Can you reconcile with the narcissist? Forgiveness is one thing,
but reconciliation? In this video, we're going to get into the subject.
Now first, for those of you who are new to my channel, I'm Shaneen Megji.
I'm a transition coach.
Welcome to my YouTube channel
on Toxicity is not your destiny.
My mission is to help people navigate toxic relationships and environments
in their lives from a biblical, practical, and spiritual perspective.
So if you like this video, take a moment, click that subscribe button.
Click that bell because every week, I'm going to be bringing you a new video
to empower you and navigating toxic relationships and environments.
So now let's dove into this subject.
In a previous video, I talk about what forgiveness looks like with a narcissist.
Jesus engaged in radical forgiveness
with his abusers, the ones who are responsible for his death on the cross.
But does God ever call us to reconcile with our abusers?
After all, is it God all about restoring relationships?
It's a tricky response.
The reason is because narcissism is not a black and white issue.
Narcissism falls on a continuum so you can
have someone who's healthy right smack in the center.
Then further along the line,
you have someone who may have some narcissistic traits and even further down
the line, someone who may be one of the several types of narcissists that exist.
And then when you get to the end
of the spectrum, you may be dealing with somebody who is
a malignant narcissist and someone who is going into being a psychopath.
So because of this continuum, there is no black and white answer.
And I'm not going to give you a yes or no answer.
But what I do want to share are some
observations from the Bible about God's mind on the matter.
So just to start, I believe it is possible for some people who have narcissistic
traits, who may have some capacity for self-reflection,
who have some heartfelt empathy to be able to reconcile.
It's really for you to get God's wisdom and guidance on that.
But then again, I wouldn't call those people narcissists. In today's video,
I want to talk about those people who are more malignant narcissists,
whose traits of narcissism are more deeply entrenched in their personality.
So these would be people who don't self-reflect but blame-shift.
They lack empathy.
They lie and manipulate.
They are cruel, vindictive, cutting and abusive.
And these traits persist across many situations, across most relationships
in the narcissist life over a long period of time.
So you might have gotten out of such
a relationship because it was so toxic, so abusive and so destructive.
And so now that you're out, you might be wondering,
is there any hope that maybe one day I could be reconciled with this person?
Because after all, if that person could just shed their
narcissistic traits once and for all and become more Christlike like
who they're called to be, they would be a great person to have around.
Maybe you've thought, well, if there's a break for a year or two
or maybe several years, maybe down the road, eventually we'll reconcile.
One day we will be in each other's lives again.
And there could be something there.
Maybe God is just going to work on our
hearts during this time apart and make us better people.
And, you know, sometimes we have that hope
that things can change, even though the ending was so terrible and traumatic.
Maybe the break or separation could lead
to something good in the relationship later.
So let's take a look at a biblical perspective on this issue.
I want to look at the story of Jacob and Laban.
Now, this story is a great example of how to navigate a toxic relationship.
If you don't know the story,
I would encourage you to pause this video right now and read Genesis 29-31.
and then come back to this video.
So this is the story about Jacob leaving his family and encountering his uncle Laban.
Laban had the traits of a malignant narcissist.
He was definitely close to being psychopathic.
He had a lot of the traits such as lying, deceitfulness, manipulation, cruelty,
intimidation, lack of empathy, and treating his family and workers in his household as
possessions and extensions of him rather than human beings.
So I'm going to give you a few examples
of how Lavon's psychopathic traits manifest in his relationship with Jacob.
So the first thing you'll notice there was this beautiful love bombing that was
happening at the beginning of Jacob's encounter with Laban.
I don't know if I'd call it beautiful,
but it was love bombing, where Laven greeted him affectionately
and said to him, Your bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh.
Now consider the context of Jacob's life
when he encountered Laban.
Jacob had been rejected by his natural father, Isaac
for most of his life.
The Bible said that Isaac favored the older brother Esau over Jacob.
So Jacob definitely had that father gap in his life.
And he was definitely ripe for an older
man like Laban to be a father-figure to him.
And Laban must have taken advantage
of that at the beginning of the relationship.
And yet that relationship blew up in such a terrible way at the end.
The second thing is that Laban promised to give his daughter, Rachel,
to Jacob in marriage for seven years of Jacob's service.
So Jacob kept his end of the agreement,
but when the wedding night came,
when Jacob was due to get the wife he had worked for her for all these years.
Laban instead gave his daughter, Leah, instead to Jacob.
So Laban cheated and deceived Jacob
and made him work for another seven years for the other daughter, Rachel.
Another way you see, Laban's psychopathic traits manifest is
in his lack of respect for his family members as human beings.
He treats them as objects.
He treated his own daughters as property.
He couldn't have cared less that he stuck
his oldest daughter, Leah, in a marriage where she would be unloved
and rejected by her husband, and a rival to her sister. Who would want that life?
And fourthly, we read that Laban was
a cruel master, changing Jacob's wages over and over.
So he never kept his word.
He always gave Jacob the short end of the stick.
And it didn't matter that Jacob was his
very nephew, his very flesh and blood and even a son-in-law.
And the man was actually caring for his daughters and grandchildren.
None of that factored in into the way that Laban treated Jacob.
Jacob and his wives had to live
with Laban's abuse and cruel treatment for decades.
And some of you watching may have been
in relationships for that long with family members or spouses.
Those narcissistic evil traits just become
normalized because they're so entrenched in the person.
And maybe for a while you had no clue about narcissism and narcissistic abuse.
And then one day you just happened to be
reading up on it, and you're like, "Oh my goodness, it all makes sense."
You realize that the textbook on narcissism that you were reading
actually describes the person you're with to a T.
It's like that person's photograph could have been inserted on the front cover.
And so now finally,
you're getting an explanation on everything you could never clearly
articulate, but where you knew something was deeply wrong.
So now you became awakened and you've probably entered into an unraveling
process. In this story with Jacob and Laban,
Jacob served for 20 years.
And, you know, Laban lies to him, deceives him, intimidates him.
So by the time God tells Jacob that it's
time to leave, Jacob is too terrified to do it.
God had to get the message to Jacob three times before he finally took action.
So you have to realize that Jacob at this point is really putting his trust in God.
He has no idea if he leaves, if his uncle is actually going to kill him
or take away all his family by force and his flock and his possessions.
So in the end, Jacob chooses to flee
when Laban is not aware of it. It takes about three days for Laban to catch on.
So that is a typical response of someone who has been through narcissistic abuse.
The thought of leaving is terrifying
because you know that if you cross the narcissist, they see you as their
enemy very, very fast and then they set out to destroy you and see to your demise.
So after Jacob flees,
Laban gathers all of his household into an army to pursue Jacob.
But amazingly, God intervenes.
God encounters him in a dream and says,
"Be careful not to say anything to Jacob, either good or bad", basically telling him,
"Keep your mouth shut, Laban. Don't say anything.
Don't do anything."
That was pretty incredible to have
that intervention from God, because I'm sure if God did not intervene
or say something to Laban, Laban would have surely taken everything
back from Jacob and sent him away empty-handed.
Who knows the kind of damage he would have inflicted on Jacob?
Because that's what narcissists do.
They lack empathy.
They play the victim. They blame shift and they tend to send people out destitute.
They will extract everything they can.
And that's the kind of character Laban was.
It's very telling at the end of the story. Jacob
finally get so angry by his uncle's arrogance and maltreatment,
he gets the courage to confront him and says to him, "What is my crime?
How have I wronged you that you want me down?
I have been with you for 20 years now.
Your sheep and goats have not miscarried, nor have I eaten rams from your flocks.
I did not bring you animals torn by wild beasts.
I bore the loss myself.
And you demanded payment for me for whatever was stolen by day or night.
This was my situation.
The heat consumed me in the daytime
and the cold at night, and sleep fled from my eyes.
It was like this for 20 years
I was in your household.
I worked for you for 14 years for your two daughters and six years for your flocks.
And you changed my wages ten times.
If the God of my father, the God of Abraham and the fear of Isaac
had not been with me, you would have surely sent me away empty-handed.
But God has seen my hardship and the toil of my hands.
And last night he rebuked you.
So this was likely a healing moment
for Jacob, where he could finally use his voice and express himself and lay out
the truth about what his last twenty years with Laban was really like.
And Labor's response is interesting.
He says, "The women are my daughters.
The children are my children, and the flocks are my flocks.
All you see is mine.
Yet what can I do today about these
daughters of mine or about the children they have borne?"
So even in Laban's response, he never takes responsibility.
He never admitted that he treated Jacob
unjustly or that Jacob rightfully earned everything he had.
Instead, Laban played the victim.
He blame-shifted and deflected,
making it seem as if Jacob stole everything from him.
When it comes to a narcissist,
they will always impose their version of reality on everyone else.
They refuse any other reality
that conflicts with theirs, and that is how they manipulate.
That is what you call gaslighting.
That is what Laban did in his response to Jacob.
He didn't acknowledge anything Jacob said,
but reframed everything according to his reality.
And that's how a narcissist operates.
And that is how Uncle Laban operated with Jacob for twenty years.
So how did that relationship end?
Will God instituted a boundary to be set up.
Both parties set up a pile of rocks and basically made a vow to each other
that neither party would cross over to the other side to cause harm to the other.
Each party was to stay on their side.
This was a barrier that God instituted so that Jacob and his family could move forward
into the new life God was calling them into and never have to look back again.
That's a pretty radical ending, I'd say,
for a twenty year relationship, which was never really a relationship.
And it wasn't just the ending
of the relationship between Jacob and Laban, but also between Laban
and his daughters and Laban and all his grandchildren, all his extended family.
This goodbye was like a death or a funeral
in many respects. And sometimes relationships have to end that way.
It is biblical. It's not wrong.
And God himself can be the one orchestrating it.
And I believe He does orchestrate endings like that when we find ourselves
in relationships with certain toxic people who persist in harmful ways.
You may have been in a relationship
with a very toxic person, a psychopathic person, just like this man,
Laban, and then God freed you from that relationship.
So now it's over whether you had to cut ties with a family member or a close
friend or whether you had to get a divorce or a separation.
You know, the Bible says God hates
divorce, but also that he hates oppression and abuse and injustice.
So you may have had a terrible ending
with a toxic person and you struggle with feeling bad about it.
there's a stigma somehow attached to being estranged from someone.
Like people might say to you, "Couldn't you have tried harder to get along?"
There's this temptation to feel this guilt or shame, especially if people around you
don't understand narcissistic abuse or any kind of abuse and the measures you had
to take to get free from that destructive relationship.
Sometimes you might even feel bad because you think, "Well, doesn't God love family?
And doesn't he want relationships to be strong?"
But it's not always the case.
God is a God of restoration and redemption,
but he's also a God of division. That doesn't get preached much in church.
But Jesus did say that he didn't come
to bring peace to the world, but a sword, a sword that was separate family members.
So you need to understand that not everything can be warm and
fuzzy in life. When Jesus comes, there will be massive disruptions,
massive separations and divisions. You need to know that just because someone
is family, does it mean that you stay with them if they're being abusive.
That's no reason to stay in a relationship with an abusive person.
Sometimes we feel this inner pressure
to believe there is something we can do to fix it, that maybe there could be
a change, because after all, there are so many scriptures referring
to God, restoring things, redeeming things, reconciling people.
So we always want that happy ending.
And sometimes it's hard to swallow that an ending has to be a permanent separation.
But I'm just telling you right now, sometimes that is what's needed and it's
about not going back any more to that place.
It's about having the same attitude as
the apostle Paul when he said, "But one thing I do,
forgetting what is behind and straining toward what is ahead."
It's also like following the same instructions that the angels gave Lot
and his wife when they had to run out of Sodom and Gomorrah and never look back.
Sometimes that's how it is leaving narcissistic abuse.
You just have to set that boundary in that relationship and cross over
into a whole new space in your life and never look back.
A good video that goes with this one is
the video called Why Should You Not Pray for the Narcissist?
I believe that video will give you some
helpful insights about moving forward with your life, in addition with this video.
So I hope these insights were helpful for you.
If you know someone who is in an abusive
relationship and trying to navigate, share this video with them so that they,
too, can get the insights in this video and how they can move forward.
If you have left a toxic or abusive
environment and you're in a season of transition, I have a gift for you.
It is a training on three key ways to navigate the difficult transition.
These are keys that brought a massive
breakthrough in my life when I was going through a difficult transition.
I have included the link below.
So this brings me to the end of my video.
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I appreciate you. Until the next time!