Kim Saeed
“Blow, blow, thou winter wind Thou art not so unkind, as man’s ingratitude.” ~ William Shakespeare
Want to know if your partner’s a narcissist? Stop catering to their excessive demands and see how they react.
2. Narcissists DO know exactly how to reel you in
Narcissistic-type individuals truly do have a sixth sense when it comes to snagging people into relationships with them, and it doesn’t have anything to do with their target’s status, wealth, or intelligence. These toxic individuals are able to detect vulnerability and loneliness in others. Generally, these states of being originated in childhood and/or early adulthood and were intensified through unsuccessful relationships and life events.
Narcissists and other predatory types can detect vulnerability in people through visual and auditory cues such as facial expressions, body language, and tone of voice. People who feel vulnerable often avoid direct eye contact with others, tend to look downward a lot, speak in softer voices, and/or are overly nice and accommodating upon first meeting them.
Even if a potential target doesn’t display the above behaviors, narcissists can alternately determine if a person is a good target through other behaviors and traits such as: high levels of trust, compassion, cooperativeness, and tolerance (traits which they gleefully concede they can take advantage of).
They then use their target’s vulnerability to reel them in, and also to keep them enmeshed in a toxic relationship through psychological manipulation which targets their victim’s emotional wounds and destroys his or her self-esteem.
“What we don’t resolve, we often repeat” ~ Sigmund Freud
If you’ve been hurt in the past and/or have a history of choosing partners who end up being detrimental to your well-being, know that this cycle can be broken through committing to yourself and your recovery.
3. Silent treatments work best after you’ve isolated yourself from your friends and family
Once the honeymoon/love-bombing phase begins its dismal decline, the narcissist then starts blaming your relationship problems on your outside influences, which may include: parents, grandparents, siblings, other extended family, exes, best friends, and even children.
After the isolation stage has been successfully implemented, silent treatments can be employed with maximum benefit to the narcissist. After ensuring you have no emotional support, the narcissist can then criticize you without bias.
This is the same technique that was used in North Korean POW camps [1]. It was not uncommon for a soldier to wander into his hut, go in a corner, sit down, pull a blanket over his head, and die within two days.
Despite minimal physical torture, the death rate in the North Korean POW camp rose 38%, with half of the soldiers dying simply because they had given up.
How did this happen? The “ultimate weapon of war”. One that your Narcissist uses against you quite regularly.
The North Koreans’ objective was to “deny men the emotional support that comes from interpersonal relationships.” To do this, the captors used these primary tactics:
- Withholding all positive emotional support
- Criticism
They used negativity in its purest and most malicious form. The soldiers had nothing to live for and lost basic belief in themselves and their loved ones, not to mention God and country. The North Koreans had put the American soldiers into a kind of emotional and psychological isolation, the likes of which had never been seen.
Aside from the silent treatment, does the simple act of walking through your house to go to work seem to induce a psychotic rage in your partner? They want you to feel sorry for being alive. To be so overly anxious that you feel you’re always one minute away from tragedy.
I keep coming as cross these articles and wholeheartedly agree; but my question is what when it’s a female narcissists? A female narc who currently has the kids because she unilaterally decided they were going with her, who let’s me see them once or twice a week for an hour or two at a time? And everybody says take her to court and do this or that, but before she left me she called the people I was working for and started a bunch of stuff going there and then through MY mistakes because of everything going on in life I ended up losing my job, I had lost 8 close friends during a rough period of life and had just lost both of my brothers 6 months apart right before she went on her tirades… insulting my then dead brothers, insulting my efforts to memorialize them saying no gives a crap what you have to say about your dead brothers, punching me, throwing my brothers memorial books at me, belittling everything single thing about me, and just being devastating, she withheld sex for 4 years and i was still trying to make the marriage work for the sake of the kids. She hit me in the back of the head with a mag light flashlight and then called the police in me, I discovered she was cheating and she punched me in the face when I played the recording for her and said that I was creepy, crazy, and a stalker and she no longer felt safe because I had violated her privacy no word on the affair though… the fact is she cleared our accounts everything was joint and I assumed in the beginning when I was giving her money for her and the kids that she was paying the Bill’s but it turned out she was having a new house built and let everything in my name go unpaid so when I found out she was moving out every bill was 4 months behind and now I ca nah t afford to take her to court and she is toxic to those boys who she now says arent even mine and whether I believe her or not doesnt matter because in my heart they are mine… what do you do if you cant bring about justice because of situations she created but you cant sit back and just let your kids slip away either…any advice on this would be great from literally anyone