Anybody who has shared her life with a narcissistic becomes an expert in walking on eggshells. Living with a narcissist is like living with the enemy because we gradually become the container of his anger and his habit of diminishing others; as a result, our self-esteem is shattered. What does it mean to be a narcissist? Besides being grandiose and having a sense of entitlement, narcissists lack empathy and introspection, and consequently always find a way to blame others when things go wrong. It is true that narcissists are not born that way; they become narcissists thanks to the flawed parenting skills of their parents. Being born to a narcissist mother or father who does not try at any time to understand her baby’s needs and only thinks about her expectations has dreadful results. Regardless of how we analyze it, the narcissistic attachment is dysfunctional and has to do with manipulating the child in order to satisfy the needs of the parent. Unfortunately, once we develop a narcissistic personality it is very difficult to change it. That is why the majority of psychologists and psychotherapists avoid treating such cases. Those of you who read “Malignant Self Love: Narcissism Revisited” by Dr. Sam Vaknin
know what I am talking about. Nobody has ever described the narcissistic personality in such a clear and profound way. In the foreword Dr. Heilbrunn writes de following: “And if by any chance you get caught in my web, I can make your life a living hell. But remember this; I am in the web too. The difference between you and me is that you can get out.” At the beginning of this post, I said that when we live with a narcissist it is very difficult to be oneself. What I mean specifically is that the narcissist uses language to diminish his partners and transform them in codependent robots. To live in that atmosphere causes the partner to lose her self-esteem and to become a toy with no capacity to rebel. When Elena came to see me, I could guess immediately that she was living in a sort of private hell. I realized it after I saw the desperate look in her eyes and her lack of physical spontaneity. What she told me later confirmed it. She had married Alejandro 28 years ago when both were young, and they had emigrated to the United States looking for a better life. The wish to be successful and the amount of effort they had invested had helped them generate an excellent professional and financial situation. But success had not come alone; it came together with severe pathologies in the case of the husband. Alejandro had been raised by a narcissistic mother who had become a widow at a young age and who had always treated him as an extension of herself. As a result, the boy himself had started to develop a narcissistic personality which flourished as soon as he became a successful lawyer. From that moment on the marriage began to fall apart. According to Elena not a day went by without an argument between them. I asked her to describe one of those arguments so that I could better understand her situation, and this is what she told me: “When I found out that my husband had cheated on me, I was unable to leave him but I became very suspicious about his comings and goings. One day his cellular phone bill arrived by regular mail and I could not resist the desire to open it to check his calls. With deep sorrow I realized that despite having promised me that he would not contact his lover again, he was calling her every day. When he came home that evening, I confronted him with his lies, but when he asked me how I had found out I lied and told him that the bill had been sent to me by email. Right there and then he called the telephone company to complain about the fact that they had sent the bill to the wrong person. When they told him that the company never sent bills by email, my husband started accusing me of being a liar and of opening his mail. I felt scared and had to stop arguing. As a result, I ended up being the villain.” Elena had fallen into the trap and had given her husband the control of the situation. The crux of the matter was not really about her having opened a telephone bill but about him cheating and lying. Thanks to his clever manipulation of language, Alejandro was able to turn the situation around to make Elena feel guilty. The lack of self-esteem that came about after years of emotional abuse prevented her from realizing that he was the guilty one. As a result, she became a victim of his manipulation and lost the battle once again.
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