Aaron DoughtyAwareness Mastery, Awareness Mastery, Awareness Mastery, Awareness Mastery, Awareness Mastery, LLC · Spiritual Teacher and Educator

If you're stuck with a narcissist...

10 Oct 2025 · 0 min

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0:19

In this excerpt from Aaron Doughty's YouTube video, Speaker A shares that her mother exhibits classic narcissistic traits—constant complaints, relentless negative energy, and an inability to provide validation. Speaker A wonders whether setting firm boundaries and walking away is the right response. Speaker B probes the underlying guilt and codependent patterns, explaining the classic victim‑perpetrator‑rescuer triangle: the narcissistic mother as the perpetrator, and the child oscillating between victim and rescuer roles. The dialogue highlights how early family dynamics teach love as conditional validation, making the triangle feel safe despite its toxicity. The conversation points toward recognizing these roles, acknowledging the guilt, and moving toward authentic boundaries as a path out of the codependent cycle.

My mother, she's a narcissist. She complains all the time, and it's this constant, constant bad energy. Am I doing the right thing to set my boundaries and say, hey, you can't speak to me like that?
What do you think the right thing is?
To set my ground and walk away?
It sounds like you know what you want, but there's a guilt that comes with making that decision.
There's a codependency there as well.
And that codependency, there is that of the perpetrator, there is the victim, and there's the rescuer. And my guess is the narcissist is the perpetrator. You are either the victim or the rescuer, and you guys tolerate that energy up here and enable that energy up here. And what you're saying is, how do I get out of the triangle? To get out of the triangle though, you feel responsible for being in the triangle. It's what you know. It feels safe to be in the triangle because as a kid, that was probably also how love was modeled. But that love is also many times reflective of validation and approval.
Because she said nothing was ever good enough for her. Exactly.
So now as an adult, here you are feeling responsible. And here's the thing, for you to be approved of, for you to be validated, what do you have to do? Be the rescuer. The rescuer, the victim, and to be in this triangle, right? So what happens is you feel stuck in that. But if you can let that energy be there and let her feel what she feels and let you feel what you feel, that's where there can be a breakthrough. So the way out of the codependency triangle is actually vulnerability, sharing, and actually establishing the boundary that you can feel is actually authentic for you.