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 soupรงon 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
