1. Cultivate your self-esteem.
Narcissistic individuals usually target people who appear vulnerable, and people who are emotionally vulnerable more than often tend to have low self-esteem. Even though a narcissist may manipulate the person through love bombing and other tactics into thinking they respect them, they usually feel the exact opposite- they tend to view the vulnerable person with low self-esteem with contempt and even resentment.
Narcissists tend to equate low self-esteem with low value, so it is only natural for them during the devaluation phase to explicitly show what they really think and feel about that person. The flip side is that they tend to view high self-esteem and even arrogance or narcissism, as a high value of that person.
So, if you find a way to cultivate healthy self-esteem, the narcissist will start valuing you, and thus respecting you more, but more importantly- you will probably become more resistant to other narcissists around you who would otherwise put you through a wringer.
2. Let the narcissist know that you can easily leave them and replace them.
Narcissists are highly sensitive to abandonment and rejection. When they do get rejected or abandoned, their inner monologue can be approximated by this sentence: “Who does that person think they are to reject or abandon me”?
Again, their grandiosity and hypersensitivity to abandonment and rejection are interfering with their cognitive processing of the fact that someone may not want to be around them. So how can you use this to make them respect you? Tell them, respectfully, assertively, and clearly that you will not be putting up with their manipulation, invalidation, lying, cheating, aggression, and that you can easily leave them, with many other options waiting for you out there.
It is preferable that you really do create those options for yourself. Narcissists definitely don’t like the idea they can be replaced, since it implies that there are people who are superior to them. This will make the narcissistic person in question respect you, at least temporarily, until you find a better way of dealing with them.
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