Let me teach you a trick in therapy or counseling or consultation or whatever it is, whenever someone talks to another person with the intention to help.
And this is a trick.
Never focus on what people say.
Focus on why they say it.
The motivation behind the speech act, the intention behind the communication, they matter much more, much, much more than the overt, explicit content.
We call this the hidden text method.
And it's studied deeply in philosophy and in the theory of psychotherapy.
This applies doubly, triply, quantuply, infinitely more to any communication with the narcissist.
And the reason is the narcissist never communicates. It's an illusion.
Whenever the narcissist says something to you, ignore what he says, never mind what he says or what she says. Yes, half of all narcissists are women. Never mind what they say.
Ask yourself, why is he saying this? Why did she choose the words she has chosen? What is behind the overt communication, the open text?
And the reason is that, as I said, narcissists don't communicate unless they have goals, the goal oriented, exactly like psychopaths.
And narcissists interact with you condescendingly, patronizingly, unwillingly, reluctantly, but still sometimes they have to communicate. They communicate with you in order to accomplish one or four goals.
The communication has a name, has a purpose, and these are the goals. These are also the answers to the question, why is he saying this? Why did she choose to communicate this way?
Reason number one, the narcissist is trying to impress you, not to communicate with you, not to talk to you, not to listen to what you have to say. He's not interested. He couldn't care less. You don't exist. You're an external object.
But the narcissist is trying to impress you, to convert you into a source of narcissistic supply or into a potential intimate partner in a shared fantasy or into a best friend which could be taken advantage of.
Impression management is critical in narcissism. Narcissism plays an emphasis on appearance rather than substance.
And so the first possible answer is not communicating with me. She is not talking to me. They're trying to impress me and they're trying to convert me to the cause, to the private religion where they have a God, the false self.
The second reason is, confabulation.
Narcissists, as you may recall, suffer memory gaps. They have a problem with memory. The memories are not continuous.
Consequently, they don't have a core identity.
In a desperate attempt to paper over the memory gaps, to bridge them, to bridge the abyss somehow, the narcissist confabulates.
He creates short stories, narratives of what might have happened, what possibly could have happened, what plausibly had happened, etc.
And then he believes his own concoctions, his own inventions, his own narratives, his own storylines and his own streets. And he begins to regard them as facts because they emanated from him and he is God.
Narcissists confabulate in order to make sense of their own lives and to create a semblance of continuous memory, continuous working memory and consequently a fake identity.
So one, the second reason a narcissist would communicate with you is that he is trying to confabulate. He is trying to explain to you what probably had happened, what could have happened or what's the most plausible explanation for his behavior and choices and decisions and temper tantrums and outbursts, whatever.
So confabulation.
The third reason is to support the narcissist's grandiosity and/or shared fantasy.
Narcissists use speech. They interact with you, they communicate with you, they talk at you, they never talk to you, they talk at you, they lecture. They're not there to listen, they're there to lecture.
And they do all this in order to buttress their self-perception and their self-image, perfect, in order to somehow uphold and substantiate their grandiose inflated sense of self.
So the speech is structured and it aims to elevate the narcissist. It aims to deify the narcissist, a form of verbal apotheosis and the speech is also intended to inculcate in you the belief that the narcissist's false self is not false, that the shared fantasy is not a fantasy, that the narcissist's grandiose claims are actually the truth. These are facts and so on and so forth.
This leads to the fourth reason.
The fourth reason is manipulation, Machiavellian, narcissist and psychopaths, of course, use speech, use communication in order to alter, modify your behaviors, your choices and your decisions in ways which are palatable and helpful to the narcissist or the psychopath.
In short, they use speech and communication to manipulate you, to do the bidding, to cater to their needs, to fulfill their expectations, to support them somehow, to provide them with what they're looking for. Could be sex, could be money, could be access, could be power in the case of the psychopath, narcissistic supply in the case of the narcissist.
You're beginning to see that the narcissist's communication, the narcissist's speech has nothing to do with the communication, speech acts and speech patterns of normal, healthy people.
The narcissist's communication and speech are weaponized. These are weapons, weapons in an arsenal intended to provide the narcissist with the capacity to manage impressions, to confabulate, to support his grandiose, fantastic self-image, to introduce you or induct you or kidnap you into the shared fantasy and ultimately to manipulate you so that you become compliant, submissive, obedient and match fully your representation in the narcissist's mind, your introject, the avatar that stands in for you, your snapshot.
So, let me recap.
It doesn't matter what the narcissist says.
Ask yourself the question, why is he saying this? Why did she choose these words? What are they trying to do when they're communicating?
Are they trying to impress me? Are they trying to confabulate to me or to lie to me if they're psychopaths? Are they trying to support a self-image that is grandiose and fantastic? They're trying to sell me on something, to sell me on a shared fantasy or in the case of the psychopath, on some corn, some swindle or scam.
And finally, how are they trying to manipulate me with this particular choice of words, with this particular communication, with this particular content?
Because they are. They are trying to manipulate you.
The narcissist manipulates the way a virus infects. His manipulation is automatic. It's unconscious. It's not premeditated, but the psychopath's manipulation is scheming and cunning and cold and calculated.
Both of them make abundant use of language, verbiage. The narcissist actually uses language to entrain you, to brainwash you, to synchronize his brainwaves with yours, literally, by the way. This has been proven in neuroscientific studies.
And entraining is done by repeating the same sentences over and over and over again. It's a kind of a hypnotic trance.
That's another use for the language.
What the narcissist says is, besides the point, is irrelevant. What the psychopath says is even less relevant.
Why they say these things? Why do they choose to communicate in a highly particular way, with specific words and specific content?
This is what you should pay attention to.
Good luck.