First published on Psychology Today on 2/21/21 Does your partner, parent, sibling, or other family member say you are too sensitive if you point out that they have hurt you or that someone else has hurt you? Here are some other phrases they may use with the same underlying message:
- You need to toughen up.
- Can’t you take a joke?
- Why do you take everything personally?
- You should learn to let things go.
Whatever the wording, you may have taken these messages deeply to heart, especially if they’ve been delivered by your parent(s). You may have spent years feeling confused and ashamed about why you’re so touchy and easily wounded. Perhaps you believe you have good reason to feel upset but can’t get out of the cycle of hurt and blame that seems to always leave you on the losing end of the argument.
If you’re angry, you have good reason to be. Telling other people they are overreacting when they’re being victimized is the most common form of gaslighting that narcissistic abusers and their enablers engage in. Often a person targeted with ongoing scapegoating is labeled too sensitive to discredit them and dismiss their feelings. When abusers reframe their abuse this way, they sidestep accountability and undermine the scapegoated person’s sense of reality so they doubt themselves and hesitate to call out the abuse. Others in the family may accept and even participate in the victim blaming to avoid being targeted themselves and win favor with the abuser.
You’re Too Sensitive: How It Works
As with other forms of gaslighting, the “you’re too sensitive” routine is usually cloaked to hide its real intent and position the narcissist as free of responsibility. Here are common ways this is done:
1. The Reasonable Guise
Taking the stance of the reasonable party allows the narcissist to cast the scapegoated person as irrational, overly emotional, perhaps even hysterical. This is a stance often taken by men toward women that is supported by institutionalized cultural bias. The reality is that the narcissistic personality is by definition hypersensitive, emotionally dysregulated, and delusional. Telling you that you are too sensitive when you react to being belittled, criticized, or attacked is a classic form of narcissistic projection.
2. The Joking Guise
What better way to get away with abuse than to frame insults and ridicule as jokes? As long as the narcissist is “just kidding,” he or she is the blameless comedian others laugh along with, while the targeted scapegoat becomes the humorless outsider who can’t take a joke. Cruel “teasing” is an all-too-common form of ongoing humiliation in narcissistic families and relationships.
3. The Tough Realist Guise
Narcissists and their enablers love to tell other people they need to toughen up. Playing the worldwise realist, in contrast to the “thin-skinned” scapegoat, makes them feel superior and appear concerned while denying their own oversensitivity and abusive behavior. Adding insult to injury, abusers often frame this gaslighting strategy to the scapegoat as being “for your own good.”
4. The Sympathetic Guise
A passive-aggressive strategy common among covert narcissists is acting sympathetic to the scapegoat’s “sensitivity” or hurt feelings to appear caring while directing negative attention onto the scapegoat. Often the narcissist will privately target the scapegoat with an invalidating look, comment, or tone and then express concerned bewilderment in front of others when that person becomes upset. Typically the covert narcissist operates within plausible deniability to pivot away from accountability if called out by the scapegoat or others. Children caught in this cycle with a covert narcissist parent may go decades without fully recognizing the abusive manipulation they are entangled in.
You’re Too Sensitive: How to Handle It
The best way to avoid being abused and gaslighted as too sensitive is to limit or end contact with the person or people abusing you. But if you are currently unable to leave an abusive situation, there are strategies that can put you on better footing.
1. Stop Explaining Yourself
The pathological narcissist thrives on exploiting and invalidating others, and your attempts to explain yourself fall on deaf ears. The narcissist does not care about your reasons, feelings, or explanations.
2. Don’t Make Yourself Vulnerable
Narcissists view vulnerability as weakness and an opportunity to exploit or attack. The sooner you stop sharing your innermost thoughts and feelings the more protected you will be.
3. Don’t Take the Bait
It’s difficult not to react, particularly if you’ve been actively targeted for a significant period of time, but withholding your emotions when you’re being criticized or insulted is the best way to disarm the narcissist and his or her enablers. They do it for a reaction, and if you don’t give them that fuel, they will look elsewhere for it.
4. Work On You
If you’ve been targeted with long-term abuse, you are likely suffering with low self-esteem, confused boundaries, and other symptoms of complex trauma. Seek support and resources to educate yourself about narcissism and the trauma that results from narcissistic abuse. People who genuinely care about you and want the best for you won’t dismiss your feelings, even when those feelings make them uncomfortable.
Listen to Julie interviewed on The Addicted Mind Podcast and Narcissist Apocalypse Podcast.
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
- Dear Therapist: You Missed My Husbands Narcissism and It Devastated My Family
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- Your Narcissistic Mother Hates Your Body and Here’s Why
- Are You Being Bullied By Narcissistic Monologuing?
- 5 Things Children of Narcissists Wish Everyone Would Stop Saying
- The Hidden Trauma of Neglect in the Narcissistic Family
- Why Narcissists Will Never Love You and It’s Dangerous to Love Them
- How Narcissists Torture Others and Believe They’re Right to Do It
- The Narcissist’s Disrespect, Envy, and Contempt
- Why Narcissists Play the Shame Game
- How and Why Narcissists Are Highly Skilled Abusers
- The Narcissist Parent’s Psychological Warfare
- 7 Defining Traits of the Narcissist
- It’s You and Me Baby: Narcissist Head Games
- 7 Things a Narcissist Will Never Do
- The Narcissist as Human Parasite: Are You a Host?
- How to Protect Your Child from Your Narcissist Spouse
- Understanding Narcissistic Rage and Why It Is Not Your Fault
- Seven Sure Ways to Spot a Narcissist
- The Dos and Don’ts of CoParenting with a Narcissist
Image courtesy of merfam, Creative Commons.
5 Comments
“You need to toughen up.” Those are the exact words my father used! I nearly fell out of my chair when I read that. It’s funny, it took me well into my 20s to realize that he was in the wrong, not me. I suddenly thought about how I would treat a child who I thought was too sensitive or “weak” if I were a parent. I would counsel them, I would talk to them about how to be stronger and how to talk to people, how to protect myself, how to carry myself in the world. It suddenly dawned on me that he cloaked the abuse in “trying to toughen me up” as if he were trying to help me. But he never gave me one piece of useful advice about how to be a stronger person. Not one. He did not do one single thing to prepare me for the world, to actually help me toughen up.
Over a year ago, I made the decision to stop communication with my oldest brother after he told me that he didn’t like or respect me. I was kind of confused because I had been his scapegoat from early childhood, but now I have enough status to be evaluated on whether I am likeable or worthy of respect? I did try to point that out to him. He — in the spirit of my father — would mock me (for example, tell me that I should put a paper bag over my head) and then tell me that I had anger issues because I responded angrily.
Every once in a while, I wish I was in communication with him again just so I can tell him another thing about how he treated me. And at the same time, I’m so very proud of myself for cutting him off.
I believe that both my parents were narcissists or a closely related personality disorder with narcissistic behaviors. My earliest memories were of my mother telling me that she was going to run away. Then she would tell me “you are so g*d d*mn sensitive.” When I was young and sad she would yell “my heart bleeds for you” in a sarcastic tone. Then she would say “I wish that I would have drown you in a toilet when you were a baby.” I never got a hug or heard “I love you.” My father who was emotionally absent, would hand out toxic shame when he was around. And that was just the tip of the iceberg, I could talk for hours about his womanizing and cheating.
I spent 20 years in therapy trying to figure out why I never felt good enough and thinking my parent’s behavior was my fault. No therapist ever told me that my parents had personality disorders. I am 60 years old and I am starting to finally figure this all out. A few good books and articles on childhood trauma and narcissists plus a guided meditation on healing the inner child have given me more progress than 20 years in therapy.
I am sad that I spent 60 years believing that I was not good enough and that I was flawed. I often hated myself. This has affected every relationship that I have had, every career decision, and my self esteem everyday until recently. I am thankful that I have started to figure it out. I hope to make the next ten to twenty years of my life a higher quality of living. I am working on self love and self acceptance.
Thank you for the above article, I found it very helpful!
And yes, I was the scapegoat of the family.
-Jan
How interesting all this reading is. Wish I had stumbled across it many years ago. I always tried to understand my mother’s complicated pre-marriage life. From the stories she’d told, her own mother was a tyrant presenting with definite narc behavours. Unfortunately, my mother repeated many similar behaviours. Myself and one brother haven’t inherited the same characteristics but the other two brothers are have been vindictive and malicious and only about 2yrs ago my psychologist at the time suggested they seemed to fit the profile sespecially one in particular. He caused so much chaos and distress after our mother died and then continued to try to play ‘gang ups’ between the siblings but also constantly harrassed and aggressively bullied our poor frail father.
When caring for my ailing father, I began to see through the many cracks. The final end for me was him always trying to undermine my LEGAL decisions for my father. He tried to force me to make decisions that I knrew my father would not have agreed with especially trying to dissuade me from dling all I could to make my father’s dying days as comfortable as possible. He was trying to convince me to leave him to die!
Long story…….So after finding him out with so many lies and disruptive and damaging assaults, I finally had the courage to admit to myself that it’s enough for me! I just went cold turkey. He frantically tried contact which I ignored. He resorted to leaving abusive massages (I contacted police) and when I still ignored, he attempted to recruit two other brothers to “bring me down” accusing me of fraudulent actions as my father’s legal appointee. That only resulted backfiring bacause those other brothers discovered it was ALL false claims. He lost that assault! But he had success with some family members but I had to decide what was best and healthier for me. So now I don’t have contact with an aunt + uncle I’d always been close with, some cousins, god brothers or any mutual people.
I still have my strong friendships and occasionally speak/see my 2 brothers. Looking back over life, he was always abusive,manipulative, selfish and jealous of anyone getting a minute’s more attention than himself. Not even his own kids were allowed to have a bit more attention than him.
Anyone who thinks they can just laugh off a narcs abuse is deluded just like I was! WALK AWAY! NEVER think they’ll admit to wrong. Even when you’re still communicating with them, they are forever tainting your reputation in the shadows. Thses people are a disease. Yourself (& family) are ultimate priority.
I’m a recovering damaged soul. Best of luck to everyone who’ve been affected.
It took me decades to figure out what was going on with my parents, both narcissists: he, an absent narcissist, and she an emotional one. When I was younger, I took his absence of concern as an asset (‘he’s not on my case’), but as I grew, I learned that both of them were narcissist personality types and that my having grown up in their household was the source of many of my issues.
I recall in my 30s; with my graduate degree in hand, independent and successful, I made the mistake of telling him on a visit that I wished we could work on our relationship and be closer. He looked at me and said “…you know, you are so smart and so talented; there is so much you do with your life; if you could just resolve this one problem that YOU have…”. Then he suggested I seek out counseling. Then he went on to tell me that he knew on the first night of his honeymoon with my mother that the marriage was a mistake; basically negating the existence of my entire family in a single stroke. I don’t think it even occurred to him what he had just conveyed to me with those two sentences.
So I did pursue counseling – fifteen years worth. The first thing my psychologist asked me about was my family and their personalities. When I mentioned that my father was a high-powered thoracic surgeon and my mother a beauty queen, she immediately stopped me, and proceeded to give me a (free) thirty minute review on this physician type, and their typical personality attributes; describing him to a tee. The following years of therapy taught me much about myself and where I had come from; explaining many things about my personality that I had always been confused about.
As the years went on, I expected less and less from both of them. Since I was no longer providing either with their narcissist supply, our relationships became more formal and distant. It was not until he died recently that the entire family model was allowed to/acceptable to fail in my mind. Once he died, and there was no ‘good bye’ letter or video or any kind of expression of regret (forget culpability/responsibility, I just wanted regret – of any kind) toward what had happened, I suddenly felt like the restaurateur who comes out to greet the guests and check on their happiness, only to discover they’ve ‘dined and dashed’.
After that, I lost all interest in my birth family as a whole, and decided that to focus only on my current family and our happiness together. So, in reading the above, I actually feel justified for my decisions, and no guilt whatsoever for my deciding to place the emphasis elsewhere for the remainder of my life.
It’s pointless trying to deal with narcissists. You’re far better off focusing on the people who truly love you, because this ride we’re on (life) is very, very short.