Why does it feel nearly impossible to leave a narcissist? Given the way they treat people, you’d think they’d be some of the easiest people to leave, but that’s rarely the case.

We often second-guess ourselves or waste time trying to understand their behavior, and get paralyzed by confusion. And even worse, they may try to weaponize our feelings against us. In today’s video, I explain why narcissists do this . . . plus how to avoid the common traps that often prevent us from leaving them for good.

 

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Matthew Hussey

In this video, I’m going to talk about why it can feel impossible to leave a narcissist, and how the key to finally being able to leave or disengage might be found in Star Wars.

Now, before I get into this video, I realize how fraught and complex the subject of narcissism is. I do not claim to be an expert in narcissism.

My dear friend, Dr. Ramani, is an expert in narcissism. She is someone who is, in my opinion, the most studied, researched, and powerful expert on earth when it comes to this subject. And I suggest you both get her book, It’s Not You, and follow her YouTube channel for all things narcissism-related.

What I have been able to develop over the years are some useful mental models for dealing with narcissism when it appears in your life.

The other thing I want to say is that I’m aware that narcissism is a word that is thrown around very lightly these days. And anyone who has suffered at the hands of a true narcissist, anyone who’s really lived that experience, knows that the flippant way in which it is often discussed devalues and minimizes the very real, very serious abuse and trauma that true narcissism creates for people.

This video also doesn’t need you to armchair diagnose someone in your life as a narcissist for it to be useful to you. You need only pay attention to your lived experience of a person for this to be something that is relevant.

Before we get into the video, if you’re new to this channel, my name is Matthew Hussey. For the last 17 years of my life, I’ve been helping people heal from the past, develop confidence, and find love through increasing their self-worth and relational intelligence.

And I am very excited to have you here, especially today because we have a Black Friday sale on right now for Matthew AI. If you’ve never used Matthew AI, it is a tool that I have that democratizes access to me as a coach.

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Enjoy.

So why is it that it is so hard to leave a narcissist? Whether that person is a partner, whether it’s disengaging from a parent, whether it’s disengaging from a sibling, a friend, or anyone else in our lives who exhibits these qualities—the antagonistic, destructive qualities of the narcissist—one of the biggest reasons we find it hard to leave is because we become paralyzed by our confusion.

Confusion plays a huge part in why we continue to go back to these people. No matter how angry they make us, no matter how much they disappoint us, no matter how much they betray us, or abuse us, or create chaos in our lives, we stay because we are paralyzed by confusion.

Now, what is it that is confusing us? I want to talk about two things today.

The first thing that causes confusion is our empathy with their origin story. There are certain people in our lives that we’re close enough to, to have a sense of where they came from—of the trauma, the abuse, or just the experiences that they have suffered. Knowing that they have been through those experiences creates empathy. It appeals to our humanity.

Not only that, but we can often draw a line between what they went through and who they became—or even who we tell ourselves, or they tell themselves, they had to become in order to deal with that past, that childhood, those experiences.

So, when we have that context for someone, it starts to appeal to that side of us. And let’s be clear: it’s one of the best sides of us—that feels genuine empathy for someone. That can see their humanity.

You see this in so many movies and TV shows, don’t you? When a movie or a TV show wants you to begin to identify with a certain character, it starts to show you their backstory.

It starts to jump back into past things that they’ve been through—scenes from their childhood, moments where they got bullied, moments where they were abused by their parents. It shows you these horrible, traumatic events in their lives. And how could our heart not suddenly go out to this person for what they went through that they never deserved to go through?

And what we suddenly have as a result is a much more complex character than we first saw. So now the TV show flashes forward again to this person who we may see committing horrible acts, and we have a slightly softened view of the things that they’re doing. We may even come to see them as this kind of anti-hero that we can’t help but root for because we know where they came from.

Now, in real life, when we do this, it’s incredibly dangerous. Our empathy for their origin story and our consequent identification with them as a human being has us excusing the behavior that we see in them today—behavior that is often directly aimed at us and is directly responsible for making our lives miserable.

Now in the case of narcissists, what experts like Dr. Ramani will tell you is that they have an excess of insecurity. And when we hear something like that, even a detail like that can soften us. The most empathetic among us can look at a detail like that and go, “Oh my God, if the root of why this person is the way they are is not that they are evil, it’s that they’re deeply, deeply insecure.”

That can even appeal to the savior in me that thinks, “Oh my God, they’re in so much pain. They might be doing horrible things, but it’s because they’re suffering with tremendous insecurity. Insecurity that has come from something horrible in their past.”

So you see how this all becomes this recipe for sympathy—this recipe for us thinking that maybe we’re the one who can show up for them. We’re the one that has to see through the facade and see who they are: the wounded inner child who is deeply insecure beneath it all and show up for that child.

But here’s the problem. Can you see how this is the ideal recipe for our confusion? Especially if we see ourselves as a good person, if we identify as a compassionate, empathetic human being who’s generous with our energy and there for people, this is a recipe for us continuing to put ourselves in the firing line.

The problem is this, and this was a line that Dr. Ramani once said to me that always stuck with me: Wherever someone’s insecurity comes from in the past, they can be capable and willing of destroying your life because of that insecurity. Their desire to get their needs met will run roughshod over anyone in their path. And if we’re not careful, we will martyr ourselves in service of alleviating their insecurity.

So, we can feel sorry for where someone who’s very destructive and harmful and perhaps malignant in our life came from. We can even practice with people like this, a kind of distant compassion. What we cannot do is invite someone aboard our lives who, by being in our lives, is going to sink the ship.

Can you see how it’s possible to do both? You can practice compassion. You don’t have to lose the best part of you: the empathy, the kindness, the generosity of spirit. You can hold on to that and practice that distant compassion.

What you can’t do is invite someone on board who will sink the ship—the ship that is you, the ship that is your life. And, in fact, it should be part of our equation, when being a compassionate, empathetic person, to apply that compassion and empathy towards ourselves.

If we are doing that, no matter how much compassion we’re practicing for somebody else, we will not allow someone on board who could do that much damage to the one person in this life. It is truly our job to protect and safeguard: ourselves.

Now, at the beginning of this video, I talked about how Star Wars could hold the key to leaving a person like this. But before I get onto that, let’s recap real fast.

One of the reasons we find it so hard to leave is that we become paralyzed by our confusion. And there are two things that leave us incredibly confused. The first is that we empathize with their origin story.

The second is what I’m about to say right now. We try to construct a singular narrative about this person in our lives. In other words, we want to tell ourselves a very simple story about who this person is at their core: that they are fundamentally bad, that they are evil, that they are rotten at their core.

And we think to ourselves that if we can just get to that level of certainty—that they are, in fact, after all, despite how we’ve loved them, despite the history that we’ve had with them, a bad person—that if I can just get there, I will finally have the righteous certainty that I need to walk away.

The problem is, we never truly arrive at that level of certainty about who they are. Now, why is that? Because people’s behavior can be incredibly confusing, and it can create all sorts of complexities in our mind.

Even someone who has hurt us more than anyone else in this world consistently over time will occasionally do something that seems to defy that idea we have about them. They do something that seems kind, or generous, or gentle, or sensitive, or they seem to demonstrate some empathy. They have a moment where they break from this all-encompassing theory we’ve tried to create about who they are.

And when they do break from that identity we have tried to create for them, all of a sudden we find ourselves terribly confused all over again. And that confusion creates paralysis because we start to doubt ourselves.

And there are two different traps we can fall into, by the way, when we try to identify in these very black-and-white terms of good and evil.

The first is that when we see some light in them, we decide they must not be so bad. The second is that when we observe some darkness in ourselves, we conclude that maybe we’re bad. Maybe we have no right to say that this person is a terrible human being, because I did something bad yesterday, last week, last year. I did something manipulative, or something underhanded, or something selfish. So we get confused both by the darkness in us and by the light in them.

This is where Star Wars can help.

One of the things that has really helped me in this area is using Star Wars and the themes of those movies as a kind of mental model for how to deal with these situations. In Star Wars, there is this constant theme of the battle between the dark side and the light side. But that battle isn’t just represented as being the battle between different people, one side representing the light side and the other side representing the dark side.

It’s also about the battle of the light side and the dark side within ourselves, within each individual. So each individual has their own story playing out. And what so much of those big moments in Star Wars are about is which one wins in each individual.

This internal battle is represented both in Anakin Skywalker and in Luke Skywalker. Both of them had experiences in their past that were traumatic, that created anger, that could have sent them in different directions. And we know that Anakin goes to the dark side and Luke stays in the light.

For all of us, there are choices that we make every day about which side of ourselves to listen to. And these choices come to define us. In other words, what defines us is not whether or not we have a dark side. What defines us is how often that side of us wins and how often the light side wins. 

When I think of the people in our lives that have caused us the most pain, the most suffering, and who do so on repeat, who do so without empathy, who do so without regard for the consequences of their actions, who do so while being able to pathologically lie about their behavior, or while constantly invalidating our experience or gaslighting us about our reality, I don’t think of people who are incapable of good moments. I think of people who all too often let the dark side win.

And once we have that idea in our mind, this mental model that everyone has a dark and a light side, what defines us is which of those we give in to and what defines them is which of those they give in to, we start to realize that we no longer need the singular narrative about a person. We need only pay attention to the experience that we are having of that person, to how often what defines them is giving in to their worst impulses or their lack of empathy or their disregard for other people and the consequences of their actions. That tells its own story, no matter what the complications are of this person at their core.

When we’re trying to construct a singular narrative about this person, not using Star Wars, we get confused by both the light in them and the darkness in us. The light in them confuses us because it disrupts this story we have about how they’re all bad, but the darkness that we see in ourselves when we do something bad makes us identify with them. We think to ourselves, I’ve done bad things in my life, I’ve lied, I’ve been dishonest, I’ve been selfish, so who am I to say that they’re a terrible person? See, the dark in us actually makes us identify with them, it makes us feel like we’re in the glass house unable to throw stones, so that confuses us too.

But there is no more confusion if, using this Star Wars mental model, we see that these are both forces we all have inside of us. What defines us is which one we let win. If we do something bad, and then we feel bad about having done that, and we seek to correct it or be better, that says something about us.

The person who does something bad and then shows no accountability for it and never self-corrects is making a statement about themselves. This is what’s important, because which of these two forces, and I don’t mean to oversimplify human nature in this way, remember this is a mental model but a very useful one, which one of these two forces someone defers to on a regular basis will determine whether they are a net positive in your life or a net negative who causes you continual suffering when you keep them around.

The big point here is that when we are trying to muster the courage to finally let someone go or disengage with them, release them from our lives in some form or another, it’s very tempting to try to make the singular narrative work. It feels like if we can just convince ourselves they’re bad, all our choices about what to do next will be easier, will be simple.

But the true counterintuitive pressure valve for being able to release someone like this is to actually make peace with the complexity of the situation, the complexity of people, that stories are not simple. People do different contradictory things and they have both of these sides, in Star Wars terms, inside of them.

But which one of those sides dominates their life is what actually creates your reality. And it’s your reality that you have to react to, not what you see as the occasional contradictions in them. 

I have been saying for a long time: someone may have their reasons for doing what they’re doing or being the way they are, but what we have to pay attention to is our reality. You may have your reasons, I have my reality. And if my reality, by having a relationship with you, is one of misery and suffering, it’s my reality that has to determine my choices, not your reasons and not the moments where you seem to do something that is out of character with the darker moments that I see from you most often.

If there is one thing I have learned in 17 years of coaching, it’s that epiphanies aren’t enough. We need constant repetition of messages in order to change. One of the reasons I love Matthew AI so much is that there is no limit to how often you can get Matthew AI to repeat the messages you need to hear, which is why I’m very happy today that we have an offer on where you can get unlimited access to Matthew AI for half price. 

Go try it for free, like I said, AskMH.com, and if you enjoy it, take us up on that offer. It’s a fantastic offer and it is, by far and away, the most inexpensive practical and emotional coaching you will get anywhere. AskMH.com is the link. Thank you so much for watching everyone. I really hope this video helped and don’t forget to leave me a comment. I love reading them. I’ll see you next time.