Concept: Of all the defenses, gray rocking is the most effective in stopping an abusive episode. To understand the analogy, picture a chaotic sea with waters crashing and sloshing all over sea walls and the shore. Now add a plain, tall gray rock in the middle of all of it. Its bland gray coloring is unremarkable, and it stands straight up in the middle of waters that fail to bring it down. Effective gray rocking means not reacting in any way to a narcissist’s tirade. Gray rocking results in a failure to upset a recovering victim and thereby preventing ammunition to use against them in some future encounter.
How this helps, and the opposite hurts: Gray rocking doesn’t usually end an abusive episode the first time, but over many instances, narcissists grow tired of failing to upset the recovering victim, and they end abusive episodes quicker. Given enough instances, the narcissist will give up entirely and move to the discard phase. Any other approach, such as arguing, only causes successful baiting and reinforcement of the narcissist’s abusive ways.
Examples:
Advice: No matter how hard and draining it is to listen to a narcissist mistreat you without responding, deploy the gray rock every time a narcissist in your life starts an abusive episode and continue the practice until it stops. With each passing instance, you’ll gain skill at it, which will work eventually. Narcissists can’t stand gray rocking because of its undeniable dismissiveness. Keep it up long enough, and they’ll leave you alone.
Home | Rights Theory | Love | Toxic Personalities | Fiction | Charlton’s Ground | About Me
Red Flags | Motivations | Fears | Techniques | Inabilities | Stages | Enabling
Assertiveness | Assigning responsibility | Boundary Setting | Happiness Focus | Hero’s Journey | Mind Eviction | No Contact | Research | Selective Advice Seeking | Self-Care | Self-Realization | Testing | Therapy | Withholding Information