How Does a Narcissist React To Your No Contact?
It is in the first few weeks that you can expect that the narcissist will probably try their hardest to get you back.
They will either contact you themselves, or they will recruit family members and friends to do their dirty work.
Whoever it is, they will not care for or consider your side of the issue.
The narcissist will try to get you back by guilt trips, reminders of duty and obligation or by making you feel afraid.
At no point will they, or their minions, accept any responsibility for the situation.
Instead, they will invalidate you, and your reality.
I say the narcissist will try their hardest to get you back, but there won’t be very much effort at all on their side.
Narcissists are lazy and can’t be bothered to try too much with other people, especially if those people aren’t serving them anymore.
Instead, they will find other people, and invest their energy in them; people who are easy to manipulate and serve their purposes.
If you are the scapegoat, the chances are that the narcissist already sensed you pulling away from them. They might have tried for a short while to get you back, but they’ll soon work out that you’re not going to let them get away with it anymore.
They will have found another scapegoat to take your place. It might be another family member, or a friend. Whoever it is will serve the narcissist exactly as they want.
The narcissist will always make sure that they are looked after.
After some time, and the first days, weeks or so have passed the narcissist will probably go silent.
If this was their modus operandi, the silent treatment, it’s meant as a punishment, to get you back into line.
Or their silence could just be because they can’t be bothered and are investing their time and effort in people who don’t have a clue how they are being manipulated and abused (yet?).
Whatever their reason, be sure that their silence won’t be forever.
It may be a day, week, month, 6 months or even 10 years later, but the chances are that the narcissist will not leave you to enjoy the peace.
They know when you are growing stronger, they can sense it. When the peace and freedom from them that you needed to heal, is helping you process and move forward, they have to do something to stop it.
They attack.
It could be that this attack coincides with a death, an illness, any life-stresses, a birthday or the holiday season or any time when you are most likely to feel vulnerable.
The narcissist hopes that they can get you at exactly the right moment.
In that moment you might be feeling guilty- the standard go-to emotion of a scapegoat child of a narcissist -or sad that you might have hurt your parent.
It overtakes you, the sensation that you have caused hurt to someone that you love and care about.
Perhaps the narcissist themselves, or one of their minion flying monkeys, will contact you. They appear to be concerned for you, hurt and confused about your silence.
However, this is all an act.
A narcissistic parent can just walk away, without even a backward glance.
Sadly, they lack empathy and compassion for others, and are only concerned for themselves. They are very selfish and self-absorbed. None of these things allow for the true and deep connections that they could have with their family members or friends.
So, whilst you are thinking that they are hurt, and maybe sad about your silence, they will carry on with their life as if nothing had happened.
If they speak to other people about the situation, it will be done with a complete emotional coldness and disconnection.
There will be no evidence of any love or care. Almost if they were discussing a neutral topic, like the weather.
Anyone who is not habituated to narcissistic abuse, will think that their behaviour is strange. That’s if they stick around long enough to listen, which most normal people wouldn’t chose.
The narcissist will not use the language, tone, body language, facial expressions, gestures of someone hurt or saddened by the situation.
In short, they will not heartbroken, like a loving parent would be if their child had cut off from them.
But if they were a loving parent they wouldn’t be in this situation!
A loving parent would never have let it get to this stage, they would do whatever they could to make it work. Of course, this depends on the desire of their child to make things better too.
A narcissistic parent will take no responsibility for the situation.
Instead, the entire failure of the relationship will be blamed on their child.
It will be as if the narcissist does not participate in the relationship, much less take responsibility for their 50% of the problems which led to the break down.
The narcissist will simply shrug their shoulders and say ‘it’s not my problem’, and expect that their child can magic up a loving and caring relationship on their own.
A relationship depends on two to make it work. The foundation of a good and healthy relationship is a basic level of love and respect.
With a narcissist, they demand all the love and respect and give nothing back and then complain when their child has had enough.
A narcissist will make excuses to explain things came to such a final point.
Their excuses could be the unreasonable behaviour of their child, their child blaming them for everything, their child just disappearing, they joined a cult, or their new partner or friend was a bad influence, or they have mental health issues or a addiction.
Whatever the excuse given, the narcissist will be entirely blameless for it. Entirely disconnected, as if they were discussing someone else’s child with their problems and issues and with the same disinterestedness and lack of emotion.
The narcissist will, of course, act like the perfect parent.
They may give explanations of the sacrifices that they feel that they made for their child, expecting the sympathy of whoever is stupid enough to listen to them!
These ‘sacrifices’ may be the usual things that a parent makes for their child, but a narcissist is so focused on themselves they can only see how they didn’t get what they wanted.
It will be a special effort of the narcissist to try to boost their image as a good parent, even when the situation shows differently. So, they may exaggerate their ‘proof’, to an extreme or ridiculous level just to try to reassert their image.
Their image is more important to them than a relationship with their own child. They will fight harder and longer to maintain that image than they ever will for their child.
The narcissist’s other children will be portrayed as having a great relationship with their parent and between themselves.
However, this is never the case.
A narcissist will only ever see what they want to see. They have a special filter that only sees what boosts their image and their ideas about themselves.
The narcissistic family is one of competition, between the other parent and children for the ‘love’ of the narcissist.
It is a toxic setup, one based on fear, because each family member fears the abandonment of the narcissist.
This is never going to be a place where each family member can relax in peace, safety and security. And this in turn creates problems between family members.
The narcissistic parent loves drama and the attention and energy they get from others. So, they will exploit these fears and the lack of safety to cause issues and problems.
Narcissists cause huge divides between their children.
The roles for the narcissists children are: the golden child- the favoured one, the scapegoat-the one to be punished and the lost child- completely ignored.
This treatment, depending on the child, and if they are being rewarded or punished for their behaviour, creates jealousy and resentment between the siblings. This is encouraged and nurtured by the narcissist, after all they don’t want their children uniting against them.
So, whatever their role, the chances are that the children of a narcissist will not have a healthy and good relationship with their siblings. They will bicker, fight or be passive aggressive, with a continual undercurrent of competition in an atmosphere of fear.
The scapegoat, the one that got away, will be treated as an ungrateful and difficult child.
When their child was born, and their role as scapegoat established, the narcissist started their smear campaign against them.
These are the lies, like being a rebellious or selfish child, having mental health issues, or addictions, or being controlled by a partner or friend that the narcissist starts and continues during the scapegoat’s life. These lies mean that the word of the scapegoat is discredited if they ever speak out about the narcissist’s abuse.
This, for me, confirms that there is a level of awareness in a narcissist, an awareness of their abuses of their scapegoat. If they didn’t have this awareness, they wouldn’t begin the smear campaign from the scapegoat’s birth.
The narcissist suspected that the day may come.
The day when the scapegoat realises the truth of the setup, speaks out and breaks free.
It’s very confusing once you realise, because you trusted the narcissist or else you wouldn’t have anything to do with them.
You assumed that they had a least a tiny amount of love and care for you.
The scapegoat can be so desperate to see something like love, they take the smallest action and blow it out of proportion to mean that they are loved and cared for.
When you realise and start pulling away, the narcissist knows. They can sense the tiniest shift in you, they have a sensitivity to it because they NEED a scapegoat.
This is the point when the narcissist’s true toxicity comes out.
Instead of wanting to understand and take responsibility for their part in the relationship breakdown, or apologise for their actions, they ramp up the manipulations.
The narcissist will use all their tools of manipulation, they know exactly what works and doesn’t because they know your weaknesses.
It’s a fight to keep their scapegoat, not to work things out with their child.
The narcissist is only concerned with getting what they want and winning.
The child is only concerned with sorting out the issues within the relationship, so that they can experience the love and care that they want and need.
The narcissistic parent and their child have very different desires.
For the narcissist it’s about someone to dump all their toxicity and bad feelings on and that person taking it. It brings them relief, although it’s temporary.
If that person questions it, or doesn’t want to take it anymore, then they are not serving the narcissist anymore. And that’s when the narcissist walks away.
Once they are not getting what they want from someone, they are not interested any longer, even if it’s their own child.
For the narcissist relationships are transactional, like a business deal and your participation in the deal is presumed, never a conversation.
The deal is you do exactly what they want, take all their crap and they give nothing in return. And you are expected to never question it and be grateful for it!
As far as the narcissist is concerned the relationship is on their terms or not at all.
Having conversations with more than one narcissistic mother with daughters who have gone no contact, it struck me how cold narcissists are.
There is no connection there, no deep emotional tie, no profound love or care for their own child.
It’s as if their toaster is broken: the same slight irritation because they’ve got to find a new one. The same disinterestedness because they are no longer getting what they want, no longer being served.
So, if you are considering reconnecting with a narcissistic parent because you’ve heard that they’re confused or heartbroken, think twice.
The moment you start thinking with your heart, you are vulnerable. You remember those little scraps of love thrown your way- maybe they did care.
But would you be here now, no contact, if they were the parent you wanted and needed?
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Originally published at https://comebackbrighter.com on October 4, 2022.