WORDS YOU SHOULD KNOW: CRAZY MAKING

The narcissist will use psychological tactics to throw you off balance and make you full of doubt, making you feel as though you, or your life, is crazy. Needless to say, this is intentional with the narcissist, since the narcissist intends to depict you as crazy when you catch on to the narcissist's ways, leading up to, or after, the discard.

Narcissists are masters of crazy making. They can't empathize and emotionally, are children who never grew up. Not that they can't mimic empathy and compassion....they can, and do, to fool people. However, what they learned growing up, and learned their lessons well, is how to be charming and to sell a fake version of themselves, and how to manipulate people emotionally and mentally.

Now, it's important to understand that narcissists can't stand for you to see behind their mask. So, as a consequence, their approach, once they've hooked you, is to gain power and control over you, and crazy making is a tactic meant to help accomplish that end. Gaslighting, or making you doubt your mind and perceptions, is a well known narcissistic crazy making tactic, but there are others, and here's a few.

1. INTERMITTENT REINFORCEMENT....this means giving you some positive and happy moments, but mixed with abuse the rest of the time, and to do crazy making, it happens at random. In this way, you never know what will lead to criticism and punishment, and so, you wrack your brain trying to figure out how....but, what you don't know is that there IS NO WAY to avoid it because it's random and simply intended to create fear, uncertainty, and high anxiety, making you feel crazy.

2. INCONSISTENT MEMORY.....we all forget things, but this is different. The key to this kind of crazy making is to be both inconsistent and random in what the narcissist says they remember, and use that to claim that YOUR memory of events is wrong...but, therein lies the problem. Did X happen, or did it not? This produces “cognitive dissonance”, meaning that your brain naturally searches for consistency in it's understanding of reality, which becomes impossible when dealing with the narcissist. There is the dissonance of feeling as though you're being lied to, and thinking that this isn't possible because the narcissist loves you. My own NarcX would claim that conversations never happened, promises did not get made, say she informed me of things never mentioned, and claim that disputes never occurred. That way the discussion becomes about my memory, not about her conduct.

3. DOUBLE BIND MESSAGES AND SITUATIONS.....My NarcX had a great talent...giving negative, critical, and sarcastic messages disguised as “concern”, or done is a way that allowed her to deny the obvious intent. Example: saying to my son, in a harsh and angry tone, that she loved him. If I said, “That didn't sound loving,” she'd say, angrily, “I said I love him”, and stomp away. She could give a gift while also implying that the child didn't deserve it. Here's another double bind....NX is leaving early Saturday, when my son expected to do something with her, so I mention that this is a habit of hers and is disappointing to our son. The double bind sounds like this, “So, you're saying I'm a prisoner in my own home. I'll do SOMETHING with him if you INSIST”, said in an angry way, letting me know that if she did do something with our son, it would be unpleasant for him, but if I tell NX to just go, when our son asks why she wasn't there today, NX says “Your father told me to leave. I offered to take you on an outing but he didn't want me to.” She's got me in a perfect double bind.

It's important to identify when the narcissist is crazy making because nothing that happens is going to make any sense. By the way, I tried, really tried, at one point, to explain to my NarcX what she was doing, but it did no good, of course. That was because, at the time, I was naïve and thought my NX didn't know what she was doing. Wrong. She did, and does. It's that narcissists don't play by the rules, and trust me, you'll save yourself a lot of time and headaches if you decide not to dance, if you know what I mean.

These are a few typical crazy making tactics.  But, no doubt, you've seen others, because the narcissist is infinitely inventive in finding ways to abuse.