Keep in mind that boundaries are your way of saying: “This is who I am. This is where I plan to go.” And sticking with your decisions. So when you set boundaries, they may intimidate you by saying, “Well, I’ll tell you what—if you want to do something like that, you’re just going to ruin everything for everybody else. You’re just a selfish person. You’re definitely not a team player.”
They’ll try to make you think that having boundaries is a bad thing. But in fact, it just means, “I have a definition of myself.”
“No, it’s a bad thing. It just means you’re a very disruptive kind of force around here.”
And then a seventh trick I put down here—one that, in this modern day and age, with the word narcissism being so white-hot—they’ll actually accuse you of being a narcissist.
They’ll say, “Well, you know what? I’ve been reading up on this whole thing about narcissism, and you’re a narcissist. You’re just terrible.” Because, to them, narcissism or being a narcissist is just a dirty name that you give to somebody. It’s their classic projection—they’re putting it on you.
Now, over time, as these narcissistic individuals come up with these different tricks to try to make you look problematic, they have one end game: they want to wear you down.
So eventually you’ll start thinking, “Forget it. I don’t want to argue with you. Why should I bother? It’s not worth the effort for me to try to take my own initiatives.” They’re thinking, “Good. That means I win. You lose.”
And then if that does indeed happen, you wind up losing yourself. You wind up becoming a person that you don’t particularly like. For example, you may have a lot of dysregulated emotions like anger and agitation. You suppress a lot of what you really feel. You can become susceptible to anxiety or depression. Maybe you withdraw from other individuals, and you can just become generally negative and cynical.
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