How to Stop a Covert Vulnerable Narcissist in Their Tracks: Get them to Leave You Alone

going to be talking about how you can get a covert or a vulnerable narcissist to leave you alone [Music] if you are dealing with a covert narcissist you are dealing with somebody who has hooked you in pretty good you have fallen for perhaps for their sob story they are the person that acts like they are you're a bff forever and you may hardly even know them they are somebody who seems like they are very willing to be there for you they can be somebody who has an ulterior motive they can be extremely intense they are um very self-absorbed but it's not easy to spot in the beginning because in the beginning they may idealize you they put you on the pedestal and so you're not realizing that they're they are self-absorbed because they make you feel like it's all about you that they're trying to connect with you and when you're dealing with somebody who has vulnerable narcissism you're not dealing with someone who is very extroverted you're dealing with someone who comes off introverted you are dealing somebody who is disagreeable but when you first meet them they may seem very agreeable they're trying to convince you that you're both on the same page and you know it's difficult because when you meet someone like this right other people will see this person catering to you and putting you on a pedestal and they might insist that you're the luckiest person in the world to have this person in your life but you feel like it's forced right and so you have this external experience from people like judging you because you're not accepting this person into your life and then you have this internal feeling like i think something's off and if you have a lot of empathy you might fall for it you know you might want to take on this vulnerable narcissist not knowing that they're a vulnerable narcissist and you can get really hooked good now now somebody who has vulnerable narcissism you're not going to see like this this outward aggression you'll see this internal aggression you'll eventually feel their distrust of you and so their goal is really to hook you good get you to feel sorry for them get you to depend on them but they want you to depend on them so that they can actually depend on you but again you don't see this all in the beginning you see somebody who wants to help you you see somebody who wants to do things in the office you see somebody who is you know right there next to you right and even though you might feel like something's wrong you know you might not have anything really to point out especially if you think that narcissism is about being grandiose that narcissism is about being overtly aggressive or narcissism is about um charm you know if you think that that's what a narcissist is when you meet somebody like a shy or vulnerable narcissist who is attempting to put you on a pedestal so that they can depend on you and you become their source of everything you figure out their problems you're the person that they go to you know so they do things for you because they want to be able to call you at two o'clock in the morning they want to control you they want you to be their everything a vulnerable narcissist is extremely sensitive to criticism the slightest hint of criticism and they're going to react nothing rolls off their back and they may be they may punish you punish you for days or weeks because of some you know comment that you made about their socks not matching no big deal where a grandiose narcissist is like i don't care how you feel about my socks you know they don't care they they really don't care what you think they absolutely see themselves as superior to you and so you know one of the differences between a grandiose and a covert narcissist that i think that we really need to pay attention to is this hypersensitivity to criticism and this need to punish you this need to persecute you because you have you know tickled the funny bone of their narcissistic injury and so what you want to do is if you've identified someone in your experiences as being a vulnerable narcissist you know i gotta tell you it's it's uh it's time to really start changing up what happens in that dynamic you know personally my experience with a vulnerable narcissist you know came out of nowhere i did fall for the sob story i did fall for the childhood trauma i did you know um i did i did see somebody who um i felt sorry for i did and you know i saw this person as somebody who really just wanted to help other people and you know i did not see past the what was really going on you know i did feel idealized and it did make me uncomfortable and i just pushed away and pushed away and pushed away um but you know i did not recognize what i was really dealing with and i i had a difficult time being cruel i didn't want to be cruel so i found myself in this awkward spot of well if i just really push this person away you know i'm going to hurt their feelings so it's a really tough spot to be in especially in a work situation where you have to work with people and you're not responsible for the firing and the hiring you know so you're in a situation where someone has basically claimed you and wants to attach themselves to you in a very dysfunctional way and the only reason that they're helping you is because they want you to take care of them and at the end of the day they're very distrustful and they're very aggressive but they're aggressive in a passive aggressive way so if you don't call them when they think you should or if they say they hurt their leg and you don't give them enough attention you know well what how did you hurt your leg and what are you doing for your leg and i hope you take care of yourself and do you want me to bring your chicken soup because you hurt your leg that's really what they're looking for and if you don't behave the way a vulnerable narcissist wants you to behave they will punish you they will persecute you and it's important if you see this pattern evolving in your friendships if you see this pattern evolving in romantic relationships where you know um you are not doing what someone wants you to do and then they stonewall you they go cold they become more and more distant but at the same time there there you understand that this is about punishing you this is really a big sign you have to watch out for it so a vulnerable narcissist is somebody who is seething internally with anger they are they have they have the ability to hook you in with a sob story they they can be extremely uh excellent at love bombing you they make you feel seen and you know you don't understand the level of distrust that they have and how sensitive they are to everything that you do they are phenomenal at making you feel guilty so um if you know someone who makes you like uses guilt trips to manipulate you because you haven't anticipated their needs right or you're just not responding to them the way they think you should that is a tell-tale sign that you really need to pay attention to when you are dealing with somebody who is a vulnerable narcissist you are dealing with somebody who there seems to be problems wherever they go so the people at work don't like them the lady at the park doesn't like them the grocery store lady doesn't like them the the letter carrier doesn't like them nobody likes them and it's never their fault right you can have the most innocuous conversation with a vulnerable narcissist and you know they hear something that they don't like they are you have to recognize that they're very distrustful so they're always on the lookout for that slightest slight and they need to go right into a full-on attack of you if they sense that you have slighted them i mean ridiculous you know i've seen people throw weights around a weight room you know i've seen people thrown over furniture like i'm not kidding i've actually witnessed this with my own eyes and i've heard some pretty terrible stories as a life coach vulnerable narcissist doesn't want to feel vulnerable they don't want that and so making sure that you're taking care of their feelings and you pity them that you feel sorry for them and you're never able to hold them accountable or you never put them at arm's distance allows them to avoid that sense of vulnerability which means you are responsible for a grown ass human being which is like not possible it's just not possible right so um i wanted to share a story that i heard recently it was a friend of mine shared this story about a friend of hers who she works with so there's this nursing supervisor who helps train nursing students and let's call her mary and mary got involved with a student named sally now sally was a student that came on to the hospital floor and right from the get-go um had a sob story and mary along with the other nursing students felt sorry for sally and you know um it was like week after week you know sally came in feeling you know she seemed like she had a little bit of social awkwardness and you know she seemed very vulnerable and very introverted but every time you talked to sally there was a sob story and mary ended up very much feeling empathy for her and took her under her wing a little bit so right off the bat mary began to treat sally differently with more attention which is what sally wanted so over the time what ended up happening was sally would say things like you know i'm the only person in the house that takes care of my mother um i'm sorry that only takes care of my grandmother and my grandfather my mother threw me threw me out of the house so of course you feel empathy for a young nursing student who was thrown out of the house by her mother and it was now living and taking care of her grandmother and a grandfather you have no reason not to believe them and so mary was also somebody who had some hard times in her life and she went through a divorce and put herself through nursing school so she resonated with sally's story her desire to want to help people and become a nurse so she got extra perks so if sally was late to class mary let it go if sally didn't come to school or didn't come to the hospital in the beginning mary let it go but eventually what ended up happening was mary began to see a pattern whenever there was a practical test where sally needed to perform and actually show how she was performing at you know at work or in the hospital sally was a no-show and mary in the beginning didn't catch that every time she emailed sally and said hey what's up it was another story in the beginning mary believed that she was in a car accident mary believed that her grandmother needed to be rushed to the hospital in the beginning mary fell for all of these sob stories and had empathy for her and one day mary decided that it was time to set a boundary because it was coming late in the year and something very profound happened for mary when she began talking to another nursing student she discovered that another nursing student was also putting herself through college and also had hardship but this nursing student never gave mary any excuses for anything so she showed up on time so she showed up and she did her exams and if she didn't do well in exam she didn't avoid responsibility for it she ended up going to a lab to make sure that she could make up the time or she went to mary and she asked for extra help she asked the other nursing students for extra help so there was this sense of personal accountability like i know i didn't do my best but i and i know that i need to do better so this is what i'm going to do and she started to compare the two students like this one student is has hardships and never told me about it and this other this this other stu this student that has hardships and never said anything about it who is not performing as well as other students is also showing up on on her own time to get extra help from me from extra help from the students so she's trying where sally is just it's another story it's another excuse and most likely another lie so mary sets a boundary with sally and she says listen you cannot miss any more exams i understand that you're having hardship and i understand that you're having a problem but if you cannot make up these exams i'm going to have to fail you for the class and that is when sally turned and that is when sally you could see sally's internal aggression and her distrust of people came out in full force what sally ended up doing was sally withdrew from the class but what mary didn't realize until many months later is that sally went to the head of the school she went to the the head of the hospital and she filed formal complaints against mary so she said things like mary had an inappropriate relationship with me mary offered me money mary offered to come to my house she completely shifted the entire story about mary to make mary look bad now the minute you hold someone like sally accountable for their actions or the minute you expect them to meet you halfway and say hey listen there's some personal accountability here the minute you no longer allow this person to depend on you in a dysfunctional way the moment you say to somebody who idealizes you in the beginning oh you're so great i love you as a nursing professor you know i think you're amazing i hope one day that i can be like you the minute you say whoa like hold on there sally you can you can praise me all you want but in order to to pass this class you have to perform yourself you have to push yourself you have to show up you can't keep using these stories to avoid taking personal responsibility you can't do that and this taught mary a very valuable lesson and she was devastated according to my friend she just could not believe that this nursing student who idealized her in the beginning who put her up on a pedestal who she took under her wing who she tried to help who she gave a pass over and over and over and over and over turned on her so quickly when she expected this nursing student to show up and take accountability for herself completely twisted the story and went on a smear campaign to hurt mary now this is not uncommon and this is what i think a lot of therapists in this space talk about where if you've bumped into a covert narcissist who wants to put you on a pedestal you better be careful you know there's nothing wrong with being in a relationship with someone who thinks you're awesome you know that's nice right but when you're in a relationship with somebody who puts you up here and you know they hardly know you or you're in a relationship with somebody who keeps idealizing you that's a tremendous red flag there's nothing wrong with you thinking that your partner is pretty awesome but you know whether you think your your partner is awesome or your partner thinks you you're awesome you have to remember there's a gray zone everybody messes up and everybody's going to disappoint you at one point in time you are hopefully the kind of person that doesn't need to throw the baby out with the bathwater unless of course we're talking about people who are narcissistic who have ulterior motives and who lack empathy and who are self-absorbed and in their world they only matter when you're dealing with a vulnerable narcissist a vulnerable narcissist wants to persecute you for not allowing them to depend and rely on you and to use you to do whatever it is that they want to do so maybe sally wanted to be seen as the special student right because she felt so special or she felt that her experiences whether they were true or not were more valid or more painful than someone else which is such a self-absorbed reality to live in because you don't know what other people are going through right you don't know right there could be someone that you know that you work with that has terrible circumstances but they just don't talk about it right they do what they have to do to get through a day it's just part of their resiliency it's part of they know that they have to do what they have to do when you're dealing with someone who's a covert narcissist it's all about them and so they will guilt you for not allowing them to glom onto you they will guilt you for not putting allowing them to put you on a pedestal and they will guilt you for not putting them on a pedestal they will guilt you for not making them feel like they are the special and unique one so this is something that i think we really need to pay attention to so if you want to make that type of a person leave you alone then there are a couple of things that you can do number one stop taking care of them stop making excuses for them you know co-dependents are notorious for enabling people codependents and empaths are notorious for feeling the feelings of other people absorbing the people the feelings of other people and so you might be taken in by somebody who has vulnerable narcissism and you might misjudge their the way they're showing up and you might feel sorry for them you might take on their energy you might even feel their vulnerability and want to protect them and so you have to be careful so if you have identified someone in your experience who acts like this around you you just notice like huh there's an expectation that this person has like they won't leave me alone and like i have to do everything that they want me to do and the minute i don't or the minute someone else doesn't anticipate their needs they're kind of mean you know um and and they're harassing people and they feel within their right to like take someone down these are telltale signs so this is not someone that you want to engage with this is someone that you want to make sure doesn't do you favors you want to make sure that this is someone that you don't do favors for this is someone that you want to make sure that you have very strict boundaries with this is someone that you need to keep out at an arm's distance so you know if you feel like you should invite someone to a party because you're afraid of their reaction maybe this is not someone that you should invite to a party right if you feel at work like this is someone that you have to pay a lot of attention to maybe this is someone that you need to not pay attention to if you um if this person works waits for you after work you know so they can drive you home or they can have a conversation for you with you maybe it's time you leave work early so so the goal really is to not give a vulnerable narcissist the attention that they want from you and if you want to you know make sure that you're sending the message to somebody who has a high uh vulnerable narcissism this idea that you are not going to be their whipping post when they get angry and you are not going to cater to their needs um you know for the rest of their lives you want to absolutely begin putting boundaries in place so i really hope that this discussion has shed some light on the dangers of dealing with someone who has vulnerable narcissism you know because they can be super super reactive and they can come they are relentlessly um they are relentless at guilt-tripping you and if you are somebody that has empathy you know somebody who tries to make you feel to feel guilty and if you have shame in your own life from from childhood then this is an incredibly incredibly um dangerous and toxic manipulative tool you have a right to be who you are you have a right to say no and it's even though that vulnerable narcissists are in pain the reality is that they don't want to look at what's really going on so they don't want to take accountability you know taking accountability and admitting that they've done something wrong means that you have the right to walk away from them and you have the right to judge them which they don't want to do so they're not going to they don't want to feel that right they can't get in touch with that so making you wrong is is their agenda right making sure that you're always there to fulfill their needs making sure that you're there so that they can they can take their aggression out on you um and making sure that they have someone a relationship that they're involved with that allows them to hide from this vulnerability you know through these various techniques of aggression and dependency and punishing you and gaslighting you and keeping you in enmeshed in this relationship is is a tactic that they use to avoid feeling vulnerable in life um but unfortunately the reality is that statistics prove and studies prove that you know um this is not someone that is very easily treated or someone who can each change easily remember if you're dealing with a vulnerable narcissist in your life refuse to allow them to glom onto you refuse to allow them to put you in a position where you're making decisions for them make sure that you're sending the message loud and clear that you know that they're an autonomous uni human being and so are you and that you are not responsible for how they think and how they feel and their decisions or their their the decisions that they don't make in life make it perfectly clear that you see a boundary between you and them if you'd like to read one of my books for free you can do that just click one of the links below and if you're interested in my 12-week breakthrough coaching program that has been specifically created for adult children of alcoholics and adult children of narcissistic parents feel free to check out the 12-week breakthrough coaching program namaste everybody until next time and don't forget to think bye for now if you love this content check out the next video and don't forget to click the link below so you can take the codependency quiz narcissist doesn't want to be challenged a narcissist believes that they're right a narcissist sees everything and everyone as competition

Channel: Lisa A. Romano Breakthrough Life Coach Inc

Views: 147,592

Keywords: codependency, codependent, how to get a narcissist to leave you alone, narcissistic personality disorder, covert narcissist, covert narcissism, narcissistic abuse, ways to get a narcissist to leave you alone, stop a narcissist in his tracks, unmasking covert narcissist, how to get a covert narcissist to leave you alone, narcissism, no contact, gaslighting, lisa a romano, how to stop a covert vulnerable narcissist in their tracks, covert abuse, get them to leave you alone, narcissist

Id: GPaUVezD3hw

Length: 22min 49sec (1369 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 01 2020