Thank you -- thank you to the people who sent me these things over the years to help me move forward with my life. I have moved forward but will always have a deep ache in my soul.
So, 99% of the time, that's what you think you are - a god. It's self delusion. But every time someone treats you like an ordinary man or woman and as their equal, worthy of your consideration and respect, they are challenging your precious delusions of superiority.
You must stop that from happening. So, in terror, you instantly attack anyone who says or does something that reminds you that you are not God. Like a three-year-old playing Pretend with her friends, you stamp your foot and yell (in so many words), "NO! You're not supposed to say THAT! You're supposed to say THIS!"
You thus train the people around you not to say or do anything that conflicts with your delusions of superiority. That is, you train them to play along with your script in your game of Pretend. But you cannot stop everything from happening that calls your true feelings to consciousness. And they are too painful.
So, you go berserk with the pain whenever they start to surface, wildly doing anything you can to instantly repress them to the subconscious again. I often liken this subconscious-burying behavior to someone frantically shoving dirt on a corpus delicti to keep it buried in one of those old horror movies. You will do anything - ANYTHING - to prevent a moment of self awareness! Because you have this dark, unutterable terror that it would kill you. Really, you are that frantically afraid of seeing your true self in a mirror. So, you are playing Pretend 100% of the time. 24-7-365.
You pretend that you are not lowdown by pretending the antidote = pretending that you are a god. And you pretend that you are a god by treating others like dirt.
You pretend that you are not amoral by pretending the antidote = pretending that you are a saint. And you pretend that you are saint by portraying others as sinners. And so on and on and on and on. Bottom Line: You kill your pain by causing others pain. (In other words, like a three-year-old, you pretend that you can transfer it to others.) You glorify your image by trashing others' image. In other words, you exploit people, brutally as unfeeling and inhuman as a psychopath about the pain and damage you are doing to them by this. You thus make others bleed just to maintain your delusions and keep you from knowing yourself as you are.
Others must bleed so that you can feel good, so that a moment of self awareness doesn't make you just kill yourself. Is that not exactly what the predator thinks? The wolf thinks the lamb must bleed so that he can eat and live. The wolf thinks that this is what lambs exist for - to feed HIM. And that's what predators, like sexual predators, emotional predators, child predators, pyschopaths, and other brands of narcissists think other people exist for = to FEED them.
By projecting it onto others. But what if you get into trouble for doing these things? What if you end up before a judge or in a psychiatrist's office? What if the neighbors find out and start looking at you askance?
Remember, you do everything solely for effect, to get the reaction you want out of these people. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out what you will do. You will just switch masks. Now you put on your "victim" mask. Your "Who-poor-little-old-me?-I-wouldn't-hurt-a-fly" act. What better place for the devil to hide? Now you whine about what a wretched childhood you had. Now, so that people don't realize that you are just a predator who attacks any vulnerable prey in sight, you say that the victim hurt your poor, poor, tender feelings and that you were just lashing out in self defense.
Narcissist Personality Disorder does not leave such concrete evidence around like empty bottles, mysterious car dents, drunk-driving charges or visibly injured spouses. No, it feeds on the less concrete aspects of our lives. Damage is visited upon the people around NPD sufferers, and the behavior of the NPD sufferer is explained away using countless plausible rationalizations. To help my own understanding, I have come up with a metaphor for the disorder and the person who is afflicted by it. The metaphor is one of a puppeteer (the disorder itself) and a puppet (the person with the disorder). Let's explore the puppet metaphor to help understand how Narcissistic Personality Disorder works. The puppet metaphor illustrates what I believe is the salient challenge of NPD for those people around it: you think you are dealing directly with a person, but you are not. Instead, you are dealing with someone under the control of NPD. Here is what I have read about and experienced first hand. Narcissistic Personality Disorder sufferers:
- Lack the ability to empathize. They can fake it on and off, but if you have enough exposure to the person, eventually you will see this pattern clearly. They may show zero emotion when hearing news of, for example, deep suffering of huge numbers of people.
- As psychiatrist Thom Hartmann says, they "Kiss up and Kick Down", meaning they are incapable of having truly healthy relationships. They regard other humans as a kind of resource to be used for their own ends.
- Loathe themselves. Extensive research shows that NPD is rooted in denied love at the very early stage of the sufferer's life, and they spend the rest of their life devouring others in a futile attempt to fill this void.
- Go from incredible highs to deep lows. When they are high, they might not be able to stop talking. When they are low, they struggle to say good morning.
- They fly into a rage at the slightest provocation on some days. And at other times, they seem impervious even to the most brutal attack. They might stay awake all night wrestling with a single innocuous thing you said to them the day before, and then launch at you the next day with some bizarre logical conclusion of it.
- When you challenge their behavior, you may quickly move from Friend to Enemy. Sufferers of NPD think in black-and-white terms. You are either "with them or against them".
- Ultimately, they are at the center of the universe. Just like an alcoholic, they will risk a lot to get their next fix.
- Their relationships with newcomers go through three stages that I have identified: (1) Enchantment to (2) Disenchantment to (3) Contempt.
- NPD starts early and its sufferers have over decades developed an impressive range of dis-empowerment skills, from "you are being too sensitive" to talk about a person being a "good person" or a "bad person". (Who are they to judge!).
They are masters at setting one person against another, and they construct a culture of distrust and hostility.- They always believe they are right.
From what I have read, NPD sufferers rarely get clinically diagnosed, let alone treated. I can understand that. Just imagine waking up with the notion that you might be afflicted with this condition; you would have to build your life from scratch, even if you did believe treatment were possible.
There are plenty of people out there who have suffered at the hands of an NPD sufferer, and extensive research has been done to be able to identify it. The Internet is awash with anecdotes, life stories, remedies and the results of research. It is called a disorder because something is broken, not because something is unusual. Don't let others convince you that the person is just "a bit quirky" or "has a bit of an edge".
At least be honest with yourself. It doesn't matter what they say, and it also doesn't matter what I say. You have to work it out. Give it time and Narcissistic Personality Disorder, if you are exposed to it in someone in whom you have personally invested, will hurt you. It's a slow nibbling-to-death process. First, you're attracted to this striking person because you seem to have so much in common with them, and striking they are, as they weave a web around you. They know exactly how to get attention - they've been perfecting it all their lives.
What's really happening is you are being prepared for dinner. Their dinner. And you are but one of their side-dishes. They never counted how many little folks like you they have consumed over the years. A spider doesn't count the flies he eats and he has no feelings for any ofthem. The fly is just dinner; that's his place in this world. When you have a relationship with a sufferer or NPD, you are the fly.
The preposterousness of what I have just said is one of the reasons NPD gets to go on giving for a long, long time. Few will believe until they personally get punched in the face by it. And by that time, they've moved on to new willing victims.
NPD destroys relationships, trust, and whole families, yet still gets to continue in full swing, for a long time. There are no empty bottles to point to, no dirty syringes, or unexplained bruises on someone's arm. A person under the control of NPD can behave perfectly normally one moment, just like the puppet sits quietly in the puppet chair while the strings remain loose, then unexpectedly and suddenly turn on you as if you had committed some great crime against them.
The Puppet Knows he is a Puppet
I believe that a person under the control of NPD know that something is wrong; that something is very wrong. Often, and perhaps this is their real curse, such a person if very intelligent. They are good at working things out and they know something is definitely awry - but they are just the puppet, not the puppeteer - so it continues. Still, like so many human issues, ones "higher self" knows.
The Nice Man, The Bully and the Friend.
Imagine a chap by the name of Joe Smith. Joe shares a flat with a bully by the name of Biff. One evening, Joe is entertaining a close friend in the living room and Biff in the kitchen overhears something Joe's friend says in the living room. Biff immediately takes grave offense, storms into the living room in a rage and verbally abuses Joe's friend who gets up to leave because he is deeply hurt from the unexpected verbal assault. Joe sits there in shock about what has just happened.
Biff goes upstairs to sleep it off while Joe gets to pick up the pieces, apologizing profusely for his flat mate's outrageous behavior, perhaps even descending into a degree of denial about it all. Joe is just a regular guy like you or me, Biff is the ever controlling NPD he suffers from, and Friend is anyone Joe has a relationship with. NPD is like an unpredictable flat-mate. It might leave the sufferer alone for periods of time, days or sometimes weeks, but it always returns. Just when it looks like it's not really there anymore, it marches into the room and beats your friend up.
NPD will try to invalidate the feelings of those it hurts
"You're too sensitive" is a common attempt at invalidation used by a person under the influence of NPD. They try to invalidate what you are feeling because you are "over-reacting" to what has happened. Ironic, really, because the person under NPD begins the emotional encounter with an overreaction in the first place.
They know how to invalidate the feelings of others. This is why the Puppet metaphor fits so well for a person under NPD. You think you're talking with a reasonable person. After all, they've got that great degree in physics or medicine - they must be open to reasonable debate, you think. Wrong. When you try to reason with them, you will get yourself caught up in their puppet strings, and if you are not careful, will get sucked into their whole messy psycho world. That is, if you care. That is, if you have empathic skills.
Lack of Empathy - the signature of a person under NPD
Somewhere in their past, a person under NPD was left out in the cold. They were neglected in some way that left them hurt and feeling abandoned. Not usually in a physical sense, but more likely in a way that suggested they were unworthy of love. It is normal for a baby to think they are the center of the universe. It is normal for a seven year old not to fully connect with the teary-eyed adults surrounding the casket of their grandfather. But babies and kids grow up. They grow to learn the emotion of empathy; they grow to take on the adult burden of supporting others in the community, the family and the relationships around them. Persons under NPD are blind to empathy. Sure, they are masters at faking it, but they just cannot feel it.
They know how to make themselves look like they're connecting, complete with speeches from the heart and teary-eyed funeral visits. But they are in the game from themselves alone. When you get that about people who have the disorder, you begin to understand just how vulnerable you really are when such a person is close.---------------
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