How to Heal a Narcissistic Relationship
Every relationship is narcissistic, and some relationships are more narcissistic than others.
No matter how narcissistic your relationship is, your life will get better if you deal with the narcissism.
This article has four sections:
What is narcissism?
What is a narcisstic relationship?
How to deal with narcissism in yourself
How to deal with narcissism in your partner
1. What is Narcissism?
Narcissism has four main components:
Fragility (you can’t handle criticism)
Indifference (you don’t care about people very much)
Superiority (you look down on people.)
Manipulation (you distort reality)
The root of narcissism is a deep sense of personal insufficiency. Narcisstic people develop these four charactaristics as a way to avoid feeling the deep pain of not being good enough.
Narcissism is a known failure mode of the human mind, a combination of character traits that are designed to protect the narcissistic person from feeling the deep shame of not being good enough.
The components of narcissism are four different ways you can avoid the intensity of feeling like you’re not good enough.
Narcissism exists on a spectrum. There’s no such thing as “a narcissist” or “not a narcissist,” there’s just people with varying degrees of narcissism.
Here’s how they work:
Fragility: you react intensely to criticism, so people around you learn to avoid criticizing you. This helps you avoid feeling inferior or not good enough.
Indifference: you don’t invest time or energy in other people, because you see them as vastly inferior to yourself, and you don’t want to dip into the emotions that come with really caring about someone.
Superiority: you can get around the intensity of feeling not good enough by focusing on the delusion that you’re better than everyone else.
Manipulation: the intensity of your distress motivates you to get good at twisting reality to make it seem like you’re better than everyone else.
2. What is a narcisstic relationship?
In a narcisstic relationship, one or both partners are doing the four things mentioned above. There is usually plenty of superiority, manipulation, indifference, and fragility on both sides.
Narcissistic relationships exist on a spectrum just like narcissism exists on a spectrum. Bad relationships tend to have a lot of narcissism, and good relationships have less.
Part of my goal here is to normalize narcisstic relationships. If you and your partner get along well and handle conflict well, you probably don’t have a lot of narcissism in your relatioship. But if you have normal relationship challenges, it may be helpful to look at those challenges through the lens of narcissism.
3. How to handle narcissism in yourself
You can delete narcissism from your relationship by dealing narcissism both in yourself, and in your partner.
First, practice reversing the four components of narcissism in yourself. If you feel resistance to this idea, remember that every single human being does all four of these things. Even if your partner is more narcissistic than you are, you still need to start by rooting these out from your own heart.
Fragility → Resilience. When you get criticized, take a moment to comfort yourself. Calm yourself down and see if you can be okay even though someone is criticizing you. It is normal to feel hurt when someone criticizes you. And if you want to have a better relationship, you need to learn how to allow the criticism to exist.
Indifference → Caring. Ask yourself what you would do differently if you cared more about your partner. Be careful to separate out caring about them as a person versus caring about what they think about you or feel about you.
Superiority → Equality. Notice when your brain starts to construct a false reality where you're better than other people. Instead of being superior, could you just be a normal person who makes normal mistakes? The trick here is to let go of judgment entirely. You may not notice it, but you exercise the same harsh judgment towards yourself as you do towards others.
Manipulation → Reality. You will find yourself devoting less energy towards manipulation as you deal with the other three components. Notice when you f feel the need to make other people see things a certain way. Practice letting go of that need. When you find yourself telling stories about victimhood or about how bad other people are, ask yourself, Is that story really true?
As you decrease the components of narcissism in yourself, you will become less vulnerable to your partner's narcissism. As you become more solid in yourself, you'll become more capable of dealing with your partner's narcissism as well.
4. How to deal with your Partner’s Narcissism
As you get more solid, you'll become more capable of dealing with your partner's narcissism.
Let's look at how the four reverse components help you deal with your partner:
Fragility → Resilience. It's hard to control a resilient person. When you're solid enough to let your partner think about you what they actually do think about you without needing you to change the dynamic between your shifts. Your partner will put less effort into criticizing you when you become less vulnerable to their criticism.
Indifference → Caring. When you care more about your partner, it makes it easier for them to care more about you. They still have to do their work. But their work becomes less difficult than it was.
Superiority → Equality. When you learn to see your partner as an equal, their attempts to claim superiority over you become less threatening too. You don't feel like you need to prove that they're not better than you.
Manipulation → Reality. When you become more grounded in reality, your partner's attempts to distort reality become less effective. They'll be less tempted to put so much effort into destroying reality when it stops working.
The more narcissistic a person is, the harder it is to change. Each subcomponent serves as a block to growth.
As you get stronger, you'll become more capable of helping your partner change, and you will also become more capable of being okay if they don't change.
