← The Little Shaman: On Narcissists & Toxic Personalities
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Hey everybody, it's Shaman Sister Sin and you're listening to the Meditations and More podcast here on the little shaman.com brought to you by Trans Relational Healing, shamanspiritcenter.com and littleshaman.org that's me, the little shaman. Today, I wanted to talk to you about something that most people find when dealing with pathologically narcissistic personalities. And that is that narcissists are not safe psychologically, emotionally and physically. When you are dealing with narcissists, you're gambling with your safety. Your emotions will never be safe with this person. Your psychological well being will never be safe with them. And physically, you are not safe with narcissists either. The entire situation affects every part of a person who is dealing with a pathologically narcissistic personality. This is because not only are narcissists often intentionally hurtful and cruel to other people, they are also so egocentric and self focused that they cause harm to other people just as a matter of course, because they have no consideration for them, their well being or their feelings whatsoever at all. In virtually any kind of relationship, this mindset, this way of being, is extremely damaging. That egocentricity and self centeredness is one of the biggest reasons narcissists are not safe. Because they think everything's about them. And since their orientation to the world is fear based, they seem to find most things threatening. They believe that they're defending themselves. They believe everybody's out to make them into a victim. That means they feel they need to be on the defensive and ideally on the offensive all the time. Get them before they get you. This mindset turns relationships and even basic simple interactions into a battleground and ultimately a war zone. Everything becomes a battle, everything becomes an attack, everything becomes a crime, either that you did against them or that they're doing against you. There is a fundamental difference between how narcissists view the world and how most other people see it. You are looking for reasons to trust other people to feel secure, to feel safe. Narcissists do seem to believe that they are looking for safety and security too. But the difference is that they are not looking for things that prove safety and security. They are looking for threats against safety and security all the time, in every place. And because they're constantly looking for them, they find them whether they're real or not. They're not looking for reasons to trust, because that's not something they really understand. They know threat or no threat, and they really don't understand no threat. Pathologically narcissistic personalities trust absolutely no one, not even themselves. They are pathologically insecure. And the definition of insecure in this context is to feel unsafe. Because of this, they don't trust you or anyone. And because they don't trust you, you can't trust them. If you can't trust them, they're not safe. Safety and trust have to be a two way street. If you trust somebody and they don't trust you, the situation is not safe. Because while you're being relaxed and not watching out for what they're going to do, if this person believes that you're going to attack them, somehow they might decide to attack you first. Or they believe that you already have attacked them and now they're retaliating in self defense. You're not safe around this person because they don't feel safe around you. It's like if you had a wild animal in your home who interprets everything you do as threatening because they don't understand it. You can trust the animal all you want, you can love it all you want. It's not going to make any difference at all. If this animal attacks you because it believes it's defending itself from you. Good intentions cannot penetrate that kind of fear and insecurity. They can't penetrate such an inability to understand what's happening. That's all bad enough, but imagine how much worse it would be if this animal was not only afraid and not only hyper defensive, but also offended and self righteous on top of that. That sounds funny, but it really does become a seriously dangerous situation because now the animal doesn't need to feel threatened or in danger in order to attack you. Now it can attack you just because it thinks you're wrong. For narcissists, the level and magnitude of threat that they feel just from basic things is probably not really understandable to people who don't have those problems. That's why their behavior appears to make no sense. Because it's like, how are you getting that from this? This is another reason narcissists are not safe and cannot be made safe. It's impossible for you to predict how they're going to take something or react to it. That is very dangerous. In most situations. You can protect yourself from problems with other people by being mindful of what you're doing, being mindful of how you're speaking. As long as you're not inconsiderate and not rude, this will keep you out of issues with like 99% of the population. Most people don't imagine things that didn't actually happen. They don't assume that you have motives or that you mean things that don't make any sense in the context of what's going on. Growing up, most of us learned what not to do. You don't say ignorant, rude things to people. You don't cut in front of the people in the line. You obey the traffic laws, more or less. You take turns and you share. You say please and thank you. You basically behave like a being who realizes that you're not the only being on the planet. Most of the other people do this too, more or less. And we can all mostly get along without issues living a daily life where we have to interact with virtual strangers all the time. However, these sort of protective measures that we learn to automatically take don't work with narcissists. They will be offended anyway. They will be outraged anyway. They will be hurt anyway. You cannot protect yourself in these situations because you don't know where the danger is. Essentially because it's everywhere. We cannot understand how and why they are taking things the way that they're taking them. So to us, it appears random. It's really not. But because we can't make any sense out of it, it might as well be because it can't predicted with any accuracy at all. If it can't be predicted, it can't be avoided. Things that are okay one day are not okay the next day. Things that were true for years now suddenly is not true any longer. Things they usually blow up about now, for some reason today they didn't blow up. When things cannot be predicted, they're unsafe. Because if you can't predict danger, there's no way to protect yourself from it. That's why, for example, humans have tried to learn to predict the weather. Weather can be dangerous, and even if it can't be controlled, people can still be warned about what's coming. People who deal with narcissists have learned to try to predict the narcissist's emotional weather. But because it's based on feelings and not facts, it's basically impossible. Predicting the actual weather involves understanding and reading patterns. With a narcissist's reactions, there don't appear to be any patterns that can be understood and interpreted, which makes any type of prediction extremely difficult. There's often no discernible inciting incident, for example, or if there is, the reaction to it is disproportionate or not understandable. That makes it not possible to avoid the danger here. Many narcissists are like human hand Grenades, they are ticking time bombs looking for a place to explode. Only this time bomb has no timer that you can see. This grenade doesn't explode three seconds after the pin gets pulled. It operates based on mechanisms that you cannot see and therefore cannot anticipate. People often spend years trying to decipher a pattern in a narcissist's behavior so that they can try to predict it, only to find that this really can't be done with any accuracy. You can find some of the landmines, but trust and believe you will not find them all. It's like if the weather was snow one day, then it's 115 degrees Fahrenheit, then it's a hurricane, then it's an ice storm, then it's a drought, then it's a thunderstorm, then it's a pleasant spring day, then it's a tornado, and then every single day. You would never be able to prepare for that or protect yourself from it in any way, because you have no idea what is coming at you at all or why. And that is what dealing with pathologically narcissistic personalities is like. It is fundamentally unsafe. It's also unsafe for you, specifically, not just because they feel unsafe and therefore they make things unsafe, but because anything you share with this person, anything you give them, any vulnerability, any anything, will be used against you. This is absolutely intentional and is done with the intention of hurting and neutralizing you. People who are as fragile and afraid as pathologically narcissistic personalities know what will hurt other people, and they are not above using that to gain what they think is an advantage over who they perceive as an opponent. That's you. You're the opponent. Part of the reason narcissists have the infamous reputation for being such vicious abusers is because they appear to attack people for no reason. But they don't view you as a partner or as a family member the way that you view them. They view you as an opponent. More precisely, they view you as an enemy. You're not an innocent party who was just trying to live life and love them. You're an enemy, an attacker. You could and will hurt them at any time. In fact, you already have, whether you realize it or not. The fact that you're over here trying to sell yourself as this innocent party is just more proof to them of how diabolical you really are. These personalities have no friends, no families, no partners. Not emotionally, not the way you see those things. All they ever really have are people who are around them, who will always remain strangers and who can never be trusted. It is extremely likely that any narcissist in your life has a laundry list of things that they believe that you have done to them that you might even be completely unaware of. There is every possibility that you are routinely, even constantly offending and upsetting and hurting this person without ever realizing it. Only an enemy would do that. Therefore, you're an enemy. These personalities tend to believe that it's your job to make sure that they don't get offended or upset or hurt or angry or whatever. And so if they do, you failed at that, and you're an abuser or you're an idiot or a liar or whatever other negative thing. They take no responsibility for their own feelings or reactions at all, insisting that they're just reacting to you and the horrible things that you are doing and saying to them. Anyone would be offended or hurt or angered by this normal, basic, harmless thing that you did. You are just so stupid or evil or conniving or whatever other thing that you don't see it or you just won't admit it. Either way, it's your fault and it's your problem. Therefore you need to fix that. The problem is that you can't, because as we've discussed, the things that humans normally do to prevent this kind of thing from happening don't work with narcissists. Us, they get offended and hurt and angry and whatever else anyway, no matter how careful or considerate you try to be, if you point that out, or if you point out that you don't have this issue with anybody else and or that they do have these kind of issues with everybody else or multiple people, they just insist that it's because you don't treat other people as badly as you treat them, or because you've got everybody fooled or some other ridiculous foolishness that negates that fact. There is no understanding from narcissists that their hurt or offended feelings could be caused by something inside of them, for example, their affected perception, or that it could be just a simple misunderstanding. For narcissists, there are no misunderstandings that result in them being wrong, especially when it involves their feelings. They really can be quite delusional on this subject, and trying to reason with them is absolutely useless. When someone is using illogical reasoning and faulty pattern finding to come to their conclusions using logic and to try to address that is a waste of time. If they could perceive and process reality the way that they need to, they wouldn't believe these things that they believe or have come to those conclusions in the first place. It is what it is. That's your proof right there, that trying to use logic and facts and proof to address these things is not going to work. They wouldn't think them in the first place if these things had any meaning for them. This is another thing that makes dealing with narcissists fundamentally unsafe. You have to surrender your reality in some fashion in order to coexist with these personalities, because they are living a totally different life with totally different people compared to the people around them. You might be inhabiting the same space and. Or you might be around the same people, but that's where it stops. With so many narcissists. The way they perceive reality and the people around them is vastly different from the way that everybody else does. If you listen to the things that they say about other people, the way that they narrate or convey events, the way that they perceive interactions, you can actually see that clearly a lot of the time. It's just completely different from what everybody else is experiencing. Many narcissists actually wear this as a point of pride or like a badge of honor, believing that this is proof that they're special and they see what other people don't see, or that they think for themselves and they're not a clone like everybody else. The truth is, many narcissists do see things that nobody else sees. And the reason nobody else sees them is because they're not there. Narcissists live in a state of constantly scanning the environment and constant assessment of other people. Judgment is actually probably a better word. They come to conclusions about people and things in situations with little or even no information whatsoever. Even regarding complete strangers on the street, people they have no way of knowing anything about at all. If they are called on these assumptions, which is all these things really are assumptions. They say that if you can't see that that's the truth, you're a fool. You're just an idiot who can't see what's going on. This is absurd. It's ridiculous. It's lunacy in some cases, but arguing with it does no good. This is a person who believes they have some kind of like, special power or special ability to see the things that other people can't see, or who believes they really do know everything, or who believes that they're the only intelligent being who can see through the lies or whatever other thing that they use to explain the reality that they're a primitive, arrested personality who is treating assumptions and projections as facts because they don't have Much in the way of critical thinking skills or any real ability to assess what's true or not true. Narcissists assess things quickly with very little information to try to avoid danger. Everybody's brain does that in certain situations, such as if you're walking down the street and you see a big growling dog ahead of you on the sidewalk, it's sort of like a cognitive shortcut so that you can react quickly to danger. But the brain of a narcissist now takes this shortcut all the time about everything. They appear to believe that this keeps them safe and that it somehow elevates them above other people's perceptions and they can see more than everybody else. But the reality is that it just exposes how limited they really are. More information is not usually needed. If, for example, we see a big growling dog in the road, we have enough information just at a glance to decide that, yes, this could definitely be dangerous and we should probably have avoid that dog if we can. But in many situations it is not that cut and dry. In many situations we need more information before we can assess if something is dangerous or bad or not. For example, we need to know the context of the behavior or the words. We need to know what else was going on at the time. It helps to know, if possible, a person's motives or their intentions, what this behavior or the thing they said means to them, etc. How we take something or what it means to us doesn't always reflect the same thing for the other person. For example, someone might give you flowers or chocolates without knowing that you're allergic to them. That doesn't make their intention bad. They were trying to do a nice thing, it just didn't work out. Or someone might use a phrase that has different connotations for you than it does for them. The other person's intention and what things mean to them does matter. This does not apply to gaslighting, where someone knows because you've told them 50 times already or something. Of course, we're just talking about general communication. We often need more information to assess, and we need to be able to trust that the information we're getting is reliable and solid. The problem with narcissists in these situations is that they don't think they need more information. Their brain has already taken that shortcut. They don't believe they need more information at all, and they don't believe you when you tell them your intentions anyway. The only interpretation there could possibly be of anything is their interpretation, and their interpretation is almost always negative somehow. It doesn't matter, for example, that your actions and the objective experience of the situation actually support what you are saying, that your intentions or your motives are. They only believe what they think they saw or heard. The fact that your actions don't line up with their interpretation of your motive doesn't mean that they could be wrong. It means you are a liar and a phony and a trickster who can be nice and do nice things when you have to. They know everything. They see it all. They have got your number. Now. On the flip side, you definitely cannot trust what this person is telling you, even if they're being completely sincere, as they sometimes are. As far as that goes, whatever that's worth, in two days or two hours or two minutes, the quote unquote truth will have changed. Nothing they tell you is reliable or solid information. It just turns into a revolving door of yes, I meant that. No, I didn't. Yes, I really did. No, I really didn't. I don't remember saying that. I don't know what you're talking about. Yes, I really meant it. No, I really didn't. You're lying. I never said that. No, I did, but I was just saying it to be a jerk. And on and on and on. In these situations, it's impossible to track or collate the information in any cohesive way, because the information itself is not reliable. It's not factual. Some of it isn't even related. It's like trying to build a very precise piece of surgical robotics equipment with measurements that were made up by the kid who parted of cars at the restaurant down the street. You cannot logically evaluate a situation involving another person if reality cannot be agreed upon. Narcissists are giving specific information that contradicts what happened, often while at the same time insisting that the thing never happened at all. So you're wrong about what happened because this is what really happened, but also that never happened. This creates a very deeply insecure and unsafe situation where the fabric of reality is being twisted out of shape. Trying to maneuver your way through this or apply logic in this situation is not only pointless, it's a disaster. Don't bother. You have enough information right now to come to a conclusion that this person is not trustworthy, period. You may even have the upper hand here. In fact, you do have it, because you're engaging with logic and reality. But it isn't going to matter. In a debate with another logical person who was playing by all the same rules as you are, you would be the hands down winner. You would Demolish them with the facts and proof and logic. In this situation, you lose every time. Facts and logic and proof mean nothing to this person. Nothing at all. In fact, those things just serve to demonstrate to them that you're not just a liar, but an idiot, a fool. There's absolutely no arguing with this. There's no way to engage with this at all. For your own safety, learn to disengage and walk away. You're not going to win. You won't even be heard at all. And what they do here, they're just going to distort and misinterpret, all the while insisting that you are not listening to them. This activates the universal human wound of not being seen and not being heard. And that makes walking away from the situation even more difficult. Learn to let it be enough that you know that what you're saying is true and correct. You're not going to get more than that from a narcissist. They don't have it to give to you. You got to give it to yourself. That's something that's not often talked about, but we do hear it all the time. The reason many people keep getting sucked into arguments and interactions with narcissists is not just that they themselves are being mischaracterized. It's because hearing reality and facts and the truth about anything takes such a beating and be so ridiculously misrepresented, gets under most people's skin in some way. It's offensive to reality, you could say. And it's very difficult for people to just ignore. People often finally just can't help themselves. And they're like, how are you getting that? How can you possibly think that? Where is this coming from? You know? And then it's off to the races. It's important to remember that this is a waste of time. They might not even know how they came to their absurd conclusions. And even if they do, it's very doubtful this is going to make any sense. Sense to you. It's just an invitation to an argument. You don't have to go. People are wrong all over the world, all the time, about everything. Learn to just let them be. It's safer for you. Nothing about dealing with narcissists is safe or secure in any definition of either of those words. For that reason, it really is best to simply avoid these situations whenever possible. If you can't, and if you truly cannot remember what you're dealing with and protect yourself accordingly by not. Not allowing yourself to be baited into becoming so angry, so upset, so frustrated or so shocked that you forget what this really is, a game you cannot win, where every single thing you do and say will be misinterpreted, weaponized and used against you. Somehow you're gambling with the devil and the price is much higher than just a few dollars. It's higher than even your life savings. Get up from the table. I hope this clears a few things up for you. As always, I look forward to your comments, questions and suggestions, so please keep those coming. I take appointments online, over the phone, via text, via messenger, via email, through Skype and Zoom for clients worldwide. So if you're interested in speaking with me one on one, you can visit littleshaman.org to do that. I have several books out for public publications, so if you are interested in picking up a copy, you can do that on Amazon.com or littleshaman.org I teach workshops, seminars and clinics, so if you're interested in seeing what we're running this month, you can visit littleshaman.org to do that. And if you're interested in joining our support group with access to exclusive content, weekly support meetings and more, you can visit littleshaman.org to do that as well. You've been listening to the Meditations and More podcast here on the little shaman.com brought to you by Trans Relational Healing Shamans, spiritcenter.com and littleshaman.org. that's me, little Shaman. May the Great Spirit bless you. Have a beautiful day.