I tried being a “mirror” to narcissists. Here is what happened.
Spoiler alert: don’t.
Well first of all, you might have guessed already what the first danger is, if you’re thinking of making the same social experiment: you could lose yourself (or more accurately, parts of yourself). I’m happy to say it didn’t happen to me, but I’m stubborn as a bull, so there’s that. If you believe in the 4 temperaments: I’m a textbook choleric. Intimidating and chronically alone? Aye. But that’s the downside. The GOOD side is I have a super strong moral compass which is non-negotiable under any circumstance. Not even bribed, not even if I’m bullied, not even under torture, not even to a god. Most people aren’t like that (and don’t get me wrong, I am not saying you should. There are downsides. Read it again). So, maybe don’t follow my footsteps.
Instead, I invite you to listen to my experience. It will spare you from trial and error.
First, it was to my mother.
This one wasn’t fully intentional, I’ll admit. It’s very hard to, ya know, be BORN with a fully formed sense of self. Usually we decide on it growing up, tweaking and adapting it along the way. So if you have the misfortune of living with a problematic parent, your core values will suffer.
The good news is you don’t need to keep suffering forever. Nothing in this life is fixed or permanent.
If you live with a narcissist long enough — and if you’re able to summon enough coldness to assess the dynamics from a DETACHED perspective — you’ll notice their assessment of you doesn’t make sense.
I’m not just saying it’s wrong (but yes it is, they’re very bad at reading people). It’s also illogical. One day they will say one thing about you; the next day they’ll say you’re the opposite. And another day, they’ll say something completely unrelated about you that doesn’t add up either. This is how I learned that she was projecting some of her own stuff onto me — she wasn’t SEEING my real flaws, because, simply put, I can’t be one thing AND its opposite at the same time. She’d have to pick one.
If you’re an empath, you won’t notice that. Empaths get caught up in the emotional turmoil (and I don’t blame you guys. It’s tough). When you’re too connected to the emotional side of a dynamics, this is all you see: “oh my goodness, I was criticised. Why does this person feel that way”. “Oh wow, I was threatened. What is their feeling behind that?”. Am I right?
Feelings are there, for sure. And there’s a lot of value in seeing them and dealing with them. I’m not dismissing that. I’m just presenting you the other side of the coin: by default, a narcissist’s weakness is NOT in the emotional game. They make EVERYTHING about emotions. They’re GOOD at that. Their weakness is in cold hard facts. They can’t do 1+1=2, if you know what I mean (don’t take it literally).
Don’t get me wrong, they’re not stupid. A lot of narcissists are super intelligent and academically good. But by default, they do not apply this to relationships. When it comes to relationships, they go 100% by emotion. If you want to outsmart them, you have to have cold blood and detect the logical incoherences REGARDLESS of how the insults make you feel.
Just like if you step into a battlefield and some harmless pawn taunts you, it’s not a good idea to take the bait. There’s bigger fish to fry.
For example (not at all the only thing I saw, but ONE of them — I don’t want this article to become a book), she loved calling me “disobedient”. Preferably at random moments when it was unwarranted, in the most hurtful way, so that it’d sting and I’d make something to change (or kiss her boots more). Especially as a fragile innocent child, hearing that, it was super painful.
Gradually, though, I grew numb.
Another favourite hobby of hers was to try and isolate me from everyone else, in a very manipulative and indirect way, so that I wouldn’t notice it was her fault and thought people just “didn’t want” to hang out with me. She wanted me all for herself, she was jealous of any friends, boyfriends, even PETS I had (I won’t get into animal torture and abandonment here; unnecessary. But it happened, multiple times). So of course she wanted to isolate me.
And in one of these attempts, she said something I’ll never forget. Not because of the trauma, but because it made me see through her. She said “you’re too naive, people are bad and will be a bad influence. I can see you obeying them without question. I just want to protect you”.
…obeying them without question…
It kept echoing in my head. How could that be true? Suddenly, the emotion was gone. If I was “naturally” so disobedient, if it was such a fatal flaw I had, impossible to address because I’d forever be that way… Why was she saying the opposite now? I thought to myself “oh. I see what’s going on here”.
Suddenly, I felt no more shame. I felt no more guilt. This all-powerful parent figure, standing tall, dictating reality to me like a sargeant… vanished. She became smaller and more helpless in my mind’s eye; A mouse I could choose to step on if I felt like it.
Cold-blooded? Aye. But this is what it took for me to open my eyes.
You see… an empath in my shoes, at this very moment, could have gone through an identity crisis. Luckily, it didn’t happen to me. A lot of people judge me for being so merciless and caustic, so unwilling to “feel what others feel”, and that’s fair enough, but back then, this flaw is what saved my sanity.
I’m not bragging. I’m not feeling superior to anyone. I’m saying I was born a warrior and know how to navigate war (aka, narcissistic and psychopathic dynamics). But nobody deserves war. I don’t glorify it. I just navigate it and try to minimise it for everyone’s sake. This makes me bad at being personable and nice, but life is full of tradeoffs I’m afraid. And I can learn; I can evolve. Being bad at something isn’t a life sentence. Nothing is fixed or permanent.
Dear stalkers (not the followers. Just those who hide in the shadows): I choose my words very carefully. Go on. Use what I said against me. No, really, do it. Underestimate me away. See what happens. If you’re so confident I’ll hand you useful stuff, test that. You’re butthurt? You want war? That’s Tuesday to me. I was born into it. Come be my puppets by all means. As long as you keep being overly confident that what you judge useful is in fact useful, I feel safe and sound.
Like Alanis Morrissette would say, “isn’t it ironic”. Sometimes, in order to have useful empathy (and avoid the self-defeating kind of empathy), you need to NOT be an empath. That’s true in war, apparently.
After all, this incident made me understand my mother more. Agree? No. Surrender? Never. Just understand. It’s what distinguishes a good warrior from a mediocre one: the moment you open your mind to where the enemy is coming from, you have an edge. This requires, on the surface, abandoning your smugness a wee bit. The Picts would agree. Look them up.
Anyway, I realised the logical disconnect, and firstly I started rebelling against her guilt trips and ultimatums (which turned out not to be ultimatums because she wasn’t REALLY strong; just bluffing in hopes I’d keep believing it). And this is what made me her scapegoat during teenage years. But although I was living my truth, the situation at home was quite miserable.
I grew up some more, became a young adult and tried a different approach:
I saw she was fragile deep down, so I decided to try and show her what I saw.
Ya know everything I said until now? Well, now things will go south. Above, you’ll find valuable lessons. Below, a cautionary tale. You can go as far as understanding a narcissist, but you CANNOT (and I’ll repeat: YOU CANNOT) inspire them to develop self-awareness.
Are they impaired in the brains, perhaps? Well, I can’t tell. I am no neuro doctor. But what I can say is they opt out of self-awareness to some extent. It is, at least in part, a choice. They make this choice in early childhood and stick to it.
…But nothing is fixed or permanent. Or so I believed.
If you ever confront a narcissist, you’ll have to deal with rage. Every single time. You learn not to do it, and it isn’t even because of fear — it’s exhausting. I, too, knew that. I wouldn’t simply confront her head-on. My plan was, instead, to mirror some of the flaws I wished she would address in order to become a better person. After all, if she projects so much (I thought), maybe I could try to INTENTIONALLY act as a mirror?
There’s this technique in Chinese martial arts, particularly Shaolin wushu, where you disarm a person by stepping out of the way and giving a helping hand with the move they’re already doing. Instead of resisting, you encourage — too far. They lose balance every time.
In a more metaphorical sense, usually if you pretend to agree with someone who isn’t seeing how wrong they are, and you take it to an exaggerated extreme level, they’ll have an “a-ha” moment and feel like a fool.
Usually. Except if it’s a narcissist you’re dealing with. A narcissist will go WITH YOU to hell and back because they refuse to reconsider what they’ve already decided on. They can’t. Their entire [disordered] personality is at stake.
It’s as if (let’s use the fighting metaphor again) you made them lose balance, and instead of reconsidering the strategy or trying a different strike like a normal person would, they just started stumbling towards you and pretending it’s totally planned and totally fine and there was no defeat whatsoever. Whereas a mentally healthy fighter focuses on what’s ACTUALLY not working, a narcissistic one will instead try to gaslight everyone into believing what was clearly a defeat is somehow not. They don’t care about truth. They don’t care about efficiency. They don’t care about obtaining anything real, learning anything new, improving in the craft — they only ever care about maintaining a fake image where they’re already perfect, have always been perfect, and will forever stay perfect.
Specifically, when I pretended to be as insecure as her in areas of my life that were exactly the same as hers, (she DID suddenly turn me into a golden child for that, don’t get me wrong, narcissists love feeling like they have power over someone — and rewarding apparent submissiveness) the penny never dropped. She’d just focus on my flaws that were “contributing to my problem”, never had a moment of “wait a sec- I’m also like that, am I not? This is relatable”. No. Never. Sometimes she’d advise me, other times she’d be insensitive and say I was overreacting, or went into oppression olympics with me (which, in this case, didn’t phase me, because I was LYING lol), and all your other usual narcissistic stuff. She’d never look within, even though I was standing there as a mirror, clear as day, playing her OWN character like an actor for her to watch.
It was a massive waste of time.
The same proceeded when I tried mirroring other narcissists.
I’ll tell you one story. If you follow me, you know there are more. I tried this mirroring game with every person who presented narcissistic traits, up until very recently. The result was always the same.
There was this fella in a filmmaking community who often would come to me seeking validation for his crappy footage. And by crappy, I don’t mean “a wee bit below average”, no, I mean drunkenly shaking camera, wrong lens, pointless angles, bad lighting, bad sound kind of crappy. Everything was always justified: oh, he was just starting out and didn’t have money (but somehow, making videos with decent planning using the smartphone he already had was not something he’d consider? He needed flashy equipment he could only partly afford? Why exactly?). Oh, well, planning would serve no purpose because he was alone in it (but somehow, asking like-minded friends was not something he’d consider? Why exactly?). Ah, there’s no storyline or point to his videos because it’s “supposed to be unique”. He’d come talking at me (yes, talking at) justifying all these things before I could even ask a question. I won’t diagnose him or anyone, I don’t know what (if any) personality disorder he had, but he for sure had narcissistic traits. So I knew better than to ask or say anything he wasn’t prepared to hear. Narcissistic people are fragile. I resorted to just digging real deep for something to praise in his work and say that, and hope he wouldn’t look for me with that topic again.
Wrong. Sooner or later, there he was again, trying to brainwash me into becoming an enabler. It’s a theme with narcissists, they always think I’m willing to enable them when in fact I’m studying them to try and see through the bullshit. I used to think it was personal, but now I’m after realising it isn’t. They aren’t just bad at reading ME. They’re bad at reading EVERYONE. They replace truth with wishful thinking; of course they’re unwilling to see people’s reactions for what they are, JUST IN CASE it will be anything other than praise. Oh, no. God forbid! So fragile…
Well. I realised this guy was super insecure and desperately trying to bury his insecurity behind a façade of flashy stuff. I tried mirroring that. Ya know, music is my hobby, and sometimes I sing. I’m 100% aware I’m an alto and I’m okay with that; But I experimented with pretending to not be ok, to make a point. I started “venting” and victimising myself to him because I “wish I was a soprano, but hey, wait, I think I can already reach some high notes. Listen. Are they good? What do you think?”
He told me exactly what I wish he would tell himself. He wasn’t even tactful, just went straight to the point: “my god, Lucy, are you stupid or what? Why wishing for something pointless if you already have this different asset you could build from instead. Wtf stop wanting to conform to what people will approve or admire. Ugh”.
Today, I laugh at the memory. At the time, I almost cried. Not at the criticism — it wasn’t me he was criticising, it was my dramatisation of himself, lol, why would I care. But I almost cried with frustration. I couldn’t get this person, who at times was a super good friend, to Fucking. Rethink. And. Learn. Ugh!
Maybe denial is part and parcel of narcissistic attitudes. You can’t have one without the other.
The reason you can’t get a narcissistic person (diagnosed or not, fully narcissistic or just some traits) to become self aware… For good, through mirroring, or for worse, through calling them out… Is they are resistant to the outcome.
They do not want to BECOME self-aware.
The problem isn’t that they’re a bit too emotionally messy and need more tact. The problem isn’t that they can’t take feedback and need to learn things more indirectly (because if this second alternative was true, therapy would easily work for them; but no. It’s difficult. They often give up). The problem is not in the MEANS. It’s in the ENDS.
They’re proud of their narcissistic traits. They’ve brainwashed themselves to think they should protect a disordered thing that is in fact hurting them. They’ve decided to side with the sickness and abhor the medicine.
This is why I refer to war when I talk about narcissists. It’m not being petty, I’m being cold and objective. I’m adding 1+1 and arriving at 2. Life with them IS a never-ending war. Forget winning, forget losing — the problem is deeper: you can’t make it stop. It’s never-ending. It goes on and on and on. If you’re not defeated by strategy, you’ll be defeated by exhaustion.
This is why no contact is the only answer. By going no contact, you’re stepping out of the battlefield. And by leaving this battlefield, looking at it from afar, you’ll see it’s fake. It was just a game of chess. Even if you’re naturally a warrior, life has real battlefields for you to try. Don’t settle for a stupid game.
