248. How To Divorce a Narcissist

In this podcast episode, I discuss mistakes and mindset strategies for divorcing a person with narcissistic tendencies.

Some people say the word narcissist is overused. I disagree. And I love that those people have the privilege of never having experienced a narcissist in an intimate setting.

When women use this word, we know what we mean. We're describing an experience that can't be captured in one simple term—the gaslighting, the silent treatment, the crazy-making moments that leave you questioning your own reality.

If you're divorcing someone with narcissistic tendencies, your divorce will look different from everyone else's. And here's what makes it harder: you've been trained to doubt yourself. You've learned to wait for permission. You've been conditioned to seek validation from people who may never understand what you've lived through.

I remember documenting my marriage for 48 days straight—writing down what happened each day so I could see the patterns in black and white. When I showed those notes to my mentor, she told me I was "being negative" and walked out of my house. She never spoke to me again.

I learned that nobody was coming to save me. I had to own my own reality.

If you're divorcing a narcissist, base your strategy on the worst moments, not the honeymoon phases. Go in prepared—with the right attorney, the right support team, and the right information. Don't bring a pen knife to a gunfight.

Want help creating your divorce strategy? Schedule a consultation with Sade at sadecurry.com/info

Transcript

Hello, my extraordinary friends. Welcome back to the Extraordinary Life and Dating After Divorce Podcast. I'm your host, Sade Curry, and today we are continuing our series on divorce. It would not be complete if we didn't talk about divorcing a narcissist.

I want to start by talking about the general attitude that the word "narcissist" is overused, and I have a bit of a ranty take on that. It's interesting that we have a ton of words that get overused in our culture. It's just the way cultures work. You have words that encapsulate a moment, they capture a model, they capture a feeling in one word. And so people use it a lot.

It's interesting that the words that get tagged as being overused typically are words that women are using to talk about their experience. Now, there is a mental health diagnosis of narcissistic personality disorder, and that's completely different from calling someone a narcissist. The word Narcissus was part of Greek mythology. It has its own connotations around vanity and self-love and self-absorption. This is a word that is available for people to use.

But when women are using the word—which I like the word, not because I want to call tons of people narcissists, but because from my experience and from the experiences of the women that I have coached and talked to—it's a really short and quick way of describing an experience without having to go on and on for three hours describing all the tiny little crazy-making nuanced situations that go into what women describe as experiences they've had with someone who has narcissistic tendencies.

If you were to sit down and describe it, you couldn't really use one word. It's not always like abuse. It's not physical abuse or sexual abuse. Sometimes it is and sometimes it isn't, but sometimes it's the silent treatment, and then it's gaslighting, and then it's triangulating and isolating. Those of us who know, know. When we use the word—this person has narcissistic tendencies, my ex has narcissistic tendencies, I'm dating this guy and he's got some narcissistic tendencies—those of us in the know know what we're talking about.

I want to chime in and say I don't think the word is overused. Another word that gets tagged as overused is anxiety. We're living in a culture where systems and situations are creating an anxiety response in people. And guess what people get told? That anxiety is overused. Everybody's got anxiety now.

It's interesting that when people speak out about their experiences, be careful of being one of those people who dismisses other people's experiences by saying things like, "That's just overused. Everybody's calling everybody a narcissist." So what? If everybody's calling everybody a narcissist, why does it bother you so much? Are they pointing at some things that you display? Are you feeling some kind of way inside? Leave people alone. Let them live. Let them be on the internet talking about narcissists if they want. If it serves them, let them do that.

I remember when I went down the narcissist rabbit hole. This was back in 2015, 2016, and it was so helpful for me to be able to do research and read papers and listen to YouTube videos and listen to forums for people saying, "Oh yes, when your ex did this, it was valid that you felt this way. It was valid that you felt like it was wrong for him to do that, even though it wasn't like an arrestable offense or something that people understood." It was helpful.

Eventually I had to be like, "Okay, now I understand what was going on. What am I going to do with the rest of my life?" And put my big girl pants on and create a life that I wanted. There was that time, but I couldn't have gotten to that moment until I had made sense of the experience. I had been married to this person for 20 years, living with this person for 17 of those 20 years, experiencing post-separation abuse in court, having my kids go through all they went through. I could not have made sense of all of that and come out healthier, stronger, more successful on the other side if I hadn't given myself space to explore all of that.

Thankfully, I learned very quickly as I went through it that this was not something to discuss with random people, even people that I knew who did not immediately express empathy or understanding. The minute someone acted some kind of way about my experience, I was out. I was out of the conversation. So I was able to give myself space and protection and safety to explore those experiences that I had. In my practice as a coach for divorced women, I try to create that space as well.

I'm saying this to let you know that this is a safe space to use the word narcissist. If you use the word narcissist, I know what you're talking about, whether or not your ex has a diagnosis. I get what you're saying.

I wanted to say all that to set the stage for saying that if you are divorcing someone who has narcissistic tendencies, your divorce experience is going to be very different from other people who may have gone through divorce. I have seen so many divorces at this point that I know that no two divorces are the same. Even two women who are divorcing people who have narcissistic tendencies or have a mental health diagnosis don't experience all of the same things.

You can't use a formula. If you've been part of the podcast for a while and listened to everything I've said about dating, the same thing happens in divorce. You cannot use a formula. All you can do is gather information and then understand your own specific situation.

That can be hard because if you've been through what I just described as a narcissistically abusive marriage, you are so used to not owning your experience. You are accustomed to questioning your experience. You are probably surrounded by friends and family plus your ex who question your experience, who question your logic and your thinking, who question your responses. And so you've probably learned to question your own experiences.

That is the worst place to be in the middle of divorcing someone who is narcissistic because you will constantly be blindsided. It will be hard for you to make decisions. When you do make decisions, you might make them impulsively because you're just trying to override all of the confusion. You don't have enough space and you don't have enough practice in looking at a situation, evaluating it calmly, and choosing the most strategic path for you to take based on what you see.

If you've been married to a narcissist, a lot of your time and mental energy has probably gone to reacting and being in survival mode and wondering and questioning and asking questions, and then going to people and asking them questions and them telling you things that don't make sense for your situation.

I'll give you a couple of examples from my own divorce. I remember the first time my ex actually crossed the line into what would be like domestic abuse. I was trying to go to bed—this happened often. This man did not like for me to go to bed and sleep. He would just be arguing for hours, and I would be like, "Listen, this is not that serious. I don't care that much, and I like my sleep." Till today, 10 years out, I'm a kid who likes her sleep. I've been that way since I was a kid. I like my sleep. If I don't get a good night's sleep, I just don't function well.

So I would be ready to go to bed, and this man would just keep arguing. And then this one time, he wouldn't let me go to sleep. He pulled me off the bed, and I was like, "Heck no." People ain't touching me. That was just the one—for me, that was the line. Unfortunately, that line was too far down. I should have left way before that. But that day, in my mind, I was like, "Oh, somebody putting their hands on me, even if they are not hitting me or whatever, I am not standing for that."

So I hit the security alarm button for the police to come, and all that played out. I don't want to go into the details of that. You'll probably read about it in my book. But I told our pastor about it because I was like, "This is really bad." And he went into a whole thing about intimacy and helping with chores. He was just ridiculous.

I'm telling you, this man—I don't know, but let's just say there was a whole lot going on there too. Because at least in 2026 in the political climate, he's on a certain side of the spectrum, like way over. Definitely not looking back. I'm like, "Well, of course. Of course he thought and acted the way he did." And that attitude that he had and that his wife had toward me—probably not—I don't know if it was because of the marriage at this point or because of the color of my skin. At this point, I don't even know. I was so far removed from that, I don't know why their response was that way.

But my interpretation of their response was that what was happening in my marriage wasn't that bad. And here's the thing: there is other people's responses, and then there is the way I interpreted it. And that was my responsibility. My interpretation that what was going on was not that serious. If they're not worried, then I shouldn't be worried. I had that interpretation because I was accustomed to gaslighting myself. Unless other people validated the data and my experience and told me that I had permission to leave or permission to do something, I was accustomed to going along to get along.

That, in general, is the worst way to live. If you're an adult—or even a child, children should be able to say what's on their minds as well—it is the worst way to live. But guess what? If you were a woman, if you were raised in a conservative culture, if you were raised in a conservative religion, if you were raised in a family that was authoritarian, if you were raised with the general societal narrative that women should submit or women should be accommodating or don't rock the boat—all those things—then you're likely also conditioned to dismiss your own experience.

You're experiencing something, it doesn't feel good, you want to walk away, but you've been conditioned to not do anything that makes waves. You're not going to be able to do anything that goes against the general attitude that you should just keep the peace.

If you are in a marriage that is extremely difficult, extremely toxic, possibly involving narcissistic abuse—whether it's physical, emotional, mental, financial, spiritual, sexual, whether it's the kids—if you're in any situation that has any hint of that, you can't just go along to get along. That has serious consequences if you do.

There have been numerous stories of women who have been physically harmed by their partners. Women are most likely—if they're going to be murdered—they're most likely going to be murdered by an intimate partner. The time when the risk of being harmed or murdered by an intimate partner is highest is when a woman is trying to leave the relationship.

This is why approaching divorcing someone who has any kind of narcissistic tendencies, violent tendencies, anger issues, control issues, temper issues—anyone who has expressed a desire to see you harmed in any way—I will say my ex-husband, this is way back in the marriage, I would probably say about seven to eight years into the marriage, maybe at the 10-year mark, I remember there was this one day we were having an argument, and he threatened to throw me down the stairs.

That was my sign. But I didn't read it as such. I was so accustomed to gaslighting and dismissing parts of my experience, and a lot of that had to do with how I was raised. My family of origin had its own issues, and then of course the religious culture that I was in had a lot of that subtext built in. So those things didn't register. When you grow up in a religion where violence is like a thing, a lot of times it's not going to register that you might be in danger. And then of course I wasn't in environments where other views were brought in.

It's funny sometimes now that I am, you could say, on the liberal side of religion and politics and things, people will accuse me of not listening to both sides. I'm like, "Dude, I know that side better than you can teach me. I have been on that side. I have been so deep in that side. I have read the Bible so deeply I can quote it like the back of my hand." I just don't because I'm not teaching that right now.

So people say I don't listen to both sides, but it's like I am at this point in time in my life—both—I spent more time on the conservative side of family, political, religious beliefs than I have on the liberal side. Literally. I mean, midlife, and if you count my family of origin, which was very conservative in their own traditional beliefs, if you count me becoming a Christian, a born-again Christian, at age 13 through 39—when I do things, I go deep. I go all the way. I read all the books. I know more about those sides than the people who are trying to tell me I should change my beliefs. I literally have seen both sides.

Okay, sorry for the rant about both sides. It's getting personal here today. All right, where was I?

If you have any of those tendencies, if you have any of that culture in your past or even in your present, you want to start to ask yourself: How much of what I am living by is my own experience? It's not that you shouldn't have spiritual beliefs or your faith or any of those things. It's only a problem if those things deny your actual experience.

If you're experiencing something in the moment, and then those beliefs override the experience—if someone smacks you and you're feeling pain, and you're like, "Hey"—for those listening on audio, I'm smacking my hand, that's what that sound was—"Hey, I feel something, this hurts," and they're like, "No, no, you don't feel anything." When you are with people who are narcissistic or people who gaslight you, that is the kind of thing you're going to hear about your marriage. It doesn't hurt. You caused it. It's your fault. If you were better, if you were happier, if you were more submissive, if you were more hardworking, then all of these things wouldn't be happening.

Those people have always said those things from the beginning of time, probably. For a long time, that narrative has been out there. That narrative continues today. The reason you are impacted by that narrative is because in your own mind, you do not believe your own reality. You have been trained, and you continue to comply with the belief that your own experiences and your own reality do not matter, or that they don't exist, or that they are wrong, or that they should be dismissed—whatever your version or whatever your flavor is of that.

I remember when that happened in my marriage with the police coming over and things like that, having to talk to other people and try to get some validation. I'm like, "Hey, I think I'm moving in the right direction with seeing this is not okay." And getting the feedback that, "Yeah, it's not a big deal. It's your fault. You had some part to play in that"—that was very confusing. But it was only confusing because in my mind, I didn't have the grounding and the personal leadership and the personal authority. I didn't own my own personal authority to determine what data in my life meant. I waited for other people to define the meaning of things for me.

I don't do that anymore. I haven't done that in a long time. And I think it's very annoying to a lot of people that I'm not that person anymore. But that's who you have to become in order to own your life, in order to be able to make decisions, and in order to be able to safely divorce a narcissist. You need to be able to say, "Okay, I need to see my situation for what it really is because I know that I can't just take other people's experiences and what other people say and assume that it's true when something else is happening to me."

What you want to do is make sure you realize that no relationship is exactly like any other. Your relationship is not exactly like any others. You have to start understanding what your own relationship really is. You've got to start mapping it out.

I remember during that period that I described, I was just so confused. My head was just spinning. I didn't—it was like I was in a twilight zone. And so I started writing things down, and I would make sure I wrote down every day what happened in my relationship. Because if you have ever looked at the abuse cycle, there's a honeymoon phase and everything's fine and everything's great, and then the craziness starts up again, and then everything comes down. And you forget about the craziness. When the craziness doesn't seem so bad, you start to minimize and justify things that are happening.

So I started writing things down. I think I did it for 48 days straight so that I could look back and see in black and white what happened a month ago, what happened two months ago. At that point I was still going to that church, and I remember when I was like, "Okay, this makes sense to me. I have written it all down. I know that this is bad."

I remember talking to my mentor at the church—a whole other story that I need to talk about one of these days. In that Christian tradition, as a younger woman, you would have an older woman as a mentor. And I wanted a mentor because my life was crazy. I remember taking this notebook to her and saying, "Hey, can you look at this? Because this is crazy."

I kid you not, this woman looked at it and said, "Okay, you are so negative. You're only writing down the negative things about your marriage, and that's not godly. Love does not keep a record of wrongs." And she walked out of my house because she had come to my house—I had invited her over. I said I would make her something to eat, and I wanted to talk to her. She never spoke to me again. This woman never—until today, you're talking—gosh, that was probably 15 years—never. I saw her in church, she would go the other way. Her name is Gloria, because I name names. I'm sorry, I'm just that person. Yeah, it's just what it is. If you hear it, you know who you are.

She never spoke to me again. I'm like, "Dang." I think about it, I'm just like, this is the craziness that people will participate in in order to hold up what they believe.

And here's the thing: It's okay for her to hold up what she believes. It was okay for her to be like, "I don't like this. I don't like the fact that your marriage is messy." It was okay. The problem was that I wasn't holding up what I believed. I was going around hoping someone would validate me and someone would be like, "Oh, Sade, it's okay." Nobody was coming to save me. And that was a lesson that took me way too long to learn.

What I'm trying to say is, if you even suspect that you are divorcing a narcissist, understand that your relationship may not be like any others around you. You need to take ownership of what's going to happen. Start taking ownership of your reality and taking ownership of your understanding of the situations and the interpretations and your decisions around how you want to handle it. Do not look for other people to validate you. Do not look for other people to pat you on the back and tell you they understand.

They may not understand, and that's not going to be their fault if they haven't experienced it, if they don't believe it exists, if they don't believe that you are credible. Listen, it is their prerogative to decide what they believe. It is also your prerogative to decide what you believe, and that's where you need to focus. That's what's within your control, and that is so critical in these kinds of relationships.

If you decide—if you are moving forward with a divorce—you have to base your divorce strategy on the worst moments. And when I say that, it's like, "Oh my God, you're trying to create a high-conflict divorce." I'm not saying go in there and be high-conflict. It's that you have to use all of the information you have about this person, about the relationship, because you're going to encounter the same patterns in your divorce. You are going to encounter the same patterns in co-parenting, and you're going to encounter the same patterns after the divorce is over. So you need to be prepared for that and have a strategy for all of that.

This is the whole premise of this podcast episode around divorcing a narcissist: You need to be street smart. You can't be naive. You can't have your head in the clouds or hope for the best from a situation that does not have the best embedded in it. This is not a nice, warm, fluffy, "Oh, everything's going to be okay" situation. Everything is going to be okay, but only if you are applying the right tools to this situation.

And then finally, like I said, don't try to seek validation or wanting to be understood. Don't try to be nice and lovely and wonderful. Don't try to live like someone who is in a wonderful situation when you are not. If you are married to a narcissist, living with a narcissist, divorcing a narcissist, co-parenting with a narcissist, while trying to live like a princess who has a soft life—and I'm just using those words because I can't think of a better way to say it—you're not gearing up for what's ahead of you. You are going into a gunfight with a pen knife.

I would love if you were not going into a gunfight at all. I would love that for you. But if you are, my job as a coach and my recommendation to you is that you go properly equipped into whatever it is you are facing. If you're in a relationship where you are divorcing but everyone's amicable, everyone is nice, everyone's just doing the right thing, by all means, put the gun down. Throw the gun away. Do not go in there armed.

But if you are facing someone who wants to see you destroyed, wants to harm your children, wants to see you destitute and not give you what's yours, then you have to go in properly prepared. Legally, with an attorney who understands and an attorney who can do what needs to be done in those situations. You want to go in with a support team that can help you navigate those things. You want to go in armed with the right kind of information and the right kind of strategy for dealing with the relationship that you are in. That way you're not blindsided, you're not constantly reactive, you're not constantly overwhelmed or shocked or heartbroken.

I remember at one point I got served—middle of the divorce, I got served with a whole set of accusations—I had a panic attack. I remember when I picked up the paper, I couldn't breathe. That's where you don't want to be. At that point, I didn't even know what codependency was. I didn't know what a narcissist was. I was just gobsmacked by everything that was happening.

But on the other side, there's so much information available now. There are better strategies available. There's so much support available now that wasn't available to me at the time that there's no reason for you, if you're listening to this and you're able to listen to this, to not be able to get the support that you need for the situation that you're in.

Okay, sorry. This was a bit ranty. I just feel very strongly about certain things, and I think it was all coming out on this one. But I hope that this conversation was useful to those of you who may be divorcing a narcissist. If you're not in that situation but you know someone who is, please send them this podcast episode. Let them know about the series so that they can benefit from that information and reach out and get the help that they need.

All right, my friends. Thank you so much for your time and attention today. I will see you on the next episode.