Reactive Abuse (The Narcissist’s Trap)

This was a query from my SANA Q&A Series:

Q: “Hi Meredith I’ve been torturing myself in my mind thinking about the ways I acted far below my personal expectations of myself in my relationship with my ex narc.

“I am a kind gentle loving person who enjoys connecting on a feelings level with my friends family and loved partners.

“I am often shy and introverted but enjoy a good laugh and a night out occasionally and truly care about the feelings of others but things went to the extremes when I was with my narc. For example he did insist we stay out longer at the bars than I’d want. I’d have an extra beer or two then out of the blue he would very covertly gaslight and provoke with meanness to get a reaction from me in front of everyone. And he’d sit back and smirk while I would look crazy for suddenly getting upset and ruining a fun night.

“This type of poking and provoking happened constantly at home. He would start an argument just for his own entertainment. Say all sorts of backhanded compliments, insults or say blatantly unkind and hurtful things or outrageous lies. And when I would get upset he would escalate the situation to a point I would snap. I would say horrible things back at him. I broke kitchen china or grab his stuff and throw it in the yard and order him to leave and then I’d cool down and we would kiss and make up. He loved his power and being able to make me act in ways I never would unless push to breaking. He loved to create these dramas.

“I would feel horrible later and apologize but still feel shame because I felt I had been abusive to him and he would tell me I had been when it suited him but intellectually I know that he had set out from the beginning to make sure a fight took place.

“I’ve learned this term reactive abuse and it’s helped me understanding the dynamic but sometimes I still feel like I was abusive without intending to be. Can you shine some of your insight on this topic in regards to healing and forgiving oneself. Thank you so much.”

A: What has just been described is basically how the devil gets you to do his bidding.

The oppressor pushes you and provokes you until you respond with aggression or violence in some way.

Then you become the bad guy, not only in his eyes but in your own when you go against your own integrity, when you go against what you actually would want to do, and what you actually want to be. Maybe you even get in trouble with the law with some other unpleasant consequence of your actions. It’s a double whammy and this is a big trap.

They get you to focus on your reaction to the abuse and not the abuse itself.

The only part that you have control over is how you react. What was described here are the parts where the querent lost control. She lost control of herself. She let him provoke her. She let him push her. She let him go to the point where she broke. The querent just totally lost control over herself then regretted it later, having gone against her integrity.

When you realize you’re behaving out of the normal, when you’re looking at your behavior and you’re like “oh my god that’s not me/I would never do that/whoa what am i doing”…

That’s a major red flag. Stop right there and start reevaluating because something is not okay if you’re looking at your own behavior and you’re recognizing this is not me. That’s when you need to really evaluate.

Get a grip. Reassure yourself, something is really out of the normal. Ask yourself, what’s really going on here?

When you behave outside your integrity you’re going to feel worse about yourself. Your self-respect is going to crash along with your self-worth, your self-esteem and now guess what? Now you’re trapped deeper in the abuse cycle. It’s all part of the game. That’s why they wear away at your self-esteem, your self-worth, your self-respect.

The worst part about it is they trick you into doing it yourself.

You’re the one who chooses your actions and your attitude. That’s all your responsibility. It’s no one else’s responsibility.

It’s easy for us to say well “he made me feel… he made me do…” No. He did whatever he did, but we choose how we respond to that. We choose. It doesn’t mean he’s right. It doesn’t mean that wasn’t wrong what he did. Doesn’t mean he’s not at fault. But it means if you respond to that with an equal back and forth then you’re just becoming as guilty as him in the game.

It’s all part of the game. It’s how they tricked you into doing that and then the worse you feel about yourself the least likely you are to leave. They know that. They know they have to wear you down because you have to feel down if you’re going to stay in that abuse cycle, if they’re going to keep you trapped there. So if you want to get out of that you have to get back into your integrity. You have to start acting as you would act as yourself. Be yourself.

They love this the drama, the poking, the fight, making you uncomfortable or upset. It’s all for their own entertainment.

Maybe you’ve seen that it’s like a dopamine thrill for them, especially for psychopaths. They have an extreme need for the dopamine thrill. Watch out for dopamine seekers. Watch out for people who need to do crazy stuff to stimulate their dopamine. They seek out the dopamine spikes. It seems like they feed on getting those thrills by messing with other people. In fact, it seems to be one of their favorite forms of supply.

I’m not saying every dopamine seeker is a psychopath but I’m saying it very often goes hand in hand. Some other person who’s not could be just desperately trying to feel something intense. Maybe they’re trying to feel something they sense that they need. Maybe they’re seeking some kind of rush. Or maybe something else is going on in their life that’s awful and the dopamine activities are what make them feel alive. Maybe everything else in their life is just utterly boring and they can’t find meaning in life. This would usually be a temporary dopamine-seeking during that period of time when something else is going on in their life.

Watch out the gaslighting that the querent described in this dynamic — especially in public. Notice how they do things like where he would trap you into this idea of staying instead of calling Uber, going home by yourself and just letting him stay. You don’t have to stay there. That’s a choice.

When he’s like “oh we gotta stay for another beer or two”. You can say “okay no problem, have fun. See ya at home.” Then you call the Uber or you drive yourself home if you’re not drinking, or take public transit but you don’t have to stay there. Recognize you have that choice. You don’t have to stay there. That was his invitation and you accepted the invitation and the invitation was a trap. Then he would start putting you down, he would say those little subtle things like the gaslighting.

In public they do this thing which is like dog-whistling. There’s an expression “dog-whistle politics” where a politician will drop certain words like neuro-linguistic programming. It has a meaning to certain people, people who are looking for that. They’re looking for the certain language and they know the politician is speaking to them.

Well, the way I describe dog-whistling in this kind of situation where it’s an interpersonal relationship and you’re in a group of people. This could be out with your friends, at the bar or whatever and this definitely happens in family gatherings. The whole family’s there and then your narcissistic parent or sibling or aunt or whomever starts dog-whistling at whomever they’re abusing. Maybe they were using their child or their sibling and they’ll say something that everybody else at the table or in the room thinks is a normal thing. It didn’t mean anything to them. This could happen at work in environments when you’re sitting in a meeting and someone is abusing you. They’ll say something and it’ll just drive you insane. But it’s a dog-whistle so only you can hear it nobody else can hear it. It just sounds like regular words to them, nothing out of the ordinary, but it’s driving you insane because you know they’re abusing you. They’re digging, they’re provoking, they’re trying to get you to react and then if you react everybody thinks, “oh my god what’s wrong with her or what’s wrong with him?”

They didn’t get it. They didn’t hear the dog whistle. They didn’t know that was a setup for you. So it’ll make you feel like you’re going crazy and if you respond to that you could look like you’re the crazy one. That’s why it’s called crazy-making.

The querent uses the phrase “torturing yourself”. You feel like this because you’re thinking about it all, you’re going over and over and over it again. The thoughts start and then emotions meet them and the downward spiral crash comes. It is torture. And then there’s the self-sabotage and all that too. The only way out of that vicious cycle is self-forgiveness. You have to transform the regret that you have.

So what would you do if you could do that over? When you think about what you did just think about one example at a time. Think about the last time you were out in public when he provoked you and you did this or the time you broke the kitchen china or the time you threw his stuff outside. Start with one example, maybe the most pressing one doing that’s the most emotional right now.

Look at it what happened, look at the decisions you made. Recognize where you went wrong. If you could reverse-engineer that, if you go back what would you do differently instead of throwing all this stuff out the lawn, instead of smashing all the kitchen china? Instead of whatever you did, what would you do differently if that were happening right now, if you had a do-over, though there are no do-overs in life, but if you had a do-over what would you do differently?

Then start to run that through your mind and imagine yourself doing that instead. Imagine if you had done this instead of that. Imagine yourself actually doing that now in your mind. You are transmuting the mistake into a lesson. Release the heavy feelings of what you wished you did differently.

It sounds like what you’re really upset about right now, what is really torturing you is your own actions, the actions that you took.

So what do you wish that you did differently? Envision that in your mind and start to overwrite the old program. Instead of beating yourself up, you’re teaching yourself. “If I’m ever in a situation like that again, this is what I’m doing instead. I’m going to empower myself, I’m not accepting that invitation to to put myself at that level to react at that level. I’m going to take the higher path. I’m going to do this instead”. That’s how I recommend you deal with the torture that you feel from regrets about things.

We all do what you’re describing here. You’re not alone.

We all did things outside of our integrity even if it was just something that we accepted. Accepting something is an action. It’s saying okay. Maybe it looks more like an inaction like the enabling piece where you just let something happen. It’s an action. It’s when you’re telling yourself, “okay I’m not going to look at that. I’m just going to pretend like it’s okay. I’m just gonna accept that and we’re just going to go on.”

Sometimes that’s what we’re most angry about. Sometimes it’s not an actual active thing that we did, rather it was more of a passive thing — the acceptance. Sometimes like you’re describing, there are actual actions that we took against our own integrity because we let the crazy-making drive us crazy.

So when you have regrets there’s a specific way that I teach people how to reprogram them. I have an exercise called Reprogramming Flashbacks and Self-talk.

Reprogramming the Flashbacks and the Self-talk is very similar. I describe the three primary kinds of flashbacks and self-talk that you’ll want to reprogram. Then I’ll show you, if it’s this kind, use this reprogramming, if it’s that kind use another. One of these is the kinds are the things we regret. It’s very short, less than 20 minutes, and it teaches you how to do this. It’s not a guided visualization, it’s a lesson teaching you how to use this technology in your own mind to rewrite the things that you regret, to rewrite the things that were out of your control, to rewrite the things that were in your control and to rewrite the negative self-talk that’s constantly going through your mind, that’s keeping you stuck and trapped in that reality of the past. This is one of the bonuses also that’s included in my Self-Care Mastery Course which is going to help you to get to the roots of this dynamic so you don’t repeat it.

We can sit here and we can just keep putting it outside of ourselves and we can go online and we can learn everything about the narcissist, the psychopath about the borderline, whomever. And that might be temporarily relieving to understand why and what is that madness. When you first start looking at this information on narcissistic abuse, it’s relieving to see. But keep in mind that all of that is outside of you and and you can learn all you want about these topics, but that doesn’t mean you’re not going to keep repeating the same patterns and it doesn’t mean that you’re going to heal the root of the issues that you’re dealing with.

That is the work that we can do for ourselves. Cultivating next-level self-love. We can’t change or fix anyone else. We can only heal ourselves and lead by example. It’s up to others whether they will change or not. It’s entirely up to them. The only thing that we can change is ourselves and when we change ourselves, everything in our lives start to change.