Day: July 24, 2015

My Mother was brutally narcissistic.

In her mind, I was an object, a tool for the control and abuse of my father; a thing she used to secure and please new boyfriends.

I was her ‘thing’.

My Mother’s control over my intellectual and emotional life was so complete
when she cried, I cried.

I cried even when I didn’t know why she was crying.

I meet my Mother everywhere.

My involvement with narcissists is a clinical symptom called “traumatic replication” and of all the damage my Mother did to me, this need to
recreate my sick relationship with her is the worst.

Thanks to therapy I’ve learned how to tell these emotional vampires to move on.

These are the five things you can expect a narcissist to do when you tell him or her to move on:

 Stalking

Expect a narcissist to treat setting a personal boundary as a violation
of his right to control your life.

My Mother barged into my bedroom at all hours.

She read my mail.

She even took the two bucks my grandparents sent me as a weekly allowance.

What was mine was Mother’s which meant nothing was mine.

To a narcissist sharing is nothing more than giving them their due.

In life, stalking can take the form of “letting you know” they watched
you eating at 2AM through your kitchen window.

Why would someone be up at 2 AM to watch me eat peanut butter out
of a jar with a spoon?

Because in her mind it breaches a boundary that shouldn’t apply.

Online this breach of boundaries can look like excessive admiration.

Or it can be creating a new account in the hope of conning me into
another relationship.

Or it can mean taking over a portion of one of my social media accounts.

Never trust anyone with the keys to any of your social media accounts.

Smear Campaigns

When the two of you first met you were the golden boy, an angel, a man of
intellect and gifts.

Now you are shit and everyone needs to know; especially other narcissists who also hate you because you might actually have a knack for doing something they can’t do.

You must be neutralized.

When a narcissist ‘loves’ you, it is because you have something he wants.

If you are beautiful in life then he will want your beauty as a show of his appeal.

In virtual reality, it can work the same way.

A narcissist in virtual reality is quite happy with someone who has an
appealing avatar and a flair for witty banter.

By virtue of being conquered, you are flawed.

No one hates himself more than a narcissist.

The qualities that drew him to you are a threat.

Especially if you’ve begun to see through the facade and are
longer blind to the obvious.

Opinions that contradict the narcissists good opinion of himself are intolerable.

Anyone who questions the absolute right of the narcissist to do as he or she pleases is subject to a ruthless smear campaign.

This is where the shamelessness of pathological narcissism is an advantage.

They will do whatever it takes to make sure you can’t ignore them.

This is different from letting you know they’re watching.

This is stalking and smear campaign combined.

Triangulation

My Mother convinced me that my Father was “the enemy.”

As a child, I blamed my Father for all of my suffering.

My Father was slow.

My Father was stupid.

My Father was the reason we were broke; not my Mother’s use of
credit cards as free money.

I hated my Father because my Mother told me to.

I’ve yet to discover what my real feelings for him are and suspect that I have none because so much of my Mother’s emotional life became mine by default.

In life a triangulation telling people I don’t know about my “tragic” mental state complete with outright lies about violent rages.

Online it takes the form of telling people who don’t know me a story of
half-truths and innuendo.

Building a minion.

The vampire metaphor is perfect for pathological narcissism.

The Vampire is a predator corpse whose ‘existence’ requires the living.

In the jargon of substance abuse treatment, this is ‘codependency.’

The co-dependent lives to suffer from the addict he or she enables.

Certainly, addicts and narcissists share much in common.

However, a man or a woman in the full bloom of an addiction simply lacks the organizational skill to manipulate other people into participating in a campaign of harassment and intimidation.

The goal of the narcissist is to destroy anyone who becomes a potential source of shame.

In life, this can be contacting a potential property owner who is about to rent to you and fabricating a destructive lie, with the help of a ‘friend’ who is vulnerable to triangulation.

Online this often involves initiating a whisper campaign designed to cause people to drop you as a contact.

The point is they can’t do it alone.

 Shaming.

The worst thing you can do to a narcissist is ignore him.

Once you’ve set your boundaries and have proven that you can keep them you can expect an inevitable tirade of accusations designed to make you feel uncertain of yourself, and flawed.

If that doesn’t work they use a tactic called hoovering.

The narcissist is fueled by an arrogant sense of entitlement.

You’re not supposed to mean ‘no’ when you say it.

In life, hoovering is as simple as complaining that he tried to reach you yesterday because he felt ill, but fortunately, he was able to find someone who isn’t so “shut-down.”

Online it can be inciting a flying monkey to send you an email bomb.

The narcissist will do everything in his power to shame you into submission.

Your job is to protect yourself.

Just as the Vampire lives only in darkness, the narcissist moves in secret.

Your words and the details that he learns about your life will become weapons for your destruction.

You can protect yourself.

In life, I cc every correspondence between a narcissist and myself to my therapist.

Online, I make letter bombs and other forms of psychological abuse public.

If a narcissist knows about your history of abuse expect him to use it to trigger you.

We survivors of abuse must understand that we cannot change what happened.

We will never please the narcissistic parent who abused us.

I’m finally healthy enough to understand that I can stop trying to please my Mother.

I can have my life now.

It’s OK for me to like it.

Now I need to learn to protect it.

(c) Rob Goldstein 2015-2017

 

Save

Save

Save

Save