Overstanding:

The first thing that you have to understand is that human beings are interdependent organisms. There is nothing you can do that does not depend upon some sort of support from others.

The narcissist has only one true “skill”: the ability to read the hopes and fears of others, coupled with the inability to care for them except as means towards ends. He can reinforce those hopes or fears in you at any moment, and if you pay close attention you will hear him condone this, since he cannot help but to brag about his conquests and accomplishments. By contending with his criticism you contend with yourself, at times perhaps overcompensating in confidence and then crashing into grief. Nonetheless, the careful cultivation of self-knowledge, even at the expense of self-sacrifice, will arm you against misguided vainglory or self-deprecation. It will render you immune to secondary criticism. You will all so be able to think critically of the narcissist without feeling like a hypocrite for rejecting his hypercritical and skewed lies. He will cease in absence to amplify the toxic and destructive voices in your mind. And you will cease to blame yourself for his victims, for where you might have reinforced those voices in their heads by accident, he will have done so on purpose.

The second thing that you must understand is that we are doomed to whatever society we find ourselves in, and a mature man might find himself in the company of children. Yet to blame him by denying these social facts, pretending towards independence of them, you simply establish yourself as one of the children.

[({Dm.A.A.)}]