Playing it Safe on the Web

I'm sure most of you know this, but for those new to the subject, here is some practical advice.

For people as self-absorbed and seemingly uninterested in you as malignant narcissists are, they are very snoopy. They go through your drawers and papers. They are looking for dirt, and they are trying to find out if you're on to them. Hence, like all abusers, they often spy on and stalk their victims.

If you are being abused by someone who has access to your computer, know that he or she can access information that tells them what Websites you've been visiting and whom you've been emailing. It's not at all hard to prevent this. Here are instructions on how to prevent it.

In fact, this is why I don't post testimonials on my sales page for the book.

Narcissists stalk prey on the Web, as well. Often they do this by posing as a victim and trying to initiate contact with some hurting person who posts in a group or blog. Therefore, when posting to any group or blog, you should use a screen name and be leery of forming a relationship with anyone out there who emails you privately and tries to strike one up with you. It's also best to use a free email account for posting to groups and blogs, because the providers of free email accounts do not require you to give your real name and street address (like your ISP does).

Free email accounts are readily obtainable from many sources, such MSN, Yahoo, and so forth. All they require is a screen name you make up and a password.

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A Malignant Narcissist's Shock Tactics

One of the most glaring outward signs of malignant narcissism is the way narcissists malign others. They are constantly improving their own image at someone else's expense.

Another very red flag is perverted reactions to things. This red flag can't be missed, because it's downright shocking. But you witness it infrequently, and it's so perplexing that people unfailingly disbelieve their very eyes and blow off this warning sign.

Therefore, whenever you DO witness a perverted reaction to something, DO NOT blow it off. It is always a very bad sign.

For example, the narcissist inexplicably gets angry at what should please. You expected a smile and - WHAM - you got a look that could kill instead. It sets you reeling, doesn't it?

Guess what? That's exactly why the narcissist does that = to set you reeling so you are easy to run over.

Other examples are being repulsed by what should endear. Laughing at what is tragic.

You know - those bizarre reactions that make you want to pinch yourself. Those reactions that you cannot quite believe even though you have seen them with your own eyes.

Remember that normal people don't do that.

My experience convinces me that narcissists use these backwards reactions to things as shock tactics. They strike you as the sight of apple falling UP from a tree would. It takes you aback. It disarms you.

That way the narcissist gets away with it, because you are stunned. It's kinda like a "sucker punch".

While your jaw is hanging and you are wondering where that reaction came from - whether you or the narcissist is the crazy one - the narcissist performs this hit-and-run to get away with the abuse.

It's a way to disable you (by morally stunning you) so that you cannot defend yourself from the attack. The term for disabling and then attacking someone is "mayhem." Needless to say, it's the lowest of the low who fight that way.

Know anybody who does that you? Who somehow takes offense and gets mad just when you are saying or doing something that should make them happy? If you do know anyone like this, stay away from them. It's a stunt. A perverted stunt to catch you off guard and run you over.

And normal people, people of goodwill, don't do that.

See also A Narcissist's Perplexing Behavior and Backward Reactions to Things.

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Blaming the Victim of Narcissism

The first thing the victims of narcissists need to know is that they are not to blame.

Not one bit.

In other words, he didn't get mad because dinner was was late. She didn't blow up because you are "too this" or "too that." You didn't "ask for it" by speaking up and saying that you deserved some attention and respect.

The narcissist attacked you just because you are there, period. Don't you have a right to be there?

Let's get real. Narcissists think they have a right to punish you just for being the way you are. Think, don't you have the right to be the way you are? Do you have to be some character in the narcissist's fiction that conforms to his or her specifications?

Does that make any sense? That's as hateful as the crime against humanity of attacking people just for being a certain KIND or nationality.

The narcissist attacks because he or she is a predator, period. Predators attack any vulnerable prey that crosses their sights, period. Therefore, the prey is NEVER the one bit to blame.

It would make as much sense to blame a sheep for getting attacked by a wolf. So what if the wolf says, "I attacked her because she is an obnoxious sheep!" What idiot falls for that line? Yet narcissist sympathizers are doing precisely this and are therefore being irrational.

The narcissist attacked just to do it, and he or she attacks any prey they have some unfair advantage over. They never pick a fair fight. They are bullies, period.

They do it to vaunt themselves on others. It gives them a high. Like as in a high from a hit on drug.

Does this mean you are a saint? Of course not. Does it mean you have never said or done anything in an argument with a narcissist that you should regret? Of course not.

You are like a bank teller who gets shot in a holdup. You are totally innocent of getting shot. Don't let the sloppy thinkers like narcissists and their sympathizers convince you that you are to blame because you were rude, or because you were embezzling, or because you are a drug addict. All that is irrelevant TO HIM SHOOTING YOU.

Of course you should change those things about yourself, but the "intellectual" clowns who make out your character flaws as justifying abuse of you are complete idiots unable to see the relationship between cause and effect.

Being late with dinner is no excuse for the narcissist to attack you. Being "too this" or "too that" for his taste is no excuse for the narcissist to attack you. Demanding decent and respectful treatment is no excuse for the narcissist to attack you.

I don't care how "threatened" any of that makes the poor, twisted narcissist feel. His perverted feelings are HIS problem, not yours. Like Osama bin Wanton, he will never run out of twisted excuses to irrationalize his attacks on you, so get off the guilt trip. His perversity is not YOUR vice.

Narcissists attack you just to do it. You are therefore 100% innocent of your victimization. Blow off this absurd "It takes two to Tango" crap.

Doubtless, you will discover that there are certain things you should stop doing. Good. Now you wise up and stop being manipulated in ways that play right into the narcissist's hands. Now you cannot be victimized.

THIS is how you stop being a victim.

But foggy-headed idiots (like those espousing the co-dependence theory) try to claim that you stop being a victim by pretending that you have never been made one. That's crazy.

That is magical thinking, like the narcissist's. You HAVE been made a victim. That's a FACT, like it or not. And "victim" is not a dirty word. Though being a victim is nothing to aspire to and is something to avoid, being a victim is NOT a sin. It is nothing to be ashamed of. To the contrary, the most innocent are the most unsuspecting and most easily victimized ... until they have learned the hard way not to assume that other people are good. And these foggy-headed idiots who blame the victim should be able to see that. (Maybe if they stopped thinking in buzzword-laden slogans, like robots, they would.)

You stop being a victim by wising up so that you are never again victimized. It requires nothing beyond COMMON SENSE to realize that.

In some cases, the narcissist has stolen something of value from you, like your job or reputation - something you have every right to get back from the damned thief. You stop being a victim when you win justice and get it back, period.

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Narcissism: Vandalizing the Images of Other People

To create the work of art that is their grandiose false image, narcissists often cheat. That is, they don't make themselves seem great when they can get away with just making themselves look better than others the easy way = by comparison = by making others look bad.

This is why every malignant narcissist is also a character assassin. His or her line is "I'm good because So-and-So is bad." (Sound like politics?)

Therefore, any praise of other people is viewed by the perverted mind of a narcissist as a "threat" to him or her. Again, this phony "threat" is nothing but the just truth about another person. Which the perverted narcissist must "defend" himself from.

This is bogus. Those who sympathize with narcissists, saying that they act out only because they feel "threatened" should turn their brains on. If a narcissist feels "threatened" by hearing some just praise of another person, that is but a manifestation of the narcissist's malignity. No excuse at all.

What's more, how can anyone avoid "threatening" a narcissist this way? To avoid it, you'd have to speak badly of every person you mention to the narcissist. If you sin by saying something good about another person, you're guilty of the poor, "threatened" narcissist's negative reaction? Give me a break.

Narcissists are not really threatened. It takes twisted thinking to view their behavior as a reaction to being "threatened." Narcissists are twisted, so they at least have an excuse for such twisted thinking. Narcissist sympathizers are not and therefore have no excuse for perverting the course of logic a full 180 degrees. Such sloppy thinkers obviously don't even bother to know what a "threat" is.

Overall, individuals high in narcissism displayed amplified responses to social comparison information, experiencing greater positive affect from downward comparisons and greater hostile affect from upward comparisons.

— Bogart, L.M., Benotsh, E.G. and Pavlovic, J.D. (2004), Feeling Superior but Threatened: The Relation of Narcissism to Social Comparison, Basic and Applied Social Psychology, Vol. 26, Iss. 1, pp. 35-44.

This is why one of the most evident warning signs of NPD is vandalizing the images of others. Which is often done very slyly, so as to sneak bad ideas about other people into your head.

More.

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More on Whether Narcissists Are Happy

Continuing with this discussion about whether narcissists are happy and when their happiness leaves them.

For example, I know a narcissist who turned viciously on her sister and parents within weeks of moving away to college. She tried to get herself adopted by the wealthy people who owned a college bar and restaurant she worked at. She told the cadre of students who belonged to that place outrageous lies about her sister and parents. Lies to make them all feel sorry for her as abused by her family – when of course, she was the abuser.

She was undone by a twist of fate. Her sister transferred to the same university, and her father became ill and landed in the hospital there so that her mother came to live with her sister during that time. These sympathetic friends of the narcissist got to know the mother and sister, because they too often came to the restaurant to eat. Of course, they didn't fit the narcissist's description of Phem.

In an addition, an older cousin, who had come to visit their father and had always smelled a rat in this girl, noticed the odd manner in which these students were relating to the mother and sister, putting two and two together to realize that they had been told some of the narcissist's patented vicious lies about her family. So, he boldly clued them in about the narcissist.

That shock, plus the attempt to get herself declared legally independent of her parents so that she could get herself adopted by rich people, plus the fact that they saw her cruelly using and abusing a suffering Vietnam veteran who loved her, outraged the parasite's new hosts. They compared notes and drove her from their midst.

How outraged were they? So outraged that apparently one of them (upon having too much to drink at a party), in front of everyone, threatened her with violence if she ever showed her face in their midst again.

Normal people don't make normal people THAT mad.

What's more, by my count, this was that narcissist's third such upheaval in life already, at the ripe old age of 19! That is, three times the people around her rose up in mysterious collective hatred of her and drove her from her midst. One such group was her 8th grade class and the other was the other employees she worked summers with in her home town's Recreation Department.

She was so hated by her class that she could not pass between classes in the hall with her classmates, because they would all shoulder her, knocking her into the lockers. Now this sort of thing had never been heard of in that school, and fighting of any sort was very rare there. So, you get an idea of how revolting her classmates found her. Similarly, she scored off the bottom of the Richter Scale in a peer evaluation of the Recreation Department, much lower than any other employee had ever scored.

So, narcissists don't always succeed. Sometimes they are exposed for what they are.

But notice the situations in which exposure occurred. Her fellow employees had an opportunity to tell the truth about her in a peer evaluation form. Getting 100% zeros from them all shocked the director and the manager, who had no idea that everyone hated her. In the case of the 8th grade class, these were kids, unburdened by any fear of being morally condemned for comparing notes and complaining to each other about what she had done to them. In other words, in this environment, the victim didn't feel compelled to cover up the narcissist's crime for her by remaining silent about it. The same was true in the college crowd. Nobody was making sinners out of the victims for telling others what she was doing to people behind their backs.

Perhaps we should take the lesson these young people teach: Don't just pretend it didn't happen; that is rolling over and dying: get justice instead. (Don't treat God or karma as your servant, expecting the Lord of the Universe to avenge you. Lift a finger for yourself.) Expose the narcissist for what he or she is. It's your only defense, because it destroys the narcissist's credibility, thus restoring your good name by discrediting the narcissist's lies about you.

It also spares others pain by warning them about the narcissist.

Back to the story.

Here she was in college, having rejected her family and having been rejected by all her college friends. Absolutely alone. She got a puppy to wag its tail at her, but that apparantly doesn't satisfy a narcissist's need for flattering mirrors.

Years later, she told me that during this "desert" period of her life she had contemplated suicide.

I knew but bits and pieces of the story then, nothing that would justify such a drastic reaction to living alone, so I asked why. All she would say was that she wanted to kill herself "Because all I did was use people."

Over the years I gradually discovered and pieced together the whole story. My understanding is that when she was abandoned and alone, with no mirrors reflecting her flattering false image of herself, her delusions could not be maintained by these mirages. In fact, the last thing she saw in those mirrors was abhorrence of her - a reflection of her true self.

Not what a narcissist wants to see in her mirrors.

Alone with her true self, the fictional character broke down. Hence she lost the mirage in the mirror that covered the likeness of her true self = a despicable person cut off from the human race who just uses others.

What did she do? She suckered her family into taking her back! (They didn't know what she had done to them behind their backs, and she told them that her depraved college friends had hooked her on drugs and tried to drag her away from her family into the cesspool of their immorality.)

Presto-chango, embraced by her hoodwinked family, she got happy again. In fact, she says that thus "coming home" is the only thing that kept her from killing herself.

And so far she has lived happily ever after.

All she needed was mirrors to reflect a falsified image of herself that she can pretend is real, one that keeps her from seeing her true self.

This scenario sheds light on why narcissists often report going through periods when they contemplate suicide but very rarely ever kill themselves: instead they simply find people to fool. Problem solved.

This scenario is also consistent with what a narcissist like Sam Vaknin says, and it squares with my other observations about narcissists. So, I have a good deal of confidence in this explanation. Of course, whether you accept it or not, is up to you.

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Are Narcissists Unhappy?

The discussion at the post Cruel and Unusual Punishment took an ironic turn that you might like to check out.

To briefly summarize:

The post pointed out how narcissists suffer when they are alone. This happens when their sources of narcissistic supply dry up and they can't find another host. No mirrors, no mirage of a false self to identify with . . . they cannot keep unwanted knowledge and feelings suppressed. So, the normally rare and easily re-repressed moments of unwanted self-awareness become frequent and virtually assail them. These are the times when they look in the mirror, see their true selves, and think of suicide.

This is why you can punish a narcissist by simply locking her alone in a room as the post Cruel and Unusual Punishment says.

Some commenters took this post as supportive of their idea that narcissists are unhappy people who suffer greatly inside. But the post doesn't support that idea at all.

It says that to cause the narcissist to suffer, you must LOCK her in that room ALONE. In other words, you must deprive her of mirrors.

Otherwise she will make her life hunky-dory again by simply finding new hosts to con and parasitize = new mirrors.

Yes, deep down inside the narcissist is wretched and miserable, but you are committing an egregious error in logic if you fail to distinguish the level of this "suffering." Any suffering the narcissist experiences is repressed to the unconscious. So, is he really "suffering" at all?

No, he keeps getting high on his drug to kill that pain. He feels fine. In fact, he feels great.

Only in those rare moments when something happens to remind him of the truth about himself, so that the truth rises to consciousness, does he experience a twinge now and then. But what does he then do at the speed of thought? He represses it again!

Bingo! He's happy, happy, happy again.

In other words, he's happy 99.99% of the time. Wouldn't we all wish to be so happy 99.99% of the time?

Normally, narcissists have no trouble repressing the unwanted moments of self-awareness that would make them see themselves for what they are and feel bad about themselves. They think they are grand and perfect. It's great to be them. The VICTIMS they bleed are the ones who are miserable.

That's the power of self-delusion.

Some say, "Well then, why not be like a narcissist then, if being one is so wonderful?"

Precisely!

That's it! That's why psychopaths and other narcissists choose to be the way they are. FOR THE REWARDS IN IT. That's why treatment does no good. That's why you can never get through to them to change them.

Indeed, why should they change, abandon their delusions, and be miserable? As it says in scripture, "The wicked prosper."

They laugh up their sleeve at therapists and others who ASSUME that they must want to change. They think we're the crazy ones for choosing to burden ourselves with a conscience and empathy.

I think this is a crucial fact to face about them.

More on this subject later.

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Technical Problems

We are experiencing spring floods, which raise the high water table (because they have filled in too much marshland for parks) and apparantly cause problems with the phone lines. Even voice communications are scratchy at times. Connection to the Internet is unreliable. And, for much of the day, I am stuck on a dial-up connection.

So, please understand if your comments are not moderated quickly and if my posting and commenting is light. Connecting to the Internet is kinda like a "hit-or-miss" proposition, and even when you have a connection, you never know when it will get dropped because of interfence on the line.