More on Narcissism

Oh my! I’m looking up narcissism because of the callous way I’m being treated by someone, and instead, I’m finding a description of some family members who’ve passed on. Pretty shocking!!  This part is the most meaningful to me: “children of narcissists keep trying, as if by bonding with new narcissists we could somehow cure our narcissistic parents by finding the key to their heart. Thus, we’ve been trained to keep loving people who can’t love us back.”

Only, it wasn’t my parents who were so narcissistic. It was other people who figured prominently in my life. And although we perhaps all have some narcissistic traits, I met someone recently who was the real deal. Was so relieved to get out of his grasp, and yet, in some ways, I do miss him. He was so charming, and I thought maybe we had some sort of special connection.

But what I found the most astonishing about him, and it’s also true for my not so narcissistic ‘friend’ as well, is how they could twist things around to not take any responsibility  when they’ve done something wrong, and to blame you instead – you’re the bad guy – for trying to make them feel bad about it. How dare you! But it’s alright for them to jump down someone’s throat for not giving them what they want when they demand it, even if it’s something that infringes on that person’s personal rights. Kind of like a child sex molester getting angry with and punishing a child for not giving him sex on demand. That’s narcissism.

They’re pretty good at maintaining a conventional persona in superficial associations with people who mean absolutely nothing to them, and they’ll flatter the hell out of you if you have something they can use or if, for some reason, they perceive you as an authority figure. That is, as long as they think you don’t count or they’re afraid of you, they’ll treat you well enough that you may mistake it for love. But, as soon as you try to get close to them, they’ll say that you are too demanding — and, if you ever say “I love you,” they’ll presume that you belong to them as a possession or an appendage, and treat you very very badly right away.

The abrupt change from decent treatment to outright abuse is very shocking and bewildering, and it’s so contrary to normal experience that I was plenty old before I realized that it was actually my expression of affection that triggered the narcissists’ nasty reactions. Once they know you are emotionally attached to them, they expect to be able to use you like an appliance and shove you around like a piece of furniture. If you object, then they’ll say that obviously you don’t really love them or else you’d let them do whatever they want with you. If you should be so uppity as to express a mind and heart of your own, then they will cut you off — just like that, sometimes trashing you and all your friends on the way out the door. The narcissist will treat you just like a broken toy or tool or an unruly body part: “If thy hand or thy foot offend thee, cut them off” [Matt. 18:8]. This means you. 

How To Recognize a Narcissist: https://www.halcyon.com/jmashmun/npd/howto.html 

If you’re reading this because of problems with someone you know now, the chances are excellent that one or both of your parents was a narcissist. Narcissists are so much trouble that only people with special prior training (i.e., who were raised by narcissists) get seriously involved with them. Sometimes narcissists’ children become narcissists, too, but this is by no means inevitable, provided stable love was given by someone, such as the non-narcissist parent or grandparents. Beyond that, a happy marriage will heal many old wounds for the narcissist’s child.

But, even though children of narcissists don’t automatically become narcissists themselves and can survive with enough intact psychically to lead happy and productive lives away from their narcissistic parents, because we all love our parents whether they can love us back or not, children of narcissists are kind of bent — “You can’t get blood out of a stone,” but children of narcissists keep trying, as if by bonding with new narcissists we could somehow cure our narcissistic parents by finding the key to their heart. Thus, we’ve been trained to keep loving people who can’t love us back, and we will often tolerate or actively work to maintain connections with narcissistic individuals whom others, lacking our special training, find alienating and repellent from first contact, setting ourselves up to be hurt yet again in the same old way.