Being With a Narcissist Is a Bit Like Being a Jenga Game

But so is healing from narcissistic abuse…..

I recently spent a lovely summer evening playing giant Jenga with a group of friends over wine and guacamole. If you’ve never played the game — it’s pretty simple. A solid tower of small wooden blocks is created, and then each person takes turns pulling one out until the tower falls.

As I was watching, I had the thought that this is pretty much what it feels like being with a narcissist: you’re a Jenga tower that is slowly but surely dismantled block by block. And this can be why it is hard for others to understand the devastation a target of narcissistic abuse goes through–each individual block may not be a big deal. But over time your core is eroded and the tower becomes very unstable.

One block might be something as simple as a narcissistic partner saying “you’re wearing that?” Or a narcissistic boss taking credit for your work. Or a narcissistic parent mentioning that it looks like you’ve gained weight. Just a block being pulled out of your tower. No big deal in and of itself. And if you make a fuss, often the response from the narcissist and sometimes those around them as well is, why are you making such a big deal of this? Why are you so sensitive?

It’s often the cumulative abuse that takes us down, not necessarily any one particular event, comment, or incident. The targets of this kind of abuse typically become less and less balanced and stable until–just as in the Jenga game, any slight bump can cause a collapse. The abuse erodes our core, making us easier to dominate, manipulate and control.

But here’s the hopeful aspect of this metaphor. It can give us a bit of a road map to healing as well. In the game that soft summer night, as blocks were being pulled from the tower, sometimes the right move was to put a piece back in where one had been removed. And this is, I think, the journey of healing.

There is a line in Gaslighter, by The Chicks (awesome song) that goes “you broke me.” I think that while it can definitely feel that way, the truth is not that we are broken, even though we’ve gone through a lot of destabilization. And so the answer is to rebuild that core. To bit by bit, locate the holes in the tower, in our core, and fill them again.

I have seen this in both my clients and myself. Learning to set boundaries might be a reclaimed block to our tower. Practicing putting ourselves first on occasion might be another. Even simply doing something that brings us joy can be a stabilizing force. Sometimes targets of narcissistic abuse feel like they will never really heal, never feel strong, never get over it. But if we can hold that it is just one Jenga block at a time, and work to do this piece by piece by piece, we may wake up one day and realize we can stand strong in any wind.

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This post was previously published on But Now I Know Your Name and is republished on Medium.

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