A Dumping Ground for the Toxic Waste of Narcisisstic Pathology

More from Narcissistic Pathology of Everyday Life by Nancy McWilliams and Stanley Lependorf:

The repeated experience of being pathologized is typical not only for the children but also for the spouses and other intimates of narcissistic people.

They cite the example of what happens to child who seeks the narcissist's attention. I have a slightly different take on it than they, because in my experience narcissists are seldom really "busy." They go to great lengths to seem busy though. They busy themselves hectically with unproductive busy-ness. I think they do it to distract themselves, to keep their minds occupied and thus ward off unwanted thoughts that might occur in a moment of quiet reflection. Busy, busy, busy as they are though, despite the reputation for being hard-working that they manage to carve out for themselves, those I have known were all remarkably lazy.

A narcissist will deny a child attention just to do it. She is a child who has never learned to share. Attention is her her pain killer, so it might as well be heroin, because she must it all: she can't spare any, even for her child. Note how incongruous that behavior is with the role of a parent, especially a mother. The children of narcissists don't really have a parent.

The narcissists I have known actually act as though it would kill them to give you any attention. Deep down inside they seem to feel that it would! I don't think they're faking that. I think they really feel that way. Insist on any attention from them and they act like you're tearing off their right arm.

Notice that this is just another in a long list of narcissistic behaviors I've mentioned that is normal only in a little child. We see it when a child refuses to share a toy. She must have it all to herself. One should think it would kill her to share it with her sister. She really feels that way, because her personality is at the emotional developmental stage of a three-year-old, where having to share that toy would be a CATASTROPHE!

Funny, in children. NOT, in adults.

So never -- not for one minute -- forget that in a narcissist you have a little child dressed up like a grown-up.  That's the mentality you're dealing with.  Telling a narcissist to "grow up" will do as much good as telling a three-year-old to grow up = no good at all. They can't grow up. They're a case of arrested child development.

Williams and Lependorf point out that a negligent narcissistic mother who witholds attention from her child defends herself against the guilt she incurs in that through denial, substituting a fiction for the truth with a fantasy of being the exact opposite -- the model parent. She will put on an Academy Award Act of being the model parent and have the whole world convinced that she is.

It's kind of a shame that so many people are fooled by narcissists. We all instinctively know that people who put on a show of anything are trying to look or sound or seem a certain way. And there can be but one good reason for that -- to look or sound or seem different than they really are.

But, while we're still naive, we prefer to give people the benefit of the doubt. I no longer do. Whenever I see anyone putting on a goody-two-shoes act a little too thick, I know they're just gobbing make-up on to hide a big zit. So, if they're acting exceptionally kind, I know that they're mean. If they're acting honester than Honest Abe, I know they're a liar. If they're acting religious, I know they're a hypocrite who has no faith to lose. But I had to learn this lesson the hard way, as most people do.

Little children need the affectionate attention of their parents like they need the air they breathe. The narcissistic parent is inadequate, because he or she is too weak and needy to spare any for their child. How does mother react to her child's need for attention?

A real mother tells the child she is busy at the moment. A narcissist tells the child he wants too much attention, that he is immature, too demanding, or whatever. And with those magic words -- presto-chango! -- the inadequate person in this exchange has somehow become the child, not his lousy excuse for a mother.

That's what the children of a narcissist are -- a dumping ground for the pathology of the narcissist. They grow up thinking that they're the one who's inadequate, that they're the one something is wrong with.

The repeated experience of being pathologized is typical not only for the children but also for the spouses and other intimates of narcissistic people. A woman who, for instance, expresses hurt when her husband defensively criticizes her, may be glibly accused of "oversensitivity." An employee who tries to convey his distress to a hypercritical boss may be told he is "overreacting." People generally feel quite helpless in the face of such defensive operations, which shift the focus of attention from the defects (as unconsciously perceived) of the narcissistic party to the alleged neuroses of the target person. Narcissistically motivated people who possess psychoanalytic insight are particularly skilled at this tactic.

Naive objects of such processes frequently don't know what has hit them.... A woman in treatment with one of us reports that when she broaches a marital problem to her spouse, a psychiatrist, she is labeled a masochist and told to work on her "martyr problem." She came to therapy convinced of her severe character pathology, and she is not without masochism, but she is hardly the picture of pathology her husband has painted. This propensity for fault-finding, or critically "interpreting" to deflect attention from felt imperfections in the self, seems to us a process very close to projective identification, in that the object of the narcissistic attack ends up affectively owning a sense of badness .... It is thus destructive to both the object and the initiator of the criticizing defense, since anyone except possibly the most sociopathic of narcissists would accumulate unconscious guilt, and defenses against it, over misusing another person.

Ah, they keep that corpus delicti buried by shoveling more shit on you. That's what all that hectic busy-ness is for, too -- to keep their mind on distracting trivia so that subconscious guilt doesn't surface to consciousness on them.