2024-11-16 Demythologizing Narcissism

Posted on by Dave Stucky

What I Did

Irrespective of where Tori and the kids have gone, each day has to transpire, with 24 hours like the last.

In light of that, I have been marching forward in my de facto singleness, with a few public offerings:

What I’m Feeling

My emotions are vacillating, but somewhat stabilizing. It’s devastating that Tori hasn’t responded, and it has been magnified by the divinely appointed knowledge that immediately after the event she had wanted us back together.

To keep my feelings in check, I maintain the following possible narratives as all viable possibilities:

  1. She desperately wants to approach Polk County and at least have a conversation with me, but the friends boarding them misunderstand how an NCO works and are preventing her from doing it.
  2. Her friends want her to approach Polk County to at least have a conversation with me, but she is gripped with utter terror of unspecified government malevolence.
  3. She has made a precisely calculated effort to disappear for a precisely set window of time, such as 90 days or 180 days, and will then emerge to find out what happened.
  4. She is utterly depressed and withdrawn and refuses to do most normal activities right now until something changes.
  5. She’s vacillating through some strange combination of multiple iterations of the above.
  6. There are many other possibilities I can’t imagine.

Each of those scenarios would paint her in a different light, and my feelings would be different each time. It keeps me tethered to the fact that I simply can’t know about the three most important people in my life until she takes action.

The most loving action is to wait, and that gives me certainty. However, it’s a challenge to keep going sometimes, as I simply don’t know what comes next.

As far as my growth, it’s like I’m coloring black-and-white logical truths in my mind. I’m not really learning new things much in this season, but I have a strange holistic sensation as my frontal lobe connects more intimately with the rest of my brain.

I’ve heard recently from a therapist friend of mine that there’s an inseparable connection between love and grief. Therefore, I am taking the hardest road possible here by continuing to love Tori, Victor, and Mia from a distance, even though it has caused me more grief than I’ve ever experienced in my life. I know it’s the right thing, but it’s also very difficult.

What I Learned

I’ve had time to reflect deeply on the situation, and the word “narcissism” has sprung up in the mix of all the other bad things we said to each other. Both of us had made accusations of the other being one.

I have had quite a few people in my background who have expressed what I now know as narcissistic behavior, so it seemed the right time for me to investigate it.

Now that I’ve found truths about it, I wanted to debunk many myths around the diagnosis of narcissistic personality disorder (NPD). I’ve seen a similar pattern with autism: the diagnosis creates a social ripple that spreads awareness but also creates a minor panic, and everyone is a little worse off through mishandled knowledge.

This is an act of love for my wife (assuming she reads it), as well as my attempt at a community service toward Christians without being a therapist. I hope these facts can assist in healing.

Please keep an open mind as you read this because some of this may become uncomfortable.

Most people start with the behaviors that make their way into pop culture, but I believe that’s unfair. Watching Rain Man doesn’t make you an expert on autism, after all. Instead, the most accurate view is to look at it the other way around, the way they see it.

Narcissistic behavior is different from narcissism, and many people do it at some point or another in their life. Only a licensed clinical therapist can accurately determine if someone has a Cluster B personality disorder. Narcissistic behavior, on the other hand, is a bit easier to track.

A. Emptiness

The core of narcissistic behavior is a lingering, profound feeling of worthlessness. It’s an insatiable vacuum of destitution that draws all aspects of meaning into serving the purpose of not feeling like an existential waste of molecules.

In discussing narcissism, it seems like most people gloss over the soulish emptiness, but I think it needs expanding. Just about everyone feels like a big bag of trash at one point or another in their life, and I’m fairly certain about 10–30% of the planet is currently in some emotional state of survival, a few hardships away from violence or suicide.

Their emptiness is chronic, with nothing filling it whatsoever. If we investigate what drives that emptiness, it’s usually some form of mantra we conclude because of a childhood experience that led us to believe something:

  • “I’m worthless.”
  • “Nothing I do matters.”
  • “Nobody can love me.”
  • “I’m only good for what I do.”
  • “I’m not good enough.”
  • “Everyone hates me.”

Any other assertions by those who love us will be rendered invalid by those predicating childhood beliefs. Any actions others take won’t satisfy that utter black hole of existential void. It is one of the circles of earthly hell, which I can say from direct personal experience can drive someone to the brink of their mental limits.

Keep this in your mind and heart because absolutely everyone can relate to it in some fashion, and it’s a severely common tragedy.

B. Victim Status

The world of psychology is hairy because it’s never about what is, but about what appears to be. To look at a person’s psychological state fairly, we must avoid making any judgments on that person’s behavior as we come to understand what they do.

In one frame, most of us are victims of parents who failed. Almost every single parent, even the most loving possible, can abuse and misuse their full, temporary dictatorial powers over the transitively weaker person they were responsible to love and nurture.

From the opposite angle, as adults, we are all entirely responsible for our actions. It’s arguable that our responsibility scales up as we age (e.g., an 18-year-old from a family of thieves can’t be expected to do much better at that age), but the moment we can stop the habitual pattern, we must change the behavior.

Many people identify with being a victim at some point or another in their life, especially when they recollect past trauma. It’s not healthy, but it’s definitely typical.

In the case of narcissistic actions, their emotions have heavily locked onto the victim feeling, and it creates a generalized emotional belief of “I am a victim”:

  • “Life is unfair.”
  • “I wasn’t taught the right lessons in life.”
  • Nobody ever gives me a chance.”

To be clear, someone in this worthlessness+victim mindset is not a narcissist yet, but they’re on the way to it.

C. Anger

Anger is a secondary emotion:

  1. We feel a hurt feeling like sadness, betrayal, dismay, grief, or hopelessness.
  2. We’ll then interpret some type of injustice in that hurt. This requires having a second belief attached: that the event that caused that feeling is immoral.
  3. That anger will provoke us to some defined action, which is nothing more than an attempt to fix what we feel to be wrong.

Unfortunately, a generalized victim state will create a generalized anger state if that person feels wrongly treated:

  • “Life is unfair, and that’s wrong.”
  • “I wasn’t taught the right lessons in life, and that’s not fair.”
  • “Nobody ever gives me a chance, and I deserve one.”

The answer to anger is to investigate the cause of the anger and adopt awareness about other perspectives that wouldn’t lead to that anger. This requires slowing down the mind, letting the feelings travel through us without affecting us, and releasing control.

However, if someone has no emotional energy to stop and self-reflect (such as from feeling utterly worthless), they won’t have the energy to stop the anger.

D. Controlling Desire

Anger is an unusual feeling among the emotions. People can become addicted to it (i.e., “rageaholic”), but it’s difficult to imagine someone addicted to sadness, grief, or fear.

Unlike other feelings, anger gives us a small dopamine kick through a type of certainty. We don’t just have to stand there taking the hits, we can get even.

The quality of our results with anger, though, comes from where we direct that anger:

  • If we’re angry at someone in particular, we will seek revenge on them.
  • When we’re angry at an object, we may damage it, or might discard it.
  • If the anger is at ourselves that we don’t measure up, and want to measure up, we will take that severe blast of motivation into self-improvement.
  • Generalized anger, though, has few places to land.

If we act in anger, we’re typically 20–40 IQ points stupider, and will often regret it. If anger persists, it bakes into our subconscious as bitterness.

If someone’s anger is severe enough, it will spill into just about everything. If that person has included that anger into many of their thoughts, they’ll be seeking endless ways to indemnify the situation.

However, if someone feels worthless, the one place their anger won’t direct will be toward themselves. Their emotional state (and the victim thoughts that protect themselves from feeling even more worthless) won’t allow the anger to settle on the one place where it’s most useful.

At that point, they have moved into position for narcissistic behaviors, though it won’t necessarily express the same way, and it may not be core to their personality. They’re not a lost cause, but more on that later.

E. Controlling Behavior

To the degree anyone doesn’t maintain a severe sense of morality, they will start violating others’ boundaries and manipulating them:

  • Appearing or behaving as if they’re entitled to something.
  • Asking for help, then discrediting the people who help them.
  • Offering help, but then withdrawing and blaming the people they were supposed to help.
  • Making excuses for everything they’re responsible for.
  • Focused on appearing blameless, or unwilling to admit their faults.
  • Lies about stories in a way that makes them look better.
  • Using Person B to attack Person A (“triangulating”).
  • Telling people their perspective is wrong (i.e., invalidating, or “gaslighting” if it’s intended to make them think they’re crazy).

The DSM-5 is the “Psychology Bible” for diagnosis, and it requires someone to have at least 5 of the following qualities to be NPD:

  • Exaggerated sense of self-importance.
  • Fantasies of things being perfect or that they deserve things more than others.
  • Belief that they’re in some way special compared to others.
  • Constant need for others to praise and admire them.
  • Convinced they deserve special treatment.
  • Takes advantage of others.
  • Unable to feel empathy for others.
  • Belief that others are competing with or envious of them.
  • Arrogance through believing others to be worthless, ridiculous, or despicable.

This domain is covered incessantly by pop culture, and it gives the wrong impression. Most neurotypical people interpret the motivation as a sadistic desire for power, or that it’s a conscious action.

While that may exist in some capacity, their internal drive is an automatic response based on what they interpret to be a “just” action, and they’re typically unaware of how much damage they’re causing.

Their behavior, in some fashion, is not appropriate, and it will create a loop:

  1. An action performed in anger, which will often be a sin against someone.
  2. Unconscious, repressed guilt over that action’s consequences.
  3. Through not being self-aware, the unresolved guilt becomes shame.
  4. That guilt arises later from another experience (often from those consequences or someone else triggering them).
  5. Generalized rage, directed toward the trigger of the shame.
  6. An action performed in anger, which will often be a sin against someone.

If someone with narcissistic behavior were being super honest with themselves, they’d openly say:

  • “Why can’t everyone just let me say what I want without consequence? I don’t really mean it, and I just need to vent my issues. It seems like everyone is out to get me when they try to shut it down. I do know what’s best, so why can’t everything just go my way so I can be free to have my tantrum?”

They can’t, though, because they know that people wouldn’t be okay with that assertion, and they’d feel a tremendous sense of emptiness and shame in openly saying it.

The reality is that they are a damaged, hurt person, and are trying desperately to control something in their life. There’s nothing wrong with that (e.g., changing personal habits is a great start), but they are often doing the wrong thing by exerting dramatic, antisocial behaviors.

Unfortunately, most society is a low-love social environment, and harshness or judgmental behavior can magnify the scope of antisocial behaviors:

  • Narcissistic behavior can create a Machiavelli-grade power game that magnifies the consequences of their actions, proportional to that person’s capacity for influence.
  • People are often quick to react without knowing the whole story, which may lead to someone else persecuting someone innocent.
  • Most people only focus on behaviors, but not on the thoughts that lead to those behaviors, so they may vilify narcissistic behavior farther than it should be, especially if that person is a victim of someone with NPD.
  • In our world of social media and rapid posting, an entire reputation can be literally destroyed overnight.

Confronting narcissistic behavior is difficult because they will typically deny anything that may imply a defect in their character. The tremendous shame over what they’ve done and the imagined consequences of being discovered can lead to either a severe assault, or completely running away from someone they’ve wronged.

Over time, for the sake of image, they can adopt a strange aura relative to everyone around them. They’ll often have a hard time finding friends, or they may congregate around other people who may exploit them back with narcissistic behaviors of their own. What they wanted, before any of this, was for the emptiness to be filled and that they could simply feel like a complete being.

If they don’t get help, their victim status will be magnified, which can create a meta-loop across relationships. The Who’s Behind Blue Eyes is literally a story of this.

F. The Answer

The answer for any narcissistic behavior is clear, but the cure itself is tricky.

Anyone who has engaged in narcissistic activities has to do three things to change from the pattern of self-destruction:

  1. Enough self-awareness to consider themselves at least partly responsible for their consequences.
  2. Sincerely admit they have a problem.
  3. Make a commitment to receive help for their problem.

Since their trouble comes through how their soul processes experiences, this is not easy. Willingness to admit their faults, in particular, is obscenely difficult given how broken and worthless they feel. Underneath it all, they’re insufficient to the task, but don’t want anyone to know, so they’ll do an effective job of hiding from the care they need.

The only true cure will aim at the root of all the problems:

  1. The inappropriate behaviors—gaslighting and everything else—come from a need for control.
  2. The need for control comes from a desire to exact justice.
  3. That belief about justice comes from anger about their experiences.
  4. Their anger comes from being hurt and having some scope of victimization.
  5. The victimization comes from being deeply hurt, possibly a very long time ago.
  6. That hurt sunk deep into their soul.
  7. They are so deeply hurt and wounded that they can’t even think straight.

The answer is to address the wounds, deep down.

G. The Cure

Unfortunately, there is no definitive earthly cure to bring an empty soul to feel whole. No human can fill the void deep inside us.

But, there is hope in something non-human.

God Himself, through Jesus Christ, loves each of us immensely. If you were the only human, He would still have taken all your sins.

Even when we’ve sinned despicably, to the point that we’ve burned every bridge with family and friends, He will push that sin aside to give us the sense of inherent worth we were designed to have.

There are so many Bible verses that magnify this point, and it’s non-negotiable how much He cares, but mainstream Christian culture has utterly diluted the spirit of this deep, overflowing compassion that God designed to sink into the deepest parts of our well-being.

Thomas Goodwin puts it well in The Heart of Christ:

  • There is comfort concerning such infirmities, in that your very sins move him to pity more than to anger…For he suffers with us under our infirmities, and by infirmities are meant sins, as well as other miseries…Christ takes part with you, and is so far from being provoked against you, as all his anger is turned upon your sin to ruin it; yes, his pity is increased the more towards you, even as the heart of a father is to a child that has some loathsome disease, or as one is to a member of his body that has leprosy, he hates not the member, for it is his flesh, but the disease, and that provokes him to pity the part affected the more. What shall not make for us, when our sins, that are both against Christ and us, shall be turned as motives to him to pity us the more?
  • The greater the misery is, the more is the pity when the party is beloved. Now of all miseries, sin is the greatest; and while you look at it as such, Christ will look upon it as such also. And he, loving your persons, and hating only the sin, his hatred shall all fall, and that only upon the sin, to free you of it by its ruin and destruction, but his affections shall be the more drawn out to you; and this as much when you lie under sin as under any other affliction. Therefore fear not.

John Bunyan, the author of Pilgrim’s Progress, also sets the right attitude:

  • “No, wait”—we say, cautiously approaching Jesus—”you don’t understand. I’ve really messed up, in all kinds of ways.”
  • I know, he responds.
  • “You know most of it, sure. Certainly more than what others see. But there’s perversity down inside me that is hidden from everyone.”
  • I know it all.
  • “Well—the thing is, it isn’t just my past. It’s my present too.”
  • I understand.
  • “But I don’t know if I can break free of this any time soon.”
  • That’s the only kind of person I’m here to help.
  • “The burden is heavy—and heavier all the time.”
  • Then let me carry it.
  • “It’s too much to bear.”
  • Not for me.
  • “You don’t get it. My offenses aren’t directed toward others. They’re against you.”
  • Then I am the one most suited to forgive them.
  • “But the more of the ugliness in me you discover, the sooner you’ll get fed up with me.”
  • Whoever comes to me I will never cast out.

As people go through destructive experience upon destructive experience, they will invariably feel suppressed shame with those failures, sins, missteps, and brokenness. The cause of what led to our pain doesn’t matter to Jesus, and He feels our suffering even at the bottom of our own self-created well of despair.

This is the inherent state of self-defined value that everyone, not just narcissists, craves so deeply. It’s freely available, by the God who made us. Nobody else will fill that void, and nobody else can. Everything else starts there.

A narcissist accepting Jesus’ unbridled and complete love is their only hope of ever making the required emotional changes.

This is also not easy because we can only accept His love and sacrifice for our sins by confessing our sinful nature.

From there, the chain of events can start the healing process in reverse order:

  1. The hurt and wounded state will be healed in Christ’s overarching, eternal love.
  2. As the hurt subsides, they’ll be able to more courageously approach portions of their soul.
  3. They will redefine themselves, not as a victim, but as a loved, adoptive son or daughter of God.
  4. The anger will subside as they see that it’s all been nailed to the cross, both theirs and their accusers’ sins.
  5. They will release any sense of injustice done to them as God’s righteous judgment.
  6. They’ll grow to hate their antisocial behaviors, and will take the road of recovery to abandon them in lieu of more loving actions.

That’s the what, which is always harder than the how.

Regarding “how”, the Twelve Steps are a beautiful parsing of how anyone can move to recovery, and narcissistic behavior is no exception to it:

  1. Admit we’re powerless over our behaviors and feelings and that our lives have become unmanageable.
  2. Came to believe that God could restore us to sanity.
  3. Decided to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God.
  4. Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.
  5. Admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.
  6. Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character.
  7. Humbly asked Him to remove our shortcomings.
  8. Made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all.
  9. Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.
  10. Continued to take personal inventory, and when we were wrong, promptly admitted it.
  11. Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God, praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out.
  12. Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to others, and to practice these principles in all our affairs.

Absolutely everyone who knows they have a problem, whether addiction or PTSD, is responsible to take the steps toward personal change. I’ve seen firsthand how the Twelve Steps can resolve things just as effectively as therapy, and the Holy Spirit moves powerfully through Celebrate Recovery.

F. How to Respond

This, right here, may be the single most toxic part of this discussion.

As a victim of a mother who practiced many covert narcissistic behaviors on me, I thoroughly understand the sentiment. You feel shamed, disrespected, lied about, betrayed, and many other aspects of hurt that may haunt you incessantly.

However, you’re now responsible for moving on. Even if it’s someone still in your life, you still must show up to what you’re responsible to do with them, whether it be a coworker, family member, or spouse.

If you look at the advice on the internet on how to deal with narcissism, you’ll get mostly the same ideas:

  • “Grey rock” them (i.e., behave as uninterestingly as possible toward their theatrics until they move on).
  • Run away, as far as you can.
  • Don’t bother trying to help them, since they’ll only use and abuse you.

But, if you’re not paying attention, how likely will it be that your actions aren’t becoming narcissistic behavior? If that person gives you enough sense of worthlessness, and you feel yourself to be a victim to them, are you so sure about your moral and psychological state?

And, if you claim Christianity, that was also nailed to the cross, whatever they’ve done to you.

In effect, to be Christians, we must take up our cross and bear one another’s burdens. This means exposing ourselves to the risks that come with loving others.

Of course, there are healthy things to do in the presence of narcissistic behavior:

  1. Practice healthy boundaries: focus on facts and stay practical.
  2. Fill yourself with the love of Christ, which can only come through the rest of the Body of Christ feeding into you. That means staying in community with them.
  3. Get as much social support as possible, even when it’s uncomfortable. Even if you’re absurdly gifted, five dim bulbs can see and solve problems better than you can.
  4. Never give “eye for an eye”. While they will have a double standard, there is no Christ-like behavior in that, and we’re called to a higher standard than the rest of the world.
  5. Live in a way that shame can’t persist. Always show up, do the right thing, and focus on what you can do. You can’t be manipulated if you can sleep well at night through doing your best.

Of course, as I write this, those things inoculate us from much more than narcissists. It’s the quality of living in righteousness by faith, through God’s grace. Only the Holy Spirit can give that amount of strength to persevere in doing it.

In the lens of God’s view, our souls are vastly more important than anything directly in this life alone. We’re all sinners, all needing Christ’s blood to cover that sin, and owing $800,000,000 doesn’t make you better than someone else who owes $850,000,000.

G. How Tori and I Will Respond

Lowering myself from the mountaintop of understanding, I come back to my life, with Tori and me in a gridlocked situation that’s now waiting for her decision.

It really doesn’t matter if Tori or I were exhibiting narcissistic behavior:

  1. We’re both sinners in need of Christ’s redemption, against each other and against our children, whom God has entrusted us as responsible to guide.
  2. We both need Jesus’ enduring sacrifice.
  3. We each need individual therapy to heal from our past trauma.
  4. God loves us, regardless of what happens, and her soul and my soul are technically more important than our comparatively short-term “until death do us part”.

I will stay faithful to her, and I trust she will stay faithful to me. God has me where He needs me to be, and I expect He’s doing the same for her. Even if she is or has sinned against me, I will forgive that, as Christ has unquestioningly forgiven my sins.

There is no shame in Christ, but there are consequences for our actions, and I hope Tori and I can both come to any repentance necessary to avoid any more adverse experiences from them.

Until then, I will grow in patience, in His will. Wherever that goes.

What I’m Doing Now

The most beautiful woman I’ve known and the two amazing children we share aren’t in my life right now, but I have high hopes they will be soon enough. She’d have to directly reach out to the Polk County Clerk of Court, either by calling or walking in, to have the NCO removed.

In that absence, I am prioritizing my habits toward moral growth in five domains, inspired by Colossians 3:12:

  • Compassion
  • Gentleness
  • Humility
  • Kindness
  • Patience

Tiny changes:

  • I’m aiming in my speech to never take more than 1 minute at a time to convey an idea. Other people have thoughts to say too, after all. (HP)
  • Anxiety and thankfulness use the same part of the brain, so you can’t do both at the same time, which validates the effectiveness of Philippians 4:6-7. Whenever I feel anxious, I swap it out with thankfulness. (GH)
  • I’m making general interaction with people a priority, which includes more small talk. (GKP)
  • I will continue to wait until Tori responds, without complaining. (HP)
  • I’m learning to take each moment as it stands, in the present slice of existence, and to have fun as I go. (GHP)

My daily routine:

  • I have vowed to meditate every day for 20 minutes. I don’t always get to 20 minutes, but I have been mostly consistent every day. (GP)
  • I get paid to insure the worst drivers in Iowa. When I see suffering in that domain, I will empathize with it, even when the person is angry. (CGK)

My weekly routine:

  • I’m taking therapy from three different sources, as well as pastoral counseling. (CHP)
  • Every week, I go to a 12-step group called Celebrate Recovery. (HP)
  • I’m going to a Bible study twice a week. (GH)
  • Assuming my bodily fluids are generally where they need to be, I go to the gym three times a week. (HP)

Hobbies and projects:

  • I’m working through content that can go on my essays. (KP)
  • I’m working toward giving more…underclass-oriented ministries functioning websites. (KP)