I Have Something To Say

When I was thirteen, my father burst into my room while I was doing my homework, and demanded that I follow him outside. He lead me in the dark to the steep, empty hillside behind our house to point out that "some guy" could see right into my bedroom window. He then berated me for half an hour because my shades weren't drawn. Never mind there was nothing back there. Never mind whoever wanted to spy on me would have to jump a fence, climb a hill, and navigate their way through trees and poison oak in the dark. "Somebody" could potentially do it, and I was in trouble for not preventing it from happening. As per usual, I absorbed the blame. It wasn't until a few years later that I realized that the "someone" who would go to all that trouble to watch me through my bedroom window was himself. My father did many sexually inappropriate things to me and around me for as far back as I can remember. He used to walk around the house naked when my teenag...

Conversations with narcissists often start out like this. You make a statement about something that matters to you. It doesn't matter what it is exactly, but the fact that it holds some meaning or significance to you is what the narc hones in on. The narc then demeans the thing you care about, through either dismissing it or making excuses why it doesn't matter. Then they make some unrelated accusation that accuses you of the opposite of your actions and intentions.  Next, they twist what you said to make you wrong, and accuse you of they very thing they are blatantly doing. Fun, huh? Let's take a look at an example of this. You say you love kittens, and hope to foster them someday. Not too controversial, right? Just a statement about something you care about. A narcissist says kittens are stupid, and there's too many of them anyway. Then they tell you you're just encouraging all those losers that don't neuter their pets. You're probably going out there...

Narcissistic abuse is a strange phenomenon to experience. Because of the very nature of the abuse, victims get sucked in gradually and often have a hard time putting their finger on what's going on. Many experience "waking up" to the realization that their parent, boss, or partner is a narcissist. Initially it can feel like the navigating the Twilight Zone as they step into a new world of insight and understanding. People who have experienced this form of abuse are often motivated to learn everything they can about narcissists to better understand what happened and why they got sucked in. This is good information to know, and there are so many great resources for survivors to understand the predatory nature of narcissists, sociopaths, and psychopaths. However, there is something that all survivors need to understand about narcissists: they aren't nearly as interesting as you. You were groomed by the narcissist because you are interesting. You have empathy, which...

I mentor a group of young adults, and was recently handling a situation where another mentor systematically tore down much of the esteem I had spent several weeks helping them build up. Her reasoning for doing this was to "toughen them up" and get them ready for "the real world." When asked her why she would purposely disparage young people just starting to grasp on to their own ideas, her response was, "Well, that's just the way the world is." No. That's the way narcissistic abuse is. Fear-based tactics do not work, and they especially have no place in any sort of system where one person holds authority over another. When a mentor shoots down the ideas of a mentee, it creates a false dependence on the mentor's "right" ideas. The mentee then feels a false insecurity about their own "wrong" ideas. Not only is this terrible teaching, this is extremely dangerous territory for anyone who has experienced narcissistic abuse...