Apr16
About narcissism…
Last night I discovered the duplicitous nature of several conversations I had with someone a while ago. I was pretty pissed and wrote about it, “Why Do We Do This?“, on my website about relational aggression.
You know, on this healing journey, I’ve noticed a recurring theme throughout a lot of situations that hurt people and in my own experiences. For the longest time, I thought the main issue for me to deal with was the fallout from the incest. I thought it was the sexual abuse that inflicted the greatest damage, that presented the biggest obstacle for me to overcome and process through.
But there’s something else, something even more insidious that seems to be like a source, a wellspring of dysfunction that supports and gives life to myriad forms of abuse.
Incest is one of them. Physical violence is another. Emotional violence, thievery, murder, slander, even “idle” gossip that actually has the well-being of another person as its target, all have their roots in this. I see a common thread in all the conversations I’ve had with people, the manipulation, the deceiving, the entitlement that appear over and over again no matter the form of abuse.
It’s narcissism. Not just the shallow vanity stuff of conceit, but the pervading sense of entitlement and total lack of empathy for other people. Oh, not that they can’t read people and even go through the motions of caring. But they don’t care. What they pick up is noted for what use it can be put to - either now or later. And if they feel an emotional charge that they call caring, it can be turned off at the drop of a hat, when it is to their advantage…or on a whim.
In its more extreme forms narcissism appears as the sociopath. Other times it skirts along an almost benign shallowness, except that it can leave an emotional devastation in people’s lives, as if it were a tsunami, or just slowly erode the banks of your spirit, as one selfish act after another gently laps up against your shore… Continue Reading »
