Narcissists choose their behaviours

Two years ago I wrote an entry entitled “It’s all about choice,” an entry designed to show us how we make choices that keep us stuck on the end of a narcissist’s pin. What I didn’t address at the time, was the choices that our narcissists have.

All too often I come across people feeling sorry for their narcissists, excusing their behaviours with the comment that they can’t help themselves, they are mentally ill, they don’t know what they are doing. I call bullshit. Narcissists have just as much choice as you or I do.

To most of us, the term “mental illness” implies a lack of control or choice on the part of the afflicted. It is generally a term used to describe people who have a chemical imbalance in their brains that renders them incapable of having a functional grasp on reality. Many of these illnesses are treatable with drugs that balance the brain chemistry and return the patient to the condition of having the ability to recognize and deal with reality, should they choose to do so.

Narcissistic Personality Disorder, however, differs from the general perception of mental illness in that the narcissist never loses his ability to have a functional grasp on reality. Where the untreated schizophrenic might not recognize that the roaring dragon he just stabbed to death was really a barkng dog and it was wrong to kill it, the narcissist recognizes it was a dog, it is wrong to kill the dog belonging to his neighbour, and he doesn’t care because the dog’s barking annoyed him and that was all the justification he needed to kill it. The mentally ill may not have a firm grasp on the society’s view of right and wrong…the narcissist knows exactly what the society considers right and wrong but considers himself a special case…the rules don’t necessarily apply to him and he is entitled to get what he wants by whatever means necessary. The Mayo Clinic, in its definition of narcissism, carefully avoids the phrase “mental illness” and instead says “Narcissistic personality disorder is a mental disorder…”

It is important for us to be able to differentiate between the kind of mental imbalance that the afflicted cannot help and the personality disorder in which the afflicted is completely capable of shaping his or her behaviour based on the same objective reality we live with. For one thing, recognizing that the narcissist has complete control of his behaviour relieves us of the perceived obligation for making allowances. This is significant because, relieved of that obligation, we no longer have to feel that we must take the crap the narcissist dishes out. The narcissist is not being rude to you because s/he doesn’t know better or because s/he has no control over his or her behaviour, the narcissist is being rude to you because s/he can, because nobody has set any boundaries, because we allow the person to do so out of misinformed and misguided compassion for an affliction we misunderstand.

If you truly believe your narcissist cannot control her behaviour, that she really can’t help herself, give thought to the times she has been sweet and charming, even loving and caring, to other people. My mother could transform into the Mother of the Year in the blink of an eye if there was somebody around whose opinion she feared or valued. She never hit me or went off in a rage in front of her parents, she never called me names and manhandled me in front of school officials, and when we went to court for custody hearings, she was the meekest, most pathetic loving mother who feared losing her child that the court had ever seen. She was a master at minimizing…when I complained that she made me into her live-in maid and baby sitter, she characterized it as “a few chores after school.” When I complained about being beaten almost daily, I was accused of exaggerating some “much-needed discipline” and having an overactive imagination. She was the perfect loving, concerned mother in the presence of anyone who had any power over her or who she felt she had to keep happy (like her parents, who took me off her hands for three months out of every year while she continued to collect my child support).

But behind closed doors, out of sight and hearing of anyone who could bring any kind of consequence down on her, she was a horror. If I had had the ability to video one of her tantrums, nobody who knew her would believe what they were seeing. She chose to behave in the way others would find acceptable and in doing so, accomplished two things: established a public persona that everyone believed and made a liar out of me. I could not tell the truth to anyone because refused to believe me. Their own observations did not match up with my tales, so I “proved” my mother’s allegation that I had an “overactive imagination.”

Mark Twain once said that it is easier to fool someone than for them to ever admit they had been fooled, and that is very much the case with the narcissist: nobody wants to admit they have been hoodwinked, so rather than take my word or even investigate what I said went on in my house, people just wrote me off as a liar…to take me seriously would mean admitting that my mother had fooled them and the only people I ever saw do that were people who incurred her wrath and got a taste of the real her.

My mother’s behaviour was completely volitional. She did what she perceived to be in her best interest at any given time. My N ex-husband was no different…he behaved like a rational professional in meetings at work, then came home and ranted and raved about the “sandbaggers” and “backstabbers” at work, his perception of anyone in the meeting who didn’t agree with him in everything. I would have to spend hours talking him down from his vengeance fantasies that, over time, I came to realize were likely to be more than just fantasies. In those meetings, however, under the scrutiny of his boss, a man he admired and sought to emulate, he was the personification of professionalism.

Narcissists see nothing amiss in this two-faced approach to life. In fact, being narcissists and prone to projection, they think we are all this way. This explains, I think, why my NM used to accuse me of behaviours and motivations that hadn’t even crossed my mind: it was how she behaved when she was my age, it was what would have motivated her. So, when my tiny 7-year-old fingers couldn’t adequately grip a slippery plate and it crashed into the porcelain sink in pieces, since because she would have broken the plate out of spite for being made to do the dishes, that was therefore the reason I broke the plate and deserved to be punished, both for the destruction of the plate and for my perceived defiance. That the plate was too heavy and too slippery for my little hands to hold it would never cross her mind because, since her behaviours were calculated to either advantage herself or punish others, mine must be as well.

Narcissists have a choice. They can choose to be empathetic or they can suppress the empathy. Narcissists consider empathy and compassion to be weaknesses that can be exploited by others…people like themselves. They don’t want to be empathetic because that might end up with someone taking advantage of them and they couldn’t take that. Instead, they shut down their own empathetic responses so that they can be the ones to take advantage. A narcissist lacks a conscience: it is part of their belief in their own entitlement. Racism is difficult to rationalize without at least a soupçon of narcissistic entitlement underpinning it. You are better than “those people” and therefore you are entitled to better than what they have and, to make sure they don’t encroach upon your entitlement, you will disadvantage them at every opportunity, all the while claiming to not be a racist. You are simply better than they are and therefore deserve better than they have…or can ever get.

The problem with this kind of entitlement and lack of conscience is that it can lead to criminal behaviour. If my scapegoat sister drives a BMW, then I am entitled to better than that…so I will commit some kind of fraud to get my hands on a Ferrari. Narcissists continually play this “one upmanship” kind of game, are constantly in competition with others, and refuse to take a backseat to anyone they have chosen to be part of their circle. So a narcissist might not envy Donald Trump’s money but he might envy the new Cayenne one of his co-workers just bought. But he has another choice: he can choose to be happy that his five year old Honda is paid off and he can spend what he used to fork out in car payments for something else, like paying down his mortgage or making some investments for a college fund for his kids.

Narcissists choose their behaviour. If your narcissistic mother is capable of being nice to anyone, then she is capable of being nice to you. She simply chooses not to. Why has she chosen not to? Because she gets something out of it. What? Well, that depends on a lot of things, but mostly it is because she has found a way to make herself blameless: if everything is your fault, then nothing is hers. My mother actually managed to make every bad decision she ever made my fault by virtue of the fact that I had been born (I was her first child): her reasoning was that if I had not been born her life would have been different, therefore the unsatisfactory life she was leading was my fault because I precipitated it with my birth.

Could she help blaming me? Could she have made another choice? Of course: all she had to do was to take responsibility for her own choices and behaviour. You choose to have unprotected sex, you stand a high risk of getting pregnant. How is that the fault of the baby that results from it? But, to make herself blameless, to make herself into my victim so that she could feel justified in penalizing me, she blamed me.

Narcissists have choices…they have the exact same choices you and I have. You have the choice of making everything wrong in your life the fault of someone else rather than choices you have made. And make no mistake, despite having a narcissistic parent, from the moment you were enlightened and you kept making the choice to maintain a relationship with your narcissist and allow her to continue her blaming games, you now bear some responsibility for your own victimization. If you throw your head back and remove your neck scarf and stand still for the man with the blade, it is still his fault for killing you but you are complicit when you didn’t run as soon as you spotted the knife.

We all have choices…you have the choice to permit the abuse to continue or to put a stop to it…and the narcissist has exactly the same choice…she can continue abusing you or she can stop. But you can only change yourself…you cannot change another person, no matter how righteous or well-intentioned you are. A narcissist will always make the choice that gives her either the greatest advantage or the least disadvantage and if you want to stop the agony of being in a relationship with a narcissist, you have to acknowledge and internalize that.

Narcissists have the same choices we do but, unlike us, the narcissist will always make the choice that advantages her the most, regardless of the fall-out others may have to deal with. The narcissist has no conscience and simply doesn’t care if anyone else gets hurt as long as he gets what he wants.

Source materials:

Empathy Is Actually a Choice http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/12/opinion/sunday/empathy-is-actually-a-choice.html?_r=0

Narcissistic Personality Disorder Definition http://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/narcissistic-personality-disorder/basics/definition/con-20025568

It’s all about choice

I'm back after a hiatus involving a medical procedure on my spine, a lawsuit against some deadbeat tenants, and a much-needed holiday. I went on safari out in Kruger National Park and stayed in a bushcamp where we had no TV, no radio, no internet, and irregular (and very weak) cell signal. The nice thing about several days of that is that is forces you to turn back to yourself for entertainment...and one of the things I find most entertaining is thinking: I like to think and the peace and solitude of Kruger really facilitated that.

One of the things I began reflecting on were choices and our perceptions of choice. South Africa's legacy of apartheid has left many people, especially people of colour, thinking they have no choices, that they are doomed to live in poverty and their only opportunities to lift themselves out of it come from unlawful means. But these people have other choices and the guides and and workers in the park were a testament to what people can achieve when they recognize that there are other choices than to live in squalor in a tumbledown hut, begging or stealing to survive. It got me to thinking about choices in general, and our choices in particular.

One of the feelings we, the children of narcissists, share is the feeling of being “stuck.” Often we feel we have no choice but to submit to the narcissist, to endure her attacks and other hurtful behaviour. We may feel we cannot leave or, if already out of the house, we cannot stop her from continuing to hurt us. We feel helpless in the face of her behaviour, her expectations, her manipulations. And we feel hurt, angry, confused, powerless, trapped, even crazy, as a result.

Well, the good news is, you do have a choice! She is not in charge of your life, you are!

Let me repeat that: she is not in charge of your life, you are.

You don’t believe me, do you?

Well, believe it or not, if you are at least 18 years of age, you have the power to change your situation, whether your narcissist is a parent, a spouse, a boyfriend, or a boss. You have that power, even though you may not yet realize it. In fact, the distress you are suffering at the hands of your narcissist is the result of a choice you have already made…really!

If you cannot believe that you are capable of changing your life, that the narcissist in your life has you trapped, then you may be suffering from what is called “learned helplessness.” Learned helplessness comes from your beliefs: if you believe you cannot do something, that there is no way out, that you cannot succeed, then that becomes your personal reality, even though objective reality may be very different.

The Buddhist website, Unfettered Mind, describes learned helplessness thus: “One of the primary characteristics of learned helplessness is that the person feels passive with respect to the system [the family]. The passivity, however, is only half the story. Whenever we are subjected to abuse, physical, emotional or spiritual, two patterns form inside us: the victim and the abuser. Our experience of being abused lays the basis for the victim pattern. Our experience of how abuse can be meted out lays the basis for the abuser pattern. Both give rise to learned helplessness, though the learned helplessness manifests differently. In the case of the abuser, learned helplessness might manifest as “Something just took over; I didn’t mean to say or do that.” In the case of the victim, it might manifest as “I don’t know why I put up with it but I can’t seem to do anything about it.” In both cases, we are expressing passivity with respect to the patterns operating in us. In both cases, we are confessing helplessness.”

Can you overcome learned helplessness? Yes…but it is not easy. The Unfettered Mind says “The cost…is high. We can only undo learned helplessness by severing our internal connection with the system that gave rise to it…We must really want to live our own life and not one prescribed by our family, society, culture…We must be willing to endure pain, know from direct experience, act on what we see and receive what happens. We must yearn to experience what is without relying on anything to confirm our existence.”

What does this mean? It means that you are not helpless, you just believe that you are. And you must want to break away more than you want to stay. And that you must do something to make a change happen. As long as you keep doing, saying, thinking and living the same way, you will continue reaping the same reward, bitter and unsatisfactory though it may be. If you want something in your life to change, then you must do something to change it.

I know this is not what you want to hear…it’s not what I wanted to hear. When I was trapped in the learned helplessness of being the victim of narcissists, I wanted a magic key that would unlock the good, loving persons I just knew was trapped beneath the narcissist’s punitive exterior. I wanted the “right” words or deeds to bring them to the fore, to make my abusers realize how hurt I was and to evoke their compassion and empathy—and love. What I learned was that I was on a fruitless quest…there is no magic key, the narcissist does not have a loving, compassionate person trapped inside, fighting to escape into a loving relationship. Indeed, I discovered the narcissist doesn’t want to change except, perhaps, to become even better and more proficient at controlling the lives of their victims and getting what they want however they want it with no pangs of conscience or hint of remorse.

While there is no magic key to awaken compassion and conscience in a narcissist, there is a magic key to your freedom and happiness, and that magic key is choice. You have choices, even if you don’t see them. Learned helplessness can result in a kind of emotional paralysis and the way out of that paralysis is to simply make the choice you have been avoiding for so long: choosing yourself and your well-being and your happiness over that of the narcissist. Choosing to give up dreams of the impossible, like your narcissist will change and suddenly treat you with love and concern for your happiness. Choosing to see your relationship with your narcissist for what it really is; choosing to take the blinders off and look cold, hard reality in the face. Choosing to cut—and mourn—your emotional and relationship losses before they make you feel any worse. Choosing a new direction for your life and taking the necessary steps to realize it.

You have choices—but choices have consequences and right now, the life you are living is the result of choices you have already made and, in some cases, have made over and over again. Every time your NM hurts you, belittles you in front of someone else, puts you down, doesn’t invite you to a family dinner or tells your sister or your grandmother or your aunt “Oh, she wouldn’t want to be here…” and you continue on with your relationship with her like it never happened, you re-make the choice to let her do these things with impunity, to continue contact with her under those circumstances, to put yourself and your feelings and your right to be respected below hers. You make the choice to be your narcissist’s doormat every single time you allow him or her to abuse you and you not only don’t do/say anything about it, you don’t start making plans to do something about it, either.

You…and only you…may choose what choices you will make and consequences you will endure in life. Nobody else can make that choice for you because when you choose a behaviour, you choose the consequences. Let me say that one again:

When you choose a behaviour, you choose the consequences.

Right now, if you are enduring the slings and arrows of a narcissist in your life, you are actually choosing to do exactly that: endure the slings and arrows of that narcissist. That is your current choice…to endure. What is the consequence of your choice? The feelings that your endurance and his/her behaviour creates in you. You have other choices, but each and every one of them has a consequence as well. You may well be in the position of choosing the lesser of a host of evils, but you do have choice…it’s just that every one comes with a consequence, so maybe you have chosen, at least for now, to put up with NM and her nasty ways because the consequences of other choices, as far as you can tell, are worse.

If you are sitting there shaking your head and thinking “What other choices??”, then you just aren’t seeing them. Unless someone is forcibly holding you hostage, there are other choices you can make. If you live at home with Narcissistic Mom and Enabling Dad, you have other choices: first and most obvious, you can move out. “I have no place to go, no way to support myself!” you cry. Then start making a plan…get a job, even if it is minimum wage and move out, even if you have to move into a furnished room. If your comfort and cable TV and keys to NF’s car are worth the price you have to pay for them…NM’s abuse and your unhappiness…I am not going to sit here and tell you that you are wrong because only you can choose your life, only you can decide if living in the comfort of your parents’ home is worth the price they exact from you in narcissistic abuse. You decide what the value of living with them is, what it is worth to you…but you cannot make that choice and then complain about the price you pay.

If you are already out of the house, you also have choices: you have the choice of not communicating with her (see “No Contact pt 1” and “No Contact pt 2”), for example. “Oh no!” you object. “She’ll cut me off from my father or my sisters or my nieces and nephews…” or she’ll stalk you or tell lies to the FOO about you or a host of other retaliatory behaviours. You are right…she very likely will…which means you are choosing to put up with her abuse because you don’t want to bear the consequences of putting a stop to it…you think the suffering you are doing now is less than the suffering you would endure if you stood up for yourself and told her to leave you alone.

But what if maybe…just maybe…if you told her to stop calling you ten times a day and she did? My late husband Charlie had a dreadfully narcissistic mother who verbally abused him in front of me at Christmas dinner one year. I got up from the table (after yelling at her and telling her not to call him names), got my handbag and our jackets and said to him “I’m ready to go home. How about you?” We left…and we didn’t hear from her for eleven months…and when we did see her again, she never, ever said rude things to or about him in my presence again…and he refused to see her unless I came along. Sometimes it works.

Will it work on your narcissist? No matter how certain you are that it won’t, you cannot know for sure until you try. Remember, when you choose a behaviour, you also choose the consequences of that behaviour. When we sit silently through a narcissist’s tirades and character assassinations, when we smile weakly at their rude characterizations of others, when we follow the old dictum “to get along you have to go along,” we choose to be abused with impunity, to be disrespected, to be treated poorly. When we chose a different behaviour, we get a different set of consequences, among them what Charlie called “the most peaceful eleven months of my life!”

“But she will turn my family against me!” someone once said to me. Really? Has it occurred to you that that has already happened? When she abuses you, lies about you, assassinates your character, what is your family doing? Who is standing in your defence? Who is telling her “Stop that! That is rude and abusive and you don’t have a right to speak to her that way!”? If you have such a person in your life, how is your NM going to turn him or her against you, since this person is already championing you against her? And the rest of your family? Where are they? If they were on your side instead of hers, wouldn’t they be speaking up on your behalf? And if they aren’t, can you accept that they have already bought every ugly, nasty, lie and half-truth your NM has told them about you and they have already been turned against you? Because if you are going to be able to exercise your choices and get away from the narcissist in your life, first you are going to have to stare reality right in its ugly eyes and know who your friends—and who your enemies—are. If you choose to continue to refuse to believe your NM has already turned (at least some of) them against you, then you will stay stuck right where you are.

When you choose a behaviour, you choose the consequences.

Some may think this is blaming the victim. It’s not. It is making you look at and acknowledge a choice you have made…perhaps not consciously, but you have made this choice just the same. You have chosen to endure what your narcissist does because somewhere in your mind you have decided that the consequences…or your fear of those consequences…is worse than putting up with her abuse. And that is where learned helplessness comes in: your fear. You may be convinced that you cannot support yourself and therefore you must put up with the abuse in order to have a roof over your head. But that only means that your fear of independence—and the rigours of it—is greater than your fear of your NM: better the devil you know than the devil you don’t know.

But when you take that viewpoint, you choose to change nothing. You choose the miserable existence you have now…because it is familiar and you know what to expect…over the possibility that you can have more or better or both. Yes, it may also be a colossal flop…but if you choose the safety of your present, predictable life, you are choosing the abuse you live with and aren't even making an attempt to make it better. To change your life, you must change your choices, make new ones, head out into uncharted waters, do things differently. But first, you must wake up to the fact that the choices—to go or to stay, to tolerate abuse or not—are yours alone to make.

I hope you make the choice to spread your wings and fly…far, far from the abuse and into a life of your own choice and making.