1. You don’t speak plainly or openly about who you are.
One of the first things that they might look for in you is you may be the kind of person who doesn’t really speak plainly and openly about who you are and what your plans are. I recall speaking with one woman who was talking about a member of her extended family who is very opinionated and very overbearing. And her thing is, ‘Well, I don’t want to say anything that’s going to make him upset.’ I’m thinking, ‘Well, what if you just said, “This is what I believe” or “This is what I’m going to do”?’ And she looked at me like, ‘Oh, what a genius!’ Because she was so accustomed to having to be cautious and calculated she had lost her ability to speak plainly. Are you the kind of person that does not speak plainly? If that’s the case, narcissists pick up on that. It’s like, ‘Well, good. I’ll go into that space then.’
Read More: The Best Way to Put Narcissists In Their Place.
2. You constantly feel the need to appease.
It could be that you constantly feel like you’re supposed to appease that other individual, that narcissistic person. And when you go into high appeasement mode and it’s obvious that you’ll do anything or say anything to keep them in a good mood and over time, they pick up on it, what they interpret it as is, ‘Good, you see me as being the top dog here. Let’s keep that up. That’s how it’s supposed to be.’ And they run with it.
Recommended: Healing from Hidden Abuse: A Journey Through the Stages of Recovery from Psychological Abuse.
3. You feel the need to justify your choices or actions.
It may be that you’re the kind of person who feels like you have to justify your choices or your actions. Once you do speak up and then the narcissist comes along with a kind of reaction to you, you try to over-explain yourself and give rationalizations about why it’s okay for you to do this. And I mean, maybe something really simple like how you manage your schedule or why you made a decision in your interactions with someone else. And it’s like, ‘Why am I having to explain myself so much?’ The more you do, the more the narcissist is thinking, ‘Okay, you’re trying to get my favor, aren’t you? I like it. That’s the way it ought to be.’
Continue reading on the next page
Sharing is caring!
