Ep 40: When AmeriKKKa has Narcissistic Personality Disorder, go NO CONTACT

Your eyes told the truth, and then the headlines told you they didn’t. That whiplash has a name—DARVO—and once you see how deny, attack, and reverse victim and offender operate, it becomes impossible to unsee the pattern in both intimate relationships and public life. We connect the dots between personal narcissistic abuse and national narrative control, exploring how gaslighting erodes trust in your senses, scrambles your nervous system, and turns outrage into exhaustion.

I share hard-earned survivor tools to navigate this moment with clarity and care. We unpack the Minneapolis case as a live example of how stories get spun within hours, then zoom out to the larger system that punishes truth tellers, manages its image, and conditions the public to accept the unacceptable. Instead of feeding the doom machine, we build a plan: set an information diet, refuse trauma loops, block freely, and pick one role—caller, donor, organizer, caregiver, or witness—so your energy touches real people. We talk about why sleep is resistance, how a regulated body is harder to manipulate, and we practice a simple grounding reset you can use today: feet on the floor, long exhale, and the affirmation “We are here and safe enough in this moment.”

This conversation is a warm hug of solidarity for Black and brown women carrying too much for too long, and an invitation to stay awake without burning out. If this spoke to you, share it with a friend who’s been doom scrolling into despair, subscribe for more hope-oriented storytelling, and leave a review so others can find their way here. What boundary will you set this week to stay engaged without being consumed?

Transcript

Naming Harm, Gaslighting, DARVO

SPEAKER_01 0:04

There's a pattern that some of us learned the hard way, and it wasn't from social media or from a textbook, of course, or from any sort of teaching from church, from school, it was from experience. And it's a pattern where you experience some kind of outrageous harm. It's entirely confusing because it shouldn't be that way. And you experience a phenomenon called cognitive dissonance. But then someone tells you, like, oh, it didn't happen that way. What you what are you talking about? But you feel confused because you know it happened that way. And that's called gaslighting. And if you have survived any kind of ongoing long-term abuse where this kind of phenomenon is happening, your body recognizes it immediately. What we're seeing right now in America isn't just violence, it's narrative control. It's something called Darvo. And I talked about this in my last episode, but I wanted to go into it a little bit more because it's something I have talked about more in the past few years because I myself was a victim of very extreme narcissistic abuse from someone who had narcissistic personality disorder. And like many women who have been with abusive husbands, the moment the orange demon came on the scene, we all said the same thing. This man is an abuser. At that point, the first time he ran for office, we didn't know nothing about the Epstein files. We we didn't know nothing about his grape charges, although maybe we knew a little bit. It was just that my body knew. Point blank and period. And what's happening now is Darvo. If you've never heard of that before, it stands for deny, attack, reverse, victim, and offender. Yet again, another innocent protester has been unalived in Minneapolis again. An ICU nurse in Minneapolis named Alex Predi. And then almost immediately and instantly, they started again using the domestic terrorist language like they did for Renee Good. There were claims about a gun, while there is video of him holding a cell phone. And other angles have also challenged that claim. But at the same time, this country has to decide. I need everyone in this country to decide whether or not carrying a gun is indeed a constitutional right or if it is a key to a death sentence. Because as far as I know, on January 6th, a lot of them ninjas had guns. Cow Ritten House had a gun. The way white folks will jump in to defend open carry, except for at a protest. Y'all please. Y'all please. But before we do all that, let me introduce myself. My name is Grace Sandra. I am a mom, a writer, author, advocate, and activist. And you are here at the Out Here Trying to Survive podcast, which is a hope-oriented storytelling space and a warm hug of solidarity from me to you and everyone who's out here trying to survive, thrive, and heal. Welcome to episode 39. Let me say this clearly up front. Okay. Do I think that low-key, the orange demon, has NPD? Yeah, I do. I do. And I try not to armchair diagnose anybody, but do I think that ninja has NPD? Yes. And if nothing else, very high narcissistic traits. However, I did want to say that having narcissistic personality disorder is indeed a very serious diagnosis and it should not be handed out by anyone. I will leave it to the qualified professionals. But I do know what I'm talking about though, okay? What I am trying to do is talk about something that a lot of survivors, especially black folks, know, and that is abusive patterns. And that systems can behave like abusive people. A system can, in fact, deny what it did and lack the credibility to take accountability for it and then reverse the victim and offender, which again is Darvo. By the way, the term Darvo was coined by a psychologist named Jennifer Freyd. It is not my original idea. Something that I experienced a lot when I was married to a narcissist and what I saw immediately when I started learning about my experience, which is what a lot of survivors go through, by the way, when you start realizing that you are in a relationship with or you're married to or you've been parented by a narcissist. A thread that I've learned from the years that I spent doing narcissistic abuse coaching for women who had been in narcissistically abusive marriages is that people immediately go into a learning mode. There's actually some memes and some jokes about when you've been narcissistically abused, the first thing you do is get like a doctorate, which is a joke, but get like a doctorate in narcissistic abuse because the cognitive dissonance is so high. The confusion is so palpable. It just makes no sense. Because the number one tool that a narcissist uses is gaslighting, which is this idea of that didn't really happen. So you can sit there and watch a person butter their toast, and then you can say something like, Oh, how'd you enjoy your toast? And they'll say, I didn't have toast.

SPEAKER_00 5:08

What are you talking about?

SPEAKER_01 5:09

And then you can be like, Oh, but I walked in the kitchen and I saw you buttering your toast, and I was just wondering if you enjoyed it.

SPEAKER_00 5:13

I didn't have toast. What the f is wrong with you? You're so fing stupid. You're the stupidest bitch I ever knew.

How Gaslighting Works On Your Body

Systemic Blame Shifting And Image Control

Rejecting Public Conditioning

Boundaries For Surviving The News Cycle

Focus Your Energy And Mutual Aid

SPEAKER_01 5:19

And you're literally like, not only confused, three major components, okay? One, you saw somebody buttering their toast. Why would they lie about something so simple? Confusion. Two, you ask them about it, and it's such a simple request. How is your toast? For them to go off on you like that. Confusion. Three, you get attacked for even inquiring about something they did that they are now denying that they didn't do. Now, that's a silly example. That's something that's never happened to me, that specific example. Let me just say that clearly. But that is how gaslighting really works when it eats away at your soul when you experience something like that 20, 30 times a day. And when you have been a victim of this type of abuse, you start keeping track. Because what happens after a long time of sustained instances like that, your body starts physically responding. And I have told this story many times before that when I was being abused in that way, my cheeks would physically fall when my ex-husband started saying and doing things like that. It was like my body was telling me through my cheeks, you are experiencing emotional and verbal and narcissistic abuse right now. I mean, I already knew by that point, but my body started involuntarily shaking when I would experience things like that. It knew. That's just one aspect of narcissistic abuse that is deeply troubling. Gaslighting. Another one is blame shifting. This is also very easy to look at in a marriage where someone will say something like, if you were sexier, I wouldn't have had to cheat on you, etc. In America, we all know what this looks like. I mean, the way that white folks have villainized black people, we just trying to live, and they have made us the target, the villain of every single thing that ever happens bad in this country. It's crazy. As if the entire last 300 to 400 years didn't happen. But I'm not gonna get into all that. I'm just gonna say it's another element that's easy to see. Another one is image management. America has this on lock. Somehow, thankfully, the world is not impressed, but somehow we have managed to maintain this sort of pristine. We are all about God and country, we're a Christian nation. It's actually funny to even say allow Lord Jesus. Punishment for truth telling is another thing. If you've ever been in a relationship where you bring up the truth and somehow you get attacked for it. So if you find text messages that are incriminating and you dare to bring it up, and then you get literally verbally lashed, maybe physically abused for bringing up what the other person did wrong, it's a horrible place to be in because you feel like you can't stick up for yourself. How is that happening right now in America? The protesters, they are literally targeting whistleblowers, journalists, and literally everyday people who film. Don't forget that a young man was arrested, the young man who filmed the police officer who choked out George Floyd. He was arrested. And as black people in America, we are so used to this, but it doesn't mean it's less painful or exhausting. It's frustrating. I think I do feel sort of numb to it in some ways now, but I do want to recognize and have solidarity with everybody else who's like, yeah, we've been experiencing this for so long. It feels kind of normalized, even though we're literally in the middle of a hostile government takeover. What to me is so terrifying right now is that America doesn't just harm people, it does it for shits and giggles. And right now it is actively recruiting the people in America to be a part of changing the narrative of rewriting what actually happened. And that's really, really evil. That's some evil shit, y'all. Because essentially America's asking us to doubt our own eyeballs. We all saw the video of Renee Good. We all saw what she said. We all saw this video of Alex Pready. We could see that he was down. We could see that he was literally getting beat up and punched in the face. And they are asking us to deny our own eyeballs. This gaslighting. They're trying to gaslight so hard that they're asking us to deny our eyeballs, y'all. Our bodies, our nervous systems were not built for this. We are not meant to open up IG every day and see someone else being unalived. We are not meant to see what we saw. I know it's not on IG as much anymore, even though it really should be, but I know that Zuckerberg and all them people took it down. But we're not meant to see kids' limbs getting blown off and being erased like we saw with the gentle that's happening in Gaza. We are not meant to see people get shot point blank. This is horrible for our nervous system. We are not built for this shit. We're not meant to be in like an endless cycle of outrage and endless levels of grief and endless levels of prove that you're a human so that you deserve to live. So today I just want to do a couple things. One is I want to name the pattern so that we don't lose ourselves in it. And secondly, talk about what boundaries look like at a societal scale so that we can stay engaged without being fully consumed. And I feel like that's where I'm at. I'm at this place where I'm able to still function because I have some boundaries around it, but I still feel it deeply, but I don't feel it too much. I'm really in an okay place with this, maybe partly because of the resilience that I built from being married to one of these crazy psychopaths. But before we do that, I want to go back to what just happened in Minneapolis because I think it is a good indicator of how we can go about this. And it really is a good example of how quickly the narrative sets in. So again, Alex Predi was 37 years old. He was an ICU nurse working with veterans who was shot and unalived by federal agents. Reports are describing him as someone who deeply cared, as someone who loved veterans, as someone who showed compassion, as someone who was extremely calm under pressure, and as someone who did very well in the ICU because it requires that kind of emotional steadiness. And actually, you can tell just by pictures of him that he looks like a real decent, calm, lovely human. But pretty much immediately the story started moving in a very particular direction. That he was a threat. Again, the allegations around him having a pew pew, and then the language of him being a domestic terrorist, which is ridiculous. I mean, look at this man. Look at him. And then, as I mentioned before, the accounts describing the witness footage go into whether or not he was holding this gun. And it doesn't say anything about the Second Amendment rights to hold a pew pew. And what we're seeing right now is something really interesting because black and brown people have been saying for years that human rights are not distributed evenly, that we are experiencing something that is not fair and that we are being heavily policed. I mean, this is what we're saying, but also their statistics, okay? So this is not just my cute little opinion. We are overpoliced and we are statistically imprisoned more than any other population. But what's interesting is that now that two white people have been erased in Minneapolis, it kind of feels like it's drawing this point home that the moment you become inconvenient, even if you're white, your rights get treated like suspicious behavior. And this is where Darvo shows up in its fullness. So the D deny. We didn't do anything wrong. This was self-defense. The A attack, he was dangerous, he's a terrorist, he had a gun, he lacked character, he had some sort of attention, intention to harm federal officers. Just talk, talk, talk, talk, talk. Lies, lies, lies, lies, lies. Reverse victim and offender. And this is something that black people know all too well. Now the person who is actually erased from the planet is the threat. And the very institution, the state sanctioned violence that unalived him becomes the victim. And we have seen this reversal our whole lives, y'all. And I just I want y'all to see this is not just about Renee and Alex. This is about what a country has continued to do for literally hundreds of years. The country was founded on this shit. Narrative control is not just about Renee and Alex. This has been happening since they erased an entire millions and millions and millions people group who they stole this land that we are all on that is stolen land. I need y'all to get that. This is not new. This is public conditioning, and it's been happening for a really long time. This is who we are. This is not a new thing. This is who we are. They are trying so hard for us to accept this as normal, and I just want us to not accept that this is not normal. None of this is normal. And I need you to not distrust your own moral instinct because if your moral instinct is telling you this is not right, this is not right, please trust that. Because if you don't resist that conditioning, one day you will wake up and you will realize that you have literally been trained to accept the unacceptable. And that is literally what happened to me when I was married to someone who I believe has NPD. When you are being very emotionally, verbally, physically, whatever, abused, they train you to accept it. And then they train you to love every little teeny tiny little good thing they do so that you will continue to accept worse and worse and worse abuse. And I just refuse. As a black woman in America, I've literally fucking refuse to do this whole song and dance at all. I always have, but I think even more now. Because the way that this lands on us, uh, particularly on black women, since we are still the most unprotected, unloved, unwanted demographic in America, we are still pressured into being the bigger person in these horrific situations. It's insane. And the bigger person is often tasked with just like swallowing it and like, you know, staying polite and not being disruptive. Even the word protester has become like almost like a bad word that you have to say, oh no, no, they were peaceful protests. Like, nah, ninja, I'm a protester. I'm protesting. Peaceful or not, y'all doing evil-ish out here. We are conditioned and taught to like not say the truth too loudly and not to make people uncomfortable. And honestly, like, I haven't wanted to do the last two episodes about this ish. I would love to just talk about things that pertain to living my best life and helping us heal from regular schmegular everyday shit, not like terror that this country is causing us right now. But I will not do emotional labor in a pretty fucking dress. Like, they want us to dress the shit up, and I'm just not gonna do it. I'm not going to do it. I'm not. Get somebody else to do it. Black women do not owe this country our self-erasure, we do not owe it endless benefit of the doubt. And I don't feel like it's really us. I feel like sometimes it's more black men, but you know, we're not gonna we're not gonna talk about that. We do not owe this country our silence, we do not owe it our nervous system because a system or a country that harms people and then punishes us for telling the truth is not asking for peace. It's just an abuser, it's another abusive system, and it's asking for compliance, and I ain't giving nobody my compliance. Fuck that. And one of the most abusive things that a demonic, toxic, narcissistic system or country can do, but you see with your eyeballs because it's 2026 and it's on film, motherfucker. It's on film. That is gaslighting at scale. When you watch a video and you can see somebody being pew-pued and unalived and erased off this planet at point blank, it makes your body feel tense, or at least it should, if you're in touch with your humanity. And then you're told that's not what you saw. It sends your nervous system into a conflict. Your eyes are saying one thing, somebody else or the news saying something else, and your body is left holding an extreme level of cognitive dissonance. It does not make you well, it makes you sick. And I'm telling you, as someone who survived very severe narcissistic abuse, that cognitive dissonance made me so ill, I was ready to jump out of a moving car one time. A moving car. It is not a small thing. This is why we feel like we can't breathe when we're watching the news, we're watching these clips come up on our IG feed, why we feel all at a limit, why we feel like this whole country is a fucking dumpster fire. And if you're 40 plus and you're a black or brown person in this country, you've been experiencing this pattern for decades since your birth. If you were born in America, since your birth, it's not just one clip, it's a lifetime of microaggressions and macroaggressions. So, what do we do, y'all? What do we do? In survivor language, one of the best things we can do is go no contact. And at a societal scale, you can't exactly go no contact, but you can come pretty fucking close. So, what is the equivalent? It's a boundary, y'all. It's a boundary. Yep. And a boundary can sound like this. Choose which ones work for you and which don't. One is I will not watch this footage at all, or maybe I will not watch this footage right before I go to bed, so I'm dreaming about this crazy shit. Another one is I will not argue in comment sections with people who don't have a GED, because a lot of these people that support this administration do not even have a GED, okay? Don't argue with these people in the comment sections. I mean, if that's your gift, if that's your calling, go ahead. But for me, that's a boundary. I'm not doing it. I'm immediately blocking and moving on. Another one is I will not consume five different versions of the same trauma. I saw the video one time of Renee, I saw the footage one time of Alex, and I'm not watching it ever again. I'm not watching it from a different angle. I'm not examining anything else. That is my boundary for myself. Another thing is I will call, I will donate as I can, I will organize as I can, I will rest as I can, but I'm not gonna allow myself to spiral over this because I still gotta keep it together for my life and my children. Another boundary is having an information diet. If you can watch the intake of your food, baby, you can watch the intake of the news. And your boundary could be you have a hard stop time. Give yourself five minutes. Set a timer if you need to. I got five minutes to catch up on the news and figure out everything I need to know for today. And when that timer goes off, I'm done. Because again, this is not normal for our body to be having a steady stream all day long of this upsetting ass shit. And then the final one that I think is a great boundary for all of us is knowing where to put your energy. Make sure your energy is going into a few things and not like scattered. So instead of doing one concrete thing, you might be doing 40 little things. So maybe choose one. Choose one action that cares for one real person in real life. And those are things that don't have to cost money. Some of this, I'll acknowledge, is overwhelming for me as someone with ADHD who hates administrative tax and anything that's like organizational. I feel like I'm at my limit as a single working mom with small details like this. But I know that not everybody is that, so I want to list them anyway. But that could be like helping someone find a lawyer, building a mutual aid circle, like bringing people together. But there's other things, donating to a legal defense fund, you know, finding GoFundMe's that are dealing with that are of families who actually need help because they already have been illegally detained. At this point, we are in a crucial point, and you cannot just say you didn't know. You cannot say that. All I know is just like an abuser wants you exhausted, isolated, arguing with people, not believed, that is what the system wants from us too. Just literally too tired and too burned out, and all we're doing is watching Netflix and buying donuts, and not that any of those things are bad, by the way, but the system wants us down bad. And the way that black women have thrived throughout all the madness that we've experienced in the last 300 years is by staying connected to each other and making sure our communities are connected. And we gotta lean back into that, y'all. One thing I experienced when I was being narcissistically abused was, and I actually heard this from a number of other women too, is that a narcissist will purposefully disrupt your sleep. My ex did that all the time. I did not understand it at all. I could not fundamentally understand it, especially because he could fall back to sleep easily, and I never could. And I just always was like, why would he wake me up for such little things? Like, even when I was in the hospital after I had our daughter, you know how hard it is to like get back to sleep when you've had a newborn because they they need to nurse every hour or whatever. Uh and you're just so exhausted from like labor. And he just kept waking me up in the hospital, and I just did not understand like why. That was the first time I ever noticed it because I said something to him like, could you could you please stop waking me up? Like, I'm so tired. I just had a baby. And I feel like what we're experiencing right now, like this stuff is disturbing enough that it's keeping people up at night with anxiety, not to mention all the people who've been detained. Do you think they're sleeping? You think they're able to sleep? Not to mention all the abuse and starvation and hunger they're experiencing in these detention centers. It's mortifying. But when you don't have a nervous system that's regulated, which is very difficult to do if you're exhausted, you're easier to control and you're easier to scare and you're easier to bait and you're easier to manipulate. And that's what I'm seeing happening across our country. And it's it's just really sad to see. So don't fall into that category. Please get your sleep. Regulating your nerves nervous system is not like just a woo-woo wellness practice, it's a strategy for survival. So let's just do a quick little exercise with it, shall we? Put your feet on the floor, if you can. Relax your tongue from the roof of your mouth. If your jaw is clenched, unclench it. If anything is clenched, unclench it. Drop your shoulders a little bit. I'm gonna drop mine too, so if you're watching on YouTube, you can see. Take a deep breath into your nose, slow your exhale, just a little bit longer than your inhale. Do that a couple times. And then repeat the affirmation we are here and we are safe enough in this exact moment. And then when you're ready, choose some engagement that does not devour you. I want you to promise yourself, and I'm promising myself this too, that however I engage, whatever that looks like, I will rest afterwards as much as I possibly can. Before and after. I have promised myself that I will stay informed, but I will not allow myself to be consumed. I myself am in a very financially vulnerable position. I just finished getting a master's degree. I just started working, but I was already like a month behind in bills and rent and such. I literally, in every way, cannot afford to let myself get consumed by this with depression or anything. I have to stay engaged with my job. I have to stay engaged with all the other things I'm doing and being a mom as well. And I'm realizing that I can care very, very, very deeply without letting this steal my life away. And in the past, I have not been able to do that. I haven't been able to compartmentalize like this. So, black women, I understand that we have been asked to carry the weight of America, the emotional weight of the evilness of this country for generations. And I'm and I'm telling you right now, you don't have to carry it in the same way anymore. We just don't have to. We can be awake and we can also protect ourselves, and we should. So, yeah, y'all, when I say America has narcissistic traits, it is that I see all of the harm showing up in these systems. And the antidote is not arguing with the abuser, the antidote is having clarity about what we're experiencing, getting close to our community as much as possible, having boundaries and regulating our bodies, please, y'all, please. Because a regulated woman is harder to manipulate. If this episode resonated with you, please share it with a black or brown or indigenous woman friend of yours who has been droom scrolling herself into despair. And if you wouldn't mind, tell me in the comments what boundary are you setting this week so that you can stay sane and so that you can continue to engage without being consumed. And if you wouldn't mind, please go ahead and subscribe if you're on YouTube. If you're on Apple Podcasts, please leave me a review. It only takes a few minutes and it really helps get this podcast out there. Same thing on Spotify, I think it only takes just a second to give me a five star review. And share this video on Facebook if you enjoyed it. If you're still here, I know you could be anywhere on these internet streets. So if you're still with me, I very much appreciate you. Thank you so much for listening, and I'll see y'all on the next episode. Bye.