If you stopped explaining yourself and things suddenly got worse, this wasn’t a misunderstanding. Your silence didn’t calm them, it threatened them. In this blog, you’ll understand why things often get worse right after you stop explaining yourself, and why that escalation is not a failure, but a predictable loss-of-control response. By the end, you’ll be able to recognize escalation for what it is and stop blaming yourself for it.

Most people believe that if you explain less then there will be less conflict.   That silence means maturity. That staying calm and disengaging will naturally de-escalate the situation. In healthy relationships, that would be true. But with a narcissist, that logic doesn’t apply.  What you stopped doing wasn’t communication, it was supplying control. 

The narcissist thrives off your explanations.  To explain yourself places the responsibility onto you to justify your actions, problem solve what happened, and to de-escalate the situation created by the narcissist.  

When you explain yourself, you’re proving you still care what they think.  You are showing them they still have emotional access.  And this allows them to redirect, distort, and dominate the narrative.  When you explain yourself, you create leverage the narcissist can use against you.  Your silence is a loss of that leverage.  They don’t want clarity.  They want control.

Your silence feels like a threat to the narcissist.  Silence communicates to the narcissist they are no longer the authority, and they don’t get to decide reality anymore.  It means you are no longer chasing their approval which means they are now obsolete.  This isn’t about peace.  It’s about ego destabilization. And when control drops suddenly, narcissists don’t self-reflect — they escalate.

Escalation from the narcissist has very different looks and it depends solely on what they think will work best within their manipulation strategy at that moment.  Those last 3 words “at that moment” are the most important. Their strategy changes based on how much supply they have left in their tank and how they have escalated and controlled the person in the past.  Escalation behaviors might be blatant such as sudden cruelty or rage, provoking reactions, or accusing you or being abusive, cold, or unstable.  

Or the escalation strategies may be more covert through the use of smear campaigns, playing the victim, or testing boundaries harder.  The narcissist will also move between the various techniques in an effort to find one which works for them. 

Escalation isn’t proof you did something wrong. It’s proof the old tactics stopped working. Escalation is a control strategy, not an emotional reaction.

One issue you may encounter is that you have taken the often-difficult step of no longer explaining yourself, but this only means you have to deal with the escalation of the narcissist.  You are trying to protect your own peace and clarity, and the narcissist keeps attacking you.  It’s true that escalation can intensify for a period,  but that doesn’t mean you’re doing anything wrong, or that this dynamic will stay this way.

Things get worse before they get better because of the change in dynamic your silence has created.  When you continued to explain yourself, you were predictable.  Your silence means you are now unpredictable.  Narcissists panic when outcomes are no longer controllable. 

It is important to remind yourself the escalation is temporary – unless you re-engage.  Every time you re-engage, you restore their leverage, and teach them that escalation works. You didn’t cause the escalation. You interrupted a system that depended on your emotional labor. And once you see that, their behavior stops being confusing — and starts being predictable.

If you’re wondering why things escalated instead of calming down, click on the video in the corner or you can find the link in the description below.