1. Change your expectations.
You can save yourself a lot of unnecessary pain and frustration, agony, and confusion simply by adjusting your expectations to be more realistic and more in alignment with who and what it is you’re actually dealing with. In other words, don’t expect a sick person to behave like a healthy, well-adjusted, reasonable, kind, decent loving human being. Not going to happen.
Instead, if you know you’re dealing with someone who is empathy impaired, lacking in conscience, manipulative, deceptive, whatever it is, tell yourself the truth about who and what it is that you’re dealing with based on by virtue of your experience with this person. You know what you live, right? People show us who they are all the time. Our job is to pay attention and take the rose-colored glasses off and actually tell ourselves the truth.
So if you’re dealing with someone who is operating from a serious, negative ego, deeply unconscious, don’t lie to yourself about that. Setting yourself up for anger, frustration, confusion, and a world of pain. Tell yourself the truth about who and what it is you’re actually dealing with so that you can take care of yourself accordingly.
2. Stop reacting.
Choose, decide, “From this moment forward “to the best of my ability, “I will no longer participate in “and willingly handover my vital life force energy “to an energy vampire, to a toxic bully, “to an emotional manipulator, “to someone who needs a scapegoat “to project all their unresolved shadow onto.” Choose, decide from this moment forward to respond where appropriate, if at all, as opposed to reacting.
Now, I know from experience, pre-recovery, this can be very difficult. We are often, especially those of us who identify as being untreated adult children, adult children of alcoholism, adult children of family dysfunction, all manner of benign and outright neglect, abandonment, abuse, etc. We are by nature highly reactive, right? We live in fight, freeze, or flight. We were programmed that way from a very early age. So I get that saying, “Choose, decide to stop reacting,” is a whole lot easier said than done, especially pre-recovery.
But it’s a vital piece if you want to learn how to beat the narcissist at their own game. Find a way. Now the reality is, if you want to get really good at non-reactivity and having, owning your sovereignty, your personal power in the ability to choose and decide if/and when you will respond, if/and when you will engage at all, this requires healing and recovery. And I Always Recommend this book for healing: Healing from Hidden Abuse: A Journey Through the Stages of Recovery from Psychological Abuse.
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