You mustn’t trigger their shame all the time because if you keep doing it, it will not work. Since they are predatory and know what’s going on, if you keep pressing this button, it will stop responding. It’s like overwhelming the responder. If you give too much exposure to the stimulus, you won’t get the desired response. You have to try it intermittently, condition them intermittently. It’s like working with a child, but the only difference is it’s a spoiled child with adult capabilities who can destroy you. Tread cautiously with this technique.
Triggering shame in a narcissist is all about pointing out the difference between how they think they are behaving and how they are really behaving. You’re not putting them down. That’s not what you’re doing because if you do that, you know what’s going to happen. If you criticize them directly, you know what’s going to happen. You have to be indirect, make it more about the collective if you will, and more about their personality without making it personal. This technique requires practice, thinking, calculated moves, and a lot of testing to know what they respond to and what they get triggered by.
You mustn’t forget to do this: you have to fight them within before you fight them externally. You have to create those boundaries within yourself first before you step in and say, “I am not going to do that,” or say, “I do not respond to that voice. When you can respond in a better way and try to be more civil, I will cooperate.” Before you do any of that, you have to set firm boundaries with yourself and work on your emotional reactivity. Understand that if you are emotionally reactive and they can elicit extreme emotions, you will fail. If you feel like you’re still traumatized enough to step into the process of justifying yourself, explaining yourself, arguing with them, and defending yourself, then this is not the time for you to play this trick. You only do it when you have these four areas covered and when you have mastered your nervous system. You need to know how to stay relaxed in a calm body, maintain a determined posture, stay firm in your resolve with a flat, unemotional face, and withdraw at a bodily level while you pass this comment on and say, “I am not going to be a part of this.”
What do you think can be said to a narcissist in a very subtle, strategic, and safe way to trigger their shame, to make them aware of the incongruence between how they think they’re behaving or how they think they should be behaving and how they are behaving in reality? They think they’re mature, but when they yell and scream, it’s total immaturity. How do you think this goal can be accomplished? Drop some of the statements or things one can potentially say in the comments below and maybe you will help a ton of survivors out there. You can give them a lot of ideas.
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