Sheep And Wolves: Or How Narcissists, Sociopaths, And Psychopaths Try To Turn You Into An Obedient Herd

2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43

Destructive people - carriers of malignant narcissism, psychopathy and antisocial traits - often demonstrate inappropriate behavior in relationships, as a result, exploiting, humiliating and offending their partners or partners, family and friends.

They use a variety of distracting maneuvers designed to misinform the victim and shift responsibility for what is happening. Narcissistic individuals such as psychopaths and sociopaths use these techniques to avoid responsibility for their actions.

We list those not-too-clean techniques by which inadequate people humiliate others and silence them.

Gaslighting

Gaslighting is a manipulative technique, which is easiest to illustrate with such typical phrases: "There was no such thing", "It seemed to you" and "Are you crazy?"

Gaslighting is perhaps one of the most insidious manipulation techniques, because it aims to distort and undermine your sense of reality; it eats away at your ability to trust yourself, and as a result, you begin to question the legitimacy of your complaints of abuse and mistreatment.

When a narcissist, sociopath, or psychopath uses these tactics against you, you automatically take their side to deal with the resulting cognitive dissonance. There are two irreconcilable reactions fighting in your soul: either he is wrong, or my own feelings. The manipulator will try to convince you that the former is completely out of the question, and the latter is the pure truth, testifying to your inadequacy.

To successfully resist gaslighting, it is very important to find support in your own reality: sometimes it is enough to write down what is happening in a diary, tell friends or share with a support group. The value of outside support is that it can help you break out of the manipulator's distorted reality and see things for yourself.

Projection

One sure sign of destructiveness is when a person is chronically unwilling to see their own shortcomings and uses everything in their power to avoid responsibility for them. This is called a projection

Projection is a defense mechanism used to supplant responsibility for one's negative character traits and behavior by attributing them to someone else. Thus, the manipulator avoids admitting his guilt and responsibility for the consequences.

While we all use projection to some degree, clinical narcissistic specialist Dr. Martinez-Levy notes that narcissists often use projection as a form of psychological abuse.

Rather than admitting their own flaws, flaws and wrongdoings, narcissists and sociopaths prefer to blame their own vices on their unsuspecting victims in the most unpleasant and cruel way.

Instead of admitting that it would be useful for them to take care of themselves, they prefer to instill a sense of shame in their victims, shifting responsibility for their behavior onto them. In this way, the narcissist makes others feel the bitter shame he feels about himself.

For example, a pathological liar might accuse his partner of lying; a needy wife may call her husband “sticky” in an attempt to make him dependent; a bad employee may call his boss ineffective to avoid talking truthfully about his own performance.

Narcissistic sadists love to play blame shifting. Objectives of the game: they win, you lose, the bottom line - you or the whole world are to blame for everything that happened to them. Thus, you have to nurse their fragile ego, and in return you are pushed into a sea of insecurity and self-criticism. Cool thought up, huh?

Solution? Do not "project" your own feelings of compassion or empathy onto a destructive person and do not accept their poisonous projections onto yourself. As manipulation expert Dr. George Simon writes in In Sheep's Clothing (2010), projecting one's own conscience and value system onto others can encourage further exploitation.

Narcissists at the extreme end of the spectrum tend to be completely uninterested in introspection and change. It is important to break off all relationships and connections with destructive people as soon as possible in order to rely on your own reality and begin to value yourself. You don't have to live in someone else's dysfunction cesspool.

Hellless meaningless conversations

If you hope for thoughtful communication with a destructive person, you will be disappointed: instead of an attentive interlocutor, you will receive an epic brain blockage

Narcissists and sociopaths use stream of consciousness, circle conversations, personalization, projection, and gaslighting to confuse and confuse you when you disagree or challenge them.

This is done in order to discredit, distract and upset you, distract you from the main topic and make you feel guilty for being a living person with real thoughts and feelings that dare to be different from their own. In their eyes, the whole problem is your existence.

Ten minutes of arguing with a narcissist is enough - and you are already wondering how you got involved in this at all. You just disagreed with his ridiculous claim that the sky is red, and now all your childhood, family, friends, career and lifestyle are mixed with mud. This is because your disagreement contradicts his false belief that he is omnipotent and all-knowing, which leads to so-called narcissistic trauma.

Remember: destructive people do not argue with you, they, in fact, argue with themselves, you are only an accomplice of a long, exhausting monologue … They love drama and live for it. Trying to find an argument that refutes their ridiculous claims, you are only throwing wood on the fire.

Don't feed the narcissists - better feed yourself the understanding that the problem is not with you, but with their abusive behavior. Stop communicating as soon as you feel the first signs of narcissism, and spend that time doing something enjoyable.

Generalizations and unsubstantiated statements

Narcissists do not always boast of outstanding intelligence - many of them are not used to thinking at all. Instead of wasting time and sorting out different points of view, they make generalizations based on whatever you say, ignoring the nuances of your reasoning and your attempts to take into account different opinions.

And it's even easier to put a label on you - this automatically negates the value of any of your statements.

On a broader scale, generalizations and allegations are often used to devalue phenomena that do not fit into baseless social prejudices, schemes and stereotypes; they are also used to maintain the status quo.

Thus, one aspect of the problem is inflated to such an extent that a serious conversation becomes impossible. For example, when popular personalities are accused of rape, many immediately start screaming that such accusations are sometimes false.

And, although false accusations do happen, they are still quite rare, and in this case, the actions of one person are attributed to the majority, while a specific accusation is ignored.

Such everyday manifestations of microaggression are typical of destructive relationships. For example, you tell the narcissist that his behavior is unacceptable, and in response he immediately makes an unfounded statement about your hypersensitivity or a generalization like: "You are always unhappy with everything" or "You are not satisfied with anything at all," instead of paying attention to the actual problem.

Yes, you may be hypersensitive at times - but it is equally likely that your abuser is numb and callous most of the time.

Do not deviate from the truth and try to resist unfounded generalizations, because this is just a form of completely illogical black and white thinking. Behind the destructive people who scatter unfounded generalizations, there is not all the richness of human experience - only their own limited experience, coupled with an inflated sense of self-esteem.