2. Narcissistic Supply.
Another reason that narcissists enjoy using word salad so much is because it gives them tons and tons of narcissistic supply. Narcissists view conversations as competitions. The objective is always to win. Like I said before, your objective for having a conversation and the narcissist’s objective of having a conversation are at complete opposites. We are concerned with honesty, they are concerned with winning.
So if the goal is to escape accountability, the word salad will be directed at accomplishing that. If the goal is to confuse you about something they had previously told you, then that’s what must be accomplished for them to win. And if the goal is to simply confuse, frustrate, and irritate you and wear you down in order to gain narcissistic supply, then that is what the goal is to achieve using word salad.
I want to elaborate a little bit on why the narcissist gains so much narcissistic supply by using the word salad? Most victims of narcissistic abuse will be highly sensitive people or empaths or both, and that means they are genuinely concerned with being fair, understanding everyone’s perspective and opinion; we really care that everyone feels heard and validated. Likewise, we genuinely care that we are understood; the meaning of things is important to us, unlike the narcissist.
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So when we are confronted with these bizarre, frustrating, word salad episodes, and we are unaware of what they are doing, then this is a narcissistic supply paradise for the narcissist. They can play this game with us for hours and hours if we will let them. The problem here is they know how we think. They know that we actually care about understanding what is going on, and they know that by subjecting us towards salad, it will provoke us to obsess about what was said: What did it mean when he or she said that? Am I missing something? Could what they said actually be true? Could I have misunderstood? And on and on, and this gives the narcissist tons of narcissistic supply.
The narcissist gets tons of premium narcissistic supply from thinking about how you are obsessing about what they said. And on top of it, they know that the entire conversation was just a manipulation to cause this distress and confusion in you and to provoke you to obsess. To the narcissist, it’s all just one big game and it’s all about winning, nothing more, nothing less.
So, how can we stop getting sucked into this?
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