"How Can I Get Him to Understand Me?"

 Welcome to the Relationship Recovery Podcast, hosted by Jessica Knight, a certified life coach who specializes in narcissistic and emotional abuse. This podcast is intended to help you identify manipulative and abusive behavior, set boundaries with yourself and others, and heal the relationship with yourself.

So you can learn to love in a healthy way.

Hello, and thank you for being here. My name is Jessica Knight. Today I want to talk about the very complex topic of how do I get them to understand me. It's a question I hear all the time, and it's a question that doesn't have an easy answer to it. And it's the answer that you don't wanna hear. So if you came here thinking that I was going to reply with this is how to get them to understand you.

I'm not, it's not the viewpoint that I subscribed to, the viewpoint that they're not going understand you. And this question or this topic came from somebody who wrote in and said, how do I get them to understand me? Apparently it's rude to have boundaries or just say no. What I want you to know is that they don't want to understand because just start there.

They don't want to understand. They feel entitled, right? If an abusive person acts on their own agenda, they don't want to understand you. If they wanted to understand you, you wouldn't even be listening to this podcast. If they wanted to understand you, just hearing you say you don't understand me, I want you to understand me, would be enough to get them to pause.

And that doesn't mean that in every healthy relationship, it's as easy as that. It does mean that that's, it's a block that they have. It's who they are. They don't want to understand you. Okay? That being said, I wanna address this question because it literally came in on an email and that that's all it said.

How do I get them to understand me? Apparently it's rude to have boundaries or just say, no. Let's touch on the boundary part. They don't see boundaries as something that they need to respect or a way to even show you respect. They are probably offended by the fact you have boundaries. It's not about getting them to understand.

It's about you understanding and accepting, radically accepting what your boundaries are, and the fact that they are not gonna understand them. When we are in an abusive relationship, and if you're in a relationship with a narcissist, you're in an abusive relationship, they do not understand or care. When you set a boundary, it's almost as if you can set a boundary and they see it as challenge.

They don't see it as a oh. It's a challenge to them. I have a course on my website, emotional abuse coach com, about setting boundaries with abusive people. The purpose of that course is essentially to get you to a place that you can think about boundaries that would actually help with these people. And the main lesson is, A boundary only works if it, it removes you from the harm.

If the boundary's not removing you from the harm, you don't have a boundary. So for example, don't talk to me like that's not a boundary. Talk to me like that again and I'm walking out is a boundary in my course. It's $19. It talks, goes more into detail and helps guide you through what that would look like and gives examples of boundaries work and don't work.

But I imagine that the person that wrote this email is believing that. I could just set a boundary and they're just saying it's rude. That's not it. They're saying, I don't respect you, and you're likely saying, I want you to respect how a certain way of treating me thinking that they're going to do that.

They're not going to do that. I promise you. There are no words that you can say that line up together that will get them to accept a boundary. And that is because abuse of people wanna treat you the way that they want to treat you, and they don't believe that they have consequences for their actions.

Have they ever cared? Would they hurt your feelings or when you felt like your boundaries were pushed? Or do they do what they wanna do when they wanna do it? Regardless of how you feel. Whose needs are above, who's here. One way that was helpful for me to see it, especially when somebody had a reaction to my boundaries, was thinking about it as a temper tantrum.

So, for example, if you speak to me like that again, I'm not gonna go out with you to the pla, you know, or do the thing that you said that you wanted to do, or speak to me like that again, and I'm leaving. I think about it in the same way that I think about my daughter's temper tantrums. My daughter's six, so.

If you're a parent, or even if you're not, if you've just been around a kid, you know that they can just have a tantrum. They just react. When you tell a six year old, no, they usually say yes or why or, but when she was three and didn't have all the words and the INT intelligence stuff hype me back, you know, in a very intelligent way that she does now, it was just feelings, just reacting, just crying, just screaming.

Now it's a certain set of words that she puts together to try and get a result. And it's on me to hold that boundary with her. No, you can't do this. No, you can't speak to me that way there's a consequence for it. She doesn't want that consequence. An adult will be able to handle the consequences of their actions.

If I was rude to a friend, actually, I'll give a real example. I'm a single parent, so I can't make definite plans with people. It's the truth. If a friend wants to go out with me, there's a 75% chance that I'll be there, 25% chance a babysitter's gonna cancel or I can't go. If my daughter's sick or something comes up, my friends know that.

The friends that I think value me understand that I've had people in my life get mad at me if I've had to cancel or reschedule due to something related to my child. If it's me just being lazy, I'm not lazy. This never happens. But if that was the situation, yeah, totally get it. But I have had friends take away the ability to hang out because they don't want their plans canceled.

That's fine. That's their boundary. Okay. Like I might think something about that. It's not really on me to judge. That's their boundary, my job to accept it. If I don't really feel like the friendship's valuable, that's another story. But it's is what it is. So when an abuser reacts to your boundary, they're basically saying, I don't want to listen.

An important piece of this very complex puzzle is remembering that somebody who is narcissistic, somebody who has narcissistic traits, somebody who is abusive, does not wanna take responsibility. They don't accept blame. When they get blamed, they push it away. It doesn't penetrate. It doesn't seep in. They don't even believe it half the time.

They don't wanna take accountability. Accountability would mean accepting the fact that they did something wrong, or that they might not be treating somebody that they're claiming to care about in an inappropriate way and have to deal with that meaning they would have to change, meaning that they would have to look back and feel like, look back and take the accountability that they don't take what they're really saying and.

This is really like sick and sad, but what they're really saying is it really hurts when you tell me the abusive things I've done and explain that you were hurt by it. It really help hurts when you tell me the abusive things I've done and explain that you were hurt by it. Can't you suffer in silence?

That's really what they're saying. Can't you let it go? Can't you look aside? Can't you just take it? Can't you not expect me to change? So how do you get them to understand you? You don't. You realize what's happening and think about all of the times that you've ever asked them to understand you, all of the conversations you've ever had with them that went nowhere, all of the times that you said the same thing and spent hours thinking about how to explain it in a way that they would hear it and that they didn't.

And like I said at the top of this episode, I know that this is not what you wanna hear, but if you need support, if you are identifying that this, or this is a pattern, I highly recommend looking at the courses that I have on my website, emotional abuse coach.com. I have one on boundaries. I have one on no contact, and I have the relationship recovery course, which includes a call with me, a one-on-one that's called a validation call.

To help you see where you are and make sense of your reality. I hope this was helpful. You can find me on Instagram and Emotional Abuse coach and emotional abuse coach com. And as always, you can email me at Jessica Jessica Knight coaching.com.