I Angered My Narcissist Boss

I typically use my writing to process my life lessons. But I have put off writing about this particular lesson for a long time, as even after years it’s still raw.

I guess that tells me something about how badly I need to begin processing this, so that I can begin the journey of putting it to bed.

Narcissistic abuse hurts its victims. It hurts our ego, our confidence, and even our sense of self.

When my overt narcissist boss finally fired me after dangling me on a string for 18 months, I had kind of forgotten who I was.

This can happen when we spend every waking moment trying to be who we think our abuser wants us to be, in the misguided belief that this will win us their favor.

My first red flag

It was 2014 and I had just graduated from University as a mature student with a non-vocational degree. That’s to say that while I now had a Bachelor’s in something cool, that something didn’t directly translate into a job. A point that a previous boss at my part-time student job had enjoyed teasing me about.

That guy told me, with glee in his eyes, that I would “work for him forever” — at least that wasn’t the case!

Suffice to say that I was grateful for my graduate job, and that was a big part of my motivation for ignoring the red flags.

The very first warning sign I ignored came up only a week into my role, when my role itself was in question. In short, the idea was that he needed to rewrite the role he had hired me for in order that I would pay my way in the business.

That’s right folks — it was apparently the case that he had hired a social media manager that he couldn’t afford, and so I needed to start doing direct selling in order to justify my wage cost.

I was never really sure if he was bad at business, or trying to keep me insecure. But since his business thrived in my short time there and beyond, I’d have to believe the latter.

Being on the phone all day is not my jam. But desperate to not be back in the job hunting pool, I spent my time bending myself into whatever shape he claimed to want from month to month. It never stayed the same for very long.

New opportunities (for him)

With the growth of the business and the expansion of our small team, came more opportunities for him to gain narcissistic supply from me. We went through strange cycles of him investing in my training and development and trusting me with more responsibility, then changing my role again and taking work projects away from me.

After almost 18 months of shape-shifting into whatever role he thought of next, I had lost my ability to grin and bear it any longer. It took my partner to point out that I was in an abusive situation, probably because I was so frazzled from the constant games that I couldn’t tell anymore.

With the growth of the team came the hiring of a difficult friend of mine who I had taken great care to slowly reduce contact with and keep at arm’s length. He knew this as we had talked about her at length a week or two earlier.

He really did like to know everybody’s personal business.

The big announcement

So the boss took the whole team out to lunch to announce his great idea to hire this person — and I couldn’t miss the fact that he was watching my face for a reaction as he spoke.

At this point I began to understand that he wanted to push me out of the company. But he didn’t want to be seen as the bad guy, so he was perhaps giving me reason to leave in hiring this person. There certainly wasn’t a role to fill — he just created one for her.

I assume he was ready to push me out because he knew that I wasn’t under his spell anymore. I was tiring of the games and didn’t have much more energy to jump every time he barked a command.

Yet, I was too stubborn to leave. I’ve never been good at knowing when to walk away. And honestly, I was scared to go back out into the job market.

Towards the end, one of the worst things he did was to make me self-conscious about how I looked in our team meetings. He pulled me aside and asked me if I had a problem with him. The reason he was asking, so he said, was that I was avoiding eye contact with him in meetings. Apparently I was making him feel uncomfortable.

But perhaps this wasn’t just one of his games. Perhaps I really was showing on the outside what I felt on the inside. I knew he was a narcissist by this point, and I was getting really tired of the drama. So maybe I was avoiding eye contact. Perhaps I had let him see that my faith in him had faded.

Self-doubt

A really tricky thing about prolonged interaction with narcissists is that it leaves you confused and doubting yourself. So even today I can’t be sure how much was true.

He let me go from our weird one-to-one, and then immediately called a team meeting, where I sat trying to make an appropriate amount of eye contact.

Yeah, it was awkward, and that was by his design. I no longer had the ability to be myself in a team meeting. Now I had to put on a show — which no doubt looked as contrived as it felt.

All change

The week that his new hire, my difficult friend, began her role, was the week that he took mine away. I had tried hard to be cool about her joining the team. But I guess that wasn’t providing his supply. A healthy boss would want a calm team — this guy loved drama. Perhaps he was mad that I was denying him some by being calm here?

On the day he fired me, he told me that he had wanted to leave his own company because I was bullying him. Yep, you read that right! I had been making his life hell. But then he had a revelation — this was his company, and he didn’t have to be the one to leave!

That day was emotionally exhausting, and of course I was scared about entering unemployment. That had been the source of his power the whole time — my fear of not paying my rent.

But the moment I left that final meeting I felt 75% lighter. I say only 75% because his final act of cruelty was to have me work out the month. And I couldn’t refuse since I needed that last bit of my pay package. But at least there was an end in sight, and it was just a few more weeks of torture away.

Hindsight

Looking back over this period of time, it’s so obvious to me that I should have got out in my first week! But we all know that in reality, narcissists are tricky, and they choose specific people as their victims. They choose people like me, who lean towards co-dependency.

We are typically people who experience abuse in our childhood first. This creates in us the ability to plow through and withstand more than we should — even it’s that’s really, really wrong.

It makes us tough in a way that actually isn’t healthy. And for the narcissist, it means that they can get their supply for a sustained amount of time. What a match made in hell.

When I was finally free, of the man and the job, I turned to freelancing and never went back. At first I just wanted to avoid employment for a while, so I couldn’t be in the same situation again. As a codependent-type I knew I was a beacon to narcissists. But also I just needed a break.

Overtime I grew to love the freelancing world, and have since found my confidence again. In the last 4 years I’ve had some amazing clients who have truly valued me.

I’ve also had a couple of clients that didn’t treat me well, and you know what, they didn’t last too long. I eventually found the courage to end the working relationships that didn’t work for me.

I'd already learned that lesson the hard way.

Going forward, I intend to stay freelance for as long as I can. Time is a great healer, and with distance from the abuse I have relearned to trust myself. Now I’m confident that whoever I work with in the future, I won’t tolerate unhealthy behavior from.

If you find yourself in an unhealthy situation now, then I urge you to talk it out with somebody who is removed from the situation. Getting a fresh perspective can help, just as my partner’s perspective helped me.

We know that reasoning with a narcissist rarely works out well, but there is a better course of action, and that’s to remove yourself from the situation.

Even in an unstable economy, there are other job opportunities. You can even create your own if you feel like trying the freelance life.

I’m not telling you to leave employment if that’s where you want to be. Just know that you have options — you just might not be able to see them all while you are under the spell of narcissistic abuse.