A time lapse view of a narcissist

by Secular Human

I met my future wife in the late 1970s. After dating for several weeks, she invited me over to her apartment for dinner. This is when I met Damien for the first time. He was six years old.

As I got to know the women I would eventually marry better, I realized Damien had problems. His Mother, Terri, indicated Damien had Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). Damien did seem to bounce off walls and was very active. He was also very manipulative, often locking the door to his room and blocking the door with his body when his mother tried to get into his room. Damien would frequently bring his mother to tears.

When Damien was four, his mother and father had divorced. From what I can gather, the father was a mama's boy who had a manipulative mother that my wife called 'Granny. ' Granny was greatly responsible for getting Damien's father thorough college. According to my wife, Granny wrote all of the father's term papers in college. Granny was also greatly contributed to the divorce between Ray's mother and father. Granny was eccentric and had also divorced.

Narcissists are not solitary creatures. Paul Lutis wrote an article about narcissist and mentioned that all narcissists have enablers. A "narcissistic enabler" is a particular personality type that the narcissist depends upon. This can become a lifelong pattern, one that is so malignant and powerful that the enabler cannot live without a narcissist to enable, even though he or she openly holds narcissists in contempt. 

Over protective mothers are natural enablers to narcissists because they constantly wish to reaffirm their child. Narcissists frequently have multiple enablers at both home and work.

Dr. Sam Vaknin discusses magical thinking in narcissists. Magical thinking postulates that one is able to exert influence over other people, inanimate objects, and events, merely by projecting one's thoughts. Infants get over this at age 3. Narcissists and other people continue to use this thought process which leads to grandiose self views later in life. This leads to unrealistic views of where the narcissist fits into the world.

Damien was on a power trip at an early age. He was primarily interested in big powerful things like earth moving equipment, large trucks and the Incredible Hulk. Terri took her son to see someone dressed up at the Incredible Hulk at a local mall. Damien was frightened by the man in the costume and apparently believed the man in the Incredible Hulk suit was real because of his magical thinking.

Every Friday, I would take Terri and her son to dinner. Damien had some problems with his feet when he young and wanted to be carried everywhere like a baby. Once he weighed 75 lbs at about age 7, I had to insist that he would have to do his own walking. I could no longer carry him.

In addition, in every outing, Damon would insist that I buy him a toy. I would go into a drug store and buy a $1 or $2 dollar toy to shut him up. Eventually I told him I could no longer afford to buy him a toy every time his mother and I went out. As time went on, I became less of an enabler and developed an adversarial view toward his constant demands.

I also recall another incident at a family restaurant. I ordered a steak for Terri and myself and an item from the kid's menu for Damien. When the food arrived, Damien made a huge scene because he though he was also entitled to a steak. I eventually ordered a steak dinner for him which arrived near he end of the meal. Damien refused to eat it.

I married Damon's mother when When Damon was eight. We got a kitten for Damien and Terri suggested father-son project to make a cat scratch post. I went to the garage with Damon to build the cat scratch post.

I asked Damon where he thought the center of the board was to we could place the cat scratch post correctly. He put his finger down on the board which I marked.  

Damien insisted that he had found the real center of the board. I took out the straight edge and measured the height and width of the board. I then marked the center of the board's top and bottom and left and right. I then drew lines between the vertical and horizontal centers of the board which matched the earlier center I found crossing lines between the corners.

I then took a ruler and drew two lines between the corners or vertices of the base of the project. I showed that this was the easiest way to find the center. Most kids would intuitively understand this, but not Damien.

Damien became hysterical because I would not agree with him. His mother suggested that I be gentler with him. I wondered then why Damien was unable to see a simple truth and why such a young person would argue with an adult.

Sandy Hotchkiss has identified the seven deadly sins of narcissism I have already discussed one of them: magical thinking which I would describe as a distorted view of reality. Lets look at some of the Hotchkiss' other sins that apply to Damion.

Arrogance - A narcissist who is feeling deflated may re-inflate by diminishing, debasing, or degrading somebody else. Damien was an arrogant child who had a great deal of difficulty with adults. Between ages six and eight his mother moved him from a public school to a private school where he continued to have conflicts with teachers.

Once we married, we moved him to a fundamentalist private school that used the contract system that revolved around children completing work books at a child's own pace. It was very regimented there and he seemed to settle down.

However, when I was reassigned in the Air Force to a base in the East, he immediately had conflicts with a middle school teacher who stated he has a lip on him more like a high school student. Damien had always been verbally aggressive and would 'talk the talk', but most of the time he couldn't 'walk the walk.'

Envy - A narcissist may secure a sense of superiority in the face of another person's ability by using contempt to minimize the other person. Envy is closely related to the arrogance sin. Narcissists go into disbelief when they are one upped by someone else. Damien perceived himself as a athlete as he got older and constantly derided other athletes when they succeeded in sports programs.

When he was 18, he told me me he would be a millionaire living in a beach house, driving two cars and owning a boat by the time he was 35. These statements had a lot to do with the grandiose views that narcissists have of themselves. He was essentially telling me that he was going to do a lot better in life than I had done.

At age 35, I reminded Damien of his bet when he was 35, but he he insisted that the bet was still on. At age 38, he was driving a 15 year old Ford Explorer, living at home and had no girlfriend. He didn't even own a dinghy.

In fact, he had trouble developing a relationship with females. He had one girlfriend for about 3 months before he discovered she had been dating another person in his profession. Somehow that disqualified her as a girlfriend. He had one other girlfriend on and off for a couple of years in his mid-thirties. I suspect he had been  looking for a female enabler.

I warned Damien that his chances of finding a wife in his late thirties was about 1:4. Once he got into his forties, the odds went up to 1:25 for a man who had never married.

Entitlement - Narcissists hold unreasonable expectations of favorable treatment and automatic compliance with their wishes because they consider themselves special. Any failure to comply will be considered an attack on their superiority and the perpetrator is considered to be a 'difficult' or 'worthless' person.
If you defy a narcissist, it can trigger narcissistic rage as described in the cat post event.

A narcissistic child may arise out of a bad divorce. The mother may be over protective and become a narcissistic enabler to compensate for the divorce. The narcissistic child may feel that he was treated unfairly by the divorce and is owed something by the parents who care for him.

Exploitation - can take many forms but always involves the using of others without regards for their feelings or interests.

When Damien was 17 he wanted a car. I offered to take him down to the nearby Air Force base to see what was available. When a lot of airmen would ship out overseas, they would try to sell their cars.

Well, my offer wasn't good enough. Damien wanted a 20 year old Chevy that had been overhauled and had one of the biggest production engines ever manufactured. Power was always essential to his ego needs. I advised him that such a vehicle was not suitable for a young driver.

In addition, banks and credit unions will not finance a car of that vintage. Damien continued to badger me about buying this particular for two months until I finally threw him out of the bedroom I used as an office in my home. Because of his inflexibility, I was never able to buy a car for him.
 
I told him if you want that car, get a job. Apparently, he wanted me to buy this car as an investment which meant I would have had to purchase a second car for him to drive.

Many years later I mentioned the care episode to him many years later as an example of his 'my way or the highway approach, He countered that I had the money at the time and could have purchased the car investment for him. He seem to be unable to come with grips that what he really needed was a car to drive to school to work with, not an object that sat in a garage.

Joanna M. Ashmun also noted that narcissists are authoritarian:

Narcissists are totally and inflexibly authoritarian. In other words, they are suck-ups. They want to be authority figures and, short of that, they want to be associated with authority figures. In their hearts, they know they can't think well, have no judgement about what matters, are not connected with the world they inhabit, so they cling fanatically to the opinions of people they regard as authority figures -- such as their parents, teachers, doctors, ministers.

Damien continued to exploit the resources of my family. I told him several times that I needed to refocus the family energies on his two younger half brothers.

This was after years of helping Damien with his finances. At age thirty, his mother was still gassing up his car and slipping him cash. One day he even came to the house and suggested his mother and I had given up on him. In other words, we needed to do more for him.

Bad Boundaries - narcissists do not recognize that they have boundaries and that others are separate and are not extensions of themselves. Others either exist to meet their needs or may as well not exist at all.

At age 34 Damien moved back into the family house at his mother's insistence and stayed until he was 38. He was supposed to save money for a house, but actually accrued more debt while he lived with us.

It was clear after about two years that he had no interest in buying a home and was simply taking advantage of low rent. This was a huge mistake to let him move in because he deposited all of his belongings into my home instead of putting his stuff into storage.

At one time he had his possessions were in disorganized piles in the living room, the dining room, the family room, the kitchen, one bathroom and two of my younger son's bedrooms. The remainder of his belongings took up one third on my two car garage.

From his perspective, it was just too expensive to put his belongings into storage regardless of how badly he had inconvenienced the other four family members.

Things came to a head during the 2008 elections. I became an Obama supporter and actively campaigned for him. Damien was a hard right ditto head and got in direct conflict with me over politics.

I told him that I used to be a conservative while I was in the Air Force, but lost confidence in Republicans after the Richard Nixon presidency. Damien insisted that I had never been a conservative. I guess he thought he had a lock on conservative thought.

My two sons found Damien talking to the HDTV when Keith Olbermann was on cable MSNBC. Most of Damien's political views would be juvenile to a well versed conservative.

However, the 2008 election campaign caused several family arguments that resulted from Damien's narcissistic rages. Damien simply could not accept a Democrat decisively beating a Republican by 10 million votes and a 2:1 electoral advantage.

He was totally at a loss when he heard some post-conventional liberal thinking of Olbermann. Never mind that Olbermann had matriculated at Cornell University at the age of 16.

Damien said that he was smarter than Olbermann and another MSNBC host, Rachel Maddow, who has a PhD from Oxford University and was also a Rhodes scholar. Yet Damien was unable to pass the entrance requirements for a local community college after five attempts.

As Ashmun has stated:

The most telling thing that narcissists do is contradict themselves. They will do this virtually in the same sentence, without even stopping to take a breath. It can be trivial (e.g., about what they want for lunch) or it can be serious (e.g., about whether or not they love you). When you ask them which one they mean, they'll deny ever saying the first one, though it may literally have been only seconds since they said it -- really, how could you think they'd ever have said that . . .? They will contradict FACTS. They will lie to you about things that you did together. They will misquote you to yourself. If you disagree with them, they'll say you're lying, making stuff up, or are crazy.

Narcissists rarely read books but pick up a grab bag of opinion they hear on radio or TV. Most of Damien's views are based upon right wing Talk Radio. I have mentioned to him several times that radio is considered the least credible of mass media after TV and print media. 

 

Narcissists need boundaries. I am in the process of re-keying my home so Damien will have to ring the bell to get into my home. I have found him in my house on more than one occasion without even knowing he was there.

Because narcissists are notoriously stingy, Damien hadn't yet purchased any Internet service two months after he had moved out and moved in with a friend. I had to disconnect his PC in my home and put it at the door after I noticed he was coming over to my house four or five times a week to use the family Internet. Once the PC was disconnected, the visits dropped to one or two per week.

After forcing the Internet issue, Damien bought a Wi-Fi wireless adapter and started using a neighbor's Internet. I also suggested he could get cable service for $19 a month though Dish Networks. Again, since his room-mate, the landlord, was unwilling to pay for the cable service, Damien did not want to shell out $19 a month to watch television at his new abode. Narcissists prefer to use other people's money whenever they can get away with it.

In summary, narcissistic behavior appears to develop at an early age particularly in a divorce situation. Narcissists believe they were the victim of injustice and are owed something. They feel they are entitled because they are special people. A narcissist requires one or more enablers.

If this behavior is allowed to persist, it is unlikely it will resolved in adulthood. If a young child is having numerous conflicts with adults such as such parents, neighbors and teachers, this may be an early warning sign of narcissism.

It was not until Damien was in his mid-thirties that I really understood the nature of his personality disorder. That's when He started stating that he was always right. When I started looking for information on people who think they are always right, I found articles on megalomaniacs and narcissists. 

The more I read about narcissism, the more I was convinced Damien had this personality disorder. Recently Damien also confided with me that he had the ability to predict the future! This could be another example of magical thinking.

Narcissism is also similar to Obsessive Compulsive Personality Disorder.

According to Wikipedia, The World Health Organization's defines a conceptually similar disorder to obsessive–compulsive personality disorder called (F60.5) Anankastic personality disorder.

It is characterized by at least 3 of the following:

1. feelings of excessive doubt and caution;
2. preoccupation with details, rules, lists, order, organization or schedule;
3. perfectionism that interferes with task completion;
4. excessive conscientiousness, scrupulousness, and undue preoccupation with productivity to the exclusion of pleasure and interpersonal relationships;
5. excessive pedantry and adherence to social conventions;
6. rigidity and stubbornness;
7.  unreasonable insistence by the patient that others submit to exactly his or her way of doing things, or unreasonable reluctance to allow others to do things;
8.  intrusion of insistent and unwelcome thoughts or impulses.

Obsessive Compulsive Personality Disorder includes compulsive and obsessional personality (disorder) and obsessive-compulsive personality disorder. It should not be confused with obsessive-compulsive disorder. This disorder is related to repetitive behavior such as washing one's hand innumerable times every day because of a fear of germs.

With early intervention of a psychiatrist or a psychologist, it may be possible to blunt narcissistic behavior. The narcissistic enablers may also need help because narcissists becomes dysfunctional without one or more enablers.

Group therapy can be problematic because narcissists may attack other members of the group. Narcissists my also attack their psychologists or psychiatrists since they look at the world as it's 'my way or the highway.' From the perspective of the narcissist, they don't have any problems: it's the other people who have the problem.

Narcissists don't like to live alone either. As Kathy Krajco has pointed out:

. . . narcissists suffer when they are alone. This happens when their sources of narcissistic supply (the enablers) dry up and they can't find another host. No mirrors, no mirage of a false self to identify with . . . they cannot keep unwanted knowledge and feelings suppressed. So, the normally rare and easily re-repressed moments of unwanted self-awareness become frequent and virtually assail them. These are the times when they look in the mirror, see their true selves, and think of suicide.

Damien graduated from high school 20 years ago. He has lived independently by himself for five or six years during this period. Narcissists need enablers to be happy.

If you have children who are exhibiting narcissistic behavior, get them into therapy early on. Psychologists and psychiatrists have had little success treating the Narcissistic Personality Disorder with adults. There is no magic pill to cure it.

I would suggest you get narcissistic children into lots of group activities such as sports and summer recreation that emphasizes the importance of social and group skills. If you have the budget for it, send your child to summer camp so the child is away from the enabler.

If I had understood the nature of Damien's problem when he was younger, I would have spent several thousand dollars to send him to military school for a year. My wife and I discussed this, but thought at the time that the program was too expensive.

Set boundaries for narcissistic children. Make them move out of you house when they graduate from high school so they can develop independent living skills. Under no circumstanced should you let them move back in to you home to re-establish the co-dependency relationship with the enabler.

Although you might think you are helping them by allowing them to move in, you're not. Damien even told me that he was smarter than me because he was allowed back into our home.

If your narcissist causes an emotional storm in your house, ban them from visiting your home for 30 days and don't accept phone calls from them. Re-key you home after a narcissistic child leaves home.

Make it clear that they are no longer a member of the nuclear family. Work with the spouse who enables the narcissistic behavior. He or she is big part of the problem and most of these enablers do not want to let go of their child. At age 38 Damien still calls his mother every day at lunch hour! 

source: Wikipedia

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