Why It’s So Difficult To Communicate With A Narcissist

Because of their personality structure and relational paradigm, a narcissist makes communicating with them feel like a treacherous, uphill climb — or even downright impossible.

In a personal relationship, healthy communication involves the following elements:

1. Open-Heartedness: When speaking with someone, you should welcome their emotional experience into your heart, empathising with and truly absorbing the experience they are conveying through their words.

2. Shared Humanity: Through channeling empathy and allowing space for the other person to express authentically, you find opportunities to share in their humanity. Good communication involves deep attention paired with emotional attunement. Sometimes it involves simply sitting with the other person’s heavy emotions for a moment. Other times it means taking delight in the other person’s experience and being happy for them without needing validation.

3. Mutuality: Nobody dominates the floor. Each person is afforded the emotional space and attention to share, yet possesses the emotional intelligence to know when to stop and invite the other person to contribute. Ultimately, this achieves far more than balancing who gets to speak. By allowing the other person to contribute, your perspective is enriched, which awakens new insights and ideas, which then feeds into the other person when their turn comes. This form of synergy spirals upwards, creating a bountiful exchange which evolves each person’s way of thinking, widens their perspective, and enriches their soul.

4. Clarity of Intention: Healthy communication comes without hidden agendas. There is no subtext. Both parties are clear on why they are communicating. Above all, the communication must serve both parties, not just one. For example, the communication can be about resolving a conflict, debating or exploring a philosophical idea, deepening the bond or simply passing time. Regardless of the intention, clarity and integrity is key.

Now let’s look at these four elements when communicating with a narcissist:

1. Open-Heartedness: A narcissist’s heart is shut tight. Whenever you try to express an emotional experience to them, that tightness grows unbearable. The narcissist’s soul is saturated with trauma, and the more emotional resonance you ask of them, the more discomfort they experience. The narcissist usually responds by interrupting you and swiftly turning the attention back onto themselves. Otherwise, they dismiss, ridicule or downplay what you are saying, aiming to sabotage and short-circuit the emotional depth of your communication.

2. Shared Humanity: Humanity threatens the narcissist’s ego, as it forces them to sink into their body and soul, which is where their trauma lies. The narcissist does seek out common threads between you both, however, this is purely a jump-off point for them to switch the focus of the conversation back onto them. For example, if you express that you had a difficult day at work, rather than attuning to your emotions and providing you space, the narcissist might nod and abruptly declare how it has been a terrible week for them also, and then carry on from there, leaving you hanging and blocked in your expression as shame washes over you.

3. Mutuality: A conversation with a narcissist is always lopsided. A narcissist will typically avoid the need for open-heartedness by engaging you in a monologue. A narcissist may also attack you with a machine-gun-level assault of words, forcing you to listen intently while trying to squeeze in your contribution. If you manage to wrestle back the stage, the narcissist will pay close attention, but only to find a gap where they can wrestle the control back.

4. Clarity of Intention: A narcissist’s default intention is to gain narcissistic supply. They will entertain your intention to exchange ideas, deepen the bond or resolve conflict, but this is pure theatre. The narcissist looks only to lure you into providing them with adulation and emotional energy, without them having to give much in return. This mismatch in intention is what makes a communication with a narcissist feel frustrating and ‘off’. Often you walk away from a conversation with a narcissist with an uneasy sense of sadness and betrayal. Of having been used.

Furthermore, a narcissist may be undergoing some form of emotional pain. Perhaps they have been triggered by someone or something, are having a bad day, or feels offended by something you did. In this case, the intention behind their communication may be either to punish you, or to covertly syphon their negative emotions into you. In this case, they will use subtext to achieve their goal.

The narcissist’s false self is the gatekeeper of their empty soul, controlling what gets in and what doesn’t. Gripped by repressed childhood trauma, the narcissist is forever vigilant, scanning for any hint of you creating authentic feelings in them, which might expose them to their vulnerablity.

Instead, the narcissist analyses and categorises all communication to ensure it is sanitised and limited while providing jump-off points for them to hijack the interaction, before weaponising their words to syphon narcissistic supply from you.

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Browse more of my articles:

Narcissistic Relationships | Knowing The Narcissist | Abuse Recovery | The Narcissistic Family| Exploring Narcissism | Borderline & Histrionic

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