The narcissist regards his input as a contractual maintenance chore and the unpleasant and inevitable price that he has to pay for his narcissistic supply. He resents the fact that he has to pay this price.
After many years of feeling deprived, feeling wrong, discriminated against, feeling at the receiving end of injustice, some narcissist laps into sadistic generosity, or what I call sadistic altruism. They use their giving. They use their charity as a weapon to taunt and torment the needy, to humiliate them, to chastise them, to demean and debase them. This is very common in religious settings, where you have a sadistic clergyman or a sadistic preacher or priest or whatever. And they use the bully pulpit to kind of torment and torture their community or specific members of the community.
In the distorted thinking of the narcissist, donating money gives him the right, gives him the license to hurt people, to criticize them, to berate the recipients.
He, the narcissist feels that his generosity, his charity, elevate him to a higher moral ground and give him the right to preach and to hector and to dictate and to set rules.
Most narcissists, and by the way, this is also true if the giving is not direct. A narcissist can say, for example, all my life I had been sacrificing, now you owe me, or all my life I had been giving to others, now you owe me. It’s like there is this universal global lifelong ledger and the narcissist expects you to pay the price for every good deed that he had done and whose beneficiaries were other people. So be very, very wary, very cautious and very afraid of people who tell you how to live, people who create a system of rules or a system of dictates or guidelines on what’s the proper way to live. Because these people are usually, they usually have a victim mentality, a victim stance. They feel that life owes them and now they are going to extract from life and extricate from life and milk life and squeeze life until life gives them back what life owes them.
They’ve gone through a lot, they’ve suffered a lot, they’ve sacrificed immeasurably and now they are entitled, they deserve and they’re going to be aggressive about it.
Most narcissists confine their giving to money and material goods. Their munificence is an abusive defense mechanism intended to avoid real intimacy. So you would have the, you would have the spouse who gives his wife or his husband, never mind, money and that’s it. Like I’ve given you money, what else do you want? What? I gave you money, you also want intimacy? You’re glutton, you know, it’s like I’m buying your absence with my money. Go take the money, go shop, go do whatever you want. Leave me alone.
Their big hearted charity renders all their relationships, even with their spouses, even with their children. Business-like, structured, limited, minimum, accounting type, non-emotional, unambiguous and non-ambivalent. The relationships with narcissists, a relationship with a narcissist is always called, always calculated, always schematic and always by a ledger. I did this for you yesterday and now you owe me. I did this for you two years ago, now you owe me. I’ve invested in you 10 years, now you owe me. I allowed you to become a medical doctor, now you owe me. By doling out bountifully, the narcissist knows where he stands. His giving is an entry in the ledger and his accounting, double entry mind always calculates. So giving allows him to position himself in the ledger. He sees the discrepancies, he can calculate them, he knows what he’s owed, he knows where he stands, he doesn’t feel threatened by demands of commitment, emotional investment, empathy, intimacy.
In the narcissist’s wasteland of a life, even his benevolence is spiteful, sadistic, punitive and distancing.
There’s a proverb of the Inuit in Greenland, by gifts one makes slaves, by gifts one makes slaves and by whips one makes dogs. Wonderful thing.
And there is a book called Debt: The First 5,000 Years. It was written by the late David Grubers, it was published by, in 2011.
And there’s an interview there with an Inuit hunter. And the Inuit hunter says, up in our country, we are human. And since we are human, we help each other. We don’t like to hear anybody say, thank you for that. What I get today, you may get tomorrow.
There are two types of narcissists, stingy and min, or compulsive givers. Most narcissists feel abused and exploited when they have to pay money in order to satisfy the needs and wishes of their nearest and dearest.
The vast majority of narcissists are actually stingy. Even when they spend money, they spend it their way on their priorities, on their preferences and wishes. And according to their view of the future, their narrative, their construct, they’re going to lavish money on you, but the wrong kind of money and they’re going to buy you things you don’t want and send you to places you don’t wish to be in and so forth to study when you don’t want to study.
But it’s always their way. You may be the recipient of a lot of money and a lot of lodges, but it’s going to be their way.
Compulsive givers. To all appearances, the compulsive giver is an altruistic, empathic and caring person.
People look from the outside, they say, wow, he gives her so much. Actually, he or she, the narcissist, is a people pleaser and a codependent. A compulsive giver is trapped in a narrative of his own confirmation, how his nearest and dearest need him. They need him because they’re poor or they’re young or they’re inexperienced or they’re lacking in intelligence or they’re ugly or they’re otherwise inferior to him. Inferior, that’s the key. He wants to feel superior by giving.
Compulsive giving, therefore, involves pathological narcissism because it involves the reassertion or assertion of superiority. It buttresses, it underlies grandiosity. The ostentatious magnificence and largess of codependent compulsive givers is intended to secure the presence and attachment of their loved ones.
They drive people, they pay people to be next to them, to be near them, to be with them. They don’t believe they’re such low self-esteem and such a lay by a sense of self-worth. They can’t believe that people would want to be with them except if they pay them, except if they endow them with something, with money.
This is their way of fending off looming and in their mind inevitable abandonment.
By giving inexorably, these people aim to foster in the recipient a kind of addictive habit and to prevent the recipients from leaving them. In reality, it is a compulsive giver who is actually aggressive. He coerces, he cajoles, he tempts people, he seduces people around him to avail themselves of his services or money. He forces himself on the recipients of this ostentatious giving.
Many of the beneficiaries of his generosity or magnanimity don’t want it, but he kind of coerces them. He insists, he’s persistent, he makes a nuisance of himself, he’s unable to deny anyone their wishes or requests, but sometimes he dictates to them that they should have wishes and requests, even when these are not explicit or expressed, even when these wishes and requests are figments of his own imagination, his own neediness and grandiosity.
Inauditably, this kind of person, this compulsive narcissistic compulsive giver, he develops some realistic expectations. He feels that people should be immensely grateful to him and that their gratitude should translate into a kind of obsequiousness, obeisance, that they should be subservient and subjugated to him because he’s giving.
You know, you won’t come across such people, the boss, the giving boss, the giving mother, the giving father.
The only condition is that you behave with humility, that you subjugate yourself, that you prostrate yourself, that you kowtow, that you kneel in front of them, that you genoflect. Internally, compulsive giver sees, sees and rages against the lack of reciprocity that he perceives in his relationships with family, with friends, with colleagues.
He says, I’m giving so much, I’m receiving nothing. They are so ungrateful.
He immediately castigates everyone around him for being so ungenerous. So the compulsive giver giving is perceived as sacrifice, taking his exploitation.
When they take from him, they’re exploiting him. And so he gives without grace, always with visible strings attached, always with a sour face, always grimacing.
No wonder the compulsive giver is always frustrated and often aggressive and given a wide berth.
In psychological jargon, we would say that the compulsive giver has alloplastic defenses with an external locus of control.
This simply means that the compulsive giver relies on input from people around him to regulate his fluctuating sense of self-worth, his precarious self-esteem, his ever shifting moods.
It also means that he blames the world for his failures. He feels imprisoned in a hostile and mystified universe, entirely unable to influence events, circumstances and outcomes.
It’s the plaything of people and occurrences.
And so the compulsive giver avoids assuming responsibility for the consequences of his actions. And yet it is important to realize that the compulsive giver cherishes, relishes his self-conferred victimhood.
He nurtures his grudges by maintaining a meticulous accounting of everything he had given and had received.
Empath, should I whisper, empaths.
This mental operation of masochistic bookkeeping is the background process of which a compulsive giver is sometimes unaware. But he is likely to vehemently deny such meanness and narrow-mindedness.
I, no way, I am big hearted. I’m golden hearted. I never keep accounts. Compulsive giver is an artist of projective identification.
He manipulates people around him into behaving exactly the way he expects them and wants them to. He keeps lying to people. He keeps telling them the act of giving is the only reward that he seeks. Giving is its own reward, such people say. I don’t want anything more than that. I don’t even want your gratitude. Giving to you is my satisfaction, my gratification.
And all the while, that’s a lie, of course. All the while, the compulsive giver secretly yearns for gratitude and reciprocity.
He rejects any attempt to rob him of his sacrificial victim status. He will not accept gifts or money or help or advice or tips or succor.
And he avoids being the recipient or beneficiary of compliments or anything positive. And this false asceticism, withholding fake modesty, pseudo humility, their baits, don’t fall for them. It’s a show. It’s not real.
He uses these things to prove to himself that his nearest and dearest are nasty ingrates. It’s his way of setting you up for failure. It’s his way of testing you and making sure that you fail the test.
Had they wanted to give me a present, had they wanted to help me, they would have insisted.
The compulsive giver bellows triumphantly. His worst fears and suspicions yet again confirmed. He’s happy. He’s happy because he cast you in the role of rogues, of takers, of exploiters, of nasty mean characters.
And by comparison, in contrast, makes him look good.
And gradually people fall into line.
They begin to feel that they are the ones, they are the ones who are doing the compulsive giver a favor by succumbing to his endless and of a winning charity.
When youthe recipients of the compulsive giver, the son with his father, the daughter with her mother, the employee with his boss, all of them compulsive givers, they will tell you what can we do. They would sign.
It means so much to him. It means so much to her. And she or he has put so much effort into it. I just couldn’t say no.
The roles are reversed and then everyone is happy. The beneficiaries benefit and the compulsive giver goes on feeling that the world is unjust and that people are self-centered exploiters. As he has always suspected, everyone falls into place.
It’s a classic, classic, projective identification scenario.
And the narcissist has a very peculiar relationship with money. When the narcissist has money, he can exercise his sadistic urges freely and with little fear of repercussions. Money shields the narcissist from life itself, from the outcomes and consequences of misconduct, misdeeds and misbehavior. It insulates him. It’s a warm and safe womb or cocoon like a benevolent blanket, like a mother’s goodnight kiss.
Money is love substitute. We know it in psychology. Money is undoubtedly a love substitute and it allows the narcissist to be his ugly, corrupt and dilapidated self with impunity. Money bites the narcissist’s absolution.
You know, in the middle ages, there was something called indulgences. You paid money to the Catholic church and they gave you a piece of paper saying all your sins are forgotten when you go to heaven. That’s money for the narcissist. It buys him absolution and his egustin tonic, friendship, forgiveness and acceptance.
With money in the bank, the narcissist feels at ease with himself, free, arrogantly soaring supreme about the contemptible, unwashed masses. With money lining his pockets, the narcissist can always find people poorer than him.
A cause for great elation coupled with ostentatious disdain and bumptiousness on his part.
Narcissists hate weak people. They detest the poor and they want to trample on them and crush them and see them dead and money gives them this power.
The narcissist rarely uses money to buy, corrupt and intimidate outright. He is more subtle than that, but he uses money to humiliate, to put people in the right place, to take them down a peg or a notch.
Contrary to common stereotype, the narcissist’s avarice, his greediness seldom devolves into conspicuous consumption. Actually, in my survey of narcissists, close to 1,900 people diagnosed with narcissistic personality disorder in a database that I had constructed over 25 years and I founded, many narcissists. They wear 15-year-old tattered clothing. They have no car, no house, no property.
And it’s so even when the narcissist can afford better, when he has money, money has little to do with the narcissist’s actual physical needs or even with his social interactions.
It’s true that the narcissist leverages, looker, leverages money to acquire status or to impress others, but most narcissists conceal the true extent of their wealth. They hoard the money, they accumulate it. And like the measures that they are at heart, like the stingy characters they are, they count the money daily and in the dark.
Money is the narcissist’s implicit license, background noise, background enabler.
So it’s a license to sin, a license to abuse, it’s his permit, it’s his promise, it’s his fulfillment all at once. Money unleashes the beast in the narcissist with abandon, encourages him, seduces him to be himself.
This obnoxious, mean, nasty, vulgar, very often aggressive and violent person.
Narcissists are not necessarily tight-fisted though. Many narcissists spend money on restaurants and trips abroad and books and health products.
Some narcissists buy gifts, though reluctantly and as a maintenance chore.
Narcissist is addictively gamble, they speculate in the stock exchange, let’s say, they lose fortunes. Narcissist is insatiable, always once more, always loses the little that he has.
But he does all this not for the love of money, for he does not use money to gratify himself or to cater to his own needs.
No, he does all this, he doesn’t crave money, he doesn’t care for money. He wants power, money gives him power, bestows power on him that matters.
The legitimacy to dare, to flare, to conquer, to oppose, to resist, to tone, to defy, to torment, this is what money gives him.
So narcissist is stingy with others.
Maybe sometimes he’s not stingy with himself, maybe sometimes he’s not tight-handed or tight-fisted with other people.
But all this money he spends on himself, money he spends on others, all this is within a narrative of empowerment, a storyline of superiority, a script of dominance, suppression, content, humiliation, subjugation, money equals sadism.
In all these relationships, the narcissist is either the vanquished or the vanquisher. Either the haughty master or an abject slave. Either the dominant or the recessive.
The narcissist interacts along an up-down axis rather than along left-right axis.
His world is not lateral, not horizontal, it’s vertical. His world is rigidly hierarchical and abusively stratified.
And that’s why narcissists find it very difficult to network.
And when they do network, it’s with a power asymmetry.
When the narcissist is submissive, he’s contemptibly submissive, he’s a doormat.
And these are the covert narcissists.
When he’s domineering, he’s distinctively domineering. His life is a dedication, a symphony of sadistically taunting, tantalizing, humiliating and frustrating other people.
And he pendulates, he swims between oppressor and oppressed.