

Let them be passive aggressive.

A narcissist needs to fight with you in order for themselves to feel real.

What does a narcissist seek?

A narcissist is going to seek power,

Dominance,

And control.

And they will do that through intimidation.

They will do it by mocking you,

By devaluing you.

A narcissist needs to argue and fight with other people to keep them off balance,

To keep them as sources of narcissistic supply,

And to be able to blame them for what they're guilty of.

Chances of you being of you bumping into,

Dating,

Or marrying,

Or working with a narcissist are higher than they ever have been before.

Does this mean that you get caught up or having arguments with these people or fighting with these people?

No.

What it means is you educate yourself so you can take control over what you can control and you don't get caught up.

You shutty shutty.

You go gray rock.

You discern.

You don't use judgment.

You discern.

You don't get in the habit of arguing with a narcissist or fighting with a narcissist or calling a narcissist out.

It's not going to end well.

You have to remember that a narcissist goes over the line.

A narcissist does not have the same level of empathy that someone else does.

That level of empathy is very important because it will prevent you from going over a line and really hurting your child or really hurting the person that you love or really hurting your sibling or hurting another human being.

There's just a line that people who have a decent amount of empathy will not cross.

Not so with a narcissist.

So that means that we need to prepare ourselves for the world that is becoming more narcissistic.

And what we want to do is live with even more compassion in our hearts,

Less fear,

And more compassion.

We know what we're dealing with.

We're not here to change someone.

We're here to find our own light and to let it shine as hokey pokey as that sounds.

And if someone would have told me that 20 years ago that I would be making YouTube videos and creating podcasts and posts and doing Facebook live streams and creating programs around the idea that you're supposed to find your light and let it shine,

I would have told you that you were bananas.

You were crazy.

Not me.

My control is in healing myself,

Working on working on myself,

Regulating my emotions,

Taking my making myself happy,

Not making others responsible for my happiness or my unhappiness,

Making sure that I'm financially independent,

Making sure that I'm emotionally independent,

Making sure that I'm accountable to myself and I'm working towards becoming more and more of a decent human being,

Becoming more and more able to relate to other people and to add to humanity rather than take away from the human experience.