Being in a relationship with a narcissist is hard. Despite your best efforts, everything is seen as your fault by the narcissist, and you are to blame for anything that doesn’t go how the narcissist would like it to. This is draining. You try hard to have things be better, but nothing seems to work. Your best attempts are pointed out by the narcissist as not only not good enough, but also another way in which you have failed. How can everything you do be wrong, and the sole reason for problems in the relationship?
First, let’s clarify that you alone are not the reason for the problems in the relationship, despite the narcissist trying to make you believe that. The narcissist can’t take responsibility for their own behaviors, so they blame-shift onto others as a way to protect their unstable senses of self. On the surface, narcissists want to suggest they are superior to others, but deep down they have low self-esteem and low self-worth. They can’t let you see this true version of themselves, however, and they must protect it at all costs. If they suspect someone might see them for who they are, or their flaws could be exposed, they will move into a self-preservation mode of defensiveness.
One form of defensiveness the narcissist will move into is projection. Projection is when someone takes unwanted emotions or traits in themselves and unconsciously attributes them to someone else. The process of projection is unconscious, and this allows the person projecting to not have to actually deal with the negative emotion or trait.
Projection is a way of avoiding taking responsibility for your own emotions and placing them onto someone else. For narcissists, projection is a form of survival. They can’t look inward because this leads to narcissistic injury and shakes up their deeply held beliefs that they are superior. If they had to actually experience the negative emotions and traits they have about themselves, then they would be unable to function in the world. The projection is their sort of body armor where they can protect themselves.
One specific way in which narcissists project is with blame-shifting. The narcissist can do no wrong, in their mind, so they do not take blame for any actions that could otherwise be attributed to them. Also, as discussed already, the narcissist has an unstable sense of self. Their sense of self is easily influenced by outside factors and small changes in their environment can lead them to feel uneasy and unsure how to function. They cannot hold positive and negative views of someone in their mind at the same time. They are sensitive to criticism as a result of their sense of self being at the mercy of their environment and difficulty in self-regulating their own emotions.
When the narcissist blame-shifts, they want you to think that you are the problem and not them. The narcissist will never admit fault, unless there is something in it for them and this would be rarely. Even during the love bombing stage, the narcissist must still protect themselves and will continue to be unable to accept blame. By projecting and blame-shifting, the narcissist is defended against awareness and accountability to their own thought processes.
If you know what projection and blame-shifting are, then you can learn that when the narcissist has blame-shifted, they are actually confessing what they see as wrong in themselves. The narcissist doesn’t project the positive things onto someone else, only the negative. It is their way of showing responsibility, in a passive-aggressive way. This is what projection is. The narcissist feels this negative emotion which is “admitting” to them, but then they turn it onto you. While indirect, if you can understand the narcissist is projecting because they find truths within themselves for the wrongdoing, then you can take yourself out of it.
You will never hear responsibility-taking from a narcissist if you listen for the words a non-narcissist would use. However, if you listen for the blame-shifting phrases then you will be hearing the responsibility-taking from a narcissist in the words they are able to use to protect their egos and unstable sense of self.
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