Concept: When people experience distress, the feeling is so uncomfortable any means of eliminating it becomes attractive, including convincing themselves that the emotional experience is meaningless.

How this creates more abuse: Emotional diminishment is a form of self-gaslighting. Victims who convince themselves that narcissistic abuse isn’t so bad after all will lose the will to exit the relationship and fall into a narcissistic pattern of actively ignoring reality.

Examples:

1. A cult member submits to a whipping, thinking it might not hurt that much.
2. “Whatever doesn’t kill me makes me stronger. I’m going to stay with her.”
3. “He’s not that mean. I could be with somebody who hits me. I mean, it’s only words.”

Advice: Recognize that negative emotions warn us when something is wrong. The emotional experience can be unpleasant, but the situation caused it. Diminishing your feelings only puts you in a position to disable your motivation to fix the problem. Instead of diminishing your emotions, allow the feelings to set you into analysis mode. When you find the cause is the narcissist, you can aim to fix the problem by dissolving the relationship.

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