evile

Well, it’s going to be your fault, of course. So much punishment for you. There will be blame and shame, namecalling, screaming and crying until all hours of the night, while you try to fix the situation, comfort your narcissist, attack your parents for being cruel and insensitive to your new honeybunch, and on and on and on.

Next, the narcissist will share with their friends, followers, and flying monkeys the ‘fact’ that you are an abusive a-hole who was raised by abusive a-holes.

Therefore, the narc-logic goes, if you love your narcissist, you will eventually agree to never see your parents again. And of course you must agree to a long list of other reparations and groveling-type behavior in order to make it up to him/her. Meanwhile, the bad-mouthing and smear campaign continues.

Just a funny coincidence, I’m sure, but the narcissist will also have ‘bad experiences’ meeting your friends, your coworkers, your sporting buddies, your nerd fan group, your church friends, or basically any social group you may belong to that may be able to give you a break from the abuse and help you get calm, centered, and focused on your own happiness again. Anyone and anything that might snap you out of the narcissist’s mind-control and remind you of who and what you were will be erased from your life, one by one.

One by one, she/he will have a ‘bad time’ with every single person whose company you enjoy and whose opinions you value, and one by one you will drop them all in a vain effort to keep him/her happy and to keep her/him from punishing you time and again for your failure to 'protect' and 'defend' him/her from them.

Eventually, you will have no friends and no support system and your only connection will be the narcissist, who will dictate the terms of reality to you so unrelentingly that you will happily agree that the sky is green and the grass is blue just so that you can get some peace and quiet and the abuse will stop for just a little while.

What fun!

On the other hand, I mean, it’s possible that your parents are actually terrible people. Have they treated every new love interest poorly when you introduced them? Do your friends like or trust your parents? How do your parents treat the SO’s of your other siblings, if you have any? It’s important to look for patterns of behavior in all people, not just the ones you feel may be disordered.

In closing, let me break it down for you this way: if you have family telling you that there’s something wrong with your new sweetheart, and you have your sweetheart telling you that there’s something wrong with people you’ve grown up knowing and have a long history of (hopefully) love and trust, what is the most likely to be true or factual? That the new person is lying, projecting, gaslighting, and conducting a smear campaign, or that your entire life up to meeting them was a fabrication or a long-con by your parents who were secretly A-holes all along?

You should give yourself some time to stop and think all of this through before deciding next steps in your relationship with this person, seriously.

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Editing to add: Posts tagged 'quora' were originally my answers to peoples' questions on quora.com. They were monetized but I am giving them away for free here.

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