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Why the Narcissist Attacks Your Success (It's Not What You Think) — Transcript · YTtoTranscript

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Why the Narcissist Attacks Your Success (It's Not What You Think)

Common Ego · 3,312 words · 17 min read · EN-ORIG

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Below is the complete, readable transcript of Why the Narcissist Attacks Your Success (It's Not What You Think) by Common Ego on YouTube. Read the full text, copy any part you need, or generate a transcript for any video with our free tool.

One thing you may have noticed about narcissists is that they can usually handle you struggling. They're unbothered or maybe even a little giddy when you're failing. And they may even be able to handle you succeeding as long as you stay small about it. But the moment you start owning your success, the moment you stop

apologizing for taking up space, you have entered different territory. And what happens next seems a lot like jealousy, but it's more like something they've buried in themselves so long ago that seeing it alive in you becomes unbearable to them. And that might sound like letting them off the hook, but I'm going to explain it also makes perfect

sense and more importantly so that you have the tools to be able to handle it. My name is Christina and on this channel we talk about recognizing patterns that keep you stuck and building the capacity to break them. So, this is part one of a three-part series on jealousy in relationships with narcissists. And by the end of this

video, the things that they attacked you for most, the qualities they made you feel like you needed to manage or apologize for, you're going to understand exactly what those attacks were really about. And it's probably not what you think at all. Because here's how it usually goes down. You get the promotion or you set the

boundary. Maybe you have the glow up or you start therapy and you actually start feeling better. And out of nowhere, the person who claimed to love you becomes hostile in a way that feels disproportionate to what actually happened. And now they're attacking the very thing that's working for you. And the cruelty of it lands in a very

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specific way with you. Because you're not just dealing with their reaction, you're dealing with the fact that good things in your life have somehow become problems for you. So, you're noticing that success has become dangerous and growth is always framed as you being somehow selfish. And ultimately, the simple act of taking up space now feels

like you're somehow overstepping. And the worst part about it is if you want to keep the peace, you know, if you know what's good for you, you'll start playing smaller and maybe start downplaying your progress because you know that if you don't, then it'll set them off. And somehow you've learned that managing

their moods falls under the list of many things that have become your responsibility. So, what we're talking about here, this is all a survival response. And it makes complete sense that you've developed it. I mean, it worked in the short term. It's kept the peace. It's just that the price of the peace was really you. And

you may have even developed this survival response in childhood, which makes it more difficult to identify and more difficult to shake, which is devastating, but it's also information. Because what they're attacking isn't actually about jealousy the way most people understand jealousy. It's more than just that simple wanting that someone else has. The targeting

here is too specific for that because they're not going after your weaknesses, they're going after your strengths. And if you notice, these are the qualities that make you most yourself. The parts of you that feel most alive and unashamed. Now, Carl Jung spent decades studying what is called the shadow. So, the parts

of ourselves that we reject and push into the unconscious. And most people are familiar with the dark shadow. So, those negative traits that we just don't want to own. But Jung also identified the flip side that he called the golden shadow. And these are the positive traits that we've learned to repress. And this would be different for

everyone, but it could be things like competence, creativity, power, or your capacity for joy. And these are parts of ourselves that we decided were too much, maybe too dangerous, or too threatening to other people to keep conscious. And this happens to everyone, not just narcissists or not just the people who deal with them. According to Young, we

all have a golden shadow because most of us learned somewhere along the way that parts of us were just unacceptable. So, maybe we were too loud or too sensitive or just plain too much. And so, we buried those parts and we decided that they were problems to be managed rather than qualities to be owned. And

then we spent years watching other people carry those same qualities and feeling something really complicated about it. And here's where it gets kind of tricky because you might admire someone who carries those traits that you've repressed in yourself. Or you might resent them. And you might even feel a mix of both of those things at the same

time. Us humans are complicated beings, aren't we? But either way, when we project our golden shadow onto someone else, we're seeing in them what we buried in ourselves. And when we're met with feelings like that, we might either put someone on a pedestal, like we're idealizing them for the very qualities that we've disowned in ourselves, or

seeing those qualities in them could make you angry. And that could look like needing to take those qualities down or discredit them somehow. Like we need to prove that qualities aren't actually that good or that the person carrying them is either immensely flawed or just pretending. And I'm betting that you're starting to

see evidence that a lot of jealousy that was directed your way was a result of someone else's golden shadow. So basically, every time someone tries to knock you down a few pegs because your light is shining too bright, it's because they've learned to dim their own light and they're angry that you haven't

had to do the same. So as we're talking through this, you probably also identified your own golden shadow or at least parts of it. If so, congratulations because that means that you're probably not highly narcissistic. And if you were, you'd really struggle with seeing that side of yourself. But I must add that if you have not identified

your golden shadow in these few minutes, don't take that as a sign that you are a narcissist, please. Maybe you just need more time to sit with it. And remember that you could either really admire somebody who has these traits or really resent somebody who has them. So you might be saying like I just don't have

it in me to be jealous or hateful of other people, but remember it's not always about tearing other people down. The tearing down part is just the most problematic way that this plays out. All right, so now wait a second. All of that really does make sense on the surface level, but from my experience and

probably from yours, too, narcissists seem to embody some of the same traits that they try to squash in you. Things like confidence, don't they? So the narcissist's golden shadow seems a little bit more complicated. They might not have suppressed things like confidence. Instead, they may be performing them. And those are really different things because actually

feeling confident, that internal sense of I'm okay, I trust myself, and I'm enough is an entirely different thing than just acting confident because real confidence needs self-awareness and so it needs some level of self-doubt to balance it out. You can't genuinely have one without being honest about the other and that kind of vulnerability is

exactly what gets buried in highly narcissistic people. So let's imagine what that might have looked like for someone early on. Just an example to illustrate how this could play out. So maybe there was a version of this person who actually felt real confidence and then someone important in their lives knocked that down really hard and maybe

even shamed them for it like who do you think you are? So what that sort of thing does is it teaches you that having confidence isn't safe especially when this happens at a very young age and when something isn't safe we instinctively are going to move away from it. But here's the crazy part

of a cycle like this. Someone who's going to shut down another person's natural confidence or happiness or whatever it is is not naturally confident or happy themselves. They're just performing too. And so maybe that child learns that the feeling of confidence isn't safe because it hurts when it gets shut down. But maybe that child learns that the

performance of confidence makes you feel powerful. So you'll never get shut down and instead you will be the one shutting other people down. So feeling truly confident is vulnerable because somebody who's jealous can knock you off of that good feeling at any time. And that hurts because you were flying high when you were feeling good about

yourself and now you're feeling way down low. But when you perform confidence instead you don't ever feel that intense high. You don't get that true confident feeling about feeling good about who you truly are, especially if you're not allowing yourself to see all parts of who you truly are. And when the only

high that you feel is from knocking other people down, you're in complete control. It's a miserable existence, if you ask me, but you're in control. So, to contrast that, when a narcissist sees you exhibiting that true happiness or confidence, when they see you actually feeling good about yourself, not a made-up version of yourself, but

your actual self, I think now you might see why that gets to them. Because when you feel good about your accomplishments, you're feeling the contrast of all that hard work and the pain you felt along the way. And you're proud of yourself for persevering. You're proud of the entire process. And when a narcissist feels good about their

accomplishments, that good feeling is much more likely to come from being better than other people. And the two are not the same. And it can be pretty obvious, depending on how narcissistic the person is that you're dealing with. There are definitely levels, and we all do carry some narcissistic traits. But someone who is very high in

narcissism isn't likely to experience these golden shadow characteristics in the same way you might. And I can only imagine how unbearable that must be to them. Because it forces them to see that their confidence, happiness, or whatever that thing is for them isn't real. It's a performance that they never let slip if they can help it. And now here

they are, face-to-face with the idea that these things that they've built their false personality around, these things that are truly a performance to them, but very much real in you. When they're face-to-face with that and seeing what real confidence or real creativity or whatever that thing is, when they're seeing what that really

looks like, they're coming face-to-face with the fact that theirs is not genuine. So, your very existence proves the narcissist wrong. So, they try to destroy the qualities that they've rejected without having to acknowledge that they were the ones who rejected them. Which means that what feels like jealousy is actually maybe something a little more complex. Maybe

they do want what you have or maybe they don't. But either way, they don't have it and so they're trying to kill it in you. So, think about what they actually attack in you. If they reject your confidence, it's because feeling confident, feeling truly confident was never safe for them. So, probably from a

young age, they just pivoted and they moved on to perform incompetence, which is a whole lot safer. And if they target your true joy, it's because they decided that their own joy was maybe naive or inappropriate. And what they're attacking isn't your weakness. I'm going to say this again, it is your strength. The very thing they

target is the thing that is most authentically yours. The quality they recognized as powerful enough to threaten their whole [clears throat] persona. So, instead of taking it personally, you can look at their attack as a >> [clears throat] >> confession of sorts. So, they're telling you exactly what they see as most dangerous about you.

Which means they're telling you exactly what is most powerful about you. But it can get destabilizing when you start to believe that this attack is actually a flaw in you. That your confidence is really arrogance, or your creativity is maybe too self-indulgent. Or maybe you believe that your boundaries are selfish, or that your joy

is naive, or childish. If you internalize their projection as so many of us do, and begin attacking those same qualities in yourself, they win. And what's worse, you risk becoming just like them over time. So, here's some useful advice from our friends the ancient Stoics. And this one is from Seneca, who shared a practice

called premeditatio malorum, which literally means the premeditation of evils. And the idea was to mentally rehearse adversity before it happened, so you can remove its power to destabilize you. Because when you've already imagined the storm, the actual storm can't catch you unprepared. And I want to be clear about what this actually feels like to use, because I

think it sounds colder than it is. It's not about becoming unfeeling. It's about not being ambushed. Because one of the most destabilizing things about being in a relationship with someone who projects like this, is the whiplash. You have a good day, and then you're blindsided by their reaction to hear a good day. And

now you're spending the rest of the evening trying to figure out what you did wrong. And more importantly, you no longer feel good in any way. The good thing gets contaminated, and your win becomes a problem that you have to manage. Premeditatio malorum interrupts that cycle by giving you a second to get your footing before the

impact. So, you might think something like, "Okay, if I share this good news, here is what usually happens next." Or if I set this kind of boundary, this is typically how they respond. You're not predicting the future, you're just paying attention to what has already been true. And once you can it coming, you have

just enough space to not take the bait. And I also want to be very clear that this isn't about rumination. This is a dangerous thread to pull on if you're not careful. Because when you're practicing premeditatio malorum, you don't have to anticipate every single word that they might say and formulate every single comeback that you can have.

Trust me, I know how that goes because I've been there and it's not healthy. But when it's working, this process goes a little something more like this. If I tell them I got a promotion, they're probably going to say congratulations and then come back 5 minutes later with an hours-long lecture about how dumb I am for something little

like leaving the light on in the garage. And I know that's the kind of thing to expect. So, I'm not going to be blindsided. I'm not going to get my hopes up that they'll share in my joy and be proud of me. I'm not going to take that congratulations to heart or as

a sign that they're actually happy for me. And so, I'm not going to be crushed when they act in the exact same way that history has shown they will act. And if they don't prove you right, great. All the better. If they are actually happy for you, amazing. But if they do prove you right, you can

look at it as data about their shadow side instead of data about your value to them or your value as a person. And so, not taking this personally means not thinking things like, "You know what? I said it in a way that sounded like bragging and that's probably why they walked away and came back angry." It is

not blaming yourself in any way and it's not ruminating about finding ways that you were wrong so that you can have control of this again. You can take control of this by thinking things like, "You know what? There's the projection." And the anticipation of of projection becomes your armor because you're removing their ability to

surprise you with their crushing blow. And you already know that they can't integrate their own light or their own shadow for that matter. So, you know they'll try to extinguish yours. And that changes what their reaction means to you. The Stoics understood that other people's reactions tell you everything about their inner world and nothing

about your actual worth. So, when someone attacks qualities in you that are objectively positive, things like confidence, creativity, boundaries, or growth, they're giving you a map of their own psychological wounds. They're showing you exactly what they decided was unacceptable in themselves. And I want to be real that understanding their projection is just

the first step. And the real work is reclaiming what they've systematically attacked over months, years, or maybe even decades or a lifetime. And this part does take time. It's not a simple reframe that you hear once and then you're all good. But think of it this way. Every time you stand up for

yourself, even just internally, and you don't accept their criticisms or takedowns, you're proving to yourself that you're worth standing up for and that you're allowed to take up space. Whatever space it was that you were taking up. And you're essentially proving to yourself that the narcissist in front of you contributed to your own

golden shadow. But now that you know that it was never about you, you can start rejecting whatever it is that they're throwing your way. And there are other ways you can do this work, too, which will be especially helpful for those of you who have gone no contact and don't have a narcissist actively

triggering you. So, think about the qualities that you've been afraid to own. What parts of yourself have you been apologizing for? Because chances are those are exactly the parts that have been attacked. And once you recognize them, you could start to take them back for yourself. You can own your confidence without apology and

express your creativity without permission. And the next time someone tries to dim your light, my hope for you is that you'll see it for exactly what it is. Their own insecurity that has nothing to do with you. So now, I hope you have a better understanding of where their jealousy is coming from and I wish it

was as easy as just understanding it and moving on. But if you've dealt with this type of attack for months, years, or a lifetime, the next step is to really understand exactly why their projection landed so hard within you and what was going on behind the scenes every time they knocked you down. So, we'll be

exploring that in the next part of this series, which will be dropping tomorrow. And if you're watching this in the future, the link to part two will be right here. And if not, I think you'll find this video right here on recognizing the signs of jealousy super helpful to watch in the meantime.

Anyway, I hope that that was helpful to you and I will see you again tomorrow.