Sometimes the best way to deal with a narcissist is to ignore a narcissist; they will try to punish you and torment you, but with a little bit of effort, you can ignore them for good.
Ignoring a narcissist is critical – it is a skill that will save your life. And there is no time that ignoring a narcissist is more important than when a narcissist tries to punish you.
Narcissists love to get your reaction. And as soon as they do, you are handing power away.
This is how narcissists “prosper” – they like to know that they have infiltrated your thoughts, heart, mind, and soul to the point where they are everything to you – front and center, sideways, up and down, and inside and out.
That is what it feels like when a narcissist gets their tentacles into you … like everything you used to think is tipped upside down and turned on its head.
Until we know better we think that combatting a narcissist, when their cruel punishment emerges, can stop the battering – the onslaught of twists, turns, mind-bends, and outright abuse.
But it can’t.
In fact, every time we “go in” trying to get some sort of decency, accountability, or sanity, things escalate and we end up even more disorientated, broken, and traumatized than before.
Related: The 7 Things Narcissists Are Most Afraid Of
What is the solution?
It is the VERY thing that is the ONLY solution.
Totally ignoring them, which means granting them no energy, no response, and no bite back.
I discovered that ignoring the narcissist was the most difficult when he was trying to punish me. These were the times when he’d decided I was somehow injuring his False Self and I needed to be throttled back into line. This could amount to not meeting him at the door to greet him adequately. To punish me, he would abandon me and leave.
And … there were the times when he believed I slighted him, causing him to lash out with verbal abuse, name-calling, and intensely derogatory statements about my character. Other times of punishment were when he believed I was involved with other men and would threaten or become physically violent with me.
I could go on and on … as I am sure you also could about the ways the narcissist in your life has punished you.
And for most mere mortals, like me and you, initially it is almost impossible to not react to a narcissist’s cruel and disproportionate behavior when the punishment CLEARLY does not match the supposed crime.
Especially, if you are like me, a high-powered passionate person who has specific beliefs about life and others and how people should treat each other with integrity.
I used to be one of these people who HATED injustice vehemently. For me to sit back and shut my mouth when something was blatantly “wrong’, unfair” or “ridiculous” was like not brushing my teeth in the morning.
It truly was part of my make-up.
So, as far as the narcissist was concerned, my previous self was the perfect target for narcissistic supply – because all he had to do was do something odd/wrong/unjust/cruel/unfair and I’d be all over it.
Before my intense recovery journey, I just thought I was doing the right thing by confronting him. I didn’t realize the repercussions of my intensely co-dependent (sourcing my life from outside of me by trying to force other people to grant me myself) behavior.
What I was doing was defying all rules of Quantum Law – so within, so without.
This is the absolute nature of this Law: whenever we try to change someone else to grant us inner peace and happiness, we are firmly in Wrong Town … and all we get is MORE inner turmoil and unrest in our attempts.
The other thing that Quantum Law forces us to get (and hopefully we do finally awaken) is that inner peace and happiness is our own foundational responsibility and then and only then other people with healthy resources will follow.
In this article, I wish to share with you the five most important understandings and processes to ignore narcissists, especially at the times when they try to hurt you the most.
Here Are 5 Steps To Ignoring A Narcissist Who Tries To Punish You
1) Know Ignoring a Narcissist Hurts Them More Than Anything.
I have found this key truth is very useful for people, to help them ignore narcissists before going to work on their Inner Game – meaning detoxing their trauma and reprogramming their painful beliefs.
Initially, it is very human that we want to get back at narcissists; we want them to suffer. They have hurt us, and what they have done to us defies our sense of loyalty, love, and what we stand for as human beings.
Please know even though I am all for Quantum Recovery where we purposefully evolve ourselves to the stage where we have no need for narcissists to experience anything at all for us to have a truly wonderful, rich, and expansive life (true Quantum Cellular Freedom), I deeply acknowledge the stages we go through emotionally.
Revenge and wanting to pay back, for most of us, is initially very real and coursing through our being. As long as we are prepared to work towards our inner recovery as soon as possible, this can be a helpful step to start ignoring a narcissist.
KNOWING nothing hurts a narcissist more than ignoring them. It renders them insignificant, meaningless, and void.
That is the deepest fear of the narcissist – having people turn their back on them and let go because there is NO greater narcissistic injury. It is literal emotional annihilation.
Please know you have a window of time with your own emotions with this – yes ignore a narcissist because you know it hurts them more than anything, but start your recovery in deep earnest immediately as well – because if you don’t your ego’s delight at ignoring them will be VERY short-lived.
The ego never holds energy and peace durably. It needs constant proof and confirmation.
Therefore, without deep healing processes to detoxify yourself from the narcissist, you will want to check up – such as look up social media or get in contact with people the narcissist knows to see IF your ignoring them has really hurt them.
Your attention will still be on the narcissist, which means that it isn’t going towards your healing and recovery, and you will still be drained off and handing energy away. This is why it is important to use this knowledge as your kick star ONLY.
Related: How To Get A Narcissist To Leave You Alone: 8 Smart Ways
2) Know That Granting a Narcissist Energy is Handing Them the Bullets to Shoot You With.
When we understand the Rules of Engagement with a narcissist, this gives us more reason to ignore them rather than go to war.
And … of course, this helps lead us to the space to get onto working on our Inner Healing.
Narcissists are not like normal people in arguments and times of conflict. For most people conflict drains energy from their Inner Being – it is distasteful, painful, and exhausting.
Narcissists are the opposite; conflict, drama, and trauma energize them.
The narcissist’s TRUE feelings about him or herself are disastrous – hence why a fictitious character was created by him or her to be a buffer between the narcissist and his or her inner wounds.
This entity, known as Ego (False Self), is running the narcissist’s emotions and life and feeds from pain.
In stark contrast, the entity is known as the True Self, (which still exists within us, even if not free yet because of internal trauma) feeds off and blossoms from love, authenticity, and truth.
Because the narcissist is self-divorced from his or her True Self, the narcissist cannot feel, register, or hold good feelings. He or she can only operate within the range of painful feelings. All “good” feelings, for a narcissist, are delusional/obsessive and ego-driven.
We are no match for a narcissist in a battle, who like a shark in blood-infested waters, gets switched on and powered up.
We … instead … are torn to shreds.
It’s your ego that wants to fight on, but our True Self knows that the energy being expended and the brutalization we suffer is not worth it and is NOT who you really are.
Your True Self is screaming at you this: Pull away and heal and create yourself as a Being that is impervious to abuse. Don’t try to fight back because you will only feed it, absorb it and become it.
Related: How A Narcissist Plays You And How Their Cycle Of Abuse Works
3) The Narcissist Has Shown Us What We Need to Heal.
If you pull away using the inspiration that ignoring the narcissist hurts them the most, and you have stopped handing energy and power to them, then it’s time to make it ALL ABOUT working on your own Inner Being to heal yourself.
This is when we step into the Quantum Power of ignoring the narcissist. This is a much-improved model rather than having to continually having to remind ourselves why we need to stay away.
When we heal the Thriver Way, we stay away … for good. This is only possible when we start the determined work on our Inner Game – the detoxing of our inner trauma and reprogramming of our painful beliefs. By doing so, a profound switch comes on … this …
What you are PUNISHING me with is EXACTLY the unhealed parts of me that I need to heal to NOT only ignore you for real but to free myself from all feelings of enmeshment, love, and neediness with you. I know now by doing so, you will become totally irrelevant to me, and I will then transcend into relationships that ARE healthy, whole, and real.
This is a massive cause for celebration truly … and I promise you it is the truth. This is the truth that ultimately set me and so many others free.
It’s then that ignoring a narcissist becomes pretty easy … because we have made the journey all about loving and healing ourselves instead of trying to make the narcissist morph into someone who will love and care for us decently.
How it went for me is how it goes for all of us. I clung to the narcissist initially like a woman in a typhoon hanging onto the side of a sinking ship. I was drowning, yet I thought he was my only option to live.
Why did I do this?
Because all the ways I had felt as a child, and how I had grown up to treat myself … feeling not good enough, feeling loved with conditions, feeling not heard, not able to have my own rights, and not being capable to generate my own life … were all the aspects of myself under serious threat again.
Whilst I had these unhealed wounds, I was holding the messenger of these wounds (him) responsible to fix these wounds.
Why do any of us cling?
Because the unhealed child within us is dictating our emotions and our life.
When I pulled away and healed these original traumas, all of my graduations happened … just as it has for thousands of people already in this Community, and just as it will for you.
It’s a beautiful day when the narcissist tries to trigger you and there is simply NO trauma there for him or her to trigger.
That’s when your response is indifference and you have nil reaction. No charge felt in your body means there is no trauma remaining.
This is the level we are capable of healing to now, and being freed from the narcissist is only a part of it. The real truth is this: we are freeing ourselves from internal trauma which has caused us to hand power away in many areas of our life.
4) Life Has Our Back and Will Support Us If We Let It.
One of the greatest reasons why we can’t ignore the narcissist is because we think that letting go means we will be unsafe, undefended, and throttled by them.
Boy does this one take some work on our Inner Being – BIG time!
I know from my own personal experience, and as a result of helping many people in this Community heal from narcissistic abuse, one of the biggest hooks we have that keeps us going back for more is crisis consciousness.
It is that terror that things out of our control, especially when they become scary or threatening, are going to get us. That we will be hurt immensely. ripped apart and taken down.
These traumas come from feeling terrified and powerless as children if we were violated, but they are also more than that … they are literal human DNA epigenetic terrors that are wedged in so many human being’s DNA as a part of the inherited human experience.
Look at our human history – it’s brutal. So many of us carry terror, aspects of powerlessness, and abuse programs deeply entrenched within us.
A miracle starts to happen when we target that stuff and release it. All of a sudden we KNOW with every cell of our Being that we do have incredible power – dictated through the composition of our Inner Being.
When we are no longer riddled with fear and all of our cells vibrate with the knowing that we are loved and adored beyond measure simply because we exist (which is our organic state when we lose our programs and traumas of fear) then for the first time in our Life we feel SAFE.
And I mean truly safe, and we know that whatever it is that is inauthentic outside of us is not our reality and cannot affect us. So … I can’t recommend enough how important it is to work on these inner programs to be free of them.
5) It’s Only Important What You Think of You.
Narcissists get us triggered and enmeshed when we start focusing on all the terrible things they do. Such as the smear campaigns and abuse by proxy – the fabricating of lies and using methods to discredit us and render us powerless.
When we are shocked, devastated, and traumatized by the false allegations and terrible things being said and spread about us, as well as people turning away and against us in droves … then we are in trouble.
We feel like we can’t ignore what is happening to us. We want to defend, have a right of reply and discredit the person who is tearing our reputation to shreds, or maybe attempting to get us prosecuted.
I promise you this one – Step 5 – is incredibly connected to the essential inner work.
One of the biggest hooks that narcissists get us on, is our fear of authority and the terror of being persecuted.
These are two of the human frailties of powerlessness in our DNA caused by the terrible atrocities that have occurred in the human experience, and which have been passed on as trauma epigenetically within families down the line.
This painful belief wedged in our Inner Identity goes like this: If people think I’m bad or that what I have done is wrong, I will be hurt and could even die.
Is it any wonder that we are triggered into white-hot terror when we discover what has been said about us, or when legal authorities confront us as a result of the narcissist’s lies?
HOW can we ignore the narcissist when this happens? We can’t.
Logically we can’t. Mere logic, which is only responsible for 5% of our Life, has no power against an almighty triggered subconscious survival program.
There is only one way to truly heal from this – address the subconscious program at its root. Because when we have targeted and released these traumas that are deep within our DNA then we start going free.
I hold your hand and take you through this step-by-step in the Narcissistic Abuse Recovery Program.
Then we are not triggered. We know we are not that person that other people believe we are. We no longer fear that people and authorities will turn against us. Instead, we calmly and clearly show the facts, or we just know that being ourselves is enough, or even doing nothing is okay – regardless of what people think.
Then, what we find is the terror campaigns fall flat. They just don’t get off the ground. We are believed, we are safe. People who want to join the narcissist can, but we have ourselves and other people in our life who know who we are.
The greatest gift is, unconditional of our outside world, we KNOW who we are and we know we are safe. Then we discover this: Life follows.
Related: Healing From Narcissistic Abuse: Here’s How To Get Started
Conclusion
After being hooked up with a narcissist watching them, confronting them, and having our entire soul and life overtaken by them, letting go and ignoring them will feel totally counter-intuitive at first.
Yet, I promise you, when done in conjunction with healing your Inner Being, detaching and generating your life will be the most natural, healthy thing you have ever done in your life.
This creates a healthy template for you, as to how to live your life in ways that serve you immensely. Such as, making it your mission to control your inner world and THEN seeing your outer world transform.
I can’t tell you what a relief it is to stop trying to control everything outside of us (which is too big and way too impossible) and instead make the change that changes everything … on the inside.
Narcissists are the pinnacle of uncontrollable!! Hence teaching us this self-empowerment lesson.
I’d love to connect to your comments and questions about this topic below!
Written by Melanie Tonia Evans Originally appeared in Melanie Tonia Evans
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