Now let me share my recent experience with a narcissist cab driver. I booked a cab, I had to go somewhere, normal cab booking, and nothing seemed wrong in the beginning. But then when I was tracking him looking at the application, he already changed the status of the booking. He made it seem like he had picked me up, I was in the car, and then he drove a couple of kilometers, which I was like, “Maybe there might have been some traffic jams, some congestion, I don’t know.” But when he arrived, the base fare was not what it was supposed to be. It was $2 more. Not that it mattered a lot to me, of course not. $2 is not a big thing, but I wanted to know why is it different. I simply asked him a question, “Why is the base fare different or more?” and it’s at that moment he got the biggest narcissistic injury ever. He was taken aback; it was as if I had stolen something big from him or I had physically hit him or I had done something terrible to him.
He got really angry, he started breathing heavily, his face turned red, and it’s at that moment I recognized what I was dealing with quite instantly, and I knew what I had to do. Guess what I did first? I checked in with my body because my natural response as a narcissistic abuse survivor is to panic and to react to the situation. I said, “Nope, we don’t need to do that. Let’s disempower him the right way.” I relaxed my body first, I sat in the car, I was quite stoic, blank.
He couldn’t guess what I was going through. He was becoming threatening, indeed, and I had planned to trigger the safety button if it had gotten worse. But because he was under surveillance, he was subtly aggressive. So, he started saying BS under his breath, and he was saying stuff that I didn’t care about, and he was saying, “It’s not thousands of kilometers that we have to drive; it’s only $2.”
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