When a narcissist turns people against you, it feels isolating. People believe the narcissist’s lies, and then friends and family start to distance themselves from you. It leaves you feeling shame, abandonment, and completely kicked to the curb. Sometimes, you question yourself, wondering if you really did something wrong and if you are a bad person. This is an awful place to be in. Without understanding the psychology of this manipulative tactic, it can lead you to think about it repeatedly, ruminating into an unhealthy pattern. So today, my friend, let’s talk about why narcissists want people to hate you, so you can understand that this isn’t your fault. Knowledge is power, and that power will give you self-resilience and confidence so that you no longer feel hurt from the narcissist’s actions when they let their flying monkeys and smear campaigns spread rumors all over the place.
1) The narcissist’s game
Narcissists thrive on control and power, and one of their favorite tools to achieve this is through isolation. By turning people against you, they isolate you from safety and emotional support, making you more dependent on them or simply just to hurt you. They will go to great lengths to make you look like a bad person, continuously talking about you behind your back, dramatizing the bad things you did or said. They will pick out tiny parts of conversations and actions that they had with you to weaponize against you. For example, you may sit them down one day and say, “Margaret, please stop walking around my house in your muddy boots. This carpet is new, and you’ve tracked mud all the way through my living room. I don’t want you wearing shoes in my house; that’s the rule. If you don’t take your muddy shoes off at the front door, then you are not allowed to come into the home.” This is a reasonable boundary, but the narcissist will spin it around and tell people how rude you are for banning them from your home, not fully explaining the reasons why. And yes, the narc knows what they are doing. When they tell people how awful you are, they will embellish to get that sweet reply of, “Wow, how awful you are. Amazing. You beautiful narcissist!”
The narcissist will always push their side of the story and make sure everyone knows their version before you get a chance to tell yours. Remember, this is emotional manipulation 101. A narcissist wants people to see them as the victim so they all turn on you. Why? So that the unhealthy behavior continues to get swept under the carpet.
2) The psychology behind it
Psychologically speaking, narcissists lack empathy and have an inflated sense of self-importance. It’s likely they didn’t get their emotional needs met as a child, and they have that inner pain that they aren’t consciously aware of, but their psyche remembers, and they are constantly acting out to soothe that pain, not realizing that their actions reinforce the same emotional neglect with people around them just like their parents did to them. All narcissists view relationships as competitions where their needs must always come first. Perhaps you are new to the friend or family circle, or you are the new work colleague, and the narcissist feels threatened by you because you are indirectly taking away their attention. So by making others dislike you, they ensure that they remain the most important and admired person in any social setting.
Why? Well, when people dislike you, they will find it hard to reason with the fact that you are actually a nice person. So if we take the shoes-off-in-the-house analogy, if a group of people who don’t truly know you firstly hear that you banned the not from your house in an aggressive tone, not sparing a thought for their bunions, people believe it, and they will start to dislike you. Suddenly the narcissist comes out on top in your defense. Well, you won’t have one because no one hears how the narcissist was rude to you. They don’t understand the victim mentality, and they don’t know about the abuse that they hurled at you. They will all think that you are the one lying, making you look more of a fool. And this all gets conveniently swept under the carpet. Now, a narcissist won’t ever take blame. They won’t ever self-reflect. They will simply lie to themselves forever to remove any uncomfortable feelings, which is why you can never get a narcissistic parent to talk about the emotional abuse you suffered as a child. They simply just won’t remember. Because they are so deep within their own lies that these lies serve as memories.
3) The impact on you
Now, you might be thinking, “I feel so hurt that people are believing the narcissist’s lies over my truth.” Now, this is exactly what they want you to feel. And this is your permission to really feel that hurt someone is abusing you. And it’s okay to feel sadness and even anger. Let yourself feel because this is the style of healing from this abuse. And if you don’t let yourself feel and you don’t acknowledge these feelings, you’ll end up fawning, ignoring toxic behavior, meaning the narcissist has more supply, and they will continue over and over to abuse you. The moment you let yourself really feel the sadness and anger, then the pain starts to lessen, and your inner growth will start to grow. Now, if you are really stuck at naming your emotion, and that’s perfectly normal at the start of our healing journey, you simply ask yourself, where do I feel this in my body? And that’s gonna help to kickstart your emotional brain back online.
Now for my next point, I don’t really see this being mentioned online quite a lot, but it really needs to be said. If someone believes a negative story that the narcissist told about you without questioning it and without standing up for you, then this person never liked you from the beginning. And you would be disrespecting yourself to try and please them into liking you. If someone doesn’t like you without actually getting to know you, they are a hater. They are emotionally immature, and they do not deserve your time.
Now, I know what you’re thinking. Kill them with kindness. No, not at all. Be pleasant. But then gray rock them. And if you want the lowdown on how to gray rock someone, there is a link above. Click on that. Watch that video.
Next. Maybe this person will say in a couple of years, “Wow, I believed those rumors, and I’m so sorry you are nothing like the narcissist made you out to be, and I never gave you a chance to understand you.” But at that point, you’ll be like, “Oh, okay, interesting. Have a nice day.”
4) The impact of this manipulation
It’s devastating. You can be left feeling lonely, confused, even doubting yourself. “Maybe I’m a bad person after all; it’s only muddy footprints. I could just clean them up, right?” You may start questioning your own worth and the overall validity of your relationships, but remember this. Mm-Hmm. This isn’t about you. Don’t make this personal. It’s about their insecurities and their need for dominance. And please, please remember this, whoever agrees with a narcissist’s full story about you shares unhealthy emotional patterns with the narcissist. Remember, we hang out with people who are just like us, right?
So a narcissist recruits other people around them that also share the same emotional dysregulation. Therefore, don’t give this circle of people your time.
Now, before we move on to how to protect yourself from this toxic behavior, I wanna say a huge thank you for you being here today and showing up for yourself, healing your wounds, and growing into the best version of you. And I can’t tell you how proud I am of you. And I know that this never-ending journey of healing isn’t always sunshine and rainbows.
5) How to protect yourself
Let’s talk about self-esteem. In the early stages of healing, when we are a little bit fluid with how positive we view ourselves, we can take the narcissist’s actions and behavior to heart. We believe their gaslighting to be true, and it overwhelms us. And more so if we grew up with narcissistic parents or caregivers, it’s really painful for us to admit that they were emotionally immature because it brings up so many uncomfortable feelings of, wait, am I putting up with narcissists in my adult life because my parents told me that this behavior was normal? And without learning that you can deny a false narrative from a narcissist. We may agree with it, but eventually with more healing and practice, your first reaction when you hear a narcissist is trying to turn people against you will just be a shrugger, a bit of a laugh, and wow, that’s really weird, but I don’t care for it. Remember, we can always predict a narcissist’s behavior. So stand up for yourself and remember, a narc will do all if they can to destroy you. Don’t give them that satisfaction. Don’t react to it; ignore it. Bite your tongue. Focus on your own stuff. Go gray rock and interact more with people that are emotionally healthy. Don’t give in, don’t tell the narcissists that you are upset with them, that you are angry because they want you to feel that hurt. Remember telling them how awful their behavior is will not make them change. Believe me, they are just too deep in their immature mindset. They have the emotional intelligence of a young child. So why are you trying to reason with a young child? See how ridiculous that is. Don’t feed into the narcissist’s emotional supply. When they learn that their lies and their toxic talk don’t affect you, they will discard you. You suddenly become boring, and they have no use for you. Don’t think about revenge. Don’t think about making them pay for what they did. If anything, feel sorry for them that they have to get people to hate you so that they feel better about themselves. And remember importantly, don’t take their actions personally. Remind yourself daily of just how amazing, kind, and loving you are, which leads me to what do you do now? So it’s easily said than done, but you need to start gray rocking them and be emotionless. Grit your teeth. Bite your tongue. Think ahead of every situation with this person and their circle of people and remind yourself, okay, they want me to hurt. They want people to hate me, so I’m not going to give them what they want and I will be emotionally resilient. And of course, don’t engage with that circle of people that the narcissist is trying to turn onto you. But be polite, gray rock them. Be pleasant because they will be looking for reasons to support your bad behavior that the narc told them about. So don’t give them a reason to believe the narcissist lies. You’ll find that the person in an argument who just sits there quietly not reacting is usually the one with the truth and the other person, the na, who shouts and screams and goes off into spiels and spiels of how much of a terrible person you are. Eventually people do take note and they will eventually think, wait, Dani never responds to this. She doesn’t say anything back. In fact, she says nothing at all. And the narcissist is very rude. And wait, is Dani innocent? Did we not see the full story? And like I said, when this happens, it’s way too late. You won’t have any interest in building a relationship with someone who believed for years that you were a bad person. Write down everything the narcissist does so that you can remind yourself over and over of how toxic this person is so you can gray rock them and not give them too much energy. Because sometimes it’s so hard at the beginning of our journey to admit to ourselves that someone is trying to ruin our social reputation, that it can take a bit of rereading and rereading until one day you’re like, aha, this person has been so rude. Hell no, I’m not gonna bake them a cake like I do every Sunday, and I’m not gonna be getting them flowers for their birthday. Hmm, except it’s unfair. Sad but true. You can be the best version of yourself at all times. Actively healing, going to therapy, working through your trauma and toxic people always pop up. You can’t avoid them. Radically accept that fact. It’s not ideal. It’s not fair, but it happens. And you cannot control avoiding pain, but you can control how much that pain affects you. So surround yourself with people that see the real you, that lift you up, that are actively working on themselves, so that if you do run into another narcissist web of lies, you have that support system to remind you of how amazing you are.