How to Spot a Dangerous Man

or how the narcissist makes you the problem There is an interesting article published in 1990 in a psychology journal that I'd like to reference in this and upcoming posts. Parts of the article are more interesting than others so I'll summarize some of them in my own words. The parts of this article that I plan to highlight here on my blog are those concepts that I've personally seen and experienced. If I've seen and experienced it, then it is likely you have too. One of the concepts this article visits is the subject of criticism as used by the narcissist. One of the terms this article uses is "narcissistically defended person". What this means is that the person is either a narcissist, or they have adopted narcissistic defenses even if their over-all personality can not be classified as someone with NPD. So, some of the behaviors can be seen in a person who can not be reasonably classified as having the full-blown disorder of narcissism. But, I'm...

An interesting read.... I just finished the book titled "Uncommon Knowledge" written by Judy Lewis. She was the love child of Loretta Young and Clark Gable. The book was recommended in a list of books which portray a narcissistic parent an ACON email group I belong to. I ordered a used book from Amazon Marketplace. If you like biographical books about Hollywood stars, you'll probably like this one. There are many interesting characters that pop up throughout the narrative. The author is not whiny and doesn't seem to exaggerate. In fact, I got the feeling she underplays certain themes quite a bit. It feels like she gives her mother the benefit of the doubt more than she needs to. The crux of Judy's narrative is the secret of her conception and birth that carried on for decades. Judy was told that she was adopted. Somewhere along the way, she is not sure when, she understood that her mother was her biological parent. Then the only question in her mind was...

A few days after I had my first baby my mom gave me some motherly advice. It went like this, "There are going to be times when your baby is going to make you very angry. In fact, you're going to be so angry that you'll wish you could throw him into a wall. You'll be tired and overwhelmed and the baby will just push you to absolute frustration. Now, you won't act out on those feelings, but you'll feel horrible about yourself for having them. I'm letting you know ahead of time so you won't feel like you're an awful mother for having those urges. All mothers feel like this from time to time." I nodded and thanked her for the wisdom. (I was quite young and still very much under my mom's control.) Of course, now that I'm many years away from this and have much perspective, I understand that she was revealing much about herself and nothing about me. I never had the urge to kill my babies. Never once did I want to smash their heads into ...

A webpage recommendation I came across this webpage a few days ago and thought I would post it here for your benefit. The author has impressed me with their ability to describe the subtleties of the relationship between a narcissistic mother and her child(ren), and how her methods of control are myriad and many of them fly below the radar for onlookers. Only the child sees the look, hears the tone of her voice, understands the dire threat of punishment in a raised eyebrow.... See if this person has captured your narcissistic mom. Characteristics of Narcissistic Mothers UPDATE (10/28/09): The link above has gone dead. Here is a link to another site which has reproduced the content of the Geocities site. Click here

and is sucking the life out of you It is essential for narcissists to live parasitically off of our humanness in order to be able to present themselves to the world as something other than the alien life forms they are. They use normal people around them to prop up their pretense of normalcy. This is accomplished in a million different ways. Projection, devaluation of your virtues, blaming and shaming are a few of the tools which accomplish this. Projection: The narcissist wipes the crap of their own behaviors or motives onto you making it seem like you are something you are not. Somehow the act of projection gives the psychological cover the narcissist needs. It distances themselves from what they do, say or think by wiping the shit off of themselves onto you. Then they stand back, shake their heads and marvel at what a stinky, dirty mess up you are. It is not rational, but it is psychologically effective for them. It works even better when you start to believe this alternate ...

They come along and attach themselves to a living being and proceed to take all they want from that life while contributing nothing except disease and, potentially, death. This is what we recognize in the natural world as a parasite. Like the parasite, the narcissist attaches itself to its host. It has identified what it sees as a source of life, a source of narcissistic supply. If their parasitism manages to suck the life out of the host they will quickly attach to the next one. There is no expression of concern or feeling for the diseased or dead host they left behind. Narcissists...like a tapeworm or a malarial protozoan....feel no regret for this way of making a living. We should feel no regret if we choose to use pesticides to get rid of them.

A study on the concept of Nothing How incredibly informative it would be if people could truly understand that the opposite of love is not hatred but indifference. It would force them to recognize the pathological relationships they are stuck in that are destroying their lives in some way. Many ACONs struggle for so long with their narcissistic parents because we all have memories of some apparently benevolent acts. We look for "benevolent" acts in our history with the narcissist as a sign that they must love us "in their own way". We think that if they didn't love us then surely we'd know it because we think we would recognize the opposite of love. We think love's opposite is active hatred. I disagree. Not to say that our narcissistic parents don't display actively hateful behavior, by the way. They can and do. But we are perplexed by the times when they seem to be acting loving toward us. (The operant word here is acting .) So we come up with e...