In Honor of Kathy Krajco

[Certain Hope]

Thanks, Lise. Just trying to balance things out and not spin off into never-land.

This comment, added by a reader of Kathy's blog to the previous article, expresses my own beliefs and experience quite well:

sonicido said...

Childhood conditioning can be undone.
 I was not a child who grew up 'suspecting' because of my experience.
I grew up accepting.
Becoming a Christian later in my 20's I was trained to "turn the other cheek"; "love suffers long"; and, "he who is without sin, may cast the first stone".
Because the N's in my life provoked bad behavior from my own self, I knew I was definitely NOT fully pure in heart.

It took me many years to separate "man's" idea of God (religion) from, God and His idea of "man", i.e. mankind.

I have learned to separate religious actions-rooted in "man's" proclamation of "love"- from, actions that are rooted in the love of God.

Any time "love" has a human twist to it, I watch out.

An example of a human twist would be, when someone commits an unloving act towards their victim,
and expects to be unaccountable for it
while the victim is totally accountable to the perpetrator for their response to the unloving act.
This kind of meddling has ruined the human race.

**********************************

Indeed.

[Gabben]

Thanks for your last post Carolyn, that was a good read.

The website with the NPD link, which you provided on the Epiphany thread, is very interesting.

Check this paragraph out:

Narcissism is therefore an inevitable and unavoidable part of psychological development. An evolving self is incomplete, and therefore more self-directed than reality-directed. Narcissism is therapy for the fragile self; to counterbalance the felt incompleteness self-directed behaviour comes into being. Narcissism is a force bringing fragmented parts together when they are not yet composed into a whole, and the more fragmented the parts, the stronger the required force, and thus the more intense the narcissism. But the penalty, the necessary penalty, of making the self more real than reality, is that reality is demoted.

After reading this I felt as though I had just gone for a walk into the brain of a person suffering from NPD.

It was a wow moment of realizing that narcissism, as this paragraph says, is therapy.

Well, like duh...but looking at it that way never occurred to me.

This paragraph also illuminated how others can suffer from varying degrees depending on the need for "therapy."

Lise

[Certain Hope]

 

I will have to think on that one, Lise!

For some reason, I seem to be saying, "Wow!" alot today, but... Wow!!

I can sure see how reality gets demoted (or totally denied!) when narcissism becomes pathological,
but I never woulda thought of N as therapy.

What you've said makes sense, though. The more fragmented a personality is, the more N is needed to hold it together... or at least it may seem so to the one who's fragmented.

Some time ago, I did a thread on NPD info from sources other than Sam V.  I think that other link would be worthwhile to post onto that list... will go find it.

Thanks, Lise. Lots to think on!

Love,
Carolyn

[Certain Hope]

excerpted from:

The Poor Narcissist Feels Threatened

Let's take a look at this line that narcissists aren't really bad, that they lash out at you because they feel "threatened."

This idea begs the question "Threatened in what way?" and "Threatened by what?"

If you're the victim of a narcissist, you know that this "threatened" excuse is a farce, because the narcissist attacks precisely when you are anti-threatening him or her. Like when you are trying please them, when you are saying you love them, when they are already mad at you and you are trying to appease them, when you try to get them to listen to you.

WHAM – you expect the normal reaction to these friendly behaviors, but what do you get instead?
The PERVERTED reaction of an attack. It's a shock tactic that takes you aback and makes you have to pinch yourself.

What on earth have you done to "threaten" the poor narcissist?

Let's look at the last example – trying to get her to listen to you.

By doing that, you ARE "threatening" her, I'm afraid. Yes.

Correction: No, you are not threatening her; you are threatening the imaginary her, the bogus "her." You're threatening her delusions of grandeur.

ANY honesty or reality does.

Remember that she is a mental child playing Pretend, and she wants all her playmates to play along.
That means you are supposed to follow her script.
You are supposed to act unworthy of her attention or regard.
When you don't play that part, she stomps her little foot at you and gets mad, throwing a temper tantrum to be so obnoxious that you give in and do what she wants.

In her self-deluding game of Let's Play Pretend, she is so far superior to you that you are beneath her notice, at the relative level of some worm or bug with respect to her. Something divine her should look down her nose in contempt at.

And, you had better act the part or she will go off at you. But here you are, acting like she owes you her attention. In other words, you're acting like God Almighty's equal.

Oh, how horrible an insult to God Almighty!!! Shame on you! You - a mere bug, a mere worm - are "threatening" her majesty by treating her as your equal!
Quit "threatening" her delusions of divinity, you mean and naughty person.


 You are not threatening the poor narcissist.
The narcissist is just a pervert = someone who perverts the course of logic to pervert reality.
Hence, she pervertedly views love or affection
 or any call for engagement from her
as its very opposite = a "threat."

Her Perverted Thinking Machine is not your fault or your problem. It's her fault and her problem.

All animals occasionally fight others (including others of their own species) when those others cross boundaries to threaten their interests in some way.
You can tell when this is the motive, because the moment the aggressor backs off the fighting stops, and everybody's cool again.

Why? Because when you feel threatened, your motive is to repulse the threat = self-defense. Once you have accomplished that mission, you are done.

But when your motive is to destroy the other, the other party backing down or trying to appease you has the opposite effect.
Then it's a sign of weakness that just emboldens the attacker to pour on the attack more furiously than ever.

That's why when an animal attacks to eat another, it doesn't stop till it has ripped that other to shreds.
That's what human predators (like psychopaths and other narcissists) do to their prey, as well.

The only way to avoid "threatening" these perverts is to just get and stay far away from them.

[Certain Hope]

Life with a narcissist is a never-ending put-down. How does he or she force the other members of the family to put up with it?

The narcissist just does whatever it takes to make them submit to her abuse. Any complaint goes in one ear and out the other, as if unhearing it annihilates it. Then the narcissist flies in the face of the complaint by repeating the offense, more forcefully and with contempt. She thus trains her family to submit by teaching them that demanding better treatment only gets them worse treatment.

What if that doesn't work? To repulse any further insistence that she treat them with respect, she just throws a temper tantrum.

One might as well try to talk into the blast of a foghorn. Sheer volume and irrationality can silence the other party, because nobody beyond the age of reason will degrade themselves by getting down to her three-year-old spoiled-brat-throwing-a-fit level to argue with her. Nonetheless, terror tactics, like hateful looks and a threatening posture in a menacing advance, or even windmilling fists, may be part of the tantrum.

Every narcissist I have known has such uncanny skill in perverting the course of logic that every statement one makes bounces off his or her forehead twisted a full 180 degrees. They grab some word near the front of your sentence and blast off with it in God-knows-what direction to yell you down in a whirlwind of bewilderment.

One might as well argue with a cantankerous three-year-old.

And the Projection Machine gets going like crazy. I mean really crazy.

For example, here's how one man I knew reacted to any complaint about his insulting treatment of others or his jumping all over his kid for trying to get attention: he always bawled "WAAH!" Get off my BAAAAACK!"

That's right, he told the jumped on party to get off his back!

Presumably this crackpot thought he was imitating the person complaining to him about his insulting treatment of her. He was making her out to be the big baby ... in the very act of bawling like a big baby for her to get off his baaaaack! Projection of his big babyhood in the very act of being a big baby.

So, give it up. Narcissists do not permit you to communicate with them. They pervert everything and just blast it back in your face. Not one word you say can get through that wall of flak. To twist everything a full 180 degrees, they use anti-rationality and acting crazy as debating tactics.

I think they have a fear of communication taking place and frantically try to block it. So, trying to have a talk with them makes as much sense as trying to have a talk with a dumb beast.

You get nothing but Nimrodian nonsense out of them. It's enough to make the head spin. The offender makes the offended the offender. There's no end to this shit. There is no getting through that irrational wall of flak. They will do anything to make you give up and be silent.

Presumably that's because, as I mentioned above, narcissists want their unanswered say. When they accuse you, you mustn't answer the accusation. When they insult you, you mustn't answer to tell them not to insult you. When they treat you abusively, you mustn't answer to complain about it. You must shut up and docilely submit to it.

For, remember, you are worthy of NO attention, no regard, no consideration, and so forth. They won't even listen to you speak.

Narcissists are desperate to shut you up so you don't answer them, lest human voices wake them there in the Land of Pretend and they drown.

How desperate? So desperate that they go nuts if you won't shut up. From what I've seen and heard, it's common for them to threaten to call the police on a family member who won't just shut up and take it but insists on a chance to speak.

To deny you your right to speak, the narcissist just blabbers at the top of her lungs to drown you out. Or refuses to stay put and listen. She obdurately refuses to let you say anything she doesn't want you say. If it's not in her script, she won't let you say it.

You are supposed to shut up and just bend over for her abuse, to play along and pretend with her that she is God Almighty and you are dirt who deserves to be treated like that.

Do it or she will get so obnoxious that it will make you scream.

http://www.narcissism.operationdoubles.com/forcingsubmissiontoabuse.htm

[Sela]

Wow!

I hadn't read her stuff before and it's......

Wow!!!

So, trying to have a talk with them makes as much sense as trying to have a talk with a dumb beast.

You get nothing but Nimrodian nonsense out of them. It's enough to make the head spin. The offender makes the offended the offender.

How many times have I tried to have that talk and experienced this?  Too many to count.  Knowing this bit of info could have kept my poor brain from many twirlings.

I feel like I need a new t-shirt that reads:

"I have learned to disengage from beasts ."

 

Sela

[Certain Hope]

lol... ((((((Sela)))))) gotta love Mr. Green   

If you find a place that'll screenprint some of those shirts, I'm interested!
How about an entire box of them... one for each workday?!

Kathy K. really nailed this stuff, didn't she?
I don't know if you saw the beginning of the thread, but she passed away last month, at age 56.
Can't imagine how many folks are missing her now.... so sad.

So I'd like to keep this thread going, just to consolidate some of her best (imo) in one place.
No idea who might keep her old site going, if anyone...
I don't think she had much family left.
Hate to think of her writing just disappearing from the scene.

Love to you, Sela,
Carolyn

[Certain Hope]

This is what I want to become immune to:
It's when every single thing that you do or say, express or attempt, lose or gain… is taken by someone with NPD and turned inside out & upside down in order to inflate her own image.
It's when you are not allowed to simply be - individual, autonomous, unique, unencumbered - because some N is determined to cast you as a mere speck of space rock, continually orbiting around her supreme sun.
It's cloying and it stinks like death... because no human being was created to revolve her life around another mortal.
It is soul stalking... and it is insidious… and if you tend toward co-dependency, it is extremely dangerous.

Also… sometimes... the soul is stalked from within, by the internalized parental voices of those who should have loved and cared the most, but only wanted to mold you into their images… or destroy you for preventing them from reaching the elevated status to which they believed they were entitled.
This stalking from within must not be allowed, either. Is it possible to go No Contact with the voices in your head? I believe so, in time and with diligent practice. And that is a whole lot easier, once you’ve detached from the outer voices who sing the same tune!

Here’s another one by the late Kathy Krajco:

**************************************************************


There's no end it. It feels exasperating because it IS exasperating. You never get through that brick wall a narcissist throws up to bounce back everything you say or do as a flattering reflection on him- or her-self. One that denies you one bit of gratification and sucks every bit of gratification in the transaction to herself. (See the book The Games People Play by Eric Berne.)

No communication ever gets through that wall. There is never any human connection. No meeting of the minds. Just this constant play off everything you say or do in a narcissist's infernal, eternal, infantile game-playing.

Normal people have self-respect. So, from an early age on, your first thought is to rise above this childishness. You couldn't bear to stoop to such silly competing for vanities.

Right. But the mistake we often make is to think that "rising above it" means "taking it."

When you do that, you are allowing yourself to be used.

That's enabling. Does that do the narcissist any good?

Does that do yourself any good?

The ego is not an evil thing. Nature has instilled us with this aspect of our personality because it is highly adaptive. It houses the healthy narcissism responsible for our self-love and instinct for self-preservation. If we allow it to be turned traitor against ourselves though, it becomes our own worst enemy, the Enemy Within.

You can't let a parasite like a narcissist constantly bleed it without that happening. This is a narcissist's way of dumping his or her own ego problems on YOU. The narc is transferring his or her own shame and self-hatred to you, like as in a bad-blood transfusion.

Don't allow it. I'd hate to have to admit how long it took me to realize that I can't expect myself to be unharmed by it. Note the narcissism in THAT!!!

I am just a human being. I am not invincible. I can and will eventually be harmed by this constant bloodletting. No shame in acknowledging that, just appropriate modesty.

We all need a world in which "I'm okay, and you're okay." But narcissists deny you that. They impose a world in which they're perfect and you're hopelessly defective.

So, now, when I sense that someone is using me - using me as a mirror for that - I take that mirror away. They don't get to interract with me at all.

In theory, it's simple to deny your presence to a narcissist who abuses it. In practice, however, it sometimes gets complicated, because the situation doesn't always allow you to physically remove yourself from a narcissist's Pathological Space. Then you must analyze the situation and find working ways to deny them interaction.

But be sure to deny them inappropriate interaction with you. Don't allow it and then just IGNORE the put-down you get.

Doing that just gives them permission to use you. And giving others permission to use you will destroy your self-respect.