What You Don't Get About Narcissism (Personal Anecdotes)

What you don’t get about narcissism:

It’s never really about you even when they are constantly attacking you.

They are all about maintaining their image and rationalizing how they are purposefully keeping you “off balance.” I have been thinking lately but all the little “digs” that my narcissist girlfriend would say to me throughout the devaulation stage that now strike me as just covert manipulation. For instance, she would draw a distinction between us: “I just like things that are cute. You like “to be comfortable.” She is a fastidious cleaner and very routine about it: weekends are for cleaning the whole house, doing the lawn, and washing her vehicles, among other things. This would happen without any variance in schedule. Why? Because she’s maintaining an image and only she can do it. This is in order to make sure the threat to her image, and therefore, her deep sense of shame was effectively covered over. I wanted to help and had offered to do so many times. But this was strictly out of the question. “You wouldn’t do it right” is the basic sentiment. If I did laundry and started folding clothes, I would get the comment, “Someone needs to teach you how to fold.” I was basically never good enough to perform the most menial tasks because I didn’t understand that it was all about her agreement with how things looked. It was, in all actuality, all about her comfort, not mine.

Turning away from the household routines, here’s another odd occurrence: my narcissist was convinced that, despite all (immediate) evidence to the contrary, our relationship was contingent and bound for failure. Have you ever heard something like “Just promise me that we’ll still be friends after you break up with me” or “What I can’t stand about you is that you think I’m the only one for you,” or “I’m going to show up at your wedding one day and make sure she treats you right.” These statements can be so confusing for someone who is pretty much “all in” on the relationship and has deep emotional investments. But what I didn’t understand then, is that these types of statements were just ways to attack my identity while simultaneously making herself superior--even selflessness in this case functions as a prop for her fragile ego. It always immediately put me on my heels, trying to defend MY feelings, trying to convince her that I wasn’t going to cheat on her, dump her, etc. Looking back, it seems obvious that she already had one foot out of the door and was already back to talking to/arranging her life with her ex.

Speaking of which, one of the days that my narcissist absolutely destroyed me emotionally was on her daughter’s birthday. I had been over to her place the night before and given out all my presents, played games, etc, but I had to work in the morning, so I had gone back to my place and done my typical deal there. My narcissist was very controlling about when I could spend the night and couldn’t and she used her daughter to control all of this--saying, “She isn’t comfortable having you over yet.” Understandable in some sense, but what happened that day truly disturbed me. You see, my girlfriend, was really already arranging her future relationship with her ex (Weird, huh) and she used the pretense of her daughter’s birthday to go see her ex. I actually woke up that morning and decided to take the day off, getting someone to cover for me, and then I tried to call my narcissist ex to see if I could join her and her daughter for the day. My calls were ignored. My texts were ignored. I became frantic, wondering if I had done something wrong or if something had happened to them. I rationalized that maybe she just wanted to be alone with her daughter. I had no idea until later that she had taken her daughter to go see her ex. When I became critical of this, asking, at the very least, “Why couldn’t I come along,” she used that moment to attack my identity, insisting that I was being selfish, and that I shouldn’t make a big deal out of it. I asked her how she would feel in my shoes and she responded that she would just be happy that a little girl was happy on her birthday. This is the cognitive killswitch--the conversation is over. I had accepted her premises and for me to be critical was effectively a way for her to keep devaluing me. She never admitted to any wrongdoing -- a classic sign of a narcissist.

And yet, it brings up something else: the fact that a narcissist can use her children as tools for manipulation. Going back to some of the mundane house chores example, I remember quite clearly when, after the narcissist had (ironically) offered to make me breakfast, she then commented on how much of a mess I had made while eating. Not only this, but she commented that her daughter was being more messy lately with me being around. She said, “She was never messy. You’re a bad influence on her.” The narcissist sees her child as an extension of herself, and she will go to great lengths to keep the child as perfect and “maintained” as she can. This is because if the child is emotionally or physically afflicted in some way, the narcissist reacts as if it had happened to them--a narcissistic injury is formed that evokes their deep-seated sense of shame. In order to maintain the illusion and never let this happen, the narcissist has to control and/or rationalize the child’s interactions.

I had always sort of thought that my ex’s weird behavior was a consequence of her PTSD and incredibly horrible childhood. I had even rationalized this to such an extent that I believed that if I just put more into the relationship, into perfecting myself, into “being a better man,” that I could keep her around. What I didn’t understand was that it was never really about me: I was just one more participant in a psychological war that had been going on long before I had entered and would be going on long after I left.