There’s a particular kind of exhaustion that comes from watching the news right now, and it’s not the regular worn-down feeling of living in a hard world. It sits in your body, and it feels strangely familiar, like you’ve been tired this way before.
If you’ve been in a relationship with a narcissist, where you started questioning your own memory and wondering if you were the problem, you know this feeling because you’ve had it before. And if it’s coming up now while you watch this administration operate. That’s your gut recognizing a pattern it already knows.
I have sat across from someone who made me feel like I was losing my mind, who changed the story of what happened and presented it as fact, who made me feel special and valued right up until I became more useful to blame instead. It took me a long time to be able to see it for what it was, and once I could, I started seeing the same pattern everywhere it showed up.
What we’re watching at the national level is not just bad politics. It’s a familiar system, the same one that keeps people stuck in abusive relationships, just operating on a much larger scale. Those of us who’ve done the work to get out and heal tend to recognize it early, sometimes before we can even put words to why something feels so wrong.
Before we get into it; every behavior I’m about to talk about exists somewhere on the spectrum of normal human experience. Most people have overpromised something at some point. Most people have gotten defensive when they felt cornered. Most people have, in a moment of embarrassment or fear, tried to shift the blame somewhere else. These are not automatically signs of a disordered person. They’re signs of a human one.
What separates a hard moment from a harmful pattern is frequency, intensity, and whether the person is ever willing to own it. A narcissistic dynamic is not built from a single bad day. It’s built from the same moves, made over and over, with no accountability, no repair, and no real change. Once you know what you’re looking for, the difference between someone having a rough moment and someone running a playbook becomes pretty hard to miss.
It always starts the same way. You’re made to feel seen, special, like you’ve been chosen. The promises are huge. Everything is going to change, everything is going to be great, and the confidence behind it is part of what makes it so easy to buy into. You want to believe someone who seems that certain, someone who has an answer for everything and makes you feel like being around them means everything.
That’s love bombing. It feels like being loved, but it works more like being recruited, getting you fully committed before you’ve had a real chance to look at what you’re signing up for.
The shift happens once those promises start falling apart, once reality pushes back, once people start asking questions that don’t have good answers. Suddenly someone else is to blame. The economy would be fine if the Democrats hadn’t wrecked it. The policies would be working if the media wasn’t lying. The country would be healing if it weren’t for the enemies from within. The specific target changes all the time, but the rule underneath stays the same: every failure belongs to someone else, and you’re either loyal or you’re the enemy.
I remember when that shift happened in my own life, the moment warmth turned off and I went from being a partner to being an obstacle. Nothing changed in me. What changed was that I stopped being useful as someone who just reflected back what they wanted to see, and started being someone who questioned things, and that kind of dynamic doesn’t have room for that. It took me a long time and a lot of distance before I could see that clearly.
Gaslighting is when someone gets you to question your own sense of what’s real, and it’s different from regular lying in an important way. Regular lying is when someone tells you something false. Gaslighting is when someone tells you something false and then makes you feel crazy or unreasonable for not going along with it, so the whole conversation shifts away from what actually happened and onto whether you can be trusted to read a situation correctly.
You’ve watched it happen over the past several years. Crowd sizes that were clearly visible were flatly denied. Election results that went through court challenge after court challenge with no evidence of fraud were still called stolen. What happened on January 6th was caught on camera from multiple directions and still got rewritten. Phone calls were described as perfect while the content of those calls pointed somewhere else entirely. Documented, recorded, visible facts were just denied or flipped, and the people who pointed to the actual evidence were called delusional, biased, or enemies of the country.
That’s how it works. It’s not just lying. It’s building a completely different version of what happened and then treating your refusal to accept that version as the problem. Over time, if you’re surrounded by it enough, you start doubting yourself just to get a break from the friction of holding onto what you know is true.
If you’ve been through this in a relationship, watching it play out at a national level is a very specific trigger, because part of you knows exactly what you saw, and another part of you, the part that learned to second-guess itself just to survive, starts wondering if maybe you’re the one reading it wrong. That self-doubt wasn’t something you were born with. It got built into you by spending time in a situation that needed you to question yourself. It doesn’t mean your read on things is off. It means you adapted to something that wasn’t okay.
DARVO is a term coined by researcher Jennifer Freyd that stands for Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim and Offender. It describes what an abuser does when they’re about to be held accountable. They deny what happened, go after whoever is raising the issue, and then reposition themselves as the real victim being unfairly targeted, so the person who came forward ends up looking like the aggressor and the person who did the harm ends up looking like the one being persecuted.
Watch how consistently it shows up the moment any real scrutiny arrives. Investigations get called witch hunts. Oversight becomes persecution by a deep state that’s out to get them. Criticism of decisions becomes a personal attack on the country itself. Every time accountability gets close, the whole thing flips, and suddenly the conversation is about how unfair it is to even be asked.
In relationships, DARVO is particularly hard to deal with because it makes every attempt to address something real feel impossible. You bring up a legitimate problem and suddenly you’re on trial for bringing it up, spending all your energy just defending your right to have said something rather than ever getting to the thing itself. Eventually a lot of people in that position stop saying anything, not because they decided the problem wasn’t real, but because it costs too much every single time. That silence is not a character flaw. It’s what happens when a system consistently punishes people for being honest, and it’s exactly what we’re watching happen to journalists, institutions, and anyone else willing to keep asking questions.
People who have lived through narcissistic abuse tend to clock what’s happening before a lot of other people do, and the reason is pretty simple. Surviving that kind of relationship teaches you to pay very close attention. You learn to track shifts in tone, to notice when what someone says doesn’t match what they do, to catch contradictions that most people would let slide right by. You get sharp at reading those things because your sense of safety depends on it.
When I talk to friends who had more stable relationships and try to explain what I’m seeing using the lens of narcissistic abuse, some of them think I’m reaching. They’re not wrong that it’s an unusual way to look at politics, but they also haven’t had to train themselves to see the mechanics underneath what’s happening on the surface. They’re looking at each thing as its own event rather than recognizing the pattern running through all of them.
That pattern recognition built isn’t a sign that something is wrong with us. It was a direct response to what we were living in, and it turns out to be genuinely useful for understanding what’s happening right now.
Here’s what I’ve found helps, both from my own healing and from trying to stay grounded and engaged without completely burning out.
Limit how much you consume without cutting yourself off entirely.
There’s a real difference between staying informed and drowning in it, and they don’t do the same thing to you. Hours of scrolling doesn’t make you more ready to do anything useful. It just wears your nervous system down and uses up the energy you’d need to actually think and act. Find the sources you trust, give yourself time with them, and then step away and do something else. You can care deeply about what’s happening without being inside the feed every waking hour.
Put a name to what you’re seeing when you see it.
Say it out loud, write it down, tell someone you trust. Not just to vent, but because naming something is one of the most effective ways to break the hold a gaslighting situation has on you. Part of what prolonged gaslighting does is that it makes the experience hard to describe, like the wrongness of it doesn’t quite fit into words. When you can say “that was DARVO” or “that’s the devalue cycle,” you give your brain something solid to grab onto. You’re not confused. You’re watching something real, and you have words for it.
Listen to your body, and take care of it.
The stress response you’re feeling is not an overreaction to nothing. It’s a real response to a real situation. But a body that’s been running on high alert for a long time needs active care to keep functioning well, which means moving, sleeping, getting outside, spending time with people who see things clearly and help you do the same. That’s not a luxury you get around to eventually. It’s what keeps you in the game for the long haul instead of hitting a wall.
Stay connected to your people.
Isolation is a central tool in controlling relationships, and it works the same way at a societal level, because people who feel alone and cut off have a much harder time pushing back or healing. Staying close to others who share your values and understand what’s happening isn’t just comforting. It’s actually necessary for being able to keep going over time instead of only when things are at their most heated.
Let your anger do something.
Anger is telling you that something matters, that something is wrong, that something is worth fighting for. Pushing it down to stay calm doesn’t get rid of it. It just turns it into anxiety, or numbness, or the kind of tired where you stop caring, and none of those are better than the anger itself. Feel it, and then ask yourself what it’s actually pointing you toward. The answer to that question is usually where your energy should go.
Give yourself space to grieve.
One of the harder parts of recovering from a relationship with a narcissist is mourning the relationship you thought you were in, not the reality of it, but what you believed it was and what you hoped it could be. Something similar is available here, a grief for the version of this country that felt possible, or that was promised, or that you were working toward. That grief is real and it’s worth letting yourself actually feel it rather than pushing past it or drowning in it. Moving through it, rather than around it, is its own kind of work.
You Already Know How to Get Through This
If you’ve made it out of a relationship with a narcissist, or if you’re in the middle of understanding and recovering from one, you already have what this moment is asking for. You know what the pattern looks like. You know how it feels from the inside. You know that your read on things is not the problem, and that being able to see clearly, even when it’s hard, is better than the exhausting work of convincing yourself not to. You’ve stayed oriented before when the ground kept moving, and you found your way through it.
The people who told you that you were too sensitive, too reactive, too broken to trust yourself about what was happening around you were wrong. And the version of that argument being made at a political level right now, aimed at everyone willing to name what they’re watching, is just as wrong.
What got built in you through surviving and healing is not just your own recovery, though it’s absolutely that. It’s also a way of reading situations that this moment genuinely needs more of. Use it. Share it with people who are still trying to figure out why everything feels so familiar and so off at the same time. Take care of yourself not as something you earn when you’ve done enough, but as the regular practice that makes everything else possible.
You’ve been through harder than this. You know how to read the room. And you’re not in this alone.
