You’re thinking about blocking the narcissist in your life and you’re afraid how they’ll respond. You’re asking yourself how does a narcissist react to being blocked. You have every right to feel nervous about their reaction.
Narcissists, by definition, lack empathy, are driven by self-admiration, and feel superior to others. Narcissism is driven by their fear of addressing the root of their narcissism, which is insecurity and low self-esteem.
So, you can’t predict their behavior or the lengths they’ll go to to get you back in their life. But, you can use these 25 ways a narcissist reacts to being blocked to get an idea of how to prepare for them.
This post is all about how does a narcissist react to being blocked.
HOW A NARCISSIST RESPONDS TO BEING BLOCKED:
1. They may reach out to your family members
Prepare yourself and your family members to hear from the narcissist in your life. Whether they are a former partner, a family member, or a friend, they will try to reach out to people who are connected to you. Let your family know what to expect if they are contacted.
This means telling them what a narcissist does, what tactics they will use when they feel threatened, and how to respond when they are contacted. Ideally, you should let them know that no response is the best course of action.
You will likely have family who want to stay in contact. Maybe they value the person and have a relationship outside of you (think related to the narcissist). In this case, let them know that any contact related to you should be ignored.
Otherwise, they can freely engage in contact as long as it doesn’t challenge your safety or cut off from the narcissist.
2. They may reach out to your mutual friends
Give your friends the information they need to keep you safe. Not every one of your friends will understand what true narcissists do and what narcissistic abuse can look like. So, you have to accept that not all of your friends will support you in the way that you need.
However, the best to keep yourself safe is to let them know you have a no contact rule with your narcissistic ex or narcissistic parent and ask for their support. Unless you truly trust your friend and would like them to listen, avoid sharing all of the details with them.
Focus on the facts: you cut off contact with this person and they will do just about anything to regain contact because narcissists can’t handle rejection.
It undermines their core beliefs about themselves. They don’t interrogate why they can’t handle rejection or have such unbending, rigorous beliefs about their perfection. Instead, they lash out in narcissistic rage and engage in harmful narcissistic behavior.
3. They may give you the silent treatment
It’s hard to predict what anyone will do, much less a narcissist. So, you have to think about their motives. On the surface, a narcissist seems like they have a grandiose sense of self-importance and their self-esteem is through the roof.
They’ll talk to everyone about how great they are, to the point that people believe narcissists believe this about themselves. But, they don’t. Narcissism is rooted in insecurity.
They need external validation so badly that all they can talk about is themselves. They need someone to confirm the grandiose things they say about themselves to feel validated.
This all leads you to expect them to reach out in some ridiculous way and, if they don’t, you’ll likely get nervous and start waiting for the worst to happen.
However, you deserve better than that. You can’t predict what they’ll do, so don’t try. Instead, focus on living your life. Prepare yourself without the possible actions of letting narcissistic people run your life.
4. They may inundate you with phone calls from a different number
Be wary of any phone calls, texts, or spam you get from unknown sources. They may send a message that seems innocent and like it’s from some bot or random person.
Keep in mind that narcissists need to feed the false narratives about themselves. This helps them to protect their fragile self-esteem above everything else.
They need to reinforce the false beliefs they have about themselves. Narcissists have such low self-esteem that they can’t handle the possibility of accepting the true beliefs they have about their worthlessness.
To be clear, narcissists, just like every human, have worth. But, their narcissistic personality disorder keeps them from seeing that or developing self-awareness.
So, keep that in mind when you get strange texts or calls. They desperately need to get in contact with you to inundate you with the reasons they’re perfect so that you’ll confirm their beliefs and give them much-needed validation.
5. They may react by love bombing you
You’ve likely come to expect that the narcissist in your life will berate you and attack you. So, when they send you loving texts that apologize for their actions and tell you how much they miss you, you may be caught off-guard.
However, this is called love bombing. It’s a manipulative tactic used by narcissists to draw in the people they’ve alienated. This might look like them sending you twenty texts about how sorry they are in the span of half an hour.
Or maybe they’ll leave you voicemails that tell you that they never meant what they said. They may tell you that you know that they really love you despite what they did or said to hurt you.
They may even go through the people you love and convince them that they are truly remorseful about their actions. This becomes extra challenging when you have to accept that the people in your life have been manipulated and might side with the narcissist instead of you.
This might seem genuine and like a chance to start fresh with the narcissist, but it’s not true remorse. It’s enough emotion and apologies to get you right back into the claws of a narcissist so they can revert back to their old ways with zero accountability or change involved.
6. They may attempt a smear campaign verbally or on social media
It’s challenging to deal with a narcissist because people outside of your relationship will likely misunderstand what your relationship is like.
They will see the false narratives and criticism that your narcissistic ex or narcissistic parent will post. This is the story everyone believes. Your family and friends assume the narcissist is telling the story accurately because they’re talking about how much you’ve hurt them.
This will hurt even more when the people in your support system ask you why you’re not getting back together with your narcissist or why you refuse to let them back into your life.
You may start to feel lonely and start to question the reality of your past familial or romantic relationship and believe the narcissist’s lies. In this case, identify the people in your life who can trust.
These friends and family who support you and believe you are the most valuable resources to rely on during this time. Let them remind you what kind of person the narcissist is and that you can’t go back to that toxic relationship.
7. They will demonstrate a lack of empathy
It sucks, but you can reason with a narcissist. The moment you try talking to them and thinking they understand you, they will hurt you again. They may let you believe they see your point and that they want to do better.
But, due to their lack of empathy, they don’t have the drive to change for the good of the relationship. Until they work through their narcissistic tendencies with a mental health professional, they’re not in a position to listen to you.
They’re so absorbed by the constant need to be right about themselves. They need to reinforce the narratives they’ve told themselves that they have no ability to think about others.
Once a narcissist admits they made a mistake, their world comes crashing down because they have to confront their low self-esteem and experience narcissistic collapse.
8. They may resort to verbal abuse like they have in the past
If you’ve already angered a narcissist, the odds are that you know they’ll verbally abuse you anytime they want. There may be no rhyme or reason because they can be triggered so easily.
Their mental illness is based on the belief that they are perfect, even though they have a much deeper understanding that this is all a coping mechanism to avoid dealing with their low self-esteem.
So, it’s easy to get triggered by anything that gets remotely close to this truth and insecurity, which means you’ve likely been verbally abused by them frequently. Any type of close relationship with a narcissist will reveal how scared they are of acknowledging the truth.
It’s much easier to yell at you and berate you than accept the truth and work through the insecurity. You can expect they will verbally abuse you outside of your relationship just as easily, if not more easily, than they did inside of your relationship.
9. They may spam you with text messages
Once you cut off the narcissist from your life, block them on everything that you possibly can. This will probably not keep them from contacting you, as you have seen elsewhere on this blog, but it will make them have to work harder to do so.
So, in other words, while you may be able to delay them spamming with messages, it is likely coming. Unfortunately, they may not be love-bombing you. Instead, they might just be verbally abusing you via text message.
There’s nothing that can prepare you for that type of treatment and there’s nothing that makes it feel better. The best you can do is develop a support network, some self-care tools, and enter this new phase of your former relationship with the understanding that they want to hurt you.
Remember that their words reveal how insecure they are without having anything to do with you. It doesn’t make it hurt less, but you can trust that their abusive tactics are just about their own insecurity and not reflective of the type of person you are.
10. They may threaten to give out your personal information
You can’t negotiate with a narcissist. Unfortunately, it’s not possible because their goal is always to act in their best interest to uphold the false narratives they have about themselves.
So, they may tell you they’re open to compromise and they just want to talk. Even then, they have no desire to make you happy or come up with a pleasant compromise. They need to win at all costs and they’ll give out your information to do it.
The problem is that if you start talking to them and they get angry, they might release the information anyway simply to get back at you in a narcissistic rage. You can’t control their negative behavior and you can’t predict it because their motivations are entirely selfish.
As much as it sucks to hear it, you have to let them threaten you without responding because you can’t change their mind or reason with them. Accept that they will do whatever they think they have to and take precautions to stay safe if they do give out your personal information.
11. They will likely prefer to stay as their false self than recognize their false self
Narcissists need to maintain their false narratives to avoid confronting the truth about themselves (i.e. that they have low self-esteem and need to work through that).
This means that they’ll do just about anything to maintain these false narratives, including becoming defensive to the point that you don’t recognize them.
A false self is the version of a narcissist that they think is the “true” self and it helps them to deny all of the truths they’re too scared to acknowledge.
Before they can make any internal changes and hold themselves accountable for manipulative behavior, they have to recognize their false self and acknowledge that it’s a defense mechanism.
It’s not your job to help them recognize that and, until they do that work in therapy or with the help of a mental health professional, they are not ready to make the necessary repairs for a new relationship with you to be healthy and loving.
12. They may play mind games
Once you cut off a narcissist and block them, they’ll know they’ve lost you and will either want to destroy or get you back. If they destroy you in the process of trying to get you back, that’s okay with them. So, they’ll make you question your reality.
They will tell you repeatedly that you hurt them and all of the conflict between you two was the result of your mistakes. They will never acknowledge how toxic they made the relationship or how abusive they were toward you.
After you hear this enough, you may forget the reality of your relationship with them and question the factual events that happened in your relationship. You won’t remember how they verbally abused you in public for making a joke.
Instead, you’ll remember that you hurt them with that joke so you deserve to be yelled at. Fight this urge by understanding, ahead of time, that they will lie to you over and over because they have to lie to themselves.
13. They may escalate their psychological abuse
We discuss a variety of emotional reactions, all of which can be considered abusive to an extent, but it’s still worth noting that you need to prepare yourself. When you’re in a relationship with a narcissist, you are navigating a different side to them.
You may develop Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder from the seemingly random, unpredictable onslaught of abuse you experienced in your relationship.
However, they will likely level up the psychological abuse. They’ll lead you to question your reality and create emotional distress from the constant worry about them entering your life.
16. They may locate you and initiate physical abuse
Do your best to stay safe in your home. You may need to move if you no longer feel safe because the narcissist knows where you live. You’ll need to use your best judgment to decide if they will show up at your home and intimidate you in person once you cut them off.
You may opt to stay with a friend or family member for a short period of time until you can feel safe. There’s no guarantee that moving will keep them from locating you, especially if you move in with someone they know.
However, the best way to give yourself peace of mind is by acting on your instincts. Remember they want to get you back in their life to validate them and, if they don’t achieve that, they’ll destroy you for threatening their false self.
17. They may lose all sense of their own emotional well-being
Narcissists are not in tune with their mental health or emotional well-being because that’s part of what makes them narcissists. They ignore the parts of themselves they need to work through because it’s painful and scary.
However, they still have the desire to stay relatively happy and content with their false self. They like to feel validated and secure in their false narratives, which is a sort of well-being for narcissists.
When that balance is disrupted, they may lose all sense of their well-being and abandon any type of happiness they had with themselves in favor of upholding their false narratives.
In other words, they are driven by defense mechanisms with one goal: to preserve their fragile self-esteem. At this point, they engage in one desperate attempt after another to stay afloat and avoid the truth about their insecurity at all costs.
18. They may make you question your healthy relationships
After being in a relationship with a narcissist, you may start to question even the healthiest relationships in your life. Whether they do it intentionally or not, they’ll gaslight you into believing you don’t know what a healthy relationship looks like.
This might mean that you abandon your current healthy relationships out of fear or that you go back to the toxic relationship because you can’t be sure it was truly toxic.
The most effective way to work through this is by researching and redefining what healthy relationships look like to you. Ask yourself what relationships feel good to you in your life.
Observe the relationships around you and decide what about them feels good and what about them you’d change.
You don’t need to have all of the answers, but it can be helpful to think through this on your own so that the narcissist in your life can’t make you question healthy relationships in your life.
19. They may attempt a power play
Ask yourself what power dynamics exist between you and the narcissist. They may be older, male, white, straight, etc. This all matters when you think about how people listen to them.
If your father tells everyone in your family that you are lost and confused and cut off him for no reason, they’ll probably believe him because he’s older and he’s your parent.
If your white ex-boyfriend tells all of your friends that you’re a “crazy” ex-girlfriend, it’s more likely they’ll believe him than whatever you tell them. The inherent power dynamics in our society suck and there’s no way to avoid it.
However, it’s useful to develop an awareness about these power dynamics. This way you can question people’s assumptions about why they believe the narcissist more than you. Plus, you know they believe them because they have privilege you don’t.
20. They may resort to temper tantrums
If a narcissist feels like their typical tactics aren’t working, they may resort to temper tantrums. This can look like lashing out with zero worry about who observes the way they yell at you.
Anytime you make a narcissist feel powerless, they’ll resort to any type of behavior that will regain that power in their mind. At a certain point, you may feel like they’re acting like a toddler. That’s because their behavior is consistent with a toddler’s.
If a toddler doesn’t get what they want, they’ll yell, pout, and insult until they get what they want or are removed from the situation. The same goes for narcissistic individuals and this phenomenon can explain why you suddenly feel like you’re no longer talking to an adult.
21. They may date people you know
As a way of getting back at you and keeping you in their life, a narcissist may start dating someone you know. This is especially true if they are your ex and they want to hurt you by making you think they’ve moved on.
Keep in mind that, while it’s not your job or place to stop someone else from dating a toxic person, the person who is now dating them will experience the same issues you experienced.
Avoid blaming the new person they’re dating for bringing them back into your life and focus on decreasing the frequency of you running into your narcissistic ex. This may mean you spend less time with your mutual friend, which isn’t fair but is in your best interest,
22. They will likely experience cognitive dissonance
Cognitive dissonance is the result of believing one thing about yourself or the world and experiencing another thing to be true. This may look like you know that social media negatively impacts your mental health when you use it too often.
Yet, you still use it too often because it satisfies your need for quick dopamine. Thus, you have to either change your action to align with your understanding of social media or change your belief to align with your action. For narcissists, cognitive dissonance is everywhere.
They know they have low self-esteem, however, they choose not to admit it and change their beliefs to align with their actions.
In other words, rather than change their actions and work through their low self-esteem, they change their beliefs and convince themselves they have high self-esteem.
However, the cognitive dissonance becomes so powerful that they need external sources of reinforcement (aka you telling them they are amazing and perfect people) so that they can continue to change their beliefs to align with their actions.
23. They may enlist their family and friends to get you back
One of the worst ways to hear from a narcissist is through their family. You know that you can’t reason with a narcissist, so you ignore their attempts to reach out. Unfortunately, it’s a lot more difficult to ignore their family members or get them to understand.
Realistically, everyone in a narcissist’s life knows how they treat people. Their family members likely experience a lot of the abuse you’ve experienced.
So, approach them with compassion if you choose to respond. Let them know what your clear boundaries are and that their narcissistic family member is not allowed back in your life. Avoid trying to reason with them because they’re too emotionally involved to really listen.
Ask them to respect that and, if they don’t, block them too. You only need people in your life who support your separation from the narcissist you blocked.
24. They may post a bunch of new pictures of themselves living their “best” life
Narcissists will attempt to pull you in in any way they can. They may know you well enough that they can predict you won’t respond to them spamming you with messages or calls.
Maybe they try that first, realize it doesn’t work, and end up resorting to vague posts on social media accounts that are directed at you. Regardless, they are probably doing more harm to the people they post about and seem to spend time with than they are doing to you.
Narcissists have low empathy, so they’re not concerned with anyone else’s feelings other than their own.
Even when it comes to their own emotions, they are not well attuned to how they feel beyond the basic feelings of anger and fear, which usually hide the deeper emotions they don’t want to explore.
25. They may try to get you to believe they are the only good thing in your life
Ultimately, narcissists believe they are the best people they know. This belief is surface level and will not hold up to any scrutiny, which is why they lash out. Yet, they will still use this belief to get to you.
They will tell you that you lost the best thing that ever happened to you and the worst thing for you to do was leave them. Once you recognize all of these statements as defense mechanisms, you’re prepared for just about anything a narcissist can through at you.
