If you know a narcissist and feel like you are never good enough for the narcissist, you are correct. The narcissist sets you up for failure so that you consistently come out on the losing end. The narcissist wants to ensure you never feel better than them so they can feel better about themselves. The narcissist needs you to feel like you are never enough so they can protect against narcissistic injury. The narcissist uses various techniques to ensure you fail and I will discuss some of those today.
One way in which narcissists set you up for failure is through their belittling of your accomplishments and pointing out your faults. The narcissist is unable to applaud you for your successes because that would create the possibility that you are better than them. The narcissist has to maintain an image of superiority and this can only be done if they think their accomplishments are better than everyone else’s. Your success is seen as a failure on their part so they will belittle your accomplishments so that you not only feel bad about yourself, but also in an attempt to get you to stop trying to succeed.
The narcissist is adept at noticing any small faults that might be present and will nitpick at these faults as another way to set you up for failure. This is part of the narcissist ensuring you never feel like you are enough. No matter what you do or how successful you are, the narcissist will ensure that they can find some fault to point out and highlight. The focus then is on your faults and not your accomplishments. The narcissist is a master at shifting attention somewhere else to best serve their agenda.
This brings us to gaslighting; a tool in the narcissist’s toolbox of punishment tactics that they return to again and again. Gaslighting is a form of manipulation in which the gaslighter misleads their target by creating a false narrative so the target questions their own thoughts and feelings. The person being gaslighted starts to question what is real because the gaslighter manipulates their thoughts, feelings, and emotions as a way to control. The person being gaslighted remembers something happening one way but the gaslighter tries to alter their reality by denying the events happened as they remember. Over time, the person being gaslighted becomes more and more unsure of themselves and can lose a sense of self-worth.
The narcissist will gaslight so that you start to feel wrong in your thoughts and feelings. When you doubt your own reality, it is much easier for the narcissist to come in and influence how you think and feel. The narcissist is better able to control their narrative through their gaslighting of you. This sets you up for failure because no matter what reality is, if the narcissist finds reality doesn’t match up with their own needs and wants, they will manipulate it in their favor.
If you do question the narcissist about what they are telling you, they will then belittle and call you names. You become the crazy one. They use your alleged failure to remember as more evidence of why you are always wrong, people don’t like you, or have anxiety and depression. Your attempts to stand up for yourself and what you know to be true, just becomes an opportunity to push their narrative even further on how you are never right, and you are always the one to cause problems.
The narcissist will forever set you up for failure, and you will likely often fail, because the narcissist is not only in control of this game of control and manipulation they have created, but they also lack empathy and don’t care how their game affects you. It is nearly impossible to win in this game against the narcissist because the narcissist is the one who determines the rules of the game, and those rules are always changing. The narcissist has an unstable sense of self and they are reactive to their environment because they lack the ability to effectively manage their emotions on their own. The rules of the game are set up in a way that you DO fail because this is not only how the narcissist stays a step ahead of you, but also protects against narcissistic injury. The rules of the game with the narcissist is a moving target. No matter how hard you try to be better, different, more understanding, or anything else in hopes the narcissist will be caring and understanding, it will actually never be enough because the narcissist isn’t focused on how to make things better with you. They only think about themselves and what they need to protect themselves against shame and narcissistic injury.