One kind of person you definitely do NOT want to marry is someone, male or female, with NPD, Narcissistic Personality Disorder.
What does an NPD look like, exactly?
An NPD is easy to spot. I’ll give you the basic clues in a simple rundown:
1 A very exaggerated sense of one’s talents, skills and importance in the world at large.
2. An obvious and obsessive need for attention, lots of it, and admiration, if available.
3. Fantasies of Great Romance. I don’t have to spell this one out for you.
4. Fantasies of Great Insight, Great Ideas, Personal Greatness in general.
5. Views people as objects or “dolls”, as in “my dolls came to help me give a party!”, or “hey, bitch, how about a blowjob?”.
6. Easily offended, and when offended, crushed beyond hope, until he or she gets his or her way with you. For the NPD, everything, even the most harmless and exalted thing, is a weapon to be used to keep you under control.
7. Self-criticism and NPD do not mix well. NPDs who are confronted with any issues problems will go immediately into a tailspin of rage and/or paranoiac accusations in every direction.
8. Totally Unbelievably Powerful Sense of Righteousness. Even the most evil of acts can be easily rationalized by the NPD, because lying comes easier than telling the simple truth.
9. An NPDs feelings are easily hurt. This is the first and sometimes last line of defense for the NPD who hasn’t yet crushed you down all the way to the ground.
10. Seems very sympathetic and empathetic, but has a heart of stone, no feelings for other whatever, totally sociopathic in every respect, and a potential candidate for doing harm to others without a single drop of remorse.
11. Has no respect for others, yet demands respect from others, and has a temper tantrum when that doesn’t happen to his or her expectations.
12. Is able to easily rationalize and justify the most barbaric and animalistic acts, thinks of them as completely ordinary and in every respect totally normal. Doesn’t everyone do what I do??? Of course they do.
13. Bad things tend to happen around an NPD. They get hurt easily and others get hurt just by being near them, either physically or emotionally or both.
14. Sense of Personal Entitlement. The world owes them a living, and they tend to let their totally disrupted partner carry the weight of earning the living for both of them.
SO WHAT’S THE ANSWER?
First of all, there is no way to live with a Narcissist, but to break away is almost impossible for the victim, so I’ll outline what you’ll need to accomplish in order to get away from this dangerous creature once and for all…which means you have to learn not to do the same damn thing again, and that means growing up emotionally, fast, before it’s too late and some bastard leaves you lying there for the hospital to pick up.
You have to realize that an NPD doesn’t ever, ever change. If you think there’s going to be any hope of change, you won’t have the strength to break the chains, and he’ll keep you going with the hope of reform forever — he doesn’t care about your pain, only his own.
HERE’S WHAT YOU NEED TO DO:
1. You are a winner, and you have to find that again in yourself, after having been beaten down into insensibility and a thoroughly scrambled and artificially deranged idea that you are a mess, you are a nothing, you are a loser. Believe me, NPDs never go after losers. They only win if they can drag you down with a never-ending string of negatives about yourself.
2. You need confidence, even if you don’t have it. If you can fake an orgasm, you can certainly fake confidence, and you need to do it, and do it now. Exude confidence; he won’t be able to take it for long.
3. You are not a slave to his desires. Don’t be a Man-Pleaser. You let him train you into thinking that’s what a woman should do, or your parents, friends and other partners may have instilled this stupid idea into your brain. Man-Pleasing doesn’t work, just makes it worse, just gives more power to his domination-through-helplessness trip.
4. Anger is his major tool, and if you show fear, he’ll use it again. Anger back doesn’t work; the only thing you can do here is walk away, find a phone, call a divorce lawyer and go on a vacation until the final decree. He won’t change, but he’ll promise you anything.
5. Temper Tantrums. Hey, they worked for him when he was a little a kid, and if you show the slightest sign of caving in, they’ll work for him now. He is in fact a little kid with a car, a credit card and a dozen secret girlfriends on the side, all of whom have been sleeping around, and some of whom are just waiting to deliver an STD to your doorstep through your egoistic bed-partner who thinks it’s cool to have unprotected sex with untested strangers, and to bring home some equally strange diseases. How cool is that?
6. Never correct a Narcissist. They’re never wrong, and you always are. You can’t win any argument with any amount of rightness, because a Narcissist cannot give ground. You can’t win, period, and you never will. When you finally learn that is when you’ve had enough pain to make you take the leap, make the jump, pull the plug on him.
7. Disagreement on any issue is a sign for accusations, crazy assertations, sexual and emotional wildness, even babbling insanities. An NPD is very likely to go take a shower or hot bath and go golfing after a major blowout, while you sit weeping and wondering how it all went so wrong…??? The NPD is a sexual predator, and will make you wrong for being a victim.
8. NPDs can turn on the “Freeze”. Using a withering stare, wild eyes, glaring and sometimes just walking into the room, you get a gut-wrenching stab as if someone hit you in the solar plexus with a baseball bat, and it’s just his negative vibes reaching out to touch someone — you — and hurt them, bad. When he or she turns on the Negative Vibe Juice, you find yourself willing to do absolutely anything to get them to stop. Anything.
9. He’ll make accusations of your sexual infidelity. This is technically called “projection”, and everything he or she does is designed to keep you off-balance and feeling vulnerable.
10. The NPD is always smarter than everyone around them. Don’t even think of arguing this point.
11. You need to reassert your independence, your liberty, your liberation, and the best way to do this is to get deeply into something totally creative. Naturally, your dearest NPD will do everything possible to prevent you from being creative. This is the one area where he or she must dominate or die.
12. Narcissists love to create drama. Anything you can do to spark it off will do the job.
13. Narcissists always blame others for their own negative actions and bad decisions.
14. Narcissists can lie right to your face, swear on a stack of Bibles and look innocent as a baby, but they are psychotic liars, totally — they tell a lie easier than telling the truth. Never trust anything a Narcissist says, especially “I’ll be good, I won’t sleep around anymore.”. That line is a total lie — a Narcissist HAS TO sleep around, or lose the game.
WHY DO VICTIMS OF NPDs WAIT SO LONG TO ACT?
Mostly, it’s to save the kids, but an NPD marriage will only teach the kids to do the same when they grow up.
Hope for change and a promise of reform keeps some NPD marriages together for a while, but they almost always end in some grisly form of violence, physical or emotional, and the change can never happen, because, as you know, an NPD cannot ever, ever be wrong.
You need to gain the confidence, to know that many folks have learned to walk away from abusive relationships with someone suffering from this terrible, totally unbeatable, disease.
Usually, there’ll be a “Last Straw”, something so ugly, so outrageously sick, that, even without the confidence that has been beaten out of you emotionally for so many years, you finally, finally say, “I’ve had enough.”.
You need an “Exit Strategy” and a way to take up your life again without falling into the same trap again, and that means learning how to live without an NPD to take care of.
The major weapon of the NPD is to threaten suicide. Talk to a professional counselor if your spouse is using suicide as a weapon to keep you under his or her control.
Well, in a nutshell, that’s the deal. There is no easy or nice way out, but out it must be. It is impossible to live with a Narcissist, and sooner or later you will leave the relationship, and I only hope you don’t leave it by being carried out in a basket.
Email me for help if you need it.
See You At The Top!!!
gorby