Why It's So Hard to Get Over a Narcissist: Matthew Hussey on Three Traps That Keep You Stuck
Matthew Hussey
Matthew Hussey starts with a puzzle. Narcissistic partners are often the people who betrayed us most and treated us worse than anyone else in our lives. In theory, that should make them easier to leave behind. In practice, Hussey says, moving on from them is unusually hard. He wants to explain why those betrayals become "wounds that do not heal the right way" and why trying to get closure from a narcissist is so "painfully unrewarding." He organizes the talk around three traps people fall into when they try to move on.
Trap One: Looking for Closure From the Narcissist
The first trap is expecting closure from the narcissist. Hussey describes a common urge to confront the person, hoping for catharsis. People want an "I told you so" moment, or at least the satisfaction of being right, having the other person admit they were wrong, and hearing them apologize.
Hussey says this fails because the other person is not "meeting you on the same moral landscape." At minimum, he says, someone like this has "massively impaired empathy." They cannot hear your pain, register the damage they caused, and then show you that they understand it and feel bad about it. Real acknowledgment needs all of those steps.
Instead, Hussey lists the responses you are more likely to get:
- Shifting the blame: "I only did it because of you and something you did."
- Minimizing: "I can't believe you're making such a big deal out of this," which makes you look like the unreasonable one.
- Playing the victim: turning the conversation to their own problems.
Always the Hero or the Victim, Never Wrong
Hussey sums up these responses with one pattern. People like this, he says, "will only ever be the hero or the victim." When they have power, they cast themselves as the hero. When they lose it, they become the victim. "What they will never be is wrong."
He gives a simple test for moments when such a person's logic leaves you confused, even though they clearly betrayed you: ask how often this person is ever wrong. "Anyone in this life who is never wrong has no credibility," he says. If the answer is rarely or never, Hussey suggests your own feelings are more likely to be true than whatever they are telling you.
He adds that both roles come from ego. Both say, in effect, "I am special. I am significant." The hero version demands to be worshipped. The victim version demands sympathy. Neither gives you the relief, catharsis, or healing you were hoping for when you started the conversation.
What Hussey Tells Coaching Clients
Hussey does not tell people to avoid the confrontation entirely. When coaching, he says, he tells clients they can go ahead if they want to have the conversation for their own peace of mind, just to have said it and gotten it off their chest. But they should not expect it to be satisfying.
In his view, the more likely result is the opposite. You may go in feeling certain and full of righteous anger about how obviously wrong this person is. You will most likely come out "more confused than you went in."
He draws a broader lesson from this. One of the most valuable things we can learn in life, he says, is "who to expect solace from and who never to expect solace from." He calls life "energy management." We will always be unhappy, he argues, if we direct more of our energy toward the people who cause us the most pain.
Anger That Turns Inward
Before the second trap, Hussey mentions a feeling that often follows: anger. People are angry about the time that was wasted and about what the other person did. That anger can quickly turn inward, into anger at ourselves for staying so long.
He describes people telling him that they are over the person but cannot forgive themselves for how long it took to leave, how many years they gave, and how many times they let themselves be mistreated. They feel angry, ashamed, and embarrassed, and they don't know how to let go. Hussey says he will return to this at the end of the video, and he does in the third trap.
Trap Two: Being Made to Feel Sorry for Them
The second trap is feeling sorry for the narcissist. Hussey says people in these relationships have been conditioned to do this. Over time the partner shares their wounds, childhood trauma, PTSD, and all the ways life has been hard for them. As a result, no matter how badly the person behaves, "our wiring from this relationship takes us back to feeling sorry for this person."
He says this is especially dangerous for highly empathetic people and for those prone to taking the blame. Many people, he notes, have spent their lives apologizing even when things weren't their fault, to keep the peace or because they never want to be someone who doesn't own their mistakes. With a partner who isn't playing by the rules, that habit gets exploited. You are asked to apologize not only for your own real mistakes but for theirs as well. Your empathy, in his words, gets "used against us."
Hussey describes the loop this creates. The partner betrays you or does something terrible. You get angry. Eventually the anger fades into pity and guilt, and you start feeling you were "too ruthless" in how you handled them.
Turning the Cannon of Empathy Around
Hussey then describes a question he got about two weeks earlier from someone in his Love Life coaching program. She was out of a relationship like this and afraid it would happen again: that she would meet someone, feel an initial attraction, and have her empathy weaponized all over again. She did not want to change who she was, because her empathy was part of her.
His answer was that she did not need to change or give up her empathy, which he called one of the most beautiful parts of her. She needed to change its target. So far, her empathy had been aimed outward, at a partner or at people in general. Hussey compares empathy to a cannon: a powerful thing to have on your side, but one that leaves you vulnerable if it always points outward.
His suggestion is to turn the cannon until it points at yourself. Think about your own experience as much as you think about the other person's. Then, he says, you can use your empathy for your own benefit. The next time you notice unhealthy or toxic patterns in a relationship, such as lying, gaslighting, invalidating your experience, or ignoring your needs, your first move would not be to understand why the other person is the way they are. Hussey says you don't have to drop that completely. But in that moment the main question should be: "What is my experience of this?"
Handled this way, Hussey argues, one of your most natural capacities can become "your greatest superpower for yourself" in your love life.
Trap Three: Blaming Ourselves
The third trap returns to the inward anger raised earlier. Hussey says members of his program regularly ask how to forgive themselves. They say they feel stupid, ashamed, and embarrassed, full of regret, and as if they wasted their lives on this person.
His first response is that we enter dating and relationships assuming the other person is using "the same playbook, the same moral code." In truth, he says, very few people are equipped to recognize and deal with narcissistic relationships when they encounter them. The other person does things on instinct: lying, manipulating, gaslighting, and using coercive control to maneuver us into confusing situations. We start to question ourselves, and our confidence erodes. We no longer feel like the person we were at the start. We become scared to leave and no longer feel worthy of anyone else. "They are acting on instinct," Hussey says. "We are simply not trained for this kind of experience."
He adds that people like this make it extremely hard to leave, and that leaving often has unpleasant or even catastrophic consequences.
The Teddy Bear Cholla
To illustrate, Hussey describes a desert plant called the teddy bear cholla. Despite the name, he says, there is nothing cuddly about it, and he calls it the most dangerous plant in the desert. It looks like a fluffy, inviting cactus until you get close. In the video he handles it and gets stuck even through a glove, saying he can feel a spine going through.
He explains that the spines have barbs pointing the wrong way. Once they are in your skin, you have to do more damage to pull them out. That, he says, is what a narcissistic relationship is like. It gets its hooks in, and removing it means creating a bigger wound. Leaving can mean more damage to your life, whether psychological, emotional, or financial, or damage to your other relationships.
Gratitude for Getting Out at All
From there, Hussey reframes self-blame. "Nowhere was it written that you were going to be able to leave this relationship," he says. History, he notes, is full of people who never left relationships like this. You may have family or friends, or people from the previous generation, who went to their graves without escaping.
So he suggests there is a kind of gratitude available in having found the "escape velocity" to get out of this person's orbit and be free again. Thinking about the lost time can be devastating, he acknowledges. But there was no guarantee you would have any time left once the relationship ended. The fact that you are still here, he says, means you do have time, and a different level of peace, if you managed to get this person out of your life.
The Injustice, and Giving Up the Revenge Fantasy
Hussey also addresses a related frustration: that the narcissist often "got to ride off into the sunset" and faced no consequences for how they treated you or others. He calls this "one of the great injustices of life sometimes with people like this."
He reminds himself, he says, that the fantasy of teaching such a person a lesson is only a fantasy. In his view, these people don't learn lessons the way others do. You could take everything from them or unleash the worst wrath on them. It might weaken them, strip their power, or make them impotent, but it would not make them learn. He argues that the catharsis many people want is the idea that "they'll finally learn," and "it's not in them to learn." If revenge left them with the worst life imaginable, he says, they would simply become "the world's greatest victim," and their ego would express itself that way.
Distance as the Real Closure
Hussey ends by saying he believes in giving up the revenge fantasy altogether. The ultimate reward for leaving a relationship like this, he says, is not revenge but distance: getting your life back and no longer having to deal with this person. "That is the greatest closure you will ever experience."
Why is it so difficult to get over a narcissistic relationship?
I don't see it the way you see it. Stop bringing this up.
Shouldn't it be in some ways easier?
He consistently blamed you for everything and never...
These are the people that betray us the most.
I told you so many times that I just can't do this anymore.
They are the people who treated us worse than anybody else in our lives.
And all you have to do is ignore. So, why is it so uniquely difficult to move on?
We are going to talk about why it is so hard to get over a narcissist, why the betrayals of a narcissist become wounds that do not heal the right way, and why it is so painfully unrewarding to try to get closure with a narcissist. We're going to do this by talking about the three traps that we routinely fall into when we are trying to move on from a narcissist.
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The first one is looking for closure from the narcissist themselves. There is the tendency to confront that person and think that in confronting that person, there is going to be some kind of catharsis. It's going to make us feel better. We're going to get the "I told you so" moment or "I knew," and I'm going to get at least the righteousness of being right, of them being wrong and them having to apologize.
The problem is with a person like this, you're not experiencing someone who is meeting you on the same moral landscape as you are meeting them. You have someone who at minimum has massively impaired empathy. So they are not able to hear you in pain, to register the damage that they have done, and then to reflect that back at you and to truly acknowledge that they have caused this pain and to feel bad about it.
They might say to you, "I only did it because of you and something you did." So they try and shift the blame. They might say, "I can't believe you're making such a big deal out of this." So trying to minimize it and make you seem like the crazy one for making such a big deal out of it. They might start citing their issues and going into victim mode.
There's something that's true of people like this, which is they will only ever be the hero or the victim. When they're on top and they're in power, they'll be the hero. When their power is stripped of them, they will be the victim. What they will never be is wrong.
And by the way, if you ever find yourself confused with a person like this, where they have clearly betrayed you, but they're confusing you with their logic, anyone in this life who is never wrong has no credibility. So if you're ever feeling confused, that is a very simple test you can apply. How often is this person wrong? And if the answer is little to never, then you can suspect that what you're feeling is much more likely to be the truth than whatever they are selling to you.
Either way, whether they go to the hero or the victim, both come from a place of ego. Both come from a place of "I am special. I am significant. I'm either amazing and you should worship me, or I'm downtrodden and you should feel sorry for me." Both come from an egotistical place. Neither offer you the relief, the catharsis, the closure, the healing that you're actually looking for in this moment from that person.
Whenever I'm coaching people, I'm always saying to them, if you want to have the conversation with this person for your own peace of mind, so that you said it, so that you got it off your chest, by all means, go ahead. But do not mistake this conversation for one that is going to be satisfying.
In fact, it's far more likely that you will leave this conversation that right now you feel certain about. You might have a certain kind of righteous anger right now about what this person has done and how in the wrong they are and how obvious it is that they have been an awful person to you or how obvious it is that they are an awful person. You will come out of that conversation most likely more confused than you went in.
I really believe that one of the greatest things we can learn in life is who to expect solace from and who never to expect solace from. Life is about energy management and we will always be unhappy if we are directing more of our energy to the people in life who cause us the most pain.
The second thing that you will likely have as you think more about this person is anger. Anger about the time that they have wasted. Anger about what they have done. And that can very quickly get turned inwards to anger at ourselves for the time we have wasted with this person.
I have had people say to me, "Matthew, I've gotten to the point where I am over this person, but now I can't seem to forgive myself for how long it took me to leave, for how many years of my life I gave to that person, for how many times I let them treat me so badly. I'm angry at myself. I'm ashamed. I'm embarrassed. And I don't know how to let go of that and move on." We are going to talk about that towards the end of this video.
But first, I want to talk about trap number two, being made to feel sorry for this person. Now, many of us struggle with this because in a relationship with a person like this, we have been conditioned to feel sorry for this person. They have over time told us about their wounds, their childhood trauma, their PTSD. They have talked about all of the ways life has been hard for them. And very often, no matter what someone does and no matter how bad it gets, our wiring from this relationship takes us back to feeling sorry for this person.
This is especially dangerous when we're the kind of person who is extremely empathetic, when we're prone to taking the blame for things. Many of us have spent a lifetime being conditioned to say sorry. Even when things aren't our fault, we say sorry to keep the peace. We say sorry because we never want to be the person who does not own our mistakes.
When you've got someone in life who's not playing by the rules, they're not just asking you to apologize when you genuinely make a mistake. They're asking you to apologize for their mistakes. It is very easy for us to now have our empathy used against us. And this can create a loop for us where they betray us. They do something horrible. We get angry and that anger eventually gives way to feeling sorry for them and a feeling of guilt that we have been too ruthless in the way that we have handled them.
I had someone in my Love Life coaching program ask me a question two weeks ago about this where they said, "I am afraid now that I am out of a relationship like this that my empathy is going to get used against me again in the next relationship. That I'm going to meet someone, there might be some initial attraction, and then someone is going to weaponize my empathy. They're going to take advantage of me all over again. What can I do? I don't want to change myself. My empathy is a part of me."
And the thing I said to her is you don't need to change your empathy. You don't need to abandon what is actually one of the most beautiful parts of you. You need to change the target for your empathy. So far, your empathy has all been directed outwards to another person, maybe to other people in general. That empathy is like a cannon. It's a powerful, powerful thing you have on your side. But when the focus of that empathy is always going outwards, you're going to be vulnerable.
What if we turned the cannon of that empathy and we turned it all the way until it was pointed at yourself? What if we made you the target of your empathy? What if you thought about your experience as much as you thought about somebody else's experience? Then you could weaponize your empathy for your own gain.
So that the next time you're in a relationship where you start to see patterns of behavior that are unhealthy or toxic, that don't honor your needs, lie to you, gaslight you, invalidate your experience, when you start to see that, your empathy doesn't go to them and understanding them and why they are the way they are and all of that. I'm not saying you have to drop that completely, but what if instead the primary target for your empathy in that moment was you? What is my experience of this?
That means you don't need to lose your empathy. You just need to change the direction of your empathy in these situations. And if you do, one of your greatest capacities, something that's completely instinctive and natural to you, will become your greatest superpower for yourself in your love life.
By the way, if you're watching this, there's a good chance that you come to my videos in order to restore a sense of clarity and sanity when the people around you are constantly confusing you or the person you're with makes you feel like you can't trust your own intuition. If you like what I have to say and you find it clarifying and comforting and grounding and it brings out the best in you and you want me as your coach whenever you want me, Matthew AI is designed to do that. You can talk to it or text it anytime you want. Ask questions, get clarity, and restore your confidence through your conversations with it.
I still have people who use it and tell me, "I cannot believe how useful this is. I cannot believe how helpful this is and how much better I feel for having spoken to Matthew AI." So, if you have someone in your life right now that's coming up for you as you're watching this video and you want me to help you work through it, go try Matthew AI. I promise you it will make a difference. The link is AskMH.com. Go have a free conversation and see what it does for you.
The third trap that makes it hard to let go of a narcissist is blaming ourselves. This is a question I regularly get from my Love Life members. "How do I forgive myself? I feel so stupid. I feel so ashamed. I feel I've wasted my life on this person. I am so beyond angry. I'm so beyond ashamed. I'm so beyond embarrassed. I'm so beyond regret and feeling like I have wasted my life on this person."
We go into dating, we go into relationships assuming that someone else is playing by the same rules as us, the same playbook, the same moral code. In truth, very few of us in this world are equipped to recognize and deal with narcissistic relationships when we are presented with them. There are things that they are doing on instinct: lying, manipulating, gaslighting. The coercive control, the way they maneuver us into situations where suddenly it feels really confusing. We start to question ourselves. Our confidence gets eroded. We no longer feel like the person we were when we started the relationship. We're scared to get out of the relationship. We no longer feel we're worthy of anybody else.
They are acting on instinct. We are simply not trained for this kind of experience. People who operate like this in relationships make it incredibly difficult for us to leave. And often leaving these relationships comes with unpleasant or even catastrophic consequences.
There's a plant in the desert. It's called the teddy—what is it called? The teddy bear cholla plant. But don't be deceived by the name. There is nothing cuddly about this particular teddy bear. In fact, it's the most dangerous plant in the desert.
Looks like a fluffy, inviting cactus until you get near it.
Ow. This can happen even with this glove on. One of them has just gone through. I can feel it. And they have little barbs going in the wrong direction so that once they're in your skin, in order to pull it out, you actually have to do more damage before you can get it out.
That's what a narcissistic relationship is like. It gets its hooks in and then in order to pull it out, you actually have to create a bigger wound. Sometimes you have to do more damage to your life, whether it's psychologically, emotionally, financially, damage to your other relationships. We find ourselves in really difficult situations leaving these relationships.
This is not pleasant at all. It won't come off or without. Oh, look at that.
And lest we forget, nowhere was it written that you were going to be able to leave this relationship. History is littered with examples of people who were not able to leave these relationships. You may have family or friends who went to their grave never leaving a relationship like this. People in the generation before you who never got to escape a relationship like this. There is a kind of gratitude we can feel in having gotten the escape velocity to get out of the orbit of a person like this and to actually find ourselves free again in the process.
It can be devastating to think of the time we've lost, but we have to actually remember that there was no guarantee we were going to have any time at the end of this relationship. The fact that you're still here watching this now means you do have time and you have a different level of peace in your life now, if you were able to get this person out of your life.
And yes, it's infuriating if you live there, that they got to ride off into the sunset and be okay afterwards and that they didn't have any repercussions for the way they treated you or the betrayals or any of that. You may even feel that though that person has never got any repercussions in life for the terrible things they've done, not just to you but to other people. And that is one of the great injustices of life sometimes with people like this.
But I try and remind myself that this fantasy we have of teaching someone like this a lesson is nothing more than a fantasy. Because in reality, the people we're talking about don't learn lessons the way the rest of us do. You could take everything from them. You could inflict the worst kind of wrath on them. That wouldn't mean that they would learn anything. It might weaken them. It might take away their power or render them impotent. But it wouldn't make them learn.
And that is the catharsis I think so many of us want, is they'll finally learn. But it's not in them to learn. If they had the worst life ever as a result of some revenge you or I were able to inflict, they would simply become the world's greatest victim and their ego would express itself that way.
So, I'm a big believer in giving up the revenge fantasy and instead recognizing that the ultimate reward for leaving a relationship like this is not revenge. It's distance. It's getting your life back. It's no longer having to deal with this person anymore. That is the greatest closure you will ever experience.
Thank you so much for watching, everybody. I hope this was helpful. Leave me a comment. I love hearing from you. By the way, we are down to a very small number of in-person tickets in Miami now. So, if you have not got your ticket for the retreat and you would like to come, now is the time. MHRetreat.com. And if you haven't watched this video yet, it pairs really well with this video you just watched. So, go check it out and I will see you next time.
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