the weight of narcissism

On Surviving Decades of NPD and How I Learned Its Language

Credit: fcscafeine

I once knew a guy, many years ago, who had to be the center of his girlfriend’s universe.

She was a friend of mine, very soft-spoken and pretty, and when we were all at parties together and he saw her speaking to another boy, he’d become physically abusive. In front of everyone. Not that being physically abusive in private is any better, but it seemed to me to be particularly horrible because he clearly felt publicly entitled, and certain that no one would stop him. Beyond the physical aspects of it, there was also name-calling designed to shame her and make her hate herself. Eventually, after five or six times, the other guys in our group of friends manhandled him out of the apartment we were in and slammed the door in his face. What didn’t happen though, were further guardrails: no one (myself included) thought to go to our high school counselor and say Hey this guy is beating up on his girlfriend and thirty of us have seen it, or call the local police and say the same thing. We were high school teenagers, most of us wrapped up in our own lives and dramas. But most of us, especially the girls in the group, would never forget it.

When my friend left for college, the guy followed her there. She transferred to get away from him, and then he transferred to the same school. I’d lost touch with her by then, but the last I’d heard of him was that after graduation he’d gone to work for a big New York City real estate corporation owned by a certain person of orange hue, who shall go nameless. (Please: let’s keep him nameless.) It was the late 1980s and there was a lot of money around, and a lot of drugs, and this orange person’s face was on every schlocky magazine cover almost every week. Those of us who knew what had happened over the years decided that he was the perfect boss for this guy, who worked for this man directly.

I remember telling my father what had happened to my friend; he became irate. He knew her — after the divorce, he sometimes took us out for lunch in the city together on the weekends — and it seemed unfathomable to him that something like this might have happened in our somewhat tidy little community. My father called the guy a narcissistic monster, which was the first time I’d heard him say the word narcissist. Used together with the word monster, I envisioned an evil golem, an out-of-control creature stomping on everything he could, just because he could, even though he was just sixteen at the time.

We were driving along the FDR Drive on a Saturday going to pick up my friend from her father’s house when my dad said to me Narcissists are not made, they’re born.

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Narcissism has become a word that is far overused in our lexicon, like trauma, or spirituality.

When words like these become part of our cultural vernacular, they grow hackneyed and clichéd, their actual meaning diluted and their importance watered down like cheap coffee. Ask anyone who has experienced C-PTSD and they will assure you that missing your bus connection is not a traumatic experience compared to, say, being physically abused for four years every afternoon at 4 pm by the local math teacher. Or having your vehicle blown out from under you and your best friends by an IED. Likewise, a sweatshirt emblazoned with a silkscreened image of Buddha does not make one spiritual.

So too narcissism. Not every annoying asshat who cuts in front of you on line at Trader Joe’s is a narcissist and not every narcissist is an asshat, although (it seems) most are. Narcissism is a complex clinical diagnosis on the borderline personality disorder continuum, with all sorts of sub-diagnoses, most of which can be found here.

I’ve tried (hard) not to write this because I had my life upturned and nearly ended by two very serious and dangerous narcissists, and my response to narcissism is to not feed it in any way; it’s taken me a very long time and a lot of therapeutic intervention to get to this place. After five decades of living with one clinically diagnosed NPD (narcissistic personality disordered) parent, I’ve learned its language. I know what it sounds like. I’ve also taken a giant step back and been able to see how it manifests in my life when I’m not paying attention the way I need to be. And unfortunately, today, we all need to be paying attention.

We also have to mind our collective health because it’s constitutionally exhausting when this kind of vigilance becomes one’s burden. But we exist in the land of selfies and TikTok, where sixteen-year-olds expect to become seven-figure influencers because they feel entitled to be, and where the nuances of interpersonal relationships have collapsed into a digital tangle that replaces human connection. We now live on the planet of ME, especially on the political stage.

If you’ve read Motherland, you know my story. If you haven’t, here is the short version: I grew up the only child of a former television singer and model who went to every extent she could to prove her father — the man who told her at five years old that she was ugly — wrong. She learned what to do to attract men, and if anything or anyone interfered with that — my presence, my relationship with my father, my stepfather’s children and grandchildren, my paternal aunt and uncle and cousins, her in-laws, her work colleagues — she turned their worlds upside down into a hellscape of nonstop, uncontainable chaos, which, despite her age, continues to this day. She conspired. She planned. If she had a Snidely Whiplash mustache to twirl, she’d have done it. On a narcissistic tear, she would show up at my Manhattan office to fight with me in front of my colleagues, waiting in the lobby until I appeared on my way to or from lunch, or on my way home. Or she would wait for me in my apartment lobby, sometimes for as long as five hours, until she saw me; very often, I would pay off the doormen to tell her I wasn’t there. When I was a freshman in college, she called my dorm room phone to fight with me, and when I stopped answering her screaming calls, she managed to figure out that the next room was one number up from mine (I was 3354, my neighbor was 3355, her neighbor was 3356, and so on), and she called every room — all thirty of them, in rapid succession — trying to find someone who she could sweet talk into finding me, saying that something was wrong with my phone and that she was concerned. The rages went on until she became exhausted and depleted, her dopamine flattened like a punctured helium balloon. Then she’d become doting and kind, sometimes for hours, sometimes for days, until she phoned again and the timbre of her voice changed. She’d call me El-iss-a. (I am Lissie to close family and friends, and have been since I was two.) After that, I was the recipient of almost all of her ire, all of the time. I was a loser, she’d say, hopeless (“like your father”), would never amount to anything, and a lesbian just to get back at her. She regularly called fourteen times a day (and often still does), leaving wailing, bellowing messages, and (this is key) absolutely incensed that I wouldn’t pick up and fight with her, or try and reason with her, or let her destroy me. Because, she’d say, I owed her; I owed her the fight, and the tears, and the attention. If I was tired, or beaten down, I did pick up the phone and let her vent her spleen, believing that I deserved everything she dished out no matter how unhinged and completely outrageous it was.

Somewhere in the last few years — it has taken me this long — I realized that there was a definable pattern to her attacks. Ask any survivor of abuse of any sort, and they will tell you the same: there are patterns. Attacks may come early in the morning during a cortisol spike, or when her midnight Xanax has worn off, or after too much booze. They may come if someone in her life has some sort of quantifiable success as a singer or actress, and overshadows her. They may come if she believes she’s being ignored after calling me a dozen times in a row. They may come if I’m ill because it takes attention away from her. After living with us for four months during the worst days of Covid, she went home and tried to self-soothe by buying thirty (more) tubes of lipstick. Because I manage her finances, I put a limit on her debit and credit card, which she only discovered when she tried to use them to order makeup. Do you feel she is withholding money for essentials, her bank apparently asked her. Yes, she said. And the bank did exactly what they were supposed to do under such circumstances: they reported me to Adult Protective Services, which launched a 90-day investigation of financial wrongdoing. It was eventually dropped as frivolous when they realized it was about lipstick. They were apologetic and said they saw this kind of thing all the time. Two months later, I had a Covid-related stroke.

Where she goes, chaos follows.

Another narcissistic person in my life was similar: they placed themselves at the center of their children's lives even when the latter were adults, and their children lived to please this person, always falling short. Nothing was ever enough; nothing could satisfy them. When they eventually, inevitably, pointed their rage at me and attempted to turn the rest of the family against me, lobbying them and largely succeeding — I was no longer invited to family functions; I was relieved of godmother status; I was made a pariah, as I write in Permission — I spent a decade begging for their love, for their forgiveness, even though I had done nothing wrong. But they identified in me a kind of innate self-loathing that could be set off like a rocket under the right circumstances. For the next ten years, I believed that I had no right to exist because they said, matter-of-factly, that I didn’t. And I came this close to not.

My mother is almost ninety now, and she still possesses many of the salient qualities of her younger years. Diagnosed in the mid-1990s with clinical narcissistic personality disorder, she never sought help because, as a rule, NPDs don’t (because nothing is ever wrong with them). Sometimes her cycles are faster and sometimes slower and longer; just today, because I only spoke to her three times yesterday, she called my cell phone this morning, screaming, name-calling, berating, abusing, and drumming up every conceivable accusation she could throw at me. I took only one of her calls, and let the rest go to voicemail, where they are transcripted and saved; I count this as a victory, particularly because it no longer involves violent stomach upset on my part. It just is what it is.

I have gone no contact with the other person I speak of, above, because I realized that every time we communicated — every time I harbored a shred of hope that somehow we could heal our relationship; this is what narcissists strive for to keep their victims off-balance — they spewed venom to and about me that reduced me to tears. They verbally eviscerated me because it made them feel better, like releasing a pressure valve. It took me a decade to get to a place of no contact, which simultaneously saddens me and gives me some peace. I don’t miss them, per se; I miss the idea of them, and all of the things I thought we had together, but didn’t.

Over the years, narcissism has invaded my life in more insidious ways: I fight an attraction to people in my professional and creative life who are identical in temperament to my mother because theirs is the narcissistic language I know and speak fluently; it’s familiar. It fits like a hand in a glove. It’s only when I change the narrative from their required pattern to one of mutuality that things go off the rails. And that’s the problem with narcissists, when you try to express your needs: not only will you not have them met, but they will attempt to destroy you. Do not kid yourself. Narcissists keep their minions around for one reason only: to fill their buckets with supply.

If you have or suspect you have a narcissist in your life — and let’s face it, where I live, we all do, every single day — It is important to recognize and track spikes in narcissistic tantrums as though they were an EKG: do they come after boundaries and guardrails are put in place? (Yes.) Do the tantrums come after they’ve experienced a perceived internal or external threat to the filling of their narcissistic bucket? (Always.) Do they come if someone else is getting the spotlight? (You can count on it.) How much energy do they have? (Endless.) When will it stop? (Never, unless you go no contact.) This is all predictable. What is not predictable is how far the tentacles of chaos can reach when boundaries are drawn.

How bad can it get if they act out? Very. I read this somewhere once, and it is spot on, and important to read and absorb at this particular moment in time: There is nothing as dangerous as a malignant narcissist who is out of options. If they’re going down, everyone is going down with them. For proof of this, look at the state of the world, at the orange golem and his assemblage of flying monkeys who think nothing of destroying the world around them in an uncontrollable, shit-throwing-gorilla manner. The only way to contain a narcissist is to cut off their supply; keep them out of your conversation, keep them out of your emails and chats, keep them off your phone; keep them out of the news. Resist the belief that you are capable of changing them; you’re not. Complete blackout, if at all possible. I cannot go no contact with my mother for whom I am caregiving manager, but the minute her narcissism spikes, I stop taking her calls. She can leave as many screaming messages as she wants as many places as she wants to leave them, until she exhausts herself. She has responded in the past by throwing a tantrum: she overdraws her accounts, self-harms (sometimes very seriously and sometimes not, but always requiring immediate attention), and lies about me and/or my wife to members of the medical community. And we are used to it. She’s 89 years old; it likely is never going to stop.

And still, you will be tempted to allow narcissists back into your life after you’ve banned them because they tend to be profoundly charming and engaging. They may beg; they may love-bomb; they may promise you the world. And then they’ll hand you your head when the time is right. I watched this unfold with my school friend and her boyfriend; it was cyclical — charm, love-bomb, promises, gas-lighting, vicious verbal attack, vicious physical attack, rinse, repeat. Eventually, something was likely done because this guy finally stopped attacking my friend— at least in public. When he died in a horrific accident a few years ago, the papers declared him a saint, a devout man of community, someone who was always giving back and helping the world around him. He married someone else, and so I wondered about his widow, and about the orange creature who employed him right after college. And I wondered whether — with people like this — the truth ever comes out, and under what circumstances. I didn’t attend the funeral; I couldn’t bring myself to. But my old friend did, and apparently wore large Prada sunglasses to avoid being recognized, more than forty years after we were all students together.

When you face down narcissism on the public or private stage and hear yourself saying things like Can you believe he did X, or OMG, I’m so shocked that she did what she said she’d do, do this instead: follow the patterns. Chart their narcissistic swings as you would an EKG. Learn the language: blame-shifting, gaslighting, love-bombing, projecting. Understand exactly how dangerous these people are, and that they are no reflection on you.

And then: walk away and stay away, no matter how loudly they scream.