4 Toxic Techniques Narcissists Use To Win Arguments

they will try and over compensate by making sure that everything is hyper controlled so you're in a relationship with a narcissistic individual you might try to compensate by making sure everything's very controlled very organized this can be exhausting you people in these relationships will find themselves almost said at an obsessive and almost compulsive level of trying to control the environment of trying to control their own words or their own behaviors enough so the possibility of activating the blame shifting tirade in the narcissist is minimized let's talk about minimization because I'm not going to minimize it like I said I don't think minimization gets enough attention and I think it's such a damaging dynamic in narcissism I think we minimize minimization when we think and we talk about narcissism and narcissistic abuse we all know that minimization is part of the classical patterns of what happens in a narcissistic relationship but I am actually going right now that's why I'm not in my usual place through a bit of a family narcissistic thing right now that has gotten pretty bad and it's dovetailed with what I'm seeing my clients experience so I wanted to talk about this so the question is how does minimization show up in narcissistic relationships how does it get in the way of healing and why is it so common in the narcissistic space minimization is a form of denial and of gaslighting that I've talked about on this channel the narcissistic person will often minimize your experiences your distress your feelings in fact it is minimization that often results in the emotional escalation that often happens in Encounters in narcissistic relationships for example also when something bad happens to the narcissistic person well the the planet has to stop spinning but when something happens to the bad happens to the other person in the relationship it's not that big a deal right think about how many narcissistic arguments that you have been involved in where you were saying hey wait a minute when something like this that happened to me happened to you it was the end of the world and now it's happening to me and you're making it out like it's nothing how come it was a big deal when it was you and at those times you may escalate and they'll say oh you need to quiet down right minimization it's gaslighting because it challenges your reality you are actually going through something and it's painted out as being not that big a deal when it's actually very important and very impactful for you and then when you are more insistent and say hey hey this is a big deal to me then the narcissistic person will say why are you always so dramatic and exaggerating what is wrong with you so you see how that sequence works minimization is part of the double standard of all narcissistic relationships different sets of rules that they have for themselves and the rest of the world they get the flu and it is a health emergency you get the flu and you are being a hypochondriac and as a result it is one of the more frustrating of the patterns of the narcissistic relationship the narcissistic folks are so grandiose and competitive that even their pain has to be more and better than everyone else's the minimization experience in the narcissistic relationship is a major issue around why people feel so unsafe and so unheard in these relationships for healthy people going through something is how they become more empathic many times we may be at some risk of minimizing if we haven't actually gone through something another person has for example I'll give you an example but person doesn't have children and they have no idea what sleep deprivation is but then they end up having children and they may even feel bad that they were not more empathic to The Sleep Interruption of their friends who had children before them now that awareness that cycle does not play out in narcissistic relationships instead after the narcissistic person goes through something just when you think they might be more empathic get it that they're actually more likely to minimize other people's experiences I'll share this you know I recently saw this happen in two family members one of whom had a massive 12-hour life-threatening surgery that will require years of Rehabilitation and the narcissistic family member comparing a rather routine surgery that took them about an hour or two I think that was even managed outpatient One Night in the hospital six weeks of your usual post-operative recovery back to normal and the narcissistic person kept trying to minimize even how many hours the surgery for the more ill person took in that more severe situation was actually rather upsetting to witness because it was akin to comparing a stubbed toe to a traumatic brain injury jury and it was really translating into a minimization of the pain of the person with a more severe illness and the psychological trauma and the physical limitations and the rehabilitative demands of the person who went through the far far more massive Health crisis this was invalidating to witness and it was even dangerous for the person who went through the massive surgery because adequate allowances were not being made for healing and the expectations that the person who had the massive surgery were not realistic like that they'll be able to pop right back to normal so that means that the narcissistic person might be more likely to get angry at the person with the long recovery period for not just popping back to normal life as they did at the narcissist did after their minor surgery I have witnessed this health minimization Dynamic happened to many clients of mine who had cancer or other life-threatening diseases complicated pregnancies and deliveries and narcissistic partners and family members would minimize the experiences of the people with those Health crises and frankly that significantly complicated the healing for those folks and in some cases their outcomes and it left massive psychological scars that another person even went directly witnessing their physical deterioration were unwilling to validate and take notice of the suffering that the other person endured minimization also results in other invalidating and confusing moments any difficult Human Experience someone may have or grief a broken heart a massive professional disappointment a failed exam a loss all of these experiences which if they had happened to The Narcissist the narcissistic person would be throwing a tantrum and expect the Earth to stop spinning for them but when it happens to the other person in the narcissistic relationship the nurse they will often find themselves being told hey come on it's not that big a deal come on people get over this stuff you're just taking it too seriously this can happen with narcissistic parents in particular and people raised by narcissistic parents will have childhoods that were characterized by parents who minimized everything leaving them going into adulthood not even having a gauge for how to manage disappointment and sadness or even illness when you go through something real and are having a real reaction to it and then someone minimizes it it really does interrupt the grief and the healing process minimization is also the enabler's game I have a theory on this I sometimes think the enablers minimize because of their childish need for everything to just be okay even if that means letting the narcissist off of the off the hook in fact typically it means letting the narcissist off the hook again something I am observing very clearly like in this familial situation I'm witnessing when a person who's very ill and will require permanent massive Life Changes I'm getting the message that like hey look how great they're doing they're just getting better so fast the people making these observations are often people who don't want to show up and aren't actually directly witnessing the person who has had the massive health problem but they want to weigh in but they don't want to deal with the Fallout of the bigger and the more disruptive decisions that need to be made on behalf of the sicker person it's as though having to see the situation realistically would be too painful for them so they minimize minimization by enablers is probably the central pillar of collective gaslighting whenever that idea that when everyone jumps on the bat bandwagon it says oh come on it's not that bad effectively shutting down the person or the people who are suffering and struggling in a narcissistic relationship because if everyone is saying oh it's not that bad and look how great it's going the people on the receiving end of the narcissistic abuse may actually feel like they're exaggerating and there's that self gaslighting again in many ways I think minimization is a major reason narcissism has become such a big problem in our culture overall journalists other people with platforms mental health practitioners just about everyone tends to minimize the impact of the patterns that we see in narcissism and the Fallout on our mental health in family court and human resource in society at large it tends to be the it can't be that bad or you're making too much of it or I'm sure things aren't that bad for you or this is how relationships are or using minimizing language like oh they're just Intense or quirky or demanding rather than using the simple word abuse that captures the reality when the damaging impacts of narcissism on other people are minimized by the entire world you end up where we are right now in a world that is that is an absolute uncivil entitled mess all these this minimization it takes at all people in narcissistic relationships when they minimize what's happening to them all of that stress has to go somewhere lots of survivors blame themselves for being too dramatic or making a mountain out of a molehill there's a proverb but over time as the narcissistic abuse continues and the person keeps minimizing we can see anxiety symptoms health problems even panic attacks by denying reality to themselves I can promise you this that reality will always find another way to come back and bite you now not all minimizers are enablers or narcissists some simply feel so helpless and Powerless that by minimizing they can cope with the situation where they feel unable to help another person or do something to be able to fix the situation if you are in a chronically abusive relationship people may see the abusive patterns and recognize that there are reasons that cannot change but they still may try to soft pedal it to make themselves feel better about it and to push down those feelings of helpless discomfort that doesn't make it okay I get it but people in pain as most people going through narcissistic abuse are sometimes we want someone to just sit in the pain with them and acknowledge that it's awful and perhaps unchangeable as a therapist it's the hardest part of my job to just sit with the pain of a client and not want to just fix it and the helplessness of watching a narcissistic relationship can often contribute to a person who is in one of these relationships getting more and more isolated nobody often wants to talk to them because it evokes so much powerlessness so people just stop calling most survivors of narcissistic abuse are there they know that these patterns are unchangeable they aren't expecting anyone to wave a magic wand sometimes survivors of narcissistic abuse just want to hold someone's hand in the darkness as they begin to recover we don't talk enough about minimization when we talk about narcissistic abuse because I think it's important to do so because it impacts people in every way in these relationships people tend to minimize what's happening in their own narcissistic relationships as well it's why we don't talk about it and the narcissists always minimize the harm that they do to other people and the difficulties that other people have in their lives the people around you minimize it and the World At Large minimizes it so everyone's minimizing it and all of this minimization is one of the brightest and the hottest parts of the gas site I see what it is it's a way for other people to not deal with the big problem that's in front of all of us and while I understand why people may want to cope by denying the magnitude of a problem they cannot fix the damage of minimization to a person who is in a narcissistically abusive relationship and cannot trust their reality is massive like I said I'm in a tough situation right now in my life so I'm right there with all of you and minimization is happening around me left right and Center it has really put a finer point on how destructive this is and I recognize it takes a lot of Courage goodness and wisdom for a person to hear another person's story of narcissistic abuse and not minimize it but just be with it if you are going through narcissistic abuse it's always my reminder please let no please know that this is real stop minimizing what is happening to you if you're watching someone else go through it never minimize their experience just be with them once we turn off the gaslights we need people who hold the lights to help us get out of these dark spaces so I hope that gives you an understanding that minimization isn't just sort of one sort of side little theme it's actually very Central to understanding narcissistic abuse and the impact it's having on you and sometimes having this framework can really really help a bad worker always blames their tools you may or may not have heard this proverb but this one actually has some pretty old Origins as all of these do this one is TR is traced to the 13th century French I could not find a particular author associated with this and then back then the way that phrase translated from the French was that basically a bad trades person can never find the right tool now I think you understand what the saying means all right it makes sense at the face of it if a person is unskilled and on top of that is also um uninciteful or lacks self-reflective capacity they blame the lack of a tool rather their than their own inability or their own irresponsibility it's a bit like victimhood mixed with blame so when we take this proverb a bad worker blames their tools we take this one and we elevate it beyond the tools really what it's saying it's a glimpse at the blame deflection that is a central core of narcissism narcissists have a very hard time taking responsibility or blame so they push it out so just like that bad worker who blames the shoddy work on a lack of tools or blames their inability to fix something on not having the right tool the narcissistic personality will blame everyone in their lives for the mistakes that they make people with this personality style blame others for their failures for their disappointments for their stress for their frustrations this makes these relationships incredibly challenging because you're constantly being blamed for their issues in fact in the early conversations with a narcissistic individual when you first meet them you will actually find yourself trying to engage with their blaming you'll say things like I didn't do that that's not my fault no really I'm not the one who did that and on and on and on you know where that goes now really at these times do not reality doesn't matter to them at those times with those personality Styles reality doesn't matter to people who are narcissistic it's all about them being able to cast blame out so they can maintain their grandiose and perfectionistic version of themselves I don't make mistakes it's everybody else's fault the bad sales presentation wasn't their fault it was the client's fault for rescheduling it was the assistance fault for not getting the materials organized on time it was their partner's fault for not keeping the house quieter while they were preparing for the sales presentation it's everybody else's fault and that blame deflection is a classical element of these relationships the proverbial bad tools the blame projection and deflection of the narcissistic relationship honestly for a lot of people go through these relationships is one of the most exhausting destabilizing confusing and manipulating parts of these relationships sort of them not being able to find their tools and blaming everyone else often means that other people end up taking too much responsibility even for things that they are not responsible for so the person the person who's not the narcissist takes on all the responsibility it's not it's not their responsibility and because of taking all this responsibility for things you didn't even do that can really result to holding on to negative emotions like guilt and self-blame and over time if you spend enough time with a person who's narcissistic they don't even have to blame you after a while you get so indoctrinated into their way of thinking that you self-blame before they can blame you it's almost like after a while you just sort of cut out the manipulative middleman and you do it to yourself sometimes people who find themselves in narcissistic relationships now whether this is a family of origin relationship whether this is an intimate relationship or a workplace relationship they will try and over compensate by making sure that everything is hyper controlled so you're in a relationship with a narcissistic individual you might try to compensate by making sure everything's very controlled very organized this can be exhausting you people in these relationships will find themselves almost an an obsessive and almost compulsive level of trying to control the environment of trying to control their own words or their own behaviors enough so the possibility of activating the blame shifting Tire rate in the narcissist is minimized and then you just keep appeasing and enabling The Narcissist if you've got the house so organized that if they're like it's your your fault I couldn't find the scissors the scissors are exactly where they need to be it's really difficult because to steer clear of being blamed by someone else who is clearly not taking responsibility means that you have to work on your own sense of self-assurance to be clear and aware on what you are responsible for to be clear and aware of what you're not responsible for and understand that some of it is gray and that there is shared responsibility the narcissistic individual is engaged in a very unconscious and a very primitive process of projection and offloading of shameful or uncomfortable deficits that they don't want to have to keep stirring in themselves and so they project them onto other people and the narcissistic disconnection from empathy actually means it's easier to blame others because you don't stop to think they don't stop to think how would someone feel if I blame them for this when they're not really responsible the challenge is that the blame shifting is also often coupled with victimization and a sense of persecution a person who is narcissistic will say I can't find the right tool and that's because nobody supports me having the right tools or they hide my tools things like I screwed up the sales presentation because people are out to get me and nobody believes in me or wants to support me that self-victimization is such a classical piece of the narcissistic personality Style so whomever was this frustrated French writer who watched people do a lousy job and blame other people actually did a really nice job of capturing this Dynamic of the bad worker blaming their tools and clearly telling us that this is a part of what human behavior and difficult human behavior and what some people do and have always done for hundreds of years not taking responsibility and then blaming something or someone else for their failings but it's always best in these blame Shifty times not to engage or to engage minimally if they blame you for something that is clearly really something you didn't do you're just nod politely and just say a gentle okay document when needed and then recognize that they're never going to listen to your version of the events some people say it's unjust it's unjust why shouldn't they hear that I'm not the one responsible it is unjust and they aren't listening in 1938 there was there was Clay called Gaslight 1944 there would play in the film is that there was a man it's basically trying to make his wife go mad and back then it was based at a time when instead of electric lights there were these gas powered lights and you could turn them up and down and he kept playing with the lights in these gas lamps and she would say he would turn the light down and she'd say who turned the light down he said well it's not any lower than it was before and slowly but surely she started losing her grip with reality because he kept denying that he was manipulating the lights so that's where that term gaslighting comes from and we retain the same meaning it basically means to manipulate someone else's reality with techniques like denial misdirection contradiction and lying anyone who's ever experienced gaslighting knows how confusing it can be because it's designed to make you doubt your own reality and any break from reality is actually defined as psychosis we can rather quickly find ourselves feeling like we're losing our minds and we can't imagine that somebody who loves us would ever doubt our reality let me give you a sort of classical example of gaslighting you're having a conversation with someone and maybe it's over and over about the same about um your partner is sort of that's that's kind of inappropriate relationship with someone he or she works with and and then he says something to you like you know like he or she they dress and kind of they were just really cute at work why don't you like why don't you start dressing like that or wearing your hair like that and as you can imagine someone would be like that doesn't feel good to hear that and then the gas cider will say don't be so so now all of a sudden you've done nothing more than merely expressed a very real feeling in a situation and someone's doubting your reality by saying don't be so sensitive or other classic gaslighting lines include you have no right to feel that way or that never happened or are you okay are you doing okay because you keep saying weird stuff I'm starting to worry about you all of these things are designed to make you doubt yourself gaslighting in that way is a tool of psychological control the more you can question someone's reality the more control you have over them something else you know we would see is that for example you might make plans with someone like and you'll say very specifically okay just so we're clear I just want to make sure you said that you're good with us going to dinner at that restaurant at seven o'clock because I'm calling other people to make a reservation okay yeah sure yeah whatever because narcissists ever listen they often you know sort of blindly go and do their own thing or they may have something better come up and so they don't want to do dinner so then the next day when you say hey it's time to go and they'll say what are you doing it's like I made that reservation you said everyone's getting together and they'll say I never said I'd do that I never said we were going to go to dinner and that's when you're like you start saying stand I don't understand what's happening a combination of factors in a narcissist make them classical gaslighters if you will obviously their lack of empathy because they don't care who they hurt they don't care that they're fooling with your mind their tendency to want to control people that also makes it very much a key gaslighting Dynamic narcissists are very manipulative and by definition gaslighting is a tool of manipulation all of these things sort of come together and conspire to make it that the narcissist is a classic gaslighter over time the gaslighting if it's chronic can literally make a person feel as though they're losing their grip with reality it'll lead them to be full of self they'll often start doubting themselves in other relations work they may feel like they're not good pay more I always say though the ringer on whether you're being gasoline it's a very simple test if you've ever been in a relationship of any kind not just an intimate partner relationship you can't even be with your mother parents can Gaslight you your siblings can Gaslight you anyone can test your reality in this way or a boss anyone like that ever felt the need to record a conversation because you want to play it back for that person or even play it back for yourself so you can be sure you heard it right you're being gaslighted I I can guarantee it because that's the only reason you would feel the need to record a conversation people who are in narcissistic relationships even when they're not supposed to record their conversations will like I said for no other reason to play it back for themselves and say okay I am not losing my mind that is truly and really what they said here's where it gets interesting when you play one of those recordings back for your gaslighting narcissist I can all but guarantee they will get extremely extremely rageful and angry because the one thing they don't like is to be called out on their manipulative tricks and when you have evidence they'll turn around and get outside you again I told you you're a crazy person you need to record everything you know what you make me sick and you'll get that kind of really toxic cruel pushback at the core of it and I think it's really important for all of you watching this gaslighting is emotional abuse okay let me say that again gaslighting is emotional abuse abuse the abort abuse is a strong word and it hits here because when you manipulate someone's reality you are in essence stealing from them you are in essence abusing and playing with their mind in a way that is nothing short of cool as far as I'm concerned that qualifies as abuse so when this is being done to you take a really good look at it and here's what's interesting gaslighting isn't just an individual phenomenon I've observed something that I call gaslighting by tribe something I've written about what I mean by that is that other people in your family system might contribute like that never happened in our family that dad never said that what do you say you know come on stop being so hard on Dad it is a it's a very triangulated Dynamic it's where one person is all scapegoated in a family very very common in our City even happen in groups of friends like oh come on he's not such a bad guy saying you know you feel as though how how is it and then when it's a gaslighting by tribe you start to feel like I've got to be wrong because everyone else is saying the same thing in the most tragic toxic and dangerous examples of gaslighting by tribe is when abuse is denied in a family that kind of denial can have devastated consequences for a person well into adulthood if that and finally let's take it all the way up let's talk about societal gas science when we're like so right about what's going on in the world and people say no everything's great everything's normal everything's fine in the world and if you're on the wrong end of the stick on that one and things don't feel like they're going right and everyone's like yeah everything's just fine you do start feeling like you've walked into a party where everyone's been brainwashed but in fact the problem is most people feel like they're the ones who got it wrong and everyone else has it right there was once a famous test that was done by a psychologist called Solomon Ash and in essence in this research they showed people three different line lengths you know there were very different ones to or shorter and what they found was that even when clearly people chose the longest lines on a piece of paper when they went into a group there would be one other person in that group that was planted there by the researcher and when that one other person said picked a shorter line as the longest one a significant number of other people in the group went along with that they conformed to that and while that's not classically a form of gaslighting it really speaks to how much Conformity plays a role in our lives and makes it hard sometimes to speak out societal gaslighting is so powerful because I believe it's the reason why narcissism seems to be growing exponentially in our society no one seems to be able to stop if I had a dime for every person who said nobody believes me they don't believe this narcissism abuse thing is real as though the only kind of abuse that counts is a black eye and not a bruised soul and the number of people said yeah all he does is yell at me all he does is yell at you and when people say Ah that's not abuse or that doesn't seem that bad or how bad can it be or get over it those reforms lighting the one thing none of us should ever let another person steal from us is our reality gaslighting is where that happens pay attention to it it's the classical number one tool in a narcissist tool belt and I don't want you to fall for it so narcissist Warriors get out there pay attention to the gaslighting and cut it off before it happens somebody gaslights with you don't engage and never doubt your own reality first of all let's talk about what it is projection is actually a concept that was introduced by Freud and his contemporaries it's about this idea and in simple layman's terms it's a defense it's what we call a defense a defense is something that protects our ego it sort of protects us from uncomfortable feelings it things that churn up ancient uncomfortable anxieties and so things like projection protect us projection is what we call A Primitive defense it's really something that comes from early early wounds conflicts and anxieties and what it looks like is this when a person is feeling something icky or forbidden inside of them they projected onto someone else so let's say someone is thinking I don't know terrible critical things about someone they may say to you hey stop saying all those terrible critical things you're like hello what I didn't do that even better is let's say your partner accuses you of cheating and not only have you not cheated you there's I mean you could have been fathom it and they say Hey you know I noticed you had that business dinner and they started making some really inappropriate accusations they're like huh it's quite possible that they're projecting their own bad behavior whether they're micro cheating or actually cheating or being inappropriate with someone projecting that uncomfortable uh unacceptable impulse behavior on you projection is one of those interesting psychological talents when somebody accuses you or says things about you really feel patently untrue or uncomfortable instead of Defending yourself take a moment think about it and say I know this is absolutely untrue about me but it's interesting that that person is making that accusation projection is a tell because when somebody accuses you of something that's very untrue odds are it's because they're experiencing it or they're doing it so what projection is in essence it's basically like psychological vomit it doesn't feel good you know like when you read some bad fish and it needs to get out of you you throw it up and then you feel better well projection is like vomiting up psychological stuff it feels really uncomfortable to have these it feels really uncomfortable to have these forbidden thoughts or ideas in your head so you throw them up on someone else and you accuse them and say things to them like accuse them of what they might be thinking what they might be feeling and maybe even what they might be doing it's very much what narcissists do narcissists have very very uncomfortable inner worlds and so as a result they don't manage them well when a healthy person feels something that kind of feels uncomfortable or unacceptable they'll take a moment they'll self-reflect on it they'll recognize that it doesn't Define them they'll they'll consider it they'll weigh it in their mind they'll ensure that they don't say something that hurts someone else and then they'll move past it for the narcissist that kind of unacceptable impulse that's in them threatens their ego and that's a very fragile space for them so instead of managing it and self-regulating it they pop it right back out on somebody else and whomever that convenient Target is that convenient Target is someone who's usually someone they have projected on before someone who's close someone who's in important relationship so that could be a partner or a spouse maybe an adult child a child child it could be a parent it can be a friend it could be someone they work with but someone who's close to them projection can be very confusing when you're first facing it because you'll hear these things and they're terrible accusations and they're untrue but a lot of us when we're faced with someone else's projection we doubt ourselves so when they feel deeply insecure they start accusing us of having a bunch of insecurities and if we're used to thinking being relatively confident well put together people will be like okay and then many of us who are mentally healthy are willing to see both sides of an equation our willingness to see their projected side of the equation can be a risky business because what's happening now is we're willing to take on their narcissistic projection and make it our own projection and narcissism go together like peas in a pod that's it's just part of the picture it's a classical part of a narcissistic clinical presentation what that means for us is if we're in the presence of any significant or non-significant frankly narcissist in our lives projections part of the game so when they're projecting their insecurity on us their self-doubt on us their anxieties on us the key is that we don't make them our own and in fact that we recognize that their projections actually give us a lot of insight into them what they're accusing us of is precisely what they are struggling with so instead of being heard and confused by those projections try if you can to use them as a really important piece of data and then you too can sort of be a narcissist Whisperer Jedi Warrior or just basically wizard so thanks as always for listening I hope this gives you some important insights into the narcissistic defense of projection as always click on that Bell get those notifications about our new content please subscribe to this channel to get all of the best content on narcissism

Channel: DoctorRamani

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Id: HuNFzmq0FmI

Length: 39min 11sec (2351 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 30 2023