Debating A Narcissist Is Bad For Your Health
Two phrases you rarely hear from a narcissist are: “I’m sorry” and “I don’t know”.
A narcissist may apologise when they are at risk of losing narcissistic supply. But ultimately, they are sorry because their supply is slipping through their fingers, not because they hurt someone.
However, narcissists never do not know something. To admit a lack of knowledge is to admit lack. To admit lack is to be in touch with one’s shame. And when a narcissist touches on the repressed shame of being neglected, abused and/or instrumentalised throughout childhood, they step on an emotional landmine.
As a result, narcissists never deepen their self-knowledge or wordly wisdom, because truth and reality rarely touch the narcissist’s True Self. To help avoid the risk of admitting a lack of knowledge, the narcissist creates an aura of all-knowingness via their false self. The most comical way they achieve this is by simply declaring ‘I knew that’. Even when our gut tells us otherwise, we avoid petty arguments and just take their word for it, or brush it off.
A more insidious way a narcissist protects themselves from a lack of knowledge is to draw you into an argument or debate. While your primary interest in debating might be to get to the root of truth, the narcissist is looking for the following:
They want to avoid being exposed to their shame.
They want narcissistic supply.
They have negative emotions they wish to be rid of.
Healthy vs Narcissistic Debate
A debate is the perfect playground for the narcissist to achieve all three of the above goals. To begin with, the narcissist will never accept your ideas or build on them. For every statement you make, the narcissist will counter with another statement which has little relevance to the thread you are discussing, or will reframe what you said and appropriate it as their own.
