The 5 Narcissist Mind Games

Why do narcissists leave you feeling confused, guilty, and emotionally exhausted? Because the manipulation is designed to keep you off balance. What are the hidden tactics narcissists use to control your emotional state, weaken your boundaries, and make you second-guess what is really happening? Learn the signs early so you can protect your energy, your mind, and your future. 

Transcript

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These are the five mind games that narcissists love to play. There are many mind games that narcissists love to play, but these are the top five. Narcissists love to create double binds. So if I want to erode somebody's confidence, if I want to erode their sense of self, if I want to make them feel uncertain about themselves, what I'm going to do is I'm going to put them in a double bind, uh, or the equivalent, like the novel, catch 22. So I'm going to tell you to do something. I'm going to say it's absolutely crucial you do this. And at the same time as telling you it's absolutely crucial that you do the thing, I am going to be working as hard as I can to make it impossible for you to do that thing. Or I'm going to say you must never do this, whilst at the same time pushing you and pushing you and pushing you to do that very thing. It's a catch 22. Essentially, you can't do right because you're always doing wrong. You can't do right for doing wrong. And it's not about the content of what's actually happening, it's about the way in which it is framed by the narcissist. So the narcissist controls your view of reality by placing a frame of perception and a frame of understanding around the interaction, around the reality. The next one is manufactured moral outrage. They will pretend that you're doing and saying things that upset them, that hurt them, that make them feel betrayed, that damage their image of you. How could you possibly do it? I don't, how could you do this to me? It's disgusting. I'm outraged. I'm so angry with you. It's completely manufactured. What they're doing is they're trying to control your emotional state. They want you to feel guilty because then you'll seek to do things. If it's me, you'll seek to do things for me to make up for it. They want you to feel ashamed. If I can get you to feel ashamed, then I can probably break your boundaries and get you to betray yourself in other areas of your life. And they want you to question yourself. They want you to question your self-image. You think of yourself as a good and decent person, and you know that you're active really trying to do the right thing and you're really trying to be honourable. How do I put a I hate that about you? I absolutely just hate that about you. I want to ruin that for you. How do I do that? I'm gonna act in a way as though your behavior is awful. Imagine I pester you for a year to do a thing that you don't want to do. I pester you and I pester you and I pester you to do it. You say, I don't want to do it, I don't want to do it, I don't want to do it. You finally do it after a year of constant psychological and emotional pressure to do the thing, and my response is, oh, oh my God, I can't believe you fully did the thing that I totally told you to do. And you're like, but you told me to do this. Yes, but not like that. So then they'll tell you to do a thing, and uh then they'll be outraged that you did it in a way that broke a condition that they previously hadn't mentioned before you did. There's no mention of that condition. You did it on a Wednesday, and I specifically wanted it to be not on a Wednesday. Well, maybe, dude, you should have told me that. It's manufactured, it's it's nonsense. What it does is it weaponizes the conscientiousness of the target. That I can only do this to you if you're a moral person. Most of narcissistic abuse can only really function if you're targeting a highly conscientious, maybe excessively conscientious person. So I had this done to me, I've had it done to me in uh by a man inside of a professional relationship. I've had it done to me once. Um, well, she didn't just do it once, but it was one person who was doing it to me inside of a romantic relationship. She used to do it like once, twice a week. And it was a really strange experience because what it felt to me like, the unfairness of it was if so, I'll use a metaphor. Imagine I brush past you as I leave a lift, and I'm thinking about something else. I'm distracted. I'm trying to get out of the uh a lift is an elevator. I'm trying to get out of the elevator. I'm trying to leave the elevator, okay? And I'm thinking about something else. And I brush past you and you go, ah, ah, as though I just crushed your foot or I broke your elbow. As a conscientious person, my first thought isn't, why is this person lying? My first thought is, my God, what did I do wrong? Well, I was distracted and thinking about something else. If I accidentally cause them an injury, it's it's this, it's it's fake moral injuries, it's manufactured moral outrage, and the only purpose is to make you feel bad. And it can only make you feel bad, ironically enough, if you are a hyper-conscientious person. Another mind game that narcissists love to play uh comes from the essence of what narcissism is all about, which is um mapping. They map people, they map what you want, and they map what you fear or what you loathe or what you really don't want. And then they engage in power asymmetries. So symmetrical would be everything is is um the same. Asymmetrical is when the relationship dynamic is no longer horizontal, adult, adult, it's like this. They love an asymmetric power dynamic. Well, it's they need that. None of your narcissistically abusive relationships came from an asymmetric power dynamic. Nobody has ever in the history of human life been abused inside of a symmetrical power dynamic. Because if you don't need them for some reason, you say, Well, I didn't need my father. Yeah, you did. You needed your father's love. Well, I didn't need my ex-wife, I had more money than her. You needed her to love you, you needed her to validate you. Don't be blind to the power asymmetry that's there. Look at it and explore it and be like, how did that power symmetry come about? How did the power asymmetry come about? The mapping is then how do I control you? How do I manipulate you? I need to learn something about you. So what they do is they map the things that you fear, they map the things that you don't want to experience, your phobias, your dreads, and they'll figure it out through conversation. You know, we're just chatting here. Why don't you open up a little bit? Tell me about yourself. Oh, you fear being misunderstood. Oh, you fear because of a horrible experience you had at school or in childhood, being rejected by a group or rejected by your tribe or rejected by your family. You fear being cheated on, you fear being alone. Whatever it is, I'll figure it out because I'll soften you up, I'll butter you up, I'll idealize you, I'll get you feeling good, I'll get you talking, you'll open up, and then you'll tell me what your fears are. Now that I've got them listed, anytime I want to push a button on you and spike your adrenaline or spike your cortisol, I just need to passively introduce the idea of the thing that you fear. And I could do this, maybe I could do it as a philosophical conversation starter. How would you know? I was watching this uh program yesterday, and uh this man uh he cheated on a girlfriend. How would you really feel if I actually cheated on you? I'm just curious, just asking. Or it could be presented as a joke. Do that again, and I'll sleep with your best friend. I'm I'm joking. It's a joke. What's wrong with you? God, you're so whatever, you're so crazy, you're so sensitive, you're so this, you're so that. This is this is the game that's played. And the whole point of this is to keep your cord sol and keep your adrenaline spiked and to keep you doubting yourself at all times. Another game that narcissists love to play is playing dumb. They pretend that they don't understand context, they pretend that they don't understand meta-communication, they pretend that they don't understand social norms. They know perfectly well. If there's anything they know, it's these things. Look, the narcissist personality disordered individual, what they do to control other people is they control frames. So there's communication. Um, I say to you, uh, please go and pick up the cup. That's the content, that's the communication. But if I say to you, please go and pick up the cup, and I use like a weird volume, weird pitch, and strange facial expressions and body language, you'd be like, if I pick up the cup, is he gonna kill me? What's the consequence of picking up this lunatic's cop? That's the metacommunication. So they're masters of metacommunication and they're masters of framing because metacommunication is the frame around the communication, but my emotional responses to what we're doing is a control of the frame itself. So when we're talking about manufactured moral outrage, this is the same kind of thing. And my intent is always to make you feel off balance, it's always to make you feel on guard, it's always to keep you uh on the back foot. It's a really, really nasty game that gets played out. And uh some of it is obviously some of it is conscious, some of it is unconscious, some of it is reflexive. When I say it's unconscious, that doesn't mean it's it's intentional, it's not intentional. You can drive to your grandma's house with full intention and do most of that drive unconsciously, right? Just because it's unconscious doesn't mean anything other than I'm really practiced at this. I've been doing it for a long time. But everything that we're talking about here has the same net effect. It emotionally dysregulates you, it spikes your stress hormones, it makes you doubt who you are as a person, it makes you doubt whether you're a good person, it makes you feel as though you could be doing something uh really, really wrong. And all of that is so that you lose your ability to say no to me. So when I'm playing dumb, the purpose of the game when I'm playing dumb is to exasperate you. The purpose of the game when I'm playing dumb and pretending not to understand what's appropriate and what's not appropriate, um, that I don't know what flirtation is, that I don't know perfectly well the way I'm conducting myself on social media isn't flirtatious and doesn't make me look like a man who's seeking other other women. Or I walk into a bar and start, you know, chatting up. I just I just said, oh, I walked into a bar and all I did was just start talking to a person in the bar. But weirdly enough, every time I do that, it always happens to be the best-looking girl in the bar. I myself don't go to bars, I'm a I'm an introvert, so I'm making up stories. You can tell by the pattern of behavior what it is that they're really doing, but when you challenge them on it, they'll go, I don't, what do you mean? I don't understand. Now, the way that we know that they're lying is because when you watch TV with them and you watch a TV show with them, if they really, really didn't understand meta-communication and context and intent and the optics of how things look, they'd constantly be confused. You wouldn't be able to get through a film without them going, why did he get so angry? Why is she crying right now? If they really didn't understand social norms, if they didn't understand morality, if they didn't understand what uh breaking boundaries inside of a relationship was, they'd constantly live in a state of confusion and they don't, which is proof that they know perfectly well, but playing dumb is part of the is part of the tactic to exasperate you and to create more doubt in you. Another tactic that they like to use is to make you feel crazy, is to make you feel unreliable. So they'll say to you something like, Do you remember last week, babe? Um, when we went to the thing, and you didn't go to the thing last week, and uh we agreed we were gonna go and do X, Y, and Z. You remember, babe, yeah? You remember that? And you're like, first of all, we didn't go to the thing. Second of all, I never agreed to do X, Y, and Z. And they're like, Yes, we did, weirdo, and yes, you did. We we talked about it for it. Yes, that happened, that absolutely happened. What's wrong with you? Why like why are you being like this? And the the content of what is being said, plus the the way it's being said to you, the meta communication, is as though you're just a very forgetful person, you're not reliable, you're an unreliable uh witness of your own life. You don't, you're very forgetful. You're a bit of a um clumsy thinker. Let me do the thinking for you because I know you don't remember these things. I know that I know that you don't remember these things. Let me let me think about this for you. I'll I'll fix it for you. Don't don't don't you worry about it. As a way of sort of dipping you in an ideology that says, look, you can't trust your own memory and you can't trust your own judgment. So if you can't trust your memory, I can get away with doing things and then afterwards say, I didn't do that, you're misremembering it. And if you can't trust your judgment, if I can successfully punch holes through your the boundary of your capacity to uh judge, then I can make it so that you can never say to me, Hey, enough is enough, idiot. You're not allowed to do that in this relationship, and if you keep doing it, I'm gonna leave. So I destroy your capacity to to discern and to judge, and then you can't anymore, and then you can't leave. Another technique that they love to use is to argue over everything and anything. Constant conflict, constant battles, one battle after another, drama, drama, drama. I I used to say um I was I was in two relationships. Um, I had two relationships that would that were really, really bad. Um, and it was a drama a week. It was a and I it's I'm not exaggerating. There would be a minimum of one drama a week and probably one major drama every month that allowed them to express negative emotion. Like, I'm so upset, I'm so angry, I can't believe she did this, I can't believe my boss said this to me. Oh, now I have this um illness, now this, now that, now the other thing. And I remember um pulling back in one of the relationships, not emotionally because I wasn't capable of doing it at that time, but uh cognitively, intellectually, and looking and saying, Hey, isn't it interesting that I didn't say this to her, I said it in therapy. On a regular basis, and it's about one a week with a big one every month, there's some huge drama that allows her to release negative emotion, allows her to have a good old uh stress dump onto someone, some somebody who was living with her and loved her and would would tolerate this nonsense, and would really centralize her. And it was like, here's a problem. Who oh, who will solve it? Here is a problem, who is here to solve it? And like, well, there's only in the room right now, me and the dog, and as nice as the dog is, I don't think he can do it for you, so I guess it's me again who's gonna have to fight to fix this. There's a story. This happened in both relationships. This happened in both relationships, this happened twice to me. I won't name the country. These are but both uh one's a Central European country and one's a uh Balkan country. And in both relationships, when it got into this, we were three-quarters of the way through, we were on the home stretch, they probably could feel that it was ending, they could feel that like I was just I just physically couldn't, even if like mentally I wanted to keep going, I couldn't physically go anymore. I was really, really getting sick and exhausted. In both I obviously they couldn't copy because I didn't tell them about the relationships. An old grandmother who lives in poverty, who I've met, is suddenly very, very sick and needs money, and I need to go there to her now because I think she only has a week left. And I was like, But the second time it happened, I was like, are we doing Balkan is you know, you know how you have routines when they study uh con artists or you watch like an espionage show and there's something that spies always do? I was like, are we doing babushka in the wilderness again? Because you know, you know, they'd introduce me. I'd been introduced to both, and I'd, you know, I like a grandmother. I like a grandmother. And so this would be thrust at me, and it would just be dumped at my feet. It was like, what are you gonna do about it? Here is somebody I know that you care about. They're in terror, you don't speak their language, they don't speak your language, so they can't tell you, they can't call you, but I think they're nearly dead. Both of these women, uh, one of them is still alive, and the other one lived another seven years, so she wasn't at death's door. The in one of the situations, it was quite funny because the person who was doing it to me uh was is quite dissociative, so she made this huge scene from a Brazilian telenovella. My grandmother closer to me than my mother, pure love, such a good humor, blah blah blah, so sick. It's uh I don't know, can't remember. And then um, you know, we really had to do something about it, and we had to do something about it very, very urgently. Three days later, she hasn't uh she hadn't mentioned it again for three days, and three days later I was like, When are you going to country, your home country? Let's say it's not Bulgaria. When are you when are you uh when's your flight to Bulgaria? What? What when's your flight to Bulgaria? Who's flying to Bulgaria? Your your grandmother? Yeah, my grandmother, what? She'd literally totally forgotten it was gone. Dissociative. It's a very, very, very dissociative personality disorder. It is as though the so say I have, say I have the the person, this is my opinion, this is not the the clinical research. So I have uh the narcissistic disorder, and I have five different self-states. I think each different self-state is so emotionally magnetized that it has five different um, don't take this too literally, something like this happens. Five different memory hard drives. I remember this when I'm in this state, I remember this when I'm in this state, I remember this when I'm in this state, and I remember this when I'm in this state. It's not literal. Obviously, the drives overlap. There'll be certain self-states where they can't, but but I claim I would claim that there's something to that, that there's something there. So these are the kinds of games that can be played, um, and these are the kinds of things that can be done. What do we do about it? So inside of the relationship, when you're still in contact with that person, you really need to be using the secret agent technique. You really need to just say, this is not in accordance with my values and with my morals, but I'm struggling here, and I need to do something temporarily to survive. And you essentially split yourself, you uh keep the uh authentic self quarantined away, you quarantine the virus away from your authentic self. And what you do is you allow the narcissist only to interact with a handler part of you, an avatar that you create that's specifically there to handle them. All of the stress gets dumped to the handler, all of the nonsense and the gaslighting, it gets dumped to the handler. All of their bullshit and their lies and their accusations of who you are, none of it touches the authentic self. It all goes to the handler. And then once you've given yourself that psychological breathing space and you've started saying, look, you lost the right through your bad behavior to access my authentic self, then you can start making real plans to leave. And that's what you should be doing. You should be looking to minimize contact down to a bare minimum. Let's say if you have shared custody or there's a business relationship, or you can't do no contact, you minimize and quarantine it down to the bare minimum. The barest minimum, minimum contact that you possibly can. And if possible, hopefully, I hope for your sake that you can uh eventually work around to no contact completely, would be the best way. Ladies and gents, I hope that you enjoyed that video. Thank you very much for your time and for your attention. I look forward to speaking again very soon.