Why It’s So Difficult To Communicate With A Narcissist
Because of their personality structure and relational paradigm, a narcissist makes communicating with them feel like a treacherous, uphill climb — or even downright impossible.
In a personal relationship, healthy communication involves the following elements:
Open-Heartedness: When speaking with someone, you should welcome their emotional experience into your heart, empathising with and truly absorbing the experience they are conveying through their words.
Shared Humanity: Through channeling empathy and allowing space for the other person to express authentically, you find opportunities to share in their humanity. Good communication involves deep attention paired with emotional attunement. Sometimes it involves simply sitting with the other person’s heavy emotions for a moment. Other times it means taking delight in the other person’s experience and being happy for them without needing validation.
Mutuality: Nobody dominates the floor. Each person is afforded the emotional space and attention to share, yet possesses the emotional intelligence to know when to stop and invite the other person to contribute. Ultimately, this achieves far more than balancing who gets to speak. By allowing the other person to contribute, your perspective is enriched, which awakens new insights and ideas, which then feeds into the other person when their turn comes. This form of synergy spirals upwards, creating a bountiful exchange which evolves each person’s way of thinking, widens their perspective, and enriches their soul.
