Healing for Yourself and Your Organization After a Narcissist Leaves

//What does it take for an individual or organization to recover from a narcissist’s impact?  Andrea gives some final thoughts about why it’s vital to engage in honest reflection instead of a rush to “recover normalcy,” as we wrap up our series on Dr. Chuck DeGroat’s book WHEN NARCISSISM COMES TO CHURCH.

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Transcript

Hey there!  It’s Andrea, and welcome to the Voice of Influence podcast.

The last couple of weeks, we’ve been talking about narcissism.  And we actually reran an episode, an interview that I did with Dr. Chuck DeGroat who wrote a book called When Narcissism Comes to Church.  And though his book is about church, it’s really about organizations and certainly from his perspective.

So, it was such an important conversation because it seems that the idea of narcissism, the amount of confusion and gaslighting, things that might be happening seem to be happening at a more obvious pace.  It doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s happening more, but it means that we’re seeing it.  We’re more and more aware of the impact of narcissism, of abusive organizations – organizations who may have a kind of narcissistic leader that puts them in a place where they end up with a toxic kind of environment.  And it’s good that this is all coming out.  It is hard.  It is particularly hard when you are impacted.

And today, we’re going to just do a little deeper dive into “how do we handle this?”  How do we as individuals in an organization handle it, and how should the organization handle it?  And the “should” is probably a bit strong, but there are definitely unhealthy ways to handle the after- effects of a narcissist, or the actual impact, current impact of someone who might be showing narcissistic traits.

And I wanted to start with just kind of a confession, if you will.  This has been weighing on me so heavily – not this confession, but this episode.  I’ve put it off, and I’ve put it off because it’s such a heavy thing to talk about.  And I want to do it justice, but I also want to share this with you.

So, one of the things that I wrote about in Unfrozen, my book, was kind of how I looked to men to validate my contribution, to validate my voice.  I would sort of look for the most… maybe respected man in the room, and I wanted to impress them because I thought if I impressed them, I might earn my way to a seat at some sort of table.

And this kind of played out in my dating life when I was really in search of a spouse.  So, I realized after a time that I was looking for a certain kind of man, one that was stronger than me because I knew that my voice was pretty strong.  I knew that my convictions were pretty strong.  I knew that when I have a question in my head and my heart, I have to go seeking out an answer.

And I dive deep.  I go really deep into stuff for periods of time to sort through an issue that I’m dealing with, or a question that I have about the world or how the world works, why people are the way they are, that sort of thing.  And I really dive deep for a long time, and then I come back out, and I have some sort of clarity.

So, I knew that I needed somebody who could handle that.  My faith tradition growing up was in particular… and I heard a lot of messages about just the importance of gender roles.  So, my understanding of my role as a woman was to be supportive, submissive, certainly a good example, and encouraging, connecting, things like this.  Some things that are really good.  But it left me with a lot of questions about what I was supposed to do with myself then, and how am I ever supposed to find a husband if that’s what I’m supposed to be?  Because I know myself well enough to know that I’m not going to be able to just submit.

So, anyway, I realized that, after a time, I was looking for a certain kind of man.  I wrote this down so that I wouldn’t kind of mess it up.  I was looking for one that was stronger than me.  And when I say stronger, I think I was looking for someone who was really good at taking initiative because I take initiative.  I move on things.  If I have an idea, I go.  And initiative was one of those things that I was taught was a really important aspect of masculinity, not so much femininity.

And so, taking initiative, I was like, “Well shoot, if I’m not supposed to do it, and I do it a lot, then I better find somebody who is better than me at that.”  And someone that I could back up in ministry.  Somebody who I really believed in what they had to say, somebody that was maybe charismatic, could really display vision and charisma and the ability to get others to follow them.  Those were the kinds of things I was thinking of.  I would imagine… for the most part, I was thinking of somebody that would be a leader in a church.

And what I realized after a while, and learning more about psychology and theology as well, I realized that I really had been looking for somebody with not so much a strength of character but a strength of these other things that made them look like a leader.  I share all this because I realized that I wasn’t looking for that strength of character.  I was really looking for more of those narcissistic characteristics.

And that’s important for me to be aware of.  It was important then for me to be aware of so that I could realize what was healthy, what was not healthy, what I should be looking for, what I shouldn’t be looking for.  And when you’ve been in a relationship of some kind with a narcissist – someone who really cares about power, makes themselves out to be the savior, the hero of your story, who wants to bring you in and, and demonstrates how important it is for you to be in with that person and that other people are out, that kind of starts to create a bit of a cult-like following, a cult-like atmosphere.

It’s incredibly important that we have a sense of, “Oh my goodness, this happened to me,” if it does happen to you or if you’ve seen it happen, and to be able to recognize it, and to be able to know how to avoid it in the future.  Because the honest truth is that some of us love what we see in narcissists.  We’re drawn to power.  We’re drawn to the idea of being in, of being called something really that we value.  Something like a patriot, something like a good Christian.  We like being called these things.  We like feeling like we’re a part of something bigger than ourselves, that we’re a part of a mission that we think it’s the right thing to do.  It seems right.

And the trouble is that when we’re under the influence of a narcissist, we have a really hard time knowing what is real.  It is so hard to know what’s real.  It’s easy to question anything that is outside, and it’s easy to listen to and believe anything that is inside because we want to be close to that hero of ours.  So, there are a few things that we’re going to cover here.  Why is it so important that we, as individuals, do the hard work of self-examination?  Because we need to learn from the experience of being drawn in by a narcissist so that we know what it is that was not healthy on their part and what it is that might not have been healthy on our part.

It’s the same thing for an organization.  Why was an organization drawn into that “strong leader” – and I say strong leader again in kind of quotations.  Not necessarily strength of character, but the person who we think is strong, so that we can make changes as an organization so it doesn’t happen again so that we can heal and move forward in a healthy way.  When I’ve talked to folks about how to approach situations like this and when I’ve had to approach situations like this, I’ve realized that there’s not much I can do as far as healing goes while I’m still under the influence of the narcissist on a consistent basis.

So, if you’re in an organization where there is somebody who is self-aggrandizing – they make themselves out to be that hero, savior kind of hero person – and they expect other people to sort of worship them, and you start to see people are kind of worshipping them.  People are not thinking for themselves anymore.  They’re starting to listen to this person and their take on it whatever situation might be, and they’re just blindly following.  Not using their own voice and agency, but assuming that that other person is right and not questioning anything.

The healthy thing to do would be to always question, even the best and most ethical leaders need to be questioned, need to be held accountable.  But when somebody is avoiding accountability, has stacked the deck so that they’re going to win every time, has created the atmosphere so that if you say anything bad against them, you’re out, and in fact, you might be scorned and ridiculed, that sort of thing…  If you are seeing that sort of thing, then it’s pretty hard to do anything about it while you’re still under that influence.

So, getting out from under the influence is the first thing, whether that means leaving the organization, leaving the relationship, putting space between yourself and that person in some way, or that person might get ousted from an organization.  But leaving and being out from under that influence is so important.  So, don’t expect yourself to get very far before you have left, before there is a departure of some kind. Because once you’re out from under it, you start to realize, you start to see things for the way that they were.  If you’re willing to look at it.  If you’re willing… not everybody’s willing to look and see.

Dr. DeGroat, in his book, talks about the narcissist still taking up space in our brains, our minds, and our hearts even after they’re gone.  But with a process and with a guide who can help us to kind of see through some of that, it allows us the opportunity to start to push them out so that they’re not taking up that same kind of space, that they don’t have the same kind of influence even after they’re gone.  But it takes time.  It is not something that you’re going to be able to just whip through.  This is something that takes time.

And it’s not even necessarily something you’re going to be able to figure out in this stage of your life.  It could be that as you mature, as you have more and more space, you gain more and more clarity about what happened, about that person and what was wrong and your role in it.  That sort of thing.  So, understand that this is a journey and that it helps to have a guide.  It’s so important to have a guide.  Somebody, in particular, who is familiar with situations like this and is trauma-informed, someone who knows about narcissism.  So, an organizational psychologist, a psychologist that has studied this particular dynamic, a counselor that has done a lot of work with trauma, and that sort of thing.  It’s important to get somebody who understands.

And in Chuck’s book, he talks about three phases for an organization and what they need to be doing in those phases.  I’m going to kind of outline those for you here, but I would highly recommend Chuck if your organization… in particular, sounds like ministry organization for him, but somebody like Chuck if you are in a business organization, if you have experienced something like this.

So, phase one is truth-telling, phase two is reimagining what you want to be as an organization, and phase three has to do with actually moving on, finding somebody to replace the person that was there before.  Phase one, the truth telling phase, it is the hardest face.  It is the one that everybody wants to run from.  Nobody wants to really look and see what actually happened because it can be somewhat disturbing.  We don’t always want to admit how unhealthy something was.

There have been times when I have had to mirror back to somebody a situation that they might have experienced that was unhealthy, and they didn’t even realize it was unhealthy.  Again, having somebody who knows… and I’m not even talking about me necessarily.  I feel like I have dipped my toe in the water of this one, and I’m certainly researching it, and that sort of thing.  But I’m not even talking about me.  I’m talking about somebody who knows something and has a lot of experience with this, somebody who can help you gain a full perspective of the truth – what actually happened, and what was actually wrong that happened?

Sometimes you need that sort of investigation of sorts to be able to see the truth.  It’s almost like a cleansing kind of thing where if you don’t actually turn over the rocks to see what’s underneath, you won’t be able to get rid of what’s underneath.  So, it could stay there, and then it’ll be there for the next time that somebody else comes.  So, if real, true repentance, change, growth hasn’t taken place, honest truth-telling hasn’t taken place, then the organization… they might want to move on, but they’re not ready to move on in a healthy way.

So, he talks about listen and understand – focus on listening and understanding each other.  So, when you hear stories, to listen, to understand, and when that’s happening, it’s somewhat traumatic for the organization, for individuals inside the organization.  It is hard.  Some people will want to leave because they don’t have time for this.  They don’t know why it’s important, “Why would we have to do this?”  They might want to be moving forward while, really, the organization probably needs to just take a breath and not be moving forward on big initiatives while they’re trying to heal.

So, when you go through grief, when you go through a big event in your life, it’s a period of time where you really need to step back, and give yourself the time, and call grieving part of your checklist or one of your biggest things on your checklist.  Just do what you’d have to do to keep, you know, the ball rolling without trying to take on some new big project because the big project in your life is actually having to go through the grief and healing process for trauma or for, you know, just grieving pain in your life.  So, it’s okay.  So, understand that.

The other part about phase one, this truth-telling phase, is it’s pretty darn important to have somebody there who can guide the process.  So, understanding what is going on, knowing the dynamics of abuse, and neglect, and trauma, and narcissism, and gaslighting, and all those sorts of things, like, having the education to be able to share with others…  Like, “We need to be educated as an organization, and then we need to be honest as an organization about what we saw, what has happened, why this was not right, why people went along with it…”  and ask those hard questions.  

Because now it’s not about necessarily that narcissist who left.  “It’s about me.  It’s about my organization.  It’s about, ‘Why did I let this happen?’”  And that’s a hard thing to ask oneself.  It is so hard, but it’s so important in order to be able to move on.  So, having somebody there guide is super important.

Phase two is this sort of, “Okay, we know what happened.  We understand what was wrong.  Now, we need to figure out what would be right.  Reimagining our sense of call, vision, and identity.  What is our longing for this organization and its flourishing?” and looking for a collective consensus on that.  And in his book, Chuck DeGroat says, “Anxiety often propelled teams into reactive rather than reflective processes.”  And I have seen this.  When somebody from within hurts an organization, the leadership of that organization may want to just push that other person out, which is completely understandable.  There needs to be separation.  But then what?

Then most often what happens is, “It’s time to circle the wagons folks.  We are going to make it clear that this is never going to happen again.  We’re going to draw these boundaries.  We are circling those wagons.  We’re going to make sure that we’re all tied up, and everybody understands that this is how you stay in the group and this is when you have to leave the group.”  And that is a really clear anxiety driven kind of a situation.  That’s a reaction instead of a reflection.

So, one time I was in an organization where someone had been pushed out because they had lied, and the leader was so upset that he was just angry.  And I talked about the importance of looking at this, and using the pain, and addressing the pain of the people that were in the organization, helping them to heal, that sort of thing.  But his reaction was so birthed out of anger that he did not want to have anything to do with healing.  He just wanted to declare what was right and wrong, and to basically keep people in their place, and be able to be very angry.

He felt personally betrayed.  Of course, he did.  We all do when somebody does something to us that is wrong.  We feel betrayed.  It’s a horrible feeling.  But we need to process that in order to be able to truly move on in a healthy way.  I had this really weird dream last night.  I had a dream that I knew that people had died, and they were in a basement on, like, a pool table.  It’s weird.  And I had covered them up with a, I don’t know, cloth of some kind so that people wouldn’t see that they were there.  And I was coming back to the scene.

So, I didn’t remember doing this.  I just knew that I had done it.  And I hadn’t hurt these people.  They were just… for some reason, they were dead.  And I came back to the scene in my dream and kind of realized that, “Oh my gosh, these dead people are still here, and nobody knows.”  I’d covered these things up.  I’d covered up this pain that wasn’t mine.  I hadn’t actually created that pain.  I hadn’t actually killed these people, but I covered it up because I didn’t want to have to deal with it.  I knew that there were other things going on for other people, and they wouldn’t have the bandwidth or the ability to address it.  And so, I was just like, “Eh, let’s just cover this up because we don’t want to deal with it.”

And I was really struck by that this morning.  And it was like, “Oh, my gosh, I have to record this episode!”  I knew I needed to do it anyway, but I really did after that.  We can’t cover up the bodies.  There needs to be accountability, truth-telling so that we can actually deal with the truth that is there.  Otherwise, what are we doing?  We’re trying to pretend that we’re okay.  We’re trying to move on.  And then we end up hiring the same kind of leader that we had before because, “Oh good, now we can find somebody else who’s really going to take us into the future, and has great vision and charisma, and is such a strong leader and takes initiative.  Yes!  And I still feel good about that because I didn’t realize that my desire for that was actually a desire to not have to take responsibility myself.”  

We have to take responsibility.  You and I, we have agency.  What we do and what we say matters.  What we think matters.  We have to take responsibility for ourselves and the impact that we have.  Nothing is completely black and white.  There’s always another side of the story, and it doesn’t necessarily mean that the victim is to blame.  I don’t mean that.  But, “How can I be even more healthy after the situation?  How can I take this as an opportunity to grow?  Is it possible that I might slip back into old patterns if I don’t?”  And the answer is yes.  It is very possible to slip back into old patterns if we don’t.

So, we have to start to see those things.  We have to start to see those characteristics as… they’re not evil in and of themselves by any means, but that those could produce and create a pattern where a leader starts to degrade other people so that they can basically bully other people, so they can build themselves up, but in an adult context where they run away from accountability, where people fall in line, where other leaders oftentimes fall in line with the other leader because they just can’t even imagine that this would be true.  They can’t even fathom that it’s that bad.  And so we ignore it.  We push it to the side.

We see that, and I’ve seen that in the past.  And if I didn’t have agency in that situation, then I had to leave.  There was nothing that I could do or say that would change things so I had to leave.  But I wasn’t going to just leave.  I went to that leader, and I said, “The reason why I’m leaving is because you’re right all the time, and you do not believe that anybody else could be right about something.  There’s no dialogue.  It is all you.”  And he immediately started being defensive, and denying, and asked for examples.

I started to give examples, and he would go, “No, wait a second.  That’s not why,” or “I got approval on that from the other leaders,” that sort of thing.  “Precisely why I have to leave, because the other leaders are not going to be able to hold you accountable.  I do not have a venue, a structural venue through which my voice can really make a difference, and I don’t want to just tear this organization apart through accusation and trying to, you know, rev up the troops, or that sort of thing.  So, I have to depart,” and I had to let other people know that as well.  Why would that be?  Why is there this departure?

So, if you’re suspecting that you might be seeing some unhealthy things in leadership, get this book, The Narcissism Comes to Church – especially if you’re a Christian, if that’s your faith tradition and belief system.  There are other books.  There are other resources as well, but go find somebody that knows what they’re talking about.  Listen, become aware, step back from the situation so that you have the opportunity to actually get out from under it, and see truth.  Start to be able to recognize what really happened, what’s really going on.  It’s not gossip to do that.  It is important that people understand.

It’s important that the rest of the organization… they don’t need all the details, but they need a few.  They need some anecdotes so that they can see, “Oh, that doesn’t sound good.”  “Oh, I should be aware of that next time,” that sort of thing.  People need to know.  They need to have some sort of clear, concrete evidence, stories, understanding of the truth.  And if the truth isn’t spoken within the organization, the organization will continue to be a hotbed that brings in the same kind of leader over and over and over again in an unhealthy way.

You can do the hard work of self-examination, of truth-telling to yourself, of finding the truth, and gaining a new vision for who you really want to be, what your life could be, what your organization could be.  There is freedom beyond a toxic leader and a toxic relationship.  There is freedom.  Come get it.  Open the door.  It’s possible.  It’s not easy.  But it’s good work, and it will be worth it because your voice matters.

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