How To Love Your Narcissist And Still Protect Yourself and Your Family
I hate to use the term “gaslight”, because my enneagram 4 wing has a really big butt and she takes up a lot of room inside my personality. We don’t like to use terms everyone else is using.
Nevertheless.
I think this will help more than one person.
You may be shocked at who you discover is willing to gaslight you - who it is that will try to tell you that your experience of them was not your experience of them. That you can’t be right, accurate, or correct in your perception. They truly will try to convince you that you didn’t see what you saw, didn’t experience what you experienced, didn’t hear what you heard.
I can promise you that there’s at least three people who’ve gone before you, who were put through the same routine: “love bomb, draw close, siphon energy, push away, mistreat, then gaslight”. It’s a dangerous pattern, and the damage is real.
When this happens to you, DO NOT RUN. If you run, they will catch on, and likely try to make you pay! When this happens to you, when the gaslighters gaslight….smile and wave. Just smile and wave.
If you say anything at all, simply say “Mmmmkay, thanks.”
Back away slowly. Smile the whole time. Tell them how wonderful they are - because they are probably a narcissist anyway. You see, even though they are gaslighting the crap out of you, you are still the one with all the power.
Because you can still find things to genuinely love about them, in spite of their behavior. But love does not have to equal access or proximity. Especially not when the well being of others you lead is also at stake - such as your children, if you are a parent, or your church if you are a pastor, or your team if you are a business owner. You can find ways to pray for them, and to care for them from a distance that keeps you and the people you lead safe.
Just put ‘er in reverse, sis. Back away slowly as you wave, smile, and keeeeeeeeeeeeep on backing away, until there’s miles between you. Then back away some more. Give them space to move onto the next person.
Oh, they will. They so will. They always do.
Because they are always looking for someone fresh and new and interesting enough to them, to siphon off some of the next woman’s spiritual insight, or creative energy, or joy. They are always looking for the next person to treat her as the screen upon which they get to project their version of themselves. Only to swear that they didn’t do ANY of those things, AT ALL.
Bless.
Trust me, they won’t go without willing victims. Like attracts like - and that is why you never really mixed as well with them at first as you wanted to. But the next person might be the perfect match. They will be thrilled to have each other. For a time. Always, for a time.
In other words, do not worry that your narcissist or gaslighter will miss you. They won’t.
But again: You have all the power. Because you know what’s up. You know what’s going on, and you are making conscious choices, for the benefit of the greater good, and with conscious love.
Day 13 of Lent: "At The Same Time" {...divine tensions DO exist...}
Because I wrote, and I wholeheartedly live by, the words I wrote day before yesterday, I might be one of the more qualified persons you know, one of the safest people you know, to say this today:
Second to Christ Himself, membership in, participation with, God’s family is one of life’s top priorities.
(…prints available from a sold original titled “Hon Fleur”)
Yes, there exists a wonderfully beautiful theological truth behind the Hebraic Old Testament mandate of “a lamb for a household”.
AND it is equally true that God’s church is God’s idea, and it cannot be diminished, set aside, or even customized to fit our busy modern lives.
This is a “Both/And”. A divine tension.
“I” by myself do not constitute the bride of Christ. You, on your own, do not “the family of God” make. Your family does not “the family of God” make.
There’s a wily deception afoot in the culture that tries to make us believe that “time together as a family - just us” - must be guarded at all costs, and that “sowing into our marriage” is a large part of our Christian obligation. We are inclined to invest “on the home front” at the expense of our service to the community of saints…which has been, is, and always will be the family of God.
Some time ago, someone left a church ( I choose to refer to this like Paul did of one of his personal experiences, “whether in the body or out of the body I do not know”…”whether our church or another church, I shall not say”…) with no clear church home to which they would go. Now, they made this decision because of a perfect storm of other influences, but they weakly cited the call of Abraham (when he was Abram) to “leave his family, not knowing where he was going”.
There’s a couple of glaring issues with this line of thinking - both issues reveal a touch of understandable immaturity, but also a willful lack of Biblical, contextual understanding:
Abram was the prototype for the whole entity of the people of God in all of human history and eternity! (psssst: you and I are not. We’re just not as important. Much like we are also not Job, who was also a prototype, and aren’t you glad?)
God thought nothing of removing Abram from his family of origin, to establish the more important thing: the family of faith. It was one of God’s most foundational, and one of His earliest acts in His own plan of salvation.
So, their whole reason for leaving should have actually been their biggest, most Biblical reason to stick and stay: God is calling each of us into a far greater reality - and that reality is our participation in God’s household. My autonomous inclinations are to be set aside in favor of the overwhelming value of being a member of God’s family.
I am not saying that your family should not be a top priority.
I am saying that your family should make a local church family a top priority.
See the sweet difference? It’s in the outworking of it, fighting through the tension of it into greater freedom to pursue the heart of God together as a family, that actually makes for strong families. To be on journey to the Celestial City together, together seeking that city that has foundations whose builder and maker is God, it is that kind of togetherness which “tends towards” abundant life, in both marriage and family.