Abuse, Trauma, and Torture - Their Consequences and Effects (12 page)
Read Abuse, Trauma, and Torture - Their Consequences and Effects Online
Authors: Sam Vaknin
Tags: #abuse, #abuser, #ptsd, #recovery, #stress, #torture, #trauma, #victim
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Narcissism and Other People's
Guilt
Narcissists, Narcissistic
Supply and Sources of Supply
Other People's Pain
(Narcissism, Sadism, and Masochism)
The Malignant Optimism of
the Abused (Victims of Narcissists)
How to Spot an Abuser on
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Surviving the
Narcissist
Question:
Is there a point in waiting for
the narcissist to heal? Can he ever get better?
Answer:
The victims of the narcissist's abusive
conduct resort to fantasies and self-delusions to salve their
pain.
Rescue Fantasies
"It is true that he is a
chauvinistic narcissist and that his behaviour is unacceptable and
repulsive. But all he needs is a little love and he will be
straightened out. I will rescue him from his misery and misfortune.
I will give him the love that he lacked as a child. Then his
narcissism will vanish and we will live happily ever
after."
Loving a Narcissist
I believe in the possibility of
loving narcissists if one accepts them unconditionally, in a
disillusioned and expectation-free manner.
Narcissists are narcissists. Take
them or leave them. Some of them are lovable. Most of them are
highly charming and intelligent. The source of the misery of the
victims of the narcissist is their disappointment, their
disillusionment, their abrupt and tearing and tearful realisation
that they fell in love with an ideal of their own making, a
phantasm, an illusion, a fata morgana. This "waking up" is
traumatic. The narcissist always remains the same. It is the victim
who changes.
It is true that narcissists
present a luring facade in order to captivate Sources of
Narcissistic Supply. But this facade is easy to penetrate because
it is inconsistent and too perfect. The cracks are evident from day
one but often ignored. Then there are those who
KNOWINGLY
and
WILLINGLY
commit their emotional wings to the burning narcissistic
candle.
This is the catch-22. To try to
communicate emotions to a narcissist is like discussing atheism
with a religious fundamentalist.
Narcissists have emotions
, very strong ones, so terrifyingly overpowering and
negative that they hide them, repress, block and transmute them.
They employ a myriad of defence mechanisms to cope with their
repressed emotions: projective identification, splitting,
projection, intellectualisation, rationalisation.
Any effort to relate to the
narcissist emotionally is doomed to failure, alienation and rage.
Any attempt to "understand" (in retrospect or prospectively)
narcissistic behaviour patterns, reactions, or his inner world in
emotional terms – is equally hopeless. Narcissists should be
regarded as a force of nature or an accident waiting to
happen.
The Universe has no master-plot
or mega-plan to deprive anyone of happiness. Being born to
narcissistic parents, for instance, is not the result of a
conspiracy. It is a tragic event, for sure. But it cannot be dealt
with emotionally, without professional help, or haphazardly. Stay
away from narcissists, or face them aided by your own
self-discovery through therapy. It can be done.
Narcissists have no interest in
emotional or even intellectual stimulation by significant others.
Such feedback is perceived as a threat. Significant others in the
narcissist's life have very clear roles: the accumulation and
dispensation of past Primary Narcissistic Supply in order to
regulate current Narcissistic Supply. Nothing less but definitely
nothing more. Proximity and intimacy breed contempt. A process of
devaluation is in full operation throughout the life of the
relationship.
A passive witness to the
narcissist's past accomplishments, a dispenser of accumulated
Narcissistic Supply, a punching bag for his rages, a co-dependent,
a possession (though not prized but taken for granted) and nothing
much more. This is the ungrateful,
FULL TIME
, draining job of being
the narcissist's significant other.
But humans are not instruments.
To regard them as such is to devalue them, to reduce them, to
restrict them, to prevent them from realising their potential.
Inevitably, narcissists lose interest in their instruments, these
truncated versions of full-fledged humans, once they cease to serve
them in their pursuit of glory and fame.
Consider
"friendship" with a narcissist
as an example of such thwarted relationships.
One cannot really get to know a narcissist "friend". One cannot be
friends with a narcissist and one cannot love a narcissist.
Narcissists are addicts. They are no different to drug addicts.
They are in pursuit of gratification through the drug known as
Narcissistic Supply. Everything and
EVERYONE
around them is an
object, a potential source (to be idealised) or not (and, then to
be cruelly discarded).
Narcissists home in on potential
suppliers like cruise missiles. They are excellent at imitating
emotions, at exhibiting the right behaviours on cue, and at
manipulating.
All generalisations are
false, of course, and there are bound to be some happy
relationships with narcissists. I discuss the narcissistic couple
in
one of my FAQs
.
One example of a happy marriage is when a
somatic narcissist teams up with a cerebral one or vice
versa.
Narcissists can be happily
married to submissive, subservient, self-deprecating, echoing,
mirroring and indiscriminately supportive spouses. They also do
well with masochists. But it is difficult to imagine that a
healthy, normal person would be happy in such a
folie a deux
("madness in twosome" or shared
psychosis).
It is also difficult to
imagine a benign and sustained influence on the narcissist of a
stable, healthy mate/spouse/partner. One of my FAQs is dedicated to
this issue
(
"The Narcissist's Spouse /
Mate / Partner"
).
BUT many a
spouse/friend/mate/partner like to
BELIEVE
that – given sufficient
time and patience – they will be the ones to rid the narcissist of
his inner demons. They think that they can "rescue" the narcissist,
shield him from his (distorted) self, as it were.
The narcissist makes use of this
naiveté and exploits it to his benefit. The natural protective
mechanisms, which are provoked in normal people by love – are cold
bloodedly used by the narcissist to extract yet more Narcissistic
Supply from his writhing victim.
The narcissist affects his
victims by infiltrating their psyches, by penetrating their
defences. Like a virus, it establishes a new genetic strain within
his/her victims. It echoes through them, it talks through them, it
walks through them. It is like the invasion of the body
snatchers.
You should be careful to separate
your self from the narcissist's seed inside you, this alien growth,
this spiritual cancer that is the result of living with a
narcissist. You should be able to tell apart the real you and the
parts assigned to you by the narcissist. To cope with him/her, the
narcissist forces you to "walk on eggshells" and develop a False
Self of your own. It is nothing as elaborate as his False Self –
but it is there, in you, as a result of the trauma and abuse
inflicted upon you by the narcissist.
Thus, perhaps we should talk
about VoNPD, another mental health diagnostic category – Victims of
NPD.
They experience shame and anger
for their past helplessness and submissiveness. They are hurt and
sensitised by the harrowing experience of sharing a simulated
existence with a simulated person, the narcissist. They are scarred
and often suffer from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). Some
of them lash out at others, offsetting their frustration with
bitter aggression.
Like his disorder, the narcissist
is all-pervasive. Being the victim of a narcissist is a condition
no less pernicious than being a narcissist. Great mental efforts
are required to abandon a narcissist and physical separation is
only the first (and least important) step.
One can abandon a narcissist –
but the narcissist is slow to abandon his victims. He is there,
lurking, rendering existence unreal, twisting and distorting with
no respite, an inner, remorseless voice, lacking in compassion and
empathy for its victim.
The narcissist is there in
spirit long after it had vanished in the flesh. This is the real
danger that the victims of the narcissist face: that they become
like him, bitter, self-centred, lacking in empathy. This is the
last bow of the narcissist, his curtain call,
by
proxy
as it
were.
Narcissistic Tactics
The narcissist tends to surround
himself with his inferiors (in some respect: intellectually,
financially, physically). He limits his interactions with them to
the plane of his superiority. This is the safest and fastest way to
sustain his grandiose fantasies of omnipotence and omniscience,
brilliance, ideal traits, perfection and so on.
Humans are interchangeable and
the narcissist does not distinguish one individual from another. To
him they are all inanimate elements of "his audience" whose job is
to reflect his False Self. This generates a perpetual and permanent
cognitive dissonance:
The narcissist despises the very
people who sustain his Ego boundaries and functions. He cannot
respect people so expressly and clearly inferior to him – yet he
can never associate with people evidently on his level or superior
to him, the risk of narcissistic injury in such associations being
too great. Equipped with a fragile Ego, precariously teetering on
the brink of narcissistic injury – the narcissist prefers the safe
route. But he feels contempt for himself and for others for having
preferred it.
Some narcissist are also
psychopaths (suffer from the Antisocial PD) and/or sadists.
Antisocials don't really enjoy hurting others – they simply don't
care one way or the other. But sadists do enjoy it.
Classical narcissists do
not enjoy wounding others – but they do enjoy the sensation of
unlimited power and the validation of their grandiose fantasies
when they do harm others or are in the position to do so. It is
more the
POTENTIAL
to hurt others than the actual act that turns
them on.
The Neverending Story
Even the official termination of
a relationship with a narcissist is not the end of the affair. The
Ex "belongs" to the narcissist. She is an inseparable part of his
Pathological Narcissistic Space. This possessive streak survives
the physical separation.
Thus, the narcissist is likely to
respond with rage, seething envy, a sense of humiliation and
invasion and violent-aggressive urges to an ex's new boyfriend, or
new job (to her new life without him). Especially since it implies
a "failure" on his part and, thus negates his
grandiosity.
But there is a second
scenario:
If the narcissist firmly believes
(which is very rare) that the ex does not and will never represent
any amount, however marginal and residual, of any kind (primary or
secondary) of Narcissistic Supply – he remains utterly unmoved by
anything she does and anyone she may choose to be with.
Narcissists do feel bad about
hurting others and about the unsavoury course their lives tend to
assume. Their underlying (and subconscious) ego-dystony (=feeling
bad about themselves) was only recently discovered and described.
But the narcissist feels bad only when his Supply Sources are
threatened because of his behaviour or following a narcissistic
injury in the course of a major life crisis.