How to Deal With a Narcissist

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How to deal with a narcissist, grounded in Gottman's research: spotting contempt, easing flooding, and noticing whether repair is possible between you.

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How to Deal With a Narcissist How to deal with a narcissist, grounded in Gottman's research: spotting contempt, easing flooding, and noticing whether repair is possible between you.

Est. reading time: 5 min.

Wife losing her temper with her husband in a case of reactive abuse.

The realization rarely comes during the fight itself. It comes later, on the drive home, after the door has closed, when you find yourself building the defense for a conversation you did not start and somehow seem to have lost. You go back over it. You were calm, or you meant to be. The apology on the table is yours again. Somewhere in that loop, a great many people open a search bar and type how to deal with a narcissist.

The word is worth slowing down on. Narcissistic personality disorder is a clinical diagnosis a clinician makes against specific criteria, and it may be rarer than the casual use of the term suggests. What many people are living with is closer to a pattern than a diagnosis. In What Makes Love Last?, John Gottman frames narcissism as a personality disorder that “bars authentic connection with another person.” If genuine connection is the thing being barred, then reaching them may not be where the work lies. If you are still working out whether the pattern fits, our guide to whether your partner is a narcissist goes into the signs in more depth.

Begin with what it actually feels like day to day, since the experience tends to be more recognizable than the label. Of the patterns Gottman calls the Four Horsemen, the one that maps most closely to what people describe in a narcissist is contempt, which he traces to a sense of superiority over a partner. You see it in sarcasm and eye-rolling, in the small mockery of being looked down on. Gottman has called contempt the strongest single predictor that a relationship will end, because being treated as beneath your partner is one of the hardest things to come back from. Sustained, it is also one of the patterns that can tip a relationship from merely difficult toward what many would call toxic. Naming what you are on the receiving end of, contempt rather than your own failing, is itself part of dealing with it.

Flooding is a state most of us can experience when a conversation turns heated, and sometimes even a small trigger is enough to bring it on quickly. Gottman gave it its name and described it almost physically: a heart that speeds past a hundred beats a minute, sometimes well beyond, as adrenaline trips the old fight-or-flight response. Flooded, most of us cannot think clearly or settle much of anything, and we tend to say the things we will spend the next week explaining. What seems to help is plain and a little anticlimactic. When you notice the signs, you name what is happening, ask for a pause, and let your body settle for around twenty minutes before anything more is said. With a partner whose contempt keeps the temperature high, that small practice may matter all the more, since it is one of the few things still in your hands.

Gottman’s research points to something more useful than trying harder. He calls it the repair attempt, the “secret weapon” of emotionally intelligent couples: any small move to reconnect, even a clumsy one, whether an offer to take a break or a sincere apology the next morning, that keeps a conflict from hardening. He also found that when repair attempts keep failing to land, a relationship tends to become much likelier not to last. So the real question is less whether the other person is difficult, since most people are at times, and more whether repair is possible between you at all: whether those small moves to mend things tend to be offered, and whether they are allowed to land.

Narcissism is a clinical term that has slipped into everyday speech, where it gets used more freely than it really applies. More often than not, you are dealing with painful behavior, not a diagnosed disorder. That distinction matters, because behavior can be understood and worked with even when a person cannot be changed, and there is real hope in that. Learning to recognize contempt for what it is, and to notice your own flooding before you act on it, gives you firmer ground, whatever you decide.

One thing sits outside all of this. Where there is abuse, or where you do not feel safe, an article is no longer the right place to be looking. That is the moment for a professional who can help you weigh it with care, and sometimes for help getting to safety.

When you’re navigating a relationship with someone who has narcissistic traits, it’s easy to become consumed by their reactions and lose sight of your own emotions.

Download our Free Emotional Literacy Guide to learn practical techniques for recognizing, understanding, and expressing your emotions with greater confidence, so you can communicate more clearly, set healthier boundaries, and make relationship decisions with greater clarity.

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