If you cannot get rid of a narcissist, you cannot let them be the star of the show.
You know how narcissists will non-verbally silence you in the company of other people so you don’t get to be you, but they can be the charming one? They may scoff or make sarcastic comments; either during or after these interactions, they’ll belittle your opinions and make you feel less than what you truly are. You know the drill. They may make you feel like a spotlight thief, even though it is them who cannot share it.
They’ll cry at being so easy to ignore or make themselves seem so pathetic that you’ll have to make yourself smaller so they have even the slightest chance of charming someone. And you know they’re a bit pathetic. You KNOW that they are not emotionally, intellectually, and talent-wise there, but they’ll HAVE TO be allowed to pretend to be everyone’s equal or superior. And you, as their significant something, friend, parent, child, or partner in something, have to take a step back and allow them to play pretend.
You’ll have to stop doing that. If you don’t want to be the narcissist’s #1 choice of a friend, you’ll have to stop being their favorite source of narcissistic supply.
Let them have a temper tantrum over you being charming – public or private.
You’ll have to start arguing back. You’ll have to LET THEM SCOFF AT YOU IN PUBLIC. Let them attack you in front of other people. Start contradicting them in front of other people. Correct their memory and point out facts. Arm yourself with a phone full of evidence.
Allow people a moment to recalibrate. They may not realize what’s going on at first. Let them figure it out on their own. Let them take sides on their own.
Send a copy of every dodgy email conversation to someone relevant. (You can legally do this. They will likely appeal to the secrecy of correspondence, but you can, actually, as a party to this conversation, reveal its contents to any 3rd party. Secrecy of correspondence protects your conversation from a 3rd party that might open your email or letters on their own. This does not apply to emails or letters that contain intellectual property, but a regular conversation doesn’t count for intellectual property.)
Don’t let them hold you to virtues they don’t even try to uphold for themselves.
Whenever a narcissist tries to hold you to a goal, value, or virtue that you’ve declared previously, declare you changed your mind. Tell them, “Well, OOOPS! It turns out I’m not that great of a person, after all! I didn’t account for assholes like yourself to try and take advantage of MY VIRTUES, did I?”
Start defending yourself to people you haven’t previously involved in your relationship problems with the narcissist. Make any relevant people aware how you are being treated, and start telling the truth to people who haven’t heard anything but narcissist-glorifying lies. Fight back. It may take them time to accept that things aren’t the way they’ve gotten used to them being – that your relationship is brilliant, thanks to the narcissist, but actually, you’ve been acting like a puppet in freaking strings to avoid embarrassing the narcissist and yourself.
Just learn to take the spotlight. Learn to demand credits for your work and talent.
Stop allowing them to make you act weak and small so they can feel better than they could ever be.
Chances are that there was never anything much wrong with your self-confidence and that you allow the narcissist to walk all over you because you feel sorry for them. Because you feel stronger than them – strong enough to carry a little more than your share of the load, right? Fighting back would feel like a loser move. Like you’d acknowledge they have power and hold on to you? Sure. It is. But you can do it in a classy way. You can be as petty and childish about it as you like or as suave, charming, and classy as you like. Rise your bar where you need it to be to hold your head up high.
Just do it.
Give yourself a permission to be charming, friendly, and happy to see other people, even if your narcissistic person doesn’t like it. Even befriend your narcissist’s friends. I mean “your friends are my friends” right?
Don’t let them befriend your friends anymore… without pitching in.
They will treat your friends as their friends, but if they befriend your friends, you befriend theirs. Whatever rule they live by, you do the same. The chances are they’ve treated your friends like their friends, while simultaneously giving you the idea you are not allowed to treat their friends as yours. Just “realize you’ve been rude” and fix this. Start being friendly toward their friends. You see them flying into a “protect territory and plug holes of a sinking ship” mode and start blocking you from their friends, and that’ll be a great conversation starter. (OK, well, maybe you should no longer treat my friends as your friends, either.)
Still, if you have real friends, let them know what’s going on. ALWAYS keep your friends in the loop with your narcissistic friends.
DO NOT ALLOW them to befriend your friends without letting your friends know who this person is and why they are obsessed with you and your friends. Then, let them draw conclusions from it.
The reason why a narcissist wants to be friends to your friends is that it’ll be all that much harder for you to kick them out when their narcissistic side is revealed to you. Also, they want to control the conversation behind your back, too, which is just something you have to risk appearing to be doing, too. But you can let your friends draw conclusions of their own, where as a narcissist must dictate their perspective.
Are you their king in a leash?
Narcissists** love to put kings in a leash, as in make a well-liked individual their lap dog. They will make it seem that you are “too busy” or “too important” for their friends or even your friends, when you know that they don’t want you interacting with them, because you could charm them off their feet in a split second. So, they act like your personal secretary to people who wish they could be as important as the narcissist who is your real friend or spouse or whatever, and act like you’re just too important to receive them as your friends. And, who is going to look like the narcissist?
This way, they’ll control the conversation behind your back. “Sources close to the artist (person of interest),” you know? They get a filtered version of you from “a trusted source” like your wife, husband, mother, best friend, who is kind enough to keep “regular friends” and who are just one degree away from the source of gossip – you.
You don’t have to be a celebrity to get this kind of celebrity treatment, by the way.
If you’re their king on the leash, they’ll try to use you to control others – and make it seem like it’s you who is calling the shots.
When a narcissist gets a good king on the leash, they’ll try to “speak for you” to other people. They will claim YOU want something done, when you haven’t asked anything of the sort. I wouldn’t be surprised if 70% of all the crap that was done in Hitler’s name, he didn’t know about. He was scary, and thus usable as a “my daddy will beat you up if you don’t.” And I also wouldn’t be surprised if Hitler shot himself out of pure embarrassment he didn’t see this coming and didn’t even want to defend himself after realizing there was nothing he could do to fix it. Pure speculation on my part, but you know… He was scary as, but maybe he wasn’t as big of a monster as history would have him to be.
Anyway, as that’s entirely possible that the king isn’t really the one calling the shots, you, as a potential king, must be very aware what people are using your name to do. You might not realize the weight that your name carries, until it’s too late.
“Johnny wants you to…” “Steven expects you to” when, truly, they didn’t.
Ask your friends if a suspected narcissist has passed on your “wishes” to them, and inform them if you have never uttered such a word.
When they crash your party.
So they heard you’re having a get-together they weren’t invited to and decide to treat it as a given that they were so invited they didn’t need an invite or would be a welcome surprise guest… Narcissists** cannot tolerate a closed door to a group of people they were once a party to. Even if they had to push the doors down the first time around. They were in, and that’s all they’ll remember.
Keep your friends and loved ones aware of the narcissist and your history. Mention the word “stalker” if you can. Try not to save your narcissist’s reputation in the eyes of those who you actually trust enough to call your friends. THEY need to know who they are, and how your relationship got to the point that it’s at. Therefore, whenever you’re with these people and a few newbies, and the narcissist crashes in… They have a pre-set idea of who that person is and why they’re acting this way. They may even do you a favor and prove exactly how much of a stalker they can be. It’s one thing to just tell people how someone is acting crazy and an entirely other when they actually do it.
In this setting, it’s entirely possible it doesn’t have to be you who kicks that person out of your house.
And when the narcissist makes your charm THEIR victory…
Now, this may well be the most annoying thing they will do. Once you’ll become your charming self again, it’ll be your narcissist who wants to take the credit for it. They will insist they made you that way, even when they were the one making it as hard as they possibly could for you to be this. Granted, they may have made you unbeatable. They may have put you in a position where you had no other option but to grow and be stronger. That credit they deserve. But do you want them beaming happiness next to you like they deserve THAT spotlight?
IGNORE THEM. If you don’t want them to be a party to your charm, ignore them, their claim of credit. Let them insist they made you that way, and ignore it. Let them try and make speeches about how they raised you, moulded you, whatever. In your speech, never acknowledge them. Give credit to those who deserve it. Thank those who inspired you. Who TRULY made a difference for you. And when they demand their credits, just give them a cold stare and move onto the next person you wish to acknowledge.
This is dedicated to my mother who raised me in the knowledge that love doesn’t grow on trees. She made me a better person just being a shining example of the person I never wanted to become. Would I known both without her? I think so, but still, the value of a repeat lesson shouldn’t be overlooked.
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*) Term changed after this post was originally written. Fractions of old terms may exist elsewhere in the post. Read about term updates.
**) Narcissists are Young Souls left alone to survive and they're doing their best. Their emotional age ranges from 3 to 17 -year old. The younger, the more severe the narcissism.
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