Original content by Ashley Berges
Often it is not possible to ignore the narcissist. Sometimes we must have communication with the narcissist. We need to have real-world conversations with them to express our truth. The question is, how do we do this? How do we do this in the process of disarming them?
Most conversations with narcissists usually end up with us feeling bad and them not hearing our truth. They may gaslight or manipulate us and we walk away feeling down.
There are some comments we can use right now to disarm the narcissist when we need to have a conversation with them. The first comment we can use in a conversation is,” Please stop interrupting me.” Often in these types of conversations, the narcissist will interrupt us repeatedly. They do this to get us to get off target, gaslight us, get us to change the subject, and they do it to get us out of control.
This causes us to get angry and upset. Instead of getting angry and stressed out we need to continue to tell them to stop interrupting us, we need to have a conversation. We are both adults and I am going to share my truth, let’s discuss this. It is very important to continue to say this. We need to try and stay calm in our tone and expression so that we can communicate this calmly.
Another good comment to use is, “What exactly do you want me to know or understand?” When we say this to someone, we are conveying the facts, that’s all we want to hear. We are taking away the mean comments and the put-downs. This is a good comment when someone is putting you down or calling you a name. We are not calling them out but bringing them back to the terms of the boundaries. We are saying tell me what you need me to know and have an actual civil conversation.
A third good response to the narcissist is, “I hear what you’re saying.” There are two differences between, I hear what you’re saying I agree with what you’re saying. It is important to acknowledge that you hear them in the conversation because everyone want to be acknowledged. We agree that we are hearing them but we do not have to accept their reality. We we say this, we are saying we are both in this conversation, I am hearing you, but at the same point in time, I am going to speak my truth as well.
The last thing to discuss for now is, saying nothing. The power of saying nothing is very powerful. When we don’t say anything, it allows the other person to pontificate on their own. When we listen to someone doing this, they have a lot of circular logic and cycle patterns. This allows us to see how they manipulate and roll game. This can be very helpful so that we do not have to get so emotionally involved.
By saying nothing we can tally it up, listen to it, see what they are saying, analyze the misrepresentation, and analyze their awareness. By saying nothing we are not agreeing or disagreeing to anything. This prevents us from being pulled in, fighting, or engaging us in a situation we do not want to be engaged in.
We want to disarm the narcissist; we do not want to give them everything they want. They want to crank us up and get us very emotional and we need to be able to prevent this from happening. We do not want them to be able to blame us and tell us we are the reason for the problem. We want to be able to keep our cool. If saying nothing is the way for us to do that, then that is what we should do.
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