This is a presentation that I had prepared for an event which was cancelled, and I didn't want my work to go to waste. I hope it could be of some benefit to someone somewhere out there. It's titled How to Destroy the Narcissist in Court.
People on YouTube love the word to destroy revenge. There's a lot of aggression on YouTube.
So I decided to fit in, to conform, to be one of the guys and the girls, and so how to destroy the narcissist in court during divorce and custody proceedings.
It's important to understand that divorce is widely considered one of the 10 most traumatic life events. When we have textbooks about trauma, when we write about trauma, when we treat trauma, traumatize people, one of the main things they complain about is having experienced divorce, either as one of the members of the couple or as children. Actually, divorce is listed as one of 10 adverse childhood experiences.
An excellent predictor of health later in life, or actually ill health or bad health.
So divorce is not easy for you, but you should also realize that divorce is not easy for the narcissist. Divorce is perceived by the narcissist as a rejection.
Well over 73% of all divorces are initiated by women.
And so narcissistic men experience divorce as a slap in the face, as in the best case, severe narcissistic injury, as a life crisis, which very often leads to the process of mortification.
Now to remind you, narcissistic mortification is when the false self is disabled, doesn't work anymore, stops functioning. And so there's no grandiosity to shield the narcissist. His fantasies crumble and he gets in touch with reality directly because the narcissist is essentially skinless, exactly like the borderline, because he needs to be firewalled in order to survive. He needs to be separated from reality. He needs to have an impaired reality testing. He is protected by his cognitive deficits, biases, fantasies, and delusions.
When you take these away from him in the process of divorce, he is like a tortoise without a shell. He is reduced. He regresses back to infancy. He is a child.
This is very important to understand because these are precisely the vulnerabilities of the narcissist during the divorce process and especially within the legal system in the courts, judiciary, law enforcement, and so on and so forth.
But before I proceed, there's something very important.
It is wrong to design a strategy that focuses only on the court and on judges, on evaluators, on psychologists. It's wrong to focus only on the legal aspect and dimension of the divorce.
Divorce is a life-encompassing process and if you want to accomplish positive, favorable, beneficial outcomes for you and for your children if you have any, you must design a holistic strategy, a strategy that takes into account the narcissist's performance in the court and how to affect it adversely for him, but also takes into account the nice narcissist's life, ongoing life outside the court, off-court life.
As far as the narcissist is concerned, in any case, it's one big game. The elements of the game which unfold in court, elements of the game which unfurl between you and him, elements of the game which involve other people, flying monkeys, your children, as pawns in this mega game of chess.
So you must meet the narcissist, sometimes on his territory. You must join battle where the enemy is and so the enemy is everywhere. You must manage the court process together with your attorney. You must design strategies which I will discuss a bit later and implement them wisely, judiciously, repeatedly. You must strike blows, the Chinese torture of dripping water, whichever metaphor suits you best, but you also must continue during the breaks between sessions, during the deposition phases, in your personal correspondence with the narcissist if you maintain any, in your correspondence via intermediaries like accountants and lawyers, if that's the way you had chosen, through your common friends, through his family, through your family, through social media.
This war, divorce and custody, they're perceived as war by the narcissist and this war is fought everywhere. It's what we call today total war.
Civilian casualties, collateral damage is in the cards.
You better minimize it and you minimize it not by ignoring the narcissist in between court sessions, not by pretending that he doesn't exist, not by telling yourself, well, that's the maximum he can do.
He's limited because the law won't allow him to do this or that or because legal strategies are well known in advance or because I have a contract with him, a signed contract, a print-up or whatever. Forget all this.
Narcissists don't play by any rules except those rules they conjure up as they go along on the fly.
Inuendos, smear campaigns, abuse by proxy, flying monkeys, leveraging your common children against you, extorting, blackmailing, threatening, passive aggression. These are all weapons in the narcissist arsenal.
And here's a tip. If the narcissist has a weapon, he's going to use it.
It's like the famous Maxim. If there's a weapon on stage in the first scene, it's going to be used by the end of the play.
So be aware of this.
Now, the narcissist's vulnerability is, of course, his grandiosity. Whenever you criticize the narcissist, whenever you disagree with the narcissist, contradict the narcissist, pass judgment on the narcissist.
You resonate very strongly with his inner critic, with his sadistic superego, with structures, constructs, and internal objects inside him that agree with you, actually, fully agree with you.
Because he cannot face this, it's ego-distonic. It's uncomfortable. It's anxiety-producing.
Because he cannot face this, he compensates.
By pretending to be much bigger than he is, he inflates himself. This is called personal inflation. He renders himself false, a piece of fiction, a narrative, a movie where he is the superstar, the only star. It's the only way to cope with a nagging inner voice that tells you, you're worthless, you're damaged goods, you're broken, you're nothing, you're zero, you're a failure, you're a defeat, and so on and so forth.
And, of course, there are narcissists who are not aware of this inner voice. And we call these narcissists covert narcissists.
They are classic narcissists. They believe their own fantasies, delusions, hallucinations, grandiosity. They fully believe that they're geniuses, perfect, brilliant, the most handsome and irresistible, etc.
And they strut along and swagger and bragand they are self-confident and nothing can shake their self-esteem.
And they put on such a great show that they themselves become the audience. They are totally self-sufficient. They are a self-contained universe, where they are the show and they are the universe. They are God, and they are the worshiper in this private religion. They become God-like in their own eyes, and they fully, firmly, firmly believe and are convinced that everything they're saying about themselves is an underestimate, actually.
These are the overt narcissists.
And there's a whole group of other narcissists, vulnerable, shy, fragile, covert narcissists, who are actually the successors to what used to be called compensatory narcissists. These are narcissists with a kernel of self-doubt, with fluctuating, dysregulated self-esteem and sense of self-worth.
They need narcissistic supply from the outside in order to regulate their internal environment. They can't live without it. They can't subsist without it.
But both types of narcissists are hypervigilant. They react very badly to any intimation, innuendo, insinuation, hint, let alone open or void claim that they're less than perfect, that they have committed a mistake, that they don't know what they're doing, that they are ignorant, or God forbid, stupid, or maladjusted, or untrusted, unreliable, etc.
So any criticism, any disagreement works in your favor. Be sure to express such disagreement and criticism in a civilized, calm, contained way. Don't let the narcissist drag you into a foot fight. Don't get caught in his temper tantrums, in his infantile behavior.
You should be the adult in the room, especially in court, where everyone is watching you, the judge is watching you, the lawyers are watching you, the audience in court is watching you, the crowd, everyone is watching you, and especially the narcissist is watching you, scanning you with this cold empathy, trying to find the chinks in your armor, the buttons to push, how to disintegrate you, how to cause you to decompensate, act out and appear to be crazy. He would gaslight you in court, he would use any tactic to drive you to literal insanity.
And when you discombobulate and fall apart in front of everyone, his version of the events is going to be believed, because he's been telling everyone that you're insane, that you are the one who had introduced chaos, unpredictability, infantile behaviors into the dyad. He blames everything on you.
Do not put on a performance that justifies his worst accusations, his worst accusations.
So you stay calm, you stay composed, you remain in control, you just state what you have to say, say it firmly, but not aggressively.
Repeat it once or twice, but not too often. Make it pinpointed and piercing, but not lethal, wounding but not lethal. Don't overdo, don't exaggerate, don't be a drama queen, there's nothing more hated than a drama queen.
So try to control yourself because the narcissist is a master of bringing out onto the surface and in full view your shadow.
And yes, you do have a shadow, you do have parts of you which resonate with the narcissist, parts of you which are essentially pathological, parts of you which you really, really don't want to display in public, especially in a session of the court.
So don't let the narcissist latch onto your shadow, interact with your shadow, because they are allies.
The narcissist in your life, in your shadow part, they are friends. They had formed an alliance long ago via grooming and love bombing. That's why you ended up with the narcissist, because you had resonated, there was an echo there.
Be aware of that. When you talk to the narcissist in court, criticize him, disagree with him and so on, one of the things you should do, you should expose him.
Again, don't expose him via a direct attack. Don't be violent, don't be aggressive and don't even be passive aggressive. Be factual, present facts, well established, well researched, well substantiated, backed up by paper copies, recordings and so on. Never ever raise anything, any topic, any situation, any fact, if you can't back it up, you should be evidence based.
The narcissist is the one who makes use of rumors and gossip and smear campaigns, but this is going to be easily exposed in court. You should be the one who can back up every single thing you say.
So do expose him, expose his fake accomplishments, for example, expose his shortcomings, point the court towards instances where he had lied or confabulated intentionally and deliberately in a manipulative process. Do all this and expose him for what he is, but do all this as a scientist would, slowly, methodically, inexorably, ineluctably so that there's no defense against the facts, the rims of paper, the tape recordings, the video recordings, testimonies and testimonials by others. Push the narcissist to the corner because one thing narcissists hate is details. They are not detail oriented. They consider themselves so cosmically supreme and important and significant that they limit themselves to the big picture. It's the big picture, men with a synoptic God-like view of history and human affairs.
Every narcissist is a self-styled genius, self-styled expert. The narcissist is very likely to undermine his own attorney, argue with his attorney, sometimes openly and publicly in court, rise up and take over the proceedings and represent himself.
These work in your advantage, these misbehaviors, they work in your advantage and you should elicit them. You should provoke them. Every time you expose a narcissist, he feels belittled. Every time you show that he inhabits, that he is resident in fantasy land, that he had lost touch with reality, that he's self-imputed talents and skills and even intellect, a fake, false, overdone, overestimated, exaggerated. Every time you do this, the narcissist is likely to react with narcissistic rage. Narcissistic rage works in your favor for two reasons.
It's unseemly. People don't like to see other people when they rage. So rage is repulsive. It's abhorrent. It's obnoxious.
So you want the narcissist to rage.
But the second reason is that when the narcissist rages, he loses impulse control. He is very likely to say things and do things that he is going to bitterly regret later on had he been capable of regret, which he is not.
So drive the narcissist to distraction.
Not distraction, like self-destruct, but distraction with an A.
Focus the narcissist's mind on your underhanded and implied criticisms on demeaning him and debasing and underestimating him and so on and so forth. He's hypervigilant and he's scanning all the time for slights and insults and discrimination and injustice and how people underestimate him. Give him good reason. Give him good reason. Aggression accumulates in him. It's like a pressure cooker with a valve off. So sooner or later, he's going to explode and the narcissist is going to hit the fan.
So you do this either directly backed by evidence or indirectly when you hint, when you feel secure, never ever venture into a territory. We are not sure what you're saying. We were speculating. We were gambling. It may end up badly for you.
Never ask a question, the answer to which you don't know in advance. You may not like the answer. It may be counterproductive. It may undermine your interests. So be prepared, be prepared, be prepared, be ready.
These are the four pillars of a good court battle with a narcissist.
But you can hint. If you feel certain of something and you still lack the evidence, use hints. You can hint.
Don't do it passive aggressively. People don't like shrews. Shrews like Shakespeare. People don't like bee bitches. People don't like nasty people. So don't be passive aggressive. Don't be smug. Don't be gleeful. Don't be sort of glow and be radiant when you humiliate the narcissist. People are not going to like it. Don't appear to be as obnoxious and nasty as the narcissist is.
When you hint, again, do it firmly, do it calmly, present it as a question rather than as a statement.
But you can hint. You can hint that the narcissist, for example, is subordinated, that he's controlled somehow, that he's inferior. You can insinuate that he's dependent or that he's owned by something or that he's not entirely independent and autonomous as it claims to be. It's one example.
Narcissists resent this very much because they're omnipotent.
Similarly, you can hint that the narcissist is less than versed in what he claims to know, that he is actually ignorant, that he doesn't recognize his own ignorance and makes no effort to supplement his lack of knowledge, to kind of cover up for it, to learn.
So that challenges his omniscience.
Show instances, point to instances and cases and events in your common history or in his history where he had failed. That would challenge his perfectionism, his self-belief that he's perfect, etc.
Make a list of all the elements of his grandiosity. What is he most proud of? What is he emotionally invested in? What makes him tick? What defines his identity? What elevates him? What renders him euphoric? And then pierce the bubbles. Pierce the bubbles. Explode his balloons. Let him feel his real self, his reality.
Narcissists cannot tolerate reality. The narcissist is far from perfect. Actually, he's much more prone to commit errors and mistakes than normal people because of his cognitive deficits. He's usually very ignorant. He just pretends to know. He's a self-infuted expert, self-styled expert, but he doesn't know what he's saying in 99% of cases. He's ignorant, sometimes even illiterate. He is very far from all-powerful or omnipotent or God-like. He fails, he's defeated, he's disrespected, he's mocked and derided, etc. He's controlled. Sometimes he's a low-level employee. Sometimes he's told what to do. Sometimes his own attorney tells him what to do, which you can leverage. You can hint that actually it's the attorney who is making the decisions, and the narcissist is a puppet. The narcissist is going to resent this very much, and he's going to attack his own attorney just to prove to everyone that he's not a puppet, that he's not a marionette, that he's in charge of his attorney, not the other way. It's an example. It's an example of how to push the narcissist's buttons, imply or even say openly that the narcissist is average, common, typical, indistinguishable, mediocre.
If you're daring enough, even in your sex life, as a lover, as a husband, as a father, as an entrepreneur, as a self-employed person, as an employee, as a friend, whenever one of these functions comes up, make clear that the narcissist is not the best you've ever seen or come across, that you have met people who are much more accomplished, much more clever, much more funny, much more sexual, much more interesting, much more everything.
Narcissists hateabove allto be considered mediocre, to be considered one of the hurt.
They are Superman. They are the next stage in the evolutionary ladder. They are the incarnation of transhumanism.
If you more than hint, if you actually prove that the narcissist is just like everybody else or even less, he's going to resent this because in his mind, narcissist is interpreted as a shattering criticism. He hates to be considered weak. He hates to be considered needy, dependent, incomplete, imperfect, indistinguishable. He thinks that he stands out immediately. He doesn't even have to do anything.
This is the sense of entitlement. His very existence is a gift from God and an unprecedented phenomenon.
And here you come and actually compare him to others and very often unfavorably. He's deficient, he's slow, he's stupid, he's clownish, buffoonish, he's embarrassing, he's, you know.
And you can inject these criticisms into a narrative. Never just come out and say, oh, he was a bad lover or he always made mistakes or he doesn't know the first thing about his own profession. Never come out and attack him frontally and out of context. Anything you do out of context will be perceived as viciousness. You don't want to appear wicked and vicious and malevolent and malicious. Do you?
You don't.
But when you come up, when you engage in a narrative, when you come up with a narrative, with a storyline, when you describe, for example, your relationship, your marriage, your child rearing, bringing up your children together, travels, traveling together, I mean, when your criticism is embedded in a narrative, in a story, in a context, it will be perceived as natural. It will be perceived as an opinion, not as an attempt to provoke.
You need to appear, you need to appear innocuous, innocent, honest, straight to the point and without ulterior motives or a hidden agenda to destroy the narcissist, disintegrate him, make him fall apart, provoke him to the point of insanity as this will go against you.
But during divorce proceedings and custody proceedings, there are numerous opportunities to tell the court your story. And when you tell the court your story, it is then that you can explain to the court that there's a problem here.
The narcissist's self-perception and self-image don't sit well, don't tally well with reality and with facts.
And you can sustain, you can enhance and buttress your point of view by bringing other people to the stand who would say the same, the morethe merrier.
The narcissist will not be able to tolerate this. The more you say that he is average and common and like everybody else, the more enraged he's going to become and the more he's going to lose control.
You want him to lose control and you want him to lose control in full view, on camera as it were, because only then people will understand what you had been going through in your relationship.
The experience of narcissistic abuse is so highly idiosyncratic, so special and specific to you, so unique, so unprecedented, so amazing, so out of this world, so alien, that it's very difficult to believe you.
You need to recreate the dynamic on camera, in full view, in front of audience, judge and attorneys. You need everyone to see what it is like to endure a life, or shall we say, extend a death with the narcissist.
You need people to see how deficient he is, how slow, how inane, if not utterly stupid. You need him to see that even when he is naive, even when he is gullible and susceptible, even when he's manipulated, it is embedded in something that is not whole, that is not good, so he is likely to be naive and gullible and susceptible, which are childlike qualities, within activities that are, shall we say, antisocial or not okay.
Even his childlike properties, which should have endeared him, should have made him cute and likeable and lovable, even these are leveraged by him in very bad ways.
So he is not a child, he is a petulant child, an obnoxious child, the kind of child you pray to not have.
You need to convey this to the court, because the narcissist is going to trot out, is going to out his inner child, is going to try to convince the court that he had been an innocent victim of you, that you took advantage of his gullibility and innocence and his susceptibility, his vulnerability to manipulate him, that he is a victim, that he wasn't in the know, that he didn't realize that you are a psychopath, that you are gull-oriented, that you are a gull-digger, that you are, I mean, he's going to try to invert, invert the narrative, invert the story, and to render himself the hapless prey, P-R-E-Y, you're the predator, and to do this, he's going to show the court how immature he is, how infantile, how regressive, how unequipped to deal with people like you, predatory, skimming, profit-oriented, gull-oriented, vicious, malicious, obnoxious, vengeful. That's how he's going to try to paint you, and you need the court to see the truth, and the only way to accomplish this is to provoke the narcissist.
The narcissist is often an ignorant, he's a charlatan, he's a dilettante, even in his own field.
You need to explain to the court that the narcissist tries to compensate with magical thinking for his lack of effort, for his laziness and indolence. He doesn't want to work hard. He wants everything to fall into his lap. He believes in magic and in fantasy.
Now, this is very nice when you are, I don't know, 11 years old or 9 years old, but within an adult relationship, it fasts, very fasts, becomes a problem. It becomes a problem because you have to cope with reality, and the narcissist not only doesn't give you a hand in coping with reality, he hinders you, he obstructs you, and he resents you if you drag him into reality.
If you demand commitment, investment, reciprocity, sharing, the narcissist is going to hate you. He's going to hate you because he prefers to live within his own mind, where everything is nice and dandy, his power is unlimited, and he can be anything he wants just by thinking about it, not God forbid by investing anything, by learning anything, just by thinking about it.
I think therefore everything is.
And so you need to be fact-based, you need to be fact-based, and you need to show the court that you mean no disrespect, either towards the narcissist or towards the court, of course, that your attempts to expose the narcissist for what he is and who he is or rather who he is not, these attempts have nothing to do with humiliating you. You're not interested to humiliating. This is not a vengeful move.
Be very careful not to appear to be revengeful, hateful, how to get the narcissist, payback time. These are very bad moments for you. Should you appear to be hell-bent on retribution and reprisals? You will lose. You will lose the case.
So you should be fact-based, and any disrespect and any injury, you cause the narcissist should be embedded in the proper inescapable context of your argument, of your narrative.
Ultimately, the narcissist will rage. He will lose control. He will expose himself with unbridled displays of firework aggression. That is inevitable.
As the narcissist sees slights and insults and injuries and wounds and everything, good morning is an insult. I mean, who are you to tell me that it's morning? I know it's morning. And who are you to tell me if it's good? I will decide that.
So good morning, insult. So don't worry. You don't have to work too hard before the narcissist ruins himself on stage, ruins his reputation and the carefully crafted image of the mature, reasonable, calm, composed adult that he had created previously, for example, in his deposition. You don't worry about that. He will do the job for you.
The narcissist is working for you. You don't need to overdo it. You don't need to exaggerate. You don't need to appear to be investing an effort. You need just to be you. You need just to be you.
Remember, the narcissist is provoked by your independence, autonomous existence. All you have to do to provoke the narcissist is to be.
The narcissist has spent years, sometimes decades, trying to eradicate, negate and vitiate your existence.
Narcissistic abuse is about negating your existence, rendering you an internal object, an extension, taking away your friends, your family, ultimately your life, your independent thinking, zombifying you, mummifying you.
So any proof in court that he didn't work and you are still very much alive, that you are autonomous, that you have agency, that you are self efficacious, he's going to throw him off. He's going to lose it.
You don't need to worry about it. And he feels entitled. Remember this. He wants to be questioned only by a superior, the most superior figure in the court. So he would insist to talk to the judge directly, even if a judge tells him a hundred times, don't talk to me. He's going to talk to the judge.
Why?
Because the judge is the God of the court and the narcissist is entitled to interact with the most superior person present.
You take advantage of this. You force him to talk to inferiors like your attorney, like yourself, like your children.
So tell him that he's not entitled. Tell him that he's doubted, that he's ridiculed, that he doesn't deserve what he thinks he deserves, that his desires, wishes, demands, are no one's priorities, that he's boring and repetitive, that his needs are common, average, typical, indistinguishable, that he's transparent, that everyone can see through him.
So he's not as clever as he thinks, you know, he's not as manipulative as he thinks.
Tell him that he must obey, must follow orders, the orders of the court, for example, or the demands of your attorney. Or he must answer your questions. Tell him that you will do as you're told. Tell him that you will not tolerate his temper tantrums, that there will be no concessions.
And when you ask him questions, make sure these questions are assiduous. Make sure these questions provoke him, but without being seen to provoke him.
So hint that he's not as intelligent as he thinks it is, for example, by saying, I think you got this one wrong. That's all. I think you got it wrong. Believe me, that's enough.
It means translation, you're not intelligent, you're stupid. You can ask, and who is behind this?
This requires a lot of intelligence and planning and sophistication. Who's behind this?
This is what you've done. Who is behind the success of your company? Who is behind your recent move? Who is behind, imply that he doesn't possess the necessary qualifications. He's not intelligent, he's not sophisticated. He's not a long term planner. He is not committed to his work. He is not industrious, he's not, you know, he's not.
So keep hinting that all his accomplishments in life, if he has any, and everything he's doing is actually not his, he's just appropriating and expropriating the fruits of other people's labors.
It's another example.
Or you can ask him, you can go through his education. Now, this is very frequently undereducated, actually. And some of them would lie about their biography and educational accomplishments. Go through it, expose him.
What's your formal education? What, really? That's it, high school? I mean, like, you know, focus on these, I mean, again, make a list, make a list of everything that matters to him, everything he invests a lot of effort in.
Is he very peculiar about his intellectual accomplishments, his academic degrees, his money, his irresistibility to women? I mean, what is his locus? What's important to him? What would he sacrifice his life for, so to speak? Definitely sacrifice his perception of reality, his reality testing.
And then omen on these points exactly. If it's important for him to be considered intelligent, ask him a question. And when he answers, say, I'm sorry, but clearly you did not understand the question. Home run, you scored, because clearly you did not understand the question means you're an idiot. You're not as clever as you think you are. You couldn't even understand my question. It's an example. If he thinks he's irresistible to women, make sure that in your narrative you describe how initially you were not attracted to him. That's all. It's a fact. And even if it's not a fact, make it a fact. It's a fact.
But he challenges what matters to him if he's a somatic narcissist, his irresistibility. If he prides himself on being a great father, at least in great intimate details, all his failures as a father, and bring the children or testimonies by the children to support this, or their educators, or evaluators, isolate the intrusion points and keep hammering, keep hammering on these points until he loses it.
If he's proud of looking younger than he is, keep raising up his age, keep mentioning his age. If he thinks that he is, I don't know, distinguished and much respected, make sure you embed in your narrative, in your story, in your testimony, in your evidence, in cross-examination. Make sure you embed numerous stories on how everyone mocks him, ridicules him, derides him, and disrespects him. And describe personal experiences where you had been embarrassed of his misconduct, of his buffoonish comport, and so that it becomes clear that he is very far from respected or distinguished.
If he considered himself to have contributed to a certain field or institution, minimize his efforts, minimize his achievements, make sure that he's plagiarist, or an imitator, or not the first, or not very important in the global collective enterprise.
So his workplace, for example, is not as important to his workplace and in his workplace as he claims to be.
Make sure the court knows this and make sure he listens in as you explain to the court that he is a nobody, that is a cog in the machine, that is just a low-level employee who nobody cares about or listens to.
Narcissists will absolutely erupt like a volcano. What did you accomplish? What did you study? What businesses did you manage? Is it true that you went bankrupt three times? Is it true that your daughter doesn't talk to you? Is it true that this is your third marriage?
In other words, the previous two ended up in failure. So would you call yourself a successful person? Really? Where? In which?
Do you think the children consider you a good father?
Did you ever talk to them about it? Did you ever talk to them at all? What kind of time do you spend with them? Is it quality time or you do what you want to do during this time?
You were last seen with this and that, implying that he doesn't have good taste. His discernment is dubious, etc.
Undermine, minimize, criticize, contradict, disagree, do all this calmly, do all this based on evidence, do all this embedded in the context of a narrative and you will win.