This is understanding today's narcissist.

Brought to you in part by psychcentral.com.

And now here's your host, Christine Hammond.

Today we're going to talk about how narcissists smear others and use smear campaigns

in order to get what they want.

Because being the victim of one of these is not very fun at all

Rather, it is an intense campaign that the narcissist orchestrates, which is designed to humiliate

their opponent, while simultaneously elevating the narcissistic status in some way, shape, or form.

It usually requires quite a bit of skill,

a lot of manipulation, and even more persistence to successfully pull one of these off. But for the victim, it can be absolutely shocking in a very damaging experience. So what I want to do is use this

through an explanation of a client of mine,

and we're going to call him John. John is getting a divorce from Sue. Sue, in this case, is the

narcissist. And Sue asked John for a divorce after 25 years of marriage because, well, we don't

really know why, quite frankly. And so after evaluating the

situation and going through what their marriage was like, we realized that she was very narcissistic.

So in the middle of all of this, of going through the therapy in order to recover and dealing

with the divorce, she starts this unbelievable smear campaign against John. So the divorce situation is

pending right now. It is not uncommon for a narcissist, in this case, Sue, who absolutely smeared him

in front of other people, but at the same time would kind of come back and forth and beg for reconciliation.

So she did this cute little push-pull thing with John, which constantly kept him on his feet.

And what we wound up working through in session was helping him to see that this was just another tactic of manipulation that she was using so that

she could get something more in the divorce and so that she could come off better because he was

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