Characteristics of Malignant Narcissists
1. Everything she does is deniable. There is always a facile excuse or
an explanation. Cruelties are couched in loving terms. Aggressive and hostile
acts are paraded as thoughtfulness. Selfish manipulations are presented as
gifts. Criticism and slander is slyly disguised as concern. She doesn’t want to
have to do this, but she only wants what is best for you. She only wants to
help.
Because her abusiveness
is part of a lifelong campaign of control and because she is careful to rationalize her abuse, it is extremely difficult
to explain to other people what is so bad about her.
She’s also careful about
when and how she engages in her abuses. She’s
very secretive, a characteristic of almost all abusers (“Don’t wash our dirty
laundry in public!”) and will punish you for telling anyone else what she’s
done. The times and locations of her worst abuses are carefully chosen so that
anyone who might intervene will not hear or see her bad behavior, and she will
seem like a completely different person in public. She’ll slam you to other
people, but will always embed her devaluing nuggets of snide gossip in
protestations of concern, love and understanding (“I feel so sorry for poor
Cynthia. She always seems to have such a hard time, but I just don’t know what
I can do for her!”) As a consequence, the children of narcissists universally
report that no one believes them (“I have to tell you that she always talks
about YOU in the most caring way!).
2. She
favoritizes. Narcissistic mothers commonly choose one (sometimes more)
child to be the golden child and one (sometimes more) to be the scapegoat. The
narcissist identifies with the golden child and provides privileges to him or
her as long as the golden child does just as she wants. The golden child has to be cared for
assiduously by everyone in the family. The scapegoat has no needs and instead
gets to do the caring. The golden child can do nothing wrong. The scapegoat is
always at fault. This creates divisions between the children, one of whom
has a large investment in the mother being wise and wonderful, and the other(s)
who hate her. That division will be fostered by the narcissist with lies and
with blatantly unfair and favoritizing behavior. The golden child will defend the mother and perpetuate the abuse by
finding reasons to blame the scapegoat for the mother’s actions. The golden
child may also directly take on the narcissistic mother’s traits and tasks by
abusing the scapegoat so the narcissistic mother doesn’t have to do that
herself.
3. She makes you
look crazy. If you try to confront her about something she’s done, she’ll
tell you that you have “a very vivid imagination” (this is a phrase commonly
used by abusers of all sorts to invalidate your experience of their abuse) that
you don’t know what you’re talking about, or that she has no idea what you’re
talking about. She will claim not to remember even very memorable events,
flatly denying they ever happened. Nor will she ever acknowledge any
possibility that she might have forgotten. This is an extremely aggressive and
exceptionally infuriating tactic called “gaslighting,” common to abusers of all
kinds. Your perceptions of reality are continually undermined so that you end
up without any confidence in your intuition, your memory or your powers of
reasoning. This makes you a much better victim for the abuser.
Narcissists
will gaslight routinely. The narcissist will either insinuate or will tell you
outright that you’re unstable, otherwise you wouldn’t believe such ridiculous
things or be so uncooperative. You’re oversensitive. You’re imagining things.
You’re hysterical. You’re completely unreasonable. You’re over-reacting, like
you always do. She’ll tell you that you need treatment for your mental problem
and she will talk to you when you’ve calmed down and aren’t so irrational. She
may even characterize you as being neurotic or psychotic.
Once she’s
constructed these fantasies of your emotional pathologies, she’ll tell others
about them, as always, presenting her smears as expressions of concern and
declaring her own helpless victimhood. She didn’t do anything. She has no idea
why you’re so irrationally angry with her. You’ve hurt her terribly. She thinks
you may need psychotherapy. She loves you very much and would do anything to
make you happy, but she just doesn’t know what to do. You keep pushing her away
when all she wants to do is help you.
She has simultaneously absolved
herself of any responsibility for your obvious antipathy towards her, implied
that it’s something fundamentally wrong with you that makes you angry with her,
and undermined your credibility with her listeners. She plays the role of the
“concerned” mother/sister so perfectly that no one will believe you.
4. She’s
a liar in too many ways to count. Any time she talks about something that
has emotional significance for her, it’s a fair bet that she’s lying. Lying is
one way that she creates conflict in the relationships and lives of those
around her - she’ll lie to them about what other people have said, what they’ve
done, or how they feel. She’ll lie about her relationship with them, about your
behavior or about your situation in order to inflate herself and to undermine
your credibility.
The
narcissist is very careful about how she lies. To outsiders she’ll lie
thoughtfully and deliberately, always in a way that can be covered up if she’s
confronted with her lie. She spins what you said rather than makes something up
wholesale. She puts dishonest interpretations on things you actually did. If
she’s recently done something particularly egregious she may engage in
preventative lying: she lies in advance to discount what you might say
before you even say it. Then when you talk about what she did you’ll be cut off
with “I already know all about it…your mother/sister told me...
(self-justifications and lies).” Because she is so careful about her
deniability, it may be very hard to catch her in her lies. The more gullible
person may never realize how dishonest she is.
To you,
she’ll lie blatantly. She will claim to be unable to remember bad things she
has done, even if she did one of them recently and even if it was something
very memorable. Of course, if you try to jog her memory by recounting the
circumstances “You have a very vivid imagination” or “That was so long ago. Why
do you have to dredge up your old grudges?” Your conversations with her are
full of casual brush-offs and diversionary lies and she doesn’t respect you
enough to bother making it sound good.
On the rare
occasions she is forced to acknowledge some bad behavior, she will couch the
admission deniably. She “guesses” that “maybe” she “might have” done something
wrong. The wrongdoing is always heavily spun and trimmed to make it sound
better. The words “I guess,” “maybe,” and “might have” are in and of
themselves lies because she knows exactly what she did - no guessing, no might
haves, no maybes.
A Narcissistic mother and sister will
say whatever feeds their purpose of the moment, without regard for the truth,
so when the purpose shifts, the Narcissist mother and sister must contradict
their past statements. This contradiction may occur within the context of a
single conversation, or even a single sentence.
5. She manipulates your emotions in
order to feed on your pain. This exceptionally sick and bizarre behavior is so common among
narcissistic mothers and sisters that their family members often call them
“emotional vampires.” Some of this emotional feeding comes in the form of pure
sadism. She does and says things just to be wounding or she engages in
tormenting teasing or she needles you about things you’re sensitive about, all
the while a smile plays over her lips. She may have taken you to scary movies
or told you horrifying stories, then mocked you for being a baby when you
cried. She will slip a wounding comment into conversation and smile delightedly
into your hurt face. You can hear the laughter in her voice as she pressures
you or says distressing things to you. Later she’ll gloat over how much she
upset you, gaily telling other people that you’re so much fun to tease, and
recruiting others to share in her amusement.
She enjoys her cruelties and makes no effort to disguise that. She wants
you to know that your pain entertains her. She may also bring up subjects
that are painful for you and probe you about them, all the while watching you
carefully. This is emotional vampirism in its purest form. She’s feeding
emotionally off your pain.
A peculiar
form of this emotional vampirism combines attention-seeking behavior with a
demand that the audience suffer. Since
narcissistic mothers and sisters often play the martyr this may take the form
of wrenching, self-pitying dramas which they carefully produce, and in which
they are the star performers.
6. She is insanely defensive and is
extremely sensitive to any criticism. If you criticize her or defy her she will explode with
fury, threaten, storm, rage and destroy. It’s easy to provoke her wrath because
she takes everything personally and any attitude short of constant emotional
and physical availability is perceived as a slight. If you’re short with her
because you’re exhausted and depressed, she has to have it out with you over
your “hostility.” If a toddler shouts “I hate you” at her she gets angry and
punitive. If you refuse her nosy request to let her read the letter you got she
shouts about how unappreciative you are and how hard she has it. She has no
sense of perspective or separation and she can’t let anything go.
7. She terrorizes. All abusers use fear to control
their victims, and your narcissistic mother/sister used it ruthlessly to train
you. Narcissists teach you to beware their wrath even when they aren’t present.
The only alternative is constant placation. If you give her everything she
wants all the time, you might be spared. If you don’t, the punishments will
come. Even adult children of narcissists still feel that carefully inculcated
fear. Your narcissistic mother/sister can turn it on with a silence or a look
that tells you she’s thinking about how she’s going to get even.
Not all
narcissists abuse physically, but most do, often in subtle, deniable ways.
It allows them to vent their rage at your failure to be the solution to
their internal havoc and simultaneously to teach you to fear them. You may not
have been beaten, but you were almost certainly left to endure physical pain
when a normal mother would have made an effort to relieve your misery. This
deniable form of battery allows her to store up her rage and dole out the
punishment at a later time when she’s worked out an airtight rationale for her
abuse, so she never risks exposure. You were left hungry because “you eat too
much.” You always went to school with stomach flu because “you don’t have
a fever. You’re just trying to get out of school.” (She resents having to take
care of you. You have a lot of nerve getting sick and adding to her burdens.)
She refuses to look at your bloody heels and instead the shoes that wore those
blisters on your heels are put back on your feet and you’re sent to the store
in them because “You wanted those shoes. Now you can wear them.” (You
said the ones she wanted to get you were ugly. She liked them because they were
just like what she wore 30 years ago). The dentist was told not to give you
Novocain when he drilled your tooth because “he has to learn to take better
care of his teeth.” (She has to pay for a filling and she’s furious at having
to spend money on you.) Unlike psychopaths, narcissists do understand right,
wrong, and consequences, so they are not ordinarily criminal. She beat you, but
not to the point where you went to the hospital. She left you standing out in
the cold until you were miserable, but not until you had hypothermia. She put
you in the basement in the dark with no clothes on, but she only left you there
for two hours.
Narcissistic
mothers also abuse by loosing others on you or by failing to protect you when a
normal mother would have. Sometimes the narcissist’s golden child will be
encouraged to abuse the scapegoat. Narcissists also abuse by exposing you to
violence. If one of your siblings got beaten, she made sure you saw. She
effortlessly put the fear of Mom into you, without even touching you.
8. She’s exploitative. She will manipulate to get money or
objects she envies out of other people for nothing. This includes taking from
all family members.
9. She projects. This sounds a little like
psycho-babble, but it is something that narcissists all do. Projection means
that she will put her own bad behavior, character traits and flaws on you so
she can deny them in herself and punish you.
10. She is never wrong about anything. No matter what she’s done, she
won’t ever genuinely apologize for anything.
11. She manufactures “no-win”
situations. In the
classic “no-win” scenario, the narcissist’s family member is manipulated into a
corner and then presented with a demand that they do something degrading,
humiliating or painful in order to please the narcissist. Any response other
than complete compliance triggers retaliation. As always, the payoff for your
mother/sister is the elicitation of painful emotions. Whether you subject yourself to her degradation or you fight back and
end up subjected to shaming, threats and blaming by the narcissist, you will
experience a sense of helplessness and fear, and those emotions are very
satisfying to the narcissist. That
feed is also augmented by the pain she elicits by undermining, insulting and
demeaning you and, as the scene winds down, by blaming you for the entire
event. These scenes are great fun for your narcissist mother/sister, for whom
they are exciting and entertaining as well as satisfying, and who gets to feel
as though she has been very clever. She commonly has an attitude of
pleasure and excitement throughout, which she will make no effort to hide. The
family members of narcissists often describe the “little smile” she had as she
played out the no-win scenario. She wants you to know how much fun she’s having
and how much she loves your pain. There is no betrayal more wounding than
knowing your own mother/sister/daughter is reveling in the pain she
deliberately caused, nor any emotion more delicious to your narcissistic
mother/daughter/sister than your sense of shock and misery that she is hurting
you deliberately and for fun.
12. She blames. She’ll blame you for everything
that isn’t right in her life or for what other people do or for whatever has
happened. Always, she’ll blame you for
her abuse. You made her do it. If only you weren’t so difficult. You upset
her so much that she can’t think straight. Things were hard for her and your
backtalk pushed her over the brink. This
blaming is often so subtle that all you know is that you thought you were
wronged and now you feel guilty. Your brother beats you and her response is
to bemoan how uncivilized children are. Your boyfriend dumped you, but she can
understand - after all, she herself has seen how difficult you are to love. She’ll do something egregiously
exploitative to you, and when confronted will screech at you that she can’t believe
you were so selfish as to upset her over such a trivial thing. She’ll also
blame you for your reaction to her selfish, cruel and exploitative behavior.
She can’t believe you are so petty, so small, and so childish as to object to
her giving your favorite dress to her friend. She thought you would be happy to
let her do something nice for someone else.
Narcissists
are masters of multitasking as this example shows. Simultaneously she is 1)
Lying. She knows what she did was wrong and she knows your reaction is
reasonable. 2) Manipulating. She’s making you look like the bad guy for
objecting to her cruelties. 3) Being selfish. She doesn’t mind making you feel
horrible as long as she gets her own way. 4) Blaming. She did something wrong,
but it’s all your fault. 5) Projecting. Her petty, small and childish behavior
has become yours. 6) Putting on a self-pitying drama. She’s a martyr who
believed the best of you, and you’ve let her down. 7) Parentifying. You’re
responsible for her feelings, she has no responsibility for yours.
13. She destroys your relationships. Narcissist mothers/sisters are like
tornadoes: wherever they touch down families are torn apart and wounds are
inflicted. Unless the father has control over the narcissists and holds the
family together, adult siblings in families with narcissistic mothers and
sisters characteristically have painful relationships. Typically all
communication between siblings is superficial and driven by duty, or they may
never talk to each other at all. In
part, these women foster dissension between family members because they enjoy
the control it gives them. If no one communicates except through the
mother/sister, she can decide what everyone hears. Narcissists also love the excitement and drama they create by
interfering in other’s lives. Watching people’s lives explode is better than
soap operas, especially when you don’t have any empathy for their misery.
The narcissist nurtures anger,
contempt and envy - the most corrosive emotions - to drive families apart. While her children are still living
at home, any child who stands up to the narcissist guarantees punishment for
the rest. In her zest for revenge, the narcissist purposefully turns the
siblings’ anger on the dissenter by including everyone in her retaliation. (“I
can see that nobody here loves me! Well I’ll just take these Christmas presents
back to the store. None of you would want anything I got you anyway!”) The
other children, long trained by the narcissist to give in, are furious with the
troublemaking child, instead of with the narcissist who actually deserves their
anger.
The
narcissist also uses favoritism and gossip to poison her childrens’
relationships.
The scapegoat sees the
mother as a creature of caprice and cruelty. As is typical of the privileged,
the other children don’t see her unfairness and they excuse her abuses. Indeed,
they are often recruited by the narcissist to adopt her contemptuous and
entitled attitude towards the scapegoat and with her tacit or explicit
permission, will inflict further abuse. The scapegoat predictably responds with
fury and equal contempt. After her children move on with adult lives,
the narcissist mother and daughter make sure to keep everyone apprised of the
doings of the others, passing on the most discreditable and juicy gossip (as
always, disguised as “concern”) about siblings and other family members, again,
in a way that engenders contempt rather than compassion.
The end
result is a family in which almost all communication is triangular. The narcissist, the spider in the middle of
the family web, sensitively monitors everyone for information she can use to
retain her unchallenged control over the family. She then passes that on to
the others, creating the resentments that prevent them from communicating
directly and freely with each other. The result is that the only communication
between anyone is through the narcissist, exactly the way she wants it.
