As we know, narcissists often act in ways that defy all definitions of normal. They regularly break the rules, tell lies, break promises, degrade, demean, and exhibit unjust, aggressive, and abusive behavior that is inappropriate, childish, without remorse, and totally inhuman.

It’s likely, if you have suffered narcissistic abuse, that you have a high level of integrity, and you’re likely known as a person who does the right thing. You have a conscience, and because you do, you’re mindful of considering your environment and other people.

Therefore, you will be dismayed and even regularly incensed by the narcissist’s inability to conduct themselves appropriately or abide by basic human morality and decency.

You will likely fight for decency and morality. Before long, you’ll find yourself lecturing and prescribing ‘correct behavior’ as if talking to a 5-year-old.

YOU act responsibly and uphold your integrity; therefore, why shouldn’t THEY?

Life with a narcissist is like a bag of tricks and a box of chocolates. You never know what will morph out of thin air or be unwrapped next. You are constantly on edge, walking on broken glass and suffering from high levels of anxiety. Understandably, you want the instability and madness to stop…

Forcing accountability logically seems to be the answer so that the crazy feelings and fear can end.

Your Integrity Is Used Against You

It’s extremely important to know the strength you possess – integrity is, in fact, one of the greatest weapons that the narcissist uses against you. Firstly, understand that narcissists purposefully target people who have high levels of integrity.

The reason is he or she knows:

• You will take responsibility for cleaning up the messes that the narcissist creates.
• You will typically work overtime cleaning up these messes.
• You are the perfect person to blame because you vehemently try to prove your integrity to the narcissist rather than leave despite the abuse.
• By focusing on trying to get the narcissist to act like a responsible and considerate adult, you will hand over lots of much-needed narcissistic supply (attention).
• The narcissist can accuse you of a lack of integrity in any area you pride yourself in – (being a good parent, a caring role model, a pet lover, an honest business person etc., etc.), which grants omnipotent delight when the narcissist views how much this maims you.
• You will be a partner ‘who loves and cares,’ willingly sharing your resources, time, support, and money.

By preying on your need for integrity, the narcissist has set you up to lose your mind. The more he or she attacks and pillages supply and resources from you as a result of your high levels of integrity – the more you will try to righteously force the narcissist to be accountable. In fact, you may go out of your way to prove a point and do the ‘right thing’ – to set the right example, hoping that the narcissist will learn and start acting like a decent person.

The narcissist, by the very definition of what a narcissist is, does not want to be accountable, does not want to ‘play fair,’ does not want to conform, and does not want to ‘do the right thing.’A narcissist believes playing by the rules makes him or her like everyone else.

In fact, the narcissist watches you doing all of the ‘right things’ and inwardly laughs about how pathetic you are for doing it and loves it because it gives him or her ample opportunity to keep mining supplies. In contrast, you keep trying to force him or her to be as ‘good’ as you.

The narcissist believes ‘being good’ would mean being reduced to a mere human, swallowed whole, and controlled by the system. The narcissist thinks this will create vulnerability and take away his or her ‘edge’ of remaining separate, having the upper hand, and securing a narcissistic supply. To co-operate means he or she will have no way to steal energy to fill up the empty, painful void within – which would spell emotional annihilation.

You must understand that there is no way to make the narcissist accountable – and trying to is one of the greatest hooks that are keeping you stuck in abuse.

The Deadly Dance

A horrible addiction process occurs when you try to exert control over the narcissist’s actions and demand his or her accountability. In fact, the more you try to control the uncontrollable, the more you lose control of yourself.

As your focus on trying to make the narcissist ‘normal’ and ‘decent’ intensifies, the more you expose yourself to the mind-bending twists and turns, the insane behavior, and the intense gas-lighting, maneuvers, projections, justifications, and downright lies that will tear your self-esteem and self-belief apart.

Before long, you will think you are losing your mind, and you find that you can barely function. As the process intensifies, you will feel so empty, tormented, and anguished that you may feel like life is not worth living.

I promise you the strongest, most intelligent people with high integrity suffer the most in this deadly dance. Be very aware you can’t win this game with the narcissist – and trying to win will just grant A-Grade supply to the narcissist every step of the way.

The Narcissist Fights Dirty

The need for integrity creates the perfect forum for the narcissist to unleash his or her most powerful arsenal. Within arguments, he or she has a wide-open playing field with no boundaries. This is like a bloodthirsty game of mortal combat with no rules. The narcissist has no conscience, so an endless amount of nasty tools are readily available.

These include:

• Outrageous lies to gain whatever goal the narcissist has in mind.
• Gas-lighting techniques to get you to doubt yourself.
• Imagined allies to back up his or her claims.
• Malicious comments to maim you.
• Attacks on your integrity to disarm you.
• Expert projection is to determine what he or she did your fault.
• Purposeful, outrageous, and childish, non-sensical comments to incense you.
• Refusal to remain on the topic at hand.
• Insistence on boundaries within the conversation, granting him or her all the rights to continue speaking and you none.
• Discard and abandonment techniques regardless of the state you are in. (The more distressed you are, the more delight in abandoning you).
• Attacking you regarding your distress, hysteria, or anger within the argument.
• The ability to use any of the above (plus more) to purposefully punish you and create the highest level of anguish possible.

No human being is a match for these tactics. Suppose you do try to match the narcissist’s game with any of the narcissist’s tactics. In that case, the narcissist immediately pounces on your lack of integrity, which throws you into despair: The narcissist doesn’t believe I am a decent person (this destroys your soul and mission to ‘change’ the narcissist …), or you will feel the incensed mind-bending rage of: Who are you to accuse me of lack of integrity?

Whichever way it goes, you end up battered and distraught, and the narcissist obtained a narcissistic supply and the omnipotent knowing that he or she can have this effect on you…

You can’t shrug off allegations like the narcissist can. The narcissist, once securing you in their life, actually doesn’t care whether or not you think the narcissist is a good person. The narcissist is simply in the game for the two reasons that narcissists interact with anyone:

1) To secure narcissistic supply, and

2) Having a person to hurt to offload their tormented inner self.

You have to accept that the narcissist simply does not hold or even care about the model of love and relationships that you do. His or her values, needs, and neuron brain pathways are miles apart from yours.

The More you Need, the Less You Get

At the time of entering the argument, you will feel that you were seeking accountability for a specific issue – now, as a result of the argument, you will feel totally unsafe and need accountability for all the brutal abuse that occurred within the argument as well.

The more you try to gain accountability, the less you receive it, and the more accountability you need—and the vicious cycle expands and broadens until it is literally ripping your life apart, with no way out if you continue.

You know when you are disintegrating and completely losing yourself because this is when you start acting like a crazy person. You may call the narcissist twenty times in a row and start seeking people in his community to tell them the truth about the narcissist. You may be constantly checking the narcissist’s Facebook, phone records, and contacts about what the narcissist is or isn’t doing, and your whole life becomes obsessed and totally taken over by the need to get accountability.

This is the exact opposite of where you want to be. With your focus utterly obsessed with what the narcissist is or isn’t doing, he or she has you right where they want you – detached from your True Self.

You can no longer supply yourself healthily with your basic emotional needs, sustenance, and safety, and you can no longer effectively look after your practical and even survival needs. You may find eating, sleeping, paying bills, and functioning virtually impossible.

How to Drop the Need for Accountability and Reach Acceptance

Read the following very carefully. This is your truth.

Understandably, you will be operating from the mind-bending pain: ‘You should or should not be doing this!’ and ‘How on earth can somebody do what you do?!’

This may seem correct at a human and logical level, but this does not help you create a healthy and accountable life with accountable people.

One of the most significant fundamental lessons of life and intense learning curves that we are forced to face as a result of narcissistic abuse is this: People can be and do whatever they want to be and do. This lesson of acceptance is one of the most essential when recovering from narcissistic abuse.

There are only two ways we can live our life. These are:

1) Resistance, or

2) Acceptance.

When we judge something as wrong, we have set ourselves up energetically (energy being the true ‘note’ that creates our reality). My experience is wrong because of this thing being wrong, and therefore, I have to make it right in order to be Okay.

For example, if you do something bad to me and I decide to be affected by it ( a normal human reaction), I’ll replay it in my mind, and every time I do, I feel the pain of what you did to me. You are, however, no longer standing there and doing ‘it’ to me. I am actually free to get on with the truth of my life, but I can’t now because what you did was ‘wrong’.

I have assessed that my life can’t be ‘right’ now because you exchanged with me in a’ wrong’ way. Your ‘wrongness’ has now become my ‘wrongness’ (I took it on), and it can’t be fixed until I change you from being ‘wrong’ into ‘right.’

Understandably, this is very POWERLESS. I have no power to change you. And If I try to, I can’t have a ‘right’ life until I change you from being ‘wrong.’ The truth is I’ll be having a ‘wrong’ life forever…

Why? Because even if I could force you to change into ‘right’ (highly unlikely and impossible when dealing with a narcissist), more and more ‘wrong’ people would still keep coming into my experience and keep doing ‘wrong’ things to me…

Why? That sounds crazy! Why would I keep attracting the ‘wrong’ behavior I detest so much?

The answer is simple. It’s because I have an intense focus and dislike (judgment) of ‘wrong.’ I take it personally. I make other people’s behavior about me and judge who they are. I try to fix them and change them in a futile attempt to make me happy rather than take responsibility for being the Creator of myself.

…all because I have not as yet learned the vital SOUL LESSON of acceptance and unconditional love, which is:

“I love you and all of life enough to allow you to be whoever you want to be on your journey, and I love myself enough to choose the TRUE journey for me. Therefore, if we are not a match, thank you for showing me what I needed to heal within myself. I can let go and allow us both to experience the journey that is our choice as it stands right now.”

Whenever we judge something as wrong, we resist it. By resisting it, we think we are saying ‘No’ to it—yet in reality, we are saying ‘Yes’ and bringing it into our experience. Resistance hooks us into the fight of trying to change something that is ‘wrong’ into being ‘right’ and pollutes our being and experience with ‘wrong’ in the process.

True Acceptance does not mean tolerating – it means the exact opposite. Acceptance means we observe the narcissist’s behavior and accept that the narcissist does what he or she does because he or she is a narcissist. With this acceptance, you will no longer have the need to change or fix the narcissist for your own well-being.

The gift of learning how to stop trying to get accountability is the peace and acceptance that we are Unlimited Beings with all of life’s resources at our disposal. We don’t have to try to force unmakeable deals to work because there is plenty more of what we really want available in life.

You need to establish that you DO have the resources within you to create your own truth and fullness. You can allow others to be whoever they wish to be, and if who they are or what they do does not align with your Truth, then that person does not need to be your reality. Leave and stop participating and put your focus fully on creating what it is that you want.

If this article resonated with you, I would love you to register for my free 16-day recovery, ‘You Can Thrive Program.’ In this course, I share my healing system, Quanta Freedom Healing™, which has allowed thousands of people from over 50 different countries to break free from narcissistic abuse and start new lives filled with abundance, freedom, and joy.

Please click here to reserve your space for this free event.

I hope this article helped you realize how much damage fighting for accountability is causing you. Next time you judge someone or their actions as ‘wrong,’ remember to apply acceptance instead. Everyone is making their own journey in their own way, given their world map. Now, set yourself free to choose your truth regardless of what this person is or isn’t doing, and if their truth is not a match for yours, it certainly does not have to play any part as your truth anymore.