So a viewer just wrote in and asked
me to do a video on some of the things
that I think narcissists are afraid of
and why I think narcissists are afraid of these things.
So what we have to understand that narcissists are really
driven by this need to run from their deep fractured sense
of self and their shame.
They don't want to touch it, they don't want to look at it,
when we're dealing with someone who's
a narcissist there's tremendous shame at the core
of their being, and they do everything and anything
to run from that shame.
And they'll go through all different types of ego defense
mechanisms to project that shame on to you
and to project their brokenness onto you,
so whatever they feel about themselves
they're actually going to accuse you of it which is all
because they live in fear.
When you're moving towards a more healthy state of mind you
are more willing to accept your shadow self,
you are more willing to accept that you have flaws,
you're more willing to say listen
my father was an alcoholic.
I am the adult child of an alcoholic.
I have been reactive, I suffer from abandonment issues,
it's been a struggle for me to accept love
and to be vulnerable with love and I've made some mistakes.
So the healthier you become emotionally, mentally,
and psychologically what ends up happening
is you move into a state of acceptance of this idea
that you're not perfect.
And you don't recoil anymore because you're not perfect.
There's a sense that it's OK I'm a work in progress.
And hopefully you get to a point where
you realize that your environment has definitely
affected you, and that just like a cell in a petri dish when
placed in a corrosive environment
the cell does not evolve as in a healthy way,
because of the environment, it's same thing with people.
So hopefully you get to a point you realize
like, wait a minute like who I have become
is very much a product of who I've been born to
and my environment right.
And so that helps to eliminate shame.
When you're dealing with someone who has narcissism,
they can't get there.
And it's really sad because if a narcissist could get there
and they could investigate why they do what they do then they
wouldn't be a narcissist right, and they wouldn't be out there
projecting their fricking craziness onto everybody
and wreaking havoc everywhere they go, lying to people,
destroying people's lives and not having any empathy for what
they do to people, it's just terrible lions and tigers
and bears oh my.
So I wanted to talk a little bit about some things
that I think narcissists are afraid of.
And I can tell you that I was raised
by a dad who has very high narcissistic traits,
and for a very long time I didn't
know what I was dealing with and I did not
know that my father was really very fractured.
The facade that he projected was one of steal.
Like nothing bothered him, he was a tough guy,
and he would go toe to toe with anybody.
I just always saw my dad as someone
who was a strong person.
And then over the years when my father was confronted
with change, when he had to change jobs,
for instance my father was completely depressed,
I looked out my back window one day he was in my backyard
actually crying.
My father was so calm with the fear and the insecurity
of having to go to work at a company
because he had on his own business his whole life
and he had security there.
And he didn't have to kowtow to anybody even
to about been down to anybody, even to act acquiesce
to anybody.
He was the tough guy.
And suddenly he was the--
he was like everyone else.
So he wasn't special.
So I can tell you that in my own life
I've watched this play out.
So the first thing I want to talk about
is how narcissists do not want to appear like everyone else.
Narcissist fear they are like everyone else.
Narcissist fear that people in their lives
see them as ordinary.
A narcissist feels good about feeling special.
A narcissist their sense of self is rooted in this idea
that there's something special about them
that rules don't apply to them, there's
just something about them that makes them different.
They're misunderstood whatever the case may be,
I can tell you from my own personal experience
that narcissist fear that they are like the average Joe Schmo,
and they fear that you don't find something special
about them.
We have to remember that a narcissist sense of self,
the false self is rooted in this idea
that there is something unique about them,
and they really need other people to mirror back
this illusionary self to them, otherwise they can't survive.
In my case, my mother constantly reinforced this idea
that my father was awesome, even when he wasn't being awesome.
So what I learned as I grew up was like, wow she is like--
it's like she runs around a life as she holds up a mirror.
And the mirror is you're amazing, you're wonderful,
you're so special, you're so handsome, you're so great,
and you're so terrific.
It was all the time.
It was actually sickening.
I can tell you firsthand that narcissists
need other people to believe that they think that they're
special because that is what they're
holding onto inside their own head,
that they actually are special.
So another thing that I experienced in my own life
is that narcissist fear the crowd turning on them.
So when you think about the great lengths
a narcissist goes to in a family to like smear campaign
and triangulate.
What just recently happened-- well, not so recently,
two years ago-- in my life is that, for the first time,
my three children went up against their dad.
They were a unified wall.
They didn't agree with him on something.
And he kicked them out of his home, told them to get out.
And they have not spoken to their father since.
It was the idea that he could not get my son
to go against my daughter.
And he couldn't get my one daughter
to go against the other daughter.
When my middle daughter confronted her father,
he turned to my son and said, what do you think about it?
And my son said, she's right.
And he blacked out.
My ex-husband blacked out, according to my children.
I was not there.
But according to them, he blacked out.
He went into a rage that the kids, in his head,
turned on him.
He wasn't able to manipulate them against one another.
And that drove him mad.
And so what the narcissist fears is
that the people that he's been manipulating
or she has been manipulating, they
fear this crowd flipping and becoming a unified force
in their truth in the perception of this person.
And so when the mask starts to slip,
the fear is that the crowd is going
to turn on the narcissist.
And so the narcissist fears the crowd turning against them.
Another thing that I think is very interesting
is that a narcissist works very diligently
to try to convince the people in their lives
that they are responsible for nothing.
So if you think about what they're going for--
and this is the way I look at it.
So what is the agenda of the narcissist?
Oh, the agenda of the narcissist was
to make me feel responsible for their actions
or their inactions.
So then what a narcissist really fears
is you or me not taking accountability
for their actions.
So a narcissist fears that the people that they're
trying to manipulate, they are not
going to take responsibility for what the narcissist did, right?
So what they want is for you to feel responsible
for why they're late or for why they lied, right?
The narcissist wants you to take responsibility for it.
And so what they fear is you saying, no more,
I'm not taking responsibility for this.
Another thing that I find super, super interesting
is that narcissists go to great lengths
to convince you that you can trust them.
So what a narcissist will fear is you distrusting them.
Because the minute you call them out on their crap,
right, it's like this whole ball of yarn begins to unravel.
It's like, wait a minute.
I don't trust you.
So a narcissist wants you to trust them, right?
They love bomb you.
They trauma bond you.
They make you believe that they are
the person that you can trust, at least in the beginning,
right?
They're everything.
No one's going to love you as much as them.
You should never trust anybody more than you would trust them.
And they have your best interests at heart.
It's you and them against the world, right?
So they create this idea that they are super,
super trustworthy.
And so if you think about it, because they
go to great lengths to make you trust them,
then that also means that they fear you not trusting them.
So a narcissist is afraid of you acknowledging the fact
that they are a narcissist.
They are afraid of you distrusting them.
Because once you distrust them, a lot of things happen.
A lot of things fall apart.
You stop holding the mirror.
You stop reflecting back to them, oh, you're so awesome.
You're so smart.
And everybody's just jealous of you, bleh, bleh, bleh, bleh.
You stop reflecting that nonsense.
And then you also stop being manipulatable.
The narcissists can't manipulate you anymore, right?
Once you no longer trust the narcissist,
the gig is up, right?
You are not going to reflect back this false image to them.
You are not going to allow them to rage on you.
You are not going to take responsibility
for things that are not your fault.
You are not going to isolate yourself anymore.
Once you don't trust a narcissist, the gig is up.
Narcissists fear criticism, big time.
Now, they fear criticism from just about everybody, right?
So if you are their main squeeze and you start criticizing them,
that just means that you're not drinking the Kool-Aid
or as much as the Kool-Aid is they want you to drink.
It means that, uh-oh, they're not mirroring back
to me this illusionary self, this false self
to the extent that I need it to be mirrored back to me.
That's bad enough.
But when someone outside of your circle, when
a family member or a co-worker criticizes the narcissist, what
it means is that this narcissist has not
been able to secure a sense of supply
from these people in the workplace,
let's say, or in the family setting.
It means that the people aren't buying their nonsense.
It means that they are not going to reflect back this false self
to the narcissist, the false self the narcissist needs
to believe in, in order to survive, right?
Because otherwise they would implode.
And so they are threatened by people
who criticize them or are critical of them
because it means that they just--
they're not able to manipulate the people in their lives
and secure from them what they need to not implode.
I can tell you from personal experience,
narcissists fear abandonment, believe it or not.
Narcissists cannot make it on their own.
It is like they absolutely need a partner that they can project
on, that they can blame, and they
can get this mirrored-back sense of self from.
Narcissists ultimately fear abandonment.
They fear you breaking up with them.
They fear you discarding them because what does that mean?
It means that you don't see in them what
they need people to see in them in order for them
not to implode.
It means without this mirror, they
are left to deal with what's going on inside of them.
When they are working off of the personality
and the energies of someone else,
it's like they're distracted from what's
going on inside of them.
And so I think it's really important
that any of us who have been in a narcissistically
abusive relationship understand that narcissists
fear abandonment.
When I was in a relationship with my ex-husband,
who I think, in my own humble opinion,
has some narcissistic traits, for sure,
definitely a passive aggressive man,
what I could not wrap my mind around was this idea
that he would put me down.
And he admitted to me--
he actually said this out loud--
that I thought that if I beat you down, you'd never leave me.
When I finally started to put all the pieces together,
I realized that that was because he feared abandonment.
And because he feared what was lurking below the surface
and he never worked it out, and he was never
going to touch those wounds inside of him,
right, he was stuck in this plane of it can't be me.
It has to be her.
And I'm never going to look within and figure myself
out and look at myself and admit that I have these flaws.
But I don't want to be abandoned.
So in that paradigm, right, in that mind construct
and that mind scape, what choice did
he have but to think that it was appropriate--
although I think it's ridiculous because it
defies logic when you really run it through a logical filter.
If you want someone to be with you,
you don't put them down, right?
But that's what narcissists do.
But if you think about why, they're
doing that because they fear abandonment.
And they're doing that because they're not
going to work out their stuff, like a co-dependent will
once a co-dependent understands they're co-dependent.
They're not going to work their stuff out
like somebody who even though has
come from a traumatic background and even though they
know that they've got stuff to deal with,
they're willing to look at it.
They're not going to do that.
So if that's their reality, and they're never
going to look within, and they hate the truth,
they fear being vulnerable, they hate being seen as average,
and they need for other people to feel responsible
for their deficits, in that mind construct,
then they're going to be abusive because they can't not
be abusive.
They can't be vulnerable.
They can't show you compassion.
They can't have empathy for you.
So in a relationship with a narcissist,
you're going to experience nothing but abuse.
And a lot of that abuse is fueled
by the fear of abandonment, by the fear of truth,
by the need to have someone mirror back to them
this false version of themselves.
Because at their core they are so shame filled,
and they're so lacking, and they're so full of fear.
But they'll never touch it, right?
And so because they never touch it,
or they never want to touch it, they
have to go through all these ridiculous-- jump
through all these ridiculous hoops and abuse other people
just so they never have to touch those wounds.
And as soon as you're sick of them or they stop--
they get bored of you, right, they're onto someone else.
They discard you, and they're onto something else.
And once that person gets sick of them,
or they get sick of that person, they try to hoover you back.
Narcissists don't want to be self-reflective.
They don't have the ability to be self-reflective.
They don't want to be self-reflective.
So that means they're constantly going
to be looking for a person to abuse them,
and that's what keeps them and their victims in these abuse
cycles.
There's no way.
Narcissists just continue the abuse cycle with someone else.
It's very, very sad.
But the more that we understand victims of narcissistic abuse,
the more we understand what motivates them,
I think the greater chances we have of healing more deeply.
So I hope that this video about some
of the things that narcissists are afraid of
has inspired you to dig a little deeper
and maybe think about how this information applies
to your own life.
And hopefully it can help you move forward
and heal more deeply.
My name is Lisa A. Romano.
I'm the Breakthrough Life Coach.
I'm an expert in co-dependency and narcissistic abuse
recovery.
And I am the creator of the 12-week Breakthrough Coaching
Program.
And it's a program that helps people
heal from narcissistic abuse and co-dependency.
So essentially what we do is we take you
from this place where you feel powerless
and through a 12-week program, through online classes,
through daily interaction with me and my team on Facebook,
you gain the insights and the tools,
and you begin to re-program your mind for health.
You learn life skills that you didn't learn as a child
because you were growing up in chaos.
Not your fault, dear one, not your fault.
And I'd be honored to be your guide in that online program.
If you would like to read or listen to one of my books
for free, you can do so by clicking one of the links
below.
Don't forget to check me out on Instagram, podcasts,
everywhere.
And if you like, join my free Facebook group,
an online support group on Facebook.
Namaste, everyone.
Until next time.
Bye for now.