My name is Sam Vaknin, and I am the author of Malignant Self-Love, Narcissism Revisited.
So you have been abused, maltreated, harassed and stalked. You feel that you fell prey to a narcissist or a psychopath.
But you must move on from victim to survivor. No one will do it for you. No one can do it for you. Not your therapist, not your best friend, not your nearest family.
Only you can choose survivor over victimhood.
There are a few steps to this.
The first one is abandon the narcissist.
The narcissist initiates his own abandonment because of his fear of it. He is so terrified of losing his sources of supply and of being emotionally hurt that he would rather control, master or direct the potentially destabilizing situation by causing, precipitating and engendering his own abandonment.
Remember, the personality of the narcissist has a low level of organization. It’s chaotic. It is precariously balanced.
Being abandoned could cause a narcissistic injury so grave that the whole edifice of the narcissist can come crumbling down.
Narcissists usually entertain suicidal ideation in such cases.
But if the narcissist had initiated and directed his own abandonment, if it is perceived by him as a goal that he had set to himself, he can and does avoid all these untoward consequences.
The next one is moving on.
To preserve one’s mental health, one must abandon the narcissist.
I have said that, but one must also move on.
Moving on is a process, not a decision, nor is it an event.
First, one has to acknowledge and accept painful reality. Such acceptance is a volcanic, shattering, agonizing series of nibbling thoughts and stronger intrusive resistances.
Once the battle is won and fresh and harsh and agonizing realities have been assimilated, one can move on to the learning phase.
What is a learning phase?
We label. We label everything around us and everyone around us. We educate ourselves. We compare experiences. We digest. We have insights.
Then we decide, and then we act.
And this is what it means to move on.
Having gathered sufficient emotional sustenance, knowledge, supportand confidence, we face the battlefields of our relationships fortified and nurtured.
This stage characterizes those who do not mourn, but fight, do not grieve, but replenish their self-esteem, do not hide, but seek, do not freeze, but move on, move on.
This is your motto. This is your mantra. This is the key word.
But of course, abandoning anyone and especially the narcissist.
Horses want to go through a phase of grieving or mourning, having been betrayed, having been abused.
Inevitably, we grieve. We grieve for the image we had of the traitor and the abuser, the image that was so fleeting and so wrong.
We mourn the damage that he did to us.
We experience the fear of never being able to love or to trust again.
And we grieve this loss of innocence.
In one stroke, we had lost someone we had trusted, and even love.
We had lost our trusting and loving selves, and we had lost the trust and love that we had felt.
And anything the worse?
The emotional process of grieving has many phases.
First, we are dumbfounded, shocked, inert, immobile. We play dead to avoid our inner monsters.
We are ossified in our pain, cast in the mold of our reticence and fears.
Then we feel enraged, indignant, rebellious, and hateful.
And then we accept.
And then we cry.
And then some of us learn to forgive and to pity.
And this is what we call healing.
All stages are absolutely necessary and good for you.
It is bad not to rage back, not to shame those who had shamed us, to deny, to tend, to evade.
But it is equally bad to get fixated on our rage.
Perpetual grieving is a perpetuation of our abuse by other needs.
By endlessly recreating our harrowing experiences, we unwillingly collaborate with our abusers to perpetuate their evil deeds.
It is by moving on that we defeat our abuser, minimizing him and his importance in our lives.
It is by loving and by trusting anew that we are known, that which was done to us.
To forgive is never to forget, but to remember is not necessarily to re-experience.
Forgiving is an important capability. It does more for the forgiver than for the forgiven.
But it should not be a universal, indiscriminate behavior. It is absolutely legitimate to not forgive sometimes.
It depends, of course, on the severity or duration of what had been done to you.
In general, it is unwise and counterproductive to apply to life universal and immutable principles.
Life is too chaotic to succumb to rigid edicts and rules. Sentences which start with I never or I always are not very credible or clever, and they often lead to self-defeating, self-restricting and even self-destructive behaviors.
Conflicts are an important and integral part of life.
One should never seek them out, but when confronted with a conflict, one should not avoid it.
It is through conflicts and through adversity as much as through care and love that we grow.
Human relationships are dynamic. We must assess our friendships, partnerships, even our marriages periodically.
In and by itself, a common past is insufficient to sustain a healthy, nourishing, supportive, caring and compassionate relationship.
Common memories are a necessary but not a sufficient condition.
We must gain and regain our friendships, our love, our relationships on a daily basis.
Human relationships are a constant test for religions and empathy.
But can you remain friends with the narcissists? Can’t you act civilized and remain on friendly terms with your narcissistic acts?
Well, never forget that narcissists, at least the full-fledged are nice and friendly only when they want something from you.
Narcissistic supply, help, support, votes, money or sex.
They prepare the ground, manipulate you and then come out with a small favor they need or ask you blatantly and surreptitiously for narcissistic supply.
Sentences such as, what did you think about my performance or do you think that I really deserve the normal price?
Narcissists are nice and friendly only when they feel threatened and they want to neutral the threat by smothering it with oozing pleasantries.
Narcissists are nice and friendly when they have just been infused with an overdose of narcissistic supply and they feel magnanimous and they feel magnificent and ideal and perfect.
To show magnanimity is a way of flaunting one’s impeccable divine credentials.
It is an act of grandiosity. It is an act of humiliating giving.
You are an irrelevant prop in this spectacle.
A mere receptacle of the narcissist overflowing, self-contented of an infatuation with his false self.
But all these beneficence is transient.
The narcissist victims often tend to thank the narcissist for little graces.
And this is the Stockholm Syndrome.
Hostages tend to emotionally identify with their captors rather than with their beliefs.
We are grateful to our abusers and tormentors for seizing, even for a moment, their hideous activities and for allowing us to catch our breath before the next blow descends.
Some people say that they prefer to live with narcissists, to cater to their needs and to succumb to their whims because this is the way they had been conditioned in early childhood.
It is only with narcissists that such people feel alive, stimulated and excited. The world glows in technicolor 3D in the presence of a narcissist and decays into sepia colors in the absence of a narcissist.
I see nothing inherently wrong with such an approach.
The test is this. If someone were to constantly humiliate and abuse you, verbally, using archaic Chinese, would you have felt humiliated and abused?
Probably not. You don’t understand archaic Chinese. He can’t get to you.
Some people have been conditioned by the narcissistic primary objects in their lives, parents, caregivers, to treat narcissistic abuse as if it were uttered in archaic Chinese to turn a deaf ear.
This technique is effective in that it allows the inverted narcissists, the codependent narcissists, the covert narcissists, the narcissists willing to mate, to experience only the good aspects of living with a narcissist and ignore the bad ones.
It’s the narcissist’s sparkling intelligence, the constant drama and excitement, the lack of intimacy and emotional attachment which some people prefer.
Every now and then the narcissist breaks into abuse in archaic Chinese.
So what? Who understands archaic Chinese anyway?
Says the inverted narcissist to herself.
And she survives.
Even so, I have one begging question. If the relationship with the narcissist is so rewarding, why are inverted narcissists so usually unhappy, so egodystonyic and comfortable with who they are and what they do?
So in need of help, professional or otherwise. Aren’t they victims who simply experience the stop-home syndrome, identifying with their kidnapper rather than with the police? Aren’t they victims who deny their own torment? Aren’t they victims who fail to make the transition to survivors? Don’t fall into this trap. Move on.
