I was bored so I made a video of myself covering Blake Shelton “Sure B Cool if You Did.” I never made a karaoke video before, so I apologize about the poor video quality.
I hope this works.
More family drama.
My son with a huge telephoto lens The Parasite sent him.
The Parasite (my ASPD/malignant narc ex) is now giving my son the silent treatment. A few days ago, flush with all his new money, he sent my son a very expensive, professional quality Nikon camera and various photographic accessories. It was nice of him. But there were strings attached: my son was told not to tell me The Parasite got his $31K from the government or tell me about the expensive photographic equipment he received. The Parasite must have known he would tell me though, because my son has always been honest to a fault. He’s honest even when he shouldn’t be.
So my son called the other night and told me, and that’s how I knew. He could tell I was upset even though I was happy that at least he’d bought my son a camera. He then told Parasite that he’d told me, and his father went ballistic, and has now blocked his calls and blocked him on Facebook and told my daughter he doesn’t want to ever speak to him again.
I know it’s temporary; he’s played these narc games before. My son being The Parasite’s second favorite scapegoat (after me), is used to being emotionally abused by his father. Growing up, there wasn’t much I could do to stop it.
But now the wonderful gift my son got is tainted. I know it would bother me a lot to look at a gift given to me by someone who days later blocked me and refused to speak to me just because I was honest. Especially if I was honest to someone I loved as much as my son loves me. The Parasite knows my son prefers me to him (even though my finances limit me to cheap gifts) and that enrages him. It just makes me so sad. I hope he’s still able to enjoy the gift.
On a happier note, my daughter got her engagement ring! I think they have the date set for April 20th (4/20, lol). She will have just turned 23. That’s young, but not too young, and her fiance is 4 years older. This is what she wanted so I’m happy.
How my NPD/ASPD control freak ex used a dog to gaslight me.
In 2011, when my parasitic MN/ASPD ex was still living on my couch, he decided he wanted a dog.
We already had a dog, Dexter, who was an awesome black lab mix (he lives with my daughter and her fiance now). The house I live in (and lived in then) is tiny. At the time, we had Dexter and 5 cats. Far too many animals for a two bedroom house, but these were pets I cared about, so I wasn’t too bothered by the overpopulation problem in the house.
But oh no, a dog and five cats wasn’t enough for the Parasite (which is his new name as far as I’m concerned so that’s who he’ll be from now on). No, he had to have his OWN dog, one that HE picked. I told him we had no room for another pet, and it was already too expensive feeding and taking care of the ones we had (remember, he contributed nothing financially since he refused to work so all their expenses fell on me) but he couldn’t see reason.
Instead, he whined petulantly, “But Dexter needs a playmate!”
Dexter did not need a playmate. Parasite needed some easy narcissistic supply.
A few weeks passed and Parasite gaslighted me by telling me and everyone else who would listen that “Lauren hates animals” because I put my foot down about getting a new puppy.
One day I came home from work and found Parasite slumped on the couch that had a huge valley in the center from his constant inert and hateful presence, and in his arms was a puppy. A Jack Russell puppy.
For anyone who isn’t familiar with Jack Russells, they’re a cute beagle-like breed of hunting dog but they have serious ADHD and need to be able to run as much as they want. They bark a lot and are just extremely hyper. They are difficult to train because they’re so stubborn. They may be fine for a family with kids who lives on a farm or has acres of land for the dog to run, but they are definitely NOT the kind of dog that would do well in a small apartment or house with only a smallish unfenced yard. They are not the kind of dog to have if you live in a suburban development where the neighbors are no more than 40 feet away.
I hate Jack Russells. (But I love dogs).
But it looked like we had one, at least for the moment.
I told him to take it back wherever he got it.
“Oh, but he’s so cuuuuuuuuuute! Look at him!” (said in low-register baby talk)
I roll my eyes. “Yes, he’s very cute, but we have too many pets already, and I can’t afford to feed him too.”
“Oh, he won’t be expensive to feed. Dexter needs a friend!” He shoves the the puppy up in my face. “LOOOOOOOK at him, he LOOOOOVES you. Isn’t he CUUUUUTE?”
I see red. He isn’t listening. Again. He never listens. He never cares about anyone but himself. I tell him this.
He projects and gaslights. “No, YOU’RE the one who only thinks about yourself. You don’t care about animals. You only think about YOU! You don’t care about MEEEE. I have diabetes and mental problems and a bad knee and I have to live here on your couch and don’t have my own home and it’s always too hot or cold in here and you buy crappy food and now you’re telling me I can’t have a dog who won’t be any bother to you at all.”
I stare daggers at him. I can feel the lava of BPD rage boiling in my gut. I try to stay calm. I count to ten.
“I want you to take him back.”
“No.”
Maybe pleasantry might help. “Please take the puppy back.”
“No, and if you dare try to take him to the shelter, I’ll kill myself and make it look like a murder.”
The BPD volcano erupts. “YOU’RE A F&%KING ASSHOLE! TAKE THAT GODDAM DOG BACK TOMORROW, YOU STUPID FREAK!”
“What will you do if I don’t?” He’s baiting me. He has me on the spot. There’s nothing I could do or would do, and he knows it. He’s in complete control.
“Uh…I don’t know….But I’LL FIND SOMETHING!”
“You’d probably have Barnaby (he already picked a name) put to sleep,” he says, fake pouting. “You hate animals, you have no compassion or you’d let me keep him.”
I give up and leave the room, but out of the corner of my eye see Parasite holding Barnaby up to his face and telling him in that infuriating fake-masculine baby talk what a “meanie” I am.
So Barnaby stayed. For two years. I never hated a dog before, but I hated this one. He chewed everything, the furniture, the rugs, important papers, my favorite book. Once he ate an entire pack of cigarettes and vomited them up all over the chewed up and shredded rugs. He pissed and shat everywhere, up until he was a year old. Parasite kept making excuses for him such as “but he’s only a PUPPEEE!” or shifting the blame to me–“you’re so impatient!” Not only did I hate him because he was so out of control, I hated him because Parasite refused to train him and that dog represented to me everything bad about the Parasite himself. Every time I saw that dog, it reminded me of how controlled, intimidated and powerless I had become.
Barnaby barked and howled nonstop. Morning, noon and night. Once he got a taste of the great outdoors, he decided this was something he couldn’t live without, so running away for hours at a time was a weekly occurrence, and eventuall a daily occurrence.
But running away wasn’t all he did. Oh, no. If he’d run away and never returned there’d be no love lost.
But he’d run into neighbors’ backyards. He’d devour their gardens, then sit there and howl for hours. You’d go try to catch him, and the little demon would run. It was a game to him. He’d run, then sit down and look at you, waiting for you to make a move. You’d lunge after him, and he’d bound off again, then sit down and look at you, teasing you and daring you. He was too fast, I could never catch him. And Parasite wouldn’t try. It was up to me to get him to come back. And I never could.
I’d go to bed and hear him howling somewhere nearby and wonder what the hell I was going to do.
Soon the neighbors were mad at us for allowing our out of control dog to keep them up all night and ruin their yards. Animal Control was called twice. The second time, I answered the door when they came, and when they told me there’d be a fine if it happened again, I told them they were free to take him, I couldn’t handle him. But Parasite was home, and intercepted, promising he’d be good and it wouldn’t happen again. Animal Control left. Barnaby stayed.
The next night, Barnaby ran off and howled in another neighbor’s yard. Animal control came and took him away. Parasite was inconsolable at first, then his grief morphed into rage. He threatened me: “You go get that dog back tomorrow.”
“I don’t have the money.”
“You’re lying. Do it or I’ll kill myself. And make it look like you did it.”
I used my week’s entire paycheck to go retrieve Demon Dog from the shelter, leaving us without food that week (which Parasite of course complained about).
This time, Parasite actually had the presence of mind to build a makeshift fence from steel beams where Barnaby could be confined. So although he continued to chew everything in sight and bark too much (and still seemed to have problems containing his bowels) he seemed calmer in his grassy kingdom and the howling ceased.
But this didn’t last. Barnaby was smart. One night Barnaby dug his way out from under the pen and I heard the distant howling.
I couldn’t do this anymore. I remembered Parasite’s threat. But sometimes frustration or anger can override fear, and I reasoned that it was probably an empty threat anyway, since he rarely had followed through on any of his past threats.
I was going to place an ad on Craigslist.
But Parasite had an announcement of his own.
“I don’t want Barnaby anymore,” he said.
I just stared at him stupidly.
A week later Barnaby went to live with a family that answered our ad on Craigslist. The man who came to get him said he had five acres of land and 4 kids, and they’d always wanted a Jack Russell.
The useless parasite who lived on my couch got rewarded for having ASPD.
I need to vent a little.
My MN/ASPD ex just received $31K in backpay disability for the seven years he spent living like a leech in my living room (after we divorced), making a mess everywhere, taking advantage of me, mentally and emotionally abusing me, refusing to work (so he could get disability–during the review process you cannot have a job), and not paying me so much as a dime the entire time he lived here. He played his horrible music loud when I was trying to sleep and got mad when I told him to turn it down. He complained constantly about everything. He brought in a Jack Russell puppy even though he knew I couldn’t have another dog and he knew I can’t stand Jack Russells (which is going to be my next post). Of course I was stupid to ever trust him and allow him to live with me at all, once we were divorced. But I was so codependent and scared of his empty threats.
I’m envious. And outraged. And I can’t seem to shake this toxic rage. I’m envious because he doesn’t have to slave away at a low-level service job and live paycheck to paycheck, but now rakes in about $500 more per month than I do for doing absolutely nothing. Plus that he has more money right now than I’ve ever had in my life even though I work like a dog for very little. The parasite is actually capable of working to some extent, but never wanted to work, so he successfully used a few medical and psychiatric problems to prove he can’t work. He’s great at playing the system, which is a good indication of someone with ASPD, which he has actually been diagnosed with.
And that brings me to my next issue with all this. The useless POS was officially diagnosed with ASPD. Apparently ASPD is recognized by the North Carolina disability board as a “disability,” for the obvious reason that someone who’s antisocial is unemployable. I understand that part, but why is he being REWARDED for being a lying POS who gets his sadistic thrills making people more vulnerable than himself miserable and crazy?
It’s outrageous is what it is. I recognized the anger I feel is righteous anger that most normal people would probably feel too in the same situation, but it’s mixed with this toxic envy of what he has and I don’t and this childish envy won’t go away and is eating away at my soul like an ulcer from hell.
So what am I going to do about it?
I’m going to do nothing. There’s nothing I can do. I might write a letter to the paper but not use our real names, just to call attention to the fact that this ridiculous state of affairs exists. Maybe some politician will read it and take it seriously. Most likely not. It might make me feel better to write a letter though.
But other than that, I have to accept this injustice. The jerk isn’t going to help me get my car fixed. I haven’t even asked because I know what he’d say and asking would be breaking my No Contact rule anyway. He’d say no. Even though it was on my back he was able to apply for disability at all. I supported him while he went through the whole process. He’d say no because he’s an asshole who likes to make people suffer. He has no empathy. He does.not.care. In fact, I bet he’s gloating right now over the fact that I’m still wallowing in poverty and working at a crappy job and driving a half-dead junker while he gets to enjoy all his new toys and sit around the house all day trolling political websites, getting high, and sleeping.
Why family scapegoats become lifelong victims.
I thought it seemed like a good time to post this again.
I just watched a video that really hit home for me.
If you were scapegoated by your family, two things can happen. You can become a narcissist yourself (narcissism being an elaborate defense mechanism to avoid further hurt and abuse) or you will internalize the early message that you’re worthless, defective and have no rights. I’m going to talk about the second scenario because that’s what this video is about and it’s what happened to me.
As a scapegoat, you are trained to live in fear. You become afraid to defend yourself, express your opinions, or demand fair treatment. This attitude of worthlessness, fear and shame is carried into adult life. Other people can immediately sense you are a pushover and a magnet for abuse, rejection, and bullying, and you become a target for abuse by others well into adult life.
You can become a lifelong victim unless you find…
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Emotional vomiting.
Reposted from Down The Rabbit Hole.
My moods have been as unstable as the ocean before an approaching hurricane. One day euphoric, the next in the depths of rage and despair. My few good moods lately are so easily shattered.
Then I see my own narcissism and have trouble sorting it out from the normal “negative” emotions we all have for survival. What’s worth being upset about? What is just selfishness and entitlement?
I observe and watch myself. Since my revelation, the wall of cognitive blindness that kept me unable to see my narcissism melted away and what is revealed is the underlying envy, rage, entitlement and grandiosity. This layer was always the most painful to me (and hardest for others to deal with, because the false grandiosity (which can be pleasant, even if deluded) came marinated in a poisonous concoction of envy and rage. So the grandiosity and entitlement is toxic to everyone. It’s like snake poison.
Becoming humble isn’t becoming weak or masochistic. It doesn’t mean you allow people to flagellate you or abuse you. It means knowing you have limits, acknowledging you are only human and not a superman or woman. It means accepting the truth about yourself, even when it hurts. It means seeing what’s real. The scales falling from our eyes may be painful, but in the end this pain will set you free.
I’ve been emotionally unstable for three weeks now. Of course those could be BPD traits coming to the surface too. But I know a lot of it is all the spiritual poison of long term narcissism rising to the surface of my consciousness so they can be purged.
I can feel these black poisons in my body and mind, dragging me down and making me feel sick. I’ve cried more this week than I cried in the past 10 years. It’s cleansing, satisfying crying. It feels good. I feel more centered and relaxed and more at peace when I’m done. The truth becomes clearer. If you really want to get better, tears are the vehicle that carries the sickness from the body. If you have a stomach virus and couldn’t vomit you could die. The same thing goes for spiritual and emotional sickness like NPD or BPD.
I also write bad purple prose poetry where I vomit everything out. I haven’t done that since I was in my teens writing angsty, angry poetry in my school notebooks. It doesn’t matter that the poems are awful. They’re helping me purge myself of the spiritual poison of decades of abuse. It’s part of getting better. Like the crying, writing these poems brings me relief and more clarity. So do writing out my thoughts and feelings, no matter how “ugly” they may be.
The actual nitty gritty of healing from NPD is going to be so painful. I can see how painful and scary it will be. I’ve seen the entrance to the tunnel and it’s dark and vast and depressing, but I’m going in there to rescue my real self, my child self trapped there who never got to grow up or to know who she was. I care about that little girl now. I used to hate her, I wanted to divorce myself from her. She embarrassed me and shamed me. Now I need her help because she has empathy and sensitivity and enormous strength of character and I need those things more than I need a million dollars or a lover. She is my beacon of light. I know she is me but we’re so disconnected; there is so much baggage between us.
Even becoming self aware is painful. Strange, unfamiliar emotions come to the surface of awareness but at first they make no sense. You feel dissociated, apart from yourself, looking inside. But then it starts to make a lot of sense and you can’t believe you never saw it before. Looking inward from the outside is like you’ve been transported to a psychedelic upside down land. You don’t know what’s the true self and what’s the false one. You feel your different selves battling it out, and it makes you confused and disoriented. It also gives me headaches.
This is the stage I’m at right now. I can finally see my behaviors as others saw them, and sometimes stop myself before I act out. I’m getting better but I still slip up a lot. My emotions seem to be rising from both the “good me” and the “bad me” and they fight for center stage. It’s like a collage in relief and you’re not sure which is the background and which is the foreground. You can’t always tell yet which self is the true one and which one is the liar, and you’re begging a higher power or somebody, anybody, to show you what is true.
If the narcissistic mind in the process of healing were the whole universe, this inner conflict would be a battle between good and evil of Biblical proportions. Most of us aren’t evil, we are deeply conflicted and make bad choices.
But only you can know what are the right choices, and what is true–and that takes patience. You have to accept it’s going to take time to be able to internalize what’s right and good and what connects you with others. You can’t give up, no matter what.
I need clarity. I need help sorting out all these conflicting, confusing emotions that churn inside me and make me sick. This cathartic emotional puking–relieved with episodes of expansiveness, optimism, limerence-like euphoria and even moments of real empathy–is removing these toxins from me and I think in time, the episodes of joy and optimism will become more frequent and more stable and replace the episodes of vomiting.
I’m beginning to see the direction God planned for me. Since making this shattering discovery about myself, everything is becoming clearer. Ideas are finally gelling together from my chaos of conflicting ideas and insights. And these ideas aren’t popular and they’re not what I thought they would be; they’re what’s needed. But before I can make these ideas a a reality, I need to face the pain and purge it and remember it’s all part of healing. I need to go in that void and slay the dragons–ether that or reconcile with them.
I’m up for the challenge…I think.
I just wish that in going through this process I didn’t have to engage with the mundane world of work and paying bills. I wish I could isolate myself somewhere on a remote beach, just listen to the waves and feel the hot sun and the coolness of the sea…go inside my beach cabin and play music and write things that elicit my real feelings…and not have to deal with other people for months or even a year or two. Just spend all that time working on myself instead of having to keep up the lie just to survive in the world. When my self imposed exile is over, I’d return to modern life a changed person.
My scarlet letter.
When does a narcissist cross the point of no return?
This question came up on the forums I’ve been active on. I think this question has fascinating implications but may never be answered with any degree of certainty.
Where the point of no return (the point at which a narc cannot be healed) exists on the narcissistic spectrum isn’t a question we will probably ever know. However, I have a couple of theories that ping ponged around inside my head.
1. Level of sadism/paranoia. (these traits were suggested by another forum member)
I think the ratio of ASPD traits to NPD traits would come into play–and most ASPDs are at least somewhat sadistic. I don’t know what the percentage of ASPD traits would have to be (and maybe it would vary in individuals anyway) but obviously a narcissist with a lot of ASPD is going to be more sadistic, and therefore more malignant/psychopathic, and that’s the point where no self awareness is possible–when a narc becomes malignant or psychopathic. Paranoia would come into play too, as I think paranoia rises with sadism. The more malignant the narcissist, the more paranoid (and sadistic) they will be.
For more, please see my article about The Dark Triad.
2. Soul-murder/cognitive dissonance.
My second theory about the point of no return is going to sound a little strange. I don’t believe the world is just the physical world we see. I’m not especially religious and don’t interpret biblical events literally but I am Christian (Catholic) and believe with no doubt that evil exists. Whether there’s an actual entity called Satan is not something I can answer. But I think there are evil entities, or energies, and I think M. Scott Peck’s book “People of the Lie” explains all this brilliantly (and was the first book to explain malignant narcissism even though it wasn’t called that in 1983). It was also the book that helped me identify my mother and my ex as MNs.
Anyway, I think it’s possible for a person (a victim of abuse) to be infected with the evil of another person. If it goes on long enough, the victims’ “narcissism fleas” (N traits picked up from their narcissists) can become cancerous and turn into full blown narcissism. If the victim was especially abused or sensitive (or was both scapegoat and golden child) they may be more covert but are still N.
I think choice also has to do with it. If one sides with their abusers all the time, or colludes with them in antisocial acts, I think something in the person’s soul can turn dark.
Once this darkness sets in, a person who was low-mid spectrum moves higher on the spectrum into malignant narcissism and can’t go back to being the way they were. That’s the point of no return. This has happened in wartime, with soldiers forced to do things that go against their morals like killing innocents, or accidentally killing a fellow soldier in combat — when these veterans return they suffer severe PTSD but for some, who were forced to commit deeds that went against their conscience and morals, they crossed a line into evil.
I think the mechanics of what happens is that when one makes a choice or is forced to do something that goes against their morals, there’s so much cognitive dissonance that a split in the mind occurs, where the person, feeling so guilty over their deed that it’s unbearable, takes the side of evil, to correct the dissonance.
I think all PD’s may actually be complex PTSD (c-PTSD) that is more deeply embedded in the personality.
As far as narcisissts lower on the spectrum (low-through mid spectrum)–and I absolutely believe it’s a spectrum disorder like autism–a non-malignant/non ASPD narcissist isn’t evil and hasn’t crossed the point of no return. It won’t be easy to get that “skeleton transplant” (and will be extremely painful!) but it can be done.
I hope my BPD wall of words made sense (someone told me that all BPD’s write posts that are as long as books with a lot of run on sentences, LOL!)
My “dark night of the soul.”
Although this post is more related to people who have NPD or BPD, I think it belongs here too because transformative experiences like this can happen to anyone when healing from any mental disorder begins to make itself felt.
Emotional vs. “cold” narcissists.
Narcissists can be divided many different ways–covert vs. overt; somatic vs. cerebral; malignant vs. “benign,” etc. They can be divided another way too. Narcissists are either extremely emotional…or cold as machines. Underneath their mask, they’re all hypersensitive though, even if they hide behind a stone cold exterior. Malignant narcs are the HSPs who went bad. Somatic narcissists are probably more likely to be hyper-emotional, similar to people with HPD; and cerebrals more often the “cold, calculating” type, though not always.
I’d venture to guess emotional, dramatic narcs have HPD or BPD traits (borderlines can’t regulate their emotions) while the colder types have ASPD or Schizoid traits. Avoidant PD traits could go either way.
I wonder if any studies have been done to determine which MBTI types narcissists are most likely to be. I’d guess the emotional ones are probably INFJ and the second type INTJ. I don’t think most narcissists are that extroverted, even if their mask includes extroversion and sociability. Narcs really don’t like people and are too self-involved to be anything other than introverted, in spite of any outgoing front.
This means there isn’t a whole lot of difference between an emotional narcissist and an unemotional one, except for the thinking vs. feeling aspect. But even when they don’t show it, all narcissists are emotional and easily hurt when it comes to themselves. None of them feel much for others.
Lucky Otters Haven 