Your Birthday Was Rigged to Fail: How Narcissists Sabotage Special Days

It's your special day. Your birthday. Maybe the narcissist participated in the build-out or maybe they pretended not to notice. But you knew. And you got your hopes up. Perhaps this birthday will go differently.

What you didn't expect was to spend the rest of your birthday managing their feelings.

In this Viewers' Stories episode, Dr. Kerry shares submitted accounts of birthdays that ended in tears, anniversaries engineered to fail, and being asked to comfort the person who hurt you.

This is the Thursday companion to Monday's episode, "Why Narcissists Destroy Your Best Days — It's Not Forgetfulness, It's Sadism," with psychotherapist Lynn Strathdee

Resources

• The Complete Recovery Collection: Narcissistic abuse resources
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• Toxic-Free Relationship Club: Live coaching & community support

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Kerry Kerr McAvoy, Ph.D., an author and educator, helps listeners decode toxic dynamics, recognize manipulation, and rebuild self-trust.

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This podcast/video is for educational purposes only. It does not constitute therapy, counseling, or professional mental health advice, nor does listening create a doctor-patient or therapist-client relationship. If you or someone you know is in immediate danger, please call 911 or contact the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline by calling or texting 988 (US/Canada).

Transcript

Your Birthday Was Rigged to Fail: How Narcissists Sabotage Special Days

Dr. Kerry McAvoy: [00:00:00] To announce publicly in front of everybody how people forgot him. He didn't want a good day. He needed to be the one who had a bad day. He wanted to be the victim. He wanted to preserve the story that he is chronically disappointed

I was trying to fix somebody who was broken, but who didn't want to be fixed when I went out of my way to create special birthdays and holidays. He'd shared when we were dating that he had had bad experiences, and I wanted to be the one that somehow helped him overcome those to have better experiences.

What I didn't know was that I was being set up. He didn't want better experiences. He wanted to be the victim. He wanted to preserve the story that he is chronically disappointed On Monday, Lynn and I shared about how toxic people, uh, e-emotionally immature individuals often sabotage important [00:01:00] days. And then on Tuesday at the live stream, I got into what is the wounding underneath this motivation?

Why do people do that? Why would they not wanna have good experiences? But today I wanna share your stories about how it's experienced to you, and then look at some of the mechanisms behind the story to help us see why this happens the way that it does. Somebody shared that they had a photo of themselves blowing out the candles while their eyes were still sore from crying the night before, that she was giving the day everything that she could, everything it cost her to show up and look grateful despite knowing that it was already sabotaged the night before by her partner in an effort to ruin it, so that she was now performing joy despite the fact that she was grieving a wound and feeling very injured.

We often do that. We will protect the abusive people in our lives by acting as if the abuse didn't happen, by pretending that it's a good day when it's really not. And yet we'll look back at those moments and we'll [00:02:00] recognize both, that we're trying to show up and put on a good face, and yet inside we are deeply grieving in pain.

I can't tell you the number of times I felt like I was a paper doll dressed up, performing the actions while on the inside I was dying. Another viewer wrote in to share how the whole birthday situation was rigged, that he would throw lavish parties for her, but when she went out to the same effort for his, he would arrive in an attitude.

He'd have a s- he would be sullen, he would ignore it, and just be a, a grump the entire day, and at the end of the day, he would announce publicly in front of everybody how people forgot him. And what she didn't realize was this whole thing was a test. He didn't want a good day. He needed to be the one who had a bad day.

That was the point, that her efforts was actually all a setup. It was never meant to be successful. He wasn't going to accept her efforts. So if you're experiencing that your efforts are not landing, that you're feeling like you keep [00:03:00] aiming at a target that keeps moving, maybe that's on purpose. Maybe this person needs to be nursing the grudge and the story that they have that they've never been loved enough and never been showed up well enough and never been celebrated good enough.

Another person shared how they had had years of every birthday being outdone, every anniversary being viewed as a competition, and the situation just got worse and worse. And what she noticed was the bar was rising. This person deliberately kept increasing the expectation so that she was designed to fail.

When we're around people who are unsafe, they don't wanna see us be successful. We're being engineered to fail. And then finally somebody wrote that after years of being in a relationship and they finally were on their own and they spent it realizing it would have been an important date that they were on their own and independent, she realized that it felt like a relief to be alone, [00:04:00] that it woke her up to how much effort she'd been putting in in order to preserve his peace of mind.

Sometimes if you feel relief when there's a break, when you don't have to, to expend the energy, maybe that's the wake-up call that you need to hear that, that you've been going to way too much effort, that there's been way too much emotional labor put on your shoulders. Here are some of the things that we discover from the sabotaged birthdays, holidays, anniversaries is that people who are toxic or emotionally immature, they don't want repair because that would require them to be thankful for being helped.

And these individuals first want to be the injured one because that serves a purpose. They get a secondary gain. It gives them attention. But also to accept help from another person puts yourself in a one-down position. It makes you vulnerable to someone else, and they don't want to be vulnerable. They want to be firmly in the seat of power, [00:05:00] even if that means being chronically disappointed about how everybody fails you.

Because to receive help de-centers them and it makes them one down. They also can't stand having a day belong to you because that means that it's about you. These are the individuals who need to be front and center. They are the sun and we are the Earth. They need to have people rotate around them.

They're not going to make you the queen or king of the day because in their minds, every day belongs only to them. They can't have you have the joy of that. So the sabotage is an effort to de-center you And we can't fix people who don't wanna be fixed. I want you to hear this, that you wanting to fix it wasn't wrong, it was that it was already set up from the beginning to be structurally non-deliverable.

There was no version of you who could have tried harder or loved better and had had this gone differently. [00:06:00] That was the point. The point was the failure, not having you see them, meet them, and show up for them. So you didn't fail to love enough, and it wasn't wrong for you to try to heal somebody. This is a person who didn't want to be healed, who wanted to, to maintain and nurture, al- almost kind of like idolize their injury.

I'm thinking of the Lord of the Rings, The Hobbit, where the ring is destroying him, but he still nursed that ring, nursed what injured him. Sometimes we're trying to heal the person who's nursing something that's an injury that they don't want to give up. I hope maybe this releases you, maybe gives you some peace.

And always remember that if you're feeling a lot of confusion in the relationship, that's data. And also notice the degree of reciprocity. If there's a big mismatch between the effort you're putting in and the response that you get, that's telling you some very important information. And if you [00:07:00] see a person take glee or pleasure over your failure in a moment that doesn't fit, that's also something terribly important to process.

That's a form of sadism So be very careful. Some people set traps for us. They indicate a hunger or a wish or a longing or a need, and they don't really actually want us to meet it. They're actually setting us up to put the effort in so that they can point to us and show that we've failed, that the setup was to make us fail.

And it even gets worse when in the failing, we fail to see ourselves and we erase ourselves in that moment because we are so centered on them that we fail to see that we've been injured in the process. We do not need to be smiling and blowing out candles when we spent the night crying. So I want you to hear that needing connection has never been your problem or flaw.

Wanting to heal somebody is not [00:08:00] a flaw, not something you should be different around, but we need to be careful about who we give it to. Some people don't want to be fixed, and they will set us up to fall on our face as part of the way to humiliate us and get us back. We need to be always be careful and think about are we surrounding ourselves with safe people because we deserve that.

So if these stories resonate with you and you'd like to share yours for a future episode, I'd love you to share it by sending it to me, clients, C-L-I-E-N-T-S, at kerrymcavoyphd.com. I always try to keep these anonymous and protect your identity, but I also deeply appreciate the privilege that you're sharing with me.

You are worthy of being loved, and you are worthy of being around safe people who then create safety for you It's 2:00 AM again, and you're replaying that whole conversation over, and you're wondering to yourself, "Was it really that bad, or maybe I'm just being dramatic?" So you start to draft that [00:09:00]I'm sorry text again because the guilt that you're feeling or the confusion you're experiencing is just unbearable.

And you know this loop because you've been there before, but I want you to know that you're not alone. I'm Dr. Kerry McAvoy. I'm a retired psychologist, and for 25 years I've been helping people untangle exactly what toxic relationships do to your mind, how they create the confusion, the self-doubt, and that trauma bond that keeps pulling you back in.

Here's the truth: recovery isn't about getting more information. It's about having the right support in the exact moment you need it. That's why I've created Reclaim You. It's a private, always available coaching app built from my work and my content organized into an extensive library that you can actually use when you're triggered.

Inside it, you'll get five-minute lessons when your brain can't handle a deep dive, check-ins that meet you exactly where you are, whether you're feeling strong, shattered, or numb, boundary scripts that help you say no without overexplaining, [00:10:00] grounding tools that work fast when you're activated, and progress tracking so you can see proof you're healing even on days when it feels like you're not.

There's no appointments, no waiting, no judgment, just practical support right when you need it. Reclaim You, real help in real time right in your pocket, and it's a coaching support, not therapy or emergency care. Learn more at studio.com/drkerry. So start your healing today and reclaim you.