How to Avoid a Narcissist's Trap

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Are you on a journey to learn how to avoid a narcissist’s trap? Maybe you have been in trap before and you want to learn how to detect and dodge these pitfalls. Or maybe you want to protect yourself, just in case. You need to learn how to stay away from narcissists when dating, meeting new people, in the work place and with new relationships. Whatever the case may be, let’s get into the matter at hand:

Narcissists are very cunning people. That means that they are going to try to trap you into relationships, or toxic situations. In order to beat a narcissist at their own game, you need to have an arsenal of tools to help you.

Whether you have already attracted a narcissist in your life or not, you are especially going to need one important coping technique to help you avoid the narcissist’s trap. That important coping skill is to learn how to respond, and not react.

Here’s the thing: how we respond is always going to be our responsibility. No matter what someone says or does to you, your response is what people look at. Let me break it down further: People will only see your actions, and not how you were manipulated into doing it.

This is an important thing I had to learn, and it promoted me to some sort of adult. It doesn’t matter what anyone does. How you react to it is your job. If someone does something to anger me, I can either let it get to me, or value my peace and let go of the emotions.

How to Avoid a Narcissist’s Trap

Below are my tips on how to avoid a narcissist’s trap. Remember that it takes time and practice to be able to spot a narcissist’s trap. Also: don’t blame yourself for falling into one. There is no way to know about narcissists and their traps until you actually run across them.

1 – RESPOND, DON’T REACT

What is the difference between reacting and responding? Reacting is driven by emotion. There is no logic or rational thinking when you react. You don’t think about the consequences of your words or actions. You are just triggered to act this way as a result of being attacked where your emotions lie.

Responding means that you have a hold of your emotions. You don’t act without thinking. You make a deliberate and calculated call. You assess and analyze the effect of your actions. After all that, you respond to the person in the most logical way. One that will save you all the trouble that comes from being rash.

Responding and not reacting might not come to you easily. That’s because every skill that’s taught to you in life takes practice. The first step is to fail and make mistakes. Trust the process. When you fail, the hurt gives room for you want to be better. The next step is to move on to being aware of when it happens. This step can take a lot of tries, because you need to be completely sure of when someone is trying to push your buttons on purpose. This is the first step to learn how to avoid a narcissist’s trap.

2 – MINDFULNESS

#2 on how to avoid a narcissist’s trap is: practicing mindfulness. Mindfulness is very important in learning to control your emotions. It helps you to become aware of what threatens your peace. If you are ready to respond and not react, you need to practice being mindful when a narcissist provokes you in order to be entertained by your reactions.

When you are being pushed, focus. Learn to breathe and remind yourself that the true intention of a narcissist is to watch you struggle to defend yourself. Narcissists are lying, manipulating cheats! They will say things about you to YOU yet you know yourself and you know that they are false.

3 – THEY LOVE TO PROVOKE A RESPONSE OUT OF YOU

Okay, here’s the thing about narcissists: They always want to watch us squirm. Narcissists always know exactly who to pick on. They will provoke you in some way that targets your lizard brain. The lizard brain reacts quickly to any sort of emotional provoking.

Narcissists love provoking you into some kind of meltdown. As far as I’m concerned, they get a perverse pleasure from watching you struggle to defend yourself. Narcissists want to see your reactions to their crazy actions. They want to know if they can get away with doing something bad to you. They want to see if you have boundaries and can kick them out of your life at the drop of a hat.

4 – LEARN TO SPOT A NARCISSIST

Before you learn how to avoid a narcissist’s trap, you need to learn how to spot a narcissist. Learning to spot a narcissist is important in a relationship. One tactic that narcissists use early into a relationship is to love bomb you. They do anything to reel you into their trap. Now, if you don’t have a solid sense of self, you are going to easily succumb to a narcissist.

Another tactic that narcissist use before love bombing you is to ask you what you look for in a partner. With this valuable information, they begin to act like everything that you ever wanted in a partner. My advice? Always deflect this question, because in the long run all that just fades away.

With a narcissist, reacting means giving away your power. Narcissists are extremely capable of formulating wild lies about you in order to get a reaction out of you. They love those reactions, and feed off them.

5 – EVERY CONVERSATION IS ABOUT THEM

Narcissists love turning every conversation back to their own toxic selves. If you tell them how you feel tired, they are going to want to one-up you. They’ll tell you how they are more tired than you, how it’s YOU that makes them tired, how you always bother them when you take up space in your head, yada yada.

The only reason a narcissist gets away with this is because they have you hooked. They know you will be in shock and disbelief over what they are saying about you, and they like that very much indeed.

6 – NARCISSISTS FOCUS ON YOUR FEAR

If you want to avoid the narcissist’s trap, you’re going to need to know that narcissists love using fear to get you to do things for them. Here’s the kicker—sometimes this fear is not even real. They will guilt you into staying with them by threatening to spread lies about you. They will make you think that something is much scarier than it actually is.

Narcissists find it easy to warp your sense of reality. if you have to deal with a narcissist you know that people don’t always understand why you do some of the things you do. Narcissistic abuse victims are subject to emotional warfare and mind-warping tactics. That is why you have to recognize where your fear is being taken advantage of irrationally. This will give you an added advantage on how to avoid a narcissist’s trap.

Living life with a narcissist is not living. It’s a forced kind of servant-master dynamic. We all deserve to be in healthy relationships with regular people.

The Takeaway

Whew. There is a reason why narcissism is called a personality disorder. These people are DANGEROUS. They don’t ever want you to disagree with anything you say, even when you are right and they are wrong. That’s why it’s important to educate yourself on how to avoid a narcissist’s trap. This will equip you with the tools you need to give your energy to the right people and to avoid being hurt by manipulative narcissists.

Check out my new e-book on narcissism: Click Here

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How to Avoid a Narcissist’s Trap

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