I think it’s time we stop bashing all narcissists.

Posted on May 2, 2015 by luckyotter

This post is probably going to make some of you angry or upset. I understand that. After all, many of us were badly damaged by the narcissists in our lives. Anger and even hatred is an understandable and very human reaction to their abuse.

The blood sport of “narc bashing.”

There are a lot of people these days writing about narcissism and the sentiments found on the Internet about “narcs” and “N’s” is overwhelmingly negative:

— They can never change.
— There is no hope for them.
— They are monsters.
— They are demons.
— They aren’t human.
— God hates all narcs.
— They all deserve to burn in Hell.
— There is nothing good about them. Everything they do is evil.
— They were born evil. They are bad seeds.
— They never tell the truth.
— They have no emotions. They are machines.
— They all deserve to die.

Pretty ugly, isn’t it? This attitude is fueled by hatred and behind hatred is fear. Again, I understand this. I’ve experienced that hatred and fear myself. We have a right to be angry if we were badly treated by a narcissist. People with NPD aren’t pleasant to be around. But here’s the rub: unchecked fear and anger lead to hatred, and hatred accomplishes nothing. Hatred builds walls and leads to a refusal to even try to understand people with a devastating mental disorder. Hatred is itself evil–and narcissistic.

Hatred also leads to bigotry and intolerance. There is already too much of that in the world. People with NPD are mentally ill. We don’t malign people with schizophrenia or bipolar disorder the way we malign people with NPD, but people with those disorders can also be very unpleasant to deal with. If someone started a blog that spewed hatred toward people with schizophrenia, there would be outrage. That person would be called a bigot and possibly evil.

Narcissists are abuse victims too.

It’s true that people with NPD are extremely unpleasant to deal with. But all mental disorders are unpleasant. People with NPD weren’t born that way. There is no such thing as a “bad seed.” In almost all cases, a person became a narcissist because of severe abuse or neglect as children. In most cases, they were raised by people who were themselves malignant narcissists or psychopaths.

Pastor David Orrison, who writes about narcissism from a Christian perspective in his “Narcissist Friday” posts, illustrates this well in this sad story. He is rightfully critical of the disorder and its manifestations but his posts are always written in a way that attempts to understand narcissism and people with NPD the way Jesus would have done–holding them accountable without hatred.

Some of you have said, “but they don’t count because they made a choice to be narcissists.” Yes, that is true, it was a choice. But that choice was almost invariably made when they were young children, as a coping mechanism to protect themselves from being hurt anymore. Narcissists are people who started life with too much sensitivity, maybe more so than those of us who identify as HSPs (because we still found a way to cope with life without constructing a protective False Self). Narcissists felt too vulnerable and naked. They were born without any natural coping mechanisms at all. They knew they couldn’t survive without this protective natural armor, so they had to construct a False Self to cope. The False Self is a lie, but it protects the True Self from further harm. The reason they act so mean is because they live in terror of the False Self being damaged and exposing the too-vulnerable True Self. Like the rest of us, they wanted to survive. This was the only way they knew how.

This doesn’t give them an excuse to act as they do. It doesn’t mean we have to tolerate their manipulations and abuse. I’m not condoning abusive behaviors and that applies to anyone. But we don’t have to spew hatred against people suffering from NPD all over the web either. We don’t have to be so judgmental. We don’t have to pat ourselves on the back because we are “better” people. Only God can judge us that way. We can try to have compassion without giving in to abuse or allowing narcissistic behaviors to destroy us.

A serious dissociative illness.

Narcissists suffer. They are deeply unhappy people. They don’t know how to feel empathy, or experience joy or love for others. They never learned how–or they dissociated themselves from those feelings at an early age because it hurt them too much to be that way. They are not without emotions. In fact, their emotions are so strong they feel like they must always be on the defensive, 24/7, 365 days a year. Imagine how stressful it must be to go through life in mortal terror of your facade of invulnerability being ripped off, of constantly having to act a part in a play, of never being able to show your pain to others, of never being able to risk loving anyone else or feeling empathy, of being bitter and envious of everyone all the time? It must be hell.

Narcissists, in spite of their name, don’t love themselves. They only love their False Self, and will do anything to protect it from exposure as the mask it really is. Because the False Self was constructed when they were so young, they don’t even know themselves most of the time. How can you love someone you never got to know? If anything, they live in deep shame of who they really are so they hide from the world behind their masks.

Some mental health experts believe NPD should be classified as a severe dissociative disorder. You can read about that here and here. It’s not that narcissists don’t have any goodness in them, but that they have “split” from their good (true) self to avoid further harm–even to the point where they can no longer access who they really are. But the pain they feel still comes through and if we listen closely enough, we can hear what they are really saying: “please love me.”

Narcissists never got to grow up. Their true self is at the emotional stage of a very young child. Inside every narcissist is a little boy or girl of 3 or 4, sitting in a dark corner crying because they feel so lonely and unloved. Their reactions are at the level of a young child too. They never learned how to experience more mature emotions, because the False Self was constructed when they were too young to feel the emotions of an older person.

NPD is a spectrum disorder running from mild all the way to psychopathy and sociopathy at the top of the spectrum. Most narcissists are not psychopaths (who actually have Antisocial Personality Disorder rather than NPD and have built a wall so impenetrable even they can never access it and will never be able to admit they are the ones with the problem). Even malignant narcissists (just under psychopathy on the spectrum) may have rare moments of insight and regret for the way they behave. It’s my belief that NPD is as much a spiritual disorder as a mental one, but that doesn’t automatically make all narcissists “evil.” Who are we to assume that God hates all narcissists and can’t help even the most malignant ones? I believe God can perform miracles should He choose to do so. To speak for God this way is itself narcissistic.

Art allows the True Self to find expression.

The pain and hurt that fuels narcissistic behaviors can find honest expression. I’ve noticed many or even most narcissists have a talent in one or more of the arts–William Shakespeare, Ezra Pound and even Michaelangelo (who probably had NPD) come to mind, to name a few. Good art is about Truth and is one of the greatest blessings God can give. It’s through these artistic endeavors that a narcissist’s true self comes through, that they dare give that vulnerable hurting child a means to express the truth of how they really feel. Having a creative ability–whether in the visual, literary, or performing arts–is all the proof I need that people with NPD are still loved by God. Through their art, they are crying out through their mask. They want to be loved and they want to feel love. I can think of many examples of this, but the other day I received an email that really stood out to me and made me take a second look at my own negative attitude toward “narcs.”

The email was from a young man who admits he has NPD. He expressed a strong desire to try to heal himself. He hates his disorder because of what it has done to his life and the ways it has caused his relationships with others to suffer. He wants to know how to feel empathy and genuinely love others. I have no doubt his words were sincere and came from his True Self.

This young man said he was a singer-songwriter so I checked out some of his stuff on Youtube. (I can’t post it here right now because I have not asked for permission to do so). I was blown away by his talent. The words of the songs he writes express emotions almost too deep for words. His powerful emotions of pain and the desire to love and feel connected with others come through in his beautiful voice–and in his face when he sings. I have no doubt his music comes from his True Self, not his false one. Through music, he’s able to break through his wall of narcissism and allow himself to become vulnerable, to cry out in the darkness.

Insight and willingness: ingredients for change.

I don’t know if this young narcissist can heal himself. It’s a difficult enough disorder to treat by professionals, but he says he can’t afford a therapist and can’t find one willing to treat NPD anyway. Most narcissists won’t present themselves for therapy because their disorder is so deeply ingrained they have no insight and think it’s everyone else who has the problem, not them. Some narcissists may have insight into their disorder and know they aren’t well but still not be willing to change because their mask has become too adaptive or they are too afraid. But insight is the first step toward redemption–it’s not possible to have willingness without insight. This man has both the insight and the willingness. With both present, I think there is hope for him.

Tough love, not hate.

Just because we should stop spewing hate against people with NPD doesn’t mean we have to tolerate their manipulative and abusive behaviors. It also doesn’t mean we can’t leave a narcissist or go No Contact. In fact, doing so may be the most loving thing we can do for them. Going No Contact removes the source of supply we have been giving them, and in rare cases may cause a narcissist to seek help or at least begin to question their own motives. Going No Contact is also the most loving thing we can do for ourselves. Refusing to have further contact with a narcissist isn’t an act of hatred. It’s an act of self-love and survival.

St. Augustine said, “hate the sin, love the sinner.” Jesus inspired this quote because He hated no one but was no pussy either. We can hate the behaviors without hating an entire class of people with a severe mental and spiritual illness that causes them even more misery than they cause those they attack. Going No Contact or refusing to play their narcissistic games isn’t an act of hatred. It’s an act of survival and is just plain common sense. It may even be a way we can show them love–“tough” love.

I realize this post may be controversial because we ACONs have gotten so used to thinking of “narcs” as evil. Their behaviors may be evil, but people with this disorder are still human beings who have feelings–even if they don’t know how to show them properly or keep them under wraps. Except for the most malignant narcissists and psychopaths at the top of the spectrum–who probably can’t ever change–I think calling narcissists evil, or referring to them as demons, monsters, or machines is a form of bullying a group of very sick people and is just as hurtful to them as what they have done to us.

I also realize I may sound like a hypocrite. I’ll be the first to admit I’ve engaged in the popular sport of “narc bashing,” and recently too. While the anger and rage we feel toward people with this disorder may be adaptive while we are trying to disconnect from an abusive narcissist, when these emotions no longer serve a practical purpose (after we have gone No Contact or disengaged from our abusers), they become bitterness and hatred, emotions that eat away at our own souls and can even turn us into narcissists.

I just get so tired of it…

Posted on February 19, 2015 by luckyotter

I just read this blog post “I Would Be Begging for Help if it were Me” by Fivehundredpoundpeep. I highly recommend it to all ACONs. However, I won’t lie–her well written article triggered me, and the following may be the most emotional post I ever wrote.
This actually started as a reply on her blog, but I decided to turn it into an article because it’s very much on my mind. Tears are not far away.

The mother she describes in her article sounds EXACTLY like mine–the tone, choice of words, attitude, everything. Criticism under the guise of “help.” Dismissal in the name of love. With mine it’s always “positive thinking:”
“If you were not so negative, things would come more easily to you.”
“If you were more pleasant to be around, you would be able to make the connections to help you advance in a career.”
“You never were the competitive type.”
And always, always, “You’re too sensitive.”

Well, excuse me, Mommie Dearest, you’re too damn insensitive. You may not know it, but my high sensitivity, much as it may annoy you, is going to OUT you one day as the MALIGNANT NARCISSIST you always were, and will save my sanity. Be afraid. Be very afraid.

And then you dare to tell me how much you love me in the next line? Prove it.

She used to send me corny memes and hackneyed sayings about always being sunny and cheerful, and accepting things the way they are. Scooping all these memes together and throwing them in the blender, here’s the pureed form of the message she was giving me:
“You are a failure and will never get anywhere in this world because you’re not a fun person, you never smile, you’re always negative, but you should accept things as they are and be happy with your lousy lot, because you don’t deserve any better.

That’s what she was really saying. She’s one of what I call “the positive thinking nazis.” Actually both my parents are. There’s nothing wrong with positive thinking, of course, and it’s something we should all strive to do. But my FOO took it too far. They used it as a way to sugarcoat and deny real issues. It was like putting a Band-aid on a cancerous lesion so it didn’t have to be seen. If it didn’t have to be seen, it would go away. That was the sort of narcissistic magical thinking and insanity I had to deal with.
They used it as a way to deny responsibility. That’s the most glaring thing wrong with the positive thinking movement, when taken to ridiculous extremes. The denial of reality and rejection of responsibility.

Of course if I ever confronted my mother about this (which I never did, not directly anyway, since I was a teenager), she’d either fly into a narcissistic rage or vehemently deny it.

My mother still has the power to make me feel this way. That’s why we’re estranged.

Seriously, that’s the only kind of “help” I have ever gotten from my MN egg donor since I grew up. But I can’t be rejected anymore because I don’t ask her for a thing anymore. I could be lying in a gutter with a broken leg and no home and no way to get to the hospital, and she’d probably tell me I was just being too negative and drawing in my own bad fortune. I would rather lie there and bleed to death than beg her to help.

My whole FOO are huge proponents of the postmodern narcissistic grandiose fantasy of “you create your own reality. If you fail, it’s no one’s fault but your own. Pick yourself up by your bootstraps and suck it up.” It’s The Cliff’s Notes version of Ayn Rand’s objectivism. No compassion. No empathy. No love. Only judgment, gaslighting, subtle put downs, no loyalty, and thinly veiled hatred. And unfair and untrue accusations of my acting “entitled” because at my age, of course I should not be needing any help. But I’ve never asked them for much anyway. They think I asked for too much. All I ever wanted was love. No their conditional fake excuse for love.

It made me furious to the point of wanting to smash my fist into a brick wall when well-meaning people who may have heard about my financial problems or need of emotional support, said to me something like, “Honey, don’t you have a family you can turn to?” Or “Surely your family will help you out of this jam.” Sometimes it still happens, though I tell no one IRL my troubles. But I don’t want to hear what they have to say: all these people assume that just because their own families will help them or give them a hand up when they’re down on their luck or just need a non-judgmental listening ear or a soft shoulder to cry on, then the same must be true of my family too. It’s just what everyone does for own flesh and blood, right?

These fortunate people with loving families may be well meaning but they assume because theirs will help them and give them unconditional love, that the same holds true for people like us. They simply can’t or won’t believe there are some parents who actually HATE THEIR CHILDREN.

I get so tired of it. So very tired of it. That’s why I tell no one my problems anymore except on my blog. I never ask my parents for help, ever, and never will again. Especially not my mother. But I won’t need to. I’m still poor but I’m surviving, even thriving now–but not because of any of their heartless and judgmental “advice.”

I’m getting better because I have the ability to reach out to my real family–this amazing community of people who have such similar stories–through a skill I’ve recently rediscovered and is the tool to my healing: my writing.
I don’t need to be my mother’s scapegoat anymore.

Why do I feel so guilty?

Posted on November 29, 2014 by luckyotter

For my daughter’s 21st birthday she was informed a trust fund was being set up in her name by her grandfather (my father) but she would not be able to access it until she showed more maturity and interest in attending college. My daughter, feeling it was unfair that her brother got to access his right away (because he has made better choices and had “proven” himself) found a way to access the money anyway. Apparently there was some loophole she found out about (I have no idea how) where she could override the stipulations put on the fund. It wasn’t illegal what she did, but was probably unethical.

While I understood her feeling like she was being treated unfairly, at the same time I understood my father’s concerns and agreed with him she wasn’t mature enough to handle such a large sum of cash and it would have been better to wait until she was older.

We were right. She wasn’t ready to handle it. Within less than two months, almost all the money was gone and she can’t even really say what happened to it. My father’s wife (my “evil stepmother”) is impossible to deal with–cold, condescending and intimidating (although she does take good care of my dad). She is a narcissist who scares both me and my children to the point we are all hesitant to call my father. She acts as a kind of gatekeeper and talking to him means going through her first, so none of us ever call him, although we’d like to. She also intercepts any mail or email that is sent to him. Nothing gets to him unless it goes through her first.

Anyway, after Molly accessed the funds, my stepmother was so livid that she wrote me a letter letting me know she would never speak to my daughter again. I think her rage was not only due to my daughter’s dishonesty (anger which I can understand), but also because, as a narcissist, she hated knowing she’d been “outsmarted” by an upstart kid. My stepmother has always taken great pride in thinking she knows more than everyone else.

It’s incredibly sad that this malignant, heartless woman has managed to separate me and my children from my father (and their grandfather) through her intimidating, condescending words of judgment and disapproval. But that’s what narcissists do–they divide and conquer. Unfortunately this sort of thing is nothing new in my family: my entire family is splintered and fractured like a broken platter, with factions of relatives not speaking to or intensely disliking other relatives due to the rampant narcissism that runs like a cancer throughout the bloodline.

A few of us, such as my son, yearn for unity and healing in the family. My son, very touchingly, recently expressed to me his wish to initiate a huge family reunion one day when he can afford to do that. I didn’t want to tell him this would probably never work, since even if everyone attended (which everyone would not), the drama would be as thick as tar. He is so naive sometimes! But he has also made contact with some distant cousins that even I barely know through social media and is now good Facebook friends with one of them. I commend and admire him for this.

This morning I received an email from my father, which I’ll paraphrase. First of all he thanked me for my Thanksgiving wishes (I didn’t dare call him because I’d have to deal with his wife, so I just sent him an email). Next, he told me I would be receiving a check in the mail soon (I have no idea for how much). That made me wonder if he is about to pass on (no one in the family informs me of such things). After all, he is in his 80s and suffers from worsening Parkinson’s disease and is almost completely physically disabled. He also has had heart issues. His wife is his full time caretaker and narcissist or not, he would be in a nursing home without her. Although his mind appears to be intact, he sometimes has trouble translating his thoughts into coherent words, and he physically he is completely dependent on her.

Frankly, I was gobsmacked I would be getting anything at all. Although I believe he does love me in his own way, I was under the impression I was being totally cut out of any will (due mostly to his wife’s influence and her ability to turn others against me, the same way my real mother does).

But the next part of his email made me feel like I’d been punched in the stomach. In it, he said my daughter (his granddaughter) is a slimey, sneaky liar and will never change. He said his wife wants nothing to do with her (which I already knew but makes me wonder if he feels the same). While I already knew how my stepmother felt about my daughter, seeing the child I love described this way hurt me A LOT. I can understand their anger toward her, (and I myself have often wondered if she is a narcissist herself but I don’t think so) but seeing these words in print was not only horrible but also, inexplicably, made me feel overcome with guilt and shame. Sure, I wasn’t a perfect parent (and sometimes a pretty lousy one), but I tried my best. Her father is an MN and I believe he really did a number on her mentally. But I still feel guilty as if her behavior is MY FAULT. I feel a shame so deep I didn’t even answer his email — I simply didn’t know what to say.

Since my divorce, I’ve been in terrible financial straits. I work extremely hard and hate living like this, but due to my Aspergers, PTSD, and pervasive self esteem issues that keep me from being able to “pull myself up by my bootstraps,” I constantly struggle to just keep the bills paid, never mind having any disposable income to do the sorts of things that normal, middle class people do. So the news I will be receiving money that might relieve some of these problems should make me happy. *

But it doesn’t. It’s not because I don’t think I “deserve” an inheritance or gift, but because of how ashamed these two make me feel as a human being: ashamed for having a daughter who has “wronged” them and keeps getting in trouble and never seems to learn from her mistakes (although I think that is changing), as well as for other mistakes I have made that were unacceptable to them (such as allowing my MN ex-husband to move back in with me for 7 years, until I finally gained the courage to kick the malignant jackass to the curb last year). They are extremely judgmental people and judge me and my daughter harshly for our poor choices, but I have not gotten much credit for anything I’ve ever done right.

It’s very complicated and I can’t even talk about my feelings in a coherent way. I feel like I’m in some kind of emotional labyrinth I can never escape. It’s all so confusing. I feel so guilty right now and I don’t even know why. I long to call or write my father and ask him about his health (because I do love him and care very much) but am terrified of my stepmother’s interception and harsh judgment and how profoundly he’s been influenced by her. He may pass away soon, but I’m afraid I might not even be informed when that happens. Somehow, I feel like I’ve been bought off…maybe I am wrong. I can only hope.

But on the bright side, at least I can reassure myself that feeling this much guilt and shame means I have a conscience and am not a narc. Because sometimes I think I inherited the family disorder too.

I really need to stop caring so much what my FOO thinks of me. It really doesn’t matter, does it? I just need to approve of myself.

* This really didn’t belong in this article because of its focus, but I want to use the money (or some of it) to take classes in web design, CSS, SEO and how to blog professionally. I would love to be able to quit my day job to be able to write full time.

Followup: The email I wrote back to my father.