It seems like everybody is talking about narcissism these days. Does social media breed it? Are we raising a generation of overpraised narcissistic kids? Is your boss, your new flirtation, or your president one? Questions and theories abound. But if you’re dealing with the nightmare of someone close to you having narcissistic personality disorder, you need help understanding how narcissistic abuse isolates people and what to do about it.

How Narcissistic Abuse Isolates 

Narcissists have an arsenal of abuses, but isolation is one of their foremost weapons. Isolating targeted victims enables the narcissist to better manipulate and control them. When it comes to their partner and children, they isolate them from the outside world, from one another, and even from their own sense of reality. To make matters worse, very few people truly understand narcissism, isolating sufferers even further.

1.  Narcissistic Abuse Isolates You From the Outside World

Seeking continuously (as in every hour of every day) to convince others, and perhaps even more themselves, that their false mask of superiority is real, narcissists isolate those close to them to control what “their loved ones” reflect and reveal about them. Narcissists typically most isolate family members because they pose the biggest threat of revealing things they want kept out of public view. Narcissists keep careful watch over what family information and images are exposed to the outside world.

2.  Narcissistic Abuse Isolates You From Family Members

Another go-to tactic of the narcissist is to divide and conquer. Within families, narcissists ruthlessly set members against another. One method they use is to treat children inequitably, favoring one and targeting others. Narcissists also create a competitive and threatening atmosphere that keeps family members vying for approval and/or a reprieve from attack. Attack can take many forms, including rage, ridicule, and blame. Narcissists isolate their partner with threats, interrogation, belittlement, and violent outbursts. The partner may enable the narcissist’s isolating tactics by supporting divisions within the family.

3.  Narcissistic Abuse Isolates You From Yourself 

The ultimate puppeteer, the narcissist regularly gaslights (leads others to question their judgment and sanity) family members, denies their reality, and projects her/his own abuse and corrupt agenda onto them. Narcissists continuously create in others the experience of cognitive dissonance—a conflict between what you feel/see to be true and what they tell you is happening. Cognitive dissonance undermines the intrinsic connection between your feelings and your sense of reality, in essence separating you from your perceptions—drilling a schism through your core, whereby you come to fundamentally doubt yourself.

4.  Narcissistic Abuse Is Not Understood

Jazz great Louis Armstrong famously said, “There’s some folks, that, if they don’t know, you can’t tell ’em.” Many people lack the imagination to understand things beyond their immediate experience. But, to add insult to horrible injury, narcissistic personality disorder is so particularly complex, insidious, ruthless, and destructive that it is virtually impossible to comprehend unless you’ve lived with it (or something like it) firsthand. Even if they know something about the disorder, most people have no idea what narcissistic abuse really entails, and they are unaware of its profound and lasting emotional and physiological harm.

Even survivors themselves, once away from the narcissist, struggle to understand what they have been through and heal from it. Tragically, when survivors reach out for support, their friends, relatives, pastors, and even therapists may fail to recognize the abuse and dismiss their experience, further isolating them.

How to Find Support

Survivors of narcissistic abuse often try to go it alone. Fortunately these days there are many resources about narcissism and its related trauma. Books, blogs, online forums, and YouTube videos, often created by survivors themselves, are now widely available. But they don’t replace personal support. There are many people experiencing what you are going through. Seek them out through your network of friends, support groups, and online forums. If you have a loving partner and/or trustworthy friends, educate them about what you’ve been through. Find a therapist or coach who is trained in narcissistic abuse recovery. Don’t let the narcissist continue to isolate you even after s/he is out of your life.

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Julie L. Hall is the author of The Narcissist in Your Life: Recognizing the Patterns and Learning to Break Free from Hachette Books.

Need support? Julie provides specialized narcissistic abuse recovery coaching to clients around the world.  

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Photo courtesy of Hendrik Dacquin, Creative Commons.