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Written summary can be found at: Self-Knowledge Daily

The monsters inside us and how they get there. Why do targets stay with narcissistic abusers? Why do people stay in contact with abusive family members?

I aspire to write a short book on abuse and wanted to share a decent junk of what I've been working on so far. It abruptly stops because its not finished. (for feedback.) The Narcissist’s Tale Sifting Through the Wreckage of the Self The Narcissist’s early childhood was a desolate wasteland. Rife with abuse and neglect, not only was this landscape devoid of the necessary sustenance required for a robust personality to develop, such as unconditional acceptance and warm intimacy, it was actively hostile. This malnourishment leaves the child’s self in an irrevocably stunted, incomplete, and damaged state. The severity of this deep impact on the child’s psyche rivals that of a fatal flesh wound and thus leaves a lifelong legacy of inner pain and torment. With this existential agony being carried into adulthood, self medication becomes the fulcrum of the adult Narcissist’s life, with narcissistic supply being her drug of choice. Narcissistic supply, simply put, is any kind of attention that provides the narcissist with a feeling of power and self worth. This supply can take the form of compliments, fame, adulation, adoration or even fear. The way in which this is different from a healthy desire for praise is that the healthy individual’s self-esteem is self-sustained and thus only requires honest praise for guidance and support, while the Narcissist is dependent on it and will accept it indiscriminately. In essence, it is a futile, yet tragic attempt to compensate for the lack love and attention she received as a child: to soothe inner pain. This is the essence of addiction. Addictions in many ways have metaphorical significance and reveal a lot about early childhood experiences. To borrow from Gabor Mate’s incredible book, In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts, “When infants are anxious or upset, they are offered a human or a plastic nipple-in other words, a relationship with either a natural nurturing object or something that closely resembles it. That’s how emotional nourishment and oral feeding or soothing become closely associated in the mind. Children who continue to suck their thumbs past infancy are attempting to soothe themselves; it’s always a sign of emotional distress. Except in rare cases of physical disease, the more obese a person is, the more emotionally starved they have been at some crucial period in their life”. I would like to suggest that similarly, the more a person requires Narcissistic supply, the more starved they have been at some crucial period in their life. Again, to support the point further with Gabor Mate’s book, “The roots of sex addiction also reach back to childhood experience. Sex addiction authority Dr. Aviel Goodman points out that the vast majority of female sex addicts were sexually abused as children, as were up to 40 percent of the men.” Like the addict who desperately pierces a dirty needle through severely infected veins to meet her heroine quota, the Narcissist is not impartial to going through the most stomach turning of rituals to fill their void. By far the most contemptuous and vulgar forms of exploitation is when a Narcissist uses her children to achieve this end. Children, to this kind of person, are no different from any other source of supply, except in the sense that it is the parent child relationship wherein the greatest of all power disparities lie. Because of this, children are a frequent target of choice. The Narcissist is able to exercise more control over her children than over any other source of supply as well as experience the most benefits. As beautiful as the Narcissist styles her hair through the most expensive salons, as detailed as she can sculpt her body through rigorous exercise routines, or as high as she can climb up the corporate ladder, there’s always going to be someone who doesn’t provide her any recognition for these achievements or even notice at all, for that matter. Children, on the other hand, are always watching you, will always need you, will offer to dry your tears when you’re upset, will offer to rub your shoulders when you are tense, and will run merrily into your arms when you come home. To them you are omniscient, omnipotent, and infallible. Maybe it’s alone time and distance you want? No matter, children will eventually learn to place your needs above their own. They will drop everything, including their identity to be what you want and what you need. Anything to keep the bond between them and their caregiver vital. They learn compliance from the severe repercussions that inevitably result from open displays of individual preferences, anger, boredom, disobedience, or contradiction. These perceived threats to the Narcissist’s fragile ego are also known as narcissistic injury. These imaginary “slights” more often than not provoke what is often called “Narcissistic Rage.” While this insanely petty and immature form of acting out might seem senseless to the outside observer, remember, to the Narcissist you are a possession, not a person. It is during this blind fit a of fury that the Narcissist takes off the disguise of posturing, pretense, and coaxing and reveals her true form. This is the most honest moment she will ever have with her victims. If the injured party is an adult, it is during this vulnerable period of hysterical raging when the target is unintentionally provided a choice. Now that the truth has become unwound, now that the narcissist is exposed, now that the target cannot unsee such a blatant expression of hatred towards herself, she can make a decision based on reality. She can either choose to stay a host or flee from the danger. This is the risk that the abuser faces when opting to wield more overt tactics of control and domination: the source of the pain becomes visible. Deep down, nobody likes to be bullied. Bullying fosters resentment, rage, humiliation and hatred. This is bad for the Narcissist because she is dependent on her target for Narcissistic Supply. It is this supply that is the lifeline which provides the Narcissist a means to escape her own lifeless existence. Much like a heroine addict off being cut off from her drug, when a Narcissist is cut off from their source of supply, the outcome is very ugly. Being the master manipulator that the Narcissist is, she is fully aware of her dependence and is already one step ahead of her target. Anger is the immune system which serves to push back abusive people, much in the same way white antibodies fight off illness. This is why she must turn the target’s newfound certainty into confusion as well as diffuse the target’s outrage. How does she achieve this? Like a totalitarian regime that will double down on brutality and propaganda whenever their is rising dissent, the narcissist must double down her efforts to maintain power. The difference is that the Narcissist recognizes that direct control is costly and demands an exhaustive amount of time and energy. Her solution is brilliant. Rather than using brute force to make the target obey, she manipulates her target’s emotions. That way, the target bullies herself into submission. Remember, much like how a dog is considered property to a human, to an abuser you also are a kind of pet. And just as the dog owner trains the canine to react to various stimuli and respond to particular emotional cues through various forms of conditioning, so too does the abuser condition her target in this way. The longer this conditioning goes on the more susceptible to emotional manipulation the target will be. The ways in which the abuser manipulates emotions are varied and plentiful, so it takes a bit of fine-tuning to get optimum results. However, once the abuser finds the right concoction of mind control tactics, this potion will be potent enough to put the target under a binding psychological spell. One of the most common and effective forms of emotional manipulation that I’ve personally encountered is the manipulation of guilt. Emotional Manipulation: Guilt Eliciting guilt can be achieved in a variety of different ways, with the success of such attempts often relying on how seasoned the abuser is. Other factors come into play too, for the seasoned abuser understands that knowing the target can be just as valuable as knowing the craft. This is important since guilt is after all, to borrow Wiki’s definition, “ an experience that occurs when a person realizes orbelieves—accurately or not—that he or she has compromised his or her own standards of conduct or has violated a moralstandard, and bears significant responsibility for that violation.” Without some knowledge of what the target values, an abuser is at best left engaging in the embarrassing spectacle of blindly throwing anything against the wall with the desperate hope that something will stick. Sometimes the effect can be quite funny, as is the case with this "guilt trip fail" that I found on the internet. Customer: “Hey, you guys sell fish food and supplies, but do you have any fish?” Me: “No, sorry sir, we don’t sell pets.” Customer: “Where do they sell pets?” Me: “A pet store?” Customer: “Is there one of those near here?” Me: “Uhm, I really don’t know.” Customer: “Will you take me to it?” Me: “… no?” Customer: “Sam Walton would take me to it!” Me: “Sam Walton is dead.” It is for this reason that this common breed of toxic behavior is often found overpopulating the interactions of our most intimate relationships. The longer somebody is around you and the closer you are to the person then naturally, the more information a person has about you to blackmail. So, other than requiring knowledge of the target, how does the manipulator get the target to believe that he’s violated his own standards as well as being fully responsible for that violation.? As we saw with the disgruntled Sam Walton loving customer, you can’t just throw out the guilt-tripping phrases point-blank. Effective guilt tripping is a set-up that requires an elaborate “generosity” phase that is designed to build to the success of later accusations of selfishness. During the “generosity” phase the abuser might offer to buy food, drinks, lend money, clean your room, ect. What distinguishes this psuedo-generosity from real generosity is the underlying motive. True generosity is to give without any expectation of reciprocity. Yet, that doesn’t stop many of us from experiencing a strong desire to return the favor in some way or another. It is this moment wherein we reveal our values and as a result, that desire value becomes high-jacked and used against us in phrases like, “What do you mean you can’t give me a discount! I’ve been a paying customer for nearly a decade! ” Or, “You don’t want to go to your aunt’s birthday dinner? Remember all those times she’s been there for you? All the things she’s gotten you over the years? ” Let’s say we don’t have a strong desire to return the favor? No matter. Since most of us still don’t want to be seen as selfish, the guilt tripper will appeal to this desire instead. While accusations of selfishness were implied in the earlier examples, sometimes it can be very explicit. “You don’t want to help your mother with the grass? That’s really selfish” Abuser’s can become really creative and pile on layers of complexity to this trick. Sometimes the request for a favor is calculated in such a way as to be asked within a short period of time after the Abuser does something “altruistic”, like purchase an entire meal, the whole purpose of which being a ploy designed to lead into the eventual request. Let’s say you’re tired of receiving gifts that will inevitably be used against you and so you ask the guilt tripper to refrain from providing any favors, gifts, or help. In order to ensure that she has some kind of leverage over you, the abuser isn’t going to be willing to agree to this request. So, how does she respond? Well, since empathetic people have a strong desire to not hurt others, the abuser will most likely opt to exploit this desire with crocodile tears. “You mean do don’t care about what I’ve done for you? I...I just wanted to make you happy. You’re hurting me!”. Then the tears ensue. So, in this example you're given a guilt trip for not allowing ploys that are designed to set up guilt trips. It’s a no-win situation that wreaks havoc on the nervous system. Prolonged exposure to this kind of abuse transforms the healthy mechanism of guilt, which is designed to send tolerable internal cues to help one adjust his actions for the benefit of his own happiness, into a mechanism that signals for the adjustment of actions for the benefit of the abuser, to avoid punishment. The only way to win is to not play.