How to negotiate with a narcissist
First, don’t expect to settle this amicably. When it comes to negotiating with a narcissist over a divorce, it is imperative to understand that the playing field is not level.
You will say something to the effect of, “I only want what’s fair, and I don’t want to fight, I’d like to settle this amicably.” But you will actually mean it. The narcissist will say something like that too and you will believe them. But it will be a lie.
Narcissists fight dirty. If this were a physical fight, and you were two kids wrestling on the ground, they would be the ones biting, pulling hair, and kicking you in the groin. Thus, coming at them directly is not a smart strategy.
Here’s a perfect example. When I interviewed Dr Joe Vitale, a bestselling author, he was just finishing a two-and-a-half-year divorce, and he said: “This divorce should have been over easily and effortlessly because what I offered was basically the world – because I was willing to walk away.
“What happened instead is that the ‘narcissistic’ other side decided to create a persecution of my life and business, and it has been the most excruciating, tortuous, emotionally exhaustive, expensive, painful experience of my entire life.”
Making generous offers will not resolve the situation. The narcissist will then want to hold you to those offers that you floated out there as if they were agreements that you actually made, but then not give you anything in return.
Start with a strategy
First, figure out your strategy. If you’re going through a divorce, you need to visualise the life you want. What kind of settlement do you need: do you want the house, how much time do you want with the kids, do you want child support, be really specific about what co-parenting is going to look like, will you be at dance practice together, who will pick up from sports games?
Visualise what you need your life to look like in three months, six months and a year. This helps give you the strength to stick to your goals.
Use their ‘narcissistic supply’ as leverage
For leverage in the negotiation, you need to threaten the narcissistic supply – I call it ethically manipulating the manipulator. For example, I had one case where the husband was a Fortune 200 CEO and he thought he held all the power in the marriage, which he basically did.
Then his wife found out she had herpes, and we discovered that he was seeing sex workers on the side. In Florida, you can demand a jury trial for sexually transmitted diseases. This would have exposed and embarrassed him with things he didn’t want coming out publicly. We let him know in the mediation that we would ask for a jury trial and depose people in his company, and he settled the case.
This was because we were threatening a form of supply, his reputation, which was more important to him than the supply he was getting from messing his wife around.
It’s helpful to keep track of all communications, financial records and regularly change your passwords. Keeping track of everything will help to catch the narcissist amid their lies and schemes and provide real evidence against them. Mary is a good example. A kind woman in her 60s, she was married to a surgeon who held the patent for a lucrative orthopaedic surgical invention.
Her husband often baselessly accused her of leering at other men in lifts and would then make her “pay” for it for days with abusive behaviour, sometimes just verbal and sometimes worse.
She decided she’d had enough long before she finally had the strength to leave. She came to consult with me and then spent the next several years slowly gathering financial documents such as bank statements, credit card statements, and income tax statements. She’d then stop into my office and drop off what she’d found every few months.
As she gathered the documents, she also gathered her strength and her nerve. Throughout the divorce process, she was shaky and felt crazy, and he was threatening. But by the time the divorce was over, many years later, Mary was a different person. She was outgoing, socialising, wearing her hair longer, wearing makeup, and exuding confidence.
Watch out for the smear campaign
In a way, covert narcissists – those who try to hide the obvious signs of the condition – are the hardest to deal with. They present as humanitarians, doing things such as showing up with the food basket at hospitals, but a lot of times this behaviour is strategic and they’re involved in smear campaigns behind the scenes.
They are more likely to be female and present as the victim, they use guilt and passive aggression. They’ll say things like, “I’m so concerned about Fred and his drinking, I don’t want the children to be affected, it’s just that I’m worried about him.”
They’ll plant a seed, and then the next thing you know they’ll be saying, “Fred’s an alcoholic, I told you about his drinking months ago, I think we need to take the children away from Fred, it’s not safe.”
All the while Fred probably had no issues with alcohol at all, or any idea at all that this was going on, but he’s been smeared in terms of his ability to care for the children.
Don’t get stuck in victim mode, focus on strengthening your self-esteem
I’ve always loved the film The Wizard of Oz. Now, looking back, I see how the Great and Powerful Oz was a lot like the narcissist: behind the curtain was a feeble, scared, little man. Dorothy, the Scarecrow, the Tin Man, and the Cowardly Lion all thought the Wizard was the one who knew everything and could give them everything they wanted until they figured out that they had to take the journey to find themselves all along.
At the end of the movie, Dorothy has to tap her red shoes together to find her way home, back to her true self.
So you need to focus on yourself and build up your self-esteem. Nobody is coming to rescue you. The cavalry is not coming to say, “you are worthy”, you have to do that for yourself.
Focusing on poisonous thoughts such as “I can’t believe this person treated me like this after everything I did for them,” means you get stuck in victim mode.
Being stuck in victim mode means you can’t be in “confidence mode”, or “power mode” to negotiate with narcissists, and you definitely can’t be in “getting on with the rest of your life mode”.
You need to stay on the offensive and know that 100 per cent of winning is about your mindset.
Make sure you have a good support system around you, reflect on how you want to feel and focus on the positive feelings you want to encourage.
The more you respect yourself, the more the narcissist will back down.