Number eight: “You have to stop now.” You may even need to use a gesture when you say it. Now, don’t put your hand in their face, but raise it gently to make your point clear. Look, narcissists have the emotional intelligence of terribly wounded toddlers at best and absolute barbarians at worst—selectively, of course, depending on who’s watching. They also have no limits and boundaries, as I mentioned earlier. So if you find yourself in a situation where you have no choice but to engage, or for whatever reason, you’re choosing to continue to engage, it is fully up to you to learn how to set healthy limits and boundaries and maintain them.
If you say, “But Tammy, I can’t” or “I don’t know how,” no problem! Learn, practice, and develop these skills—you can do this. The thing is if you want to put an end to the emotional and psychological abuse and you’re in a situation where, for whatever reason, you can’t or won’t go full-blown no contact, and I get that you may have a very good reason for that—know that it is absolutely going to be on you to learn how to set and maintain healthy limits and boundaries. You have to learn how to do that for yourself—set them, back them up, hold the line, and hold firm. There’s no other way.
Number nine: “I didn’t listen to your voicemail,” or “I didn’t read the email,” or “the text,” whatever the case may be. In other words, “I’m not interested.” In fact, I’m so not interested that I couldn’t even be bothered to read or listen to the nonsense you said; you simply don’t matter that much. In fact, you don’t even register on my radar for me. That’s the message you’re sending when you say to a narcissist, “I didn’t read it,” or “I didn’t listen to it.” And not another word—you’re letting them know, “You don’t matter. You don’t even register on my radar at all. I am not interested.” And the truth is that’s a crushing message to send to someone with a destructive narcissistic personality pattern—someone who absolutely needs others to see them through their distorted lens, the distorted lens of their egotistical delusions of grandeur. It’s crushing. Absolutely gets the job done.
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