If your partner or a family member tries to control, weaken, and manipulate you through gaslighting, you may frequently question your self-worth, your abilities, and your mental and emotional stability. In fact, you may often question your core beliefs and even your perception of reality. Over time, this cycle of manipulation and distortion of reality can greatly erode your sense of dignity and self-confidence, and this “shredding” of your identity can actually cause you to remain dependent upon this person. This dependence results from believing that the relationship problems are your fault. Remember that gaslighting is particularly damaging when it comes from your intimate partner, but it is also a common pattern within families, such as from a parent to a child or teen. There are several residual effects of surviving narcissistic abuse, such as actions which are focused solely on pleasing others, chronic self-doubt, social isolation, self-defeating inner talk, identity confusion, guilt, shame, loss of your previous identity, poor decision-making abilities, dissociation, and poor self-care.
Confronting a narcissist is like pushing a boulder and expecting it to move. If you feed the emotionally toxic energy of the narcissist, you are only harnessing it within you. It is insanity to expect a narcissist to NOT retaliate when his or her façade is confronted. The narcissistic façade is full of unresolved emotional issues, pain, rage, and self-hatred. These emotions are all turned inward, but, when they are challenged or exposed, they become targeted toward the one who is attempting to shed light upon the narcissist’s façade. Do not contemplate trying to get empathy or cooperation from the narcissist. It is extremely important to do frequent self-awareness checks, so that you maintain focus on your own daily needs, responsibilities, and well-being.
Distress Tolerance is a therapeutic approach within Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) and is taught to clients in conjunction with Mindfulness Training. Both Distress Tolerance Skills and Mindfulness Skills are often called “crisis survival skills” because they help clients to navigate through perceived and actual crises. Distress Tolerance focuses on synthesizing one’s emotional brain with one’s reasonable brain, with the primary goal of learning how to tap into one’s innate wisdom and capacity for intuition. Distress Tolerance is about accepting reality, from moment to moment, just as it is, and also combining realistic circumstances with a new “constantly-learning” version of oneself.
Distress Tolerance Skills can include simple actions, such as following a structured schedule of exercising three times per week, using mindful daily eating habits, engaging in new interests, journaling at least twice per week, and making lists of immediate goals and specific action-oriented plans for achieving each goal. Positive self-talk, maintaining a social support system, improving interpersonal confidence, and engaging in activities which promote one’s sense of inspiration, one’s release of natural pleasure and motivating neurotransmitters, and one’s overall appreciation of all life experiences. In sum, if you dare to try new activities or to attend new events in your community, you will increase your hope and faith in thriving as an independent being.
Emotional pain is an inevitable aspect of the natural order of life, but you will eventually feel overwhelmed and “frozen” in all stressful situations if you do not restructure your perceptions and actions toward not blaming yourself for your misfortunes and not engaging in self-defeating thoughts when in a crisis or other challenging circumstances. Accepting pain or mistreatment does NOT mean that you are approving of it or internalizing the blame for it. Rather, it is just about giving yourself the freedom to acknowledge that it is there, looming in the near or far distance. It is also about validating your self-worth enough to confront distress and learn how to “tolerate” and “plow through it” when it makes its frightening presence.
If you have financial or parental ties to a narcissist, I believe that Therapeutic Dissociation is the most effective strategy for regulating your emotions, maintaining your independent identity, and focusing on your own life goals. Therapeutic Dissociation is a learned skill which can help the romantic partner of a narcissist to no longer engage in the narcissist’s dysfunctional “tennis match” of manipulative and critical words. Narcissists have little awareness of boundaries, and Therapeutic Dissociation can be used as a healthy mental and emotional boundary when the narcissist tries to dominate a situation. This type of dissociation can be applied as soon as the narcissist begins the same narrative aimed at shaming and blaming you. Here is how it works….
When feeling triggered, you practice the following series of thoughts and actions. First, project your vision and your mental attention away from the moment and away from the narcissist’s same old narrative. Secondly, you will feel a relief and a natural endorphin increase when you move your eyes from side to side repeatedly after consciously choosing a focal point. This focal point could be anything, such as a random object, an area of a wall, or a visualized image. By doing this, you are interrupting your brain’s conditioned responses, which can range from self-doubt, anxiety, guilt, or just sheer frustration. You are no longer caught in this cycle of pain and manipulation, because your mind is elsewhere and because you are focusing on the side-to-side movements of your eyes. OK, I must now state the obvious, which is to do the eye movement exercise only if you have the chance to look away or to go away from the narcissist, as if you are taking a “time-out.”
By using Therapeutic Dissociation, you are moving away from the chaos and toward your true higher self as the wise and calm observer of the insanity, rather than being a part of it or thinking that you are the cause of it. The human brain has the neurotransmitters and structures to organize information, to continually learn from unproductive information, and to create new information. Narcissists are unlikely to communicate about their responsibilities within a romantic relationship and will distort the facts about situations. You can free yourself from the narcissist’s narrative through this strategy of intentional disconnection. A helpful self-statement to make while using Therapeutic Dissociation is, “I will observe but not absorb the narcissist’s emotional toxins.”
You cannot be manipulated if you do not react to the narcissist’s dysfunctional triggers. When you need to remind the narcissist about your boundaries, do so with a calm, soft tone and a slow pace of speech. When you confront your fears or insecurities or pain, you are tapping into your true higher self. By doing this, you will be able to clearly see the effective coping behaviors which you are already using and areas of needed improvement. The purpose of these techniques is to focus on what’s going on around you or in your thoughts, and these skills can be a valuable shield when you feel overwhelmed by a narcissist.
