Narcissistic Rage: Not always a firestorm

If you have a narcissistic parent, you’ve experienced narcissistic rage. But because narcissists are as individual as anyone else, you may have experienced it without recognizing it for what is really is.

When someone says “rage” we tend to think of someone screaming and yelling and waving their arms and being loud and angry. We are probably also familiar with the quiet rage…the seething but controlled anger that manifests as clenched fists and jaws, giving the fear that the person could burst into some kind of physical fury at any moment.

But with narcissists there can be yet another kind of rage…the silent, subterranean rage that simmers, often for years, before being released…and the release can be in a long-planned and carefully executed manner.

What provokes a narcissist to rage? On the surface it may look like a lot of different things provoke a narcissist, but the fact is, only one thing does it: narcissistic injury.

Freud defined narcissistic injury as occurring when “…a narcissistic individual is confronted with a situation that counter-argues their firmly held beliefs about themselves.” Narcissist injury leads to narcissistic rage:  “This wound or blow that threatens their firmly held set of beliefs is likely to elicit a violent outburst of anger, known as narcissistic rage. The rage has a variety of forms and can be very mild or severely extreme.”

So what constitutes narcissistic injury? The short answer is “virtually anything.” This is the reason that living with a narcissist feels like walking on eggshells…you just never know when something you innocently do or say will set the narcissist off. That is because what is innocent and innocuous to you the narcissist may perceive as challenging or defiant or even intentionally attacking. Why that perception? Because whatever it was you did or said the narcissist finds it threatening to the delicately balanced house of grandiose cards she has built as her perception of herself.

You can know that certain things are guaranteed to set off your narcissist…you will have gained experience over time that certain behaviours or opinions or words will light the fuse. But there is always, always something else…something you don’t know about that will start things. You may think that always agreeing with the narcissist will guarantee peace but not only will this make you feel like a fraud, at some point the narcissist is liable to tip to it and say “Wait a minute…are you just humouring me, like I was some kind of senile old goat?” and then the rage game is on.

The narcissist will tell you that you have no one but yourself to blame for her rages because you provoke them with your contrariness, your defiance, your insensitivity, your cruelty. And for a long time, we may believe this because the fact is, you did do something the narcissist found provoking. But analysed from a greater distance, you have to acknowledge that the narcissist has no right to hold you, your feelings, your actions hostage to her perceptions, she has no right to deny you your autonomy by using rage and hurt feelings as a weapon to beat you into submission and back into control. You may have provoked the outburst, but you were no more in the wrong that the concentration camp inmate who, attempting to escape, provokes a guard into shooting at him.

Narcissistic rage, then is both a reaction on the part of the narcissist, and a tool used to control and manipulate others. I can remember saying to my brother “Don’t do that…it will make Mommy mad.” Mommy’s anger was a palpable, fearsome thing to be avoided at all costs and it was a weapon she consciously used “Are you trying to make me mad?” she would ask. Her rage was unpredictable in terms of what she would do with it, but predictable in its being a response to anyone doing anything that she did not like…and I mean anyone and anything.

Interestingly, her rage was often expressed differently, depending on who was the target. The more power a person had, the less overt and explosive her rage, and the more manipulative, subtle and vindictive…as if, by denying her a temper outburst, you earned a deeper, more lasting expression of her rage. When I was a child she would scream at me until her voice was raw, and hit me with anything handy until her rage was purged. This often left me sobbing and curled into a defensive little ball which, curiously, could act as yet another narcissistic injury: the reality that a beaten child will cry and cower away from her abuser was not acceptable to her and her response to my perfectly normal reaction would be to tell me to shut up or she would give me a real reason to cry. And any time I cringed or flinched in her presence was enough to set her off as she did not want other people to see it as it would give them the “wrong impression” of her.

She would not, however, use such overt means to rage at people who had more power than a child. She was capable of long-term planning and incredible spite. And, like so many other narcissists, she was glib and charming enough on the surface to convince others that her treachery was actually a good thing.

She would never rage at her mother or father…but she behaved in such a way, from her teens onward, as to cause a scandal in their tiny rural town such that the reputation of the entire family was damaged. Then, when it was clear that nobody found her cute or amusing anymore, just so shameful they didn’t want to soil their skirts by even walking past her on the streets, she packed up her children and moved 1000 miles away.

She had visions of an upper middle class lifestyle and convinced herself that the little Eichler-style house she nagged my father into buying was the first step on that ladder. So secure was her vision that she couldn’t see the impact of the dirt road, cesspool that backed up into the bathtub with high tides at the nearby bay, chronic cockroach infestation, lack of sidewalks or even trash collection tarnished the vision. No, the thing that brought down her property values and was the scourge of the neighbourhood was the next door neighbour who, as a war widow, had no husband to maintain the house and, as a nurse working night shift, kept “suspicious” hours. When NM’s demands that the woman spruce up her house and front yard fell on deaf ears, she took on a narcissistic rage that consumed her. In the end, NM convinced the neighbours that the woman’s job as a nurse was a convenient cover, that she was really a prostitute using the hours of her nursing job (where NM claims she stole drugs and was an addict) as a cover, that she beat and starved her children and kept a filthy, unsanitary house. The woman almost lost her job and custody of her children over NM’s accusations and ultimately sold her house and moved away. NM got what she wanted: a quiet English couple with a penchant for gardening bought the house and fixed it up. Throughout this campaign, NM’s family heard the towering rages about the woman next door, the woman who dared defy my NM and refuse to give her what she wanted. Superficially it was only a small thing…most lower middle class neighbourhoods have a shabby house or two, but NM took it as a personal affront that she lived next door to one (even though it was in that condition when NM bought our house) and the owner would not succumb to her demands to clean it up. Living next door to the shabby house damaged NM’s grandiose vision of herself living a genteel suburban lifestyle, which was her narcissistic injury, and she quite determinedly retaliated against the woman. Rather than go to the house and have a screaming fit in the woman’s face…which would make her the “bad guy” instead of the offending homeowner, NM undertook a campaign of undermining and sullying the woman’s reputation and creating an environment so hostile that the woman had to move away or lose her job and her children. That was one form of narcissistic rage at work.

“Symptoms of rage may be mild and non-violent, such as displaying visible irritation, vocal disagreement with the situation or head-shaking. More severe symptoms of narcissistic rage include outburst of physical violence, directed at both objects and people, and vocal outrage. In general, a person that frequently displays narcissistic rage symptoms is often labeled as selfish, spoiled and a sore loser by their peers. Unlike regular anger, narcissistic rage is unwarranted and is caused by neutral events that will not provoke reactions in non-narcissists. Persistent episodes of narcissistic rage may result in the perpetuation of rage cycles: patterns of rage behavior that frequently repeat day after day.”

The key to identifying a narcissistic rage is ascertaining if a non-narcissistic person would be outraged by the same thing that triggered the narcissist. If you tell your mother you are going on a two week vacation to Greece and she flips out, you are dealing with a narcissistic rage. A non-narcissist might ask a few practical questions like “do you have travel insurance?” and “has the political situation calmed down there?” whereas the narcissist could do anything from scream at you about wasting your money or traumatizing your dog by putting him in a kennel to inviting herself along to actively sabotaging your trip by falling “ill” or even causing something costly to happen to your house or your car so that you can’t afford to go. Narcissistic rage is not confined to temper outbursts and overt expressions of rage…narcissists are perfectly capable of the “slow burn” kind of rage that manifests in an extended period of retaliation, and that retaliation can be small and childish, like calling and hanging up the phone to big and devastating, like blackening your name among family, friends, and neighbours and making herself look like your victim.

It all starts with that narcissistic insult, that little injury that most people would not even perceive as an injury or insult. You have a choice of living your life walking on eggshells in an attempt to avoid causing that injury or you can decide that if you N gets his/her nose out of joint by something you do or say, that’s not your problem. If you decide you won’t be controlled by a narcissist’s tantrums or your own misplaced guilt, then you are prepared to set and enforce boundaries with your Ns, including getting restraining orders against them if nothing else works. You cannot control them but you can control yourself and what influences you allow in your life.

I read a line the other day that said when it comes to narcissists, you must weigh their influence on your life: if they bring you more joy than difficulty, then find ways to live with them but if they bring you more pain than joy, then you must let them go. It didn’t make exceptions for elderly narcissistic relatives or mothers or even narcissistic adult children: it simply said that if they bring you more pain than joy, then you must let them go.

Sounds like good advice to me.

She is insanely defensive: Characteristics of Narcissistic Mothers Pt 13

 The black text is a shortened version of an original work by Chris, The Harpy’s Child. Original at https://sites.google.com/site/harpyschild/  Copyright 2007, all rights reserved

[There are two basic types of narcissistic mothers, the ignoring type and the engulfing type. These may—and often do—overlap but most NMs have a basic style and will be primarily one or the other. Some of the following points may not apply to your NM simply because they describe an engulfing characteristic when your NM is an ignoring type—or vice versa. But our mothers are not the only narcissists we will encounter in our lives. In fact, being raised by a narcissistic parent actually sets us up to be prey for more of the self-centred emotional vampires as we go out into the world, from girlfriends who are anything but friends to lovers who love themselves best to husbands who are the mirror image of dear old mom. So, whether something looks like it applies to your NM or not, read and consider it carefully—it may give you the awareness necessary to avoid the predator lurking around the next bend. As ever, my comments are shown in violet. -V]

It's about secret things. The Destructive Narcissistic Parent creates a child that only exists to be an extension of her self. It's about body language. It's about disapproving glances. It's about vocal tone. It's very intimate. And it's very powerful. It's part of who the child is. ~ Chris

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
She is insanely defensive and is extremely sensitive to any criticism.

Narcissists must always be right…their sense of self depends on it. Many narcissists I have known tend toward “black and white” thinking, so if they are to acknowledge they are wrong on anything, then they must be wrong on everything. So, any kind of criticism must be vigorously defended because their entire being feels at risk. They don’t conceptualize that being wrong on “something” doesn’t mean they are wrong on “everything.”

I suspect this comes from a deep inner knowledge that the person they project to others is not their authentic self, and so their lives are a house of cards and that the smallest jostle can tumble it down, revealing the real person they try so hard to keep hidden. If they weren’t so destructive to others, one could almost feel sorry for them. But, despite their inner damage, narcissists have a choice and that they choose to hurt others to salve their own wounds makes them rather like psychic cannibals and beyond the pale of compassion.

I ordinarily advocate giving people the benefit of the doubt and to act with compassion and empathy towards others. In dealing with narcissists, however, I withdraw that advice. Narcissists are the people who see your compassion as weakness and your empathy as condescension. It provokes them to defensiveness (which is sometimes embodied in offensive or aggressive tactics); in your compassion they feel you pity them, in your empathy they feel you mocking them because, lacking compassion and empathy themselves, pity and mockery are all they have and so they assume the same of you. Pitiful people are, in their world, to be exploited and weak people to be mocked: their interpretation of your compassion and empathy is that you see them as pitiful, weak individuals to be mocked and exploited, just as they would see you, and so they become defensive.

Criticism is viewed much the same way: in order to be legitimately criticized you must be wrong; narcissists cannot be wrong, therefore they cannot be legitimately criticized—which therefore means if you criticized the narcissist, you are wrong. Only weak people are wrong, so if you are wrong, you are weak and therefore vulnerable to attack. And nothing shores up a narcissist’s sense of self like beating someone else at something, even if it is a 6 year old playing Monopoly for the first time or a well-meaning person who made what he thought was a helpful observation and was verbally excoriated for his trouble.

The bottom line is, narcissists cannot be wrong and if you try to show one s/he is, you open yourself to a battle they cannot allow you to win…their very lives depend on it.

If you criticize her or defy her she will explode with fury, threaten, storm, rage, destroy and may become violent, beating, confining, putting her child outdoors in bad weather or otherwise engaging in classic physical abuse.

There are self-appointed “experts” on the web who maintain that true Ns never engage in physical abuse of their children; they claim that if a parent engages in physical abuse, s/he is not a narcissist but suffers from some other problem, like Anti-social Personality Disorder.

Don’t you believe a word of it. Narcissism seldom occurs in a vacuum and it is most likely that your NM’s disorder is what the shrinks call “co-morbid” with another disorder including the Anti-social Personality Disorder noted above. In other words, while your NM may be largely narcissistic, she can also be a little bit BPD (borderline), a little bit HPD (histrionic), and/or a little AsPD (Antisocial). There is nothing in the psychiatrist’s Big Book of Personality Disorders that says a person cannot have more than one personality disorder at a time so, if your narcissistic mother beat you or put you outdoors in the snow or otherwise physically abused you, she probably has some AsPD along with her NPD. But she is still a narcissist.

I never criticized my NM because I was afraid of her. She was physically as well as emotionally abusive. I am not sure how non-malignant NMs respond to criticism from their kids, but I can tell you that my NM brooked none from anyone except, maybe, her own parents. If my father objected to something, she blew up into a towering rage and she would try to get her own way through bombast—intimidating and trying to back him down. And then, no matter how her rage and the ensuing fight turned out, I suspect she just went and did what she wanted, no matter what. She did seem to be a bit subdued in the presence of her own parents, but only when they were physically present. The snide remarks to me never stopped, they were just delivered quietly and menacingly when Nana wasn’t nearby.

Defiance, however, she saw at every turn. Any time something was not done exactly to her liking (even if she had never bothered to set out parameters or demonstrate how to do something to her liking), she blamed it on defiance—there was no quarter given for inexperience, ignorance, youthfulness, or the natural immaturity of a child—no, if it wasn’t done properly, whether it was a chore or simply how I spoke, it was because I was defiant.

Truth is, I wasn’t defiant, I was terrified. Whenever I opened my mouth around her, I stood a good chance of the wrong thing coming out, or at least something she could twist and use against me. So, if I spoke, I got skewered with my own words; if I was silent, I was defiant. There was no way to win—which, to me, meant to be safe.

I have previously mentioned how, when she took The Strap to me, I would often grit my teeth and try to endure the beating without making a sound. This was because I didn’t know if she wanted me to scream or be silent, and it was very hard to stop screaming, once I started…and to keep sobbing or hiccoughing or sniffing once she commanded silence was to ask for more. But if she was in a mood that she wanted to hear me scream, my silence was “defiance.” But if I screamed when she hit me and didn’t stop all semblance of sound when she commanded, that was defiance as well.

Defiance was a punishable offense. And it didn’t have to be (and usually wasn’t) real defiance either, just anything she could identify as such. And while other NMs might rage and bellow and scream,—or go into a sulk—mine got physical. Why should she break something she owned in a rage? (Although she could blame me, I suppose—I often heard “Don’t make me hurt you,” from her, so certainly a broken tchotchke could be blamed on me with “Look what you made me do!”) I suspect throwing dishes against a wall would not be as satisfying as beating her child into a quivering pulp, so she skipped the starters and went straight for the main course—me.

I have often wondered why she didn’t see defiance in my younger brother when, in fact, he really was defiant! The kid was always in some kind of trouble or another—but I generally got punished for “letting” him do whatever it was he did. He was not a stupid child and this was not lost on him…since the consequences for his misbehaviour was invariably meted out on someone other than himself, he had no incentive to behave himself. He knew enough not to openly defy NM to her face because she might not ignore that…but he was certainly smart enough to exploit her weaknesses as well as mine.

Narcissists loathe being thought of as being wrong. For some reason, many of them think a tantrum, a meltdown worthy of a sleep-deprived 2 year old, is an appropriate way to deal with someone who has had the audacity of implying they are not perfect in every way. Back them down with bullshit, teach them with terror not to make the mistake of thinking a narcissist is anything but utterly perfect. Never let a crack in the defences show—how very narcissistic of them!

Next: Part 14. She terrorized.

Arrested Development

From House of Mirrors:

Let’s take a look at why malignant narcissists not only don't change but become worse. Keep in mind, they have mastered a lifetime of this twisted way of being in the world, and are always pushing their warped behavior to the limits.


All Malignant Narcissists are a case of arrested development. They live in the mindset of a child. Like a child, they know the difference between right and wrong but choose to do wrong when they can get away with it. However, unlike a child, the narcissist cannot be influenced by authority figures. The narcissist believes they are the ultimate authority on everything. They are determined to remain children who always get their way. And like all spoiled brats who control everyone by temper tantrums and bad behaviour they only get worse with the more they get away with.

“…they know the difference between right and wrong but choose to do wrong when they can get away with it…” This describes my mother to a T. How do I know she understood that some things were wrong but chose to do them any way? Because she taught me they were wrong and punished me when I did them. She also taught my brother, the Golden Child, that such things were wrong, but when he did them, I got punished for letting him.

For example, she taught us it was wrong to lie. If she suspected I was lying, I got punished (and punishment at her hands was brutal!). And yet, she regularly and easily lied, and even forced me to be complicit. My father worked two jobs, one full-time day job and one part-time evening job. When he would leave after dinner for his evening job, MNM would dress up, put on make up, high heels and jewellery and go “bar hopping,” (her term) leaving us alone. Not only was I admonished not to say anything to my father about her nocturnal activities, I was expected to keep my hyperactive, undisciplined little brother (who was bigger than I was) out of trouble while she was gone…nice trick for a scrawny 7-year-old and a husky bruiser of a 5-year-old!

On one occasion my brother found our father’s camera and disassembled it. Unable to put it back together, he got a hammer from the kitchen drawer and used it in an attempt to force the front and back halves of the camera back together. I was unable to stop him (and, truth be told, I was afraid to try to wrestle the hammer away from him lest he clobber me with it!) and when my mother got home, shortly before my father was due home from his night job, all hell broke loose. I was punished for “letting” my brother break the camera and we were both sent to bed after being told to say nothing about this, that she would handle it.

The walls in our house were paper thin and my bedroom adjoined the living room. My bed was pushed up against the shared wall, so at night I could hear what was going on in the next room. Through that thin wall, I heard my mother tell my father than my little brother had damaged the camera while she was out at the wash lines…a blatant lie if I ever heard one!...and that he had already been punished for it.

She knew it was wrong to steal, and she taught us it was wrong to steal and even punished us for stealing. But, like all narcissists, the rules didn’t apply to her, only to us lesser and unfavoured mortals.

My father liked to fish and hunt. He and my mother both had jobs to support my mother’s upwardly mobile lifestyle, and my father had a second job as well. What my father wanted more than anything was a good hunting rifle. With it he could not only indulge his pleasure of hunting, he could provide meat for the table. And to that end, my father began saving money, secreting it in the closet, far back on the shelf.

My mother, however, considered such pastimes to be “low class” and did not support his ambitions. Instead of the hunting rifle he wanted, for his birthday she gave him a solid gold tie pin in the shape of a crab. My father was a Pisces, not a Cancer, and I doubt he had ever eaten crab, so the reason for her choosing that emblem was a mystery. And a tie pin? My father owned only one tie and wore it no more than once a year. But it was gold and it was a tie pin so that when they got dressed up to go somewhere, my father would look prosperous...God forbid my mother associating in public with someone whose appearance did not shore up her own.

So, knowing the rifle would never be a gift from his wife, Daddy started saving money from his night job. And then my mother found it. I know she didn’t ask him about the money, what it was for or why he was hiding it. I know this because I still remember hearing them, through that paper thin wall, fight about it. He demanded that she give it back and she very sarcastically said she wouldn’t even if she could—it had already been spent. He was outraged, she was completely unashamed…her tone of voice was superior and condescending. And a few weeks later a new living room suite arrived, a sectional sofa and chair and several blonde wood tables, all perfectly in keeping with the trend of the day. She even got a neighbour, who was a carpenter and painter, to come and paint the living room walls to match the rosy pink chair and intense turquoise bouclé loop sofa. Daddy’s savings were gone, but my mother had the trendy new furniture she wanted that leapfrogged her into the position of having the newest, most fashionable and enviable stuff on the block.

She knew stealing was wrong…she told her children it was wrong and even punished me if she suspected me (or my brother) of stealing. Yet, when she found it, she shamelessly and without remorse, stole the money my father had been saving for a hunting rifle, something that would not only bring him pleasure but would have the added benefit of putting meat on the table (he liked to go deer hunting and a single deer could provide us with meat for the table for the better part of a year).

While Lisette states that narcissists cannot be influenced by authority figures, like parents, I am not so sure this is entirely correct. My mother, for example, moved from the northern Willamette Valley in Oregon to San Diego to distance herself from her parents (and a scandal she created that caused the people in their very small town to shun her) and she seemed to dread their visits. She changed when they were there, she actually seemed normal. It proved to me that she did know how to behave properly because she did so in front of her parents. I got no beatings while they were around, no nasty, vituperative tongue lashings, and I wasn’t punished for my brother’s misbehaviour. Life seemed normal…or at least what I imagined to be normal…when my grandparents were there.

My grandparents had several big walnut trees in their back garden and when they came down to visit, they always brought a big box of walnuts with them. I can remember sitting on the floor in front of the TV, cracking and eating walnuts to my heart’s content—I was never hungry when my grandparents were around. But as soon as they left, those walnuts were gathered up and put away, with instructions that we were not to touch them without permission, permission for which I was too intimidated to ask. Eventually they would go bad and they would be tossed out with the trash. Once my grandparents were gone, so was my mother’s “good” behaviour.

My mother had a temper and I was terrified of her when she let it loose. “…like all spoiled brats who control everyone by temper tantrums and bad behaviour…” Yep, that was my mother. I was afraid of her in general, but when she got angry—which was often—I was frequently in fear of my life. For one thing, anything could set her off. I had to wash the accumulated breakfast and lunch dishes when I got home from school (even though I was so young I needed to stand on a chair to get to the sink). My brother was supposed to dry them and put them away, but because he knew that he would not get punished for failing to do so (I would get it for not making him do his chores), both the washing and drying fell to me. If I did not put them away “right,” if I stacked the pans wrong, if I put the can opener in the wrong drawer or mixed a big spoon in with the little ones, it was a punishable offense. I have been dragged out of bed by my hair, my mother screaming almost unintelligibly at me, and pulled into the kitchen where I was told to put a glass or cup in its proper place or pick up a piece of trash that had not made it into the sack, then whipped with a thin leather strap every step of the way back to bed. Did she know this was wrong? Of course—“if you tell your precious father about this, you’ll get twice as much tomorrow when he leaves for work,” she would tell me…like a naughty child, a schoolyard bully, who threatens you with more violence if you report his bad behaviour.

They never grow out of it. My mother remained mean and angry and punitive right up to her death. When she died she had two children and four grandchildren. She had inherited a lot of money from her parents and when she wrote her will, she wrote one child and three grandchildren out of it “for reasons they already know.” One of those grandchildren she had refused to meet for the whole of his 26 years—how could he know anything? But her last act was to put the cat amongst the pigeons and create conflict and hurt feelings among her children and grandchildren for years to come. I can just imagine her writing out the will, smiling and congratulating herself for turning one of her grandchildren into the next family bully and sowing a legacy of dysfunction into the next generations. Like spoiled little chidren, narcissists must always get their way.