Malignant Self Love - Narcissism Revisited

Excerpts from the Archives
of the
Narcissism List

Part 19

1. The Hated-Hating Personality Disordered

The personality disordered are usually hated. It is a fact. An unpleasant one but there it is. You need only read professional texts (case histories) to realize how despised, derided, hated, and avoided the personality disordered are even by the therapeutic professions. Because many people don't even realize that they suffer from a personality disorder - they feel victimized, wronged, discriminated against, and hopeless. They don't understand why they are so hated, avoided, and abandoned. They define themselves as victims and attribute mental disorders to others ("pathologizing").

They employ the primitive defence mechanisms of splitting and projection augmented by the more sophisticated mechanism of projective identification.

In other words:

They "split off" from their personality the bad feelings of hating and being hated - because they cannot cope with negative feelings.

Then, they project these feelings unto others ("he hates me, I don't hate anyone", "I am a good soul, but he is a psychopath", "he is stalking me, I just want to stay away from him", "he is a con-artist, I am the innocent victim").

Then they FORCE others to behave in a way that JUSTIFIES their projections and models (projective identification followed by counter projective identification).

I, for instance, firmly "believe" (it is now conscious but it mostly used to be unconscious) that women are evil predators, out to suck my lifeblood, and abandon me. So, I try and make them fulfil this prophecy. I  try and make sure that they behave exactly in this manner, that they do not abnegate and ruin the model that I so craftily, so elaborately, and so studiously designed.

I tease them and betray them and bad mouth them and taunt them and torment them and stalk them and haunt them and pursue them and subjugate them and frustrate them until they do abandon me.

At this stage I will feel vindicated - not realizing MY contribution to this recurrent pattern.

In a nutshell, the personality disordered are full of negative emotions.

They are filled to the brim with aggression and its transmutations, hatred and pathological envy. They are constantly seething with rage, repressed anger, jealousy, and other corroding emotions. Unable to release these emotions (personality disorders are reducible to mechanisms which defend against "forbidden" emotions) - they split them, project them, and force others to behave in a way which LEGITIMIZES, JUSTIFIES, and EXPLAINS these negative emotions. "No wonder I hate him so - look what he did to me". The personality disordered are doomed to inhabit the land of self inflicted injuries. They generate the very hate that legitimizes their hate which generated the hate in the first place.

2. Hating Love

NOTHING, but I mean NOTHING is more hated by a narcissist than this sentence, "I Love You". It evokes in the narcissist almost primordial reactions. It provokes him to uncontrollable rage. Why is that?

1. The narcissist hates women virulently and vehemently. Being a misogynist he identifies being loved with being possessed, encroached upon, engulfed, digested, and excreted. To him love is a dangerous intestinal tract.

2. Being loved means being known intimately. The Narcissist likes to think that he is so unique that no one can ever really fathom him. The narcissist believes that he is above mere human understanding and empathy.
   He is ONE of a kind. To say "I love you" means to negate this feeling, to try to drag him to the lowest common denominator, to threaten his sense of uniqueness. After all, everyone is capable of loving and everyone, even the basest human beings, actually love. To the narcissist loving is an ANIMAL reflex - exactly like sex.

3. The Narcissist knows that he is a con-artist, a fraud, an elaborate hoax, a script, hollow, and really non-existent. The person who loves a narcissist is either lying (what is there to love in a narcissist?) - or a dependent, blind creature, an imbecile, unable to discern the truth. The narcissist cannot tolerate the thought that he selected a liar or an idiot for a mate. Indirectly, a declaration of love is a devastating critique of the narcissist's own powers of judgement.

When you are happy - the narcissist wants you all to DIE. Nothing less than horrible, tortuous death. He is so pathologically envious of you that he wishes you never existed. Being a tad paranoid, he also nurtures the growing conviction that you are doing it ON PURPOSE, to remind him of how miserable he is, how deficient, how deprived and  discriminated against. He regards your interaction with your children as a provocation, an assault on his emotional welfare and on his emotional balance. Seething envy, boiling rage, and violent thoughts is the flammable concoction that floods the narcissist's brain whenever he sees other people happy (see here: http://excerpts.cjb.net ).

3. Living with a Narcissist

You cannot change people, not in the real, profound, deep sense. You can only adapt to them and adapt them to you. If you do find her rewarding at times - you should do two things, in my opinion:

1. Determine your limits and boundaries. How much and in which ways can you adapt to her (=accept her AS SHE IS) AND to which extent and in which ways would you like her to adapt to you (=accept you as you are). Act accordingly. Accept what you have decided to accept and reject the rest.
   Change in you what you are willing and able to change - and ignore the rest.
   It is sort of an unwritten contract of co-existence (could well be a written one, if you are more formally inclined).

2. Try to maximize the number of times that "...her walls are down", that you "..find her totally fascinating and everything I desire." What makes her behave this way? Is it something that YOU say or do? Is it preceded by events of a specific nature? Is there anything you can do to make her behave this way more often?

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