I'll keep this as short as I can. I have been in business with my brother for over fifteen years. During that time he has been almost impossible to deal with and has only gotten worse. Finally after 10 years of doing all the work and getting half the money while he traipsed around the world, I told him I no longer wanted to be in business with him. We acquired about a thousand acres of property in our business and I asked him to divide it any way he wanted and I would take whatever half he didn't want. He told me if I wanted my property I would have to sue him. After fruitlessly trying to appease him for another year and a half I finally did sue him. And so began his campaign to destroy me and my family. His slanders and libels and manipulations have destroyed my relationship with my mom and sisters and cousins. My daughter has not seen her grandmother in two years because she (my mother) bought his lies. I am barred from the family property. He has cost me literally hundreds of thousands of dollars by delaying things for nearly five years now. He is trying to bankrupt me so that he can steal my half of the property which is worth a couple of million dollars. He has brought tremendous emotional pain and stress to both my wife and me. I could fill a book with the crap this jerk has pulled but most people here undoubtedly could write their own.
This is the point I would like to make. In two weeks I am filing a MASSIVE defamation, fraud, breach of contract etc. suit against him. I have the documents and the witnesses to make it stick, but more importantly I intend to knock his God blessed head so far off that he permanently seeks some other victim or has a breakdown and actually might seek help. This is not revenge it is survival. This is the only way I have to get this malignant growth permanently off my back. If I destroy him financially and take everything he owns I will sleep like a baby. He did nothing to help me in the business other than manipulate me with false promises for years so that I would make him a living and complain that I wasn't making him enough. It is largely irrelevant to me how he got to be like this and it is at the moment largely irrelevant to me whether or not he is in psychic pain. I don't care if Scott Peterson was feeling a little out of sorts when he killed his wife and son so why should I care if a guy who is attempting to destroy me is? If I can remove the red hot poker from my eye and the knife from my back and the fang marks eventually heal up then maybe I'll have a little more pity for him; right now I'm reserving my empathy for his victims, and yes that includes me.
Perhaps some N's don't know they're nuts and perhaps they are to be pitied and I do love him in the Christian sense in that I hope and pray that somehow he is healed, but I can assure you he knows he is screwed up and he knows exactly what he's doing. I have, to my eternal shame, sat by and watched him try to destroy other people prior to me. I have listened to his calculated lies. I have watched his pride in twisting the knife in somebody who wouldn't make their kow tow to the king. It was only about 6 or 8 months ago that I even found out about NPD when I described his behavior for about thirty seconds to a therapist friend who said "Oh, he's a narcissist." When I looked at the DSM lV description of NPD I was surprised his picture wasn't at the top of the page. He has all nine "symptoms" in spades.
I guess the point of this post is that perhaps in some cases it is best to just walk away. But in many it is not possible, nor do I even think it is ethical. Letting some arrogant incompetent nutbag get away scot free while they destroy peoples lives is, to me, immoral if something can be done about it. And it just reinforces the nutbag's behavior to let them go. It doesn't mean we should engage in slander and manipulation, it simply means we should be wise as serpents, gather our evidence and seek compensation for the damage these psychological vampires inflict on perfectly harmless people.
One last thing. My behavior toward my wife and daughter and friends was pretty bad when I sat back and endured this crap for a couple of years without defending myself. I was depressed and irritable all the time. It has been a revelation to be on the offense for the last few months knowing that he is about to, for once, have to suffer the consequences of his actions. The idea that knocking one of these weirdo's teeth out makes you just as bad as them or turns you into one of them is preposterous. It has been liberating and therapeutic. I treat normal people the way I used to now because my anger and purpose are properly directed at the cancer in my life rather than directed away from him because I was afraid of provoking him further.
Sorry I didn't keep it too short but it sure felt good to get a small portion of it out.