Two Dozen Traits of a Malignant Narcissist –Part I
Malignant narcissism is a much more oppressive, grievous wound than that from narcissism. It’s dangerous and often deadly, due to the rate of victim suicides. The Dark Triad refers to a set of grave, interrelated personality traits or disorders that signifies the potential for behaviors that lead to harmful and serious social dysfunction, as in malignant narcissism, i.e. Hitler, minus the mass murders.
The Dark Triad consists of three distinct personal attributes:
· Narcissism: a pattern of grandiosity, need for admiration (supply), and total lack of empathy, known as Narcissistic Personality Disorder
· Machiavellianism: a tendency to deceive and manipulate others for personal gain and power
· Psychopathy: a lack of remorse or guilt, emotional disconnect, and impulsive, even unlawful, behavior, also known as Antisocial Personality Disorder.
Sickening Sadism
In the context of malevolent narcissistic mothers, one of the most pervasive and destructive behaviors of the Dark Triad is sadism, the horrific pleasure derived from inflicting pain or suffering upon bewildered victims, usually their child.
Malicious narcissistic mothers often engage in sadistic acts as a means to reassert power and control over their target. They inflict psychological, emotional, and/or physical abuse, leaving deep and lasting mental scars on their prey. They’re savvy enough to not use physical harm too much, because they realize they won’t get away with that measure going unnoticed for too long.
If the malignant narcissist (MN) senses that she’s losing some control (less worship and supply) after her wounded one marries at age 19 to get out of the house, she may later magnanimously offer to watch your children, ages 9 and 5, after school, since you have an hour commute each way to work. You must say NO! Keep them away from her unless you’re there to intervene! She’ll strike out and brainwash your innocent girls, who don’t know what she’s capable of, with a daily mantra, telling them:
“She’s a bad person.”
“She doesn’t know what she’s doing.”
“You don’t have to do anything that she says.”
After repeating doses of those lies, they naturally will believe her, as she will be an entirely different “grandmother” than “mother,” doing and saying anything that would hurt their mother, but allowing them everything they want.
Then her revenge sets in, as they become hell to raise, having no respect for their mother at all, disobedient, sassing, back-talking, poor grades, promiscuous, fake suicide attempts, and causing constant uproars in what’s left of your home.
The MN used her grandchildren as pawns to obliterate their mother’s life. There will come a time when you must ask your belligerent and destructive college graduates to leave your home for your own sanity and the value of your home. After educations, cars, apartments, and weddings, all done on your own, no help from their “father,” you’re broke anyway, used and abused again.
Neither daughter used her education: they took menial jobs as a waitress and a daycare worker. You might be in your 50s or 60s when your younger daughter, just to get rid of you in her life, decides to tell you what her grandmother did. In a couple months, you sell your own house and move 1003 miles away.
Malignant narcissism, from research, is the most highly inherited personality disorder; the daughters got it from their “father” and grandmother. I suffered at the hands of all four of them.
Devoid of Empathy
As empathy, we refer to the art of vicariously stepping into another’s shoes to sympathize with, understand, and share his/her feelings, and allowing that understanding to guide our response. A MN has no such capacity and never will. Malignant narcissism is not considered curable; neither does it change with time but actually gets worse.
I so very much wish that all tormented children knew deep down inside, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that the malignant narcissistic parent/parents in their lives will never change, that they will never love you, and that you’re already plenty good enough for everyone else’s love; you are not sick like your parent(s). Please stop hoping for them to be your parents, because they can’t change, and they cannot love. The problem is NOT with you; it has nothing to even do with you, no matter how much they blame you for! It’s their problem, not yours. You’re fine just as you are. Look for a surrogate mom or dad whom you like and admire to help you through the ups and downs, just between the two of you. Maybe she can take you for ice cream so that you can chat.
As the targeted child, the family scapegoat, and the golden child (the one to bring her praise and glory), I was abused from birth by a malignant narcissist (MN), and due to the severity of her actions, I have no memory until I was almost nine years old. One’s psyche can shut down for protection, if reality is too much to bear.
I have three or four flashbacks; one involves a trip to the beach on the Gulf of Mexico in Alabama. I was maybe three or four years old. My “parents” were with friends, and they decided to walk down the beach. At some point, I got lost, and soon I was sobbing. I kept looking and walking, and a Good Samaritan said he would help me.
We walked for a while, and I remember being disoriented, scared, and crying hysterically. When he delivered me to my “family,” my “mother” turned around to see me and laughed at length, having not noticed I was gone. What I recall, though, is the look of shock on the Good Samaritan’s face; his jaws dropped open. I still wonder if I really wanted to stay with him. To this day, I don’t go to the grocery store without a GPS.
Punitive Projection
This trick is a defense mechanism where a MN attributes her own unacceptable thoughts, words, deeds, or motives to others. Due to a narcissist’s lack of awareness and fragile ego, this individual often blames others for their bad behavior.
She may make a vile remark, and five minutes later, claims she never said those words, but insists that you were the one who said them. For a child, it’s not just confusing but also causes her to doubt her reality. Soon she no longer trusts her own perceptions. It’s crazy-making.
A MN may project her own insecurity onto another by frequently accusing her partner of being unfaithful without any evidence. This behavior allows her to shift her internal sense of inadequacy and distrust onto her partner, effectively absolving herself of responsibility while creating turmoil in the relationship. Moreover, a MN may accuse her partner of cheating to hide the fact that she’s the unfaithful one.
Staggering Sense of Entitlement
My biological mother felt entitled and regal, like royalty, with an enormous chip on her shoulder, because she felt unwanted as a child. Her mother died when she was eight years old, and her father didn’t want to raise two girls and farmed them out to his sister. She never once came to the hospital during my many surgeries, probably because her mother spent years in a nursing home with tuberculosis before her death.
In fact, my memory began when I awakened from anesthesia after a tonsillectomy when I was nearly nine years old. The military doctors had ripped open the sides of my mouth for the procedure, and my braids were stuck to the pillow full of blood. My parents weren’t ever there to ensure that I was cared for. Thank goodness my memory was still locked away during the procedure.
I can almost recall feeling different, but it would be years before I realized that I had no memory before that surgery and that my memory started in that military hospital. My father picked me up and drove me to a new house on the Air Force base– my “mother” had scheduled the surgery during the time of the move when I wouldn’t be in the way. What a jolt to arrive at a different house, and to my “mother’s” announcement that I was going to a new school the next week, whether I was well or not.
She usually left me, crying in pain, for dinner parties and bridge club, telling the babysitter to put drops in my ear for the infection. The babysitter insisted on telling me stories about Hitler sticking burning needles in peoples’ eyes so that I couldn’t sleep. Before I was school age, I later learned, she’d drop me off at a daycare center run by a woman who stuck a cigarette in my eye; after it healed, guess where I went when she had to dress up and go to a club meeting?
She ensured that I never felt wanted either. In high school, I might have had cheerleading practice or National Honor Society after school, but I always got home before my brother at football practice (until college) and my sister with ballet. I was relegated to daily screeching rages when I walked in the door. I had to sit in the chair with my coat on and listen to it – everything that was wrong with me or everything that I had done wrong – about an hour.
Half a lifetime later, a therapist told me something incredible: my “mother” was insanely jealous of me. She would forever brag about making good grades without having to study, or teaching herself to play the piano, or having two suitors after high school and just having to pick the one that “would make more money.” I never believed anything she ever said, as it all was lies. By the age of twelve, I knew she was mentally ill. But by then, she had total control.
She was jealous of my looks (much thinner than she, looked like my father, and in pageants), my grades and academic honors (4.0 GPA, valedictorian, Mensa), and my talents (piano, pipe organ, flute, accordion, ballet). She put me on a diet of cottage cheese and apples in my teens, because that’s when she put on a few pounds, and she couldn’t have that happening.
My “parents” spent the summer before I was to go to college trying to force me to get over the fear and pressure of failing. My father finally asked me, “Who ever told you that you had to make straight A’s?”
There was a deafening silence in the kitchen. I looked at the MN, she looked at him, and I never answered. That tells you what an absentee father he was – totally oblivious. How I got to be the abused child, the golden child, and the scapegoat, I don’t know, but I was. My problem was that I got my father’s brains and build, not hers.
I lasted over a week at college, and I, along with the Assistant Dean of Men, asked my father to come and get me. I had never had theoretical calculus, only applied, and found myself in a class where I didn’t quite understand everything– the end of me. (I would earn my bachelor’s, summa cum laude, 4.0 GPA, later, although she was dead — still had control.)
The MN locked herself in the master bedroom for two solid weeks and never once came out. Then there was the blessed silent treatment for a while. The golden child treatment officially transferred to my younger sister, the ballerina. After what she knew, she wasn’t happy. Thereafter, I was the slave, dirt beneath her feet.
The MN had her hair done at the salon every week, belonged to a bevy of women’s clubs, and ironed her husband’s shirts once a week. The only time she cooked was when her husband was home on the weekends – 48 hours – otherwise it was Stouffer’s in the oven. We did our own wash, and, of course, she had a housekeeper. She was owed.
She had high blood pressure, and a blood vessel behind her eye burst, eliminating sight in that eye. While I was cooking my “father’s” eggs one weekend morning, he told me that it was my fault that she was blind in one eye, because she did so much for me! Really – what?
Methinks he got in on the pass-the-blame (projection) act to the slave. He heard so much griping about the slave by the MN, although I’d wager that she never named one thing that she did for me, or anyone else, that he had to get me in line so as not to have to listen to it.
The MN came down with lung cancer (my “father” smoked for at least 50 years) and became too weak to rage at me. Of course, I was expected to fix her food from a cancer cookbook and travel an hour each way on the weekends with a fulltime job, house, and family, although my brother was five minutes across town, and she never ate the food anyway. She died after the first Hospice visit.
She died six weeks after her new golden child, her prima ballerina from Stuttgart, Germany, visited. She was given three months to live, but lasted fourteen months, waiting for her new golden child’s visit. I cried, not for her, but for the fact that I would never have a mother. My hope held out that long, sick hope that I would be good enough, hope for nothing. Deplorable.
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