When you are interacting with people who only want what they want, regardless of how it affects you, you’re in for a very dysfunctional and possibly emotionally harmful situation.
It’s important to know your line and know when people cross it, then honor that line so that you don’t lose a bit of yourself.
Important: If you believe that you may be doing emotionally harmful behavior and would like to change that about yourself, sign up for the life-changing Healed Being program over at healedbeing.com).
If you are currently in a relationship with a selfish person who doesn’t seem to care if they hurt you, listen to my podcast Love and Abuse to help you navigate through the difficulties.
There’s a specific type of person who will drain your energy, violate your boundaries, and make you question your own worth. They’re the ones who seem incapable of caring about how their behavior affects you. No matter what you say or how clearly you express your hurt, they continue doing exactly what they want.
I received an email from someone whose friend is trapped in a relationship with this exact type of person. The friend has been dealing with a partner who repeatedly hurts her, dismisses her feelings, and prioritizes his own needs above everything else.
Despite seeing the damage this relationship is causing, despite recognizing the patterns, the friend isn’t ready to leave. She’s stuck in that painful space where she knows something is wrong but can’t quite take the step to protect herself.
This situation highlights something crucial about dealing with selfish people. They don’t operate the way you do. If you’re someone who values kindness, compassion, and empathy, you probably assume others share those values. You think that if you just explain how much their behavior hurts, they’ll understand and change. But that’s not how it works with truly selfish people.
Selfish people want what they want, and they’ll do whatever it takes to get it.
They don’t care if you’re hurt by their behavior because your hurt isn’t their priority. Their needs, desires, and wants come first. Always.
What makes this even more complicated is that selfish people in a romantic relationship are often very good at making you feel special at the beginning. They shower you with attention, affection, and gifts. They make you believe you’ve found something rare.
This isn’t an accident. It’s how they hook you. And once you’re invested, once you believe in the relationship, that’s when the real behavior starts to emerge.
The person who wrote to me described watching her friend go through exactly this pattern. The friend thought she’d found someone special, only to slowly realize there was a problem in the relationship.
Selfish People Convince You That You Are The Problem
When you’re dealing with someone who constantly makes you feel inadequate, you start believing you’re the issue. You think if you could just be better, kinder, more understanding, things would improve.
The truth is, if you’re already a kind, caring, compassionate, empathetic person, you’re already doing enough. You really are. And if you have to try any harder than what you’re doing now to please someone, all it does is get taken advantage of. Your energy gets sucked out of you, and you end up feeling depleted and traumatized.
Selfish people are experts at keeping you focused on yourself.
They’ll make sure you’re always questioning what you did wrong, always analyzing your own behavior, and always trying to fix yourself. And as long as you’re focused on those things, you won’t see what they’re actually doing to get their desires and needs met.
What’s worse is that even when they get what they want, it still won’t be enough.They will still want more, continuing to make you feel like you never do anything right and you never do enough.
There’s a pattern these people follow: They’ll push you to your breaking point, then pull back just before you actually break.
They know exactly how far they can go. They also understand that if they push too hard, you’ll leave. Because they don’t want to lose the target of their control, they calibrate their behavior to keep you right on the edge – Just hurt enough to be compliant, but not so hurt that you walk away.
This is why it’s so important to be aware of what’s happening. You need to step out of your own “stuff” and make sure you stop feeling bad or sorry for yourself. In other words, stop thinking you’re the problem.
You are not causing them to feel bad. And there is nothing you can do to make the situation better.Their selfish behaviors are out of your control.
I know that sounds harsh, but it’s necessary. If you’re a generally kind, caring, compassionate, and empathetic person, again, you’re already doing enough. If you have to try any harder to please someone like this, you’re just setting yourself up to be used.
The friend in this situation hasn’t reached her breaking point yet. She’s still in that space where she’s making excuses. “Maybe it’ll work out. Maybe he’ll change. Maybe he’ll realize he’s hurting me.” These are the thoughts that keep people trapped in toxic situations far longer than they should stay.
Some people can become resilient to bad behavior. They might tolerate things they shouldn’t tolerate because they’re forgiving, compassionate, and caring. They might even feel bad for the selfish person because they’ve had a tough life or is currently going through difficulties.
Don’t waste time trying to please someone who would rather point out what you’re doing wrong rather than show gratitude for you being in their life.
Resilience For Bad Behavior Will Keep You In A Bad Relationship
Resilience, while generally a good quality, becomes dangerous when it allows someone to continuously violate your values and boundaries. You start thinking, “At least it’s not worse. He pushed me against the wall, at least he didn’t punch me in the face. He yelled at me in front of my mom, but at least he didn’t smack my child.”
All of these violations of your values and safety can get thrown out the window when you adapt to the next worse thing and the next.
Don’t grow resilient to bad behavior. Protect yourself from it.
The person who wrote to me can see this clearly from the outside. She can see her friend being hurt, drained, and diminished. But she can’t make her friend leave.
That’s the difficult truth about these situations. You can’t convince someone to leave until they’re ready.
The simple answer is that you probably will never be able to convince someone to leave a person like this until they reach their own breaking point. Some people have to crash before they finally make that kind of decision. They have to hit that moment where they can’t take it anymore, where the pain of staying becomes greater than the fear of leaving.
This person wrote to me again letting me know her friend in that relationship finally left. And since then, she’s much healthier and happier now.
This is a testament to what can happen when you decide to remove toxic people from your life.
For her, getting to that decision-making point was hard. I’m sure it probably felt defeating at first. She probably felt like she’d never find love again, like she was going to end up alone.
Fears like this are what keep people trapped. They stay way too long in situations that are abusive and harmful because they become resilient to and forgiving of the bad behavior. It makes sense that they would be forgiving, of course. It comes natural to kind, caring, compassionate, people.
But those qualities can also work against them because people like that also feel like they need to be more than they are for the person they love.
Can Selfish People Change?
What’s important to recognize is that certain people will never, ever change. No matter how much you love them, no matter how much you give, and no matter how many chances you offer, most people will not change unless they want to. And in most cases, selfish people do not want to change.
When you accept that certain people won’t change, you can shift your focus to taking care of yourself. You can stop trying to win against people you can’t win with. And you can stop engaging in battles that will never end in your favor.
The woman who left her toxic relationship realized she wasn’t the problem. She started thinking critically. She started being discerning. She realized she was doing the best she could, and the other person wasn’t. That’s the shift that needs to happen.
If you’re the type of person who is kind, caring, compassionate, empathetic, considerate, respectful, and understanding, yet someone is treating you badly, don’t take that on as something you did or didn’t do.
If you have most or all of those wonderful qualities and someone is still making you feel inadequate, let me tell you the most important message in this entire article: the problem isn’t with you.
Selfish people don’t access empathy. And most people do have empathy unless they have anti-social personality disorder. But empathy is what differentiates selfish people from the rest of the population.
Selfish people don’t put themselves in your shoes. They can’t feel what you’re feeling. They might seem to care at certain moments, but they do that to get their own needs met. It’s transactional, not genuine.
This is especially true of people with narcissistic tendencies. Those people are so selfish that you don’t matter at all. Your needs are inconsequential. They might pull back and seem caring right before you reach your breaking point, but it’s calculated. It’s designed to keep you hooked.
How Do You Protect Yourself From A Selfish Person?
The only way to protect yourself is to stay highly aware of what’s happening. You have to step out of your emotional reaction and see the pattern clearly. You have to recognize when someone is making you focus on yourself and your own perceived flaws so that you won’t notice their actual behavior.
Keep a slight bit of skepticism about every person you meet. That might sound pessimistic, but it’s actually healthy critical thinking. It doesn’t mean you’re negative or think badly about people. It means you’re protecting yourself. You’re carrying your own personal bodyguard with you.
This also doesn’t mean your guard always has to stay up. It just means you stay vigilant and observant, waiting for them to turn the tables on you to divert your attention away from their own bad behaviors.
When you get to know people and they prove themselves as safe and trustworthy over and over again, that’s when you can relax. You can trust people who show up consistently like that because they’ve shown they’re kind and have your best interests in mind. But until they prove that, I believe it’s okay to maintain some healthy skepticism.
The friend who finally left her toxic relationship had to reach her breaking point. She had to get to that place where she couldn’t take it anymore, where the violations became too much, and where her resilience finally gave way to self-protection. And when she did, her life got better.
It was hard at first. Leaving always is. But only a few months later, as I said earlier, she’s healthier and happier. After leaving a relationship, life can be harder initially, but it does get better. The damage starts to heal once you step away from the source of the toxicity.
The process is like quitting smoking. The very first day, you’re giving your lungs a break for the first time. The second day, your lungs can breathe easier. The third day, even easier. But it might take months to fully heal.
Some people won’t entertain a choice that takes months of hard work, hard decisions, or hard emotional battles. They don’t want to deal with it. But that’s why some people need to crash.
Sometimes you need to hit bottom before you’re ready to change.
And sometimes, as painful as it is to watch, you might have to watch friends or family do that just so they can start making healthier decisions.
If you’re the person in the toxic relationship, know this:
You have standards.
You have criteria.
When someone violates that criteria, when they violate you, you have the right to say no.
You have the right to say this behavior is unacceptable.
And always value yourself so much that you’ll never let someone continue to hurt you.
Life is too short for people to be crossing your boundaries and stepping all over you. You don’t deserve that. Make sure your line is solid. Make sure that when people cross it, they know they’ve crossed it. Selfish people need accountability when they violate your values.
If you’re not there yet, work on getting there. Work on recognizing your own worth and understanding that being kind and compassionate doesn’t mean tolerating abuse.
Also work on accepting that some people won’t change, which means you have to take care of yourself.
The friend who left is healthier now because she stopped making excuses and stopped waiting for her partner to realize the error of his ways. She stopped thinking maybe it would work out. She reached her limit and broke through whatever was holding her back.
You’ll reach that limit too, if you’re in a similar situation. You’ll break through whatever is limiting you now, whether it’s hope that things will improve, fear of being alone, or belief that you’re somehow responsible for their behavior. You’ll reach that point where you say enough is enough.
And when you do, life will get better. It might take time. It might be hard at first. But stepping away from toxicity allows healing to begin. Each day away from the source of harm is a day your emotional wounds can start to close. Each day you protect yourself is a day you reclaim your power, your worth, and your peace.
The person who wrote to me wanted to help her friend, but the truth was that her friend had to get to the point where she wanted to help herself. She had to reach that breaking point on her own. And no amount of outside pressure or advice made that happen before she was ready.
If you’re watching someone you care about go through this, be patient. Be there when they’re ready. But don’t exhaust yourself trying to convince them of something they’re not ready to see. Sometimes the most loving thing you can do is wait for them to reach their own conclusion, while making it clear you’ll support them when they do.
Selfish people don’t care about you the way you care about them. They don’t operate with the same values. They don’t have the same capacity for empathy. You can’t change that. You can only decide whether you’re willing to continue accepting it.
 | Paul Colaianni Paul Colaianni is an Emotional Abuse Expert and Behavior and Relationship Specialist who has been analyzing complex relationship dynamics since 2010. As the creator of the Healed Being program and host of the top-rated Love and Abuse and The Overwhelmed Brain podcasts, with over 21 million downloads worldwide, he specializes in helping people recognize hidden manipulation, navigate emotionally abusive relationships, and empower themselves to make informed decisions. |
