Facing Facts About NPD
Taken together, my last few posts make an important point:
- If people suffering from NPD can keep themselves from abusing when there would be witnesses, they can keep themselves from abusing when there wouldn't be witnesses. They just don't.
- By going to great lengths to abuse on the sly while portraying themselves to the outside world as the very antithesis of what they are, NPDs prove that they know that their behavior is wrong and shameful = something to hide.
- Most children of narcissists do NOT choose to imitate the parent who hurts them so and therefore do NOT become narcissists themselves.
- attack people in broad daylight, in front of God and everybody, like that tiger I mentioned in this previous post.
- are NOT cunning; they don't do evil on the sly; they don't cover up their true character with an impressive facade; they don't plan (premeditate) how to sneak around and get away with wrongdoing on the sly.
Does any of that fit the NPD modus operandi? No.
This is why NPD is legally a CHARACTER disorder, not a mental disorder that leaves a person free of responsibility for what he or she does.
In other words, NPD is NOT insanity. NPDs are twisted, not insane.
Are they then just evil?
Nobody needs anyone to tell them the answer to that question. Just follow simple logic: Add 2+2 = ?
NPDs don't do evil to do evil: they do it because it makes them feel good = because doing evil is like a drug, a pain killer.
So, we cannot get on a high horse of moral superiority, because we aren't tempted as they are. We don't have their predatory urges.
But that doesn't mean that we should close our eyes to what they are. If hurting others makes you feel good, you like hurting others. Sorry, there's just no getting around that.
If you want to hurt others, you're malevolent. Sorry, there's just no getting around that.
It's DANGEROUS to be in denial of these facts. Dangerous to regard NPDs as people of goodwill, as suffering victims who can't help it.
That just plays right into their hands. That's what they want -- for you to be a sucker and feel sorry for them. To make excuses for them. To assign them a lower set of standards to live up to.
There's a sucker born every minute. Before you know it, they have you regarding THEM as the victim, feeling sorry for THEM instead of their victims. All hell must be laughing their heads off at this joke. What a travesty of justice. What a perversion of Truth.
It's a false choice -- that suggested choice between hating them and sympathizing with them. The sensible choice is simply to regard them as what they are: predators. In other words, STAY AWAY FROM THEM. NEVER TRUST THEM. AND DON'T GO INTO THEIR CAGE.
If you lie, you are a liar. If you kill, you are a killer. We are the sum total of what our CHOICES to date have made us. Narcissists too are the sum total of what their choices to date have made them. Adult narcissists have passed the point of no return long ago.
Perhaps some day psychiatrists will learn some way to help them pay the toll to that demon at the door, so narcissists can return to the human way of life. Let us hope for that day, but let us not, in the meantime, be dangerously naive.
9:17 PM permanent link
9 comments
9 Comments:
Hi Cathy,
First off I wanted to tell you that it was you who tossed me a rope to save me from drowning in the NPD swamp!
I thank you for the wonderful information. The information you provided me gave me the knowledge but only time will heal my wounds.
You mentioned a couple of times children of N tend to not be N. That wasn't the case with my exNBF. His dad was a full blown narci and his mom contributed to by conducting a covert incestual realtionship with the exNBF.
I also witnessed the making of another casuality of NPD. He has custody of an 8 yr old daughter. I saw her developing some of the same characteristics and behaviors that he displayed.
Thank goodness I wasn't another casuality of that DYSFUNCTION JUNCTION!
The risk may well be greater in small families, especially those with but one child.
I know the family history of so few cases that I myself put little stock in the ratios they suggest, but I do know one sorry secenario.
(1)The father, one of his sisters, and their mother were all narcisists.
(2) The mother's father was a narcissist and she was the (spoiled) baby of the family, way behind the others in age. The only child her father didn't treat like dirt. In fact, she feared him with an unusual loathing as a very little girl that hurt his feelings, even to the point that the other members of the family felt sorry for the beast.
Neither she nor any of her four brothers and sisters became narcissists. But she had learned some tricks. By that I mean she had some narcisisistic character traits = she would play games. Also, like so many women who marry narcissists, she had been raised under one to think that "some men are just like that," that it's acceptable, and therefore she didn't know how much better marriage should be = didn't know better than to marry a man like that herself.
She remained in this marriage, apparantly thinking to beat the narcissist at his own game. She never learned. As he drove her crazy, his shame that she couldn't put him on landed on the kids. She too treated them like servants, though she did love them. But she was inadequate to counter her husband's influence on the children, being a woman who remained stubbornly in denial of the serious problem in that house.
Result? 50% of the children became narcissists.
My NH has two older sisters that were either narcissists or histrionics. This means three of the five children (the father was a malignant narcissist) are narcissists (or a variation).
Validation, yes, that is what I need. Got caught in the "cage" the last two months. Frightful customer service issue. I was the customer complaining to the great god of "you-should-be-so-grateful-I-have-bent-over-backwards-in-service-to-such-a-non-world-class-creature-as-yourself." But it was more like a black widow web I was caught in...a devouring snare. In the process of freeing myself from the snare, I commenced with confronting the NPD with The Truth. Following my well aimed yet honorable blow, I could see the rapidly firing onslaught of weapons shooting at me ..With experience, I have begun to be able to call them as they happen: "yes," I thought, "that was a projection..and that one was a twist to someone else's truth..and that was a mockery of my vulnerability...and that was a derogatory name meant to squash me, there, that was a threat to degrade my reputation to the public, that was an insult that my reputation has already been degraded..." I saw them all like arrows flying at my head. They didn't sink in but I still bled. Fight back and you are despised. Don't fight and you are despised. But after being trashed and discarded, I have found power in being somewhat of a mystery. Let them guess what I'm up to. Let their narcissistic imagination run wild. Don't show all the cards. I know I won't compromise my integrity. But they don't know that because I'm only a projection of themselves to them. So I can properly get my ducks in a row for my own safety without showing the whole deck. NPD's watch to see what you do next when they devalue you. When they can't read you it makes them nervous you are organizing some "big guns" to do to them what they did to you. Fear of retaliation. Knowing they fear it is retaliation enough for me. But being a mystery helps cloak me from those tentacles of control while I arrange what's necessary to orchestrate peace into my life again.
i can't tell you how much this site has made me realize i am alive and well. you have helped me stop being an enabler and a survival of a dysfunctional, highly respectable functional narcissistic. i just feel a little stupid because i have known this individual for 10yr before i became involved and not really missed but ignored all the signs. thanks again and God Bless You
Hi deede,
Glad to be of help. It may interest you to know that the rate of NPD is higher among psychiatrists than the general population, though that isn't the only field it's higher in. Unfortunately, it's higher among teachers too.
Hi, Kathy:
I have enjoyed reading your website. It reinforces what I have suspected about my mother and sister for years. They have spent 19 years singling me out as their scapegoat and their toxic- emotions dumping ground. I can go down the list of traits of malignant narcissism and see that mom and sis are the major NPDs in my life. About 2 years ago, their lies and lousy treatment toward me got so outrageous, I told them I was cutting off contact with them. I still write my mother occasionally, as she is my sole connection to my dad, who has alzheimers.When my dad still had his mind, we were buddies and got along well---which enfuriated my mother. My sister has always hated our dad. Bottom line, my mom and sister have had to find some other relative to commit scapegoating and manipulation on, now that They can't get to me. Unfortunately, it seems that their newest victim is my sisters youngest daughter---whom they have convinced that she has some form of hereditary insanity. Poor kid. She believes them and theres nothing I can do to help her. This NPD is evil stuff and destroys lives when possible.
Hello Kathy,
This is a response to deede on her research. My exNgf was a very educated woman. She holds two Masters Degrees in education and is going for a PhD. in psychology. I asked her one day how was it that she felt that she could counsel people about the very issues that she herself refused to look at in her own life. She looked at me and said that she could counsel people because she was not being "personally attacked".
She was/is a very intellengent woman. There is no doubt about that. She feels though her intellect is so superior to everyone that should be the "go to" person in solving other people's problems.
deede you are absolutely correct in your assessment of how N's say and do very bizarre things.
There is not enough room here to tell all of my stories. In the end people with NPD destroy so many. I too struggle with picking up all of the pieces of my life but more importantly it's the pieces of my heart that hurt the most. I will never understand the concept of " no act of love should go unpunished".
Hi Kathy,
Thank you for the valuable information you have provided regarding NPD. I have known for several years that my mother has NPD (we no longer have a relationship) and today, my 15 year old daughter was diagnosed with NPD. I'm devasted to say the least, she isn't a spouse i can leave. I have 3 younger children who are frequently the vivtims of her abuse as well - I have no clue as to what resources are out there, how to cope, or if there is any hope at all. Does anyone else out there have a teen with NPD?
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