(8 minute read)
When maintaining their reality means recruiting other people into it
You know what happened.
Perhaps you were there.
Perhaps you have the messages.
Perhaps you remember the conversation perfectly well.
And yet, somehow, the story has changed.
More bewilderingly, other people seem to know the new version.
Someone tells you there are “two sides to every story”. Someone else thinks you are being unfair. A friend becomes strangely distant. A family member suggests that perhaps it is time you moved on. You may even discover that people have been discussing a situation you did not know they knew anything about.
And slowly, something peculiar happens.
The original behaviour stops being the problem. Your refusal to accept the revised version becomes the problem instead.
How does that happen?
When Deception Becomes Relational
Deception maintenance has a cognitive load. Narcissistic defence maintenance has a relational load as well. Other people have to be recruited into keeping the preferred version of reality alive.
A sustained deception is mentally expensive. The person has to remember what was said, what was omitted, who knows which version, what evidence exists and where the inconsistencies lie.
But when deception is protecting a narcissistically defended sense of self, remembering the story may not be enough. The social environment has to be managed too.
This is where the load becomes relational. Behaviours that are often described separately - lying, gaslighting, triangulation, smear campaigns and the recruitment of allies sometimes called “flying monkeys” - can be understood differently when viewed through this lens. They may perform different tasks, but they can serve the same broader function: maintaining a preferred reality between people.
The lie creates the discrepancy.
Gaslighting pressures another person to doubt or surrender their account of it.
Triangulation manages the information passing between people.
A smear campaign prepares others to receive a particular version of events.
Recruited allies then help to stabilise that version socially.
What can look like a collection of separate behaviours begins to resemble a system of relational maintenance.
How Other People Become Part of the Story
Other people may be given selective versions of events.
Some are recruited as validators: You know what I’m really like.
Others become messengers, defenders or witnesses to a carefully edited account. Information may be distributed differently according to what each person is likely to believe. Sympathy can be gathered before another person has even realised that there is a dispute.
Not everyone who becomes part of this process is consciously colluding.
Some genuinely believe what they have been told. Some sense that something is wrong but find agreement easier than confrontation. Others may know that the account is distorted and nevertheless accommodate it because challenging it carries a relational cost.
Gradually, a small social system can develop around the defence. And once that happens, maintaining the preferred reality is no longer the work of one person alone.
When Your Memory Becomes the Problem
This helps explain something that can otherwise be bewildering to the person on the receiving end.
The individual who says, No. That isn’t what happened, may attract more hostility than the behaviour they are describing appears to warrant.
Why?
Because they are no longer simply disagreeing. They are refusing to perform their allocated role in maintaining the preferred reality. Their memory becomes troublesome. Their questions become attacks.
Their refusal to accept a revised account becomes cruelty, vindictiveness, disloyalty or an inability to “move on”. Attention shifts away from the original behaviour and towards the supposedly unreasonable person who continues to name it. The defence has therefore achieved something important:
The problem is no longer what happened. The problem is the person who will not agree to pretend that it didn’t.
That reversal can be profoundly destabilising. You may begin explaining yourself more carefully. Producing evidence. Reconstructing conversations. Trying to find the exact combination of words that will finally make somebody understand. But if the difficulty is not a lack of information, more information may not solve it.
You may be trying to correct a misunderstanding while somebody else is trying to preserve a structure. Those are very different tasks.
The Greater the Discrepancy, the Greater the Load
Narcissistic defence maintenance can therefore consume relationships as well as cognitive resources.
A private distortion can be held privately. A preferred reality that depends upon other people’s agreement must continually be negotiated, reinforced and defended. And the greater the distance between what happened and the version that must now be maintained, the greater that relational load may become.
More contradictions have to be explained.
More perceptions have to be managed.
More people may need to be persuaded, reassured or recruited.
And the person who continues to hold onto the original reality becomes increasingly disruptive simply by refusing to surrender it. This may also explain why apparently small challenges sometimes produce disproportionately large reactions. The immediate disagreement may not be the only thing under threat. The challenge may disturb a much larger network of explanations, loyalties and assumptions that has accumulated around the preferred account. Eventually, the people around it face a choice of their own.
Participate, accommodate, withdraw - or tell the truth.
The Second Act
Being exposed does not have to be the end of somebody’s story.
People lie. People cheat. People betray trust. People sometimes do things entirely inconsistent with the person they believed themselves to be. None of us can know with absolute certainty what we would do under circumstances we have never faced.
We can know our values. We can know what we hope we would do. But human beings are capable of behaving badly when frightened, ashamed, tempted or under pressure.
The psychologically revealing question may be what happens afterwards.
Because there is a route back from wrongdoing. It is simply an uncomfortable one.
What Genuine Repair Requires
Genuine repair requires the person to stop recruiting, stop managing perception, tolerate other people’s independent versions of events, and allow the truth to exist without controlling what everyone does with it.
That means being able to say:
I did this.
Not:
I did it because you…
Not:
You have misunderstood…
Not:
Everybody else agrees with me…
Not:
What about what you did?
Simply:
I did it. It caused harm. I cannot undo that.
For a narcissistically defended person, this can demand the surrender of precisely what the defence was designed to protect. Shame must be experienced without immediately exporting it.
Other people’s anger must be allowed to exist without being discredited. Consequences have to be tolerated without converting oneself into their victim. And perhaps most difficult of all, the person must accept that they no longer control how they are held in somebody else’s mind.
Accountability Does Not Guarantee Forgiveness
Repair does not guarantee forgiveness.
An apology cannot compel reconciliation.
Accountability does not purchase restored trust.
The injured person retains the right to remember what happened, to interpret it differently, and to decide that the relationship is over.
They may acknowledge genuine remorse and still leave.
They may accept an apology and still not trust again.
They may understand why somebody behaved as they did without agreeing to expose themselves to that behaviour again.
That is not a failure of repair.
It is part of the price of genuine accountability.
Because accountability means relinquishing control not only over the story, but also over the outcome.
Defence or Repair
The alternative is defence maintenance:
Deny. Minimise. Reinterpret. Counter-accuse. Recruit. Revise.
It may protect the preferred identity temporarily, but it also prevents the very thing the defence is attempting to achieve.
There can be no genuine restoration of the self while enormous effort is still being spent protecting an invented version of it. Repair moves in the opposite direction.
Acknowledge. Tolerate. Repair what can be repaired. Accept what cannot. Change.
That does not erase what happened.
It makes a future possible in which maintaining the past no longer consumes the present.
So perhaps the real second act begins with an uncomfortable surrender.
What if redemption requires relinquishing the very thing you are trying hardest to protect - your image of yourself?
The second act does not require becoming the person you wanted everybody to believe you were.
It requires becoming someone who can live with the truth about the person you actually were - and choose what you do next.