Healing from narcissistic people - a guide

It is all charm and seduction at the start of a relationship with a narcissist.

But then comes the manipulation and gaslighting, says Dr Ramani Durvasula, a professor of psychology at California State University who works with survivors of narcissistic abuse and has personal experience with them too.

She says narcissists rarely change, so people in relationships with them need to learn about self-protection, setting boundaries and trusting your own instincts.

Her new book is called It's Not You: Identifying and Healing from Narcissistic People.

"I've not only worked in this space as a researcher, as a clinician; I've had experiences like this in the workplace and close personal relationships and family relationships," Durvasula told RNZ's Afternoons on Tuesday.

"We don't see it for a long time. I mean, in fact, I was already well into doing this work and still didn't recognise it was happening around me. 

"But ultimately getting it, seeing it, radically accepting it, not saying that was easy - there was a lot of grief around that - but once I got it, once anyone gets it, we're really prepared to get to the other side of it and understand how these relationships affected us and how to heal from them."

Narcissism is not quite as simple as just a person having a high opinion of themselves, she explained. 

"Many people think… this is somebody who's just arrogant or brags a lot or likes to look in the mirror. And it's actually not that at all. It's about a lack of empathy, entitlement, grandiosity, arrogance, a superficiality, an egocentric, sort of self-centred, 'I am the centre of the universe, everything else is orbiting around me.' 

"There's a real need for control, domination, power. Things like manipulation, gaslighting, invalidation, betrayal often happen in these relationships. These relationships are really run on a schedule and in a way that works for the narcissistic person. And if the other person in the relationship attempts to express any needs or wants or aspirations or beliefs, they'll either get shut down or shamed. 

"So over time, in order to stay in the relationship, you just sort of keep carving off parts of yourself. There's almost nothing of you left. You've really simply become what you think the narcissistic person wants you to be, whether to appease them, to avoid conflict or because you think if you do that, you'll finally be able to turn them around."

But it was almost impossible to turn a narcissistic person around, she said. 

"As a rule, narcissistic people lack sort of self-reflective capacity and self-awareness. They don't look. And, in fact, if anything, some of the research has shown that they have a very distorted sense of who they are. They often have an over-inflated sense of their own empathy, of their own goodness. They often walk around the world thinking/ 'I'm a nice person…' because of that lack of ability to reach inwards. 

"There's often no motivation to change because they think everything's everybody else's fault. So why would they change if they think all of their problems are due to other people? 

"Every so often we'll have that unicorn narcissistic person who sort of looks around one day and says, 'Whoa, everyone's gone and I burned all my bridges and I've ruined my career,' and maybe, maybe, then you might see someone who might have a kind of a flicker of, 'Am I responsible for some of this?' And then maybe that client will be motivated to enter treatment and then maybe they'll find a good therapist and then maybe they'll stick it through. There's a lot of maybes in that sentence."

How it happens

So how do people keep falling for narcissists? Durvasula said it was because they are attractive - at least, initially - and often successful. 

"Narcissistic people tend to be quite charming, charismatic, confident, successful. They're overrepresented in leadership, they tend to make more money than other people. They're successful at dating. They're doing fine.

"So when I say it's socially incentivised in most countries, the way money is made in capitalistic economies and all of that, is that it's competitive, right? The person who's able to win, close the most sales, be the most competitive, those are the people who succeed.

"And the problem is that narcissistic people are really good at competing at that level and they're willing to break the rules, bend the rules, behave unethically to win. And our systems often reward that… It's very difficult in many ways to be an agreeable, integrity filled, patient, empathic kind of a person and succeed at business in the same way as somebody who's narcissistic."

A main tactic narcissists used was gaslighting, described by Durvasula as a strategy "to destabilise a person in a relationship, and then that the gaslighter gets to hold all the power". Essentially they deny the "experience, the memory, the reality" of another, leading their victim to think they are going crazy.

"The problem with gaslighting is it's predicated on some level of trust and connection. It's hard for a stranger to gaslight us, but someone we care about, we will second-guess ourselves because we want to maintain that relationship. We want to maintain that connection and that love… 

"By the time gaslighting is done, the person who's actually often not doing the right thing in the relationship or not telling the truth in the relationship will now position themselves as the victim and the other person as the offender or the problem."

It was a similar tactic used by cult leaders, she said. 

"Cults will get a lot of what's called 'collateral' on a person and then use that against the person down the road to keep them stuck in the cult. It's a very similar dynamic, and I think many people are devastated because what they thought in the early phase of a relationship was real intimacy and sharing real vulnerabilities actually came back to bite them."

How to end it

The only realistic way to escape a relationship with a narcissist, Durvasula said, was to disengage entirely. 

"It has to be a pretty rapid disengagement where as soon as you recognise it… I think that many people exhaust themselves on the altar of thinking, 'This could change if I try this,' or, 'We are having a good week.' 

"Remember, the tough thing about narcissistic relationships is they're like a slot machine. There's good days scattered into the losses, right? Good days, losses, good days, losses. And that kind of back and forth thing on a schedule you don't quite understand… We kind of hold out for that next good day, it makes it much harder to leave."

And there will be grief, she said, but that was natural and to be expected - even when it was for the person's own good.

"People say, 'Why should I be sad? I'm out of a relationship with a toxic person. I should be happy.' I'm like no, but you built a really robust narrative around this. And then as the grief slowly works its way through just like everything else in life, give it a moment and it will heal. We're an incredibly resilient species.

"Then when you get to the other side, that's when you will start engaging in disengaging - things like not defending yourself when they make strange accusations about you, not explaining yourself because they're not listening, not personalising because they're going to do this to anybody, and definitely not engaging."