How to Spot a Narcissist Before They Capture Your Heart

I was watching a video today on how people blame others for their relationship and how more and more people are claiming to be victims of narcissists and narcissistic abuse. I’d like to try and lay out my understanding when it comes to that framework and what you can do about it. Let’s hit the ground running, shall we?

If you are caught off guard by someone who is a, let’s face it, shitty person, caught yourself in the cycle of revivifying traumatic experiences, you are welcome to blame the other for the relationship you've been in calling them narcissistic and speaking to how it was all them. The challenge, however, I pose for you is that in saying it's all their fault, you're naturally doing your future self a disservice. Here’s what I mean.

I'm not saying the boogeyman doesn't exist. I'm saying if you blame everything on the other person in the relationship, you give up, along with the responsibility and your part in the collective, the choice to choose someone different in the future because you'll keep living out that pattern of having unconsciously chosen badly in the past never bringing into conscious awareness your part in the matter. "I am in essence at effect and there was nothing I could do, blah blah blah." Do not mistake me for making light of it.

That is to say you were with a shitty partner because you chose a shitty partner. Taking that a step forward, you chose a shitty partner because you don't have the skillsets of choosing a better partner - of weeding out the bad apples, being able to walk away and say no, driven by your emotions and underlying instinctual drives that really drive the bus below the threshold of conscious awareness. In a nutshell, I’m not saying anything new here … you just don't know how to vet your potential partners.

If a company welcomes new members on board, on their team they have staff that takes the candidates through the interviewing process. In the totality of what's going on, I'm saying you may or may not have an interview process you’ve been using that needs to get an update. I’m reminded of climbing movies over the years. Some of these old movies use old equipment from the 70’s and you can still watch them … but there are so many new awesome tools and techniques of climbing available to everyone today these 50 years later. Now, what’s happening is you’re working off an old, outdated model of what’s really important, using interview techniques for possible partners that sort for the wrong shit letting in the wrong people instead of what could be in place.

What am I really saying here? If you aren't weeding out the narcissists early enough, that's the only reason you ended up having them in your relationship in the first place because that's who you chose based on the information you were using and how you used said information to sort for a partner. All in all, it’s simple really. You need to embed into your skillsets ways of knowing beyond the surface level who's actually good for you, and not, as well as ways of discerning which ones you need to start walking away from earlier on in the interview process and specifically in the case that you need to walk away how you can put that decision into action.

As a final note, blaming the other in a relationship is a totally reactive approach and Narcissists thrive on you being reactive. You counteract that by taking charge of your relationship process, becoming proactive taking both initiative and responsibility in your need to update how you chose your previous partners and how you might choose your next. The good news to all this is that once you’ve figured it out how to do all that, you won’t be attracting narcissists to begin with because you won’t be giving off the signals, even at the nonverbal level, that paint you in the narcissists eyes as a good victim or an easy target, and they’ll weed you out of their own process before you ever even have a chance to get caught up in their sticky web of bullshit.

And that to me puts you in a way better position than the one you might’ve started with.