What’s a narcissist? Someone who makes your life absolutely crazy! The stress of living with a narcissist will send you right over the edge, and meanwhile, he’ll be standing there saying it’s all because you are so controlling, cold and impossible to live with.
Here are a few examples of a narcissist:
- You tell him that you have something important to talk about, and he blows you off, instead diverting the conversation at once to something he is interested in– whether it’s a basketball game on TV, a project he’s working on, or telling you about an old girlfriend he dated 10 years ago. The subject doesn’t matter. The point is to keep that spotlight on him. Talking about you and your issues or things that are meaningful to you are simply not on a narcissist’s agenda — although many if not all of them have learned enough about how to fake it so they can fool you and not end up in the doghouse. It’s vital to a narcissist that you have a great opinion of them and believe they are the most wonderful person on earth!
- If you make a mild suggestion about something in the relationship you would appreciate their changing–such as asking if he could stop leaving dirty clothes all over the bedroom and instead put them in the laundry hamper each day–he will immediately puff up with rage and get very annoyed if not downright furious with you. He considers any request to be a “Demand” that is not only unreasonable but that proves you are a bitch, a nag and totally impossible to live with. He may give you the cold shoulder for the rest of the day or even the rest of the week, to show his extreme displeasure and then will act like nothing at all happened. Because…to him, nothing did. It is simply the way he operates in life, so it’s standard. (While you stand there, feeling like a steamroller ran over you, backed up, ran over you again and then merrily went on its way tooting the horn while the driver waves out the window.)
- If you have kids together, and you ask the narcissist to go to a school event or some other family activity that he did not suggest, he will get angry that you make all these constant demands on his time and don’t respect that he works hard and deserves a little free time to himself. It won’t matter how nicely you ask, how far in advance you ask, how sweetly you explain how much this would mean to the family — he’ll throw a hissy fit. And if he does go, for example to your son’s piano recital, he’ll shift impatiently in his seat, sigh loudly and repeatedly whisper (loudly) that this is lasting too long!
If any of this sounds a bit familiar to you…or you realize that your mate (or someone else significant in your life) constantly creates dramas and blames you for them… you probably have a narcissist in your life.
I’m writing a book about how you can cope…stay tuned for more on that soon.
to your happiness and stress-free living,
Evelyn Brooks