Good to understand.
In the beginning narcissists seem to enjoy your company when you are happy and self confident but as soon as you say no to some request or fail to agree with their point of view you will find out how much they secretly want to attack your happiness, confidence, and self esteem. Your happiness and confidence are seen as something they want to take for themselves so they mirror your happiness and meanwhile they try to destroy your happiness with devaluation so they can look like the happy confident one. This is what starts the devaluation phase and while there may be temporary returns to love-bombing, as they experience more and more episodes where you fail them (by not agreeing with them or simply by not admiring them enough) the episodes of devaluation will increase concurrently.
Then they begin an all out assault on any quality or asset that they see makes you happy. If anyone admires you for some quality or ability you have, they make sure to say things to try to make you feel that it isn't true or doesn’t matter. And then they try to make you feel the exact opposite - that the things you enjoy or find beautiful are actually inferior to their opinion on the subject. (for example when someone said I was pretty my narcissistic mother would quickly interject “I don't think” so or make some other disparaging remark.)
There is no win/win for a narcissist, if you are up they are down so you must be kept down for them to win. They win either through devaluation or if they are malignant narcissists – physical force. Its the endless game of one up where no one ever gets to rest on their laurels and take a breather because the narcissist will be sure to dismiss and diminish anything you do or did to belittle it and make themselves look superior. Narcissistic family members will dismiss everything that happened in your life if you did not make a record of it that is witnessed and kept on file to show proof that you actually existed and ever did anything in your life to be happy about.
There is also no understanding of presenting a unified front where you have each other's back as equal partners enjoying each other's success, instead you are seen as a rival. The very fact that you are happy to be loving them is ironically seen as something that must be destroyed because they CANNOT happily love and god forbid you would be better at it than themselves, even though it actually benefits them to be loved.
“To further understand the lack of empathy among the Dark Triad personalities (narcissists, psychopaths, and Machiavellianists), research examined affective empathy, which is the ability to have an appropriate emotional response to others’ emotions, and cognitive empathy, the ability to discern others’ emotional states. They found that all three personality types lacked affective empathy, but had unimpaired cognitive empathy. Creepily, all three felt positive looking at sad faces and felt negative seeing happy images. Narcissists and psychopaths also felt good seeing angry faces. Psychopaths liked seeing fearful faces.” Beware of the Malevolent Dark Triad
Hierarchical thinking makes the narcissist try continually to climb the social ladder in his or her chosen arena. When you are happy the narcissist is not, since for the narcissist to be up you must be kept down. Even your smile is seen as a threat that announces that you are happy and this reminds them that somewhere inside they are never happy with themselves, and always fighting chronic shame that makes them feel like they are never good enough. You and your happiness are seen as being in competition for their very life blood – narcissistic supply – attention, admiration, approval - that they think will bring them happiness. Happy people feel good about themselves so your self esteem has to be brought down because it rises as a threat to their never ending pursuit of being seen as superior.
No comments:
Post a Comment