A narcissist is their own worst enemy.
A tale of Narcissistic Personality Disorder, and how it can hurt not only other people, but also the narcissist themselves.
Children of narcissistic parents (yes I’m talking about the personality disorder, not just the insult given willy-nilly) often feel like life has been unfair to them, because even after they’ve broken free, the narcissist usually doesn’t pay for their hurtful actions, and might even look for someone else to abuse. So these victims are left feeling powerless, pining for justice and compensation. I am talking in third person for stylistic effect — in fact, I am one of these victims. I understand the feeling first hand, and wouldn’t ever invalidate it.
That being said, may I suggest one thing? Real quick, just a hypothesis: what if the “justice” you want has already been served? Perhaps you can’t see it, but that doesn’t mean it hasn’t happened. Perhaps the narcissist is suffering from the result of their actions already. They just hide it well.
Now, instead of explaining why, let me just tell you a story:
There once was a young lass who went to school in the 1930s.
I won’t tell you where exactly, it’s irrelevant. What I can tell you is she was born into a working class family in a 3rd world country. Her parents worked really hard and led a tough life in the countryside. The young lass — let’s call her Ariel— was the youngest of 10 siblings, and never met her mother, who died during childbirth. Ariel was raised by her eldest sister, and they had a good relationship. Her father, on the other hand, was a lot more emotionally unavailable.
Unlike most of her siblings, Ariel had a hard time at school. It took her a long time to learn to spell, and in maths she was equally “hopeless”. Teachers back then were very strict and would often join in on the bullying. Ariel had what today would be described as undiagnosed dyslexia. To make matters even worse, she didn’t exactly fit into the beauty standard, so she felt both ugly and unintelligent. It goes without saying that her self-esteem was pretty bad.
Ariel compensated for that in sports, and became known as a fast, strong kid everyone wanted on their team. However, that didn’t really help her in the beauty department, as she ended up not becoming cute and dainty like some of her friends. This was a very important goal for her, well into adulthood, because back then it wasn’t really considered “proper” for a grown-up woman to be “strong and masculine”, like people would describe her. She never found the validation she’d expected for her looks OR smarts, and remained unhappy.
“Ariel” is my grandmother.
She would sometimes tell me that one day, during her childhood (which she recalls very vividly), she took a decision that would change her life forever: she promised herself she wouldn’t think of herself as anything other than “brilliant” and “gorgeous”, EVER again, from that day onwards. Regardless of other people’s opinions, regardless of the insults the world threw at her, she would stand proud and just stop listening to external input.
Growing up, I was fascinated by her story, and felt proud of her strength and determination. Indeed, she was determined. However, as I’ve come to realise, there was just one problem: she’d taken that to a very unnecessary extreme.
You see, instead of truly embracing herself for who she was, Ariel started fantasising and idealising herself in a very exaggerated manner, an overcompensation for her sense of inadequacy. So in truth, she didn’t embrace herself. She simply started hiding her real self, whilst “acting” as the “ideal her” that she wanted the world to see. Instead of realising people were silly for judging her, she still believed in their insults deep down. She didn’t take her time to question or challenge those judgemental idiots. Instead, she created a false self that would fulfil, in her imagination, all the criteria people had taught her a woman should accomplish in order to be “desirable”.
She developed Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD) — and even worse, she is proud of it. Yes I’m affirming it without hesitation. I am no therapist, but every therapist that saw her agrees, so it isn’t just me saying that, FYI. Do with this information what you will.
She went on to marry a man I’ve never even seen pictures of, I only know him through her stories. She claimed he was bad to her, and they divorced, and she had to raise 3 children alone. Was that true? Well, no, because she also claimed (repeatedly, too) that this very same man once gave her a specific CD, and today I found out it hadn’t been launched until 1995 — when all her children had married and moved out already, I existed, and so on. The timeline has a problem, and goes to show a lie. Perhaps she fantasised about the gift; OR perhaps her divorce was a lot later than she says, or even mostly because of paranoia, just like my mother’s divorce many years later, continuing the same cycle. I don’t know, I could be wrong there. Maybe he was really bad to her. I can’t tell. The story is just weird, with an even weirder timeline, and her defensiveness against having to clarify anything makes it even more suspicious.
I can never know the truth for sure, nor do I care, but it’s just a free sample of how her stories don’t add up. This isn’t even my “favourite” of hers — I was more (un)impressed with the tale of my estranged aunt who apparently was “a burden on the family” and “never wanted to work or do anything useful with her life”, so granny “kicked her out”, but as it turns out, the truth is: she moved out herself after getting a very high paying job offer which she recently retired from. She had been the family’s scapegoat and the butt of everyone’s jokes all the time because she looked prettier than my mother, and that made her feel jealous. Can you see a pattern there?
No I’m not gossip girl: I only know the story of my aunt because granny and mother used it as a cautionary tale whenever I “misbehaved”, threatening to abandon me on the street or “send me to my father, whose family has a pact with the devil”. It’s grotesque how untrue these things are, but they really scared me when I was 7.
I won’t give you a TED talk on what’s NPD. (Yes I’ll abbreviate it from now on, I’m dyslexic too, deal with it). You can find a lot of useful articles by experts with a quick google. Instead, I’m telling you a personal story that shows where (and most importantly why) narcissists lie, and how it can lead to their own demise.
Deception
The childhood “origin story” above is the only truth Ariel has ever told me, and I know it’s true because it confirms patterns of her disorder. I grew up with lies, both hers and her daughter’s (my mother), lies that have shaped how I related to the people around me my entire life, lies that I’m slowly unveiling and looking for the truth behind them, like an incomplete puzzle. A lot of those lies don’t concern me or my immediate circles, but they influenced all the unhealthy coping mechanisms I inherited, and this is why I care about them at all.
I grew up learning a weird hierarchy of criticism: strangers weren’t allowed to criticise me. Anyone who thought of me as less than perfect was just “jealous” and “bad company”. At the same time, though, my mother and granny were allowed to criticise me, nitpick everything I ever did, and put me down to their heart’s content. On a surface level, this is the kind of thing you look at and go like, “what a stupid double standard, what does that even mean?”. If you’re an insider, though, you know the inner battles these narcissists are desperately fighting, and then you have 2 options: 1) rebel against it and become a scapegoat until you cut ties with the family, or 2) go with the flow and become a narcissist yourself. They sometimes overlap. I have a few learned narcissistic traits I’m [hopefully] unlearning, but mostly I opted for option 1.
You see, there can be no NPD without deception. Self-deception, first and foremost. A narcissist’s exaggerated self-esteem is just that: exaggeration. It isn’t real. And in order to develop your entire personality on a lie, you must be okay with lying. There’s no need to even admit that to yourself. That’s why it’s self-deception.
Being okay with lying also implies you fear the truth. You do everything in your power to make sure nobody ever finds out the truth — that’s the only way the lie can live on. For a narcissist, that’s the only way their personality can live on. So at some point, of course, you just convince yourself that the lie is a truth, and the truth is a lie. You become genuinely unable to tell reality from fantasy. You do that for years and years, and become used to it. That’s why NPD is so hard to treat.
It’s twisted, it’s cruel and childish and cowardly and every negative adjective in the book — but it works. If this coping mechanism didn’t work, it wouldn’t last long, and narcissists wouldn’t even exist. And just like anything else that works, it comes with a price. I’m not just referring to the inevitable negative influence on the victims of narcissists, which is well documented and we don’t even need to mention here. I’m also talking about a price the narcissist themselves have to pay: eternal dissatisfaction. Eternal suffering.
It seems like a paradox that although a narcissist is constantly trying to run away from pain (especially emotional pain. I mean, healing is painful. And they avoid healing like the plague), that also causes pain — but perhaps it’s more bearable on the short term than the pain of healing ever would be. I’m not sure, just guessing. All I have is an observer’s perspective, but I suppose my 20-something years living with narcissists taught me that they’re very unhappy. They put on a happy facade for outsiders, but in truth they’re unhappy. Never satisfied. Always looking for flaws in themselves, in others, in every situation, no matter how comfortable.
It is true that for a narcissist, the glass is always half-empty; but they don’t simply stop at SEEING the negative side of life; they also enhance it, fantasise about problems that don’t really exist in a very masochistic way, and they do that in order to keep justifying the lie they once told themselves. I mean, just think about it: even if a narcissist achieves every dream they once had, even if they tick all the boxes for a “happy” life, they can’t simply admit they made it. Because if they admit they made it in life, they must admit to themselves that, previously, they hadn’t made it yet. And that would lead them to have to admit to themselves that previously, they weren’t perfect yet. Therefore, they were living a lie. Therefore, their lives were built on a lie, therefore they can’t be perfect or justify feeling superior to anyone else.
And there goes the initial illusion that started everything.
So they can’t go down that path. They must keep looking for reasons why life remains “not ideal” and they’re still the victims of everything, and the world is out to get them. Forever. Even if it means creating problems out of thin air, that only exist inside their heads.
That’s the price of NPD. So no, they aren’t simply evil people, leading comfortable lives while they make everyone else pay. In fact, they’re paying very dearly for the deception they chose to embark on a long time ago, from the very beginning. And it won’t end as long as they keep insisting on avoiding treatment. You don’t need revenge, dear survivor, trust me.
