Narcissists and their rages

[garlicbaubles]

For a number of reasons, I thought it might be a good idea to share our stories. I'll post one after this.

About 1 in 10 people have mental disorders, of a type that renders them incapable of seeing the world as others do. For them, all the world really is a stage: the men, women and children merely props for the drama going on in their heads. They can't see that things go on without their influence, or accept that other human beings feel & think independently. It's like the way young children think - and may well be caused by arrested emotional development.

For them, your every word and deed is scripted, by them. It's impossible to know exactly what your 'script' says. If you know them well, you can make a good guess but they will always surprise you by introducing another plot twist. (And anyway, who wants to live as a figment of somebody else's imagination?) When you step out of your appointed character - by having a thought or feeling of your own, for instance, or not being exactly where they wanted - they get terribly cross. It absolutely shakes their world; it's very distressing for them so they blame you for wrecking the world, like a temperamental director ranting at an opinionated actor.

The rage, the blame, the insults are never about you. Never. If you can manage to listen quietly, what you'll hear is this: "I wrote, cast and directed this scene. You're spoiling it for me!" You will also hear them tell you their insecurities - what they most dislike and fear about themselves, projected as if they were your faults, not theirs.

They usually forget what they said, or that they raged at all.
Please, do, share your stories of 'stepping out of character' and the Narcy rage that followed. You never know how many lightbulbs you might switch on

Describing these behaviours is not disablist - it's fact.

In fact it is possible to predict exactly how these people will behave in situations BECAUSE THEY HAVE FIXED PERSONALITIES - which is what a personality disorder is!

I'm not sure I'd go along with this Margery - the MIND link you posted says that some psychiatrists don't accept the validity of diagnoses of personality disorders not just because they are potentially unhelpful and stigmatising (like labels such as 'schizophrenia'), but also because they are quite subjective assessments and possibly exist on a spectrum from acute to tendency (normative)?

I think these sorts of behaviours are very confusing. I grew up in a dysfunctional family, full of daily dramas and histrionics. They leave you in a sort of adrenaline-addictive state that you have to 'come down' from when you try to establish a different dynamic. They also become very familiar and the 'default' behaviour when under extreme stress. It's very very hard to shake off dysfunctional behaviours learnt at your mother's or father's knee.

I'm not sure where I'm going with my post, except to say your initial OP is a very interesting way of regarding a histrionic outburst/rage, garlic and will certainly be helpful in achieving some detachment I think

I think sometimes it helps to read about normal healthy relationships, check in on how other families function. In the same way that it's helpful to read about what a normal relationship is with a man if yours is abusive, it's probably good to read about what healthy parent / sibling relationships are like.

Where would you find that sort of info Wondering?

Just spent a week with my narc relative, the longest I've spent with her in years. The comments started gradually then built up as she got no reaction. Criticised my hair, shape, weight, surname (??) and wrinkles - she's 20 years older and twice as big and wrinkly as me. A couple of my more perceptive friends both said, "she's projecting".
This is a very very interesting thread, garlic, thank you.

PS I finally blew up on the last day!

Good to hear it, thanks! I think we need to use the labels as invaluable ANTHROPOLOGICAL tools. They describe dysfunctionally rigid character types, which have been known & recognised throughout history, with greater accuracy than ever before. It really doesn't matter what a specialist would say if diagnosing the people we call Narcs, OCPD, or whatever; the point is that we can clearly identify the behaviours. Perhaps, with that, we might go some little way further to understanding them and also their impact on us. We won't get anywhere if we can't name them.

I really empathise with what you said about your dramatic family, bunchoffives. I do find myself feeling at sea sometimes: I want a stable, minimum-fuss, emotionally honest life but still haven't got all the tools for it, psychologically speaking. Otoh I loathe being around my siblings when they act out and am 100% sure I ain't going back that way! I'll get somewhere in the end And, if nothing else, I am fantastic in a crisis!

I'm OK, thanks, UA.

My narc is the opposite of what wondering said about not being listened to. She was the youngest of a very large family and totally ruined and over-indulged by all of them plus two husbands. I've always thought this could be the reason for her NPD but am not an expert so could be wrong.

Afaik, most experts think the spoiled child is most likely to become narcissistic. If they're the golden child of a pd parent, they'll have had the particular pleasure of being abused with favouritism. That must leave any kid feeling confused about who they are.

I find it very sad that the 'favourite' is blamed for things quite a lot - when as children they feel their sibling's neglect or abuse and suffer from witnessing that. They play the parent's narc game out of fear of ending up like the less favoured sib.

In my case it all came back as DM got older and felt more vulnerable. It is an interesting time.

bunchoffives- the way to shake it off is to go and have psychotherapy for years.

I play a little game with my PDers - just to test them now and again - first to make sure that I wasn't imagining it all - and second to make sure they really are predictable.

I say or do something and predict their reaction to it - in other words I predict their behaviour. It never fails.

The new thinking would probably say I am being cruel to the poor defenceless souls and we should all feel sorry for them. But I went and did something about my sanity and behaviour so that I don't upset others and repeat shocking parenting I was subjected to.

They never have. They all just carry on their merry ways and their fixed thinking, projecting all their inner conflict onto me.

The psychotherapy I had put me in groups with some PDed people - they even disrupted those groups.

Anyway - to answer the OP re narc rages - the biggest one I have witnessed is my exH who started raging the day I left him and is till raging now nearly seven years later. This manifests itself mainly through dragging me through very expensive court cases and not speaking to one of our children. Pathetic.

Margery - that's a good trick, to test them. When I'm being blamed for stuff or gaslighted in the family that's exactly what I suggest to others - to test the narc that's blaming me and turning sibs against me in order to see whether I'm really at fault in the problem.

Of course this is preceded by lots of self-doubt and thinking I've surely done or said the wrong thing.

Like the 'watch the clock' trick it really helps to give you confidence about your own thoughts and behaviour - although that is more useful with the manic phases of bipolar. The narcs in my own experience have never raged, just carefully manipulated or excluded/ignored and then gaslighted when I have responded to that. This is when it becomes tricky to see who is the perpetrator and who is the victim.

The trouble is that there's a lot of amateur diagnoses go on and there's a lot of (very understandable) dislike.

That dislike comes over rather strongly in some cases.

I'm glad Mumsnet just gently nudged things into at least some sort of neutrality.

By definition, people with any diagnosis have a number of traits or similarities in common, no matter the diagnosis.

But that doesn't alter the fact that it's better to respond to an individual as an individual and not as one of a mass diagnosis. There's a great deal of variation in even diagnoses of PD, and a great deal of variation in prognosis.

Mostly change comes about if the people have the -will- for it. Sadly lacking in some cases, not in others.

I have an acquaintance (NOT friend) who is a textbook extrovert narc.

She will literally talk at you for hours about herself and her wonderful body, and her interests and imagined achievements (she's long-term unemployed but considers herself to be a professional artist), and her plans for her future.

If and when she ever runs out things to say about herself, she will turn the conversation to you but she will start telling you things (her perceptions) about yourself instead of allowing you to talk.

She's also incredibly jealous and paranoid to the point of borderline psychosis, and will respond with aggression if she feels threatened.

Thanks for this thread garlic

• There are several people in my life that this relates too, DH is the one who has affected me the most, closely followed by DF throughout childhood. DM as well finds it hard to really listen to others experiences and views - talks a lot about her/their stuff.

DH recently seems to have made some improvements I'm glad to say, and I can see there's a clear link to stressful situations. Your post has made me see more clearly why this might be the case ... Things not going according to their script .... That's something of a light-bulb moment for me so thanks for that

Ah, the artist. I used to maintain that you have to have a big ego to be an artist - you have to be able to put your needs/desires before everything else. You can't have self-doubt and lack of confidence. Until I learned to draw and paint and it's like anything else - if you don't have self-doubt you can't learn and you certainly can't reflect.

I do however think we need to make allowances for creatives, even the narc ones - if everyone was behaviourally perfect the world would be very dull.

Bloody hell, that's mad. Of course not all narcs are like that on the spectrum. Some can just be noisy drum.

It's odd, I did know a guy who was a paranoid schitzophrenic. He had pills for it and seemed a nice middle class lad, you didn't want to be prejudiced. But one you settled into the friendship, boy, he did not stop talking. It is hard to call out, as in a way you can go along with it, there are no akward silences. It seems okay but it drains you. He too had that thing however when a new person would appear on the scene, he would drop this eccentric behaviour and be quite urbane. If anything, he would try to make out like YOU were the fool, you would be wrongfooted. Like, you were watching his back and he would stick a knife in yours. There is a film called The Servant which seemed appropriate to me at the time, I have to say I wasn't aware of the whole narc thing, and perhaps one should be wary of creating links, I mean at the time I attributed it in part to his starsign, as the relationship seemed similar to that of another guy with a similar sign.

He had this little boy lost schtick, so you wanted to be a good bloke and help him. Later it kind of shocked me, he simply would not take any advice you gave him, he would get quite petulant. You got conned because, listening to his problems ad nauseum you falsely felt you had some say in things and could dish out advice. Not at all!

The problem is that there becomes a reason why you can't easily check out of the friendship, these types to sort of 'bed in', it's hard to find a break in the chatter where you can just say, actually, let's leave it. I did feel the bloke might top himself too, we were working on some business-style arty project together, you wind up feeling responsible. The more you leave it the more difficult it becomes.

The only suggestion I have is becoming a bit vague and useless so they want to dump you.

I do wonder if there is a type to attracts all these, that said it can be a case of once you've got the T-shirt, that's it. One problem is that, as I suggested, you can't easily ditch them given a particular circumstance.

Meerka, I think it helps if you read posts as people reflecting on their experience, rather than attempting diagnosis or treatment ... I'm staunchly in favour of shorthand terms for effective discussion. We're in a conversational setting, not a clinical one, and these words are useful. All syndromes are defined by their common features - PDs included. Of course individuals have individualities (!) but the commonalities are what guide us to a helpful understanding.

Bringing this back to a personal level, I couldn't have re-shaped my relationship with my mother before understanding the extreme nature of her self-absorption. I couldn't have understood it without some knowledge of PDs, because she doesn't advertise it. And if I'd understood the insides of other people's heads - the husbands, the boss, the flatmate - then I would not have made the sacrifices I did. Regarding the boss, the team had a habit of saying "You are not dealing with a normal, rational human being!" To me, it was amusing and comforting, but had no real meaning. Turns out it was a quote from my predecessor's therapist, who had given him some insight into how the boss's mind worked. With labels, we can aim to help each other like that.

I'm just wondering if anyone thinks it's possible for a narc to change?

Perhaps with a shock, coupled with smaller evidence they were wrong over a period of time?

Yes, my mother's script always had me written as The Bad Guy. It meant that no matter what I did, I would always be wrong/acting out of malice.

My best story is this:

My mother, let me call her Jan, has the same name as her great uncle's sister in law. After she and my dad divorced, my dad and her great uncle remained friends. My mother was most angry about this.

My mother had a big thing about being the first to know about important family events to the point where she had decreed that all important news (such as births/marriages/deaths) should be announced by text/email to everyone all at once. That way, no favouritism had been shown in the order in which people were told and it was the responsibility of individuals to check their texts/emails regularly. If they missed an update it was their own fault. This complete ignored the fact that people generally want to tell people important information in person!

So back to the story.

My (now stbx) h proposed to me, had bought a ring and it was all lovely. I phoned my mother to tell her. I didn't want my engagement announcement to be via text, or to be the source of a problem by not telling her first.

The following day my grandmother was admitted to hospital. My mother phoned her great uncle to tell him and during the phone call (it later transpired) had told him that I was engaged.

It would appear that he had gone to visit my grandmother in hospital and when my grandmother told him that I was engaged he said "I know, Jan told me". That would be Jan, my mother who I had told the previous day.

My grandmother got on the phone to my mother and (my mother later told me) spent most of the evening bitching about me. About how I had lied about telling my mother about my engagement first and how it was obvious I'd actually told my dad first, who had (somehow and for some reason) told my great uncle's sister in law (also called Jan, remember?) who had then told my great uncle and that was the Jan to whom my uncle was referring when he said, "I know, Jan told me". So it was obvious that I hadn't told my mother first afterall, I'd actually told my dad first, but more than that, he'd told my mother's distant family before I'd had chance to tell her... (following?)

My mother then, laughingly, revealed that she and my grandmother had been calling me all the things under the sun until "I then realised that my name is also Jan."

And that, dear reader, is why she was not invited to my wedding!

Sorry, it's not my mother's great uncle, he's my great uncle and her uncle.

We never see him or any other member of her family because she has alienated everyone with her fucking oddball behaviour.

wonderingagain

I didn't say she was an artist or an objectively talented person- just that she considers herself to be such because it sounds better than admitting she's on the dole

This is the major difference between a narcissist and someone who just has high self-esteem. A true narcissist will believe that they are talented or entitled to special treatment regardless of the realities of their status or achievements.

Anyone can quit their job and sit around colouring in all day. Doesn't make you the new Michaelangelo.

And yes, I know I'm bitchy but I don't care. She brings out the worst in me.

Well if you are the kind of person that doesn't fit in anywhere else I guess you have to create the world around you, so being an artist (or claiming it as your day job) can be a convenient label / excuse to continue your dysfunctional behaviour with your head held high. It's not such a bad thing, at least they are self-contained and not inflicting their narcissim on others.

It's in the charity sector I find the worst kind of narcs. Bloody terrifying some of them. Volunteers with zero accountability, responsibility that has been taken rather than earned, delusions of grandeur all fitting into the perfect package of 'helping' the disadvantaged and thereby wielding a lot of power over people when they really shouldn't be anywhere near them.

XMale seeks attractive, intelligent, independant female with own home, excellant career, close family and lots of friends. I will treat you like a goddess, and swipe you off your feet until you have fallen for me. Then my challenge begins. I will break your self confidence isolate you from friends and family, drain you emotionally and finacially and drain the last drop of self esteem out of you. When I have gotten everything I will drop you like a flick of a switch all my feelings turned off cold and move on for my next challenge.

This could be my ex boyfriend.

My relationship with my ex boyfriend was a rollercoaster of shit. When we first met he was quite quiet, very handsome, a little quirky and moody at times but then everyone can be right?

Thing is, the closer I got to him the more the cracks started to show until I went from being the Most Awesome Lady Ever to someone he wouldn't piss on if I was on fire.

Here are some things he did:

Say I'm the sexiest ever.

Then resent me for being sexy. He started withholding sex from me, because it was my fault he got excited and it was annoying (wtf?).

He likes older ladies.

Then I'm too old to be seen in public with him and he's ashamed of me.

He asked me to teach him [a sport] because I've taught a couple of people before. He then decided to ask someone else who can't actually do this sport, because it would be less shameful for him to be seen with her rather than me.

Oh, and I'm too fat (I wasn't).

No hugs any more. Only young people hug each other.

I got screamed at for not waking him up when he needed to get home.

I got screamed at for waking him up because he'd obviously changed his mind. In his sleep. Literally.

I got screamed at for offering him something to eat or drink. HE CAN GET IT FOR HIMSELF, DON'T YOU KNOW.

I'm very rude for not offering him any food or drink. That screaming fit lasted for about an hour.

And the lying. His father is dead, then he wasn't, his sister was a psycho (she wasn't), his evening job was at a supermarket, stupid Butt - didn't I know he worked at a factory?

Calling a woman a bitch is NOT ON (unless it's me).

Being spiteful to people is bad unless it's him doing it and he doesn't get caught: so-and-so's a fat whore, these people are so stupid they deserve to die. HOW DARE YOU CRITICISE DEBBIE'S CHOICE OF TIGHTS, BUTT, YOU ARE SUCH A NASTY BITCH.

He's the officially the best at [sport] in the entire country.

He hates brown people. He is mixed race (he IS actually mixed race and doesn't hide it).

Drinking and driving is fun.

Obviously, there's more to it than this, but it might ID me.

In the end I was lucky when he unceremoniously dumped me. I managed to retain my self esteem but very little of my sanity.

For the benefit of the couple who seemed to be insinuating people were stupid for falling for all of this: you think people deliberately choose this sort of treatment? It can be very insidious at first.

He was handsome, charming and quiet outwardly. I am confident and brash outwardly.

He could be very sweet and considerate until you got to know him better, then you uncover the vitriol, abuse and self-hatred that he takes out on the rest of the world - whether they know it or not.

Nobody believed me, because I'm the 'loud' one, the confident one.

Garlic it was the original title that made me read this thread!

Hmm, sorry my post wasn't aimed at wanderingagain... for some reason I read the first page of a thread without realising there are other pages and the chat has moved on. Seems to be a thing on mumsnet, the way it is presented.