How to use your nemesis as your muse

Shifting from irritation to inspiration

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Dear Readers,

For those who have read most of my work, you will have noticed that I don’t share much about myself. I’ve shifted from being an open book earlier in my life to learning through many betrayals to keep my feelings and personal details to myself and to share them with whom I have developed mutually trusting relationships.

The published articles to date are from my research, practice and examination of my stories intertwined with countless stories from others. I write about the things I have done, the things that have been done to me, how to break the cycle of suffering and forge better ways of being in relationship with others.

I also have about 30 drafts going at once, which can feel overwhelming at times, and pluck one to focus on to complete when my muse inspires me. Sometimes my muse abandons me or my life is busy between family, work, life to give the writing the focus it needs. This is why there might be weeks between drafts - writers block and being at the mercy of a demanding muse might be two sides of the same coin.

The Muses are Greek mythological goddesses of literature, arts and science who are the sources of knowledge that contributed to the stories, music and poetry transmitted orally through history. Nowadays, a muse is anyone who provides a source of inspiration for any creative endeavour.

Who is my muse, you ask?

My muse is my nemesis.

What is a nemesis?

According to Greek mythology, she’s the goddess of retribution. She personifies vengeance and retribution to restore the balance between good and evil. The literal meaning refers to an enemy like a villain. The villain can be temporarily neutralized but always returns.

A nemesis can be an adversary, rival, archenemy, frenemy or foe in your personal and professional life. She can be a single individual or several individuals who share a narcissistic behaviour traits that contribute to an unwanted power dynamic with you.

I can guarantee there is someone in your life who gets under you skin and who seems to get more mental attention than you’d like to admit. I can also guarantee that someone you get along with and who you believe likes you will turn on you seemingly overnight. These individuals will turn up the heat in your life so that you’re forced to give them and your self-defence more attention than before. Their actions will expose an existing power imbalance and will push you to navigate the situation in more strategic ways than you did in the past.

The nemesis can also be more than an irritating person. It can represent an irritating situation or a challenge that life throws at you to disrupt your status quo and shake you out of your stupor of comfort. This challenge is life forcing change on you. You can either resist it until you can’t or you can face it head on.

I have my share of irritants - people and situations - that can be distracting and try to nudge me into the Victim role. It can be the undermining work colleague, the internet troll, the flat tire on an already bad day, sudden financial trouble, or the dissatisfied client. When the stressor - the Persecutor - is constant and ongoing, it requires conscious mental effort to 1) not allow it to defeat me 2) avoid looking for a quick fix 3) turn irritation into inspiration.

I turn the Persecutor into my Muse.

As previously discussed, you can’t get to the root cause or a novel solution when you’re in a reactive state, triggered by an irritating situation. You also can’t gather your mental and emotional resources to view your situation from a different perspective when the challenge brought by your nemesis is ongoing. You are more likely to view a situation as the Victim or Rescuer when you’re emotionally charged and will be limited in your ability to seek the wisdom hidden in the challenge because you’re focused on protecting and defending against a perceived threat (the irritant).

When in a reactive state, you’re at risk of taking action that keeps you stuck in drama rather than liberating from it.

When in a reactive state, you’re at risk of taking action that keeps you stuck in drama rather than liberating from it.

Note to readers

Irritants and stressors in this piece are not to be applied to situations where you or another are experiencing unsafe, dangerous, illegal or life threatening circumstances. These challenging situations are not within the realm of muses and require practical, legal or financial resources to remove danger.

How do I use the nemesis as my muse?

An alternative role of the Persecutor is the Challenger. The Challenger is the most powerful role of all because like the Persecutor, its role is to disrupt status quo. However, rather than shrink into threat and shame of the Victim, the Challenger nudges you to critically examine and challenge your worldview, morals, expectations, or rules about the world as well as your interpretation of the irritating situation.

The Challenger can also be seen as hidden truths, the revealer of biases and inner conflict, and exposer of blind spots. Out of all the six roles, the Challenger is the only role vital for the emergence of new learning, wisdom and offers the potential for personal growth and interpersonal transformation. It has the potential to promote beneficial change as long as those who feel challenged can work with the irritating discomfort accompanying disruption rather than try to push back against it to preserve status quo.

When the Nemesis strikes and you feel irritated, threatened or upset, you will need an attitude and cognitive shift to view this situation as an invitation to beneficial change.

The shift required involves CURIOSITY and an interest in discovering something new about yourself and the irritating situation. The Nemesis might seem like she’s trying to take you down or she can also be viewed as your Muse inspiring you to investigate your reaction and undertake an investigation to discover how she’s supporting your learning, emotional maturation and refinement of critical thinking skills.

There are few prompts you can try out to use your nemesis and your muse.

Prompts about emotion, beliefs and rules

• What is behind this irritant? What is this person doing that is getting under my skin?

• What beliefs/assumptions am I making about them?

• In what way are they resembling me and the traits or emotions that I feel ashamed about? ie. Are they showing me through their envious behaviour how I’ve been suppressing envy I feel toward others?

• What am I worried about regarding their behaviour? ie. Are they misusing their influence? Are they misleading people? Are they being aggressive toward others?

• What moral principles or rules is this person violating and getting away with? Are these rules restricting me or enabling me?

• If I were to see this person/situation as trying to help me break free from limitation in my life, how might I reframe the behaviour/situation?

If I didn’t allow myself to ask these and many other questions of myself, Hacking Narcissism would not exist today. Nearly every piece of content emerged because a shitty situation with a shitty behaved person pushed me to want to liberate from the suffering the situation caused. I needed to choose to be inspired by the nemesis and choose to use their narcissistic behaviours as a nudge to discover hidden information and wisdom held within the Challenger. The insights gained from this exploration were then implemented to produce strategies that I wrote about here, here and here.

Questions for the discussion section:

1. What do you think about this idea of using your nemesis as your muse? Feasible?

2. What are other questions do you ask yourself or your muse when trying to get through life’s challenges?

Thanks for reading, sharing, stacking, subscribing and discussing this piece,

Nathalie Martinek, PhD

The Narcissism Hacker

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I believe that a common threat to our individual and collective thriving is an addiction to power and control. This addiction fuels and is fuelled by greed - the desire to accumulate and control resources in social, information (and attention), economic, ecological, geographical and political systems.

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