It’s not personal…and it never was…

Do you have trouble trusting people? Even trusting yourself? This is a common issue with the scapegoat children of narcissists. Have you ever wondered why that is? Well, for one thing, it is almost impossible to have an NParent and not be the victim of gaslighting…and one of the consequences of being gaslighted throughout your formative years is that “…gaslighting, when effective, will actually damage your trust in yourself and your experience of reality.”

When we acknowledge that we have been gaslighted, triangulated, hoovered, and otherwise manipulated by our Ns, when we look at the aftermath, like our difficulty in choosing emotionally healthy partners and friends, our inability to trust people…including ourselves…our constant state of feeling anxiety and/or guilt, it is difficult to believe we were not deliberately targeted and attacked. And yet, for most of us, this is actually the case: there was nothing truly personal in it.

Hard to accept? How many times have you asked yourself “why does she hate me?” or “Why me?” or “What did I do to deserve this?” How often have you searched your memory for something you might have said or done…or assumed something you said or did…that provoked her to dislike you, to not love you, to punish you. Because you assume it is your fault, you take on guilt, you feel like you are a bad person, even if you can’t figure out why. All of this is based on your assumption that her negative actions and/or attitudes against you are somehow justified and for them to be justified, you would have had to do or say something wrong, even if you don’t remember what that was.

Maybe, like many ACoNs, you have holes in your memory, periods of time that you cannot remember. When your N gaslights and accuses you of being mean to her or of having said or done something that upset her and you can’t recall ever having said or done it, it is natural to think you may have done it but can’t remember. “Losing spots in your memory makes it very plausible when someone tells you that they cannot trust your memory. It makes it very plausible when they tell you that you are abusive.” This is a common way be begin to think we are crazy, because our memory of our experiences and reality do not match with what our NParents report.

When they call in the flying monkeys, it can get even worse. Flying monkeys accept the N’s version of things uncritically, so the next thing you know, your N has an army of supporters and you are but a lonely voice crying in the wilderness. “It’s hard to stand firm when one person is trying to replace your experience, but when they have a chorus of supporters, it is nearly impossible. There is a reason why cult abuse can lead to a complete breakdown of someone’s personality…Group manipulation and abuse is devastatingly effective.”

So how can this not be personal?

The first thing you have to realize is that Ns do not see other people the way we see them. We have a habit of ascribing to others our own feelings, beliefs, motivations and, in general, we will be roughly accurate as long as we are dealing with people of the same general culture and background. If we come from a culture in which mothers are expected to love their children and put them first, to take an interest in each of them individually and treat them as individuals, with love and respect, we will expect that of all mothers in our culture, including our own. We have expectations.

But narcissists are outliers. We base our expectations on our societal norms and our narcissistic parents do not meet those norms, even though some of them may attempt to appear to meet them. We expect our parents to care for us and put our needs ahead of their wants because that is what our society expects as well. And if they don’t, because the society assumes that they are fulfilling their ordained roles as parents, it is we who are suspected of causing the problem. We even suspect ourselves, wondering what we did, what we didn’t do, what is wrong with us, that our mothers and/or fathers do not love us in the way we expect. It is we who think it is personal.

For narcissists, I don’t think it is that complex. We are not people to narcissists in the way that we are people to others. We are objects. That can be difficult to wrap your head around. Think of it this way: if you have three empty trash receptacles in your kitchen, a pink one, a yellow one, and a silver one, which one do you throw the empty soup can into? It doesn’t matter, does it? What if they are different shapes? Say round, square, and rectangular openings. Still doesn’t matter, does it? Suppose they are different sizes: medium, large, and huge. You only have one can to throw away and all of the receptacles are empty…

So, what DOES matter? What criteria do you consider when you choose which one to throw the can into? The specific characteristics of each bin…its personality, if you will…is immaterial. All that matters is your need, and you are going to choose the nearest one to where you are standing with that empty can in your hand. It is all about you and your needs, and the looks, size, and shape of the bins are immaterial.

Over time, things may evolve. You may find yourself unconsciously sorting your refuse: tins into the pink one, plastic into the yellow one, paper into the silver one. You habituate this such that even if the position of the bins is swapped, you now will take three extra steps to put the tin in the pink bin because that is where the tins belong. Over time, the pink bin becomes the one for tins, not because of anything inherent in the bin or its position that makes it more suitable or deserving of the tins but because, in the beginning, it was the closest to you when you were throwing tins away and you habituated it. If the pink bin has a rubber liner, so that the goo from inside the tins doesn’t ooze out into the metal of the tin, or out through the mesh of the silver tin that you use for paper, and it has a lid that closes to keep the flies out, then you have even more reason to use it for the tins, don’t you?

I suspect the scapegoat child is chosen in much the same way. It is nothing personal against you, it is simply that 1) you are there at the time your N feels a need to lay blame on someone other than herself and 2) you are vulnerable to accepting this blame. If there was another child present at the same time who was more vulnerable than you, it is possible that child would be chosen. If you were not there at all, definitely another child would be chosen. It wasn’t you…the essential personhood of yourself, s/he who resides inside the body…who was chosen, it was the person nearest and most vulnerable to being responsive to the narcissist’s manipulations.

Over time I have noticed that first children, especially first girls, seem to be disproportionately singled out for scapegoat status. We are someone upon whom our NMs can dump their responsibilities. Culturally, girls are still the caretakers and the people who do the bulk of the domestic chores, so it is natural that narcissistic parents will task the first available person (the oldest child), and in particular the oldest girl, to take over responsibility. You are there…and you were there first. Sometimes, however, that first child is not malleable enough but a subsequent child is more easily manipulated or frightened into the role. The narcissist does not choose you based on who you are and what you might have said or done, the narcissist simply chooses the most available and most vulnerable, regardless of other factors like personality or actions.

Once you are identified as the scapegoat person, the choice needs to be rationalize or justified. In a normal environment, your actions are the justification for how you are treated: break curfew, get grounded, for example. With the narcissistic parent, the choice is made first, then the justifications for the choice are found. These can range from actual events (you did run out into the street after the ball and nearly get hit by a car), to real events twisted to have new meanings (you were trying to give the cat a bath, not drown him), to outright lies (you didn’t call your mother a bitch, even though you might have been thinking it). The reasons you are the one who gets dumped on can sound rational, like you didn’t finish your chores so you can’t go skating with your friends (even though your chores consist of doing her housework) and they can absolutely absurd (you ruined her life by being born, so now she is blaming you for her ruined figure and poor job prospects). But what they all have in common is this: it has nothing to do with you, personally. It has to do with her agenda, her perceptions, her refusal to take responsibility for herself and her life.

If you had not been born, if you had born at a different point in her life, if you had been born to another mother, this person would still have a scapegoat. It had nothing to do with YOU.

Sources:

10 Things I’ve Learned About Gaslighting As An Abuse Tactic http://everydayfeminism.com/2015/08/things-wish-known-gaslighting/

Real-life Exchange with a Narcissist

Sometimes the heavens just align right and what you need is served up to you on a gleaming, sparkling silver platter. And so it is with this blog post because not only have we had a visit from a real narcissist, he has gifted us with an object lesson in how a narcissist can go from appearing normal to showing his real self in the space of a few conversational exchanges. What is particularly droll about this exchange is that he did it all in context with the last blog post, which is about how a narcissist cannot choose his nature but he can choose his behaviour.

James, our narcissist, initially presents as a rational person who disagrees with my basic tenet that a narcissist can choose his behaviour. James further identifies himself as autistic and in passing, describes narcissists as not being neurotypical. This popped my first red flag. James said: I disagree completely that you, Sweet Violet, are capable of "making everything wrong in your life the fault of someone else rather than choices you have made." because you, unlike your mother, are not a narcissist. It has probably never occurred to you to engage in the blame game your mother plays; likewise it has probably never occurred to your mother to take responsibility for her own actions. You, Violet, cannot choose to be narcissistic. Your mother cannot choose to be neurotypical.

There is nothing in the literature that I have been able to find that indicates a narcissist is not neurotypical. In fact, a PsychologyToday article would seem to discount that possibility with the observation that, in a test wherein the subjects were shown pictures of facial expressions and asked to identify them, “only narcissists were accurate at recognizing anger. Therefore, … narcissists appear to stand out as having enhanced cognitive empathy.” This is the antithesis of the autistic, who has great difficulty in reading facial expressions, including anger. Autistics and narcissists do share some characteristics, namely difficulty with empathy. Additionally, both autistics and narcissists can get fixated on something to a degree that is astonishing to others and they have often have a lot of trouble with change that they, themselves do not initiate. Narcissists are opportunists and it would not be surprising for a narcissist to seize on these shared characteristics to excuse his behaviour: people make allowances for autistics, knowing they are incapable of certain things and what better disguise for a narcissist to slip under the radar than to pretend to be an autistic?

But, like narcissists everywhere, James took it a step too far when he implied that narcissists are not neurotypical because the science simple does not support that. Unlike the autistic, who is not neurotypical and commonly has trouble discerning the meanings of facial expressions, the narcissist has an enhanced ability to do so. A search on Google, PubMed and NIH revealed no peer-reviewed articles supporting the idea that narcissists are not as neurotypical as you or I.

I responded to James—you can read the entire exchange here—and reiterated my position using examples, closing with “That you don't grasp this very fundamental fact of narcissists, that they can show one face to you and another face to me, tells me that either you have no narcissists in your life or that you have them but are deep in denial. Either way, you are one of the ones who doesn't “get it.’”

James responded with what appeared to be an empathetic response but then reiterated his position. Another red flag for me. He is unwilling to give up…I suspected at this point that he would not give up until I agreed with him, that he would rephrase and reframe his position until he got me to agree that he was right and I was wrong. This felt very manipulative: first show empathy to soften me up, agrees with my basic premise—that narcissists can show one face to some people and another face to others—and then reiterates his position, which implies they have no choice in the matter.

Again I refuted his contentions, again giving examples, and his next response gave me the “aha!” moment I was expecting: he twisted my words to support his contention. I replied: “Sophistry doesn't work with me. When faced with my brother's misdeeds, my mother did not punish him, she punished ME for ‘letting him’ misbehave. Narcissism or no, she had a CHOICE in who to punish.

“Narcissists cannot change their natures but they are perfectly capable of changing their behaviour. If they can treat one of their children well, they can treat them ALL well. They simply choose not to.”

And the gloves were off. James replied “It's not sophistry, but a rational argument, something which you unfortunately lack. I'm not going to waste any further time speaking to you, not because we disagree but because, despite my best efforts to not offend you and apologising when I thought I had, you have been consistently rude in return. It's entirely your choice as to whether you publish this comment; just knowing you read it is enough for me.”

I replied, pointing out how narcissistic this exchange was, but giving James the benefit of the doubt just in case he really was autistic, and pointing out that when he did not succeed in getting me to change my position, he became rude and attacked me. I then said I would not publish any more correspondence from him because “If a person can’t get his point across without attacking, then they don’t get space here.”

And that is where it got really interesting!

I didn’t publish his next response, which was “Well played, very well played. If I am a narcissist, I am not the only one here.” Note that I had given James the benefit of the doubt in my previous comment. I had specifically said “Now I am not saying James is a narcissist… I am going to be generous here and write off James’ rudeness to autism and an inability to grasp concepts that do not support his personal perception.” So James’ response to this was to gaslight and take the position that I called him a narcissist when I most specifically did not. He then attacked me yet again, calling me a narcissist. And amongst all of this, he revealed that this was a game to him… “well played, very well played” he said, like a chess player admiring an unexpected move by his opponent.

Then, in an attempt to outflank me, he sent two messages anonymously. How do I know they were from him? Because they were gaslighting: they accused me of being rude to James instead of the other way around. They accused me of wrongdoing and tried to hoover me back into the game, a typical ploy for a narcissist who is smarting from being bested in a competition that exists only in his mind. James (as Anonymous) said: Sweet Violet....what I saw was you going on the attack first and tried to argue your point so vehimently that you didn't allow him to have his own opinion. He also reacted as did you. You both have the right to your opinion and I would welcome to hear more of how the two of you worked through this. It's not about black and white, right or wrong, it's about really listening to the other person's point of view and letting them have their own opinion. BOTH of you....all of us.

I didn’t publish it so, a few hours later another message from James came in (narcissists hate to be ignored), also under the Anonymous name: It's o.k. for you to attack him? Sooooo those that disagree with you have no "voice"? hmmmm just curious  Remember, my last published comment about James specifically excused his rudeness just in case he really was autistic…

Well, I didn’t publish that comment either and, true to narcissistic form, he was back this morning, this time with an email entitled: “Autistic? You wish.” The message said:

I lied about that, I'm a psychopath. I've written about being one: [link redacted]

You were a fun distraction for a little while, but your insistence on blocking anybody you don't like got in the way of that. Didn't the narc bitch who squeezed you out teach you not to get in a psychopath's way?

It's very interesting reading of your tales of scapegoating when you were a child. Have you ever wondered why Petey was the chosen one while all you got was blame and bruises?

As if you're going to answer, you'll hide away from me like the weak speck (though these days I read you're more of a blob) of nothing your mother always knew you were.

This, of course, made me laugh out loud. Talk about being butt-hurt and petulant! Victim-blaming, attacking, James came to the blog expecting to be a cat toying with a mouse and found a big dog who bested him at every turn. Narcissists don’t scare me anymore nor do they have the power to intimidate me. I will be generous here and answer the questions James posed in his email for you all:

1) Didn't the narc bitch who squeezed you out teach you not to get in a psychopath's way? Obviously if she did, that was not a lesson I cared to retain. Like a typical narcissist, you inflate yourself and call yourself a "psychopath" so you will sound more formidable but, like all narcissists, you are a weak person who creates a powerful false persona to hide behind. I was onto you in your first message…my red flag system works extremely well.

2) Have you ever wondered why Petey was the chosen one while all you got was blame and bruises? No, I never wondered at all because I knew why: she favoured him over me. And I knew why: because my birth caused her to have to change all of her plans for her future. And, instead of handling that fact like a mature adult, she childishly blamed me for it.

3) …you'll hide away from me like the weak speck (though these days I read you're more of a blob) of nothing your mother always knew you were. There is a difference between hiding and refusing to give an asshole a forum. Pity you don’t know the difference, James.

And so here you have it…an exchange with a narcissist from pseudo-empathetic beginning to truth-revealing end, complete with gaslighting, hoovering, sweet talk and attacks. A real smorgasbord of narcissistic interaction: I could not have given you a better example if I had created an illustrative analogy myself! Thanks, James!

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