How to live with a narcissist wife

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So your wife is a narcissist. How do you change this? How do you turn the situation around?

“Hey, Cody Butler here, marriage coach and founder of Better Marriage, and today I want to talk to you about how to live with a narcissist wife. This is something I hear all the time—very regularly, every week. Many men come to me saying, ‘My wife is a narcissist, and she’s doing this, and it’s causing problems in the relationship, and this is why our marriage is failing. How do I work with my wife on this? How do I turn the situation around?’ The answer is very simple, but it’s probably not what you think it is, and it may very well not be what you want to hear. But I’m not here to tell you what you want to hear; I’m here to give you the information you need to turn your marriage around.”

First, where is this diagnosis of narcissism coming from?

Is it from a mental health professional who’s qualified to make the diagnosis, or is it a self-diagnosis that you’ve made? Maybe you’ve seen some videos online, and you’ve decided that your wife is narcissistic. All too often, we place labels on ourselves and other people around us that simply aren’t true. We say our kids are ADHD; we say that we’re dyslexic; we say our kids are dyslexic; we say our wives are narcissistic. These kinds of labels are terribly destructive because they give a behavior for that person to live up to, and it excuses your own behavior in the situation.

When men come to me and say, ‘My wife is narcissistic, and she’s engaging in this behavior and this behavior and this behavior, and it’s causing all of these problems in my marriage,’ what it does is completely eliminate yourself from any responsibility for the failure within the marriage. It places full responsibility on that person, and it eliminates and eradicates all responsibility upon yourself. But here’s the thing: that person simply hasn’t been diagnosed with narcissism. Even if they were, nine times out of ten, it would be a completely false, completely wrong diagnosis. We’re looking at the effect and making it the cause. We’re saying that her narcissistic behavior is the cause of the problems in the relationship when, actually, the narcissistic behavior – and I’m not denying that she might have narcissistic behavior – is an effect of the problems within the marriage, not the cause.

Whether your wife is narcissistic or not is completely irrelevant. It is extremely unhelpful. There is no good that can come out of you believing that your wife is narcissistic in any way, shape, or form. It is only going to damage your marriage. After ten years of working with men and marriages in therapy and counseling situations, I have not seen one situation where a marriage has survived where the man has self-diagnosed his wife as a narcissist and been determined to hold on to that diagnosis and refuse to let it go. In ten years, I have not seen one marriage turnaround in that situation. If you want to save your marriage, then you have to let go of this narcissistic idea, the idea that your wife is a narcissist, because even if it is true, I’m telling you, brother, your marriage is not going to survive. Your wife is not going to tolerate you calling her a narcissist, or believing that she’s a narcissist, or behaving in a way that you believe that she’s a narcissist. She’s simply not going to tolerate that, and she is going to leave.

And 10 years appearance backs that up, so let’s go to the cause of the problem now. Because the narcissistic behavior is simply an effect. Her behavior is not causing problems in your marriage; it’s a response and an effect of the real cause, which is she’s simply defending herself. This is what is going on most of the time that gets diagnosed, self-diagnosed by people that are not qualified as narcissistic behavior.

So, what happens is, over a period of time, the woman is attacked. She’s attacked, she’s attacked, she’s attacked, and I’ve got other videos on this. Like, I’m not saying necessarily that you know that you’re attacking her, but she’s being attacked because men are logical, women are emotional, and the logic attacks the emotion, and women perceive that as attack, and attack.

And what they do over a period of time is they start to build a wall to protect themselves against the attacks. Now, it might be a very annoying attack, right? We might belittle her position, or we might invalidate her position unknowingly, or we might be more aggressive than that; we might actually attack her and be very critical, going up to being even verbally abusive, right? Going up to various different scales. It doesn’t matter what happens; what happens is the woman starts to build layers of the wall in order to protect herself against the attacks that are coming.

how to live with a narcissist wife

And when that wall gets built, we then turn the attack to the wall. When we start attacking the wall that she has built to protect herself from the attack, right? Does that make sense? Do you get what I’m saying here? We inadvertently attack or maybe even overtly attack our partner. They build walls to protect themselves against that attack, and then we attack the wall that they have built. And we say, “My wife’s a Stonewall, or my wife’s a narcissist, or my wife just doesn’t care.” We start assigning labels when actually the behavior is not what you think it is.

The behavior is actually coming out of another aspect of the relationship. And I’m gonna put it out here, brother, that that behavior that you’re putting out there, actions that you’re taking, she’s simply taking self-defensive maneuvers and building walls and developing behaviors to protect herself against these attacks. And then the behavior itself that has been developed to protect against the attack starts to get attacked, and this just goes on and on and on. And before you know it, the only way that your wife has to defend herself is to start to exhibit what you would consider narcissistic behavior. But the reality is, she’s not.

It’s not narcissistic behavior at all. It’s simply self-defense. She’s simply defending herself from the lack of emotional safety and security and the lack of proper communication within the relationship. This is what’s going on. And when we can start to understand that what we deem as narcissistic behavior is simply a defense against a known or unknown attack against her, now we can go to work.

Because the problem is not her, right? The problem is not the behavior. The problem is the behavior that’s coming at home. When we start to become self-aware as men, when we start becoming more self-aware of the impact that our communications have, and when we start to become more self-aware of how to interact with your wife on an emotional level, not a logical level, when you start to become more aware of how to make her feel heard, understood, loved, recognized, seen, all of these things in the relationship, versus attack, negative, having no value within the relationship.

I’m not saying that she has no value within a relationship. This is how she’s perceiving it, and perception is reality. Brother, she’s going to start building these walls of self-defense to protect against your attack when you label her as a narcissist. And if you attack her further, it will only make things worse. In my ten years of practice, I have not seen one marriage survive the labeling of narcissism because it simply isn’t narcissistic behavior. The person who’s been labeled The Narcissist knows that they’re not narcissistic and won’t tolerate that label.

There’s a lot that goes into this, as you can tell, and we cover this in the ‘Win Your Wife Back’ program. You can find the links in the description. We can overcome all of these issues by accurately diagnosing what’s going on and truly understanding the cause and effect of what’s really happening in the relationship. If you’re interested, check out the links in the description.

If you believe that your wife is narcissistic, change your attitude towards her because until you change that attitude, you won’t see an improvement in the situation. Work on your own sense of self-awareness and ability to create emotional safety and security where she can start to disassemble these walls one brick at a time. You can turn your marriage around, and I hope this helps someone. I love you, and I’ll talk to you very soon.

Win Your Wife Back In As Little As 8-Weeks

Discover How To Win Your Wife Back, Even If She Wants Out

Watch Our FREE Video Tutorial Class: "Your First Steps to Saving Your Marriage"

Click Here To Watch The Class Now

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