When you were growing up you likely were told to do as your parents did and to follow their lead. This would help you build trust in someone else because you could trust what they were telling you was accurate and appropriate, and it also helped you learn how to interact with your environment. And when your parents didn’t want you to follow in their footsteps with poor decisions they had made in the past, they would say “do as I say and not as I do.” This is all part of modeling, which is a term used in psychology. Modeling is when someone serves as a model for someone else by exhibiting the behaviors they would like someone else to follow. Modeling can be intentional as well as unintentional. For example, if you have cussed your whole adult life and then have children, you may cuss around them not realizing what you are saying until the child also starts to cuss. In this example, you were modeling a behavior that the child picked up on, but it wasn’t your intention. Modeling might be purposeful when you tell a child to say thank you after something is done for them. So, now that you understand what modeling is, what does that have to do with the narcissist?
The narcissist is a hypocrite. They act in contradiction to their stated beliefs and feelings. They expect you to act a certain way but then they will blatantly go against their own words when it comes to their behavior. The narcissist doesn’t model the behavior they expect you to follow and will be cruel and harsh when they tell you how you are wrong in your actions, even if it is what the narcissist said or did themselves. The narcissist plays by their own rules, and it is not ok for someone to go against what they believe.
The narcissist is a hypocrite largely because they are self-centered and everything revolves around them. They can’t take the perspective of someone else so it would be reasonable to think they expect others to act in a way that they see fit and not what someone else might want to do. However, the narcissist is confusing because of their hypocrisy. You never know what you should or shouldn’t do and this is because the narcissist’s mood and behavior changes moment-by-moment and is dependent on what they need to fill their supply in the moment.
This is where the modeling comes into play. The narcissist will never want you to do or say as they act because they are grandiose and think they are better than everyone else. Only they can behave a certain way and no one else is entitled to that.
The narcissist lives in a fantasy world and the only way they can maintain this false image of themselves is by controlling and manipulating those around them. They need things to be predictable, or else they will expose themselves to narcissistic injury and this will quickly deflate their narcissistic supply, leading to narcissist punishment tactics to prevent narcissistic injury.
Because the narcissist can’t take the perspective of someone else, they don’t understand the concept of modeling. And if you were to act in a way that the narcissist acts, they don’t see this as a reflection of their own behavior. They only see you doing something that is counter to how they want things to go and that is all they can focus on.
This is maddening, however, because the narcissist is brutal in their attacks on you. You are simply doing what they said or acted how they acted but then you are met with a barrage of insults. This is why nothing you do with the narcissist will ever be right. You can’t act like them, and you also can’t go counter to what they say. Everything you do, in reality, is wrong and never good enough. The narcissist has a set of rules they expect others to live by and these rules don’t have to make sense to anyone but the narcissist. They are inconsistent in their actions because these rules change all the time. No, you aren’t going crazy when you don’t know what you can say or do around the narcissist. The hypocrite narcissist never wants you to feel safe and secure and the more they can beat you down, the better they will feel about themselves.