27 Ways the Narcissist Encourages You to Feel Badly About Yourself

The narcissist benefits from you feeling badly about yourself. If you feel bad about yourself then you are easier to manipulate, control and exploit. Narcissists can pick up on any negative feelings you have about yourself pretty easily. It's like they have a worthlessness detector.

If you've felt badly about yourself for your whole life, chances are good that you were raised in a narcissistic environment. The narcissist parent encourages his or her children to foster poor self esteem--this is the heart of insidious narcissistic abuse that is so painful for the child and the adult who endured this as a child.

Here is a list of 25 Ways the Narcissist Encourages You to Feel Badly About Yourself:

1. Makes subtle comments about aspects of yourself for which you are already insecure.
2. Makes negative comments about aspects of yourself for which you are proud.
3. Talks negatively about someone else who has the same trait as you.
4. Invalidates your experience through abuse tactics such as Gaslighting.
5. Invalidates your experience by telling you that you're not supposed to feel the way you feel.
6. Compares you to others.
7. Listens to you when you complain about being a victim, but ignores you when you're doing well.
8. Acts disgusted with you when you make a mistake.
9. Won't give you the affirmation you would normally get from a healthy relationship.
10. Keeps silent when a kind word would be helpful and strengthening to you.
11. Holds back affection when you're doing well, pours on the sympathy when you're going through hard times.
12. Accentuates the areas in which he or she seems to be better than you: career, family, relationships, body, financial, beauty, etc... 
13. Nit picks any area of your life or being.
14. Takes help from you without saying thank you.
15. Refuses to give you credit for the excellent things you do.
16. Ignores conversations about areas in which you excel.
17. Tries to exclude you or ostracize you from events with your mutual friends.
18. Blames one of your life issues on an insurmountable problem that you can never overcome.
19. Tears down your efforts.
20. Insults you directly.
21. Insinuates you are a failure in any area of your life.
22. Laughs at your mistakes.
23. Refuses to meet your emotional needs and express their good feelings towards you.
24. Give you back-handed compliments.
25. Take advantage of weak moments by agreeing with any of your own negative assessments. 
26. Blame you for their own poor behavior.
27. Gives you the silent treatment as if to insinuate you're not worthy of attention or respect.

This list is to get you thinking. It will help you to recognize when someone is deliberately trying to bring you down so that you can set boundaries and go no contact. You deserve to be treated well by kind people. You deserve to get your needs met by people who know how to have equal relationships with reciprocity. Set boundaries! Go No Contact! Protect yourself. Stop blaming yourself for feeling bad and start taking care of yourself so you can feel better.