Narcissists live in fear of being controlled by others. To avoid that, they create scenarios so that they can have the upper hand over their victims. Long after I was done with the Narcissist (the N) that I dealt with, I shuddered to think about his controlling behaviors.

One example of that was when I was questioning his behaviors when he started leaving me. Because I dared to ask questions and demand answers, in his eyes I wasn’t as “compliant” as I used to be. Scrambling to take back his control, he offered for me to “stay home and be a mom” and I didn’t “need to work anymore”. Mind you, this conversation took place when he was discarding me. I didn’t know at the time, but he was on his was to be with the other woman. So why on earth did he want me to have a baby and become a stay-at-home mom at the same time?

It was all about the control he would have over me if I decided to do just that. It was not about love, not about family, or commitments. He wanted me to stay at home and lose the income from my job, so that I would have to depend on him financially. This same man who didn’t even want to pay his own car insurance, do you think he would be amendable to pay for the family? I don’t think so. And if he would, he would constant interrogate where I would go and what I would buy I would imagine. By holding the family’s fiances over my head, he would restrict what I could and could not do. He would get the control that he wanted over me. If I had a baby with him, I would be held down and could not escape without having my own resources. I would be kept at home in the name of being a stay-at-home mom, while he, in the name of working, could run around and have affairs without the slightest chance of me knowing. I would like to note that there is nothing wrong with being a stay-at-home mom in the conventional sense, it just becomes disastrous when there is a narcissistic husband or partner in the mix. Narcissists know how to entangle a web around their victims so that it makes it hard for the victims to escape, either because of finance, childcare or commitments. The bigger the web, the more control the narcissists have, which leads to more narcissistic supply for them.

Another way that the N exerted control over me is pretending to give me choices but then giving me the reasons for not choosing what I chose. For example, he and I were thinking about eating out. He asked me where I wanted to go. I told him I wanted to eat Mexican food. He said, no, that Mexican restaurant I wanted to go to wasn’t that good. Then he gave me two other options. Then I would say, ok, let’s go to one of those. Then he said, no, maybe something else, then he suggested yet another restaurant. This kept going on and on until I became tired of picking a restaurant, and finally told him, you pick one. And we always ended up at a restaurant that he picked. One might say, oh well, he just couldn’t make up his mind. That was not the case because almost every time this happened, we always went to a place of his choice. Whenever I picked out something, he found reasons to go against it. He masqueraded it as “you can’t make up your mind” while he was the one that undermined my decision. This is how a narcissist insidiously control another person. He got the thrill and narcissistic supply from tricking me into saying ok to whatever he was planning. If he would have just suggested what he wanted from the beginning, there would be a high chance of me being ok with it anyway, but no, that was too easy; there wasn’t any thrills there for him.