1. Do not minimize their dysfunctional behaviour.
When you’re in love with someone or when you think you’re in love with someone, especially when you are in a relationship with a narcissist, it will be appealing to want to downplay their abusive behaviors. We make all kinds of excuses for how selfish and cruel they are because it makes us feel better and makes us feel like what they are doing is somehow not as bad as it actually is.
We will be inclined to tell ourselves all kinds of things to try and minimize the abuse like he or she didn’t really mean it as they said it, or it sounds worse than it actually is. One of my all-time favorites was, oh well, his bark is worse than his bite. We might tell ourselves that he or she only raged because they’re under so much stress from work or had X Y & Z not happened, he or she wouldn’t have reacted that way.
There are just a million different ways that we can do this. We can minimize their dysfunctional behavior, and over time, victims usually become fatigued and numb about their abuse because it happens so often that we just have gotten used to it, and that is very dangerous territory. It’s important that you’re truthful with yourself about the abuse.
If you continue to make excuses or downplay, the dysfunction not only will the narcissist’s behavior become more frequent and more intense, but it literally starts to fog your own cognitive abilities.
When you tell yourself something long enough, you come to believe it, or at the very least accept it. It leads to living in denial. You can eventually become a contributing participant in the delusion that they’ve created. There is not anything okay about manipulating, deceiving, and humiliating other people. It is wrong. And it’s really important that you understand that it’s wrong.
2. Don’t take them at face value
Narcissists are deceptive, really pretty much everything about them is a deception. So it’s not just that you can’t trust their words as you know they are constantly lying, but the image they present to the world is also a deception. Image is everything to them.
They work incredibly hard to present a facade of superiority, but underneath that shiny façade, is people with narcissism feel empty. The presentation that they give, the image that they portray is not an act accurate depiction of who they truly are. If you take them at face value, if you believe the image they are presenting is an accurate account of who they are, you are in for a rude awakening.
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