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.
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.
Related Articles by Julie L. Hall
- The Narcissistic Family: Cast of Characters and Glossary of Terms
- Why and How Narcissists Play the Shame Game
- Healing a Sense of Foreshortened Future in Adult Children of Narcissists
- The Narcissist’s Caretakers: Caught Hook, Line, and Sinker
- What the Narcissist Fears Most
- Narcissist Parents Are Hurt Machines to Their Children
- Identifying the Covert Narcissist in Your Life: A Checklist
- Understanding Narcissistic Rage and Why It’s Not Your Fault
- Setting Boundaries with Narcissist Parents
- The Dos and Don’ts of CoParenting with a Narcissist Ex
- How to Protect Your Children from Your Narcissist Spouse
- Why Narcissists Will Never Love You and It’s Dangerous to Love Them
- Horrid and Shocking Things Narcissists Say and Do
- The Overt Versus Covert Narcissist: Both Suck
- Seven Things Narcissists Will Never Do
- The Hidden Trauma of Neglect in the Narcissistic Family
- Enabling the Narcissist: How and Why It Happens
- How Narcissists Torture Others and Believe They’re Right to Do It
- Seven Sure-Fire Ways to Spot a Narcissist
- Maddening and Bizarre Things Narcissists Do Explained
- Behind the Narcissist Mask: The Bully, Coward, Liar and Fraud
- Why You Should Not Feel Sorry for the Narcissist
- Adult Children of Narcissists Face Trauma-Induced Health Risks
- Raised by a Narcissist? 11 Healing Things to Do for Yourself Right Now
- What Raging Narcissists Break: A Real-Life Damage List
- The Dilemma of the Golden Child in the Narcissistic Family
- Narcissism 101: A Glossary of Terms for Understanding the Madness
- The Narcissism Disease Cluster in Families and How to End the Cycle
- A Daughter’s Story of One Hell of a Narcissistic Mother
- The Narcissist Parent’s Psychological Warfare: Parentifying, Idealizing, and Scapegoating
- Raised by Narcissists? Why You Can’t Afford the Wrong Therapist
- It’s You and Me Baby: Narcissistic Head Games
- How and Why Narcissists Are Highly Skilled Abusers
- The Strength of the Scapegoat in the Narcissistic Family
- Life in the Fun House: Narcissistic Mirroring and Projection
- The Paradox of the Narcissist’s Unrequited Self-Love
- A Golden Child Story of Guilt in the Narcissistic Family
- 9 Best of the Worst Narcissist Mothers on Screen
- Understanding the Narcissist’s Disrespect, Envy, and Contempt
Photo courtesy of Hendrik Dacquin, Creative Commons.
View Comments (12)
After going No Contact with my covert narc mother and family of origin (ENTIRE family of origin who believed her lies), my neighbor of 9 years and "friends" of 20+ years began to attack, smear, put me on the defense over nonsense and show their true narc colors that were hidden from me all along and I had to go No Contact with them. It's as if they could "smell" the wound inside of me from my narc family of origen even though I didn't even mention it to some of them. THEN, Lo and Behold, the only persons I have left, my dear husband and teenage daughter (who got infected by my narc mother and sibling), have begun the "mean sweet" cycles, subtle ignoring, tag teaming against me, etc., with husband treating daughter like he should treat ME but acting like a juvenile instead of the adult and daughter treating me like a CHILD, projecting his stuff onto me when I try and communicate how I feel and gaslighting me in subtle ways, etc. I have nowhere left to go, my inheritance was stolen from me, I hve no job, C-PTSD, my hair is falling out, I've gained weight and when I try to lose it husband brings home chocolate and cookies and lays them on the counter in front of me. I'm completely trapped. When will this nightmare end? I now understand the reason behind probably 97% of ALL suicides.
Reese, I'm so sorry. Please seek help, even if on an on-line forum such as Out of the Fog. You are not alone.
Perfectly executed! Thank you!
If anything typifies the narc pattern of assuming the role of victim all the while usurping attention, invalidating the struggle, diminishing resources available to help the true victims of this malody, its this ridiculous classification of NPD as a Cluster B personality disorder .
Every aspect of a person's life is negatively affected by personality disorder. Everything is a struggle from getting work to keeping work, getting friends and keeping friends, fighting isolation, and all with no family support in most cases.
Does that sound even remotely like the life of a narc? Of course not. The narc gets your job, steals your girlfriend, takes credit, gets undeserved promotion, and can steal a parents love from you. They have figured out how to cheat their way through life, and they are quite happy. If more people knew how effective this is, they would be narcs as well.
This is a decision to choose the worship of self ; evil manifest in the physical. These are unredeemable, untreatable, nonproductive, greif machines that are a growing burden on the fabric of society. Every publicly funded program is drained of resources by them and their growing number of casualties. Just one less narc slithering upon the earth is a victory for every person whose life would have been destroyed by them. Moses killed from rage, yet he was forgiven. David killed from lust. He was forgiven. Who can condemn the selfless act of ending a existence of a narc? Sometimes, doing what's right, brave, and protects the innocent, isn't legal.
Put the comprehensive list of offenses committed against you to paper, then read it over. It sounds like a disjointed paranoid petty list of grievances from a disturbed mind. Yet we all know it amounts to assassination of the spirit. It is worse than murder. It leaves the victim just alive enough to experience the grief of ones own death. abandonment of loved ones, paralysed by fear, with no end in sight.
Narcs are in the highest offices of power. they know how to maneuver around laws and standards of evidence, probable cause, with such expertise, they are literally above the law. Aside from Divine intervention, we are all at the mercy of this growing number of wolves in sheeps clothing.
Going no contact is not a solution. "Evil flourishes when good people are silenced ." We become silent acompaces to the injury they inflict on others. Who is willing to live with that?
Where ever there are emotionally fragile people, you will find narcs "serving" their needs. The social services agencies are full of them, as ar the psychiatric and psychology professions. NLP, neuro linguistic programing is a form of mind control used to access the subconscious mind to gain compliance from others. Paired with hypnotic commands, a narc can imbed in the subconscious mind anything they want without the victim being aware of the hypnosis nor consenting to it. It can be done with a simple phone call about any topic.
The soul is the sum of three parts; mind, will and emotions. Narcs can bypass the conscious mind, the place of logic and reason to access the subconscious mind to command emotions and act outside of one's will. They can literally steal the soul of their victim. Even if no contact occurs, the victim remains in an awakened state of hypnosis without knowing. They continue to feel think and do things they do not understand. It can last a lifetime. Please don't believe me. Do your own research. Orwell was nothing by comparison to the hidden reality we are living today.
I have a habit of only listening to tv in the background while I do other things. This seeming unimportant detail, has made me hard to hypnotise covertly. Every time someone gets so engrossed in a tv show, they don't notice anything else, That is a self hypnotic trance. Most people do it daily. It opens the door to being receptive to covert hypnosis.
If there is a narc in your life who is a professional psychologist, beware. If you find yourself behaving outside of your moral standards in a reflexive way, or have no memory of doing things you have been accused of, it may have already happened. Your free will is no longer yours. You have been made an extension of the narc.
What must one do? Voice activated recording of all conversation with narc for starters. Do not confront them. If you do, they will lie and then be guarded for a while. Record as much as you can; hours of it. Then contact a cult deprogrammer. They specialize in reversing the brainwashing of cult followers by the leader. A deprogramer will analyse the conversations to determine what words or phrases are being used to induce a hypnotic state. Then the embedded commands can be removed.
You know Reese, it is not you who needs help but the people who do this to you. If I were you, understand how narcissists operate and learn to recocnize it. Take charge of your life. And: disengage. There are a billion people who are NICE you can connect with and leave these few people. I have the same issues with some family members (My father and half sister) and recocnized and disengaged. Since then, things are going great! But the main aim is: disengage. And if they bother you with messaging etc, make it a point to answer in once empty sentence. If you have the time.
My life has been divided in two recently, as I am in my 50s; 1. The time before I realized my mom was a borderline Soc.P. Narcissist. 2. The rest of my new life, when I can finally see who I really am!
I totally get it. My sister has done the triangulation thing for years. When my elderly mother was ill, she told no one that she put her in a nursing home. When we visited her, she was promptly pulled out the next day. She has been so manipulative and deceitful. She repulses me. Once her mask fell off, it was like a death. I grieved the person I thought I knew. I am still coming to grips with her lies and betrayal. Total abuse. I am proud for calling her out and cutting contact.
Once you become aware of what is happening the table doesn't just turn, it flips on itself. I've been extremely lucky enough that while dealing with inflicting narc injury and going through the textbook attempts of isolation/gaslighting/degrading stage that I have a loving, strong-willed husband who's been insanely supportive as well as a circle of friends who are entirely aware of my situation and have supported me day in and out. I'm essentially just riding out the narcs crazy wave while they collapse into themselves realizing they've lost all control over me. The more they try, the harder they fail. At this stage in their self-preservation crusade it's just head shake after head shake at how utterly insecure and sad/angry they are with themselves, the projections no longer work. When you know yourself, your heart, your worth and your intentions in this world is the day they've lost. Keep walking away and be grateful that you'll never experience the level of misery they wish to inflict on you. Happy healing <3
The damage they do to you as a person is so hard to explain, insidious is right
It’s so soul crushing to realize you loved a lie more than you’ve ever loved another person