Cool, Calm & Contentious - Merrill Markoe [25]
Coming to a real understanding of how a narcissistic personality works took persistence. For a while, it just didn’t add up. It was counterintuitive. One reason may be that some experts believe that the narcissist’s emotional system becomes fatally damaged at about the age of three, maybe from something as common and inevitable as failed initial attempts at independence from Mommy. The freshly wounded three-year-old, unable to make the right adjustment, continues to cling to the infantile idea that baby and Mommy are the same all-powerful person. Sometimes he keeps clinging to this fallacy and applying it to everyone he meets for the rest of his life. So say goodbye to the development of empathy. Since everyone else is, in his view, already part of him and his system, there is no need to worry about other people’s feelings. For the eternally infantile narcissist, there is only one person and one correct opinion: his.
Finally I could see how my mother (like every narcissist in good standing) was chained to a seesaw of two behavioral extremes: grandiosity and rage. Anything that happened to her inspired one reaction or the other. Things were either all good or all bad. If it wasn’t summer, it was winter.
Here, at last, was an explanation for that mysterious fight on Christmas.
When my mother was allowed to be the one to pick out my clothing, it fed her grandiosity and she was pleased. But when I suggested that I had an idea I liked better than hers, I was calling her worthless and therefore humiliating her. If I wasn’t feeding her grandiosity, then I was provoking her rage.
But how could I have possibly known, without talking to a shrink, that according to the unbendable rules of the narcissistic personality disorder, if I was not paying homage to my mother’s taste by embracing the clothing she picked out, then in her view of things I was picking a fight? I didn’t understand that narcissists never roll with the punches because I didn’t know that narcissists can never be wrong. Or that, for my mother, the act of buying me a present was not about finding something I might like but a way for her to pump up her own sense of self-worth.
Had I just shut up and let her waste her money on another gathered skirt decorated with appliqué ducks that I would never wear, I would have provided her with more evidence that she had all the right answers. Instead, by thinking that my opinion mattered too, and that I was showing respect by helping her buy me something I would find useful, I had ground her face in the dirt and triggered her rage.
“In the Greek myth, Narcissus fell in love with his own reflection. But narcissism isn’t actually about self-love,” my shrink explained. “More like self-obsession. Anyone who isn’t part of the pillar of support is part of the abyss around it.”
Or, as one of my friends once explained this credo: “I’m the piece of shit the world revolves around.”
Here’s how it works: When a narcissist admits you into their inner circle, you haven’t just made a friend, you have been annexed by an imperialist country with only one resident. Your borders have been erased. The subtext of all future interactions with this person, forevermore, will be: “What’s mine is mine and what’s yours is mine.” Welcome to a world where there is no you!
A narcissist cannot tolerate seeing you as separate because he is a jumbo-sized three-year-old child who must be at the center of your world as well as his own. Either your needs are perfectly aligned with his or you can expect some kind of a tantrum.
Once you are involved with your narcissist, there are only two acceptable ways for you to behave with them: you become part of the admiring support team or you become the fall guy. If you are not mirroring your narcissist by reinforcing what they stand for,