The “Me” Flea

You know how narcissists can take any situation and find a way to make it about themselves?

Well, many of us have the exact same talent. Let us be in the proximity of any kind of dysfunction and we will find a way to feel guilty, or responsible, or obligated to fix or mitigate or otherwise resolve the issue. Mother’s an alcoholic? you must do something to intervene and fix it… Golden child brother wrecked his car and got thrown out of his house by an angry wife? you have a spare room—well, no you don’t but your kid won’t mind sleeping on the couch while your brother stays there… Husband cheated? you tear your brain apart trying to figure out what you did wrong that would make him cheat… You never met a problem you couldn’t find a way to make your fault or responsibility: the “Me” flea—whatever is wrong, it has to be linked to me.

Anybody recognize yourself here?

One of the first things I learned in therapy was that I was “overly responsible.” I found this difficult to wrap my mind around because I had spent the better part of my life hearing about how irresponsible I was. I grew up in a house full of mixed messages and no key—no clue—to figuring them out. I was supposed to wash the breakfast and lunch dishes after school and my brother was supposed dry them and put them away. If he refused and I told my mother, I was tattling; if he refused and I didn’t make him do it, I was irresponsible and hopeless and a failure. My solution was to take on the responsibility myself and dried and put them away in order to prevent a maternal meltdown, a behaviour choice which, I later discovered, was being overly responsible.

As an adult and married to the laziest narcissist west of the Mississippi, the same continued. He had a car but he refused to maintain it. And while it is all well and good to say “let him suffer the consequences of his inactions,” the truth was, our budget couldn’t handle him blowing up car engines regularly because he refused to put water in the radiator or have the oil changed. I managed the household funds because he refused to—he just spent until it was gone—, I decided what work needed to be done around the house and who was to do it…and, like my brother, he simply refused to do the work that was his.

It occurred to me that if he had some choice in which household chores were his (as opposed to me assigning them to him like he was one of the kids), maybe he would be more inclined to do them. That was when I discovered that he considered himself exempt from anything resembling labour because he earned more money than I did. Bottom line—if I wasn’t willing to do something myself or delegate it to a kid, it wasn’t going to get done, no matter what the consequence—and that included a blown engine in his Mustang.

Oddly enough, I was irritated about this from a superficial feminist perspective—I worked as many hours as he did and if I was contributing to the household income, then it was only fair that he contributed to the household labour—but the idea that I, alone, was responsible for running and managing the household and his obligation was to perform the occasional assist, never occurred to me as being innately unjust. I had always been the one to whom responsibility fell and I had never questioned it. The responsibility had always belonged to me and where it was not specifically given to me, I simply took it.

I recall sitting in a job interview and being asked about my problem-solving process and saying that the first place I looked was to myself…was I responsible for the problem? And if so, I would then find a way to correct it. The first place I would go would be me. When anything went wrong in anything, my first question was always “what did I do to cause this? And what can I do to prevent it from happening again?”

It doesn’t help that this is actually very pragmatic question to ask. If you have to spend money on a mechanic or a plumber or a repairman of any kind, it is a perfectly rational question to ask: knowing what caused a problem allows you to take steps to prevent a costly recurrence. But for me, it was more than that…it was finding out where *I* screwed up so I could pro-actively prevent it from happening again…so I wouldn’t be at fault…and have to feel the anxiety of having screwed up…again.

I can’t say I felt much guilt—that is not something I even spent a lot of time with—because the anxiety overshadowed it to the degree of virtually obliterating it. My childhood was one of waiting for the other shoe to drop, the next blow to land, the inevitable punishment to fall. I didn’t have an opportunity for guilt—guilt was seldom elicited because it didn’t give my NM anything she wanted. She wanted me to be afraid of her—she even told me that she would rather have me fear and obey her than love and respect her. Each and every time I fell short of the impossible standards she set for me (often without even telling me what the standard was), each and every time I did something, I waited anxiously for the pronouncement from her just how far off the mark I was and what the consequences were to be. No matter what the assignment or even who it was assigned to, Violet was the responsible party in the end—Violet was the de-facto project manager who had no authority, all the responsibility, and bore the brunt of any shortfall.

Objectively speaking, it may not actually have been as dire as all that, but that was my perception, even in childhood, and our perceptions are our realities. My reality was that I would be punished for anything that went wrong in our household and to minimize that possibility, I became what my NM called “bossy.” Only by having control over every possible bit of my environment did I feel I had a chance to forestall blame and punishment. I rigorously self-examined, looked for facial expressions in the mirror that were suitably bland so as to not provoke NM’s eagle eye for evidence of defiance or insubordination. I practiced tone of voice that would be informative but neither whiney nor timid and fearful: I was to be afraid of her but not in an obsequious manner that might cause notice in others. There was no aspect of my life that I did not examine in one way or another, seeking ways to stay away from my mother’s “bad side.” No small feat, considering her “bad side” was pretty much all she showed at home.

And so everything became about me. The expression on my face, my tone of voice. What I did—what I didn’t do. When I overheard my mother expressing displeasure to a friend on the phone or to my father, my mind immediately turned to myself: what did I do to cause this? What did I fail to do? What can I do to mitigate it and reduce the consequences? How can I control this, spin this, avoid getting caught in this?

Things did not improve in adulthood. The “Me Flea” followed me everywhere. If there was no business in the club where I was dancing and waitressing, did I do something to cause it? What could I do to improve attendance the weekend before payday? If the bus was late getting me to work, what could I do to make sure I got there on time tomorrow? Take an earlier bus? Take a chance on this bus again? My focus on life was its faults, its problems, and how I caused them, contributed to them, and/or could fix them. It was all about me…my choices, my actions, what other people thought of me, how they viewed me, what they might do to me, how much power they had over me and what could I do to take that power so as to protect myself. Things that could not possibly have been my fault became my fault: tree fell over at a neighbour’s house? I should have seen that it was diseased or damaged and warned the neighbour—it was therefore my fault that the tree fell down. Washer broke? I should have known that odd noise heralded a catastrophic failure of the motor…my fault. Co-worker’s brother died in the war? I managed to find a way to feel responsible for that, too—my brother was in the same war and he was alive and well, so I felt that somehow I should have been able to prevent her suffering and failed to do so: it was her brother who died, but my feelings of empathy for her loss were all but obliterated by my anxiety about my lack of power to control the world around me.

Through this all, I did not see how self-oriented I was. My perception of the social expectation was that I would keep a clean house, that I would see to disciplined children, that I would have meals on the table, laundry done, groceries bought, that I would see to a tidy home, obedient children, and a well-fed, happy husband and if I could not achieve that, I was failing my duty. Never mind that there was no committee judging me—not even my NM was looking over my shoulder—never mind that the nebulous “they” who I was trying to satisfy did not actually exist: everything in my life was about living in such a way as to not further provoke the anxiety that overshadowed my life. Without even consciously realizing it, everything was about me. About manipulating everything in my life to assuage my anxiety, to minimize my potential for feeling guilty. Even though it did not look like it nor did it feel like it, in reality, everything was about me.

I have to wonder how many of us go through life under the influence of the Me Flea without even realizing it. How many of us make choices that are dictated by the Me Flea without seeing what we are doing? Every time you do something out of Fear, Obligation or Guilt, you are succumbing to the Me Flea because you make those choices so that you do not have to feel guilty, or because you are unwilling to take the consequences (fear) or because you feel obligated, even when you are not. Every time you choose to expose your kids to their toxic grandmother, every time you do as bid by your N rather than say “no,” every time you get upset with the behaviour of a flying monkey, you are acceding to the Me Flea, putting your unwillingness to bear the brunt of an NTantrum ahead of the well-being of your children, allowing your fear of your NM’s reaction to usurp your time, permitting the opinions of people who don’t care about your feelings to actually dictate those feelings.

When the Me Flea dominates your life, you cannot live a healthy emotional life because the Me Flea does not put your well-being front and centre. The Me Flea lives in an environment of fear, reaction, and irrationality. It controls you and leads you to sacrifice not only your own well-being but the well-being of others in your life, like your children, your spouse, even friends. It is a selfish Flea that demands all other aspects of your life be subordinate to it: rather than stand up to unreasonable demands and protect your children, you worry about the repercussions from your N or you try to avoid guilt by succumbing to the Me Flea. Living your life giving in to the F.O.G. is actually a very selfish mode of existence because it sacrifices everything else in your life to it.

The Me Flea is no more powerful than any other Flea in your life: you have absolute control over it, but too often we refuse to exercise that control because we aren’t willing to deal with the consequences. But all of life’s choices have consequences, so even choosing not to stand up to the Me Flea has consequences: you allow yourself to be exploited and your children and spouse, marriage and friendships become sacrifices to your unwillingness to take the other consequences…the consequences of shutting down the Me Flea and standing up to the Ns and Flying Monkeys in your life.

Like so many other things, the decision to continue succumbing to the Me Flea or the decision to stand up to it and face down your Ns is a personal choice. But be clear on this: when you choose to let the Me Flea rule your life, when you choose capitulation because you don’t want to feel guilty or afraid or you don’t want to bear the consequences of refusing to fall prey to a feeling of obligation, when you succumb to the F.O.G., you are choosing to sacrifice others to save yourself. And that is how the Me Flea operates.

Am I a Narcissist, too? All about fleas

Do you ever find yourself asking this question? Do you worry that, because you grew up in a household with one or more narcissist dominating it, you might have “caught it”? Perhaps you have caught yourself displaying some kind of narcissistic traits and you are suddenly brought up short by the fear that you, too, are a narcissist like your mother or father or other family member.

Let me put your mind at ease: the very fact that you are asking that question, the very fact that it concerns you that you might be a narcissist, pretty much proves that you aren’t. The psyche of the narcissist is so constructed that the simple act of self-reflection is highly unlikely, and rather than engaging in self-doubt, the narcissist will simply find ways to rationalize or justify those behaviours that have you worried you might be one of them.

It doesn’t mean you cannot be displaying narcissist-like behaviours, attitudes and traits, however. We learn at the knee of the narcissist, and we learn such fundamentals as right and wrong, good and bad, honesty and deceit…and if we learned them from a narcissist, our take on them may be a little...well…out of the mainstream. These narcissist-like behaviours, attitudes and traits, when displayed by the non-narcissist, are known as “fleas,” (narcissistic-like behaviour traits displayed by a non-narcissist, generally learned behaviours from having been raised by a narcissist and not knowing what is normal for the situation) and you get them from being around and adopting them from the narcissist, just like you get real fleas from laying down with a flea-ridden dog.

Most of us get our fleas from our narcissistic family members as we grow up, but we can also acquire them later on in life as well. Sometimes we acquire them subconsciously but sometimes, when we see certain behaviours or attitudes working for others, we adopt them consciously, wanting to get the same benefit. It is a kind of “follow the leader” or even “follow the herd” principle at work, and can lead to an attitude change in which something previously viewed as wrong eventually becomes seen as a right or entitlement, like stealing office supplies or spreading rumours about or bullying a co-worker. It is good for our egos because it makes us feel accepted, like one of the gang, and if we can set the standard for others to follow, it feels even better to be the trendsetter to whom others look for direction.

If you are a normal human being with a normal conscience, you are eventually going to feel bad about doing things you know are wrong. This puts you on the horns of a dilemma because the human psyche doesn’t like cognitive dissonance…and feeling guilty just doesn’t feel good. You basically end up with two choices: 1) stop doing what is making you feel guilty (which means you will have to give up the benefits you are getting from it) or 2) find a way to stop feeling guilty about it (which means you will have to rationalize and/or justify what you have been doing). Now, the difference between you and a narcissist is simple: the narcissist never feels guilty and never even considers #1—the narcissist automatically invokes #2. You may also invoke that second option, but your reason for doing so will be very different from the narcissist’s: you will be doing it to quiet your conscience; the narcissist doesn’t have a conscience to quiet, she feels truly justified in whatever she does.

I used to know a woman who took the most outrageous chances at work, chances I would never dream of taking because I just knew I would get fired for it. She often came in late to work, took long lunches, left early, even took whole days off on a whim and even though she was only an admin, acted like she was one of the managers. And you know what? Instead of counselling her to work the hours she was getting paid for, she got promoted! Sure enough, one of the other admins tried to follow the first one’s lead and wound up getting disciplined. When she tried to defend herself with “But Tessa has done that for over a year!” she was told “You are not Tessa.” Who told me this story? Tessa, laughing gleefully at the other woman’s predicament, not a shred of responsibility tainting her amusement. She found it hilarious that the other woman was disciplined for following her example, and in true narcissistic fashion, the incident reinforced her self-perception of being special and above the rules.

This happened years ago, before I knew anything about narcissists, but I remember being surprised and appalled at Tessa’s reaction. Putting my self in her shoes, I would have been chagrined at having set an example for my co-workers that resulted in one of them receiving disciplinary action, I would have felt bad about it and that would have motivated me to be more circumspect. The last thing I would have felt was amused at the other woman's plight!

We can pick up fleas anywhere. I have seen things on FaceBook, people saying really hurtful, mean things about LGBT people, about people of colour, about the poor and disadvantaged, about women, and they are absolutely shameless about it. Some of these people are narcissists, but others have picked up fleas from narcissistic politicians, pastors, or other authority figures they either revere or fear. Taken out of that environment and shown how their words and attitudes actually hurt other living, breathing human beings, some of these people will feel shame for what they said and the hurt they caused. Others will not, and they will rationalize and justify what they said, even blame their victims for their hurt (I have actually seen someone say that feeling hurt by the words of a bully is a choice, that you can choose not to be hurt and therefore what the bullies say and do is OK!): these people are most likely narcissists. Some of them not only have no shame or remorse for their unkind words and thoughts, they advocate violence ranging from beatings to rape to death. Those people are probably narcissists, too, but malignant narcissists who may be comorbid with another personality disorder like Antisocial Personality Disorder, which is “characterized by ‘...a pervasive pattern of disregard for, and violation of, the rights of others that begins in childhood or early adolescence and continues into adulthood.’”

Fleas are things you usually acquire at home, as a young child, by accepting the values of your narcissistic parent and emulating her/him. It is possible, however, to get them from working with someone like Tessa and copying both her entitled behaviour and adopting her self-serving lack of compassion. We can suppress our guilt and our remorse through justification and rationalization, so if you find yourself acting like an N, you may need to sit down and think about how you really, truly feel about something. If you can’t penetrate the rationalizations and justifications, if you can’t see how something you did or said that caused harm to someone else was wrong, then you just might be a narcissist.

The key, then, is whether or not you are capable of feeling remorse. If you have a conscience, if you have empathy or compassion for other people, if you can feel guilt and remorse for actions you have taken that end up somehow harming someone else, then the odds are strongly against you being a narcissist and just as strongly in favour of you having a case of fleas.

And truthfully, if you even ask the question, you most likely just have fleas.

Learning at the Narcissist's Knee...

“If you lie down with dogs, you get up with fleas, or in Latin, qui cum canibus concumbunt cum pulicibus surgent. “He that lieth down with dogs shall rise up with fleas” has been attributed to Benjamin Franklin’s Poor Richard's Almanack.

“The quote has a large almost universally agreed meaning of ‘You should be cautious of the company you keep. Associating with those of low reputation may not only lower your own but also lead you astray by the faulty assumptions, premises and data of the unscrupulous.’”

I suspect most people, when they think of teaching children, think of formal teaching, like parents schooling their children in table manners or classroom teachers with a lesson plan. But children learn more by observation and mimicking than by what they are formally taught and so you get children whose parents are mortified (or worse, amused) when sweet toddling Susie opens her little rosebud lips and an obscenity pops out. The little ones learn by observation and imitation much more than they learn from what we tell them.

In narcissistic terms, “fleas” are “…narcissistic-like behaviour traits displayed by a non-narcissist, generally learned behaviours from having been raised by a narcissist and not knowing what is normal for the situation.”  And if you live with narcissists, you’re gonna get fleas…

There’s nothing shameful in that—none of us are perfect, our parents are our first teachers and we, as little kids, believed them implicitly. They are our first gods, our first teachers, our first role models. We are programmed by nature to believe in them and in their benevolence because our survival literally depends on it: in our primitive brain, which is concerned with survival issues, we understand that pandering to and learning from our care-givers means our own survival, and so we ape and imitate them from our earliest years, absorbing their beliefs and prejudices and behaviours right along with their form of communication (language), rituals, and habits. And very little of this is consciously, formally taught or learned.

Children also learn from what they don't see. If they do not see compassionate or courteous behaviour from their primary caregivers, if they don’t see honesty and truth-telling from them, if they don’t see sharing and giving the benefit of the doubt, they don’t learn those things themselves. And when they see these things later in life, demonstrated by others, they not only don’t value and adopt them, they may disdain them because they were not part of the core values they absorbed in their homes of origin.

You see, children are naturally narcissistic. It is a survival mechanism built into the infant. Helpless and unable to do even the smallest thing for itself, the infant lives in a world of only two states: needy or needs satisfied. When it is hungry, it will squall and it will keep squalling until it is fed, no matter the circumstances…not even if its noise brings danger upon it and those around it. The infant operates from its primitive brain and is totally preoccupied with its own needs, having no care whatsoever for the needs of those around it. Programmed by nature to survive and to alert its caretakers when it has needs, there is no sense of shame, compassion, empathy, or consideration for the circumstances of anyone except itself.

As children grow, so does their capacity for seeing outside themselves. But by then they absorb the values and beliefs of their home of origin, and they ape their caretakers. It is natural for children to begin to outgrow their embedded self-centredness, but part of the job of the caretaker is to help the child become aware of the feelings of others and teach the child to respect them, to give them value.

Children, however, remain convinced for quite some time that their experiences define the normal world. Things that are different are potentially dangerous, so they often fear and balk at new experiences, particularly those that do not involve their protectors/caretakers. Lots of kids are clingy and apprehensive at the beginning of their school careers, or when changing schools, for example. And they carry with them that notion their world, their experiences, their knowledge is what is right…meaning that, at least initially, things alien to them are wrong—even bad or dangerous.

School is the great equalizer. I remember being in the third or fourth grade and being tormented by a nasty little boy who reminded me of my own equally nasty little brother. My brother was the GC and even by that tender age, I was nurturing a growing hatred for him as he browbeat me verbally like NM and he physically abused me as well—and if I told NM, she “spanked” me for tattling and let GCBro continue on. This other child would punch me in the arm or back and was verbally abusive, calling me names and inciting other kids to do the same, so I was nurturing a growing dislike of him as well.

Remember, children believe that their lives and their feelings are universal…it is part of the natural narcissism they must eventually outgrow. So when he came up to me on the playground and said something rude to me when I was talking to his sister, one of my classmates, I sincerely thought that she would have as much animosity towards her little brother as I had towards mine. Imagine my shock when she told me “Yes, he’s mean a lot, but I love him. He’s my little brother.”

My own upbringing did not include loving someone whom you did not like. It was inconceivable to me, at that time. Hate was the watchword in my household and, like any child, I just assumed that that was how everybody was—you only loved the ones who were really nice to you, and you hated everybody else. That was what my household felt like to me—why would anybody else’s house be any different, why would any other little girl feel differently from me about a brother who tormented her at every opportunity?

The very notion that everybody else feels the same way I do is at the core of the narcissist. They lie and manipulate, connive and misconstrue, all without guilt and remorse, assuming everybody else is exactly the same way. And because they believe everybody else is lying, manipulating, conniving and misconstruing, just like they are doing, they feel justified, which eliminates any reason for guilt. This kind of thinking is actually not atypical for young children (along with vengeful notions of payback), but it is something conscientious parents try to help their children grow out of. Some kids respond to those efforts…and some kids do not.

One of the things that narcissists do is they take things for granted…especially things you are expected to do. I learned to say “please” and “thank you” as formal kinds of politeness and, modelling on my mother’s behaviour, usually said them to strangers or to adults outside my family. My grandfather once watched me polish off a huge piece of lemon meringue pie that my grandmother had made just because it was my favourite pie (we had fruit she could have used for a fruit pie, but made this one because of my affinity for it). When I finished it and started to get down from the table, my grandfather very quietly said to me “It might be nice to thank your Nana for making your favourite pie.” It had never occurred to me: nobody ever thanked me for doing my chores, nobody ever thanked me for making sure my surly little brother got to school on time—in fact, nobody ever thanked me for anything. It simply did not occur to me to thank anyone for doing their “job,” including thanking my grandmother for cooking. It was a single sentence, but it opened up a whole new world of possibilities for me. I ran into the kitchen and hugged my grandmother around the waist and thanked her for the pie and for the dinner, then told her I thought she was the best grandmother in the whole wide world. I don’t think a diamond necklace could have made her smile so broadly!

I still remember that day…brilliantly…and still recall the huge amount of thinking I found myself doing, pondering all the different ways I could apply this newfound insight. Wouldn’t it be great if I could make people beam with happiness, like my grandmother, with just those simple two words, “thank you”?

It inspired me to go to the library and check out books on etiquette and to learn and practice good manners. It inspired me to pay attention to others and their feelings, to say please and thank you for the most mundane acts—if it served me, it deserved thanks. More than half a century later, I still practice it: I thank waiters when they bring the cutlery, I thank shop clerks when they give me my till slip and, even after having her work for me for five years now, I still thank my maid after every shift. Yes, I pay her and for some people that is considered enough, but she saves me from all of the housework, which I hated even before my back issues started and I really do appreciate her work, her cheerful demeanour, her attention to detail, her honestly and reliability. And I thank her every time she goes out the door.

But, as I said earlier, we all have fleas and I am no exception. Deeply ingrained in me, learned from my NM and incorporated into my being from my earliest days, is this failure to notice and acknowledge the efforts of others, the tendency to take things for granted, to expect that some people just know how I feel. And while I know that an appreciation or gratitude, if unspoken, might as well not exist, I have blind spots and I fall into ingratitude, not so much in spirit but in practice. And every once in a while I wake up and see what I am doing (or failing to do) and try to amend my behaviour to fix it.

On Saturday my husband and I were sitting at a red light, getting ready to go into a petrol station. As we sat there I looked at the station’s name and it clicked to me that we were buying petrol here because they had a loyalty-reward program, linked to our bank, that gives us 15% off every fuel purchase if we use that bank’s credit card. Considering that my car is an SUV, that comes to a handsome piece of change! In just few seconds a host of thoughts flooded mind about the many things my husband has done and the many ways he has sought to improve our finances and maximize our income to give us—me—the highest standard of living that I have ever enjoyed in my life. And while I have told him that…my thanks for all of his efforts implied…I suddenly realized that in the nine years we have been married, I have never actually said it to him. All these years and all that effort, and not one word of thanks to the person whose efforts made my comfortable existence possible!

As the light turned from red to green, I put my hand on his thigh and said “I don’t think I have ever told you this, but I want you to know that I am very proud of you and very appreciative of all the hard work you have done to give us the comfortable life style we enjoy. I really do notice and I really do appreciate it…and I am sorry I never said anything before this.”

He pulled the car up to the pumps and turned and looked at me, a bit of surprise on his face, and said, “Why thank you! I really appreciate that!”

I felt shamed that I had allowed him to go all of those years without a word of encouragement or appreciation of all of his efforts. It made me think…and more than that, it made me wonder why I, who never fails to thank the maid for her efforts on my behalf, would let him toil for nine years without ever thanking him. And for the next day or two, I turned it over in my mind until I realized that in the household I grew up in, that was the norm…that nobody rewarded you with thanks, or even a “well done!” when you did what was expected of you. Oh, you got plenty of flak if you failed to do what was expected of you, but no encouragement, no appreciation, no kudos. That rule applied only to members of the household, however…friends, neighbours, even visiting family members were thanked for their assistance—they were even thanked just for showing up at our door!

I thought back, trying to think of just one time that NM thanked me for anything (children tend to absorb traits of the same-sex parent more than the opposite sex parent, by the way) and couldn’t come up with a single instance. Instead, I remembered the Mother’s Day card I made for her when I was about 8, and how I brought her breakfast in bed and the card, which I had laboured over for hours, and how the anticipated praise and thank you never materialized…and how I got castigated, instead, for a spelling error.

And I thought about myself and how like my mother I was being, taking my husband’s hard work and his clever, out-of-the-box thinking that gave me a comfortable lifestyle, for granted, never telling him what I was thinking but just assuming that he somehow knew. And I felt ashamed of myself, wondering how I had let such a thing come to pass…

Those fleas are damned difficult to get rid of!

She doesn't acknowledge people’s feelings: Characteristics of Narcissistic Mothers Pt 21

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

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Part 21. She seems to have no awareness that other people even have feelings

This is her lack of empathy in a nutshell. Without awareness and concern for the feelings of other people (and animals as well), it is impossible to have empathy for them. And without empathy for others, people behave as if they were the only people in the world who have feelings.

She'll occasionally slip and say something jaw-droppingly callous because of this lack of empathy. It isn't that she doesn't care at all about other people's feelings, though she doesn't. It would simply never occur to her to think about their feelings.

This is very true…it is as if the filter that most of us have that keeps thoughts from popping out of our mouths is not present. Where you and I might think something rude or inappropriate, we keep it to ourselves either because we don’t want to look like insensitive clods or we don’t want to hurt another person’s feelings: NMs think they are right about everything and don’t expect others to view them as insensitive but as right. And the feelings of others is simply not part of an NMs thought processes—only her feelings matter.

Malignant NMs take it a step further. They intentionally say callous, cruel things for the purpose of stirring up some drama, whether it is to get a rise out of somebody or because they expect the other person to react. My MNM was a racist and didn’t care if anybody heard her, including members of the group she was disparaging. My best friend in junior high and high school was a Jewish girl and everything was fine with my NM until she found out the girl was Jewish, then the shit hit the fan. I never told my friend, but I am sure she wondered why I quit inviting her over to my house: my NM had not forbidden me to see my friend, but she had forbidden me from having a “dirty kike” in her house. But even if she hadn’t forbidden her presence, I would not have invited her anyway—it was very unlikely that NM would keep her antipathy to herself with a real live Jewish person…a vulnerable teen aged girl at that…in the house.

Her insensitivity and lack of awareness of the feelings of others, the complete lack of empathy, is best embodied in her attitude when I had a miscarriage and, due to a serious infection, nearly died. She was in California, I was in Boston, and my husband was overwhelmed with the duties of taking care of two toddlers and trying to work. Expecting a normal mother response (“Oh no! My daughter is sick in the hospital and my grandbabies need me—I’m going to Boston!”) he got a shock when she chewed him out and told him to stop calling her. Then she called me and, completely disregarding how I might feel being just out of isolation, after days of unconsciousness and the loss of my baby, she proceeded to tell me that the miscarriage was a good thing because I didn’t need “more brats clinging to my skirts,” that if I didn’t have contraception to keep my legs closed, and to stop malingering and playing the doctors to get their sympathy so I could stay in the hospital and get home to my husband and kids so he would stop calling her!

Fourteen year old girls can be hormonal, hypersensitive, contrary creatures. When my daughter was fourteen, she spent some time talking with her grandmother on the phone one afternoon and when she hung up, she was in tears. When I asked why, she told me that Grammi had spent most of their conversation complaining about her own children, finishing up with “I wish I have never had children—I should have had cats instead!” My daughter turned to me, eyes streaming tears, saying “If she never had children, I wouldn’t be here! Does she wish I was dead?” It obviously had never crossed NM’s mind that my daughter would be hurt by her words…and if she had seen my daughter’s reaction, she most likely would have accused her of “deliberately misunderstanding” and “turning on the water works for sympathy.”

An absence of empathy is the defining trait of a narcissist and underlies most of the other traits [herein] described.

If you are not sure if your mother is a narcissist or not, this is the trait to watch for. But don’t be fooled by fake expressions of empathy—narcissists, especially older ones who have had a lot of practice, often know the words and facial expressions and social conventions and can make a convincing act. It is away from the situation that you find the real person. It is what they say when they think they are not at risk of being found out that tells the truth.

In the old days, when people regularly had servants, they didn’t care what they said in front of “the staff” because they weren’t really people to them. Narcissists are much the same way inside the family and even with a few friends who share or tolerate their disorder. So, where your mother might coo and ooh and ahh over a relative’s new baby, out of earshot she will say rude things—like my NM when her aunt had a baby late in life. I was excited about having a new baby in the family…NM was congratulatory on the phone and sent the expected card and gift—it was her mother’s sister and it would not do to slight Nana’s sister—but once she put the phone down, she was nasty. Auntie was “disgusting” to have a baby at her age; she and Uncle should be “over that by now” and on and on and on. She had no joy for her aunt and uncle, no pleasure at her new cousin’s arrival…her feelings were centre stage.

Unlike psychopaths, narcissists do understand right, wrong, and consequences, so they are not ordinarily criminal. She beat you, but not to the point where you went to the hospital. She left you standing out in the cold until you were miserable, but not until you had hypothermia. She put you in the basement in the dark with no clothes on, but she only left you there for two hours.

Actually, psychopaths do know right from wrong, they just don’t care. This scholarly article explains a study done in 2009 to determine if they did or not. For those not up to reading the whole article, here is the abstract: “Adult psychopaths have deficits in emotional processing and inhibitory control, engage in morally inappropriate behavior, and generally fail to distinguish moral from conventional violations. These observations, together with a dominant tradition in the discipline which sees emotional processes as causally necessary for moral judgment, have led to the conclusion that psychopaths lack an understanding of moral rights and wrongs. We test an alternative explanation: psychopaths have normal understanding of right and wrong, but abnormal regulation of morally appropriate behavior. We presented psychopaths with moral dilemmas, contrasting their judgments with age- and sex-matched (i) healthy subjects and (ii) non-psychopathic, delinquents. Subjects in each group judged cases of personal harms (i.e. requiring physical contact) as less permissible than impersonal harms, even though both types of harms led to utilitarian gains. Importantly, however, psychopaths’ pattern of judgments on different dilemmas was the same as those of the other subjects. These results force a rejection of the strong hypothesis that emotional processes are causally necessary for judgments of moral dilemmas, suggesting instead that psychopaths understand the distinction between right and wrong, but do not care about such knowledge, or the consequences that ensue from their morally inappropriate behavior.” Psychotics may not know the difference, but psychopaths and narcissists both know what the society around them considers acceptable.

Narcissists, like psychopaths, seek to advantage themselves and simply do not care about right and wrong except as they define and rationalize it. A narcissist will blame the victim, saying “Look what you made me do,” or “Don’t make me hit you,” when, in fact, the N has many choices other than hitting, and the victim is not compelling the N to choose hitting. The narcissist rationalizes and minimizes her transgressions and fully expects the victim to do the same. And while the narcissist may well know that whatever it is she is doing may not be “right” in the eyes of the neighbours or the authorities, the narcissist’s denial of reality coupled with her ability to rationalize and justify has the narcissist convinced that the others are wrong, and probably too stupid to even realize it. Punishments of children that normal people might consider to be over the top are viewed as necessary, desirable, clever, guaranteed to be effective (even in the face of repeated failure) to the narcissist. The outrageous is normalized in the eyes of the narcissist, although it may well be hidden simply because she is aware that other people might take exception to her methods.

One of the problems this creates is that the children brutalized in this manner also normalize this kind of behaviour and punishment. It can give rise to children of NMs who, while not liking severe punishments meted out to children, wholly believe in their appropriateness, necessity and effectiveness and go on to use them with their own children, lacking other parenting tools. And the normalized inappropriate treatment is not limited to physical abuse, which seems to be more the hallmark of the Malignant NM. Psychological and emotional abuse are no less devastating—and no less likely to be adopted by the children when they become parents if they have no alternative behavioural models…this is called “having fleas.”

I once knew a man whose stepmother gave birth to her first—and only—child in her 40s. She did not want a child, she was dismayed and distressed at the whole prospect of pregnancy and childbirth—and the inherent messiness of children just added to her unhappiness. He daughter was a very headstrong child, adding further to her issues. When her two-year-old misbehaved the mother would slap the child repeatedly on any body part available and yell at her “You stop this or I won’t love you any more!” She would also threaten that her father, who absolutely adored her, wouldn’t love her anymore, or that she (the mother) would “run away from home.” Since the mother did not appear to be an N in other respects, I suspect this was a legacy from her own mother, a woman with nine children who was born and raised in the 19th century.

Whether the mother commits this kind of psychological abuse on her child out of narcissism or fleas is immaterial: the result is pretty much the same. A child threatened with the loss of love of her parents as a result of her behaviour can become terribly insecure and fearful; a child whose mother threatens to run away develops abandonment issues. And, because the mother clearly implies these dreadful things will happen as a result of the child’s behaviour, the child may also come to have an over-developed sense of responsibility, to feel anything bad that happens in her family is her fault, even if she cannot clearly see or articulate why. No mother, flea-ridden or narcissist, can inflict this kind of abuse on a child if she is aware of the child’s feelings, if she has empathy for the fear and pain this can inflict on the child. The mother with fleas may do it because she simply has no other tools for managing her child and even empathize with the child’s pain but know no other way to discipline. Hopefully, their own empathetic pain drives these mothers to seek out alternative means of disciplining their child.

But the narcissistic mother, even if she also has fleas, differs in that to her, the child has no feelings or, if she acknowledges the child’s feelings, they do not matter. What matters is the NM getting what she wants from the child, regardless of cost to the child, because what the NM wants is all that really matters.

Next: Part 22. She blames.