Feeling Sadness and Remaining Differentiated

Narcissists are often drawn to very caring, nurturing people who are willing to put their own needs aside to care for others. This is part of the reason that people remain in narcissistic relationships for so long. In order to set some healthy boundaries or leave the relationship, you are often forced to end up acting in ways that feel very outside of your personality. You need to be clear, direct, and firm when talking to a narcissistic person which can feel very foreign to someone who identifies as a warm, nurturing caretaker. The problem is that those beautiful parts of you are taken advantage of and used against you when you allow the narcissist in your life into those spaces.

One of the things people often say is “I tried to hold a boundary but they ended up looking so broken. I felt like such a bad person. This is not like me to be so cold to someone who looks broken down.” This is very tricky for a number of reasons. One, narcissists often have used guilt in the relationship for years to get what they want and that is a complex feeling to work through. Secondly, narcissists often have legitimate histories of trauma from childhood that any reasonable person would have compassion for. The difficult part is that someone having a difficult past is not a free pass for them to continue abusing people. What happened to us in our childhood is absolutely not our fault and it becomes our responsibility to heal from those things so we do not continue the cycle of abuse. It is a very hard thing to both acknowledge someone's pain and hold them accountable for their actions. 

Here is the thing: you might always have times when you feel sad for the narcissist in your life and that is okay! You feel that sadness because you are a kind, compassionate person witnessing a vulnerable part of someone else. The important thing for your healing journey is to learn that you can feel that sadness, ride it like a wave, and not move towards that person because it is not safe to do so. This can feel very uncomfortable in the beginning as sadness is typically a cue for us to soften our voice, move closer to the person, touch them if the relationship allows, and provide comfort. But when you have done that with the narcissist in your life, it backfires and they end up using your kindness against you and you get hurt all over again. Your boundaries are not out of spite or hate, they are out of valuing yourself enough to remove yourself from that cycle and this is the only way they have allowed for you to be safe in the relationship.