Narcissistic Phrase Grenade

There is a phrase that narcissists like to say to a victim of their constant psych-abuse that, like everything else the narc does and says after the initial lovebombing phase is over, is meant to set the victim off, to elicit from the victim a delectable effulgence of anger and angst from which the demon inside of the narcissist can slurp up its hellish narcissistic nourishment.

This phrase is not only repeated in real life by real-life narcs, but it also appears in the depiction of an obvious narcissist in the novel/memoir THIS BOY'S LIFE by Tobias Wolff. In that account, the author recounts how, in his boyhood, his divorced mother was lovebombed and then psych-abused by a textbook middling-to-lower functioning narcissist, and the bulk of the story relates the terrible years when the author himself had suffered from having this terrible narc for a stepfather. But, sure enough, just like I myself had experienced in my own nighmarish marriage to a communal narcissist, this character of the stepfather narc in this book drops this phrase on a victim just at the right moment to set the victim off and drive the victim into vociferous anger, to the smirking delight of the stepfather narc, of course. And it is the same damn phrase that ”my narc” would drop on me every once in a few years at just the right strategically diabolical moment in an argument.

The phrase of which I speak is this: “IT'S A MOOT POINT.”

Be advised: Narcs LOVE this phrase. They LOVE to drop this phrase on a victim at exactly the right, rare moment at which a (codependent) victim actually and finally raises up their hackles, girds up their loins, and forcibly calls out the narc on some particularly narcky, abusive behavior that the narc has been caught doing by the victim. The codependent will have made his or her insistent point, they will have been strenuously logical in nailing down the narc to some particular at-last-realized abuse, assiduously detailed in points of objective fact in nailing down the narc--but then the narc will evince that haughty, narcky tone of theirs, and they will toss out this little verbal grenade at just the right moment, right at the codependent’s reddening face:

"It's a moot point,” the narc will say. Casually, of course.

And the codependent who has not hit rock bottom and had their ultra-nasty, paranormalish, penultimate epiphany of what he or she has been tolerating and facilitating out of this demon-possessed fleshbag of a spouse or

“lover” for so many years, that pre-epiphanal codependent will take the bait, he or she will jump on that grenade, and it will blow up and he or she will wax ballistic and begin arguing ever more vociferously with the narc, and that little grenade of a phrase will have blown up inside the codependent's guts once again, all over again.

And the demon inside that narc just calmly slurps it AAAAAAAAALLL up, the angst, the anger, the attention, the blown-up guts, the whole miasmatic tormented loosh of it all that is gushing and hemorrhaging out of the codependent. The narc will have it all in that moment. The cake, and the eating of it thereof.

Beware of that phrase around a narc.

“It's a moot point.”

Beware of it. They will use it. If you are a codependent primary supply of a narc, they WILL use it on you at some point. Do not let it set you off. Like everything, everything, everything else with a narc, it is best to ignore it, give it no attention whatsoever. You cannot wrestle with a pig, because you only get dirty and the pig only just loves it. Walk away. The narc will wither up and die and go find some other codependent victim, if you just give it zero attention, zero reaction, zero emotion.

Go. Gray. Rock. No matter what they do: Give them nothing. No emotions for emotional vampires. Cut them off. Look at it this way: They may have got the better of you a thousand times, but once you FINALLY know what they are, now that you KNOW ("When you know, GO!”) then you get to go collect the ultimate prize of a lifetime that no narcissist can ever win: At least you are not them; you are not stuck like this, as they hopelessly are.