Say This To A Narcissist And Hold Onto Your Energy

It's a significant test of emotional and mental resilience when someone you love attacks you through gaslighting, projection, moral superiority, subjective morality, innuendos, and storytelling, all of which downplay their actions and focus entirely on your reaction to their behavior or words. Loving those with high conflict personality means you are investing your emotions, time and energy toward a relationship wish a person who is not as invested as you are. In time, you will notice the one-way nature of the relationship. Through an enormous painful event, if you are lucky and wise, you will let go of those whose false mask, grandiosity, and tremendous insecurity prevent them from taking accountability for how their narcissism affects those who love them.

Transcript

Welcome to Breakdown to Breakthrough,

The podcast that empowers you to transform your life by awakening to your true,

Authentic self.

I'm Lisa A.

Romano,

Your host.

As an award-winning author and certified life coach,

I've dedicated my life to helping others understand the incredible power of an organized mind.

I believe that true empowerment begins with awakening to our false self.

My mission is to support you on your journey toward mental and emotional regeneration through conscious and deliberate awakening.

In this podcast,

I'll share insights,

Tools,

And transformative stories that illuminate the path to healing and self-discovery.

Narcissists aren't afraid of your anger.

In fact,

If you are angry at a narcissist and you can't let go of this feeling of injustice,

Lots of my clients struggle with that.

I can't want them to think or I don't want them to think that they got away with this thing.

The way that they tried to turn my children against me,

The way that they lied to my family about me,

I can't let them get away with this.

They cheated on me with my best friend.

They lied to me for years.

It's just not fair.

The issue is with someone who's highly narcissistic,

Your anger is actually a sign that they're still in your mind,

That they're still on your radar.

The one thing that narcissists fear the most,

In my opinion,

Is so deep and it perplexes them.

It makes their brain fart,

Is when you stand there and you're calm and you're resolute and you develop the mental space to be able to take a step back.

Here is .

.

.

Let me get my stick figures because this is a great time to use them.

If you can imagine,

And if you're listening to this via the podcast,

Just try to envision this.

Imagine there's the physical 3D you and then there's the observer you.

The observer you is observing you interface or work with a narcissist or deal with a narcissist or you just got a text message or an email or you've been confronted by a narcissist,

Whatever it is.

This is somebody who,

By the way,

We should mention,

Caveat here,

Narcissists are not people that just don't like you.

They just don't like you.

You rub them the wrong way and they avoid you.

A narcissist is somebody who has a pervasive pattern of high conflict conversations,

High conflict.

Well,

This person is very confrontational.

This is somebody who stirs the pot.

This is somebody who chaos and drama seem to follow them.

They get a dopamine release by playing the king of the jungle.

They get a dopamine rush by being Barnum and Bailey in a three ring circus.

They get a rush out of seeing other people jump.

Their dopamine comes from your reactivity.

Now,

When you stop reacting to a narcissist and when you start realizing what's really going on,

Their brain is going to fart.

It's not going to compute.

They're going to be lost in space.

What do you mean you're not reacting to me?

What's going on here?

What happens is if you really want to understand your power in a narcissistic relationship,

It's not in arguing with them.

It's not in complaining.

It's not in trying to convince them that they're wrong.

It's not in decoding their behavior.

It's not in trying to fix them.

It's not in trying to understand them.

It's not in walking around on eggshells.

It's not in trying to understand them or get them into therapy.

That is not where your power is.

It's not in answering every email or answering every cognitive distortion.

It's not in defending yourself because a narcissist is going to make you question who you are.

They're going to question your integrity.

They do that to elicit fear in you,

To elicit shame in you,

To elicit guilt in you,

To get you to really worry about what they think about you.

Now,

This is even more complicated for somebody who has complex trauma,

Who are the people that I hope to reach with sessions like this because if you have complex trauma,

Then you are naturally insecure and,

Dear one,

That is not your fault.

You're not broken.

You just didn't receive what you needed in childhood.

It's really important to understand that.

It's not that you're not good enough.

It's just that you don't think that you are,

And so you hide your true self.

Why?

Because that's a complex trauma response.

You hide your true self because as a child,

You learned that to be yourself risked your ability to attach to other people,

And so it was safer for you,

And your limbic brain,

Your mammalian brain realized that,

You know what?

I need to be a chameleon.

I need to pretend that I don't feel what I feel.

I need to act like I'm okay.

That comes from insecurity.

That's not authenticity.

You can gain a secure attachment with enough recovery work,

With enough inner child recovery work,

With enough codependency recovery work.

You can regain and reclaim a secure attachment to yourself,

But it takes time.

It is a process.

It's not a quick fix.

It's not like you read a book and,

Oh,

I'm done,

Or you even go to therapy and,

Oh,

I'm done.

No,

No,

No,

No,

No,

No,

No,

No,

No.

This is a true reprogramming of the subconscious mind because you may have become addicted to pleasing a narcissistic person,

So where are you getting your dopamine from?

You're getting your dopamine from fear.

You're getting your dopamine from avoiding pain,

Avoiding upsetting them,

And so what happens is you are locked into this trauma-bonded situation because below the veil of consciousness,

You don't realize that your brain has now become addicted to keeping this person calm,

And so it's not going to be,

I'm going to go into therapy for six months and I'm going to be fixed.

This is an ongoing commitment to elevating your consciousness around the childhood dynamics that caused you to become codependent in the first place,

The childhood dynamics that have programmed you at the subconscious mind to seek approval,

To gravitate towards people who very much resonate with the frequency of the parents who raised you.

It's not uncommon.

It is not uncommon,

And unfortunately,

It's very likely that if you were raised by narcissistic parents,

You're going to attract narcissistic people.

As partners,

You will remain in tango-type relationships with siblings who have high narcissistic traits and who lack empathy for you and who are designed to not hear you.

You will try to fix them.

You will try to save them.

You will try to rescue them,

Just like you tried to rescue your parents,

Perhaps,

But it's not going to work,

So what a narcissist is going to fear the most is your ability to decode your own attachment to them,

Number one,

And number two,

A narcissist is going to really feel your ability to shutty-shutty and observe the games that they're playing.

You have your 3D self,

And then you have the observer self,

And so the 3D person is the person that is dealing with the narcissist in real time,

And then the observer you,

The higher self you,

Is observing how the 3D you is responding to the situation.

The observer you is able to observe from a detached plane of existence or consciousness how your emotional brain is acting,

How logic and reason gets knocked offline,

And the higher self you reminds you that you're in a pattern right now and you're engaging with someone who elicits all of these limbic responses to you,

So in this detached space of awareness,

You are your most empowered self.

You are what all narcissists are afraid of.

In this space,

You are essentially giving off the impression through the way that you behave and the way that you speak and the way that you are,

The way that you relate to a narcissist.

In this space,

You're basically saying,

I see you.

I see the game.

The gig is up.

Oh,

That's guilt.

Oh,

That's flame shifting.

Oh,

That's gaslighting.

Oh,

You're minimizing me.

Oh,

You're grandstanding.

Oh,

You are the king of everything,

And only you get to decide what is right,

What is moral,

And what is just here.

Oh,

You're annihilating my perspective.

Oh,

Okay,

Got it.

When you give off this impression,

And you can only do this from a detached state of awareness,

That's why I think Shati Shati is such an important tool.

Shati Shati is essentially once you've identified that you're in a relationship with somebody who has a high confident personality,

Drama follows them wherever they go.

They use you for what they use you for,

But they really have no use for you.

God forbid you disagree with them,

Then you're punished for it.

You're triangulated for it.

There's this mob mentality.

If you come from a family that is used to scapegoating members of the family,

And coming together,

And pushing members out,

It all goes back to childhood,

Golden child,

Scapegoat child.

There's sick family dynamics.

When you're on the recovery path,

You start to detach,

And you can see these patterns.

It can be so freaking overwhelming.

It's so hard to digest that.

This is what's going on,

Because it means that you have to confront all of the faulty illusions that you have been operating from at a subconscious level.

Everybody has cognitive biases and confirmation biases.

You could have such cognitive dissonance and not even know it.

That was my entire life.

I did not believe that I was good enough,

But I didn't know that I didn't believe that.

In my heart space,

I felt unworthy from childhood.

In my head,

If you would have asked me,

Lisa,

Do you think that you're worthy of peace,

Or abundance,

Or love,

Or respect?

I'd say,

Of course.

That wasn't true.

There was a mismatch there.

I didn't feel worthy.

We all attract from the feeling space.

The feeling is the subconscious mind.

You can only heal what is at the subconscious level through your feelings.

You have to use your mind in such a way.

It's a skill.

It's a skill that I work at every single day.

I work on it for myself,

As well as with my clients.

It's a skill of understanding that I need to use my mind as a tool to help me access the subconscious mind with new feelings.

We use imagery.

We use anchoring thoughts.

We confront cognitive biases.

We confront where are we getting our dopamine from?

Do I get my dopamine from walking around on eggshells?

Do I feel flat when there's no drama in my life?

How many women do you know?

We'll just use women in this example,

But it goes for men too.

How many people,

Male or female,

Do we know that tend to attract very problematic people,

And there's a lot of chaos in their life?

How many people,

How many times have you heard it?

I know I've heard it where,

Well,

He feels boring to me.

Right,

Because you're not associating dopamine with peace.

You're not associating dopamine with respect.

You have an addiction to the chaos.

It's not your fault because you grew up in chaos.

It was unpredictable.

The house was unpredictable.

And so to feel safe,

Which is not the same as feeling peaceful,

To feel safe,

You had to remain on guard.

You had to remain hypervigilant.

So yeah,

Your brain associates this sense of safety and hypervigilance with dopamine.

And so when you are around people who are not attacking you,

Who are emotionally intelligent,

Who are truly humble,

They have empathy,

There's nothing for you to react to.

This warm feeling of love actually feels foreign to you.

You will not resonate with it.

You're not a match for it.

And you,

In that moment,

May reject it or completely screw it up and cause chaos within your own skin because that feels more familiar.

So it really is part of this.

I mean,

A big part of this is confronting.

So all of it's about confronting what's going on with you at a subconscious level,

What happened to you as a child,

But then committing 100% to identifying like,

What about me is keeping me stuck?

Yes,

I can point the finger at a narcissist all day long.

Yes,

I can get angry at the narcissist.

Yes,

I can feel the injustice of how my narcissistic mother abandoned me,

Rejected me,

Compared me to other people,

Withheld love on purpose.

I can stay in that energy,

But all that does is keep you stuck.

So when you're in relationships with people who make you feel bad,

That's another sign.

It's like when you're hanging out with somebody and you don't feel good when you leave them,

You're just like,

Ugh.

You're not around them and you walk away with this icky feeling.

That's a part of you,

A very instinctual part of you that's telling you that's a sour pickle.

Don't eat it.

Don't hang out with it.

Don't feel good.

But when we have,

Especially if we have complex trauma,

We have so much self-doubt.

It's like,

No,

No,

No,

It's got to be me.

Or worse,

We have the more you dislike me,

The harder it is for me to gain your approval,

The more my childhood programming is activated and I'm going to associate dopamine with getting your approval.

Oh,

Lions and tigers and bears,

Oh my.

It's so bad and it's so deep and it all happens as a subconscious level and we don't know it's even happening.

That's why the awareness piece is so important.

Dear one,

This is what's wrong.

This is what's going on.

People don't know.

We've been taught to believe that our feelings are inconsequential.

We're too much.

We're over-emotional.

We're too sensitive,

Blah,

Blah,

Blah,

Blah,

Blah.

So how do we work it out if we can't even be authentic and deal with our emotions and be able to express what we feel?

You can't.

You're going to remain stuck.

Narcissistic people want you stuck.

They want you angry.

They want you frustrated.

They feel,

They fuel off of that.

That is their fuel.

So when you really want to disarm a narcissist in your life,

Or if you want to get a narcissist to leave you alone,

It starts with you.

It starts with you standing there and looking and saying,

I'm not going to defend that criticism.

I give you permission to criticize me.

I'm not going to defend your insults.

I'm not going to fight against your insults.

I'm not going to try to fix you anymore.

I'm not going to try to save you from your own narcissism anymore.

I'm not going to interject when I see that you're having issues at work anymore.

I'm not going to try to convince you that your drug addiction is an issue and that it's filtering into your marital relationship.

I'm not going to try to rescue you anymore.

I'm going to stand in this awareness and observe the mind games,

Observe the gaslighting,

Observe the weapons of fear,

Observe how you try to guilt me,

Observe how you try to make me feel bad about myself.

This was a huge thing for me.

I remember when I started calling it out with my ex-husband and it was so helpful.

It pulled me out of the quagmire of my emotions where I had this detached space of awareness where it was just like,

Oh my God,

I can see it.

I can see the game.

I can see he's slamming the cabinets and I'm starting to get upset.

I'm starting to get nervous.

And I look at the kids and I don't want them upset.

So I go,

Honey,

Are you okay?

What's going on?

Oh,

Nothing's wrong.

Nothing's wrong.

Right?

And then the next bang and the next bang and the grumbled and disgruntled facial expressions.

What's wrong?

Nothing's wrong.

And like my brain would become activated.

Oh no.

Oh no.

I have to fix this.

I have to fix this.

Why?

Because going back to childhood,

I have to fix this.

I have to fix this.

It's tied to survival.

The fear of abandonment and detachment from a parent that treats you like this feels like death.

It goes back to our limbic brain.

It goes back to human survival.

So my reaction to him,

The fear,

Oh no,

I have to fix this while it was codependent.

It was very natural based on the way that I was raised and based on what happens to my brain at the subconscious and neurological level and also the spiritual level,

The mental and emotional level.

It was like the neurons in my brain were completely enmeshed and I didn't know how to get above them to read them out.

Metacognition comes online and then when people can actually see what they're doing wrong and we help them shift their perception of self,

Then we're shifting the feelings and the subconscious mind shifts.

But what a narcissist is really afraid of is your ability to activate higher awareness or self-awareness and see through the game.

When you give the narcissist the impression like,

Okay,

I'm good.

Again,

Lay it on me.

Okay,

No problem.

Think what you want.

Sorry you feel that way.

You're entitled to your opinion of me.

Your anger is not my responsibility.

I give you permission to criticize me.

I give you permission to perceive me this way.

I give you permission to triangulate me.

I give you permission to distort reality.

I give you permission to grandstand.

I give you permission to blame me for everything.

I literally give you permission.

I can look at your narrative and I can say,

Okay,

There it is and I'm not going to fight it anymore.

And that is what a narcissist is afraid of because what a narcissist needs to survive is drama.

A narcissist has very little care for you as a 3D autonomous human being.

They care about their feelings.

They don't care about your feelings.

They care about manipulating your feelings and controlling your opinion,

Which is power,

Which is coercive control,

Which fuels their narcissism because they don't have true empathy for other people.

They think they do sometimes,

But what they really have is dominance and control issues over other people.

What they really have is disdain and jealousy and envy and coveting of other people.

They don't accept,

Especially if in their mind,

They perceive the other person as achieving more than them or being more powerful than them or more influential than them,

Smarter than them,

Whatever it is,

More beautiful,

Whatever it is in a narcissist's mind that they use to like use this hierarchy to justify their anger and their dysfunction towards another person.

So it really does depend.

So if you're dealing with a female narcissist who wants to be the sexiest in the room and have the best Instagram and the most followers,

Yeah,

She's going to envy and she's going to covet one of her friends who maybe they're a yoga instructor and maybe they really enjoy what they're doing.

And it's a way to express yourself versus manipulate likes and dislikes or whatever.

Now,

If it's a male narcissist,

Male narcissist can be jealous of women who are smart,

Right?

They can have this,

This Machiavellian,

They can be Machiavellian,

Like they could really dislike women that can happen.

They could dislike men who are confident.

These are all signs of a narcissistic personality.

Somebody who covets someone who from their perception is better than them and they can distort reality,

Right?

So as you,

And justify,

Well,

I'm mean to that guy because that guy thinks he's better than me.

Well,

How do you know what that guy thinks?

That guy is just a confident person and you have an issue with confident men.

Why are you doing this to yourself?

You're creating this chaos.

They can't help it because it makes sense to them because when they start telling themselves stories about other people,

It's running through their filter,

Through their false perception of self.

Everybody's out to get me.

I can't trust anybody and I need to dominate and control people in order to feel like I'm okay,

Right?

Well,

That means that they're more codependent than a codependent.

Codependents can live alone.

Codependents get into trouble when they start feeling emotions for other people.

They start having trouble when they're in relationships and they,

They struggle with setting a boundary.

They struggle,

Struggle with holding onto the self and not going into people-pleasing behaviors.

But a narcissist cannot survive without a host.

A narcissist demands and requires narcissistic supply.

And when you start waking up in this family dynamic,

When you start waking up in this relationship and you're just done,

You're just done,

What they will fear most is your ability to perceive their patterns.

Your ability to say,

The gig is up.

And I also am,

I am no longer dancing with this toxicity.

I am no longer engaging.

That's what the narcissist fears the most.

Reviews

Painful but necessary truth. Thank you for so precise explanation!

Thank you Lisa.

best talk on recognizing a narcissist and how to disengage 🩵🤍💛🩵🤍💛🩵🤍💛

Great.

Ah! This is the great solution. This confirms the path I am on towards healing and sanity. Thank you Lisa Romano!!!💜🙏🏽💜

Definitely need to remember to say to my 26 yr old granddaughter that I will no longer be her narcissistic host!! This is the closest I’ve ever been in trying to change the dynamic and it’s been impossible in the past because I was severely codependent but alas I’m seeing the light!!! Thank you Lisa!

This addresses the core dilemma for someone dealing with a narcissist who by definition are in no-win situations: what to do when confronted with all the chaos and nonsense of a narcissist. The short answer is “do” nothing (ie, “do” presence/awareness, acceptance).

I met my husband when I was 17, he was a 23 year old rookie cop. I had been kicked out of my adoptive family a few years prior and when I met him, he felt like home. Twenty years later and I've been bullied out of my home and away from my children. He did bad things to me and convinced everyone, including myself, that I had paranoid delusions. He made me question my entire existence. When I finally realized what was happening, it was way too late. He convinced me I would die without him and when I stopped letting him put me into panic attacks and crisis, he lost his damn mind. I had to carry pepper spray in the house. He ostracized me from his family and my children with so many stupid lies. Things I would never even consider doing. Now I'm completely alone and on my own and I'm so scared. He didn't have to do what he did.

I really appreciate how you break down complex issues into manageable chunks. Thank you for this amazing work! 💫💕💫