EP 25 Ways to Stop Feeding a Narcissist and Claim Your Power

When you’re dealing with a narcissist, peace doesn’t come from changing them. It comes from changing how you show up.

In this episode of Wildly Her, I’m breaking down one of the most powerful truths in healing: your interaction is your protection.

We’ll talk about why engaging, defending, explaining, and waiting for accountability keeps you trapped… and how stepping out of that cycle is where your freedom begins. This is where you start to gain clarity and protect your peace. 

TRIGGER WARNING: ABUSE AND TRAUMA

We'd love your feedback. Your voice matters here. Feel free to email us at WildlyHerPodcast@gmail.com. 

Transcript

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Welcome to Wildly Heard, a podcast about rising from psychological and emotional abuse and stepping into purpose, authenticity, and true identity. Each episode unpacks the journey of healing, from learning to recognize the scars of abuse to reclaiming your voice and embracing the truth of your identity. We'll explore what it means to walk free from fear and self-doubt and how to rebuild a life that is rooted in confidence, joy, and wholehearted living. This is what it means to be Wildly Her. Welcome to Wildly Her. I'm your host, Pamela Moore. And today I want to talk about how we can work to protect our own peace of mind, even in the midst of relationship with a narcissist or with someone who is psychologically and emotionally abusive. And I want to share this because this was something that I had to learn, and I had to learn it the hard way. So for me, because my relationship with my abuser was with my ex-husband, I didn't, when I started understanding that this was abuse, when I started coming into understanding that I needed to get out of this relationship, I didn't leave right away. I needed help. And I I stayed in counseling. I wrestled with a lot of things personally with, you know, trying to tear apart this marriage that I felt like I had committed to, and I didn't know quite how to do that. And there were a lot of things involved in that that I can get into in another episode. But for me, I stayed for probably close to seven years through counseling before I was able to finally walk away from that marriage and walk away for good because I had left so many times and gone back. And so, in that interim, when I am trying to heal, when I am trying to regain some sense of reality back, when I am trying to stay grounded and keep some semblance of a peace of mind, it was difficult in the midst of that because I had the, I had that constant barrage of abuse. I was still in the middle of the silent treatments and the manipulations and the triangulations and all of the things that were going on. And so I had to learn how to protect my own peace of mind. And I stumbled through and and I messed up many, many times. But the more that I kept practicing some of these things, the more that I started to regain that control and hold on to my own reality and not fall victim to that manipulation and the distortion of reality. And so I think this is a good thing to share because I just don't believe that I am the only one that ends up in that situation. And sometimes it's it depends on how you're connected to your abuse, or it may be that you are a grown child and this was your parent, and you still have to have a relationship with them in some form. And so, how do you protect your own peace of mind when these situations come up? And what I learned in the process is that it really is it's it's about control. And it's in things that we can do that stop giving them the reaction that they're trying to evoke from us because they feed off of our reactions. Everything they do is a calculated attack to create some type of reaction out of you that proves that they are in control of you. And the reaction that they're looking for maybe some type of emotion. Um, they may be looking for you to get defensive, um, even in your own pain or frustrations, or even in your own sympathies towards them. If there's some type of a victimization that they're playing on you and they they play on your sympathies. Anything that invokes in you that they are the ones that created that, it's proof to them that they are in control and they thrive on knowing that they control you, that they are the ones that can push your buttons easily and keep you reacting the way they want you to react. So then, how do we protect our own peace of mind? How do we stop giving them control with our reactions? I gotta tell you, it's not easy. It's not easy at all because everything inside of us, when we're being attacked, wants to respond. Everything inside of us, when we feel like somebody else is a victim or being hurt or they're truly struggling with something, we want to offer those sympathies. So, how do we navigate then in a healthy way to stop giving those reactions and hold our truth and not fall prey to manipulation? But also, it's a fine line because we don't want to cut ourselves off emotionally completely. Because I learned how to do that in a defense mechanism when I was pushed to the limit. I could just shut down completely. And I felt nothing. I could just numb everything. And I'm not suggesting that that is the answer, certainly not. So somewhere in the middle is a balance. And when I started figuring out and noticing the patterns of how he would create these reactions and how then they were used against me, it took me a long time to kind of figure out how to stop falling victim to that. And a while, even from there, before I really got skilled at being able to slow down and stop giving the reaction. But over time, I was able to shift into taking back the control over my mind and then eventually my life. And the truth is that somewhere we we really want to believe that if we if we explain ourselves or if we help them with any kind of a misunderstanding, um, that somewhere there's there's going to be a reconciliation, that somewhere we can have connection, that somewhere we can um we can find some semblance of peace or connection if we're just being understood by them. Like we just need them to understand. And I think the biggest core truth to everything today in this is that it starts when we stop needing their understanding or their validation. So once we can come to that realization, that's the very first step. And it's understanding that they they absolutely cannot and will not give understanding or validation. And even when we start to get like little hints of them maybe trying to understand us or seeming like they're um connecting with us in some way, it's all part of mirroring and love bombing. So it's not, it's not a sincerity, it's not true empathy, and it's not them truly understanding you or your feelings. That's why in the long term, you won't see a change because they're incapable of true empathy. And so our biggest frustration is when we keep expecting them to give us something that they simply cannot give. Because the real truth is, and this is where we can draw that line to understanding, and we stop expecting them to understand or to validate us. The honest truth is we don't need their validation for us to be validated in our feelings or in our pain. Let me say that one one more time, because I I feel like this is this is such a hard truth, and and it needs to be repeated until we get it. The rawest truth that we can own is that we do not need their validation for us to be validated in our feelings or our pain, in our truth. We don't need outside validation, and we certainly don't need it from the person that caused any of the pain. That's not necessary for us to have peace. Somewhere we want that, we desperately do. There's nothing wrong with wanting it, but we have to come to the realization to call it what it is, and the truth is you don't need it. So if you've ever found yourself feeling exhausted from explaining yourself, defending yourself, waiting on them to finally just get it, this episode might just be for you. So these are a few things that I learned over the years that helped save my sanity. Um even after I left, you know, in those times when he would try to reconnect with me, this was this was the things that I used to help me hold on to that sanity and take back control of my own mind. And the more I started to practice these, the more I stopped losing control. You know, I stopped feeling like I was crazy. So the first one that I want to talk about is um what we don't want to do is we don't want to engage. So we're gonna stop engaging with them. Don't defend, don't reason. You're trying to reason with someone who doesn't want understanding. When we start defending ourselves, we actually open ourselves up to more attack from them. Because what they do is the more that we use our words and we're trying to reason and defend and and just talk it out, if they could just understand, they will take every word that we say and they twist it and then they use your defenses against you and they flip the script then to turn it into an accusation against you, and those accusations will hold and they'll use them again and again and again against us. When we are engaging with them, we open up conversation for what's called a word salad. And word salad is when they start just throwing words, start changing topics, start running off on rabbit trails and jumping around to create more and more confusion. And it leaves us feeling crazy. So the more that we engage with them when we're trying to explain and defend and reason, the more that we open ourselves up for that word salad that just leaves us feeling crazy. And I I fell for this so many times because in my mind I thought, oh, he must just un misunderstand me. So if I could just explain it, then everything will be okay. But then in those conversations, what would happen is we would end up in this vicious cycle of me explaining jumping topics, accusations, the attack, the screaming, the coldness from him. And then it would just leave me confused, usually crying and feeling like a horrible person. And feeling absolutely insane because I I couldn't there was nothing concrete in the conversation. It was everywhere. And I couldn't keep up. Here's what I want you to understand about when you try to reason. You cannot have a healthy conversation with someone who is committed to misunderstanding you. They're not seeking truth, they're seeking control. So everything that you're bringing to them to try to reason is everything that they're stirring up to create reaction out of you, and it proves their control. Logic will never work because logic will never land where accountability does not live. And here's the other thing I want to explain about defending yourself. When you fall into the pattern of defending yourself, it keeps you in this place where you're stuck because what happens is our brains start to create this belief that everyone misunderstands us and everyone judges us. So this is how that works. When we fall into the pattern, we tend to internalize others' opinions and attitudes towards us. But when it happens consistently, then our brain starts to fill in the gap. So that their lack of reason and their constant accusations, now our brains fill in the gap with the belief that we are doing something to cause them to misunderstand us. And we will assume the worst in ourselves. And we stay stuck in this place, assuming that it's us, we are the problem, we are the misunderstood one, we are creating this misunderstanding, and so we spend our lives constantly defending based on this belief in our subconscious. And the more explanations and reasoning and defenses that we give fall flat, the more that this belief solidifies and deepens into our subconscious. And so we stay stuck and we feel like we're always on the defense. So you trying to defend or engage or reason with them is the very thing that's keeping you stuck in that cycle. So here's here's how we're gonna reframe this. Remember, I said you don't need their validation. So you don't need them to understand you. If you explain yourself, you explain yourself. You're not responsible for how somebody else receives that. The other thing I want you to know is you owe no one an explanation. Stop asking someone to see something that they are absolutely unwilling to see. This is not a win or lose, right? We're not winning or losing a relationship, we're not winning or losing an argument. Your silence is not you losing. This is when we stop engaging, when we just stop uh giving all of these explanations, we simply are refusing to play a game with someone who is committed to you losing. So when you're being attacked, you can say things just as simple as, okay, I'm not disagreeing and I'm not agreeing with you. I'm just simply saying, okay. Because I'm not going to engage. You know, a prime example of this was that my ex-husband would come to me because, you know, if there's no drama going on, I feel like they just have to stir drama somewhere, somehow, and and just kind of keep poking to make sure that they still have control. So every once in a while he would come to me sometimes and he would bait me by telling me something about someone else and just see how I would react or what I would say about it. And when I started noticing this pattern, because he would, it was a bait, because he would take then, if I agreed with him, he would take my agreement about that person back to them and twist it around that I said those things about them. Or if I disagreed, he would flip it back on me that I was being judgmental and that I um was this horrible person. So it just I couldn't win. I just couldn't win. And I started realizing that long time into the relationship. It was 25 years with this same person. So it did take a long time. But when I finally started seeing this pattern, he would come to me with things and I would not interrupt him, I would let him talk, I would sit very calmly, and then I would just look at him and say, Okay. And absolutely nothing else. And he he waited for the reaction, and I could see that he was disappointed that he wasn't getting one. And so he would keep talking. And I just sat there and said, Okay, every time he was done talking. I didn't change his subject, I didn't try to shut it down, I just let him talk. And I just said, Okay. Here's what I noticed in those interactions. In the past, when I was the one trying to explain or engage in some way, it left me the one crying and broken and confused at the end of the conversation. And he would dismiss me like, look at you, you're you're crazy. What's wrong with you? And it was this disgust for me. And it kept me in this cycle of I'm the problem and hating myself. When I learned this to just stop engaging, and I it took me a long time. I'm not saying I got this right when I figured it out. I figured it out, and and it took me a long time to get to the place to where I could just not engage. But when I did that, I noticed that he was the one that walked away frustrated, and I was just fine. It shifted, and it was about changing the control because now he no longer controlled me, I controlled myself and my own emotions and my own reactions. Another thing that I would suggest is that we don't apologize. And I'm not saying a blanket, don't ever apologize. If you know you're wrong, apologize. But here's what I'm suggesting. So many of us have learned to just apologize without first even giving a thought whatsoever as to what we're apologizing for. We sometimes fall into this place where we constantly walk around to everyone saying, I'm sorry. And it's it can be to people that really don't even have any offense against us, but we're assuming that it's there. And so we're constantly apologizing. We live in a world of us constantly apologizing. And that is because somewhere we learned that to apologize meant we were trying to keep the peace. It's a learned pattern because in our subconscious, we believe that we are the problem and a bother. Here's the depth that I want you to see in this. The peace that we're trying to keep by constantly apologizing and we're desperately trying to gain, that peace is not coming. You taking the blame for anything and everything and constantly apologizing does not change anything. The peace is not there. No matter how many times we apologize for anything, there's no resolution or peace from it. So here's why. Your apologies get weaponized because it's not about what you offer in good faith to them to build a bridge for connection, it's what they're using for control. The moment that you say, I'm sorry, even if it's just to calm things down, even if it's just fine, I'm gonna take the blame for everything, and I'm just so sorry, it gets locked in as evidence and they hold this evidence for future disagreements. And it starts this pattern then that you are the problem and they are the victim. And every time they will be the ones to say, this is just like last time. Remember, it was your fault then too. Over time, there's a subtle shift in power. Over time, we stop checking to see if we're actually wrong, and we now are using our apologies to keep them regulated. We use apologies to avoid things escalating, to stop the tension. That's why we apologize to everyone. Because we feel like if I can apologize before things get tense, before you get too angry, I can keep it from escalating. I'll just take the blame. This is where our brains have filled in the gap and created the belief that peace comes when I take the blame. And I need you to know that's not accountability, that's conditioning. Let me say that to you again. The belief in our subconscious that peace comes when we take the blame for everything is not accountability. That is conditioning. That is a conditioning from abuse. Every single time we do that, we walk away feeling slightly smaller than before. We are conditioned in this way to shrink because shrinking feels like fitting into a version of yourself that feels acceptable. And we just want to keep the peace by being accepted. I'm not going to create a problem. I'm just going to take all the blame. And I'm so sorry. Over time, that subtle, slow shift in power happens because we shrink so much. Please hear me on this. We stop apologizing now for our actions and we start apologizing more for our existence. We slowly move and shift when our apologies are about keeping them regulated. It's no longer I'm sorry for what I did. It's I'm sorry for how I feel. That's when they know they have control over you. Your apologies that are given under this kind of pressure is not an accountability for anything that you've done. It's what we're doing in survival. This is survival. You have every right, no matter what's going on, to pause and ask, did I actually do something wrong? Or am I just trying to keep the peace? When we can come to the place to just pause even for a moment, just take a deep breath, just close our eyes, and just stop and ask ourselves that question did I actually do something wrong or am I just trying to keep the peace? And maybe you hold your apology for a day or two. There's nothing wrong with that. Nothing at all wrong with that. You don't have to are you don't have to argue and you don't have to offer anything in the moment. You can just say, you know what, let me let me think about that and I'll get back to you. And slowly we start to take back that control because now we're really giving thought to what am I apologizing for? And if you're apologizing for your feelings, for your existence, or for your needs, that's where we need to stop it. And it's about shifting that subconscious belief that somewhere your apology is going to bring peace. Let's just call it what it is. It's conditioning. We're not gaining anything, we're surviving. The next thing that I want to talk about is, and this kind of falls in with engaging with them. One of the things that you never want to do in relationship with a narcissist, and again, it doesn't matter how you're connected to your narcissist or to your abuser, if it's a parent, a sibling, a spouse, however, it doesn't matter. And this is gonna feel very counterintuitive. I get that. But what you don't ever want to do is call them out. You absolutely are setting yourself up for failure. And I say it feels counterintuitive because in normal relationships, when someone does something that hurts our feelings or there's a misunderstanding, we definitely want to have those conversations. We want to be able to confront issues that are in our relationships. But what I want you to see is when you're in a relationship with a narcissist, this calling them out, you're not just naming behavior, you're actually threatening their control, which creates in them the reaction that you don't want. So instead of reflection, instead of some kind of reconciliation or connection that we're looking for, you're met with their reactions to it. And it can be rage, um, sudden, it can be explosive. It's meant to intimidate you and absolutely shut you down and shame you. The other thing that you can be met with is denial. They absolutely will say, That never happened. You're making that up. That's not how that went. I never said that. And now it has you in the place of questioning reality because they will deny it so much and twist what you're saying so much that now you start to change the way that you saw it play out or what you know happened. The other thing that is very common in narcissists when they're being confronted with something is what's called Darvo. And Darvo is it's D-A-R-V-O, and it stands for deny, attack, reverse, victim, offender. And it's kind of that cycle that they'll go through with this. You'll find this, it's pretty common, but it they'll flip it around. So in their denial that it ever happened, then there's the attack that comes against you that you're the problem now for bringing this up and it's false and you're lying. So now you're the one being accused because somehow you've done something wrong, and they now are the victim. So it flips that reverse victim offender where you're the offender and they're now the victim in this. So now you're the one being accused and blamed, and everything that you've done is is just being dissected and torn apart. And it it ends with you defending your own sanity, trying to hold on to no, no, no, no, that's not how that went. No, that's not what I'm saying. No, that's not what I'm talking about. No, that's not what you said. And you're constantly in that place. And then it wears us down. It absolutely wears us down. And this is part of that manipulation where we start to really lose touch with our own reality. And we start to just, again, give in, accept the blame, apologize for who we are and how we feel, or we are shamed and heaped in the shame that we are the problem and we lose touch with what really happened because it's so foggy and cloudy and misconstrued, and we can't keep the facts straight. It's like you're trying to hold a mirror up to someone to say, see, this is what I'm looking at, and they refuse to see their own reflection, right? It's they they cannot reflect inside themselves. So what they're gonna do is they're gonna shatter the mirror that you're holding, they're gonna hand you back all the broken pieces, and you have to deal with it. And they just walk away and leave you in a heap. So you end up trying to defend your own reality. So this is where we fall into that trap now. We're back to over-explaining our intentions, we're back to replaying or recounting conversations, trying to remember what was said, how did that go again? We're trying to provide examples and timelines and put things together, and it gets more and more confusing. The more we're trying to make sense of it, the more they keep distorting it. The more you talk, the more they have your words to twist and manipulate your reality. And it keeps you on this emotional hook to them. You're caught in this loop waiting and hanging on for them to understand, for them somewhere to admit something that they've done that you know happened. And somewhere we're waiting for them to change. And it just doesn't come. And so when they don't, then sometimes we feel like, okay, maybe it was the wrong time of day, maybe it was the wrong day of the week, maybe they had a rough night or a rough day at work, or maybe it was this, or maybe they were hungry. Like we try to give all of these reasons why it didn't work the first time we tried to talk to them. So what do we do? We try again. We think maybe if I do it at a different time, maybe if I say it in a different way, maybe if I'm softer, maybe if I'm more clear, maybe if I say it louder. It's all a different angle that sets us up in the same trap. And we get pulled again into trying to prove something that should never have required proof. And it leaves us again, all over in that same cycle of negotiating our own reality. And it just wears us down. And eventually we just give up and give in. When we do that, somewhere it feels like we're letting them win. Because we, without realizing what we're doing, we're giving them control over us. When we try to call them out, it assumes something fundamental. It assumes that they care about truth the way that you do and they don't. It assumes that they value accountability the way that you do and they don't. It assumes that they want repair and they don't, they want control. They simply don't want to change, they want control. And you trying to call them out, you just keep giving them every opportunity to keep twisting your own reality. There is no reasoning with someone who refuses to understand. And in the beginning of the relationship, a lot of times you'll find that they may make promises. They will not accept full responsibility, they'll make excuses, but they'll make promises to you. But when you see the pattern of empty promises and denial and deflection that eventually escalates into their rage every time you bring something up, that's your sign. Just stop. Because you're giving your power away and you are staying frustrated and exhausted. And what happens is our subconscious, remember, our mind, our brain will start to fill in gaps. And so our subconscious will start to build and hold this belief all over again that you are the problem and that you cannot trust your own reality. So the belief is I can't trust myself. And then we start to lose our own power and we lose our own voice in this cycle. So what begins feeling like power, because remember, I said it's counterintuitive. In normal relationships, we should be able to talk about conflicts. We should be able to have peaceful confrontations where there's resolution. So it feels like we're in empowering the relationship in the beginning, but this repeated exposure to the very thing that's hurting you is the thing that's keeping you stuck and creating and solidifying the belief in your subconscious that you can't trust yourself. Power is not always in the calling out. Sometimes your most exercised power that you can use is the quiet withdrawal of your own energy from a person or a situation. You don't need to convince someone of what you've experienced to honor that it happened. And you certainly don't need to prove everything that you know to be true. Closure doesn't come from confrontation all the time. Right? Their validation of your feelings or the harm that they've done, it it's not it's not necessary for you to have closure. You don't need their validation. Closure can come from clarity, and clarity is having clarity of mind. And so the more that you stop trying to reason and and um call them out on what they've done, the more that you stop letting them distort your reality and the more clear your mind becomes. So that's where all of this comes back to this one anchor is that we hold fast to the truth that we don't need them to understand us for us to have peace. The moment that we stop waiting for them to say, Oh, I hurt you, is the moment that we really start deeper healing. Because the more we wait on them, the more we stay tied to their version of reality and not truth. The moment that we stop waiting for them to acknowledge what they've done or how they've hurt us or validate our feelings in any way is when we can come out of this false hope that we've been stuck in. And when we can get out of that, here's what staying stuck in that looks like. And two, it keeps your cortisol levels spiked. The more that we're holding on to that, and you may be far outside of the relationship with your abuser, but still holding on to somewhere. I need them to admit what they've done, or I need some type of closure. You're waiting on them to give you the closure. That means your cortisol levels are staying spiked. And long term, that affects you physically in so many ways. Your delay of your own peace, waiting on them. I need you to know it's something that they absolutely cannot give you. They are not withholding closure from you. They are simply incapable of giving it. They cannot admit wrong or ever take accountability because they see no wrong in their actions. They deny it as if it never happened. I never did that to you. They see no wrong in themselves. And they will actually become angry that you see it as wrong. So they continue the cycle of shaming you for your feelings and your truth. And I need you to know that is not your burden to carry anymore. It's not your burden to carry. You're not responsible for making them see something they are unwilling to see. Peace isn't something that they will give you, it's something that you protect. And protecting your peace is not you screaming or shouting to be heard and validated. It's simply you owning your truth without waiting on anyone else to own it with you. You don't need to be understood by them to have peace. You find peace by understanding yourself and stop engaging in things that keep abusing you. Remember, this is not about winning or losing an argument or a relationship. It's not a failure on you. You're not trying to win. We're just trying to stop losing ourselves. If any of this resonates with you, try it. Stumble through it, mess it up and pick it up and do it again. I did. And if it doesn't, that's okay. Toss it aside. I'm not saying I hold all the answers. I'm saying here's what I found. And it's worked for me. And it could work for you. As always, always I am here for you. And if you need to feel like somebody will own your reality with you, I'm right here. I will hold your hand and we'll own it together. I know how that feels. I absolutely know how that feels. To feel like you're the only one. I get it. I do. I understand. If you need somebody to cheer for you, to take that moment to pause and catch your breath, I'm right here and I'm saying, you got it, girl. You got it. Let's do this. I will cheer for you. And as always, I will always, always, always end with this. Because if you have seen the darkness that I have seen, if you have ever lived with any of the torment like this, I need you to know that I see you and I believe you. Thank you so much for listening today. And I hope that you felt the love and the encouragement that's being sent to you. Feel free to share this podcast and follow us so that you'll get notifications when we release new episodes. And until we meet again, dear friend, be kind, be courageous in truth. Love yourself as deeply as you would a close friend, and keep leaning in to the joy and the beauty of discovering what it means to be authentic, whole, and wildly her.