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.
28 thoughts on “Never Mirror the Narcissist”
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HG,
What is the overall effect of engaging in the narcissistic manipulation of Future Faking and mirroring this back to the narcissist? How does the narcissist respond and how does this impact the victim?
1. The impact on the victim is that you are engaging with the narcissist and thus you will be impaled on The Narcissist´s Pitchfork.
2. The narcissist will either be wounded or given challenge fuel.
“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.”
I suck at Grey Rocking.
That is why you should not do it. It does not work, you get impaled on The Devil´s Pitchfork as you go round and round on The Narcissist´s Wheel of Misery.
HG,
Could you elaborate on what you wrote:
“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.”
This interests me greatly. Examples??
1. The priority is GOSO.
2. If that has not been achieved, that must be examined as to why.
3. If you are preparing for GOSO and are seeking to buy time through the extension of the absent silent treatment then the messages would need to be the provision of pure fuel, so they do not challenge but instead enable the narcissist to receive fuel and know that he is in control. Apologising and pleading fits the bill. I would not advocate adopting this however, because if your ET is too high, you will not execute it properly.
Because I’m an idiot, I have reached out every few weeks. I suppose because the need for answers and closure weighs heavily on me.
So I understand that, according to the article, because I was still reaching out, he wound stay away because I am still delivering fuel without him needing to make any effort at all. He knows I’m still bound to him.
Ok.
So then, when I am no longer in need of his answers and I no longer care about closure or acknowledgement and I stop reaching out, then he will not be receiving fuel from me anymore and that may prompt him to attempt to contact me in whatever fashion to;
1.) Encourage me to keep delivering more fuel?
2.) Test if my interest in him is still active?
So, if I want him to talk, he wont, and when I don’t need for him to talk again, it’s probable that he will then do so.
Contrary!
1. You are not an idiot. You are being conned by your ET.
2. He is staying away because although there is a Hoover Trigger (you enter the sphere of influence) the HEC are not being met. I cannot explain why that is without more information which is required through consultation.
There is always a risk you will enter the sphere of influence (he may just think of you) and then IF the HEC are achieved, he will hoover you. If they are not, he will not. There are lots of different factors that constitute the HEC and it is too detailed to explain to you in a comment.
Thank you, HG! 🤗
I’m getting the impression that I need to arrange something.
Correct.
I’m right about something? 😉
HG, my brush with Narcissism just recorded a world’s first!
HG,
You stated…………….
“He is staying away because although there is a Hoover Trigger (you enter the sphere of influence) the HEC are not being met.”
There was never a time where after not corresponding , I would text him and he did not reply. I was never “ignored”. Courious as to why it seems the HEC was always met when I contacted him after no contact foor some time. It is because he would hoover me and I would ignore him but then when I did test he thought it was because of his hoovers?
The relevant factors at the time of the Hoover Trigger meant that the HEC were met, therefore you were hoovered. As to what those precise criteria were, I would need more information as to what was happening at that point, so I could then identify the relevant factors which would have been applied and the effect of each one so that the criteria were reached.
Thanks HG. Not that important as I intend on never hearing from him again. Just courious.
Interestingly , my narcoholic (either a lesser or LMR- will find out next year at tax return time) responded oddly to my mirroring the AST.
I intuited that my not reacting to a week long AST indicated to him I was trying to mirror him, and that he got thought fuel from it.
Of course after a week he made contact, appearing momentarily contrite but I didn’t react to that either- didn’t even acknowledge it.
However him not calling or touching base often was a point of contention at the time so he defin knew it bothered me.
I guess what he DIDNT know was how close I was to Done, bc he then immediately implemented ANOTHER AST- And this one went a couple days longer than a week
I mean, right on the heels of the first one!!
My intuition was he was thinking we were playing a game of “how long till WAF blows it and reacts“.
Instead, I went NC.
This sort of behaviour makes me think he’s LMR, just a dumpster fire of a LMR lol
Which is crueler, block or ignore?
To whom ME? The narcissist or the victim?
Crueler to the Narcissist.
In essence both are forms of ignoring. I am proceeding on the following assumption that when you state ignore you mean for example a text comes through but you do not respond to it and by block, the text cannot come through. Since in each instance you are ignoring the narcissist, this will cause wounding. The wounding is not substantial because the wounding is through an electronic medium, but it wounds nevertheless. In an “ignoring the text scenario” the narcissist would likely text further trying to provoke a response (the victims ET would rise and thus create a greater risk of ultimately responding and providing fuel and control to the narcissist).Where you have blocked the narcissist, the narcissist would most likely see that the texts are not being received/read and would sooner shift, if the HEC were met, to a different form of hoover or stop hoovering. It depends on what the relevant HEC are. However, blocking or ignoring the text causes wounding. You would be best changing your number so there is no electronic method of reaching you.
Thank you HG. You are spot on about the Narcissist upping the ante to get a response. Intellectually, I know healing the wound and moving on should be more important than wounding the Narcissist. Appreciate this.
Correct. That is applying logic. Look to your own defences. You can only control yourself, you cannot control us, if you think to the contrary you are either being misled by your ET (the vicitms) or a narcissist (always trying to assert control).
Class image from Harold and Maude: Harold with his shrink:
https://compagnieaffable.files.wordpress.com/2015/10/harold-and-maude-psychiatrist-scene.jpg
Ha ha, very good.
Very interesting subject, HG.
But what about tapping into our own narcissistic traits as a way to cope with the influence of the Narcissist, especially post-disengagement? Not exactly copying or mirroring the Narcissist, but using smth from his arsenal (pride etc) for our sake?
Maybe there has been an article on manifestation of narcissistic traits in empaths and what to do with them?
No, that is breaching the first golden rule of freedom. I recommend you read The Council of Emotional Thinking in Narc Tales Volume 2 as this will provide you with greater insight into how your are being misled by your emotional thinking.
I’d rather talk to you about it in the foreseeable future.
Both options sound good!