I have been trying to stay away from the rabbit hole that is analyzing narcissistic patterns in the behaviour of Meghan Markle. As an educated and hopefully recovered survivor of a relationship with a narcissist, I can’t help but see a forest of red flags. But there are plenty of channels out there dedicated to analyzing Meghan Markle, so I thought there was no need for my adding my views. But I have to admit that I got quite triggered by some of the stuff that has come out of the leaks from Prince Harry’s memoir, the Spare, and I want to provide my interpretation of the situation.

There are two specific situations that I want to focus on. The alleged physical assault by Prince William on Prince Harry and the baby brain insult by Meghan Markle on Kate Middleton. I do think that these two bits come together in quite a nice way to reveal the toxic dynamic that I believe is going on in those relationshops.

The reason why I have been so triggered by this whole thing is that it terribly reminds me of a situation that I have with my sister and, as a result of that, I am 100 % on the Prince William and Kate side.

So what do we know: There was a situation when a discussion about Meghan Markle’s behavior ended by William losing it and attacking Harry. I have seen a lot of people on Twitter use this to claim that William is abusive or that this is normal between siblings. I don’t agree with either.

Dealing with a manipulator

What I think was going on there was Prince William losing it after being subject to covert aggressive and passive aggressive behavior from Meghan and Harry. As I said, I have this experience with my sister. For years, my sister would be insulting and attacking me and using plausible deniability and gas-lighting to claim that I am too sensitive or whatever, and then, if I would snap, and tell her to go to hell, she would run to other family members to complain about me being rude to her.

One example? When I first moved to London, it took me a while to get into my first job. It was a deeply stressful period and I was very anxious at that time. My sister, the supportive creature that she is, informed me via facebook that I was a loser who had three degrees and no job. As you would have it, I set a boundary, telling her to go to hell. My sister, used that bit of information of me telling her to go to hell to tell my family how rude I was to her while conveniently omitting the fact that she insulted me in the first place. This is just one of many examples. I no longer have any relationship with my sister. More about that later.

So how does that fit into the Royal saga? Let’s look at the other incident. That of Meghan Markle telling Kate Middleton that she had a baby brain, and then getting offended when told that her remark was rude and abrasive. Let’s state the facts. Telling a woman who doesn’t consider herself to be particularly close to you that she is hormonal and that this fact somehow makes her irrational or inferior is actually a form of misogynist abuse and it’s absolutely horrifying that a woman (Meghan Markle), who is by the way portraying herself as a beacon of feminism, is using this misogynist argument to undermine another woman. It’s insensitive at the very least and if someone told that to me, I wouldn’t like that either.

From what we can hear, Kate Middleton responded like a pretty adult and mature person. In fact, apparently, she tried to make peace by owning responsibility for a certain portion of the situation. That ownership of responsibility, however, was used by Meghan to claim the victim role and apportion full blame to Kate.

Kate actually stated her boundaries. She essentially told Meghan ‘you insulted me, we are not close enough for you to be making any comments about my hormones’. Kate absolutely has a right to do that. We all have the right to tell people if they insult us. We don’t need to just take it in, because that is enabling. So what is Meghan’s reaction? Let’s have a look.

Toxic people disregard boundaries

Based on what we are told as per the leaks from Harry’s book, Meghan was ‘offended’ and insisted that she talked like that to all her friends (Kate clearly did not consider herself Meghan’s friend and she certainly was not obliged to). Meghan claimed that whatever she said was not intended as an offense.

Let’s analyze this a bit deeper. There are two possible explanations. Meghan may have said that out of insensitive ignorance, which would tell you that she is not the person most attuned to other’s feelings. Still, Kate has a right to state her boundaries and Meghan should not be offended by that.

Meghan, however, may have said that deliberately, as covert aggressive and passive aggressive people often do, and was then using plausible deniability to get off the hook and gaslight Kate and make her feel that she she overreacted.

Passive aggressive, covert aggressive and manipulative people frequently use plausible deniability to gaslight their victims, create doubt and confusion and gain the upper hand. It’s very difficult to deal with them. Frequently, the person on the receiving end of covert abuse knows that the behavior is deliberate but has no way of proving it because it’s their word against the manipulator’s word and manipulators are very skilled at playing the victim and pulling the wool over other people’s eyes. People who have never been targeted by this behavior have a tendency to blame the victim. The good news in all of this is that apparently, both, Kate and William, understood what was going on, so neither has been scapegoated and marginalized as a result of the manipulator penetrating the family.

It’s kind of funny because while manipulative and covert aggressive people operate by pushing and disrespecting other people’s boundaries they do get terribly offended when asked to respect those boundaries. It’s a good test to put any of your friends through actually. When they do something that you feel uncomfortable with, clearly state so and observe their reaction. If they are well-intentioned and only behaved improperly out of ignorance, tiredness or perhaps cultural differences, they are going to correct their behavior. They will not be offended by you stating your boundaries. If they are toxic (or too dumb), they will try to make you feel wrong for stating your boundary by essentially gaslighting you, calling you too sensitive, lacking sense of humour or misunderstanding things. They will also get quite angry for you calling out their behavior.

One example from my saga with my sister: she loves using trangulation, which means dragging other people into our arguments to state that they too thought something was wrong with me. Well, she tried that once using one of my ex-boyfriends. My reaction was to directly ask that ex-boyfriend whether he had said such things to my sister. My sister was furious that I circumventing her manipulation attempt by talking to him directly. Likely, she really was offended by it. Anyway.

So if Meghan Markle was offended by being shown boundaries by Kate Middleton and Prince William, it unfortunately means that Meghan Markle is quite toxic and lacking self-awareness. I find it very difficult to see any other possible interpretation of the situation.

Making you flip

Does any of that make it O.K. for Prince William to physically assault his brother? Obviously not. So why am I defending William? Because I think he temporarily lost it in the face of the passive aggressive and covert aggressive behaviour he and Kate had been subject to from Meghan and Harry. Manipulators lie and deny into your face and it really is exasperating. You try and try and try to make them understand you, but the point is that they don’t want to understand you. Their actions are deliberate and it’s shocking to discover that.

Being in such a situation is a very intense learning process and it takes time to figure out what you’re dealing with. The manipulator is essentially deliberately hammering your buttons in the hope of making you react so that they can claim the victim position and point the finger at you as the abusive one. Narcissists all over the world are successfully doing this to their victims, frequently using that in divorce battles to pain their spouses as unstable.

You can never win with manipulative people. The only thing you can do is to disengage.

Disengage

When it comes to disengaging with toxic manipulators, there are two ways of doing that. You can maintain some external contact and disengage internally, which means that you absolutely ignore anything this person does or says, expect nothing but manipulative behavior from them, and focus on not giving them any sort of reaction. I do think this is rather difficult to do with people who are too close to you perhaps because they are your family and know your buttons too well.

I terminated contact with my sister quite a few years ago and was subsequently subject to a couple of hoovering attempts from her, by which she tried to loop me back into the toxic dynamic by pretending to apologize, only to essentially start covert abusing me immediately again and even admitting that she really didn’t feel sorry for any of her behavior toward me, because apparently I deserved it.

What you see Prince Harry doing is exactly that. He is trying to rope his family back into the argument because they disengaged from him and his wife because they concluded that she and he under her influence as well, are toxic and manipulative and that their only interest is to claim the victim position.

Can you fix a toxic relationship?

The short answer is no. You really do have to accept people where they are and understand that that is all what is in them. Then you make an informed choice whether you want to have anyone like that in your life.

I can imagine a scenario under which Prince Harry would get to see through the fog which he currently inhabits. It would involve Meghan Markle divorcing him, which I personally think is set to happen, and I think at this stage it is set to happen sooner rather than later. Markle is a narcissist, the pacing of the relationship and their actions seems all designed for her to gain attention. I do think that with the Netflix show, her podcast and now this book, there is not much more what she can get out of the relationship with him.

He made some serious blunders in that book, such as discussing the Taliban fighters that he had killed. I think he has given her an opening to seek separation soon because it has now been claimed that he has made himself and his family possible targets of Islamist retaliation.

So take this as my prediction. I give that marriage two years maximum. The next installment in the sorry affair will be Meghan releasing her own book post divorce.

Harry in the meantime will possibly suffer a break down. It will be really tough for him to see the mask slip from her face. For the first time, he will see the disinterested unempathetic predator and will seriously struggle to believe that the person who had brainswashed him into believing they were soulmates really doesn’t care one bit.

It is really tough to be recovering from a manipulative relationship because you have to accept that you have been used and undo all the brainwashing that the manipulator had subjected you to. I think he would be in a very bad place when this shit hits the fan and we shell see whether his biological family will be so generous as to forgive and support him through the darkness of true recovery.

Why is Harry’s resentment against William ridiculous

One more comment on why Harry’s resentment against William is as ridiculous as my sister’s resentment against me. Among the grievances listed in the leaked excerpts is the issue of the size of their childhood bedrooms and the comparison of the Cambridges’ flat compared to the Sussexes’ living quarters. Now let me state this clearly: I think that children should be treated equally by their parents and that any unequal treatment creates fertile ground for resentment to sprout. Now, the problem is when the child that feels wronged blames the sibling instead of the parents who caused the problem in the first place. This is certainly something that every sibling resenting their brother or sister for the perceived better treatment they received as children must process before lashing against those siblings.

Let me conclude by stating this: if people behave in toxic ways to you, you have a right and a obligation to yourself to state so. If they are well-intentioned people, they will correct the behavior. If they are not, they will feel offended by being called out on the behaviour because they think they have a right to treat you poorly. At that stage, you have no obligation to maintain the relationship and it is more likely than not a better option to terminate the relationship