Dr. Phil: Mothers who hate their own children.

Posted on April 3, 2015 by luckyotter

In this full episode, Dr. Phil interviews two malignant narcissist mothers who admit they hate their own children (both daughters). For those of us with normal feelings of love for our children, these mothers’ attitudes and behaviors are beyond comprehension.

The first mother is a narcissist who is embarrassed by her daughter’s autism. She whines that “I don’t deserve this.” She wanted to have a “normal” daughter.

The second mother has murderous feelings toward her daughter. She seems quite psychopathic.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kC7K719HwjM

ETA: Unfortunately, Youtube removed the video I had posted. The only one I could find only shows the second mother.

Narcissist parents demonize their own children.

Posted on March 17, 2015 by luckyotter

Most parents like to tell cute and funny stories about when their children were young, or brag about their school accomplishments or tell sweet stories that show their child in a flattering or loving light. They are also proud of their children when they’re kind and nice to others. That’s the way things should be.

Not for narcissistic parents though.

Narcissists who “erase” memories of their children.
Some narcissistic parents don’t like to talk about their children at all. It’s as if they erase any memories of their offspring’s childhoods and don’t want to be reminded of it. It’s weird. My malignant cerebral narcissist sperm donor used to get bored and annoyed if I talked about the children when they were young. Inexplicably, he couldn’t stand it and became annoyed when I wanted to put some of their baby and early school pictures around the house. (He didn’t like that I displayed our wedding photos either).

He isn’t interested in his son’s accomplishments, even though Ethan (not his real name) has recently been asked to join a semi-professional urban dance crew and has been told he is a shoo-in for the finals at the next dance competition he will be performing in next month. Ethan is seriously considering auditioning for the TV show “So You Think You Can Dance” in about a year or two, when he gets just a little better. He’s completely self taught and has never had a dance lesson and yet people are always impressed by his dancing skills.

I am so proud of my son but his father could care less. I thought maybe it was because he thought dancing was “too gay” (because my son is gay or possibly bisexual–he recently told me he may have some interest in women) but he acts the same way about all of Ethan’s other accomplishments too. It’s almost as if he wants to erase him from his mind, even though he insists he loves him.

And when they “brag” about you, watch out.

My mother, also a malignant narcissist (of the somatic rather than cerebral type), loves to talk about me as a child. But her “bragging” is never about the things a normal parents would brag to their friends and relatives about. It’s never about how smart I was or what a good student I was, or what a good painter or writer I was, or how kind and generous or big-hearted or animal loving I was. Instead, she tells stories that illustrate the many ways I was “too sensitive” or how much I cried as a little girl. When she talks about me, she always brings up the most embarrassing stories, like how afraid I was of thunderstorms and how I used to run into the closet in terror (I like thunderstorms now) or how “hysterical” (she loves to use that word about me as a child) I used to get when I was frustrated or scared of something (I was afraid of many things but loved a lot of things too).

Whenever she talks about me to people, she makes me sound like there was something wrong with me (there was–I was an Aspie child with attachment issues–but surely there were good things too she could choose to talk about instead of what a pitiful, awkward, oversensitive crybaby I was). She loves to tell everyone the still-embarrassing story of my first period and how happy I was when I shouted the big news from the bathroom, because I had always been “so hysterical” and panic stricken because I was slower to hit puberty than most other girls my age (I was 13 and really not far behind at all–and I never got “hysterical” or “panic stricken” the way she insists).

I no longer hear these stories because I no longer have much contact with her, but I’m sure she still tells her friends and extended family (who she has isolated from me and turned some of them into flying monkeys against me) and they still all have a good laugh about “poor, over-sensitive, ‘hysterical’ little Lauren.” I know they also laugh about what a “loser” I am today, because I’m not wealthy like most of the family is and don’t have a great number of impressive professional accomplishments. Of course, that’s all due to my “poor choices” and not to the fact my self esteem was all but obliterated during childhood and adolescence, not only by my family but also by the bullies I often had to deal with at school.

Fivehundredpoundpeep posted an article today about the way her psychopathic MN mother (who was much worse than mine if that can be believed) and the rest of the family gave her a poem for her college graduation. Instead of it being a sincere congratulations or about how loved she was and how proud of her they were, it was a “humorous” ode to how afraid of crickets she was as a little girl. Notwithstanding the fact this poem had absolutely nothing to do with Peep’s college graduation, its real intention was to embarrass her and make her feel self conscious. It was a poem that could have easily ruined an otherwise joyous occasion.

The navy blue dress.

What my mother saw whenever she looked at me. (Just for the record, I think this big lady is stunning.)

My mother always loved to point out my faults–even imaginary ones she had projected onto me–in public. I’ll never forget the birthday party I had one year as a teenager. My mother had invited several of her friends to the apartment and some of my friends were there too. When it came time to open the gifts, she made sure hers was the first one I opened.

In the fancily wrapped box was a rather conservative, navy blue sleeveless dress. It was a nice dress I suppose, had I been about 40. She made me go try it on and then have me come out into the living room where everyone was sitting to model it. I obeyed because what else could I do, and she scared the living shit out of me.

Now, I was not overweight. At 5’4″, 120-125 lbs was about the right weight for my frame. But my backside was a little on the big side (not Kim Kardashian big, but still pretty round) and my mother was constantly calling attention to it. It made me very self conscious and due to this (as well as my desire to rebel against the way she’d dressed me like a doll when I was younger), I had taken to wearing baggy, masculine clothes that hid my curves. She was convinced I was “fat” and was always threatening to send me away to weight loss camp. As a somatic narcissist, she was obsessed with her own weight, physical appearance, and health. She seemed to judge other people by the way they looked instead of their personal qualities. Almost every day she called attention to how much weight I was putting on, or reminding me not to have seconds because of my “weight issues.” I become incredibly self conscious about my body as a result. It’s a miracle I didn’t develop an eating disorder.

Getting back to the birthday party and my “modeling session” in front of all the guests, after I modeled it, she announced that the dress’s dark color and style was flattering for someone with “Lauren’s little weight problem.”

You could have heard a pin drop in that room. I think everyone was shocked at her callous and embarrassing remarks. As for myself, I was so mortified I ran out of the room crying, which of course was a huge mistake because that gave my mother ammunition to remind everyone once again about how sensitive I was (and she didn’t mean this in a complimentary way). She was always making jokes at my expense and then when I didn’t laugh or if I looked hurt, it was always “Lauren is just being over-sensitive again” or “Lauren has no sense of humor.” I’ve heard this is quite a common accusation narc parents use against the child they have chosen to be their scapegoat. They hate sensitivity and love to turn it into a bad thing because it takes the responsibility for their cruel behavior off of them and puts the blame onto the child.

This is the sort of “flattery” a scapegoated child can get from a parent who is a malignant narcissist. There are times I feel guilty that I don’t feel more love for my mother than I do, but when I think of all the years she demeaned me and put me down, always going out of her way to make me feel small and worthless, I don’t feel so guilty about my ambivalent feelings toward her.

I don’t hate my mother. Instead, I pity her for being so shallow and never having known who her true self might have been. She’s an intelligent woman but you would never know it because she never was interested in ideas or the life of the mind. Her eyes glaze over if you try to engage her in any “deep” topics. She reads pulp novels and fashion magazines, never anything scholarly or educational.

She has now lost her beauty due to age (and too many facelifts) and she is all too aware it. Knowing she has lost her physical beauty–the one thing that gave her an identity of sorts–has turned her bitter and angry in her old age.

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.

Guilt: the great inhibitor.

Posted on February 10, 2015 by luckyotter

When I started this blog, I also made a commitment to 100% honesty about my feelings, no matter what. Doing that was easier than I thought and due to my honesty, I’ve become less fearful of what other people think and my self esteem has improved (though it still has a long way to go to be in the “normal” range).

About a month ago, my parents discovered this blog. My mother, though she’s in her 80’s, is active on social media and has accounts with Facebook and LinkedIn. At first I was horrified, and waited for something terrible to happen.

Nothing did, at least nothing that was evident at first.

I worry less about my father reading this blog, but then again, he’s not an MN and he actually seemed somewhat supportive of what I’m doing. If he objected to my discussing my MN mother in such a negative way, he never let on that he did. My mother, as expected has said nothing. I quietly unfriended her on Facebook because I’m linking my blog posts there now (my profile is set up so only friends can view details), but she can still access this blog directly if she wants to.

And that’s where my problem comes in. Knowing that she is probably reading every word I say is causing me to censor what I post and be about 95% honest instead of 100%. It’s stupid, because she doesn’t approve of me anyway and will say bad things about me to others no matter what. She has for years. So I don’t really understand why I’m so worried about what this 80-something woman might say about this blog to her relatives.

Every time I want to post something, I’m hesitating if it’s about her. Since it would be dishonest of me to post wonderful, great things about her, I’m finding I’m not posting about her much lately at all.

My mother has terrified me my entire life. Even though I’m in my 50s now and I am very low contact with her (I only went No Contact with my ex), I still worry about what she might be thinking or saying about me. It’s so stupid–what difference could it possibly make? I’m not a child and I’ve already been abandoned emotionally by her, so why do I still care so much? I know I’m never going to win her approval even if I should ever become wildly successful (for her, it wouldn’t count as success because it would be ME) and what else can she say about me that she hasn’t already been saying? I don’t use real names so I can’t be sued. And finally, it’s not as if she hasn’t already read everything I’ve said about her under “My Story” already. There’s nothing worse I can say that I haven’t already said.

I know it’s irrational to censor myself for fear of what she’ll think, but I can’t seem to let go of my fear of her. I know she will never love me or approve of me. But I feel like she can still control me and she still scares me. I know much of this has a lot to do with having been programmed to always feel guilty and ashamed, even though ironically, both my parents believe guilt is a bad emotion.

How many of you have had to face this situation? What did you do to cope with it? I really need some help here, because if I can’t be 100% honest about EVERYTHING, that puts a damper on my healing.

“Mom, you make me sick!”

Posted on February 10, 2015 by luckyotter

I like watching true crime videos, and I thought this one was interesting. Kathy Bush was the Perfect Mother and an activist for health care reform. She is also a malignant narcissist who deliberately kept her young daughter Jennifer seriously ill in order to garner attention for herself from the medical establishment. This type of child abuse is known as Munchausen syndrome by proxy.

Here’s how Wikipedia defines Munchausen syndrome:

Munchausen syndrome, is a psychiatric factitious disorder wherein those affected feign disease, illness, or psychological trauma to draw attention, sympathy, or reassurance to themselves. It is also sometimes known as hospital addiction syndrome, thick chart syndrome, or hospital hopper syndrome. True Munchausen syndrome fits within the subclass of factitious disorder with predominantly physical signs and symptoms, but they also have a history of recurrent hospitalization, travelling, and dramatic, untrue, and extremely improbable tales of their past experiences.

Munchausen syndrome by proxy is when a parent, usually a mother, deliberately makes their child ill to obtain attention and sympathy. They often become overinvolved in the child’s treatment procedures but their intent to is have control over the treatments so they can be sabotaged. It’s common for a mother who victimizes their child this way to be knowledgeable about medical procedures and protocol. They may have worked in medical professions such as nursing.

For Kathy, not only did she gain attention and plenty of sympathy from her entire community, it also provided a way for her to lobby for health care reform and get noticed by none other than Hilary Clinton, who took sympathy on Kathy and Jennifer as well.

Pay close attention to Kathy during her interviews. Although she tries to feign emotion and manages to even make herself cry, notice how dead looking her eyes are and how her words seem rehearsed, as if she’s reading from a script. Creepy!

By the time she reached her teens, Jennifer decided she wanted nothing to do with the calculating, narcissistic mother who almost killed her.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uPj9Jcvh5xk

This comment under the video was interesting:

ASPD and malignant narcissism. Son’s are probably GC (golden child) while daughter is SG (scapegoat child). Reading through transcripts about her and reports from neighbors, friends, family etc, she had a pattern for years. It suggested histrionic behaviors as well as constant gaslighting (rewriting history to be in HER favor). It also suggested she regarded herself as the consummate victim and had a grandiose sense of self importance. Lastly, other things listed also described her as having a pathological desire to be admired and praised and would take credit for other peoples accomplishments. Invalidating others while justifying herself also seemed to on the menu as well.

How my ex became a malignant narcissist.

Posted on February 2, 2015 by luckyotter

I’ve talked about several of my own family members and how narcissism has infected other family members with NPD and/or made them victims, but I haven’t focused too much on how my ex husband Michael, as malignant as they come, got that way.

So I am doing that now.

Michael, like most narcissists, wasn’t born that way. He was the only child of a machinist who was rarely home and when he was, stayed in the background, believing raising a child was “woman’s work.” The household was blue collar but back in the early ’60s, blue collar didn’t mean poor. A working class man could adequately support his family, buy a home, have two cars, and his wife didn’t have to work to help make ends meet.

From all accounts, Michael’s father loved him in his rough-around-the-edges macho way, but he spent hours every day in bars or at the pool hall after work to avoid his nagging, manipulating, self-centered, never-satisfied wife, Helen, who was a dangerous malignant narcissist and probably psychopathic.

Michael was a sweet, obedient child and a good student. He always tried to please his mother, making her things at school, picking flowers to bring home to her, and always, always trying to hug her. He was very physically affectionate, desperately trying to elicit love from a woman who didn’t have any to give. He told me his childish hugs were met with an unyielding stiffness and sometimes she would even push him away.

I remember during our engagement, during a dinner following a wedding rehearsal, Helen was almost bragging at the dinner table about how she never would have gotten pregnant at all if “Neil hadn’t got me drunk.” The woman swears she never had sex during their marriage and the only time she did was because her husband got her drunk. (She did have sex once in 1965, got pregnant and miscarried, or so she says). She liked to show off Michael’s baby pictures as if he was some kind of doll, but I don’t think she ever had any real love for him. He was her toy and her possession. She dressed him up like Little Lord Fontleroy and made him wear a Safari Suit to his 8th grade graduation.

Michael’s early photos show a child with a sad expression, although he was always smiling. But there was sadness and fear there. I was reminded of a picture of my mother taken when she was two–and she was wearing a similar sad and dejected expression, looking close to tears. She had been sitting on an oversized chair, her little feet in brown high top shoes, and clutching a teddy bear. Narcissists are sad little children before they turn to narcissism as a defense mechanism. They are never born this way. It is something that is done to them (although they have some part in having made the choice to become narcissists).

When Michael was five years old, his father brought him home a small white puppy, who was named Buster. Michael loved that dog, and spent all his time playing with him when he wasn’t at school. Buster would sit on the floor next to Michael while he played with his toys or drew in his coloring books with crayons.

One summer day, Michael and Buster were sitting in the middle of the hardwood floor in the living room, in a patch of sun that came in through the picture window. Michael got up to go do something else, maybe go to the bathroom, and left his crayons on the floor in the patch of sunlight. Some purple and red crayons melted in the sun and the dog Buster somehow got some red wax on his white fur. There was also a pair of child’s plastic scissors nearby.

While Michael was gone, Helen came into the room and saw the waxy mess and the red crayon on the dog. She marched off to find Michael and dragged him into the room.
“See what you did, you stupid child. That dog is bleeding.” She pointed to the plastic scissors.
“See, you cut him. Well, that does it. Buster must be put to sleep.”
Michael started to cry. “But he’s not tired.”
Helen flew into a rage. “I don’t mean it that way. We are taking him to the pound where he will be destroyed. You are not capable of caring for a dog. Look what you did to him.”
Michael tried to appeal to his father, but his father, tired from work, and an enabler to Helen, just said, “I’m sorry, son, but we have to do what your mother says.”
Michael never forgot this and was never able to forgive his mother for this. He thinks this was the point at which he started to hate her and stopped trying to appeal to her love. He stopped making her things and bringing her gifts.

Helen never allowed Michael to stay home from school, not matter how sick he was. Once he had scarlet fever and was sent to school anyway. The school nurses, concerned, called Helen and asked her why she would send a child sick enough to be in the hospital to class.
Instead of apologizing and getting Michael the medical care he needed, she attacked him, blaming him for “getting her into trouble with the school.”
Any time anything went wrong, it was always Michael’s fault.

When Michael was about 11 or 12, there was a huge custody dispute over an older daughter from his father’s first marriage. The father went to court to try to win custody and lost. During this time, Michael was sent to live with neighbors, to “keep him out of the way.” He felt rejected by his own parents in favor of his father’s daughter from an earlier marriage.

Helen was a pious churchgoer, involved in every activity, but was not well liked by the other women. She was known as a troublemaker and had no real friends. But she loved to tell everyone how “everyone loves me” and “they all listen to me.” In actuality she was doing nothing but spreading gossip and lies about the other women in her church groups. The old Saturday Night Live character “The Church Lady” could have been Michael’s mother. She even looked like that character.

Dana Carvey as “The Church Lady.”

She also got involved in Michael’s school, and got the same reputation there as a troublemaker. This reflected badly on Michael, who was embarrassed by his mother’s antics and his friends’ dislike of her. She was always interfering in things that were none of her business and stirring up drama, playing divide and conquer games between other women and breaking up their friendships through her malicious lies and triangulation.

Michael hated his mother by now and tried to avoid her, but did not become a narcissist until he was almost 13.

It happened in January 1973. His father had not been in good health for some time, and suffered from atheriosclerosis, hardening of the arteries. He was only 57 when he suffered a massive stroke and died suddenly at home.

Michael went into the bathroom to get ready for school and found his father’s dead body lying on the cold ceramic tiles of the bathroom floor. He screamed and tried to revive him, but the man was already cold and wouldn’t wake up. He had been dead for several hours already.

Crying hysterically, he found his mother in her bedroom, fast asleep. He started shaking her and yelling at her to wake up.
She finally did, and was annoyed to find Michael crying at her bedside and pointing to the hallway toward the bathroom.
“Mom, I think Dad’s dead.” he sobbed.
“Don’t be ridiculous.” She marched off to follow him into the bathroom.
She stood at the doorway and looked at her dead husband on the floor, grimaced, and then turned on her heel and said to her son, “Well, I have no idea what to do about this. You take care of it.” Not one shred of empathy, grief or compassion was shown. This was her own husband, and she acted as if he was a bag of trash that needed to be taken outside.

Michael changed after that. He went through the motions of doing what is done when a family member dies, calling all the relatives himself, arranging the funeral, and all that goes with that, but inside he wasn’t the same.

After his father was buried (and his mother put on a huge show at the funeral of crying louder and more hysterically than anyone else present), Michael began to drink and get into trouble. His grades remained acceptable, but he began to show a lot of narcissistic behaviors and started to use people for his own advantage. He went into the city on the weekends and sold his body to older men for money. He thinks he killed a guy once by pushing him into a glass table, but if he did kill him he was never caught.

The malignant behavior soon became ingrained and for Michael, there was no turning back. He’d given up on life and turned to narcissism to protect himself against further injury from those who were supposed to love him. As the years progressed he became a skilled manipulator and con artist, expert at gaslighting, lying, projection of his own defects onto others, and triangulating. This was exacerbated by intermittent drug abuse and alcoholism. The rest of his progression into full-blown malignant narcissism is described in my posts about our marriage under “My Story,” which appear in the header.

Michael had turned into his enemy: his mother. At the same time, he projected his hatred of his mother onto all women he became close to. In the process, this once-brilliant man eventually burned all his bridges, both romantically and professionally. Today he is a burned out shell of a human being, now living at the Salvation Army subsisting on handouts and disability payments. He’s a “needy” narcissist, mooching and freeloading off others, and taking, taking, taking in a pathetic effort to procure the maternal love he never received as a child. He still blames “society” and other people for “making him homeless and unemployable.”

Even his children want little to do with him. He has lost everything. But he made his own choices so I can’t feel too badly for him.

The man you love to hate…or hate to love.

Posted on January 15, 2015 by luckyotter

For victims of narcissistic abuse, Sam Vaknin is the man you love to hate–or the man you hate to love. He’s a controversial figure in the field of narcissism. He has ardent fans within the community as well as seething haters. Just taking a quick scan of the comments under his many Youtube videos will give you an idea of just how polarizing Sam Vaknin really is.

Vaknin, self-professed malignant narcissist and possible borderline psychopath, is in the unlikely and highly ironic position of being a guru and hero for countless victims of narcissistic abuse, and remains one of the most famous voices on the subject.

Until narcissism became a thing a few years ago and blogs by survivors of narcissistic abuse began to proliferate like wildfire, Vaknin was one of the only voices on the Internet who delved deeply into the subject of narcissism and its effects on victims, outside of mental health professionals and psychologists–and not even many of them paid much attention to the problem of narcissistic abuse. Sam was a voice in the wilderness and offered hope to many who felt they had no hope at all. And yet Sam was exactly the kind of person they were trying to get away from.

Sam is a conundrum. If he’s a malignant narcissist who is also a self-professed misanthrope and psychopath, why on God’s green earth does he feel the need to write self help books for victims of abuse and run forums and discussion groups for them? Why does he warn us against people like himself?

When I first found out about Sam Vaknin, there was no way I thought he could be a real narcissist. I was already aware of his books and already knew he was a self professed narcissist, but other than that, knew very little about him. Later on, after watching “I, Psychopath,” I decided he was a narcissist wannabe who more likely had Borderline personality disorder (BPD) with some narcissistic and schizoid traits, and I wrote this article stating my case.

Sam found this article and apparently really liked it, because he disseminated it all over social media. It wasn’t particularly complimentary. I nearly accused him of being a huge fraud, and yet Sam began to visit this blog and share some of the other posts I wrote about him. I read in one of his interviews, that Sam loves to be hated and feared. He doesn’t like to be liked or thought well of. He hates to be loved. But he does like to be thought of as a guru and an expert. Maybe he liked the fact I was critical of him in that post, although I did say some nice things too. Whatever the reasons for his approval and attention, I was inadvertently feeding his narcissistic supply and in return, he was helping give my new blog much needed visibility. This quickly became a mutually beneficial arrangement (though due to his being much more famous than me, I’m sure I benefited more than he did).

Going back to the film “I, Psychopath,” Vaknin’s behavior toward the filmmaker and others, including his submissive, endlessly patient, high-empathy wife Lidija, was as whiney, argumentative and petulant as a three year old who needs a nap or maybe a spanking. He seemed impossible to please. Ian Walker (the filmmaker) who was also in the film, seemed to be losing his mind and it was clear there was no love lost between them. I wasn’t sure how much of Sam’s childish and explosive behavior was an act for the camera to appear more narcissistic than he actually was, but when Walker secretly filmed Vaknin at one point to prove it wasn’t just an act, Sam’s behavior remained just as abusive.

Walker, for his part, seemed to have bit off far more than he could chew in making this film, and seemed nearly destroyed by Vaknin’s abuse. (I read it took him two years to recover from the experience). But to be fair, Walker had chosen to make this film about a self professed malignant narcissist and possible psychopath, so what did he expect? Candy and roses?

Vaknin became petulant when one of the psychological tests he took (the one that scored in all known personality disorders) had him scoring higher in schizoid and avoidant traits than narcissistic ones. In fact, his N score wasn’t really all that high. Other tests he was given gave him much higher scores, and Robert Hare’s Psychopathy Checklist (the test that’s given to criminals to make sentencing and judging decisions in courts of law) gave Vaknin a whopping score of 18 in psychopathy, which is extremely high, even for conscienceless criminals.

An intelligent man like Sam, of course, could be faking the answers. Having a lot of knowledge of personality disorders and general psychology, he could have answered the questions in the manner a psychopath would have answered them to get the results he wanted.

The brain scans were more telling. He was definitely missing some essential connections that people with a conscience possess. But I still didn’t buy it. I didn’t believe he was a psychopath and if he was a narcissist at all, he was a very weak one.

Sam seemed to be all over the place, but his behavior in the film, while mostly unpleasant, still didn’t scream “narcissist.” I was initially confused by him–and then I was fascinated, and finally mesmerized. Even though I had never met the man or spoken to him, I was falling under his spell, which I hear is legendary. This could prove he is dangerous.

Many narcissists can be quite charming, and Sam, for all his toolish and childish behavior, certainly could turn on the charm. He was intelligent, incredibly so, and sometimes funny. He was self aware and quick to admit how much of a bastard he was. Sometimes he was nice. He was always brutally honest, something most narcissists are not. He was definitely unpredictable and moody. He wasn’t someone I’d want to spend much time alone with, and part of me wanted to protect his sweet little wife Lidija from her unstable husband, whatever his psychological problem was. He was a ticking time bomb, and although he has never been physically abusive, he was clearly verbally abusive and the poor woman seemed to have “settled” for a disordered man who could never really return the love she constantly showered on him, as much as he sometimes appeared to try.

In the film, she said she wanted to have a baby with him but knew it probably wouldn’t happen (partly due to her age but also because they have barely any sex life. Sam is not interested in sex. He lives inside his head). What a sterile, joyless life any normally wired woman would have to endure to be married to him. But Lidija, in her codependent way, seems happy and satisfied. It’s very dysfunctional but apparently works for both of them. She’s his constant supply and she’s more than happy to fulfill that role, or says she is.

So, moving on…I think it’s a very good thing that they never had children. I read somewhere (I can’t find the link now) they mutually decided not to reproduce, in order to protect any potential child from either becoming NPD or a victim of its effects, which to my way of thinking shows a side of Sam that does not want to inflict his disorder on a child–so does that mean he has some semblance of a conscience? In another video, I saw how impatient Sam seemed toward some children playing nearby. “Why can’t they just be born adults?” he said. Clearly Sam would not be an ideal father to a child.

It didn’t take long for Sam’s brilliant but disordered mind became my latest Aspie obsession (we do get obsessed over things). I wanted to find out what really made Sam Vaknin tick. I wanted to get inside Sam’s mind and feel what it felt like to be him, and maybe that would give me some answers in solving the puzzle of him. By now, having read more of his writings and seen his interviews, I was becoming convinced that Sam was really a narcissist, but probably not a malignant one.

I read everything I could about him. Interviews, articles, his own stuff. I read blog posts and articles by both his fans and his haters. I watched his videos. I read the comments under them. I read his personal journals and poetry, which are publicly available on his website

Sam’s poetry and personal journals show a side of him that cannot be detected in his almost robot-like Youtube videos where his face is nearly devoid of expression or emotion. It’s my belief this intellectual automaton he wants everyone to believe is the real him is a mask he wears to fool everyone into thinking he is just a walking, talking brain with no emotions, a person who cannot feel anything, a person with no vulnerabilities. I believe these creative writings are the only windows we have into Sam’s true character–his lost self.

Sam’s emotionality can’t be directly detected in “Malignant Self-Love,” although he does write with passion and there’s an odd underlying mood of darkness and pain I’m picking up that I don’t get from watching his videos. I can’t explain why I feel this underlying anger and pain emanating from the pages because it’s not really present in the words themselves. He’s a powerful writer and it just comes through, whether he intended it to or not. Other people have said the same thing about this book.

It’s taking me longer to read than I anticipated, partly due to its length, but also because I’m finding I need to put it down from time to time, because the rage and hurt I can detect that underlies his intellectual, scholarly prose can make me feel depressed. I feel like I’m being drawn against my will into a dark night of the soul. It’s nothing I can put my finger on, just a mood of bottomless sadness and hopelessness that filters through his words. I haven’t reviewed his book yet but I will say this. In spite of his having written “Malignant Self Love” primarily to obtain narcissistic supply for himself, it’s actually one of the most insightful books on narcissism I’ve ever read. Who better than a narcissist to be able to write about what the disorder feels like and what really causes it? But if you’re sensitive at all, it’s not a fun book to read.

Sam has said even in his videos that he often feels sad and depressed. There are flashes of humanity occasionally too. In one of them he is being questioned about something he did to another boy when they were about 12. He had tried to brainwash this other boy, and the boy was so damaged by the psychological abuse that he had to be hospitalized. When the interviewer asked if Sam felt any remorse, he replied he knew it was wrong on an intellectual level but couldn’t feel any remorse or shame. But his face told another story. For just a moment, Sam’s face changed. It seemed to clench and then softened and he looked away quickly from the interviewer, as if he didn’t want his humanity to be seen. I saw him grimace a little, as if remembering this was causing him a jolt of pain.

His journals and poetry are where I believe is Sam’s true self really comes out. Creative writing is the only form of expression it has. Even with all the honesty and insight he has into his disorder (and what I believe a strong desire to be rid of it too) his true self is eternally dissociated from the hostile, volatile, intellectual mask of protection he shows to the world. I no longer have any doubt Sam is a narcissist on the higher end of the spectrum, if not malignant, but even for such an insightful intelligent narcissist as Sam, a cure is probably not going to happen.

Sam’s journals, short fiction, and poetry are so filled with sadness, rage, hopelessnes and pain it takes my breath away. It’s almost too painful to read them. His writing, as emotional as his videos are intellectual, makes you feel like you’ve been punched several times in the gut. People have accused him of being a fake, but there’s nothing fake in the raw emotion he is able to express in his creative writing and journals. No one could fake that.

His words tell what it really feels like to have NPD–from the inside of a sufferer who really does suffer and at the same time is all too aware of it. And it’s pure hell, worse than anything you can imagine. Knowing you can never escape, wanting to be human but not knowing how. Knowing you can never give or receive love like a normal person. That you long to be good but don’t know how. That you feel superior and worthless at the same time. That you want to be hated and feared because deep inside you feel like you don’t deserve any love because of what was done to you by your mother as a child. That you hate and envy others for what you want but can’t have. It’s like being possessed. Maybe it is being possessed. Maybe when one chooses to become a narcissist (Vaknin said he chose to become one at a very young age to protect himself from further hurt) you are drawn into darkness, and once you’ve entered you can’t ever escape.

I read an interview where he admitted he has memories of himself as a very young child, and these are indicative of a person who may have been an empath had he not been subjected to horrific abuse. I think Sam is actually a deeply emotional man with very sensitive feelings but these are unfortunately limited to just himself. Any ability he once had to feel empathy and love for others was cut off like a leg that was amputated for no good reason other than his mother’s malignant envy of him. Sam’s overreaction to a slight on this blog proved to me just how sensitive he actually is. It’s tragic that sensitivity was not allowed to develop into empathy for others. Here is an excerpt from that interview (because I found it posted on another blog with no link, I don’t know where it came from or who was interviewing him):

Q: So can you remember not being a narcissist?

A: That is a really good question. I do remember a period before I became a narcissist, that must have been around age 3 or 4, I do remember forming my narcissism as a conscious effort. I remember I’ve been diagnosed with 180+ IQ, very high, which allowed me to achieve results which were not age-appropriate, advanced. Also my memories are unusual for a child of three, I remember as a child of ¾ inventing the narratives, the stories that became my narcissism later. Inventing the stories of my omniscience, how I knew everything, and inventing fictitious figments of me that are very powerful. Telling myself I would not feel pain if I told myself not to. I remember assembling it like Lego. Before that, I remember being a spoiled child, admired and loved because I was achieving things that were not typical for a child, the entire neighborhood was there first, then the whole nation. So I became a spoiled brat. Later I was subjected to horrific physical abuse up until the age of 16. The answer to the question is yes – I remember the exact moment where I decided to be a narcissist.  

Q: So you remember the empathic abilities you have lost in this process?

A: No, I was too young to develop real empathy.  

Q: A little compassion, do you remember that at least?

A: I remember being compassionate, that I cried when my mother was sad, that I was a good-hearted kid, I used to give away my things, tried to understand other peoples emotions. But these are just flickers of memory, they have receded so fare. It’s like the shades on the wall of Plato’s cave. I do not relive them, do not have access to them. I just know of them.

Sam is a paradox, an enigma, a person too complicated for anyone to ever be able to really understand, and he is just as flummoxed by his complexities as those who try to understand him. I believe he’s a good person trapped forever in a disordered mind that betrays him and makes him lash out at a world that never gave him a chance to become fully human. Having so much insight just makes it all so much harder.

Do I think he’s dangerous? Yes, without a doubt. Even if he doesn’t want to, he can draw you into his illness. He can infect you with his misery and darkness. I don’t think it was necessarily Sam’s abuse of Ian Walker that made him feel the need to symbolically wash himself clean at the end of the film and that changed him for the worse for two years hence. After all, Walker chose to make that film and knew what he was getting into. I think it was the darkness that surrounds Sam that infected Walker and threatened to engulf him. Sam has to live with that every day of his life and can’t free himself from it like Walker can.

When I think about Sam Vaknin, I’m reminded of “Demons” by Imagine Dragons. The protagonist is warning us of his malignancy.

Sam is warning us too. That’s why I don’t think he should be demonized and dismissed as a fraud or someone with malignant intentions, even if they’re primarily self-serving and intended to procure narcissistic supply for himself. There’s a good core in Sam that wants to separate himself from the rest of humanity. That’s why he went into exile by moving to Macedonia and lives a life as a near recluse. He knows what he has become and I think he hates it. But he’s helping people. People look up to him for advice about how to deal with their abusers, and the advice he gives is good. So does it really matter if his primary motives are selfish? I don’t think it does. Just don’t get too close.

How To Survive Narcissists.

Posted on December 25, 2014 by luckyotter

I just have to reblog this. This narcissistic mother sounds SO much like mine, I wonder if they were long lost twins. My mother was always one to have a Perfect Tree. Only white lights with silver and red balls and bow only. No other shapes would do. Colored lights were tacky. And my childish creations? God forbid! You might want to read this: https://otterlover58.wordpress.com/category/cleanliness/

Narcissism is a family disease

Posted on December 10, 2014 by luckyotter

Children of narcissistic parents are always deeply damaged people. Because it’s a genetically inherited disorder (at least to some degree) but also because narcissism is a defense mechanism to protect and isolate oneself from abuse, many victims of narcissistic abuse become narcissists themselves. Those who do not become narcissists suffer from all manner of mental disorders, especially PTSD, avoidant personality disorder, schizoid and schizotypal personality disorder, depression and bipolar disorder, the whole gamut of anxiety and dissociative neuroses, and even psychoses like schizophrenia. And it’s entirely possible to be a narcissist and ALSO suffer from those other disorders. Being a child of a narcissist is the ultimate mind-fuck. There is no way to escape its effects, unless you are removed from the disordered FOO at an early age and adopted and raised by loving parents. Even then, the child will be scarred (“Child of Rage” Beth Thomas is a good example of a child who was severely abused and adopted by a loving family at age one and a half, but still needed years of therapy to overcome the damage that was done to her.)

I see signs of this happening in my daughter due to her MN father’s psychological mind games and mental abuse, but I don’t think it’s deeply entrenched in her because she also suffers from guilt and remorse and does have empathy or at least seems to, so I may be wrong. I hope I am. I still see signs of the sweet child she was, and her currently relationship seems to be bringing that out in her more and more often; she told me sincerely she wants to change her behavior and stop doing things that sabotage herself and hurt others.

Sam was an abused child, the oldest son of a malignantly narcissistic, thoroughly evil mother. He is an ACON, like we are. This is an interview he gave to a writer for Psychology Today, in which he describes what his childhood is like. It’s an excerpt from this journal entry from his website.

Interview granted to Elizabeth Svoboda of Psychology Today

Q. Could you briefly describe your relationship with your parents growing up? What were some of the high and low points?

A. My mother was by far the dominant presence in my life. She treated me as an extension of herself. Through me she sought to settle “open scores” with an indifferent world who failed to appreciate her gifts and to provide her with the opportunities that she so richly deserved. My role was to realise her unfulfilled dreams, wishes, and fantasies. I thus became a child prodigy.

But this was a vicious circle. The more successful I was, the more insidious envy I inspired in her and the more she attempted to subvert me and my accomplishments. Moreover, she resented my newfound personal autonomy. Smothering and doting turned into undisguised contempt and hatred and these fast deteriorated into life-threatening physical and psychological abuse.

Apart from savage beatings, she hit me where it hurt most: tore my poems, shredded my library books, invaded my privacy, humiliated me in front of peers and neighbours. Instead of being her prized possession, I now came to represent the much despised “establishment”. To avoid this disorienting predicament, I made myself into a juvenile delinquent, a gang member, a truant, a rebel with one cause: to regain my mother’s attention. But to no avail.

I hate the words “physical abuse”. It is such a clinical term. My mother used to burrow her fingernails into the soft, inner part of my arm, the “back” of my elbow and drag them, well inside the flesh and veins and everything. You can’t imagine the blood and the pain. She hit me with belts and buckles and sticks and heels and shoes and sandals and thrust my skull into sharp angles until it cracked. When I was four she threw a massive metal vase at me. It missed me and shattered a wall sized cupboard. To very small pieces. She did this for 14 years. Every day. Since the age of four.

She tore my books and threw them out the window of our fourth floor apartment. She shredded everything I wrote, consistently, relentlessly.

She cursed and humiliated me 10-15 times an hour, every hour, every day, every month, for 14 years. She called me “my little Eichmann” after a well known Nazi mass murderer. She convinced me that I am ugly (I am not. I am considered very good looking and attractive. Other women tell me so and I don’t believe them). She invented my personality disorder, meticulously, systematically. She tortured all my brothers as well. She hated it when I cracked jokes. She made my father do all these things to me as well. This is not clinical, this is my life. Or, rather, was. I inherited her ferocious cruelty, her lack of empathy, some of her obsessions and compulsions and her feet. Why I am mentioning the latter – in some other post.

I never felt anger. I felt fear, most of the time. A dull, pervasive, permanent sensation, like an aching tooth. And I tried to get away. I looked for other parents to adopt me. I toured the country looking for a foster home, only to come back humiliated with my dusty backpack. I volunteered to join the army a year before my time. At 17 I felt free. It is a sad “tribute” to my childhood that the happiest period in my life was in jail. The peaceful, most serene, clearest period. It has all been downhill since my release.

But, above all, I felt shame and pity. I was ashamed of my parents: primitive freaks, lost, frightened, incompetent. I could smell their inadequacy. It wasn’t like this at the beginning. I was proud of my father, a construction worker turned site manager, a self-made man who self-destructed later in his life. But this pride eroded, metamorphosed into a malignant form of awe of a depressive tyrant. Much later I understood how socially inept he was, disliked by authority figures, a morbid hypochondriac with narcissistic disdain for others. Father-hate became self-hate the more I realized how much like my father I am despite all my pretensions and grandiose illusions: schizoid-asocial, hated by authority figures, depressive, self-destructive, a defeatist.

But above all I kept asking myself:

WHY?

Why did they do it? Why for so long? Why so thoroughly?

I said to myself that I must have frightened them. A firstborn, a “genius” (IQ-wise), a freak of nature, frustrating, overly-independent, unchildlike Martian. The natural repulsion they must have felt having given birth to an alien, to a monstrosity.

Or that my birth fouled their plans somehow. My mother was just becoming a stage actress in her fertile, narcissistic, imagination (actually, she worked as a lowly salesperson in a tiny shoe shop). My father was saving money for one of an endless string of houses he built, sold and rebuilt. I was in the way. My birth was probably an accident. Not much later, my mother aborted my could-have-been-brother. The certificate describes how difficult the economic situation is with the one born child (that’s me).

Or that I deserve to be punished that way because I was naturally agitating, disruptive, bad, corrupt, vile, mean, cunning and what else.

Or that they were both mentally ill (and they were) and what was to be expected of them anyhow.

And the other question:

WAS IT REALLY ABUSE?

Isn’t “abuse” our invention, a figment of our febrile imagination when we embark upon an effort to explain that which cannot be explained (our life)?

Isn’t this a “false memory”, a “narrative”, a “fable”, a “construct”, a “tale”?

Everyone in our neighbourhood hit their children. So what? And our parents’ parents hit their children as well and most of them (our parents) came out normal. My father’s father used to wake him up and dispatch him through hostile Arab neighbourhoods in the dangerous city they lived in to buy for him his daily ration of alcohol. My mother’s mother went to bed one night and refused to get out of it until she died, 20 odd years later. I could see these behaviours replicated and handed down the generations.

So, WHERE was the abuse? The culture I grew in condoned frequent beatings.

It was a sign of stern, right, upbringing. What was different with US?

I think it was the hate in my mother’s eyes.

You can read about the daily reality in our home:
Nothing is Happening at Home
http://gorgelink.org/vaknin/wronghome-en.html

Q. Once you became an adult, how did your relationship with your parents change? What are some of the unique difficulties of being an adult child of narcissistic parents? Feel free to give examples or describe specific situations you found yourself in.

A. Adult children of narcissists adopt one of two solutions: entanglement or detachment. I chose the latter. I haven’t seen my parents since 1996 (Actually, since I left the army in 1982). I avoid the encounter because it is bound to stir up a nest of emotional hornets which I am not sure I could cope with effectively. I also refuse to subject myself to repeated abuse, however subtle, surreptitious, and ambient. Absenteeism is my way of neutralizing my parents’ weapons.

But the vast majority of grown up offspring of narcissists find themselves enmeshed in unhealthy permutations of their childhood, caught in an exhausting dance macabre, developing special semiotic vocabularies to decipher the convoluted exchanges that pass for communication in their families. They compulsively revisit unresolved conflicts and re-enact painful scenes in the forlorn hope that, this time around, the resolution would be favorable and benign.

Such entanglement only serves to exacerbate the corrosive give-and-take that constitutes the child-parent relationship in the narcissist’s family. Such recurrent friction, unwelcome but irresistible, deepens and entrenches the grudges and enmity that both parties accumulate in sort of a bookkeeping of hurt and counter-hurt.

Q. What effects do you think your parents’ personality problems had on you–as a child and as an adult?

A. I owe my multiple personality disorders – narcissistic, borderline, masochistic – and my depression to their unhealthy upbringing and to the nightmarish atmosphere that they have instilled in our home. I owe them every single self-destructive and self-defeating act I have since committed (quite a few). I inherited from them and via their flawed version of socialization my paranoid delusions, my antisocial behavior, my misanthropy, my a-sexuality.

I am fully accountable for my conduct. My parents cannot be held responsible for my choices at the age of 46. But that I react the way I do, that I am the sad vessel that I am, is their doing, no doubt.

Q. When we become adults, what are our responsibilities to parents who have personality problems? Do you think we’re obligated to put up with them as a kind of payback for everything they gave us when we were young, or are we justified in cutting them off if the situation gets too intractable?

A. Our first and foremost obligation is to ourselves and to our welfare – as well as to our loved ones. People with personality disorders are disruptive in the extreme. They pose a clear and present danger both to themselves and to others. They are an emotional liability and a time bomb. They are a riddle we, their progeny, can never hope to resolve and they constitute living proof that not only were we not loved as children but are unloveable as adults.

Why would one saddle oneself with such debilitating constraints on one’s ability to feel, to experience, to dare, and to soar to one’s fullest potential? Narcissistic parents are an albatross around their children’s necks because they are incapable of truly, fully, and unconditionally loving.

Q. Now that your parents are no longer part of your life, have you compensated by putting together your own “adopted family,” so to speak, of people you care about and that care about you? If so, could you talk a little bit about what effect doing this has had on your well-being?

A. In my late teens and early twenties I was still making the mistake of looking for a surrogate family. Soon enough, I have discovered that I cannot but import into these new relationships all the pathologies that characterized my family of origin. Ever since then I am careful not to get involved with family structures. I haven’t even created my own family. I am married (for the second time) but am repulsed by the idea of having to parent children. In general, I am trying to avoid relationships with an emotional component.

further reading: The Narcissist is Looking for a Family
http://samvak.tripod.com/narcissistnofamily.html

Q. How can we try to manage difficult parents’ behavior, if at all—or at least, minimize its impact on us? Q. What advice would you give others who find themselves in a similar situation with their parents? What were some of the strategies that worked for you?

A. At the risk of sounding repetitive: disengage to the best of your ability. Make it a point to limit your encounters with these sad reminders of your childhood to the bare minimum. Delegate obligations to third parties, to professionals, to other members of the family. Hire nurses, accountants, and lawyers if you can afford it. Place them in a senior home. Move to another state. The more distance you put between yourself and your personality disordered abuser-parents and their radioactive influence, the better you are bound to feel: liberated, decisive, empowered, calmer, in control, clear about yourself and your goals.

These points are crucial:

Do not allow your parents to manage your life any longer

Do not allow them to interfere with your new family: your wife and children

Do not allow them to turn you into a servant, instantaneously and obsequiously at their beck and call

Do not become their source of funding

Do not become their exclusive or most important source of narcissistic supply (attention, adulation, admiration)

Do not show them that they can hurt you or that you are afraid of them or that they have any kind of power over you

Be ostentatiously autonomous and independent-minded in their presence

Do not succumb to emotional blackmail or emotional incest

Punish them by disengaging every time they transgress. Condition them not to misbehave, not to abuse you.

Identify the most common strategies of fostering unhealthy (trauma) bonding and the most prevalent control mechanisms:

Guilt-driven (“I sacrificed my life for you…”)

Codependent (“I need you, I cannot cope without you…”)

Goal-driven (“We have a common goal which we can and must achieve”)

Shared psychosis or emotional incest (“You and I are united against the whole world, or at least against your monstrous, no-good father …”, “You are my one and only true love and passion”)

Explicit (“If you do not adhere to my principles, beliefs, ideology, religion, values, if you do not obey my instructions – I will punish you”).

Narcissists and cleanliness

Posted on December 6, 2014 by luckyotter

I read an interesting post about Joan Crawford over at Five Hundred Pound Peep’s blog. Crawford was definitely a histrionic malignant narcissist even though most sources say she had BPD (another Cluster B disorder that can mimic and is easily confused with the histrionic form of narcissism). The issue of Crawford’s obsession with cleanliness and order was raised.

There seem to be two kinds of narcissists: those, like my ex, who are complete slobs who refuse to lift a finger around the house and expect everyone else to pick up their mess for them; and those, like my MN mother (and Crawford), who are obsessed with cleanliness and order.

I’m going to talk about the second type.

My mother’s house was like a museum–it was all for show. Even magazines on the coffee table were forbidden because it was “clutter.” Family photos were consigned to bedrooms only because she felt they looked “tacky” in public rooms. She vacuumed, scrubbed, polished and dusted every day, in addition to hiring a weekly housekeeper to keep things spruced up. She invaded boundaries too–every day she came into my room (without knocking of course), and would start straightening up and criticizing my teenage sloppiness. She’d go into my closet and rearrange my clothes, making it hard for me to find what I was looking for (because I had everything in an order that made sense to me). When cooking, she’d wash dishes while she cooked, so there were no dishes inthe sink after dinner (actually, I picked up this habit from her and do it myself).

My mother loved beige, white and eggshell. Everything in the house was in those boring colors, with no bright spots of color to liven things up. I read somewhere once that beige is the devil’s color, not black. I think that person was onto something. I hate beige. It’s the most boring color on the planet. Is it even a color at all?

The glass tables in the living room with their chrome legs and edges were spotless and free of any clutter: what was the point of having tables at all if you weren’t going to put anything on them? The television was tucked inside a cabinet because a visible TV in the living room was gauche and low class and offended my mother’s upper class pretensions.

Even our Christmas tree (after my parents divorced) would be decorated in white lights only, with red and silver balls and bows–no other colors or shapes allowed. She always hated the colored lights, tinsel, and varied ornaments my father bought for our tree when they were still married. Me? I happen to love lots of colored lights. Tacky or not, they seem much more homey and Christmassy to me than the all-white lights you see in offices and banks. Another thing she did after their divorce was refuse to hang any ornaments I had made at school, because again, they were too tacky. My father, though certainly far from perfect, always took pride in my childish little creations, and proudly hung them from our tree, while my mother held her nose in distaste.

When company came over, she became an obsessive basketcase, zooming through the house with the vacuum and duster, and woe to you if you didn’t match her level of obsession and jump in and help out.

But of course, it was all for show, intended to impress. Narcissistic cleanliness is another way they can control everyone around them. I also think it’s an unconscious attempt to hide the “dirtiness” inside them. That’s why they’re so obsessed with it and rage whenever they see dirt or disorder.

I’ve also noticed how many of them (especially women, but some men too) are obsessed with bodily functions. I’ll warn you right now we’re getting into the ick factor here, but I’ll try to spare you too much detail.

I’m acquainted with a narcissistic woman who told me she douches every day. Not just after intercourse or after her period, but every freaking day. I mentioned to her how unhealthy that is and how it can rob her vagina of healthy bacteria that prevents infection, but predictably, she looked at me like I was crazy and said I didn’t know what I was talking about.

I know other narcissists (both men and women) who are obsessed with keeping their bowels clean. They are big fans of enemas, cleansing drinks, diuretics, fasting, and laxatives. They obsess over these things and even talk about their rituals in public, with no sign of embarrassment. If you know someone who goes in for colonic irrigation sessions on a regular basis, and then talks about it to everyone as if they were discussing the weather, it’s a good bet they’re a narcissist. I had a narcissist boss once who made his colon cleansing sessions a regular topic of conversation and would describe the process in the most intricate, intimate detail, even in front of customers. He didn’t care who heard and seemed to want everyone to know about it. The ick factor was off the charts with that one. It made me want to throw up.

They’re also obsessed with their children’s bowel functions. This is a little embarrassing but I’ll talk about it anyway because it’s so typical of the type of abuse (and it is a form of abuse) some children of narcs are forced to put up with.

When I was a child, my mother obsessed over whether I had a daily BM. If I skipped a day, out came the big rust-red rubber enema bag with its snakelike black hose. It was an adult sized contraption and not meant for children, but she’d fill that unholy thing up all the way with soapy water and make me lie down on the bathroom floor on a towel while she shoved that thing into me.

Of course it was extremely painful and my small body wasn’t equipped to hold all that water. If I cried or had an accident, she’d get mad and shove that medieval instrument of torture up me even more and hold my butt cheeks together with her cold hands, her long sharp nails digging into my tender buttocks like thorns from Hell.

It was much worse than the yardstick or any other punishment ever inflicted on me. I developed terrible constipation due to my terror of that thing, but of course that just made the enemas even more necessary and frequent. When it wasn’t in use, that evil device hung on the back of the bathroom door, facing the toilet, like a constant threat of what would happen if I didn’t produce.

You see, I wasn’t a real person, but merely an extension of my mother’s mask of narcissistic perfection, her little baby doll she could do whatever she wanted to with, her mini-me. Like an infant, she couldn’t seem to tell where she ended and I began. She obsessed over my hair, my clothes, my weight. She dressed us in mother/daughter matching outfits. In the morning before school she made me sit at her dresser while she took a hard bristled brush to my fine hair that tended to tangle and form knots. If she couldn’t undo a tangle, she’d angrily yank it out, making me scream in pain while my scalp felt like it was on fire.

Mother-daughter outfits like these were the rage in the ’60s, but were tailor-made (pun intended) for mothers like mine who wanted to make their daughters into their own image.

When I was five, she decided she wanted my fine, straight hair to be curly. So she gave me a home permanent and while rinsing my hair under the kitchen faucet with a glass milk bottle, the bottle accidentally slipped from her soapy hands and broke. A shard of glass buried itself into my forehead, and I had to get stitches. She didn’t try to perm my hair again after that but always complained about how flat it was and insisted on keeping it short.

I never got to choose my own clothes until my teens. Until I started going to Catholic school and had to wear a uniform, she’d lay out the clothing she had chosen for me to wear the night before. Most of the time it was some frilly frock I hated. But if I complained, I was immediately silenced. I wasn’t allowed to be myself, have opinions, or an identity of my own. All she cared about was the image I presented to make her look better in her own mind.

As a teenager, I rebelled by wearing the sloppiest, grungiest clothes I could find, refusing to have my hair cut and styled (even though I really don’t have the type of hair that looks best when it’s too long because it’s so thin), and even gaining weight on purpose just to spite her. I wore a lot of black even though it wouldn’t be fashionable for another few years (I probably would have been a Goth kid had I been a few years younger) because my mother hated black. Part of this was normal teenage rebellion (and in the ’70’s, dressing in unisex, sloppy clothes such as workshirts hanging over beat up jeans was the fashion) but for me it was also a way to say “fuck you” to my mother’s obsession with image at the expense of my growth as an individual.

Obsessive housekeeping and obsession with their own and their children’s bodily functions is another way narcissists can exert control and dominance, as well as a desperate and sad unconscious attempt to hide or try to “clean out” their own spiritual filthiness.