So now let’s look at a comment from one of you who’s dealt with this firsthand: ‘She heard the words “I can’t talk to you when you get too emotional” after having a narcissist rage at me when I finally broke and started crying.’ And that comment, I feel, really sums it up because that is why the narcissist was raging: to get that person to back down and to either be fearful or sad or a combination of both things. But no matter what, the ultimate goal was to get them to back down, and then they come in with, “Oh, I can’t deal with this,” which was the truth all along. They can’t deal with it. They can’t deal with the other person’s emotions. They can’t even deal with their own emotions. And they resort to these cowardly tactics to make sure that they don’t have to. And I know there’s at least one of you right now getting ready to get to the keyboard and tell me that it’s not always just rage that they use to accomplish this, and we’re going to get to that soon, I promise. But now let’s have a conversation that’s incredibly important when we talk about these cowardly tactics, and that is reactive abuse. So if you’re dealing with a narcissist of any sort, I know you’ve dealt with reactive abuse. And whether the person you’re dealing with is more grandiose or more covert, eventually, this is going to become an issue. There’s going to be some reactive abuse. And really, what this term explains, and not very well in my opinion, is that it explains when someone is baiting you into an argument. And when it’s reactive abuse, it is very covert baiting. It’s kind of almost like they’re poking at you; they’re poking at a wound, something they know bothers you, and something that you have circled back around on so many times with this same person. It’s maddening, and it’s infuriating that they would still be touching on this with you. And often, they do this in front of other people so that when you react, you look like the abusive person. And the cowardly part about this is that they do it on purpose to make you look bad. And going back to the man behind the curtain analogy, this is very much a situation where they’re trying to pull the strings and stay completely covered. They don’t want anyone to see what they’re doing. And usually, they get away with it because, by the time they’re baiting you in this way, your nervous system is on high alert, and you’ve dealt with this so many times before, and it doesn’t take much to set you off.
So I’ll share a personal story that I probably haven’t shared in years, but I think it really illustrates this baiting for reactive abuse. So when I was in a relationship like this, essentially, I always did all the cooking. I didn’t really have a problem with it, but I did have a problem with insensitivity and being overlooked. So whenever we had an audience, that insensitivity button within me would get pushed, and I have to be honest, it took me years before I actually realized this person was doing this on purpose. And that’s really the problem with reactive abuse: we become so reactive that we’re blinded to what’s really going on. But anyway, so we had this person’s family over. I made a meal for everyone, and the one thing that this other person was handling was getting the cups. And so I watched him point and count how many cups each person needed to get. So he walked over—he might have even done it twice—walked over to the cabinet, brought out the cups, and he was one short, of course. And this might have gone unnoticed if he just put the cups right on the table and everybody grabbed their own. But that’s not what he did. He put a cup in front of every person as we were all sitting around the table, and naturally, everyone got a cup except for me. Still, at this point, you’re probably saying, “It’s not a big deal.” But what did he do when he realized that he did not have enough cups? Well, he sat down to start eating the meal that I made for everyone instead of actually getting up and fixing the mistake. Because, you see, it wasn’t a mistake. He did it on purpose. And when I said something about it, I saw the change in him, and he said the words, “Oh, you’re going to make a big deal out of this now, aren’t you?” And I don’t know; even though I was very much in the thick of it at that moment, I was starting to see glimpses of what was happening. And so I decided to just let it go, even though everything in me wanted to make a big deal out of it. And yes, that is something small, and a narcissist will be quick to tell you that is something petty. But when someone is consistently overlooking you, and we’re going to get to that in more detail in a little bit, it can make you feel small and insignificant. And honestly, that’s the purpose of it. It’s an incredibly cowardly way of going about it because, just like someone can say, “Oh, I was just joking,” they can easily say, “Oh, it’s just a mistake.” But it’s a mistake that they make consistently when they have an audience, and it’s the same mistake that they make over and over and over again. And you start wondering how it’s possible that this person cannot understand this, and the answer is that they do understand it. They understand it very well. They understand it maybe a little too well, and this is why you keep ending up in that same situation.
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