Why Narcissists Obsess Over Your Reaction To Their Behavior

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.

So today we're going to be talking about how and why a narcissist often takes your reaction to their behavior as the problem.

So today we're talking about people who have high conflict personalities,

The people who make you feel like you're walking around on eggshells,

The people in your life that you feel are emotionally bullying you,

The people in your life that make you feel like you need to.

.

.

You feel oppressed.

You feel like you're not allowed to speak your mind.

You feel like everything that you say is going to be scrutinized.

You feel like no matter what you do,

You're damned if you do and damned if you don't.

These are people who make life for the rest of the people that they know very difficult.

You end up feeling like it's your job to manage their emotions.

You feel like you need to predict how they're going to react to something that you say.

You usually end up finding that you begin to censor yourself,

So you can't have the relationships that you really want with the person that you love who might be narcissistic.

If your parents were narcissistic,

You grew up feeling like a punching bag.

You grew up feeling like the whipping post.

You grew up feeling like you were a specimen on a Petri dish.

Everything that you did was questioned.

You were judged.

You got the feeling that for whatever reason,

The parent that you love did not trust you.

You could have this feeling in an intimate relationship with a partner and feel like you're living with someone who is constantly jealous,

Someone who needs to have all the passwords to your social media.

You could love a child who is highly narcissistic and who is unable to accept anything that you say,

Everything that you do and everything that you try to do to prove that you love this child will be rejected.

And so across the board,

If we're dealing with someone who has high narcissistic traits,

Life can become oppressive and unmanageable.

You really end up feeling like you're having out of body experiences because you can't be yourself inside these relationship dynamics.

This has devastating consequences if your parent was a narcissist because you end up having a deeply wounded inner child that fears abandonment,

That fears rejection and who may have had to dissociate from the self in order to survive the difficult family relationships that you were forced to live in.

Remember when you're a child,

You are completely dependent and you are powerless and all you want to do is avoid more pain.

And of course you want to feel loved.

But when you have a highly narcissistic parent,

That's just not possible.

You will end up feeling like you need to perform.

They will teach you early what they agree with,

What they like.

And so if you're a female and you have a narcissistic father and he likes women that have long hair,

Then you learn that you should grow up and you should have long hair.

If your father has nasty comments about the size of women's hips or something else about a woman's body,

That becomes part of what you fear and you may begin to contort yourself into the version of a female that you think your father would approve of.

And this doesn't go away when we turn 18.

This becomes part of our relationship data.

It becomes part of our microchip.

It becomes part of our subconscious programming.

And unfortunately,

Unfortunately,

Depending on how you look at it,

We end up marrying people who have similar traits to our parents,

Sometimes a mix.

So if you have a highly narcissistic father and maybe a passive aggressive codependent mother,

Don't be surprised if you find yourself in a relationship with someone who has those personality traits all in one.

Don't be surprised if when you go to work in the morning,

You begin feeling like that inner child.

Maybe your boss is highly narcissistic or maybe your coworker is highly narcissistic.

But when you have a wounded inner child,

Inevitably you discover that these dynamics are showing up all around you.

I personally think this happens so that we are presented with opportunities to heal,

To transcend and to overcome the types of emotions that we felt as children that arrested us in some earlier stage of emotional development.

So I might be an optimist,

But I believe that we as human beings can overcome anything once we get clear about the problem,

Once we identify new goals.

For instance,

If the problem is that you were raised in a narcissistic home and the problem is that you have a wounded inner child and how that manifests,

For instance,

Is the way you people please,

The way you fawn,

The way you enable,

The way that you feel most comfortable when you are in relationships with people that you can fix,

You've identified those problems.

And now with a new goal,

You can work at healing the inner child and overcoming codependency once and for all.

Once the inner dialogue changes,

Dear one,

That is when your life will change.

I am proof and so are the thousands of people who have embraced the journey of codependency recovery with me.

They are gone on to create loving relationships,

Triple their income,

Some of them manifest businesses write books,

You name it.

And so it is possible to overcome and to stop attracting narcissists and stop tolerating this poor behavior when it comes to dealing with a narcissist.

One of the things that you will need to get very,

Very clear about is the way in which they respond to when you respond to being treated poorly.

This can keep you stuck in a maze indefinitely because narcissists,

First of all,

Believe that they're right.

They need to believe that they're right because science at least ebbs in the direction of informing us that many narcissists are very fragile and they cannot integrate their flaws within themselves.

And so they project those flaws onto other people.

And that's why if you live with a narcissist,

Whether this narcissist is your spouse or a child or your mother or your father,

What you'll notice in moments of clarity when you are not in a survival response or a trauma response is that you will notice that the narcissist is accusing you of what they are guilty of.

Perhaps a narcissist is accusing you of being clumsy.

The narcissist is accusing you of lying.

The narcissist is accusing you of being anxious.

The narcissist is accusing you of doing things to upset them on purpose.

And in a moment of clarity,

You'll say to yourself or you'll find yourself thinking like I'm not guilty of that,

That they're guilty of that.

A narcissist that is your spouse who is cheating and or lying or gaslighting and trying to manipulate you will accuse you of those things.

They'll say you're cheating,

You're twisting my words,

You're trying to blame me.

You're not taking responsibility for your actions and so on.

And when you're nice and calm,

Which doesn't happen often when you have to deal with the narcissist,

But what you'll notice is that your mind will begin to question,

Is it me or is it them?

You may end up feeling like I did,

Like you need to write everything down.

You need to immediately call a friend or text a friend and have a conversation about what just went down.

Because after you've had an argument with someone who was highly narcissistic,

They use so many word salads,

They gaslight,

They project,

They twist the story,

They come back with weird rationalizations and you end up thinking it's you,

There's something wrong with you.

They refuse to admit that they said what they said.

They rearrange the story.

They add things to the story.

They leave things out.

And if you are somewhat healthy,

When you self reflect,

You will also be able to be willing to think maybe I'm wrong,

Which is not something a narcissist can do.

And your willingness to be wrong will be used against you in a narcissistic relationship because narcissists don't self reflect.

When you're having an argument with a narcissist and you say something back to them like,

I don't like that you're using that tone with me or I don't like you accusing me of things that I'm not guilty of,

The narcissist has a very strong reaction to you challenging them and what they will harp on is your reaction.

They will not question what they said to you.

They will not take into consideration how you feel.

Perhaps you have a narcissistic parent who when they come over your house,

They're very intrusive.

Maybe they even go through your computer.

Maybe they stalk your friends on Facebook,

Whatever it is.

If you have a narcissistic parent,

This is someone who may get very much involved in your life.

This is someone who wants to keep checks on you.

And why?

Well,

If they're involved in your life emotionally and they're narcissistic,

Then this is ammunition.

They get to stay 10 steps ahead of you.

They get to say that,

Oh,

I was talking to Mary and she told me X,

Y,

And Z about you.

Or I was talking to your ex-boyfriend and he said X,

Y,

And Z about you.

So it's about staying one up.

It's about control.

It's about causing you to worry about what your parents are thinking about you.

And if you dare say,

Hey,

Mom,

I find that very intrusive,

Then that is when a narcissistic mother goes all out to annihilate you.

She will bully you because you dared to confront her about her being intrusive.

Their lack of empathy makes it nearly impossible for them to stop and reflect and ask themselves,

How does my daughter feel?

Or how does my spouse feel?

Or how does my coworker feel?

Do I cause people to be nervous around me?

Are my reactions over the top?

This is not something a narcissist is able to do,

At least not easily.

Generally speaking,

Narcissists are people who walk around on planet earth believing that anything that you do,

You did on purpose.

So you are meaning to hurt them,

Which is almost impossible to be in a healthy relationship with someone who is that distrusting,

Someone who takes everything that you say to mean that you did it intentionally to hurt them.

Narcissists tend to be people who think that you should be thinking about them,

That you should be making them the center of your life.

And they can actually rationalize and justify feelings of abandonment when you haven't abandoned them at all.

It's their perception.

So in their mind,

They're thinking,

You should have done this.

You should have said that you didn't do this.

And that means that you're an uncaring person.

And that means that you did this because you don't love me.

And you did this because you don't care about me.

And you did this because you intentionally meant to hurt me or make me feel bad.

A narcissist is someone who no matter how hard you try to convince them that you do love them,

It's never enough.

Narcissists generally believe that you're out to get them,

That your intentions are negative,

That you will ultimately abandon them and fail them.

And that's because they are so fragile at their core.

And they really do want to feel secure.

However,

Unfortunately,

They are so easily wounded that it is impossible in most cases to have any type of a relationship with them.

For a narcissistic husband who has a codependent wife,

This is a very dangerous scenario.

Because with a narcissistic husband,

For instance,

And a codependent wife,

The situation is set up in which the codependent woman will end up catering to the needs of the narcissistic husband.

And a codependent woman feels so worthless and so ashamed at her core and is driven by an unconscious need to please others.

And this is a direct result of feeling abandoned as a child.

It's a fawning response,

Which basically means that a codependent woman in this type of a situation will fawn after her husband's approval.

Now imagine this situation if you are this codependent woman who feels ashamed,

Who feels guilty,

Who grew up feeling emotionally neglected,

And she now manifests and marries a husband who is more narcissistic.

In lots of the cases,

At least in my coaching practice,

What seems to be across the board is codependent women who attract narcissistic husbands tend to be women who have had a narcissistic father and or a narcissistic mother.

And in this situation,

We have someone who is seeking approval,

Someone who doesn't feel good enough,

And someone who is unconsciously driven to gain the validation of the person that she loves.

Below the veil of consciousness is a wounded inner child that never felt good enough and who has not met very early psychological milestones for a sense of safety or a sense of trust.

All children are born with a need to securely attach to their primary caretakers.

When that is frustrated,

We don't stop wanting to attach to other people.

In my opinion,

I think what we do as adults is we carry this energetic wound within us and it becomes like a magnet.

And we don't attract people who can fulfill that wound.

This is the dangerous thing when we're unconscious.

We attract what is similar to the wound.

So we end up attracting in our partners similar energy beings to the people that created the wound in the first place.

It's an illusion,

But we don't know it.

We don't know that when we feel attracted to a more narcissistic partner that this attraction is really resonance.

It's not a mature,

Loving attraction.

Below the veil of consciousness,

This hole within us has created a magnet type of energy and we are attracting into our experiences people that mirror the energy beings of the people who wounded us in the first place.

And that is why inner child recovery work is so important.

If you discover that you have high empathy and you're unable to set boundaries or you're in a toxic relationship and you're not able to end it or you live in fear of your spouse,

You live in fear of upsetting your children,

You feel like you're stuck inside dynamics that you can't change.

So many of my clients are people who feel like they can't escape these dynamics.

They had no awareness that codependency or people pleasing or the fear of abandonment or feeling ashamed at the core and not feeling good enough caused them to seek these types of relationships and cause them to remain in these types of relationships.

And as life goes on,

Things get very complicated.

We buy houses together.

We start businesses together.

We have children together.

And it's not so easy to end these narcissistic relationships.

When we are in a relationship with the narcissist,

We are dealing with someone who is very easily upset.

And so it becomes a string of calming this other person down.

It becomes the way for us to anticipate the next attack.

And in our mind,

We don't realize it,

But we are trying to avoid the next attack.

So we're never in the now.

Unfortunately,

In terms of law of attraction,

We stay on this frequency and we don't tap into the field of potential because below the veil of consciousness,

We are seeking approval,

Avoiding abandonment,

And trying to convince this narcissistic person that we are not who they think we are.

I spent many years in a relationship in which I was trying to prove to this person I was not who they said I was.

It was so painful for me because it triggered all of my childhood wounds.

I felt unworthy.

I felt unlovable.

I felt like I was the worst person on the planet.

Seriously.

I felt like there was nothing good about me.

No matter how hard I tried to please people,

No matter how good I tried to be,

No matter how perfect I tried to be,

No matter how I stuffed my emotions and put people before my own needs,

It was never enough.

And so when I did speak up and I was told that I was negative,

That I was crazy,

That I had no right to be unhappy,

That triggered all of my childhood wounds and it kept me stuck.

So I was not able to step into the field of potential and create a new paradigm until I figured out what was wrong.

And that's why I believe there is a benefit to labels like narcissistic behavior,

Narcissistic relationship,

Gaslighting,

Projection.

What is the silent treatment?

What is codependency?

What is too much empathy?

What does it mean to feel like a people pleaser?

What is the fawning response?

All of these labels allow someone who is in a toxic relationship to understand and gain a grasp of what's going on.

Not that long ago,

I met someone in a local ice cream shop who happens to be a fan of my work and she said,

I didn't know what I was involved in until I started listening to your podcast and listening to you on YouTube.

I didn't know that this was the relationship that I was in.

And so it is with so many of us.

And that is the value of sharing what we learn along the way.

So if you are involved with a narcissist,

Be very careful about not getting caught up in this loop where you are being accused of things that you're not guilty of.

It triggers your inner child.

You feel deeply wounded and you go right back into the trauma response of fawning,

Which is trying to get this person to calm down,

Trying to prove to this person that you're not who they think you are,

Which is you seeking the approval,

Which in my opinion is a mirror to the inner child's wound of feeling rejected by mother and father or both early on.

So we don't even realize that we are unconsciously projecting our inner child's wounds onto this narcissistic person who is mirroring the energy of one or both of our parents.

We don't even realize that we're not showing up by true self saying,

Hey,

Wait a minute.

This is gaslighting.

This is projection.

This is triangulation.

You're not hearing me.

You're disrespecting me.

You're taking my reaction to your poor behavior as the problem.

My reaction to the way you're speaking to me is not the problem.

The way you're speaking to me is the problem.

But you can't find that empowered stance until you start to work this out.

You can't find the true self until you have a moment of awareness,

Until you have a spiritual awakening,

Until your mind awakens to itself,

Which by the way,

The scientific term for that is metacognition.

It's the mind's ability to question the way it thinks.

You cannot heal from this and get out of these cycles until you awaken to the cycle.

Can you tie your shoelaces the right way unless you first figure out that you're tying them the wrong way?

No.

Until you figure out that you haven't tied your shoelaces the right way,

You get up in the morning,

You put on your sneakers,

You tie them,

Or at least you think you are,

You go out for a jog and you fall on your face,

You break your front tooth.

This happens until you stop and you say,

Wait a minute,

And you observe the way you observe your program and you observe the way you are tying your shoes.

Then at that point,

Once you've been awakened,

You have the ability to think about the way that you think.

You have the ability to question whether or not you're tying your shoelaces the right way.

In that space is the field of potential for you to learn something new.

When you're in a codependent loop,

You're not learning.

You are rehashing.

You are literally in a program.

When you are in a loop of this type of a cycle with a narcissist,

You're not in a learning phase.

You are repeating the past.

You learned early that your feelings don't matter.

And so you are in a relationship with someone who essentially mirrors that back to you.

And below the veil of consciousness,

You go right into these inner child behaviors of seeking approval,

Acquiescing,

Feeling smaller than,

Fawning,

Doing everything that you can to convince this person that you are good enough for them to love you.

On some level,

We believe,

Although it's an illusion,

We have been programmed to think that if we gain this person's approval,

The heavens will open and we will feel good enough.

Now,

Why would I feel this way?

I know I felt that way,

But I'm sure many of you feel that way.

But where does this come from?

Because we're not crazy.

If it's a resonance,

That means it's come from somewhere.

It's an imprint from something.

Energetically,

I have this feeling.

And so I didn't give myself that feeling.

It came from something outside of me.

And in my humble opinion,

I think it goes back to and it mirrors the grand design.

I think in the best case scenario,

If we were born to healthy parents,

We would have felt like we had a gap type love,

That everything was fine.

Planet Earth was not an aggressive place.

It was not an unsafe place.

Planet Earth welcomed us.

I'm a human being.

It's good that I'm here.

Good things are going to happen for me.

So I think that our unconscious belief or our drive to seek approval and our illusion of believing that this narcissist is going to be able to make us feel good enough about ourselves comes from the grand design.

That's the way it was supposed to be.

What we have to do is awaken to the truth.

We have to awaken to how we're showing up in a relationship.

We have to awaken to our people pleasing.

We have to wake up.

And if we are people who are not setting boundaries,

If we are not feeling empowered,

We have to work at being empowered,

At speaking our truth.

We have to work at putting ourselves first,

Carving out time in our day for us so that we have a life.

And so our life isn't wrapped up in this narcissistic person,

Whether that person is your daughter,

Your son,

Your mother,

Your father,

Your spouse,

Your best friend,

It doesn't matter.

We have to find the ability to recognize what we're doing wrong and to detach.

If we are not able to stand up for ourselves,

Oftentimes that's because we are in so much fear and we don't even know why.

So we're afraid that we're going to lose this person.

We're afraid of what they're going to do.

We're afraid of the smear campaign.

We are afraid that they're right.

We're afraid that if we end the relationship,

We were wrong.

So we have all of these fears.

Another issue is simply because we have never been modeled a healthy relationship.

We don't know anything better.

So we're walking around on planet earth thinking,

Well,

Maybe this is the best that there is.

It's very difficult to desire something that you've never seen before,

But it's so important that you know on a conscious,

Logical level that if you keep doing what you've always done,

You're always going to get what you've always got.

It's not going to change.

As someone who has walked this path,

I had to convince myself that healthy relationships existed,

That love was real,

That I could resonate with someone who could love me and respect me,

That I could manifest someone that I could love and I could respect and put 100 percent of my heart behind.

I felt on an intrinsic level I as a human being was not going to be happy as a woman unless I manifested a man,

A partner that I could put all of my faith behind.

And I can tell you that I've manifested that relationship.

Now that's not to be braggadocious.

That is to encourage people,

To help them understand that codependency is a program.

You're acting out assimilation.

You have made the narcissist your God.

You have put the narcissist before yourself.

This narcissist may represent the mother that you never gained approval from or the father who rejected you.

Everybody's a little bit different,

But it's important that if we're in narcissistic relationships and we are codependent and we have high empathy and we struggle to not want to heal people and not want to fix people,

We struggle with enabling other people.

If these are our issues,

We need to figure out why.

We need to retrace our steps.

Remember that oftentimes you may want to share your feelings with someone who is highly narcissistic,

But in most cases,

At least in my opinion,

It's often best to say as little as possible.

This is not someone that you can joke around with.

This is not someone who,

If they ask you a question,

They say,

I want you to be honest with me.

If they're a narcissist,

They're very fragile and they really don't want you to be honest with them.

They can't take a joke.

They can't take your honesty.

Even if they're asking you for their honesty,

Narcissists really struggle with being able to see themselves as imperfect.

This is because they are so fragile on the inside.

Their self-esteem has been shattered.

Some of the best things that you can do include saying as little as possible,

Not joking around with them and not answering their questions honestly.

When they ask you to,

They are setting you up.

Another thing that you can do is when you hear a sarcastic comment come from someone that you know that is sarcastic and perhaps narcissistic is don't respond at all.

Find a way to change the subject.

Get up from the table,

Make an excuse to go wash the dishes.

Just act like you didn't hear the comment at all because it's not going to end well.

Narcissists love to argue.

That is their arena.

It's like wrestling with a pig in the mud.

And oftentimes they're the one that's going to win because they have the energy to be able to endure these types of conversations.

Do what you can to hold onto yourself the next time you're around somebody who wants to poke the bear.

Try to remember not to poke them back.

Sometimes the best tool is silence.

And remember,

One of the short telltale signs that you're dealing with a narcissist is someone who has a strong reaction to your reaction to their poor behavior.

Namaste everybody.

Until next time.

Bye for now.