Cool, Calm & Contentious - Merrill Markoe [26]
So here are your choices: the Fan Club President with rose-colored glasses or the Incompetent Boob who is ruining everything and is, therefore, the enemy. If you choose the latter, you offer the narcissist a chance to release decades of pent-up unexamined rage. This works out well for them, since they are continually looking for a way to vent.
It will not, on the other hand, be so great for you.
To survive your beloved narcissist flipping out and screaming at you, it may help you to know that their personality is a mask of fake superiority covering up a deep sense of shame. All that arrogance is a fit thrown by a plus-sized infant who is furious at Mommy for not banishing every problem before it began to bother baby. It was eye-opening to realize that what I thought was a roller coaster of unpredictable behavior was instead a predictable system.
For years I could never tell if the time I spent at home was going to be unexpectedly pleasant or deteriorate into a fight that seemed to come out of nowhere. Now I learned that those unexpected fights, which looked to me like unfortunate breaks in the normal pattern of stability, were the pattern. The placid periods and good times were the exception.
Even if you have made yourself the designated Fan Club President in the ongoing scenario with your narcissist, you can still count on their disposition to keep flip-flopping between grandiosity and rage. That’s just the way it works. It has almost nothing to do with you or your choice of actions. It is based on tiny fluctuations in their mood, as they react to whatever is available, real or imagined. At two o’clock: happy and grandiose; three-fifteen: furious and raging. Within the narrow boundaries of this extremely fragile self-system (which, don’t forget, was created by a frightened three-year-old), everything that is not pumping the narcissist up is trying to destroy them.
At last I had a reasonable explanation for why my brother and I, even armed with perky outfits, tidy haircuts, and carefully selected topics of conversation, always seemed to be wearing and doing and saying the wrong thing at family gatherings.
Now I had insight into what was behind three decades of embarrassing restaurant incidents in which my parents, behaving like aristocracy, treated the stammering waitstaff with barely disguised contempt.
“That’s a very meager amount!” my mother would say, offended by the size of the complimentary crudités tray the waitress placed on our table. It always seemed strange to me that she would make this kind of hostile announcement rather than simply ask for a few more when she was finished. In retrospect, it is a wonder that the members of my family survived so many dinners that must have been drenched in the spit of humiliated, revenge-seeking waitpersons. Perhaps our bodies learned to embrace and process other people’s saliva as an essential nutrient, like riboflavin.
Ultimately, the biggest lesson that came from my narcissism-related reading was learning how to identify members of this annoying tribe when they are encountered in their natural habitat. Like a perfectly camouflaged salamander, almost invisible when he rests on a matching granite boulder, narcissists can be difficult to see. Especially at first, when they wrap themselves inside the charm they use to make themselves attractive in the world. This, of course, means that the charm-intensive arenas of show business and politics are as natural a habitat for narcissists as marshlands are for ducks.
Perhaps the most obvious and familiar red flag is the doting coterie of yes-men. In narcissism talk, these people are called “narcissistic supply.”
Spotting a narcissist is kind of like spotting a bear. Much the way naturalists tell you not to look a grizzly bear in the eye lest it detect a challenge and attack, you are better off not staring down a narcissist. To engage them is to play by their rules. Don’t forget: they are always right. Which means that the