The Subtle Signs a Narcissistic Partner Is Destroying Your Life

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Here is a summary of the transcript from YouTube, slightly edited with AI.

Unpacking “Unknown Number: The High School Catfish”

This is a video that is super important for anybody who has been traumatized by a narcissist in life. We are going to be talking about a show that just came out on Netflix called Unknown Number: The High School Catfish.

This is the story of a young girl, around 12 or 13 years old, who begins getting bullied by text. She doesn’t know who the person is. She doesn’t recognize the number. And this goes on for a long time.

By the way, let me issue a spoiler alert now. I am going to give the entire show away in this video. If you do not want to know what happens in this real-life documentary, turn this off now. Go watch it and then come back.

It is everything imaginable about the worst kind of cyberstalking. They are trying to track down this person and have no idea who it is. After two years of this, it turns out that the person doing it is not a jealous girl at school. It is not some boy with a secret crush or vendetta.

It is, in fact, her own mother.

Her mother has been harassing her, relentlessly bullying her, and even commanding her to take her own life.

There is an actual filmed moment from a police cam where she finds out that the person who has been destroying her life and making her an anxious, depressed wreck for two years is her own mother.

You see this harrowing moment where she learns the truth. Her mom—the perpetrator of all this abuse—walks over, puts her arm around her, and hugs her. And you see this young girl shut down. She doesn’t know what to do. She just sits there and allows her mom to cuddle her.

Betrayal Blindness

A friend of mine, Dr. Ramani—who is one of the world’s leading experts on narcissism—once came to speak at my retreat. She talked about a term called betrayal blindness.

Betrayal blindness occurs when we are unable to process the betrayal that is right in front of us. That phenomenon of not looking deeper into an unhealthy relationship relates to this concept.

It’s not intentional. It’s not like, “La la la, I know he’s cheating on me, but I’m not going to look at his phone.” It’s that to truly see and register what’s happening might mean the evening goes away. The marriage might need to be dismantled. The life you know might need to change.

But betrayal blindness doesn’t come without a cost. It’s like junk accumulating behind a drain cover. The more it builds up, the sicker a person gets—depression, somatic headaches, anxiety, isolation. The person feels crazy.

I believe the moment we see in this documentary is that moment for this young girl. The person who is supposed to be her safety—her protector and champion—is the person betraying and abusing her.

It’s too big to process. And that’s what results in that inability to truly take it in.

The Narcissist’s Love-Bombing Campaign

When we have been through something like this with someone, a common tactic they use is to turn up the intensity of their affection as a way to scramble our radar about what they’ve done.

When someone knows they have a grip on our nervous system and our emotions, they know they can still impact us as long as they still have contact. This is why contact with a narcissist can be so dangerous.

I’ll leave it to the experts to determine whether this behavior falls under narcissistic personality disorder, borderline personality disorder, or somewhere on the cluster B spectrum. But even a casual observer can see many traits of severe narcissism in what this woman is doing.

One of them is love-bombing.

Her mom goes to jail for a year and a half. From inside prison, she begins a love-bombing campaign toward her daughter—sending incredibly sweet texts that completely obfuscate everything that has happened.

As a child who hasn’t been able to process the betrayal, she is, of course, susceptible to that affection. It feels like the sunshine and warmth she has wanted all along.

There’s a chilling moment where it becomes clear this mother takes no accountability. She says, “Yeah, I did a bad thing, but people do bad things all the time. It’s just that my bad thing is out there for people to see.”

She even compares herself to a drunk driver—as if a single reckless moment is equivalent to two years of harassing your own daughter and telling her to kill herself.

Victimhood + No Accountability

When someone cannot hold themselves accountable, does not see the damage they’ve done, and cannot see how wrong their actions were, it can make you feel crazy.

Worse still, she moves straight into victimhood—a classic narcissistic behavior. She talks about the sexual abuse she experienced at 17. It’s terrible. Clearly, she has had a hard life.

And I actually believe people have an extraordinary capacity for forgiveness. It’s one of our best human features.

But when someone does a horrible thing and instead of taking accountability simply points to their past and expects our tears—that’s something entirely different.

There is no accountability here. Only: “I’m the victim.”

“Can This Person Change?”

When we are the ones traumatized by someone and that person is still around, continually asking, “Can this person change?” is taking responsibility for something that is not ours to carry.

It is not our responsibility to figure out whether someone who has hurt us acutely or repeatedly can change. It is their job to show us that they have changed.

If the person cannot even take accountability, the answer is almost certainly no.

Sorry is different from accountability. And accountability is not the same as change.

Even when someone takes accountability, all their work is still ahead of them—changing the behaviors that hurt you in the first place.

Making Sense of This Behavior

This show is further evidence of something Dr. Ramani says all the time: people do not truly understand narcissism.

Narcissism is still deeply misunderstood. Throughout this documentary, it felt clear to me and Audrey that this mom is almost certainly a narcissist.

Yet the people around her couldn’t make sense of her behavior. And her daughter cannot even begin to understand the kind of personality she is dealing with in her own mother.

That’s why she is still open to—and even rooting for—a relationship with this woman. It hasn’t become fully apparent to her that contact with this person is poison.

Coming to terms with the size of this betrayal will be an extraordinary feat for this young girl. It’s almost impossible to fathom that someone who was meant to protect you could betray you in such a profound way.

Managing the Fallout

If you are in that place right now, I want to leave you with this:

When someone creates pain and destruction in our life, the fallout is usually enormous.

In this girl’s case, she’s managing her mom going to jail, being the subject of conversations in her town and high school, living with one parent, and navigating her dad’s emotions in all of this.

Just managing the fallout can completely monopolize you. And when that happens, there’s very little bandwidth left to process the betrayal itself.

If you’ve been spending all your time dealing with the fallout and haven’t yet processed the depth of what happened to you and how it impacted you, you are not alone.

I will be here. We will be here to support you in the courageous work of unpacking that when the time is right for you.

The Love Life Reset

Thank you so much for watching this video. I cannot wait to read your comments on this one.

Before you go, I want to let you know about my final big free event of the year. It’s happening online in the next few days. It’s called The Love Life Reset, and it’s for anyone who feels like they want to regain control of their emotions, nervous system, and confidence.

Whether you’re single or in a relationship, this is for you. It’s going to be a healing session for so many people.

It’s free, and you can join at lovelifereset.com.

Thank you for watching, and I’ll see you this week.

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This post was previously published on YouTube.

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