Richard Grannon's Work - Lessons to Learn From Him (not the hard way)

Abandon All Sincere Communication When Communicating With the Terminally Insincere

On Richard Grannon's most liberating idea

There is a particular kind of exhaustion that comes not from overwork, but from over-explaining yourself to someone who was never listening. You have said the true thing. You have said it clearly. You have said it again, differently, more carefully. You have offered evidence. You have remained calm. You have stayed vulnerable. And none of it has mattered - because the person across from you was not engaged in a conversation. They were engaged in a performance, a manipulation, a game whose rules you were never told.

Richard Grannon, the narcissistic abuse recovery specialist and trauma educator, has a phrase for what you should do next: abandon all sincere communication when communicating with the terminally insincere.

It sounds blunt. It might even sound cynical. But understanding what it actually means - and what it doesn't mean - is one of the more practically liberating ideas in the field of recovery from narcissistic abuse.

What "Terminally Insincere" Actually Means

Grannon is not talking about people who are sometimes dishonest. He is not talking about someone who lies about being late or exaggerates a fishing story. He is not even talking about ordinary selfishness or occasional cruelty.

"Terminally insincere" describes something structural - a person for whom sincere communication is not available as a mode. These are individuals, typically with significant narcissistic or other Cluster B personality pathology, for whom every exchange is instrumental. Words are not used to convey meaning or connect; they are used to manage perception, extract supply, deflect accountability, or win.

When you tell them how you feel, they don't process your feelings - they scan for leverage. When you explain your reasoning, they don't evaluate your logic - they look for gaps to exploit. When you try to resolve a conflict, they don't engage with the substance - they file the attempt away as evidence of your weakness or need.

The sincerity is terminal in the sense that it is absent at the root, not just at the surface. You cannot appeal to it, coax it out, or create conditions under which it will emerge. It is not that they have not heard you well enough. It is that hearing you - really hearing you - is not part of the operating system.

Why We Keep Trying Anyway

Understanding this intellectually is one thing. Believing it in your bones, especially when you are still in proximity to the person, is another matter entirely.

Most of us are wired for reciprocity. We assume that if we are transparent enough, kind enough, precise enough in our language, the other person will eventually respond in kind. This is not naivety - it is the appropriate default setting for functioning human relationships. The tragedy is that this default gets brutally exploited.

There is also often history involved. You may have seen flashes of apparent sincerity from this person - moments of warmth or vulnerability that felt real. Those moments form a kind of psychological collateral that keeps you investing. Grannon and others in the field would note that those moments are often either manufactured (idealization phase) or genuinely disordered (inconsistency doesn't equal sincerity).

And then there is hope - the deeply human hope that if you could just find the right words, the right moment, the right angle, something would finally click. That they would understand. That they would stop. That it would end.

Sincere communication, in this context, becomes less a strategy than a compulsion. And it is a compulsion the terminally insincere are very good at sustaining in you.

What Abandoning Sincere Communication Is Not

This is where the concept gets misread, so it deserves careful handling.

Abandoning sincere communication is not:

• Becoming manipulative yourself. This is not a license to fight fire with fire, to deceive, to gaslight, or to adopt the tactics of the person harming you. That path leads to a very dark place and doesn't actually protect you.
  

• Becoming cold or cruel. You can be civil. You can be functional. You can engage on neutral topics. The abandonment is of vulnerability and depth, not of basic human dignity.
  

• Giving up on all relationships. This principle applies specifically to people who have demonstrated, through a pattern of behavior, that they cannot or will not engage in good faith. It is not a worldview about humanity in general.
  

• Suppressing your inner life. Your feelings, your needs, your sense of self - these remain fully real and fully worthy of expression. They just belong in contexts and with people who can receive them properly.
  

What It Actually Looks Like

In practice, abandoning sincere communication with the terminally insincere looks something like this:

You stop explaining. You stop justifying. You stop offering your reasoning as if it will be evaluated fairly, because you have enough evidence to know that it won't be.

You stop disclosing your feelings, not because your feelings are wrong, but because they will be used against you. The terminally insincere person who knows you feel guilty about something will use that guilt. The one who knows you fear abandonment will weaponize that fear. Sincerity, in this specific relational context, is not vulnerability - it is exposure.

You become strategically grey. Not emotionally flat or dead, but deliberately unremarkable in your communications. You give as little signal as possible. Short answers. Neutral responses. The minimal information required to navigate the interaction.

You stop trying to resolve. There is no resolution to be had through good-faith engagement with someone who does not engage in good faith. You manage, you disengage, you document where necessary, you exit where possible.

And critically - you move your sincere communication elsewhere. To a therapist, to trusted friends, to a journal, to yourself. The need to be genuinely known does not disappear. It gets redirected to people and contexts that can actually honor it.

The Deeper Point: Communication Requires Two

There is a philosophical assumption embedded in the idea of "abandoning" sincere communication that is worth naming explicitly.

Sincere communication is not just about what you offer - it is about what the exchange is capable of. When you speak sincerely to someone, you are operating within a certain kind of relational space: one where words carry weight, where meaning is exchanged, where both parties are attempting to understand and be understood.

That space does not exist with the terminally insincere. What looks like communication is actually something else - a performance, an interrogation, a dynamic of control. You cannot have a genuine dialogue inside that dynamic any more than you can have a chess game with someone who keeps pocketing your pieces.

Recognizing this is not cynicism. It is accuracy. And accuracy, here, is a form of self-respect.

The Liberation in the Phrase

What people often describe when they finally take this idea seriously is not coldness but relief.

Relief from the endless loop of explaining and re-explaining. Relief from the hope that this time, if you just say it the right way, something will change. Relief from the subtle self-betrayal involved in offering your real self to someone who will use it against you.

There is also, eventually, a kind of grief. Because the person you were hoping to reach - the version of them capable of genuine connection - is either not present or not accessible. And that loss is real.

But on the other side of that grief is something important: your sincerity, intact, available for contexts and people where it actually belongs.

A Note on Who This Is For

Grannon's work is specifically aimed at survivors of narcissistic abuse - people in or recovering from relationships (romantic, familial, professional) with individuals who exhibit narcissistic, psychopathic, or other Cluster B traits. If you are reading this and the concept resonates, it may be worth sitting with why.

This is not a framework for navigating ordinary relationship friction, communication differences, or even the ordinary selfishness that most people exhibit sometimes. The word "terminally" is doing real work in the phrase.

If you are unsure whether someone in your life fits this description, consider: have their patterns of behavior remained consistent regardless of how clearly or kindly you have communicated? Do they show a pattern of accountability - genuine accountability, not tactical apology followed by repetition? Is there any evidence that sincere communication has ever produced real change?

Your answers will tell you more than any framework can.

Abandon all sincere communication when communicating with the terminally insincere.

On the surface, this sounds like a counsel of hardness. But it is, in its way, a counsel of care - for yourself, for your capacity for genuine connection, for the sincere part of you that deserves to be received well.

You cannot fix someone else's insincerity by doubling down on your own openness. You cannot create a good-faith exchange by insisting on good faith unilaterally. At some point, the compassionate thing - for yourself - is to stop offering what was never going to be honored, and to redirect your realness toward places where it can actually land.

That is not a retreat from connection. It is the precondition for it.

Richard Grannon is a trauma specialist and narcissistic abuse recovery educator whose work can be found at spartanlifecoach.com and across his YouTube channel. This post draws on his broader framework for understanding and recovering from relationships with high-conflict individuals.