5 Things You Need To Do Once You Realize You're Dating A Narcissist

Oftentimes when it comes to talking about narcissists, we're talking about how to identify them in our lives so we can cut them out as soon as possible. But in reality, especially when it comes to romantic relationships, not everybody may be so eager to head for the door.

Perhaps you're feeling a bit blown away because you've just realized that your partner—someone you love—is a narcissist. You feel very connected to this person, but you also feel turmoil and confusion because you know you're not being treated as well as you could be and don't know what to do.

First of all, you need to be certain you are staying for the right reasons—and not because you are scared to be alone, scared of what the narcissist might do, addicted to the drama that occurs with your narcissist partner, or are trauma-bonded to the narcissist (which can happen when your narcissistic partner is similar to one or both of your parents). Be honest with yourself: Why do you really want to stay?

For your relationship to work, your narcissistic partner will need to be proactive about changing—and that means they need to seek out professional help. The problem, of course, is that narcissists generally refuse to acknowledge their own flaws and see everyone else but themselves as the real problem. If this is the case, then you either need to 100 percent accept that nothing is going to change—that you get what you see—or you need to leave the relationship.

Most of us, as we were growing up, learned various forms of control to get love and avoid pain. Controlling behavior is any behavior that has an agenda attached to it—behavior that is an attempt to get your partner to change and to see things your way. Some controlling is overt, such as anger or threats, and other controlling behavior is more covert, such as giving up your own needs to try to get a certain response from your partner.

Sometimes controlling behavior may seem well-intentioned, but it's nonetheless unhealthy. Any time you are trying to control your partner rather than focusing on taking care of your own feelings and needs, you are abandoning yourself. It will not only result in you feeling even worse—because you are trying to control something you can't control—but it will likely also create resistance. This is true in all relationships but especially so when it comes to narcissists, who generally hate being controlled.

In addition, trying to control in both overt and covert ways is your participation in the dysfunctional system you are in. If you have any chance of making this relationship work, you need to heal your end of the codependent system.

While narcissists tend to have little motivation to change, people tend to treat us the way we treat ourselves. In other words, your partner's treatment of you might be mirroring your own self-abandonment. You might find that the more you learn to love and value yourself and treat yourself as you would treat someone you love, the better your partner treats you. It doesn't mean that your partner is healing, but we can indeed train people to treat us the way we want to be treated.

It's your job to make yourself happy, which will begin to happen naturally as you learn to treat yourself with love.