To ask how to deal with a narcissistic relative?

[yogaoga]

Can’t stop contact with them completely but they are very difficult to deal with and thrive off drama, then pretend they never wanted drama / other people are sensitive. They deflect all of their own horrible behaviour and accuse others of doing the same thing. The victim complex is next level and they are so sure that they are not the problem, but everybody else in their life is

There is no winning with them and even doing simple amicable things is impossible as they have such a high, inflated sense of self worth

How do you deal with this sort of person? They cause me stress & another relative who is also dealing with them lots of drama and very high blood pressure.

If she has the hide of a rhino she won't care if you ignore her then, will she?

If she blanks you and stares at you when you speak how do you get drawn into her dramas in the first place? Surely that means she is grey rocking you, so you grey rocking her back should be easy?

I think you should mostly ignore her, but one little trick that we found worked quite well might help you.

One of his little control tactics was to create "atmosphere". In particular, they'd come over to our house and (we learnt after) he'd manufacture some kind of argument or something before they arrived. Then they'd get here and he'd be all moody/sad/depressed/edgy. She would be upset because she was embarrassed at him being rude but he didn't care because his actual goal was to make us think she was being mean to him and he was the victim. Needless to say, we weren't having any of that. So DH and I started challenging him. His favourite little trick was to barely greet us as he came in the house - imagine depressed, surly teenager pissed off and grunting at you as he comes in the door from school. So we started being basically treating him like we'd treat that surly rude teenager with a firm "HELLO?!" or similar.

He HATED it because he looked like a complete idiot.

He also stopped doing it when he came to our house.....