They Are a Liability And You Are Their Asset

Not everyone in your life is there to see you grow. Some people are there because you make their dysfunction easier to maintain.

In this episode of The Imposter Phenomenon, we are having the conversation nobody wants to start but everybody needs to hear — about narcissists, boundaries, and the very real cost of being someone's greatest asset while they operate as your greatest liability. We dig into why high-achieving, empathetic people are the most vulnerable to narcissistic relationships, how those relationships feed and amplify imposter thoughts, and what it looks like to build boundaries that actually protect your peace, your growth, and your sense of self. 

This is not about revenge. This is not about hate. This is about clarity — and making a decision that your energy is no longer available for extraction.

🎧 Listen. Reflect. Heal.

Enjoyed this episode? The conversation doesn't stop here! For all things Impostor Phenomenon, visit us at theimpostorphenomenon.com — where you'll find resources, support, and everything you need to keep going. See you there!

© Content by The Impostor Phenomenon Podcast

Transcript

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You've been performing for so long, you forgot who you were before the applause. You don't need a new identity. You need to come home to the one you abandoned. It's time to change the narrative. It's time to recognize who you are. You are not an imposter. You are not a mistake. You are not a placeholder in your own life. I want to talk to you today about something that I struggle with early in my journey. And that is the circle around you. You see, I grew up in a household where it was basically mandated that you had to take everyone with you on your journey, regardless of the harm they may have done or their lack of accountability for themselves. If you made something of yourself, you were responsible for bringing everyone along with you. I changed this expectation, and it was a paradigm shift for me as a person and for my overall well-being. And I haven't looked back. And my hope with today's episode is to give you another vantage point to look from. There are some people in your life that are liabilities and you are their asset. Let's talk about something that most people feel, but very few ever say out loud. The fact that there are people in your life who are drawing directly from you consistently and without reciprocity. Not because they are going through a hard season, not because they are temporarily overwhelmed or struggling in a way that will one day balance out, but because you are an asset to them, a living, breathing source of energy, validation, talent, emotional labor, and supply. And they have never had any real intention of giving that back. You are the one who shows up. You are the one who holds it together. You are the one whose insight gets borrowed, whose ideas get laundered, whose steadiness gets leaned on until there is nothing left standing straight. And they, the person, the relationship, the dynamic are a liability, costly, depleting, a drain on everything you have worked so hard to build in yourself. This episode is for you, and I need you to hear every single word of it. Before we can talk about what to do, we have to name what we are dealing with. And I want to do that in plain language, not clinical language, because clinical language lets people off the hook too easily. Narcissism, in the way most of us encounter it in real life, is not about someone staring at their reflection and loving what they see. It is far more insidious than that. It is the person who makes every room about themselves without ever seeming to try. It is the relationship where you consistently walk away feeling smaller, dimmer, more confused, and somehow responsible for a problem you did not create. It is the subtle erosion, the way your wins get minimized, your losses get amplified, your confidence gets quietly carved away, not all at once, but in small, nearly invisible installments over time. It is the bizarre dual reality of feeling desperately needed and profoundly worthless in the exact same moment, sometimes within the same conversation. That confusion, that disorientation, that specific kind of emotional exhaustion, that is what proximity to a narcissist actually feels like. And if you recognize yourself just now, I want you to know you are not imagining it and you are not alone. Here is what makes this particularly relevant to this show and to this community specifically. Narcissists do not pick their people randomly. They are remarkably skilled, almost unnervingly so, at identifying individuals who already carry a certain kind of self-doubt. They have a radar for the person in the room who is the most capable and simultaneously the least certain of their own capability. They find the high achiever who secretly wonders if she deserves to be here. They find the brilliant mind who has convinced himself that his success has been more luck than skill. They find you. And here is the part that I need you to sit with because it is important. They do not create your imposter thoughts. They did not plant that seed of self-doubt from scratch. What they do, what they are brilliant at, is finding the door that self-doubt has already left open, walking right through it, and renovating the whole interior of your psyche to serve their needs. They move in, they rearrange the furniture, and before long, you are living in a version of yourself that was designed around their comfort, not your truth. Every narcissistic relationship at its core is transactional, but the transaction is never balanced and it is never meant to be. What you bring to the exchange is real and it is valuable. Your talent, your ideas, your presence, your time, your emotional intelligence, your labor, your encouragement, and your seemingly limitless capacity to give people the benefit of the doubt. What they bring in return is chaos, confusion, and just enough affirmation, strategically timed, carefully rationed to keep you invested. That affirmation is the hook. It is the moment they say exactly the right thing, show up exactly when you needed them to, or reflect back a version of you that you desperately want to believe is real. And in that moment, all the red flags blur and you stay. The technical term for this cycle is intermittent reinforcement, and it is one of the most powerful psychological mechanisms known to produce loyalty and attachment. You are not weak for being affected by it. You are human, but understanding the mechanism is the first step to escaping it. If you are a high-achieving, empathetic, self-aware person and the fact that you are here doing this kind of introspective work tells me that you are, then I want to speak directly to something you may have been told, directly or indirectly, that I categorically reject. The idea that your vulnerability to this kind of relationship is a flaw. It is not. The very qualities that make you extraordinary are the same qualities that create the entry point. Your capacity for empathy, the fact that you can genuinely feel what another person is going through makes you generous in ways that others are not. Your willingness to extend grace, to see the complexity in someone's behavior, to hold space for someone's worst moments without walking away. Those are not weaknesses. Your deep desire to see the best in people, to believe that the person in front of you is capable of more is not naivety. It is a profound human gift. It is just that gifts can be exploited. And in the hands of someone who operates as a narcissist, these qualities of yours become access points. Knowing that does not mean you should stop being who you are. It means you need better gatekeeping. And there comes a moment, and if it has not come for you yet, it will where something shifts, where all the confusion, all the rationalizing, all the exhausting mental gymnastics you have been doing to make this relationship make sense suddenly snap into focus. And in that moment of clarity, you see it. You are the asset. You have always been the asset. The energy has been flowing in one direction for a very long time, and the person on the receiving end of it has not been building something, they have been extracting something. That moment of recognition is simultaneously one of the most clarifying and one of the most painful experiences a person can have. The clarity comes and grief walks in right alongside it. Grief for the time spent, the energy poured out, the version of this relationship you believed in and worked toward. I want to honor that grief because it is real and it deserves to be honored. And I also want to tell you this that moment of seeing clearly is not a loss. It is the beginning of something entirely different. It is the moment your life starts to belong to you again. And so, what do we do with that clarity? We build. And the tool we build with the thing that most people have fundamentally misunderstood is boundaries. Now, I know that word has been overused to the point of feeling abstract. So let me offer you a different frame entirely. Think of boundaries, not as walls you build to keep people out, but as financial instruments of the soul. In business, a company protects its assets from liabilities. It does not do this because it hates the liability. It does it because allowing a liability to drain unrestricted access to assets is how organizations collapse. You are an organization. Your energy, your peace, your clarity, your confidence, your time, your creative capacity, these are assets. Real, finite, irreplaceable assets. And just like a business that refuses to let a liability run unchecked through its balance sheet, you must make a deliberate, strategic, non-negotiable decision to protect what you have from those who deplete it without return. That is not cruelty. That is stewardship of the most important resource you will ever manage, which is yourself. Now, let's be honest about what this actually looks like in practice because theory is clean and real life is messy. In theory, you set a boundary and it is respected. In real life, when you begin to draw lines with a narcissist, you will encounter resistance that is designed to destabilize you. They will not say, I understand, I respect that. They will reframe your boundary as a betrayal. They will position your reasonable need for self-protection as an act of aggression against them. They will manufacture guilt with remarkable precision. Guilt that is custom-built from the specific things they know you care most about. They will call you selfish, cold, changed, ungrateful, or difficult. They will find your people and work those angles too. And in the face of all of that, holding the line will feel harder than you expected. I want you to know going in that the resistance is not evidence that you are wrong. The resistance is evidence that the boundary is working, that you have successfully interrupted a dynamic that was never designed for your benefit. And the person who benefited from your openness is responding to the loss of access. Hold the line anyway. One of the most liberating truths I want to hand you today is this you do not always have to make a dramatic final exit. You do not have to burn it down and walk away from everything in a single gesture of liberation. Though sometimes that is exactly what is needed, and it is absolutely the right call. But often the most powerful move is strategic reduction. You become intentional about access. You decide quietly, deliberately, without announcement or justification, what you are willing to share, how much time you will give, which conversations you will engage, and which you will let pass without invitation. You stop explaining yourself to people who have demonstrated they will use your explanations against you. You stop justifying your choices to someone who will never validate them. You stop defending your decisions in the court of someone else's opinion. You do not owe a narcissist a press release about your peace. You simply begin to live it, and you do so by granting them progressively less and less access to the parts of you that they have been living off of. The guilt will tell you that you are being cruel. It will tell you that they need you, that you are abandoning them, that if you were a truly good person, you would stay and try harder. I want to say this as tenderly as I know how. Protecting yourself is not abandonment. It is not cruelty. It is not a failure of love or loyalty. It is one of the most profound acts of self-respect that a human being can perform. And it is one of the most important things you will ever do, not just for yourself, but for every relationship, every endeavor, and every person in your life who is worthy of the version of you that exists when you are not constantly depleted. You cannot pour from an empty vessel. You cannot build from a place of perpetual drain. Your self-preservation is not selfish. It is sacred. Here's what begins to happen when you reduce the narcissistic interference in your life. And I want you to hear this as a promise because it is one I feel confident making. The quiet returns, not all at once and not without some strange discomfort at first, because silence can feel unsettling when you have been living in managed chaos for so long. But it comes, and in that quiet, the clarity follows. Your thinking becomes cleaner. Your instincts, the ones that have been second at guessed out of you for so long, start to come back online. And the imposter thoughts, the ones that have had a soundtrack playing underneath them all this time, begin to lose their grip. Because here is what we know deeply and specifically on this show, imposter thoughts thrive in environments where they are being fed. They grow strongest when there is someone in your life who benefits from your self-doubt, someone for whom your diminishment is a feature, not a bug. When you remove that fertilizer, when you stop allowing proximity to someone who profits from your insecurity, those thoughts begin to quiet. They do not disappear overnight, but they lose their authority. And you begin to remember, maybe for the first time in a long time, what it feels like to simply trust yourself. So let me bring it all the way home because we started somewhere important and I want us to end there together. They are a liability and you are their asset. Say that again slowly inside yourself, not as an accusation, not as a verdict, but as a fact. The kind of clear-eyed, unflinching fact that changes everything once you allow yourself to fully see it. You are valuable, you are capable, you are the energy in the room that other people orient themselves around. And there are people who have known that about you long before you fully believed it about yourself, and some of them have used it, but that ends when you decide it ends. Not when they become worthy of you, not when they finally acknowledge what they have taken, not when you get the apology you deserve, when you decide you are the asset. Assets require protection, intentional management, and investment in their own growth. So protect yourself, manage your access with intention. Invest in the environments, the relationships, and the internal work that make you more of who you already are, not less. Walk out of this episode standing a little straighter. Walk back into your life knowing what you know. And know this above all the most radical thing you will ever do is refuse to be extracted from again. So take a breath, settle in, and let's begin the work of separating who you are from who you've been performing to be because it's time to stop performing and start belonging. Welcome to the work. Welcome to the becoming, welcome to unmasking the imposter. Thank you for listening to the imposter phenomenon podcast. If today's episode opens something in you, share it with someone who needs this conversation too. Make sure you're subscribed so you never miss an episode. And if you're ready to go deeper, get ready to join our community where we're doing the real work of reclaiming identity, rewriting narratives, and rebuilding belonging from the inside out. Remember, you are not an imposter, you are not a mistake. You are the author, and your story is far from finished.