This is fictitious but humour me.
An interaction takes place between a man and a woman who are acquaintances.
All seemed fine if not icy until, after some further awkwardness, and out of the blue, the man says to the woman nonchalantly, “Wow, aren’t you feeling a little silly for looking the way you do? Gee, you seem a lot weird to me.”
The woman checks herself and tries to imagine whether she’s actually heard what was said; whether she’s offended, or her heart’s just been ripped apart in a second, or both. And so much more. She’s a strong woman and normally quite unfazed by the typical insensitivities of people. She normally laughs them off, thinking people are not being themselves in their unkindness. She’s a benefit-of-the-doubt kind of person.
But she’s genuinely thrown by what she’s heard. Not one to be broken down to tears in an instant, she melts all over the table right there and then.
The man shrugs his shoulders, thinks, “Well that’s weird,” and continues to look vacantly out the window. Within a few seconds the woman gets up and leaves the room. She seeks solace in a friend. At her friend’s insistence, she lets her friend know what happened. As the friend listens, the friend is perplexed, because the woman she knows is quite stoic; kind and gracious, but stoic.
The friend hears the whole story and she’s quietly livid.
She wants to go to the man and challenge him on his behaviour but is wise enough to take another friend with her. Between them they decide that they want to take their hurt friend with them to encounter the man over his words.
They all go to the man and seek to have a conversation about it.
Once greetings are disposed of, it goes like this:
Friend: did you say, “… aren’t you feeling a little silly for looking the way you do?”
Man: not quite. I didn’t say it like that… and I didn’t use those words… she did look a bit funny to me, though [in a way as if to say, don’t you think this, too?].
The man’s response is unflinching, no sign of remorse, trying to confuse the line of questioning by answering the one question in many and potentially contradictory ways. He’s appearing unflappable with no case to answer. Here’s a warning of a slippery fish—he’s not going to be ‘caught’ easily.
Friend: what do you mean by saying all that? [getting caught up in his tactic to confuse the conversation, but then…] Actually, let’s come back to whether you said that or not. Did you?
Man: what bit? What bit are you asking whether I said… or not. Have you asked her [pointing at the hurt woman] if she’s got her story right? She probably misunderstood me. Happens all the time…
Again, the man is confusing the conversation, engaging in gaslighting, throwing them off track with diversions and distractions, normalising the abnormal, and still no sense of remorse for possibly having hurt someone; no empathy.
Friend: [seeing through the evasion] can you just answer the question? Did you say, “… aren’t you feeling a little silly for looking the way you do?” If you did, can you see how hurtful that would be?
Man: I guess so. It didn’t mean it. It’s just that the moment was strange, and I thought I’d change things up.
Wow. The moment was strange… he thought he’d “change things up.” What he’s saying is that reducing his boredom is more important than her feelings or her being hurt for what he said. That’s a sociopathic lack of empathy right there.
Friend: Wow, so you said it, but you don’t sound very sorry… [now being cut off]
Man: … wait a minute, I didn’t say I said it… if I did, I’d be sorry. Sorry [words betraying body language and gestures].
Friend: I’m confused. You said you didn’t say it, and then you said sorry. Did you say it or not? Are you saying sorry or not?
Man: well, no… [silence]
Friend: well, no what?
Man: well, no, I’m not sorry because I’ve done nothing wrong… [and around the merry-go-round they all went again.]
~
The reality of this conversation is the friend never got to ask about the second part of the question (Did you say, “Gee, you seem a lot weird to me?”), which was equally upsetting, because the first question was never answered.
She never got the first part of the conversation resolved, and narcissists will find a way to confound reasonable logic. They won’t be pinned down unless they want to be. When they are pinned down, they will make it out that they were the ones doing good. And there will be no sign of remorse and no capacity for repentance will be shown. They may say sorry, but they never mean it.
Another reality about this kind of conversation is the power to destroy a person in merely two sentences. Think of the fact that women and men in abusive relationships will hear confusing and hurtful language and be subject to soul-eroding communication regularly, and that’s not even conceiving the narcissistic presence that a narcissist has about them, which ranges from awkward to feeling unsafe to feeling violated for simply being in their presence.
Narcissists will classically deny, deflect, distract, diverge, de-identify, delay, and slowly destroy every challenge from people who desire honest dialogue.
Photo by Adrian Swancar on Unsplash
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