7 steps to reduce your interpersonal narcissism burden

Hacking narcissism begins now

Happy 2024 to Everyone!

This is a re-post from last year to remind you all that no relationship is fixed and you’re in control of your responses to tricky/annoying/unpleasant/energy sucking interactions with others.

Photo by Icons8 Team on Unsplash

‘Tis the time of the year that many make declarations of things they want to achieve this year or reject resolutions all together. Either way, new year can mean a fresh start, new opportunities and clarity about what you no longer want to experience in your life.

This is also a time to contemplate relationship goals and how you might proceed to cultivate and enhance relationships so they are satisfying and fulfilling while also reducing the impact of narcissism from key relationships in your life.

Unlike my other pieces, this one is focused on YOU and supporting you through a process to make a desired and necessary change to alleviate your narcissism burden.

I’m going to step you through self-reflection prompts to help you identify ONE change you want to make in ONE relationship (or more if you’re motivated and ready).

Caveat: Choose a relationship that is challenging or annoying that affect your mood. This process and strategies are NOT appropriate for violent, unsafe or abusive relationships/situations.

Ready? Here we go! First question….

1. Who’s the most challenging, trickiest person in your life right now?

Challenging behaviour can comes in a few forms:

• People who don’t give you as much airtime as they expect you to give them.

• People who diminish your accomplishments and abilities.

• People who try to be your teacher, therapist or spiritual guide when you didn’t ask for it.

• People who have high standards for your conduct but are combative when you point out when they’re not walking their talk.

• People who view themselves as superior to you based on devalued attributes that you were born with because of the privileged attributes they were born with.

• People who use emotional manipulation to draw you into fixing their problems and cleaning up their mess.

There are three major categories for these behaviours:

1. Dominating by trying to control your actions and doing things their way. They might invalidate your feelings or experiences and suggest an alternative explanation or interpretation that suits them. This makes you feel like you can’t do what you want and your needs come second to theirs.

2. Diminishing you by criticising your efforts and ideas, deliberately excluding you, humiliating you in front of others, and putting you down. You can’t seem to do anything that satisfies them yet you still try.

3. Ignoring you completely by talking over you, interrupting you, not responding within a reasonable time frame, or act as if they never heard what you said. This can border on neglect of your needs or requests altogether, making it seem like you’re invisible to them.

In all three categories, the person can at time be generous and seemingly caring toward you when they need something and make unrealistic demands when it’s time for you to reciprocate (on their terms). The unpredicted fluctuation in their behaviour toward you can feel confusing when you suddenly find yourself on their shit list after being treated like the Favourite.

These behaviours are their default and unless they qualify as Dark Triad characters, they have no idea they do it. When you try to tell them how you feel, there’s an eruption, DARVO, emotional blackmail or dismissiveness. You just can’t win.

You have an opportunity to re-engineer your experience of them with ONE action to interrupt the current dynamic. First, you need to identify the behaviour that triggers you to react and the emotion driving your reaction. Second, you need to identify your behaviour when you react. This awareness primes you to respond differently next time you encounter the triggering behaviour.

You can proceed to the next step once you’ve identified ONE tricky relationship to work with.

Sprinting past tricky people. Image by Retrorocket via Alamy.

2. Spot your trigger

What does this person DO or SAY that causes a reaction?

Choose the main ONE from the list below:

3. Identify the emotion associated with the trigger

Anger: they might have violated a boundary, made you feel insecure, uncertain, out of control, unimportant, threatened or crossed the line in some way. You might have realised you violated your own principles to please them to no avail.

Dejected or down: you might have expected a different outcome to the norm and you got the same old reality.

Sad, low energy or de-motivated: you might have been diminished, criticised, invalidated or your advice dismissed when you got drawn into a problem you tried to fix.

Rejected: you might be excluded from a conversation or task that should involve you, or judged as worthless, faulty or unacceptable.

Betrayed: you know they’re being dishonest, lying, or behaving in an uncharacteristic way while disrespecting you, making you lose trust and respect for them and making you want some answers.

Afraid or anxious: can accompany any of the previous emotional states and a desire to apologise to smooth things over.

Now that you have identified ONE emotional state that surfaces when they push your buttons, you’re ready to look at your own reaction to them.

WARNING: this next step can be confronting and cause discomfort. The good news is that discomfort can accompany insight and activate motivation for change.

4. Identify your reaction

What do you do in response to the trigger?

You’ll notice that the list is the same as above. These are reactive behaviours to the emotions that are triggered by the other person’s behaviour. We tend to mirror back the other person’s behaviour for self-protection and self-defence. Unfortunately, your reaction can keep both parties trapped in a disempowering, confining dynamic instead of a liberating one.

5. The outcome

What is the outcome of this exchange that keeps you locked in conflict, impasse, hostility or hurt?

What happens to you? How do you feel?

What happens in the relationship? How do you get back on track and how long does it last before the next tricky situation?

There are many possible outcomes. You get the silent treatment or you feel angry or shut down for a while/days and lose motivation to do other things, or you bury yourself in activities to not think about it, or you tell others who know this person and recruit others to side with you. Another outcome is that you placate the person to get some temporary peace but it could have required you to sacrifice something you needed or wanted. Try to get as descriptive as possible or draw a flow chart for what you’ve learned so far.

Now that you know what they do that triggers a reaction in you, your strategy to respond and the unwanted outcome, you’re now armed with awareness to make an intentional change.

6. Preferred & realistic outcome

What outcome do you want instead?

Before you respond, it’s important to be realistic about what’s possible rather than hope for the best. People don’t change without motivation to change. You’re the one making a small change and there will be a ripple effect to doing something different and interrupting the default pattern that has comprised the relationship status quo.

Realistic can mean that you anticipate what they’re going to do when you don’t deliver the expected reaction. It can also be that you no longer seek their approval so you no longer disclose personal information about important matters or matters close to your heart. Therefore you no longer feel down about them being dismissive or diminishing about them not validating you.

If your outcome is simply “I want to remain steady even when they do the annoying behaviour”, then it might be that your new strategy is to respond with mild interest or neutrally and finish up the conversation.

You need to keep in mind that the change you make can’t be abrupt where they think WTF? Any change in response disrupts status quo, so the change needs to be minimally destabilising.

7. Alternative response

Next time they do the thing that ticks you off, here are some options of what to do differently (choose ONE):

1. Accept them as they are. Avoid expecting them to behave differently this time compared to all the other times. They’re a package deal of traits and attributes that range from generous to mean. Accepting the range of behaviours they show you means that you can predict how they’re always going to treat you when they don’t get their way.

2. Adjust your expectations of them. Avoid allowing disappointment to colour your experience that keeps you stuck in false hope for change. It’s unrealistic for you to expect them to behave differently/better than before without them suddenly needing something from you or seeing you as someone with importance that can benefit them. Based on the evidence of their behaviour to date, you already know what to expect and this can feel empowering when your predictions are correct.

3. Boundaries. Avoid situations that aren’t time limited. Minimise your time and exposure to anyone who is happy to be challenging/difficult/painful. This also includes shutting down an unproductive interaction and exiting the situation. This is self-compassion.

4. Have a goal for your conversation or interaction. Do you want to plan a meeting? Do you want to negotiate a change in plans? Do you need to communicate an idea? Whatever the goal, be clear about what it is and keep the conversation focused on getting there.

5. Remain transactional. Avoid hoping they will be interested in what you have to say or your feelings. They don’t need to love you. You don’t need to love them. You can be friendly or warm while focusing on a task at hand without getting personal. If they continue to be unfriendly, inconsiderate or distort the truth, I can see a place for calling out any bullshit and ending the conversation.

6. Suspend your need to be right. Avoid entering a battle of wills to come out on top. It’s draining and a game to the other person too. ie. “That’s an interesting point that I’ll need to think about further”. End conversation.

7. Suspend your need to feel seen & understood. ie. Avoid seeking their approval and hope that they will be interested enough in you to want to understand you. An alternative response might be point 10.

8. Suspend your need to express your opinions. Avoid trying to change their mind when you know they’re going to do everything to change yours so you see things their way. An alternative response might be point 6.

9. Their perspectives are always interesting/fascinating/correct to them. Avoid being judgemental when their point of view sounds flawed or incorrect. It will fuel unproductive disagreement and hostility. You can disagree in your thoughts or verbally without judging them for theirs. Alternative responses might be: “I have a different way of seeing things based on my experience and evidence.” or “I’m interested in how you arrived at this conclusion! Would you mind walking me through your thought process?” or “I disagree (and here’s why).”

10. Maintain focus on them. Avoid trying to turn the conversation back to what you want if they already control the conversation. Their ideas, experiences and opinions are all that matter here because they’ve already shown you that yours don’t. An alternative response can be found among the detailed strategies here.

11. Medium chill to gray rock. Avoid getting activated by their attempt to provoke you. You can respond with nonchalant, mild interest to one word answers, especially if they’re not even listening to you because they’re being a conversational narcissist.

Pick one strategy that is the most likely to achieve your desired, realistic and achievable outcome.

I hope this was a useful process to zone in on a tricky relationship, one tricky behaviour, one ineffective response and one alternative response that is more likely to interrupt a tricky dynamic and make things easier for you.

All you need now is a plan to implement the new response and a support person to help you prepare (ie. role play and refine approach), debrief with after executing the new behaviour, evaluate your effectiveness and celebrate your attempt/success!

What’s the problematic behaviour and what will you try to interrupt this dynamic to improve your mood and reduce your narcissism burden?

Comment below!

I hope that 2024 is the year you can hack narcissism and reduce the impact of narcissistic behaviour from your life!

Thank you for reading, supporting, subscribing and sharing with people who could benefit from this process (including your tricky person!),

Nathalie Martinek, PhD

The Narcissism Hacker

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Hack narcissism and support my work

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.

While activists focus on fighting macro issues, I believe that activism also needs to focus on the micro issues - the narcissistic traits that pollute relationships between you and I, and between each other, without contributing to existing injustice. It’s not as exciting as fighting the Big Baddies yet hacking, resisting and overriding our tendencies to control others that also manifest as our macro issues is my full-time job.

I’m dedicated to helping people understand all the ways narcissistic traits infiltrate and taint our interpersonal, professional, organisational and political relationships, and provide strategies for narcissism hackers to fight back and find peace.

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