I understand narcissists. I used to be one.
It started during my teenage years, but thankfully, it didn’t last long. My parents both caused (and screamed me out) my narcissism.
Want to know what caused me to stop? I wrote a letter to my grandiosely narcissistic father and covertly narcissistic mother.
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As a child, I felt loved for what I did but not for who I authentically was. You worked hard to remove who I authentically was, replacing it with a downloaded copy of yourselves. Growing up was never about self-discovery but brainwashing, indoctrination, and performing well. Thus, my self-esteem in myself as a child was very low.
Because of this, parental correction and discipline were excruciatingly painful. It brought on full narcissistic collapse: the feeling that you’re less than nothing, don’t deserve life and are the lowest human on Earth.
I felt worth less than sh*t and had no basis for making eye contact with another human, let alone standing up to them. I spent many hours curled up in the fetal position, sobbing.
The envy I felt toward other normal teens was horrific. I hated them for being more confident, prettier, opinionated, happy, and healthy. I hated and envied them for what I didn’t have.
But I didn’t hurt anyone because I didn’t want anyone to endure my pain. Committing narcissistic abuse is a choice. I chose not to abuse. It’s wrong. And my empathy and sympathy for others run deep. I didn’t want anyone to endure at my hands what I endured at my parents’ hands.
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I suspect this is how you, Dad, felt about yourself and what triggered your blackout rages, followed by hours of lying in your darkened room, experiencing narcissistic collapse.
Was I “defensive” as a child? Absolutely! I was fighting for my life, to be OK and not collapse. And it was odd. Whenever I started to cobble together some vanity and feel OK about myself, you destroyed me again. It was as if you sensed I was starting to feel better about myself and wanted to take that “prideful” girl down a notch. Again and again and again.
I was not prideful. I was vain, and that’s something entirely different. It’s called “False Ego.”
But you never understood that. Remember how I tried to explain to you that Grandma was vain, not confident? Oh, how she bamboozled you!
Pride has a valid basis. C.S. Lewis came close to describing it in The Screwtape Letters when he said, “[God] wants to bring the man to a state of mind in which he could design the best cathedral in the world, and know it to be the best and rejoice in the fact, without being any more (or less) or otherwise glad at having done it than he would be if it had been done by another.”
That is true self-esteem and pride: Healthy, accurate, and truthful.
Vanity is like the vanity cakes Ma Ingalls made — fluffy on the outside but nothing on the inside. No self-esteem. Every narcissist develops the Narcissistic Supply and False Self to survive and function in this world, work with others, and make a living.
A healthy person has self-esteem and can thus afford to be humble because admitting a flaw does not destroy them. They know they can afford to be wrong because they know they’re OK.
As always, C.S. Lewis said it best in The Screwtape Letters:
“You must, therefore, conceal the true end of humility from the patient. Let him think of it not as self-forgetfulness but as a certain kind of opinion (namely, a low opinion) of his talents and character. Some talents, I gather, he has.
Fix in his mind the idea that humility consists of trying to believe those talents to be less valuable than he believes them to be. No doubt they are, in fact, less valuable than he believes, but that’s not the point.
The great thing is to make him value an opinion for some quality other than the truth, thus introducing an element of dishonesty and make-believe into the heart of what otherwise threatens to become a virtue. By this method, thousands of humans have been brought to think that humility means pretty women trying to believe they are ugly and clever men trying to believe they are fools. And since what they’re trying to believe may, in some cases, be manifest nonsense, they cannot succeed in believing it, and we have the chance of keeping their minds endlessly revolving on themselves to achieve the impossible.”
But in the end, dear parents, you also screamed me out of my narcissism. And I thank you for that. I learned that the best way to mitigate the drama was to…grovel. To show you, Mom, the empathy Grandma always denied you because you were assigned the role of scapegoat.
“Oh, I’m so, so sorry.” I could turn on the tears on a dime; that helped. After all, you always screamed at me until I cried. So, if I cried right at the beginning, there would be less drama.
Somehow, I learned how to live without much self-esteem. I couldn’t stand up to anyone, and I couldn’t handle professional criticism. But I can drag myself out into the world, day after day, always late, always afraid of it, always feeling like a piece of shit and the lowest form of life on the planet, avoiding eye contact, without resorting to narcissism to cope.
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But a funny thing happened when I got married. Naturally, I thought you had handed over your job of constantly criticizing me for “keeping it straight” to my husband.
