Narcissistic Word Salad
Even if you are wise enough to avoid the C word, word salad will just take another turn.
You might ask the narc to stop treating you with disrespect. To which the Narc will answer:
“Disrespect? How interesting you use that word…remember that time you disrespected me in front of your teacher?”
To which you might reply:
“I was in seventh grade.”
And now the Narc has pulled you into their web:
“Of course it was seventh grade, but that just proves how disrespectful you’ve been your entire life.”
And if you are still crazy enough to imagine you can reason with the Narc, you might reply:
“I’d prefer to talk about our current relationship instead of events years ago.”
(Seems reasonable right?)
But the Narc will find a recent event to prove how you have shown a lack of respect:
“Okay, so how about the fact that you can’t even show up at your grandmother’s birthday dinner?”
Of course they leave out the fact that they planned the dinner on the spur of the moment, on another day that wasn’t even her birthday and you had to work that day. Be careful here, you might try to defend this by suggesting true respect would be to consult you before the party was set, but that will just take you down another rabbit trail which like all rabbit trails will lead you back to where you started.
All of the Narc’s circular reasoning and arguments are simply a distraction to make you wonder if you are the real problem, but let me state this plainly:
.. Bottom line:
The Narc needs a scapegoat and you have been selected. (Unlucky you.)