Never Mirror the Narcissist
It is often stated that you should mirror the narcissist.
That is wrong. Such an act is contrary to your interests.
Those who make such a suggestion are wrong and evidencing their lack of understanding about our kind.
Why should you never mirror us? Let’s examine some examples.
Take for example word salad. If we engage in a word salad whereby you cannot follow the logic of what we are saying, we are doing this because it enables us to draw fuel from your frustrated, hurt and annoyed responses. You are a truth seeker and therefore, not knowing what we are, you continue to try to break through this word salad and get us to make sense, get us to see sense and toss the salad aside. We do not. We continue with it as it is gaining fuel for us and ensuring that we are rejecting the relevant (perceived) attack against us so that our superiority is maintained. The chief components of our manipulations are either
- Gain Pure Fuel – this is where there is no challenge or wounding;
- Gain fuel and assert our superiority – this in instances where you are providing us with challenge fuel. We are not wounded BUT you are challenging our superiority in some way and therefore we must respond in a way which makes you back down and enables us to assert our superiority once again;
- Gain fuel because you have wounded us, so this fuel heals the wound.
Accordingly, in a particular interaction with you we have utilised the manipulation that is a word salad. You decide to mirror us and respond with a word salad of your own. Let us assume that you manage to do this without providing us any fuel with it – difficult, but you may be able to achieve it. These are the consequences.
- You will wound us. This is because you are not providing us with any fuel and you are noticeably mirroring us which we will perceive as you mocking us. This will wound us. You may think ‘that’s good, so why not do it?’ – the following points explain why you ought not to.
- This will cause an ignition of fury, most likely with the Lesser or Mid Range Narcissist and possibly with the Greater also. We may well have been using the word salad manipulation in the context of a Challenge Fuel situation. There was no ignition of fury then. There is now.
- The ignition of fury will result in a different manipulation being used against you. You have nullified the word salad but all we do is shift to a different manipulation.
- The ignition of fury will mean that this alternative manipulation will be an escalation. Given the circumstances this means that you are increasing your risk of violence being used against your person or your property. All schools of narcissist may well apply that against you in that moment. The Greater may control the fury so that you are punished at a later juncture, when you are least expecting this to happen and this will occur with malice. You have just increased the pain that will follow.
- You have signalled to the narcissist that you are trying to manipulate the narcissist. Predictably enough, this will not sit well with us. This will mean that we will now increase our efforts to exert control over you. Since you are in devaluation already, this devaluation will continue and will be increased to ensure that you are ‘brought to heel’.
- Your use of word salad will be used against you – we will bring it up against you in future instances to demonstrate that you do not know what you are talking about, we will tell other people about this behaviour and smear you in that regard, we may well use it as evidence with regard to some form of manipulation against you.
- The Greater Narcissist will realise that you are ‘on to us’ and therefore a careful mental note will be made about that fact. This means that alternative methods of manipulation will be used against you and you will be punished for your behaviour. You have also tipped us off.
- You will not be in a position to keep the mirroring up for long without providing us with fuel. Although you have wounded us, when you start providing us with fuel again, this will address the wound that you have created, thus the mirroring has proven pointless and you have also risked the points raised above. It is very hard for a person to stop themselves from giving us fuel when there is a face to face interaction. You have to control what you say, how you say it, your body language, the look in your eyes and your facial expressions. That is difficult and often you do certain things unconsciously that will provide us with fuel. Accordingly, you cannot go for long in a face to face situation without providing us with fuel.
- You are hampered by the fact that you are honest, decent and usually consistent in your behaviours. Compare this with our kind where we operate with no sense of remorse, no guilt and no conscience. Guilt will start to creep in to what you are doing, pity, disgust with yourself for dropping to our level and so forth and this will have an adverse impact on you and your ability to mirror us.
What about other instances of mirroring us?
If we are shouting at you and you do the same back to us, all you are doing is provide us with fuel and that suits us perfectly well. Further, we can use your fierce temper against you, for instance by suddenly switching so that we wish to shield the children from mummy’s nasty temper. This shift in manipulation to triangulation is likely to catch you off-guard so that you feel guilty for doing this, feeling a need to explain the truth to the children about what has happened and then being pinned down by your honesty and decency because you do not want to drag the children into it. We do not care if we do, needs must.
If you try to triangulate us with someone else, we see through it. We will then use that as evidence of you being flirtatious, that you are having an affair, that you are selfish and self-absorbed. We will use this to smear you, attack you with an alternative manipulation – for instance the Lesser Narcissist may well beat you up on the basis of your wounding behaviour. The Mid Range Narcissist may also physically attack you or will go around delivering Pity Plays as he talks about the fact you behaved like a slut at the party.
If you try to engage in blame-shifting, this will not work because this just amounts to a further attack against us and therefore by repeatedly trying to place the blame at our door you will either be wounding us or issuing challenge fuel. We are configured never to accept blame (unless there is a clear benefit in doing so) and therefore our narcissism will just defend us against this in the usual fashion, accordingly the mirroring will be ineffective.
There is one slight exception to this rule against mirroring us and this relates to absent silent treatments. If you mirror our behaviour by ignoring us also because you want to cause us to get in contact with you and stop the silent treatment then all you need to do is ignore us also. You do of course run the risk of being subjected to an alternative manipulation, however the difference is that with the absent silent treatment we will not be with you when we are wounded by you failing to respond to the silent treatment. Accordingly, we are more likely to seek fuel from a different appliance and then contact you thereafter and our fury will no longer be ignited. Of course, you may want the relative calm of an absent silent treatment and if that is the case then you ought not to mirror and instead provide some messages which would provide fuel. This will maintain the absent silent treatment.
With each manipulation, if you try to mirror it, it will backfire against you because we will see through it (and dependent on the school of narcissist this will always happen, it just depends how quickly this will occur) and there will be the consequences that I have described above. This mirroring is not in your best interests. Even if you think you will achieve some kind of victory by wounding us, it will only result in a bad outcome for you thereafter because we are different creatures.
Instead of mirroring our manipulations you ought to focus on
- Establishing and maintaining no contact;
- Being able to recognise the various manipulations that we deploy;
- Your increased knowledge will reduce the impact of the manipulation on you;
- Following the methods set out in ‘Escape’ which will enable you to deal with these manipulations in a way which will benefit you and not cause you additional problems which occur if you mirror us.
Do not mirror us. Your mirror will shatter first.
19 thoughts on “Never Mirror the Narcissist”
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Oh, boy,
Often I have – mostly unconscious behaviour – thought words which made me feel or jump, will also work on the narcissist (whom I didn’t know was a narcissist, like my mom e g).
A guy who sometimes said, and ended messages with “Take care!” or “Wishing you a Good day!” in a very off-cutting way, like “You’re so sexy Have a good day!” would after some meetings ghost me, and I sent three pretty balanced short messages, the last one ending with “Take care!” hoping that he would ‘wake up’.
But it did not work at all.
Only silence. Haven’t heard from him since. Players know their own tricks. They won’t give away one micrometer power. And I guess this is why they don’t fall in love. As you say we can only cut contact and cut our losses.
This is seriously a great advice. I had to learn this the hard way. When I was almost a year into my relationship with my husband, at that time he was just my boyfriend, I finally got so fednip with the bullying and power struggle tactics from my two step daughters. At that time only the older one was an adult, she was 4 yrs younger than me so she was about 24 at that time and the younger was 16. It was Christmas eve and we had the Christmas eve dinner and exchange of gifts. The whole time they would not talk to me and when my ees meet with theirs it was like they were looking at someone who was inferior to them. And also all kinds of other bullying tactics that are too many to write here. When they adult one left, the 16 yr old started crying that her dad was getting too serious with me and started calling all kinds of horrible names, just screaming histerically and then when her dad yelled at her to stop she ran into her room and was still screaming all kinds of horrible names you can call any woman. So I was really angry and decided to employ one of the things that I learned from my narcissistic mom. I opened the door of her room, showing her that I can also cross her boundaries like she has been doing to me in the past year like reading my cellphone and getting mad about her dad’s texts to me etc., and I yelled at her in a really harsh strong voice, “Rhianna (not her real name) you are such a brat!”. Then I closed her bedroom door. That shocked her to the core and she screamed for help and ran into the bathroom and called her older sister and was crying kn the phone to her sister asking for help and to please get her. I thought that I will show them that I’m not afraid of her sister so I mocked her by repeating what she said in a ridiculous manner and I made sure that her sister can hear me over the phone. I said, “Help me! Help me! Please get me!” And I looked at her with a really dark demonic smirk that I learned from my mom. I did show her. But the problem was she was only 16 so apparently here in the US people are not supposed to be that harsh to people until they turn 18. They would always bring that up as their ammunition against my character, no matter how many times I genuinely apologized for it. I was the adult and she was a child, even though she was the spawn of Satan in so many ways that she has been acting towards me. In the country that I came from even children are expected to act in a polite and respectful manner and being under 18 is not an excuse. My husband still ended up marrying me and he tried to defend what I did that night saying that I finally exploded. But those sisters and their mom never lets me forget it. It’s really just better to not engage and go down to the gutter with them. I just avoid them now.
Thank you.
The thing is… sometimes I accidentally mirror them because my own sense of identity is not terribly secure within itself.
I never attempted to mirror my ex except for the silent treatment. Towards the end of our relationship, whenever my ex gave me the silent treatment I would respond “Oh. Time for the silent treatment now? I will be in the other room until you decide it’s time to talk to me again.” I would walk away and ignore him. He was not impressed.
Yeah, I agree with this. When I find I’m entangled with one, I will rarely go on the offensive, it just won’t work. I observe the manipulations and side-step them. I do not take the personally. In this way, I have been afforded many pleasant interactions. Learnt a lot about myself and the N-E bond as a whole and also other more mundane things too which have helped enormously. It also helps that I am not in the market for serving as a IPPS at the moment so am less likely to be devalued. I get around this by simply saying, my ex has y heart and therefore, I’m not really free to give myself.
In fact, a few months ago, I seriously began to panic that I was on an upward trajectory to being crowned as one and it gave me some consternation. It’s just not what I want anymore. maybe never. Who knows?
There’s no need to mirror a narcissist’s behavior. Much better to thwart them and show them they’re not in charge. Unintended consequences are always a possibility.
Example: the narcissist came to a nightclub where my husband was playing. She came with a friend who knew about their affair and also knew that my husband had ended it. At one point she went and sat directly in front of my husband at an elevated bar on the edge of the dance floor and the stage. Sitting there she was about five feet from him as he played. FYI my husband hates this kind of drama, it had been months since the end of the affair and any contact with her.
Unfortunately for her, I’m a very good dancer, and the song was a great dance tune. I went and danced in front of my husband, and he came to the edge of the stage and played directly to me. It was a pretty heady moment, it’s rare that we interact like that when he’s playing and knowing that I was literally in her face with my husband’s attention riveted on me as he played…take that, silly bitch. If you want to sit right there, you’re going to get an eyeful. The memory of it is quite delicious.
Her blatant attempt to gain his attention in front of a club full of people who know us both backfired spectacularly…unintended consequences. She couldn’t immediately get up from her spot without showing obvious displeasure and wounding. She hasn’t pulled that particular brand nonsense since.
If the narcissist feels manipulated by us, or suspects that we are on to them, does this also raise the hoover bar?
The sense of you manipulating the narcissist will usually either wound the narcissist or is challenge fuel and this is most likely going to cause a reaction direct against you. However, if there is wounding it acts to raise the hoover bar with the NEXT hoover trigger (subject to its diminution through the passage of time).
If the narcissist senses you are on to them, this raises the hoover bar (of course other factors at the time of the other hoover trigger may lower it).
“Do not mirror us. Your mirror will shatter first.”
True, but in the best case we manage to find your (narcissist’s) true colors and better yet, show them to others.
I must add I was referring to relationships we can’t GOSO from just as simple (social norms and innocent people involved, emotionally striving for the narcissist’s approval we all know is impossible to get).
I have to admit that I did try the mirroring including word salad, triangulation and silent treatment. I am not proud of it because I was sinking down to his level. He was mad at first, but he picked up on it and told me:” I see what you are doing, it won’t work with me.” Obviously he was the expert! Then I paid for it with more manipulation. It’s a dangerous game to play and we are better than that. The best thing as you say is to let go. Narcissists have no limits, they will always up the ante. Moreover, why would we want to act like them? We are so much better than. That.
Every single word true!! I was good at mirroring and the more I learned here I got better. I couldn’t keep it up though. He did exactly what you said. Switched manipulation tactics, increased fury… They are built for it, we are not.
Entirely accurate.
He really overdosed silence. So I mirrored it once. “Ah, finally the games can level-up!” – he must have thought. And added two extra weeks of silence.
Shesaw the silence started out as the worst form of punishment I ever endured then became the only thing that helped me keep my sanity. It was the only weapon I had that benefited me and wounded him at the same time. The only problem is that when I would go silent then decide I wanted to talk again I’d usually have to grovel. I knew what had to be said to get him to talk but I hated it. I felt like a fraud.
It was exactly the same for me, Mercy. From the worst punishment to a recharge-moment. The groveling, feeling like a fraud… I remember that like it happened only yesterday. Yuk. He is now trying to provoke me to contact him by writing something on chat and then delete it when I open my chat-app. I didn’t block him – but am still in silent-mode. I literally don’t know what to say to him anymore. I can choose between groveling and then being punished for my silence + a period of fun + the hassle starting over, OR this peace-of-mind state. Easy choice!
How is your no contact going, Mercy? Still going strong? I believe so, reading your posts. Wish you courage and lots of peace! It will only get better! (as opposed to my favorite quote of you ‘it doesn’t get better’ (concerning the narc-illusion) – which really convinced me to stay silent, back then.
Hi SheSaw, my no contact is rock solid right now. No social media checks, no wondering about what he’s doing or who he’s doing it with. Complete silence. He has not hoovered but I don’t expect him to yet and this is a good thing because I can build my defenses. I don’t want the hoover but I know it’s inevitable when he figures out that things have changed on my part.
I have my moments of sadness but for the most part I’m really happy. You are absolutely right, peace of mind is the right choice.
Just a small bit of advice that I hope you consider. Block him on the chat. I know how hard it is. We want to hang on to a piece of them but it causes emotional thoughts. You deserve to be free of those thoughts. We can’t move forward if we don’t let go.
Your support means the world to me. Funny how complete strangers can come together and lift each other up.
Take care