3 Signs You’re Stuck in a Narcissistic Friendship

Some friendships don’t fall apart all at once. They wear you down in quieter ways. You start leaving conversations feeling strangely guilty, oddly drained, or responsible for emotions that were never really yours to carry. At first it can look like compassion to stay patient, keep explaining, keep giving the benefit of the doubt. Fair enough. Most people want to be decent.

But there’s a point where kindness turns expensive.

A friendship becomes dangerous when the rules keep changing, when honesty gets replaced by performance, and when nearly every road somehow leads back to the same person’s pain, needs, crisis, or version of events. You can spend a long time trying to understand why someone behaves this way. The better question, though, is what the dynamic is doing to your time, your energy, and your sense of reality.

That’s where things get uncomfortable. Because once you see the pattern clearly, you also have to decide what you’re going to allow. And most people already know the answer before they’re ready to say it out loud.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Here's three ways that you can tell that you're involved in a friendship that's become somewhat narcissistic. So, narcissistic personality disorder as it's defined in the DSM has nine diagnostic criteria. You don't really need to know what they are. Largely speaking, broadly speaking, when everybody outside of the clinical world is saying narcissist and narcissism, they're broadly speaking talking about somebody who lacks introspection, lacks accountability, is very, very self-focused. You know, in years gone by, we would say an egomaniac or self-absorbed or god complex. Um, they're interpersonally exploitative, they have a shaky relationship with the truth, and they create relationship dynamics where often you can feel a bit used at the end of it. So I want to give you an easy way of knowing whether you've strayed into a friendship with somebody that has some of that positioning to it. Now it doesn't matter whether the person qualifies for a clinical diagnosis of narcissistic personality disorder or any other cluster B spectrum disorder, whether it's histrionic, borderline, antisocial. To you as a person, to me as a person, we are not clinicians, it's not really our problem. Our problem and our responsibility is the management of our lives, our time, our energy, and our emotion, and we don't want to waste that because we we can't get it back. It's a very, very precious gift, it's in small supply and we can't get it back. So we don't need to worry about specifically what problem that person has. The way to know if your friendship has drifted into unhealthy territory that could have a narcissistic interpersonal style is you just have three simple rules. One, you don't engage in friendships where there are two sets of rules. One set of rules for them and one set of rules for you. You can't have that. Number two, you can't be involved in relationships with people in work, in your family, in your friendships, in romance that are rooted in some kind of deception or some kind of a fantasy. So if the person you're in a relationship with is insisting that you accept a version of them that you know is BS, that you know is nonsense, you can do whatever you want. You can, my advice is please don't. Please don't. It's it's not it's not safe, it's not healthy, and it's not adult. And the third thing is that the relationship relies heavily on manipulation. Are you hearing an awful lot of signal from the other person that is that could be a signal to coerce a response from you that would be something like, give me attention, give me pity, give me sympathy. Now, every human being is going to signal authentic vulnerability occasionally. What we're talking about here is where there is barely any other signal. So the person is talking about themselves in a way that positions themselves as the victim or somebody who needs help or somebody who needs sympathy 98% of the time. And most or all 98% of conversations that you have, all roads lead to Rome, all roads lead back to them and their suffering and their pain and their trouble. It's a kind of um, it's almost as though the self-absorption they had have is rooted in a pain and a trauma and an experience that is very, very dense and it has its own gravitational pull, and they can't pull themselves out of the gravity well of their own dark self. They can't, and they can't pull their attention away from it. The other thing to watch out for is when you are talking to a friend who's who you think is a little bit this way, if the conversation drifts away from them and their issues to something else, do they visibly become bored and or do they change the topic? If you're sat there, say there's five of you, and there's a person who wants to talk about themselves and dominate the conversation with themselves, and everybody's sat there looking at them, and then when it's no longer their turn to talk, and somebody else starts talking, they pull their phone out, or they start yawning, or they look away, at bare minimum, they're rude, and potentially at the maximal end of the scale. You could be looking at somebody who's effectively so self-centered, they're not really capable of being a decent friend. And my advice would be don't try and fix them, don't try and save them, don't try and make everything okay, is to distance yourself from people like that. If you have a selfish friend who is just taking from you, and that's all the relationship is based on, that's not a healthy relationship. Let me take it one step further. Let's turn this whole thing on its head. So in the modern culture, we are highly psychologized. That's a verb. I can't remember who came up with it. It might have been a psychologist, it might have been a journalist. And it was a process by which psychology itself as a subject grew in its uh scope and in its um applicability in the world until everything became psychologized. Banking, the military, hospitals, governments, all institutions, all interactions started to be viewed from the 60s to now in highly psychologized terms. Everything became psychological to the point where people don't even know they're doing it. So in modern parlance, it's it's um cool and hip to hate Sigmund Freud, but the same people who be like, oh yeah, Sigmund Freud, he's a misogynist, they can't talk for more than two minutes without using fundamentally Freudian concepts, such as the leakage into normal culture of quite deep psychoanalytic theory. So when we're talking about psychologization, that's what I'm talking about. That kind of psychologization, because of the psychology we inherited at this moment in human culture, is rooted in it's usually referred to as um the medical model. So Freud was a doctor first. A lot of the people who are involved in psychology and popularizing it were popularizing it as a branch of medicine, as uh uh rooted in the disease model, which means when we do psychologization, we tend to focus on where people are broken. We tend to focus on where people don't work, we tend to focus on pathology, meaning where people are suffering and where they are in pain. That's important for clinicians for who are licensed and are supervised for whom that is their job. It's really not good for the rest of us to be doing it because it means we're viewing reality through a lens of where is this person or this situation mentally ill? Where is this person or this situation in in other language, diseased, but but mentally. Apart from the fact it's a flawed model anyway, it means we're constantly looking for what's wrong and then trying to push away from that which is wrong. That's quite weak tactically. What's much stronger for you, for me, for and well, for clinicians in their personal lives. Like a clinician should be a clinician and be professional and perform their function with a paying client under contract, but in their personal lives they shouldn't be doing that. I mean they'll just they'll just burn, they'll go crazy and they'll burn out. Which we know from the research happens unfortunately a lot because the way they are in their clinical practice, they bring it home, they bring it to golf, they bring it to their friends, they bring it, and and then they usually unravel across time. No, the better thing for all of us to do, psychiatrists, psychotherapists, and clinicians included, is in our personal lives, is not to push away from that which doesn't work, but to push towards that which we do want. I only want to engage in friendships that are healthy, that are authentic, that are based on truth, that are rooted in reality, that is adult to adult and symmetrical. I don't want this. I don't even want this. I don't even want that. Not really, because why? Why can't we have this? Why can't it be equitable? Why does it have to have some elements of asymmetry, dominance, or exploitation dominance and submission or exploitation inside of it? It doesn't. It's not necessary. I think, and I'm gonna finish with this, in our culture, we've been tricked by the psychologization of everything to as non-clinicians, as uh members of the general public or lay people, you and I, we've been tricked into putting up with a lot of BS, a lot of nonsense, because we think, oh, um, that person has a mental illness and there's nothing they can do about it, and therefore the kind and compassionate thing to do is to be as tolerant as possible. Yeah. So in clinical practice, that makes sense in the real world, you're opening up a gateway to Satan's mansion by thinking that way. You've got to be very, very, very conscious and very conscientious when you start thinking that way. I owe this person because I've judged that they have a mental illness, or they've told me that they have a mental illness. Therefore, I'm gonna let them do this, I'm gonna let them do that, I'm gonna let them do the other. That's a therapist's job, that's a clinician's job, and even those who are trained and they're receiving supervision, and you know, there's there's multiple um hopefully layers of safety and safety redundancy in place for them and their mental health, they still burn out. Happens all the time. You can go and find they have forums that you can where they're chatting to each other and you can see what they're saying, and clinicians regularly burn out because of this. The idea that if a person just goes, aha, I have this mental illness, maybe like, who told you that? Is it self-diagnosed? I have this mental illness, and that means you have to let me do this thing that you wouldn't otherwise let me do if I didn't have this card in my hand. Mm-hmm. Not sure what you all think about that, but I'm not having it. I'm not having it outside of clinical environments, within friendships, within businesses, I think it's totally inappropriate. It's a totally inappropriate response. My responsibility is only to see your behavior and to respond to your behavior in accordance with my own moral system, with my own morality. The reasons why you're doing that behavior is between you and your therapist, is between you and your priest, and is between you and God. Why you're doing the terrible thing you're doing is quite honestly none of my business. And I think when we or I, when I make it my business, in the name of compassion, I'm opening up a portal to Satan's mansion. Really bad things can happen with uh a positive a step towards a positive intent. You'd be like, oh well they say, um, what is it, the road to hell is paved with good intentions. I think it's a mistake. So inside of your friendships, have a set of rules and stick to them for your safety and for other people's safety as well. Ladies and gents, thank you very much for your time and for your attention. And I look forward to speaking to you again very, very soon.