So, like many, you love your narcissist. You don't want your narcissist to walk away. You want him to remain in your lives, because when you are with your narcissist, you feel much more alive. You feel that the world is full of colors. When he is away, when he is absent, when he had abandoned you, the world becomes black and white, dull, boring, predictable.
The narcissist brings into your life excitement, thrill, novelty, adventure. It's very difficult without the narcissist.
The narcissist actually reflects an idealized view of you. The narcissist makes you, in some ways, love yourself, or, at the very least, love your life. And this is highly addictive.
So, I'm going to teach you how to keep the narcissist, how to not lose your narcissist, how to make sure that you spend a long time with your narcissist, as long as you wish.
But before I do so, a disclaimer. In 1995, I am the one who invented the no-contact strategy. Yes, I'm the guy who invented no-contact. And for well over ten years, until 2004, I paid a very dear price for this coping strategy, because the entire profession, psychologists, psychotherapists, marriage counselors, everyone was attacking me. And they attacked me because they said that the no-contact strategy is cruel, is unnecessary, is wrong.
Today, no-contact is the standard advice. It's the mainstream coping strategy. Today, you go to a therapist, a counselor, anyone, and they tell you, well, if you can, you know, cut your losses, walk away, dissolve, dissolve the relationship, break up. And to this very day, this is by far the best advice. It's much better than gray rock and any other color of rock. It's much better than mirroring, which is a technique that I also invented. It's much better than any known method to manipulate the narcissist or to cope with him.
Just walk away. And it doesn't matter if the narcissist in your life is your son or your daughter or your husband, or even your parent, your mother, your father. Staying in touch with the narcissist is a process of osmotic, osmotic poisoning.
The narcissist is like a toxic frog. It is aesthetically enticing, but if you touch his skin, he poisons you incrementally, gradually, imperceptibly, until you shrivel and you die like a plant without water.
Why would you wish upon yourself such a fate is beyond me.
But there are some people, women mostly, whose emotional needs are such that the narcissist caters best to their internal processes. They get from the narcissist what they cannot get from any other type of person.
Maybe they have a need to be mothers and the narcissist caters to their maternal instincts because he is an eternal adolescent. He's a child.
Narcissist is a case of arrested development. Maybe they're afraid, these women are afraid of intimacy. They have a dysfunctional attachment style.
This sits well with the narcissist. His attachment style is anywhere between non-existent and dysfunctional. Maybe they're a bit psychopathic or antisocial and they like novelty and excitement and thrill and the lack of impulse control. The narcissist gives you all that in ample measure.
So some people have been conditioned by years of dysfunctional wrong upbringing to be with narcissist. There is even a subspecies of covert narcissist, the inverted narcissist, who thrives only when her intimate partner is a narcissist. She basks in the narcissist's reflected glory. She derives a narcissistic supply from her primary narcissist supply. She's like the moon to the narcissist's sun. Her light is reflected.
So you can generalize and say that no one should ever be with a narcissist on any circumstances. There are small groups of people, women mostly, who find a narcissist the only solution and a diet with a narcissist, the only viable arrangement.
So for these women, to these women and for these women, I want to give a few tips, insider tips if you wish.
Leaves from the narcissist's user manual, how to keep him, how to make him happy, how to make him stay.
And so the first thing is that having said that my advice is leave now, leave before the effects of abuse, including complex post-traumatic stress disorder before these effects become entrenched and leave him before your children begin to pay the price as well. That's my advice.
But if you insist on staying, always against the best interests of yourself and your nearest and dearest, here's a survival manual.
Let's start with the five don't do's.
There's five don't do's. If you do certain things, you incur the wrath of the narcissist, you provoke his rage, you provoke his abuse, and his abuse could be up to lethal.
You don't want the narcissist to be your enemy. You don't want him to consider you a per-secretary object. You don't want to feel that you are deliberately frustrating you.
So here's five things you should never do.
Number one, never disagree with the narcissist. Never contradict the narcissist. Never criticize the narcissist. Never, if you can, speak if you're not spoken to. Background noise. Just be there, nod your head, adulate, admire, reflect back, remind the narcissist of his grandiose moments, his accomplishments, his claim to fame, his nine minutes of glory. That's your job. You're an external memory. You're a repository of all the past narcissistic supply and you provide secondary supply. You regulate the flow of narcissistic supply in the narcissist's life.
You can't do that if you disagree with him or contradict him, let alone if you criticize him. It's bad. Never offer the narcissist any intimacy, and that includes never offer him advice, never offer him help, never offer to help him, never give him another point of view, never suggest anything, never tell him how much you love him, never suddenly hug or embrace him uncontrollably, impulsively.
Intimacy is a threat. If you offer the narcissist advice or help, it means that you're superior to him in some way. You know something he doesn't know. If you have another point of view, that means he did not consider all points of view. He is God-like. He sees everything. He knows everything. There's nothing you can contribute to him. There's nothing you know. There's nothing you see that he hasn't already long ago considered.
If you try to imply that there is, then you are challenging his grandiosity. You're undermining his self-perception and self-image. You are destabilizing the inner precarious equilibrium that took him decades to establish.
It's bad news. You're bad news. You're becoming bad news.
Intimacy does the same because when you offer intimacy, what you're saying is, I know you. Intimacy is founded on knowing the other person.
You can't have intimacy with a total stranger. Intimacy develops and evolves and is a derivative and a byproduct of getting to know each other.
But the narcissist like God is unknowable. Who are you to know him? You don't have the necessary intelligence. You don't have the necessary skills. He's above you. He's so much above you. It's like an ant trying to understand a human being.
The gap between you is so enormous. Your chimpanzee is human. I mean, there's no way you can really know him. You can guess, but you can never know.
Moreover, intimacy is something everyone does. Everyone does intimacy. Everyone in his dog does intimacy.
So if you're offering intimacy, if you're offering the narcissist intimacy, you're actually telling the narcissist, you're like everyone else. You're average. They're common. There's no bigger insult.
Narcissist react with rage to two things, ignoring them anddirectly or indirectly that they're not special.
And intimacy does exactly this. It implies that the narcissist is not special. That he is in need of something that you can't get to know him. That he's graspable. That is, you know, just human.
Narcissists don't regard themselves as human. They regard themselves as perfect machinery or gods.
So my next advice is look odd. You know, O-A-W-E, look odd by whatever attribute matters to him.
For example, if he puts emphasis on his professional accomplishments, every time he mentions his profession or his accomplishments, look as though you are thunderstruck. Thunderstruck, nothing short of thunderstruck. Look like you are adulating and admiring him, prostrating themselves before his implied divinity.
Don't be afraid to overdo it. You can be as unsubtle, as obvious, as overt and as manipulative and as exaggerated and as caricatured as you want to be.
And then narcissist will not notice. Flattery, adulation, admiration will get you anywhere and everywhere with your narcissist. He's a kid. He's a child. He's a baby.
If what matters to him is his good looks, keep telling him how handsome he is. If it's his professional accomplishments, tell him what the genius is. If it's his success with women, tell him he's irresistible. Support his delusions. Enhance them. Amplify them. Agree with them. Get yourself incorporated in them. Show him the effect that his magnanimous benevolence has on you, that his divine deity-like attributes have on you. I mean, show him how you're transformed by his mere presence. Worship him. Worship him.
Next advice. Never, ever remind the narcissist of reality or of life out there.
As reality impinges on the narcissist's sense of grandiosity. Reality hurts. Reality is injurious. Reality keeps reminding the narcissist. You're so small. You're not as smart as you think. You're making, you're fallible. You're fallible. You make mistakes.
So don't remind the narcissist how fallible he is. Don't remind him of reality.
He hates reality. He wants to divorce reality. He withdraws from reality. He has an impaired reality testing and he constructs a fantastic bubble and he lives within this fantastic bubble. He inhabits it. He resides in it. This is his sense of grandiosity depends crucially on not being in touch with reality or on confirmation bias, filtering out countervailing information, injurious data, and external notification.
When people humiliate him or insult him or challenge him or criticize him or disagree with him. He filters all this out. It's like it had never happened. Don't remind him of it.
The last don't do is do not make any comment which might directly impinge on his self-image, on his omnipotence, on his judgment, good judgment, on his omniscience, on his skills, his capabilities, his professional record, or even on his omnipresence. He knows everything. He is everywhere. He is all powerful. He is the most, most perfect, most brilliant, most handsome, most everything.
Go along with that. Conform, confirm, accept, uphold, buttress, amplify, add.
Bad sentences. Start with the words. I think you may have overlooked or maybe you made a mistake here or I don't know if you know but or you were not here yesterday so or you can't do that or you shouldn't do that. All these things are rude, injurious, challenging, hurtful, frustrating, and above all malevolent.
You become a persecretary object. You're out to get him. You're out to ruin him. Plus it makes you look stupid. I mean you're an idiot if you can't grasp his magnificence.
If you can't grasp the narcissist's perfection and brilliance, he's genius. He's a resistibility. Something's wrong with you. Maybe he made a mistake. Maybe you're not the right partner.
Narcissists react very badly to restriction placed on their freedom and to challenges to their grandiosity. Generally speaking, don't start sentences with the first pronoun. Don't start sentences with the word I. Mine. Mine. You don't exist as an autonomous entity. You have no personal autonomy. You're not independent. You're an extension. You are not separate from the narcissist. You have merged and fused with him. You are a construct within his mind. You're an internal object.
Any time you say I, it reminds him that you are outside him, that you are not controlled by him, that you may hurt him by abandoning him. Narcissists have object inconstancy. They fear abandonment and separation because they're babies. Babies fear abandonment and separation out of sight, out of mind.
Never mention the fact that you are a separate, independent entity. Narcissists regard other people as extensions and their internalization processes were screwed up. They don't differentiate properly between themselves and the world.
The narcissists in this sense are nothing short of psychotic. They confuse internal objects and external objects and you're internal. I hope you get the gist of it.
This is what not to do.
Now what about what to do? How to make your narcissist dependent on you? How to make him want to stay with you?
If you insist on staying with him, of course, which is highly counterproductive and self-destructive, but it's your choice. I respect your choice. I recognize your personal autonomy. Maybe you're not a narcissist, who knows?
So how to make him want you? How to make him never leave you?
Number one, listen attentively to everything the narcissist says, agree with everything he says. Even if he says it's evening and it's morning, it's evening.
Narcissists are never wrong. They are the only ones who can change, who can review, who can revise, who can modify and alter what they had said.
You don't have these rights. You don't have administrator rights. You are a user. You're a client, but not an administrator. So he rules the computer. You can't hack. You can't enter. You are not allowed to disagree. Even if he makes the most outlandish, egregiously insane and idiotic statements, counterfactual, you must accept them, agree with them enthusiastically and vehemently and even add to them, support them. You don't have to believe what he says. You don't have to believe a word the narcissist says, but let it slide, let it slide as if everything is just fine, business as usual.
Advice number two, personally offers something absolutely unique to the narcissist, which they cannot obtain anywhere else.
If he likes kinky sex, be more kinky than sexual. If he likes food, cook ceaselessly, a variety of cuisines, always be prepared to line up future sources of primary narcissistic supply for your narcissist because you will not be it for very long if at all.
You need to become a source of sources. You need to become a database of potentials. He needs to refer to you as he would refer to Google. You need to become a search engine. If you take over the procuring function, if you take over the scouting function, if you take over casing the joints for the narcissist, they become that much more dependent to you, which makes it a bit tougher for them to pull their haughty stuff, which they will do in any case, but much less so.
The more the narcissist is dependent on you, the less he will abuse you and the less it will take the risk that you will abandon or dump him.
Advice number three, be endlessly patient, endlessly patient. It's a child, a young child. The average mental age of most narcissists is between four and six.
So be endlessly patient. Remember your own children, if you have any. Remember when they were four.
Go out of your way to accommodate the narcissist. Keep the narcissistic supply flowing liberally and keep the peace relatively speaking.
Use child psychology techniques. Interact with the narcissist as you would have interacted with a baby. Be endlessly giving.
You may find this a very unattractive proposition, but it's a take it or leave it proposition. You have to give and give and giveand you have to be ready to receive nothing in return.
Your position is to give. Your reward, the prize, the gratification is in giving. You need to be a giving person. You need to be needed.
As Lydia Galovska puts it, you need to feel that by catering to someone else's needs, your narcissist in this case, you are the one who is being fulfilled.
And it's not altruism. It's actually a form of control, co-dependence, control via giving.
So this way you will control your narcissist. The more you give, the more he is under your thumb. The more you can manipulate.
Next, be absolutely emotionally and financially independent of the narcissist. I repeat this. Be emotionally independent, emotionally independent of the narcissist. Don't let him regulate your emotions and stabilize your labile moods. Don't make him the source of your inner internal regulation. And do your best to gradually build up financially dependence. Steal money from him and put it away.
In some countries it's called the Black Fund. You know, save money, steal money here and there. Put it away for a rainy day.
Make sure you have a reserve. Take what you need. Take the excitement. Take the engagement.
Refuse to get upset. Refuse to get hurt when the narcissist does or says something dumb, rude or insensitive. And he will. He will because he recognizes no boundaries and he does not recognize it as a separate entity. He's talking to himself. He's talking to your representation in his mind. Something that I call snapshot. You're an internal object. He can't, by definition, hurt you or slight you or humiliate you or insult you. He can't be rude. You can't be rude to yourself. Yelling back sometimes works well. This is part of my mirroring technique.
But you should reserve this to special occasions if you don't want to erode, erode the efficaciousness of this technique. The more you use it, the more it's like inflation with money. The more money you print, the less valuable the money, the more you yell back, the less it has effect. Use it on special occasions when you fear that your narcissist may be on the verge of leaving you.
Silent treatment is a better ordinary response, but it must be carried out without any emotional contact.
You must be detached. You must be cold. You must be pervious. You must be apathetic and indifferent. You must appear to be bored with him. And I'll talk to you later when I'm good and ready. And when you are behaving in a more reasonable fashion and just walk away, use manipulative techniques.
The only way to survive in a relationship with a narcissist is to counter his manipulations with yours, leverage his manipulations against him, like in martial arts.
Use the enemy's force and power and momentum against him.
If your narcissist is cerebral and he's not interested in sex, what should you do now?
Well, give yourself ample permission to cheat on him, to have hidden sex with other people.
Be discreet. Don't be injurious. Don't be ostentatious.
But you need sex. Do not deny your needs if you feel like having sex.
He doesn't give it to you. You have a full moral right to look for it elsewhere.
Your cerebral narcissist will not be indifferent to infidelity.
So discretion and secrecy is of paramount importance.
But there's a difference between discretion and secrecy and deception. Usually cerebral narcissists and their spouses or intimate partners or mates, they settle into something called don't ask, don't tell. Don't rub it in his face, but don't deceive.
There's no need to deceive. He will never, he doesn't care. He will never even ask you anything.
You go out, you come in, who cares? Who, he doesn't care who you're with.
On the contrary, by the way, he's relieved. This chore is someone else's problem, some other man's problem.
And if your narcissist is somatic and you don't mind joining in endlessly interesting group sex encounters, make sure to choose properly for your narcissist because they are indiscriminate. They don't care about sexually transmitted diseases and so on. Better to control the situation.
I know you find this particular advice very off-putting and even shocking.
What? I will participate in threesomes. I will swing with my narcissist or I will agree to kinky sex, humiliation, sadistic sex. No way.
Well, if you don't, he will go ahead anyhow, but he will go ahead anyhow without your control, without your knowledge. He will bring home diseases. He will do horrible things. He will give all your money to someone.
You must control him as a child.
The only way to control the narcissist is to co-opt him, to cooperate with him, to collaborate with him, to become a part of his world.
If he's into group sex, so should you. If he's into threesomes, you should be one of the three.
And if he needs sexual partners outside the marriage, outside the dyad, outside the diktat, then, you know, procure. Bring him your friends. Bring him some other people.
You must control the situation. They're heedless. They're very undiscriminating in respect of sexual partners.
And that can get very problematic. Not only sexual STDs, but for example, black men.
If you're a fixer, then focus on fixing not the narcissist, but fixing situations, preferably before they become situations.
Do not attempt to fix your narcissist for two reasons.
He's not fixable. And the second reason he's going to resent it really badly. He's going to create a lot of friction and a lot of conflict. And then he's going to dump you because he would perceive this as a challenge to his grandiose, constant challenge to his grandiosity.
So let it go. Let it slide. Ignore it. Focus on objectives, on goals, on situations.
Fix what needs fixing. Ignore your narcissist. Don't for one moment, delude yourself that you can fix the narcissist. It simply will not happen.
Not because they are being stubborn. They just simply can't be fixed. End of story.
Not every problem has a solution. Narcissism is one problem that has no solution, not even co-therapy.
My new treatment modality co-therapy doesn't cure narcissism. It eliminates the need for grandiosity and it destroys the false self. That's it.
If there is any fixing that can be done, it is to help your narcissist become aware of their condition that you can do gradually, gently, subtly, patiently, lovingly, compassionately, without challenging, not head-on, not in a confrontational manner, and not in a narcissistic manner. Don't be grandiose.
But you can gradually make him become aware of his condition. It's very important.
Don't go into negative implications, into accusations in the process. Don'tmake it positive psychology, not negative psychology.
It is like living with a physically handicapped person and being able to discuss calmly, unemotionally what the limitations and benefits of the handicap are of the disability and how the two of you can work with these factors with his disability, rather than trying to change his disability.
If someone is quadriplegic, the only thing you can change is the wheelchair. Change the wheelchair.
Finally, and most importantly of all, you should know yourself.
You focus too much on him, all victims focus too much on the abuser.
They refuse to see themselves and their contribution to what had happened, what is happening. They deny, sometimes ferociously, sometimes malevolently, their own narcissism and their own unsavory behaviors.
You must know yourself. It's a source of fount of power.
What are you getting out of the relationship? Are you actually a masochist maybe? Why is this relationship attractive to you? Why is it interesting?
Define for yourself what good and beneficial things you believe you are receiving in this relationship. Define the things that you find harmful, bad for you.
Develop strategies to minimize this harm, this hurt, this pain, the evil aspects.
Don't expect that you will cognitively be able to reason with the narcissist, to change who they are.
You can't negotiate with them. You can't agree with them. They break promises and contracts because they have no constancy.
You don't honor a contract with someone who faces in and out of existence. I mean, you're out of sight, you're out of mind, you don't exist. You're back, you exist.
How do you maintain continuity when you're in a permanent state of inconsistency in dissociation?
It's hopeless. Don't make agreements with the narcissist. Contracts, compacts, promises, decisions, it's ridiculous. What are you negotiating with, the four-year-old?
You may have some limited success in getting your narcissist to tone down on the really abrasive and harmful behaviors, the behaviors that affect you, which emanate from the unchangeable, the immutable, what the narcissist is, his essence.
So we can modify behavior. You can modify behavior to some extent. Don't expect too much. This can only be accomplished in a very trusting friend and open relationship.
And I want to suggest to you a few resolutions, personal resolutions, New Year resolutions, if you wish.
Resolutions are notoriously fragile and ephemeral, but victims of abuse cannot afford this cavalier attitude.
Your mental and too often physical health, they depend on strictly observing the following promises to yourself.
Number one, I will treat myself with dignity. I will demand respect from others. I will not allow anyone to disrespect me.
Number two, I will set clear boundaries and I will make known to other people what I regard as permissible and acceptable behavior and what is off limits and out of bounds.
Number three, I will not tolerate abuse. I will not tolerate aggression in any shape, form or disguise. I will seek to terminate such misconduct instantly and unequivocally.
If I can't, I'll walk away.
Number four, I will be assertive and unambiguous about my needs, wishes and expectations from other people. I will not be arrogant, but I will be confident. I will be assertive. I will not be self-effacing. I will not be meek. I will not be selfish. I will not be grandiose. I will not be narcissistic. I will not be hurting, but I will love myself. I will care for myself.
I come first in the best sense of the word.
For me to love others, I must love myself. For me to care for others, I must first take care of myself.
Number five, I will get to know myself better. I will study myself. I'll make myself into a topic of study.
I will make my, render myself my project.
Number six, I will treat other people as I want them to treat me.
That's a very ancient wisdom. I will try to lead by way of self-exam, by way of example.
Number seven, if I'm habitually disrespected, regularly abused, or if my boundaries are constantly ignored and breached, I will go no contact. I will break up. I will terminate the relationship with the abuser forthwith.
Zero tolerance, zero tolerance, first strike and you're out and no second chance would be my maxims for self-preservation.
I wish you luck with your narcissist. It's not an easy ride.
Some of you think that it's the only ride in town. You're wrong. There are many buses where this one has departed, but you insist to ride a specific bus, polluted, dirty, infected.
It's your choice. At least do it properly.