Don't Do THIS If You're In A Relationship With A Narcissist... | Rewind

It can be quite easy for someone who's manipulative to use their past as a way to mobilize your empathy.

Foreign.

Welcome, everybody, to the Love Life Podcast. I am Matthew Hussey, and this is a clip from the archives that I think is really going to help you today. Check it out and I'll speak to you at the end of the episode. Let's talk about that for a moment. When does empathy go too far?

Empathy extended outwards is a beautiful thing, but I think it becomes dangerous when you can't extend it back to yourself.

Explain what you mean by that for a moment, just so that everyone. I really want people to get that message. Like what? What do you mean by that?

Well, I was going to say, if you're with someone who, if you're taking care of them and making sure they're okay and they're taking care of themselves and making sure they're okay, who's taking care of you? You know, it's quite a common thing that you hear, but in order to be there for other people, your own cup has to be full. And your priority in life should always be to make sure that you're okay. Now, that doesn't mean that you have to put yourself first in every single situation. And in fact, you shouldn't. It's really important to put other people first sometimes and to put those you love before you when they need you more than you need them in that moment. But ultimately, your empathy towards other people cannot come at the detriment of actually making sure you're okay. That's when you have to suspect yourself, I think, as to whether or not is it really empathy, or are you just caught in a toxic cycle where it's serving some kind of need for you, whether it be that you like the identity of coming to the rescue of other people or you feel safe in that position, because then you never have to look at yourself and you never have to look at the ways in which you're not really taking care of yourself. And it's much easier to put. For some people, it's much easier to put other people's needs before their own because there's a lot of shame and guilt around having needs. And sometimes people who feel that way can gravitate or can be a magnet for people who are narcissistically inclined, because ultimately they're just people who have a hell of a lot of love to give.

Right.

And that's not. I'm by no means blaming, you know, in, in. In the instance of an Actual, true relationship with a true narcissist. I'm no. By no means blaming, you know, the person who finds himself in that situation, a victim in that situation. But I do think that in general, sometimes we. If we are wildly empathetic, we can sort of. We can almost wear that as a badge of honor and use that as our identity. And it can get us into trouble because we end up having no boundaries with how far we let someone exploit that.

Well, I think that that's exactly right. And we. What happens is because we're so close to this person, we've heard all of their stories. And people who are really good at mobilizing your empathy get very good at telling stories that make them sympathetic. Yes, I have this awful trait. Yes, I am not good at this. Yes, I struggle in this way, but this is what happened to me growing up. This is what my mum was like. This is what my father was like. This is the stuff that I've been through in my life. And by the way, we all have things that we've been through in our lives that could have made us worse people or better people. Right? Everyone has things. But there are certain people who are really good at taking their past and constructing a narrative that creates excuses for really bad behavior in the present. Now, there's a difference between contextualizing who you are in the present by talking about the past, but also saying, you know, that has been part of why I've struggled, however I own it and I'm gonna fix it, and then showing that you're doing that. There's a difference between that and repeating the same damage to a person over and over and over again, always citing your past as. As an excuse, a way to abdicate responsibility for that. And if you're somebody who is truly empathetic and you're prone to feeling sad for people or seeing people as sympathetic, then it can be quite easy for someone who's manipulative to use their past as a way to mobilize your empathy. And it could also happen in reverse, by the way, if. If they know that you pride yourself on being generous, being kind, being empathetic, and then you start calling them out on their behavior and having more boundaries.

Yeah.

They can then attack you for that and say, oh, and you're supposed to be. You see yourself as this empathetic person. Well, right now you've got absolutely no care for what I've been through and the ways that I'm struggling. And you're always playing this empathetic character. And yet Right now you're just abandoning me, you know that now they can weaponize it in the other direction and get you feeling guilty that you haven't been empathetic enough.

And it's so interesting, right, because you, it has no, it knows no limit in terms of if you want to extend a sympathetic or a compassionate or kind of understanding lens towards a person, you can do that with a serial killer. You can say it's not their fault, they're born this way. They went through these different things in their childhood. That's why they ended up being aggressive and killing people and, or even just they're a psychopath. They don't feel empathy. They're not, it's not their fault. They're not born with that. You can actually have compassion towards anyone for anything. And the kind of, what's really interesting is the duality between this over compassion. You might extend towards somebody who treats you badly, but this total lack of compassion, you extend towards yourself as you put yourself repeatedly in harm's way of that person. And for some reason your well being and the way that you feel isn't being prioritized by you in the same way that you're prioritizing being understanding towards them.

Yeah, I think Jack Kornfield said something along the lines of your, your compassion for people is incomplete if it doesn't extend to yourself.

Yeah, I think that's right. I think, I think it's so easy to get stuck in roles that you play over and over again in relationships and especially with people you know. Well, I think you can adopt a role really easily where you've got used to being a bit like you, you have a masochistic relationship with that where you, you give in to their needs or their difficulty or their drama or their like selfishness and then you like chastise yourself and oh, I've got to do this now. And now I've got to do this because of their problem or they screwed up and now I've got to fix it. And I think it takes a lot of stepping back to get out of that and to actually take control again and say like what? I do think there's a big difference between giving love to someone and having love for them and sacrificing yourself, sacrificing your needs. And I think a lot of people just conflate them together. Like if I love this person, I will sacrifice my happiness to just fulfill whatever their thing is or help them because they're whatever, a narcissist, an addict, a different whatever. But I Do I think there's a real difference between loving them and sacrifice completely sacrificing yourself, your happiness, your well being. And I think some people get addicted to that, that role a bit.

Absolutely. The thing that scares me about empathy in the context of a relationship like this is it can really, if that empathy becomes a proactive kind of forgiveness for that person and a forgiveness that leads to you constantly letting them back into your life. Not a distant forgiveness where you say, I forgive you but I can't have you near me. There really is no limit to how far you can fall in that relationship, as you say, Audrey, if you excuse them on every level. Well, it's their past. Well, even if it's not their past, it's their genes. They can't help it, it's just the way they're built. You can always find a justification. And by the way, those things are true, they're actually true. But the danger of saying that's true, therefore I should forgive this person and be involved with them romantically, that's, that's the non sequitur. And the danger of that is that if you continue to use your empathy as an excuse for forgiving someone and letting them back in, there is no limit to the level of destruction that someone can impose on your life. You're letting them into the house where they can wreak havoc and you have to at a certain point say, I cannot trust you. I cannot trust you with my heart, I cannot trust you with my time, I cannot trust you with my energy, I cannot trust you with my future. And therefore I can't let you in the house because if I let you in my house, so to speak, you will predictably wreak havoc. So I can have a death distant compassion for you, but I cannot have a kind of proactive close degree empathy where I constantly let you back in because you will destroy my life. Thanks for listening everybody. And before you go, I would love you to consider coming to the virtual retreat. In June is from the second to the fourth. We do three days of immersion coaching together with me Live. And it is one of the most powerful ways I know to start a fresh chapter in your life. It gives you amazing tools, amazing insight and a blueprint for how to change things going forward. Come to MHVirtualRetreat.com to learn more.