You come away from most conversations with your ex feeling confused, wrong, and somehow the bad guy, even when you started out sure of yourself. If that keeps happening, you may be co-parenting with a narcissist. The word gets thrown around a lot, so let us look at what it actually looks like, and what helps.
A note first. You do not need a diagnosis to recognise a pattern, and the aim here is not to label your ex so you can win an argument. It is to understand a dynamic clearly, so you can stop using approaches that only make it worse.
The signs you are dealing with it
It is a pattern, not a single moment. In mediation I see it show up like this.
Everything is about them, even matters that are supposed to be about the children. Conversations that leave you doubting your own memory of events, so that you start to wonder if you are the problem. Blame that always lands on you, no matter what actually happened. The children being used to get to you, whether as messengers, bargaining chips, or an audience. Charm in public and something else entirely in private, so that other people see a reasonable person while you deal with the other side. An inability to compromise, because compromise feels like losing to them, and losing is intolerable.
If you are constantly walking away feeling like the problem, when you know you came in reasonable, that feeling is worth paying attention to. It is often the clearest sign of what you are dealing with.
Why the usual approach backfires
Standard co-parenting advice says communicate more, be open, find the middle ground, assume good faith. And in an ideal world that is what is the best thing to do. With a narcissist, that often hands them more to work with. More contact means more openings. More explaining means more material to twist. More vulnerability means more to exploit. Good faith met with bad faith just leaves you exposed.
A pattern I notice is that the other parent keeps trying to be understood, keeps hoping that if they just explain it clearly enough, the other person will finally get it and be fair. That day does not come, and each attempt costs them. The way through is not to try harder to be understood. It is to change the terms so that being understood stops being the goal.
How to stay sane
Keep contact minimal, written, and about the children only. This is often described as replying with only the necessary facts and nothing more. Short, flat, factual. No emotion for them to grab onto, because emotion is fuel. A message that is all logistics and no feeling gives them nothing to work with.
Stop looking for fairness or insight that is not coming. A great deal of the exhaustion is the waiting. Waiting for them to be reasonable, to acknowledge their part, to play fair just once. When you let that expectation go, you stop handing them the power to hurt and disappoint you over and over.
Keep a calm, factual record of arrangements and what actually happens, so decisions can rest on patterns rather than on who argues hardest or rewrites history most convincingly.
Build support around you. This dynamic makes you doubt yourself, so you need people who see it clearly and can steady you when you start to wonder if it is all in your head. It is not. And do the work on yourself to heal and remove the buttons that your ex likes to push.
Parallel parenting often works best
For many families, parallel parenting is what finally works here. Each parent handles their own time with minimal direct contact, which removes most of the openings the behaviour needs to operate. You stay fully involved with your children. You just stop giving the dynamic room to run.
If you want help setting that up, book a free call with our team.