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How to Cope with the Narcissist
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I. How to Cope with the Narcissist
If he has a rage attack rage back. This will provoke in him fears of being abandoned and the resulting
calm will be so total that it might seem unbelievable. Narcissists are known for these sudden tectonic shifts in mood and in behavior patterns.
Mirror the narcissist's actions and repeat his
words. If he threatens,
threaten back and credibly try to use the same language and content. If he leaves the house, leave it as well, disappear on him. If he is suspicious, act suspicious. Be critical, denigrating, humiliating, go down to his level, because that is where he permanently is. Faced with his mirror image, the narcissist always recoils.
The other way is to abandon him and go about reconstructing your own life.
Very few people deserve the kind of investment that is an absolute prerequisite to living with a narcissist. To cope with a narcissist is a full time, energy and emotion-draining job, which reduces the persons around the narcissist to insecure nervous wrecks.
II. The Narcissist in Court
How can you expose the lies of the Narcissist in a court of law? He acts so convincing!
A clear
distinction has to be made between the FACTUAL pillar and the PSYCHOLOGICAL pillar of any cross-examination or deposition of a narcissist.
It is essential to be equipped with absolutely
unequivocal, first rate, thoroughly authenticated and vouched for information. The reason is that narcissists are superhuman in their capacity to distort reality by offering highly
"plausible" alternative scenarios, which fit most of the facts.
It is very easy to break a narcissist, even a well-trained and prepared one. Here are a few of the things the narcissist
finds devastating:
Any statement or fact, which seems to contradict his inflated perception of his grandiose self.
Any criticism, disagreement, exposure of fake achievements,
belittling of "talents and skills" which the narcissist fantasizes that he possesses, any hint that he is subordinated, subjugated, controlled, owned or dependent upon a third party.
Any description of the narcissist as average and common, indistinguishable from many others.
Any hint that the narcissist is weak, needy, dependent, deficient, slow, not intelligent, naive,
gullible, susceptible, not in the know, manipulated, a victim.
The narcissist is likely to react with rage to all these and, in an effort to re-establish his fantastic grandiosity, he is
likely to expose facts and stratagems he had no conscious intention of exposing.
The narcissist reacts with narcissistic rage, hatred, aggression, or violence to an infringement of what
he perceives to be his entitlement.
Narcissists believe that they are so unique and that their lives are so cosmically significant that others should defer to their needs and cater to
their every whim without ado. The narcissist feels entitled to special treatment by unique individuals, over and above the regular person.
Any insinuation, hint, intimation, or direct
declaration that the narcissist is not special at all, that he is average, common, not even sufficiently idiosyncratic to warrant a fleeting interest will inflame the narcissist.
Add to this a
negation of the narcissist's sense of entitlement, and the
combustion is inevitable. Tell the narcissist that he does not deserve the best treatment, that his needs are not everyone's priority, that he is boring, that his needs can be catered to by an average practitioner (medical doctor, accountant, lawyer, psychiatrist), that he and his motives are transparent and can be easily gauged, that he will do what he is told, that his temper tantrums will not be tolerated, that no special concessions will be made to accommodate his inflated sense of self, that he is subject to court procedures, etc., and the narcissist will lose control.
The narcissist believes that he is the cleverest, far above the madding crowd. If contradicted, exposed, humiliated, berated ("You are not as intelligent as you think you
are", "Who is really behind all this? It takes
sophistication which you don't seem to have", "So, you have no formal education", "you are (mistake his age, make him much older) ... sorry, you are ... old", "What did you do in your life? Did you study? Do you have a degree? Did you ever establish or run a business? Would you define yourself as a success?", "Would your children share your view that you are a good father?", "You were last seen with a Ms. ... who is (suppressed grin) a DOMESTIC (in demeaning disbelief)". I know that many of these questions cannot be asked outright in a court of law. But you CAN hurl these sentences at him during the breaks, inadvertently during the examination or deposition phase, etc.
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III. What to Expect
Narcissists are often vindictive and they often stalk and harass.
Basically, there are only two ways of coping with vindictive narcissists:
1. To Frighten Them
Narcissists live in a state of constant rage,
repressed aggression, envy and
hatred. They firmly believe that everyone is like them. As a result, they are paranoid, suspicious, scared and erratic. Frightening the narcissist is a powerful behavior modification tool. If sufficiently deterred, the narcissist promptly disengages, gives up everything he was fighting for and sometimes make amends.
To act effectively, one has to identify the vulnerabilities and susceptibilities of the narcissist and strike repeated, escalating blows at them, until the narcissist lets go and vanishes.
Example:
If a narcissist is hiding a personal fact, one should use this to threaten
him. One should drop cryptic hints that there are mysterious witnesses to the events and recently revealed evidence. The narcissist has a very vivid imagination. Let his imagination do the rest.
The narcissist may have been involved in tax evasion, in malpractice, in
child abuse, in infidelity, there are so many possibilities, which offer a rich vein of attack. If done cleverly, non-committally, gradually, in an escalating manner, the narcissist crumbles, disengages and disappears. He lowers his profile thoroughly in the hope of avoiding hurt and pain. Most narcissists have been known to disown and abandon a whole PNS (pathological narcissistic space) in response to a well-focused campaign by their victims. Thus, a narcissist may leave town, change a job, desert a field of professional interest, avoid friends and acquaintances, only to secure a cessation of the unrelenting pressure exerted on him by his victims.
I repeat: most of the drama takes place in the paranoid mind of the narcissist. His imagination runs amok. He finds himself snarled by horrifying scenarios, pursued by the vilest
"certainties". The narcissist is his own worst persecutor and prosecutor.
You don't have to do much except utter a vague reference, make an ominous allusion, delineate a
possible turn of events. The narcissist will do the rest for you. He is like a little child in the dark, generating the very monsters that paralyze him with fear.
Needless to add that all
these activities have to be pursued legally, preferably through the good services of law offices and in broad daylight. If
done in the wrong way, they might constitute extortion or blackmail, harassment and a host of other criminal offenses.
2. To Lure Them
The
other way to neutralize a vindictive narcissist is to offer him continued narcissistic supply until the war is over and won by you. Dazzled by the drug of narcissistic supply, the narcissist
immediately becomes tamed, forgets his vindictiveness and triumphantly takes over his "property" and "territory".
Under the influence of narcissistic supply, the
narcissist is unable to tell when he is being manipulated.
He is blind, dumb and deaf to all but the song of the NS sirens. You can make a narcissist do ANYTHING by offering, withholding, or threatening to withhold narcissistic supply (adulation, admiration, attention, sex, awe, subservience, etc.).
No one should feel responsible for the narcissist's predicament. To him,
others hardly exist, so enmeshed he is in himself and in the resulting misery of this very self-preoccupation. Others are hangers on which he hangs the clothes of wrath, of rage, of suppressed and mutating aggression and, finally, of ill disguised violence. How should the persons nearest and dearest to the narcissist cope with his eccentric vagaries?
The short answer is by abandoning him or by threatening to abandon him.
The threat to abandon need not be explicit or conditional ("If you don't do something or
if you do it, I will desert you"). It is sufficient to confront the narcissist, to completely ignore him, to insist on respect for one's boundaries and wishes, or to shout back at him.
The narcissist is tamed by the very same weapons that he uses to subjugate
others - read more about his forms of abuse HERE. The specter of being abandoned looms large over everything else. In the narcissist's mind, every discordant note presages solitude, abandonment, and the resulting confrontation with his self.
The narcissist is a person who is irreparably traumatized by the behavior of
the most important people in his life: his parents, role models, or peers. By being capricious, arbitrary, and sadistically judgmental – they molded him into an adult, who fervently and obsessively tries to recreate the trauma (repetition complex).
Thus, on the one hand, the narcissist feels that his freedom depends upon re-living these experiences. On the other hand, he is terrified by this prospect. Realizing that he is doomed
to go through the same harrowing experience over and over again, the narcissist distances himself from the scene of his own pending emotional catastrophe. He does this by using his
aggression to alienate, to humiliate and in general, to be emotionally absent.
This behavior brings about the very consequences that the narcissist so fears. But, this way, at least,
the narcissist can tell himself (and others) that HE was the one who fostered his abandonment, that it was truly fully his choice and that he was not surprised. The truth is that, governed by
his internal demons, the narcissist has no real choice.
The narcissist is a binary human being: the carrot is the stick in his case.
If he gets too close to someone emotionally, he fears ultimate and inevitable abandonment. He, thus, distances himself, acts cruelly and brings about the very abandonment that he feared in the first place.
In this paradox lies the key to coping with the narcissist. If, for instance, he is having a rage attack, rage back. This will provoke in him fears of being abandoned and the
resulting calm will be so total that it might seem eerie. Narcissists are known for these sudden tectonic shifts in mood and in behavior patterns.
Mirror the narcissist’s actions and
repeat his words. If he threatens,
threaten back and credibly try to use the same language and content. If he leaves the house, leave it as well, disappear on him. If he is suspicious, act suspicious. Be critical, denigrating, humiliating, go down to his level, because that's the only way to penetrate his thick defenses. Faced with his mirror image, the narcissist always recoils.
We must not forget: the narcissist does all these things to engender and
encourage abandonment. When mirrored, the narcissist dreads imminent and impending desertion, which is the inevitable result of his actions and words. This prospect so terrifies him that it induces in him an incredible alteration of behavior. He instantly succumbs and tries to make amends, moving from one (cold and bitter, cynical and misanthropic, cruel and sadistic) pole to another (warm, even loving, fuzzy, engulfing, emotional and saccharine)
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The other coping strategy is to give up on him.
Abandon him and go about reconstructing your own life. Very few people
deserve the kind of investment that is an absolute prerequisite to life with a narcissist. To cope with a narcissist is a full time, energy and emotion-draining job, which reduces people around the narcissist to insecure nervous wrecks.
Who deserves such a sacrifice?
No one, to my mind, not even the most brilliant, charming, breathtaking,
suave narcissist. The glamour and trickery wear thin and underneath them a monster lurks which sucks the affect, distorts the cognition and irreversibly influences the lives of those around it for the worse.
Narcissists are incorrigibly and notoriously difficult to change. Thus, trying to change them is doomed to failure. You should either accept them as
they are or avoid them altogether. If one accepts the narcissist as he is, one should cater to his needs. His needs are part of what he is.
Would you have
ignored a physical handicap? Would you not have assisted a quadriplegic? The narcissist is an emotional invalid. He needs constant adulation. He cannot help it. So, if one chooses to accept him, it is a package deal, all his needs included.
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from 'Malignant Self Love - Narcissism Revisited' by Sam Vaknin, Ph.D.
http://malignantselflove.tripod.com/
(Narcissistic Personality Disorder)
http://www.suite101.com/welcome.cfm/npd
http://www.suite101.com/welcome.cfm/verbal_emotional_abuse
http://www.suite101.com/welcome.cfm/spousal_domestic_abuse
(Relationships with Abusive Narcissists)
http://ceeandbalkan.tripod.com/
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