Relationships with narcissists: Sisyphean Undertakings

Is it possible to have a reasonably satisfactory, wholesome and authentic relationship with a narcissist? This is a question I have frequently asked myself. I keep arriving at the same answer: probably not. 'Narcissism' is the antithesis of 'wholesome' and 'authentic'. It represents everything that should be the antithesis of 'relationship'.

But - whether we can tolerate or even enjoy a relationship with one depends what we need and expect from a relationship, and on how severely narcissistic they are.

To put it simply: the more narcissistic traits a person has, the more Sisyphean the task of maintaining a relationship with that person. I am going to go out on a limb here and state that it is IMPOSSIBLE to have a fulfilling, honest and happy relationship with someone who has full-blown NPD. Even those of us who are obstinately optimistic masochists (as I tend to be) will soon end up feeling exhausted, demented and depressed. It is simply NOT WORTH IT.

A relationship SHOULD be based on mutual respect, consideration and appreciation (indeed these are the very things most of us consider to be the bare essentials). Problem is, narcissists don't "do" reciprocity. They take, and take, and take. And then they'll take some more. On the rare occasions they 'give', it is done begrudgingly and with a hidden agenda; they will make it seem like it's such a monumental sacrifice for them that your gratitude will be overwhelming, or rather, their expectation of your inordinate gratitude will be overwhelming. They are insensitive or unsympathetic to your feelings, even if they put on a convincing show of the opposite. If you are feeling proud of yourself for some reason, or simply content and at peace, they will attempt to outshine you or bring you down, either flagrantly or covertly. If you are feeling sad and in need of moral support, they will harangue you with their petulant "what about me and my feelings?!" complaints, or will find another way to make you feel even worse. (An example of this is when my dad died. My sister was naturally crying her heart out over it, and rather than extend genuine heartfelt sympathy and perhaps even a little bit of maternal affection (!?) to her bereaved daughter, my mother harrumphed "Well, I knew him longer than you did".)

As I concluded in my blog post Should we think of NPD as a mental illness?, narcissists suffer from what is, essentially, an emotional disability. Is that 'disability' due to an actual lack of ability (to connect with people; to love) or a more unsettling and unbridgeable unwillingness? In other words, can they help being the way they are - or not? I'm aware I've asked that question already, more than once. I just keep coming back to it.  It's because, for me, although the answer might not bring me any closer to understanding NPD, I would rather think of my mother as being sick than being evil. I cannot bear to think of her as evil, although that conclusion does appear to be as legitimate and plausible as the 'sickness' explanation. (See The Narcissist: an emotionless facsimile.)

At least a snake never thinks to pretend to be anything else

Quite.

Of course it is possible to LOVE a narcissist - or at least to love the person they have convinced you they are - the persona, or the person you have romanticised in your mind (through their various manipulations). But a narcissist's 'love' for another person comes with so many conditions and caveats, it can scarcely be thought of as real and proper love at all. (See my blog post: Is a narcissist capable of love?)

Embarking on a romantic/sexual relationship with a narcissist is, of course, quite different to being raised by a narcissistic parent - but the head-fuckery of it all is pretty much the same. They murder souls; they drain the life-force out of their victims, bit by bit. Some people remain married to (and all the while passionately in love with) a narcissist for many years, sometimes even decades. Some narcissists are more skilled, calculating and conniving than others. The stealthiest covert narcissists can dupe hundreds of people over their lifetime (or in the extreme cases of megalomaniacs like Hitler and Trump, millions). While some bide their time, others reveal their true colours within just days or weeks of meeting their target/s. But some of them can act human, even super-human ('too good to be true', 'a perfect soulmate'), for inordinate stretches of time. The illusion, the mirage, is so powerful that it can inveigle and entrap anyone. And it is important to remember this: many narcissists fool themselves at least as much as they fool everyone else. "The most dangerous liars are those who think they are telling the truth."

I made my 'No Contact' decision when I had realised and accepted all of the following fundamental truths, in order:
1. I love my mother, and nothing will ever change that. BUT...
2. She doesn't love me, and will never love me in the way I need(ed) her to love me.
3. She will never acknowledge or apologise for the pain and suffering she has caused me, my sisters and my dad.
4. She will always find a way to blame me (and/or others) for everything.
5. She has at least one serious personality disorder and at least one co-morbid mental illness, which will never be officially diagnosed because she is both 'high-functioning' and a seasoned deceiver (not just a deceiver of other people but above all of herself). Thus, a close and meaningful relationship with her is rendered utterly impossible.
6. She will not change. There is no cure. There is no hope.
7. Her hatred and contempt for me is a reflection of her, not of me.
8. Therefore: Leaving her alone is the kindest thing I can do for her, and for me.

Resources and further reading:

1. Traits of healthy relationships, and what is a 'high conflict' relationship? http://www.bpdcentral.com/blog/?Can-borderlines-and-narcissists-have-healthy-relationships-31

2. The Happy Sensitive: Narcissistic Love Versus Unconditional Love
http://thehappysensitive.com/narcissistic-love-versus-unconditional-love/
This extract in particular is devastatingly true: Some people believe that sending/giving unconditional love will help, but here’s the thing: narcissists don’t want unconditional love. Unconditional love requires openness and honesty. It requires facing fears, feeling difficult emotions and being open to change. In the narcissist’s mind, these are all awful things that are to be avoided at all costs.

Projection: whatever you say I am, that's what you are

Trying to make a narcissist see the error of their ways is an intensely infuriating, pointless and ultimately ineffably self-defeating exercise. Every caring suggestion, accurate observation, justified accusation or constructive criticism either bounces straight off them or is met with seething, formidable anger and defiance. Typically, a narcissist will also do one of two things: project (blame-shift) or deflect (avoid the issue/change the subject).

Example: I confronted my mother (just once, in my twenties) about the fact she used to hit my sister and me. She did this frequently, and sometimes severe enough to make marks on our skin. Firstly, she minimised the physical violence ("it was just discipline; lots of parents smack their children; my mother smacked me, too"), then the blame was projected ("you were such difficult children; I was under so much stress after your father left... I was on my own, living with two rebellious teenage girls!")
Note: we were not difficult. We were not rebellious. And as I have said before, even if we had been, would that justify how she treated us? Even she knows the answer to that.

Narcissistic rage is a common reaction if the narcissist feels threatened, cornered or attacked - or even just simply irritated to the point of lashing out. (I was extremely good at irritating her. Usually I didn't even have to do or say anything to irritate her - my existence alone was enough to provoke her.) My mother's worst rages only ever took place behind closed doors, so whenever I have described her to others as violent, terrifying and volatile, her 'friends' assume that I am the one with a screw loose. To them, she's a diminutive, kind, spiritual old lady who goes out of her way to spread 'love, light and healing' to the deserving people of the world. (This is her 'brand', and yes, as you might imagine, it sickens me to my very core. And no, I am not, and have never been, one of those 'deserving people'. She has instead vomited out all her 'hatred, darkness and suffering' onto me and my sisters, so most of my enduring memories are thus of a person who is the exact polar opposite of the one my mother pretends to be.)

So, this leaves me, and every other narcissistic abuse victim, with a bit of a dilemma. When the person abusing us is going great guns with a smear campaign (trying - and all too often succeeding - to convince everyone that we, the victims, are actually the bad guys), how do we rise above that? How can I prove that I am not the narcissist, that I am not the toxic one, the psycho, the abuser? How can I prove that I am telling the truth?

The simple answer is: I can't. And merely by reacting with (natural) outrage and hurt to my mother's innumerable cruelties and lies - the wholly understandable act of attempting to defend myself - I risk showing myself up as unstable, unreasonable, maladjusted, crazy. I show myself up as everything she claims I am. Therefore, I have made the decision to not defend myself. Why should I bother? There's no point. I know my mother's game. I know the things she does, and I know the things she says, and the insincere, pseudo-maternal way in which she says them. I know the credulous people who uphold her heinous lies as gospel truth.

These people admire her. These people admire someone who I KNOW is a liar, a hypocrite and a child abuser.

So, I know that none of them really know her; certainly none of them has a clue what deliberate, sadistic psychological torture she has inflicted on her daughters while unashamedly parading herself as some kind of model mother.

And I now know what motivates her, and even more importantly, I know what terrifies her. This means I finally have the power, I am no longer the weak, eager-to-please, viciously exploited, downtrodden daughter, and this is why I know, with absolute certainty, that I will never hear from her again. She has no hold over me any more. None. She does not want what she can no longer control. She has no use for me any more. Sadly, I was only ever a 'thing' to her, a thing to be used and abused. Never a person, a human being, someone to relate to and connect with, much less a daughter to be loved and cherished. Perhaps that is the most tragic aspect of the NPD mother: the impossibility of perceiving your child as a human being... an awesome, loveable, unique human being.

What an incalculably massive loss for her. For both of us.

Can NPD be treated or cured?

I've not posted anything for several weeks, and that's because I had almost finished a particularly brilliant and detailed post (even if I do say so myself), which I'd spent many hours researching, only for it to mysteriously disappear (even despite frequently 'saving' it) just before I was ready to publish it. So that set me back a bit.

One of the most important questions, for me, is whether or not NPD can be cured or at least improved. (This relates to a blog post I will publish shortly, about whether it is possible to have a meaningful relationship with a narcissist, or with any toxic person: I think it is, but only if they learn to moderate the way they behave - and that is a monumentally huge 'if'.)

Like all of us, my mother had (has) 'good' days and 'bad' days. Likewise, my schizophrenic half-sister Elle had 'good' days and 'bad' days (by which I mean, sometimes she would appear to be a regular, sane person). My alcoholic father was agreeable company (even irresistibly effervescent company) 99% of the time, even when he was extremely drunk. Sometimes especially when he was drunk...

We are not defined or limited by our afflictions, vices and illnesses - so while I might be accurately described as an anxious, dithering diabetic, I don't consider that to be an entirely fair and rounded description of the person I am. Likewise, my mother is not really a cruel, troubled, deluded narcissist - at least that is not ALL she is, and certainly her friends would never describe her in those terms. (Because they do not know her any better than I do.) Elle was not a tragic paranoid schizophrenic - she was a lovely, compassionate, warm human being who had a catastrophic life of relentless trauma and devastation. My dad was not a shambolic alcoholic - he was an exceptionally clever, witty, warm and wise man, whose life was ruined by the wasteful stupidity of alcoholism. Classifying problems - which invariably entails labelling people in this rather arbitrary, lazy and subjective way - is inherently problematic in itself, as I will discuss in a later post.

If my mother's 'good' ('nice', 'normal') days had significantly outnumbered the bad ('nasty', 'cold', 'inconsistent', 'abusive', 'abnormal') days, there might be no need for this blog at all. Because the 'normal' would be... well, normal. But her 'normal' state was, for want of a better description, profoundly abnormal. Therefore, the abnormal became my normal. (I recently started a new blog called 'Ordinary Abnormal' and my opening post discusses this.)

I have been looking into the long-term prognosis or 'treatability' of NPD ever since I found out that it was a recognised and classified disorder. I've already stated (in my post How do I know my mother has Narcissistic Personality Disorder?) that I am in no doubt that my mother definitely, indisputably has NPD, among at least one or two other mental/emotional issues, which I believe could be bipolar and/or schizophrenia. Sadly, I will never know for sure exactly what troubles my mother, because all her problems and faults are habitually projected onto others (blame-shifting) while she assumes a wearying stance of untouchable moral superiority.

But to assume NPD is treatable - or curable, even - is to assume that it is an organic illness, with a specific and essentially identifiable cerebral impairment, injury or malfunction to target and correct. For example, schizophrenia (or at least its symptoms) can be treated or tamed by anti-psychotics, and a depressed person can take any of the dozens of available anti-depressants to alleviate their symptoms and buoy their mood, albeit temporarily. There are hundreds of prescribed medications available for the dozens of mental and emotional illnesses and disorders, including mood stabilisers and specific anti-depressants (Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors, or SSRIs) for anxiety. (Perhaps I would benefit from one of those myself, but I don't want to turn into a walking pharmacy.) It is usually just a case of finding the "right" medication for a particular individual. In the crudest and most basic terms, it's redressing a chemical imbalance.

We all self-medicate from time to time - paracetamol for pain relief, a sedative for insomnia, cough medicine and decongestant for flu and colds, antihistamine for hay fever and allergies, antibiotics for infections, alcohol or other brain-altering drugs (in inadvisable quantities) to escape from reality and stress...

In many cases, we are ignoring the underlying cause of our various problems and targeting only the symptoms of those problems. Much of the time, that's OK, because it works. We get rid of the symptoms of an illness, so we can get on with our lives, and eventually the illness (or problem) itself disappears - the virus passes, the germs dissipate, the migraine subsides.

Even if we accept that NPD is a mental illness (which, strictly speaking, it isn't), it cannot be treated in the same way as mental illnesses such as schizophrenia and depression, because there is no obvious organic basis. While certain narcissistic traits might be ameliorated by certain medications, nothing (in pill form at least) will stop a narcissist from BEING A NARCISSIST. But likewise, there is no agreed definitive 'cure' for depression or schizophrenia - most sufferers just go through periods of remission - breaks of calm and normalcy between debilitating mental and emotional storms. I don't advocate treating mental illness exclusively with pills anyway, for a number of reasons, not least of which is the fact that the medication controls the symptoms without addressing the underlying cause. In fact in many cases, the addressing of the symptoms necessitates a masking or oversight of the cause.

It is tempting to conflate 'sickness' and 'disorder'... surely, if you're disordered, you're not exactly 'healthy'? The website 'Flying Monkeys Denied' explains this well (see Further Reading): "People who are diagnosed [with NPD] do not technically speaking have a disease or even truly a dysfunction. What they do have is a highly efficient and self-serving personality type — and a personality type is not something that is broken. Technically speaking, it simply is what it is."

This seems unbearably fatalistic. But true narcissists are extremely unlikely to seek help for themselves. While they may attend therapy sessions, it is rarely as a means of seeking help for their own issues, because that entails admitting fallibility, vulnerability, imperfection. It entails accepting responsibility - something I now know my mother, like all narcissists, will never do. Can never do. All I ever wanted to hear from my mother, even more than the words "I'm sorry", were the words "I fucked up". How she would have liberated herself with those three words! It would have lifted the weight of the world from her shoulders, if only she had found the strength and the courage to confess: yes, I have been a terrible, terrible mother to all three of my daughters. None of you are to blame for any of our family's myriad fractures and dysfunctions, I am. It is all my fault. ALL OF IT. How can I make it better? For you, for me, for all of us?

A recent article, Is There a Cure for Narcissistic Personality Disorder (see the third link under 'Further Reading'), states that: "When I work with my clients, victims of narcissistic abuse, I encourage them to focus on themselves rather than the narcissist. This is where true change happens. You cannot hope to change him [or her] but you can change yourself. This means refusing to tolerate abuse on any level and taking control of your experiences."  [my emphases]

Personality resides in our psyche, and our psyche is undoubtedly the 'soul' of our brain - that endlessly complex, arcane bulk of hectic pyrotechnic convoluted grey matter inside our skulls, which is so susceptible to every life experience and every unpredictable vicissitude of fate. Can we change our personalities? There are certainly aspects of my personality I would dearly love to change, but I fear they have become an intrinsic part of who I am: my anxiety, insecurity, indecisiveness, gullibility, my maddening inability to accept either a compliment or a criticism, my lack of self-confidence (which, to the eternal chagrin of my husband, often translates into a regular and pitifully transparent "fishing for compliments" - compliments that I am unable to accept)... And there is certainly no changing my mother. She is a sad, lonely, bitter, broken, sorrowful woman with a whole range of complex mental and emotional problems that are now so deeply entrenched they have, in effect, become who and what she is. They have usurped the normal, reasonable, pleasant human being that she almost certainly once was. I cannot do anything for her, and I am sick of trying. I am sick of feeling responsible for something that is not and never has been my problem, much less my fault.

I suppose I've got to a point where I no longer even wish for a cure or a solution. I've just removed myself completely from the situation, a situation that was slowly and inexorably killing me off. Removing myself is my only cure, and my only solution, and the only way I am going to see any positive changes in my life. As the 'Your Healthy Tricks' article rightly says, "most people seeking the change are the victims of narcissistic abuse, not the narcissists themselves." 


See my blog post What lies behind NPD?


Further reading:

http://flyingmonkeysdenied.com/2015/11/04/can-narcissism-or-npd-in-narcissistic-people-be-cured/

https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/media-spotlight/201509/can-you-change-your-personality

http://www.yourhealthytricks.com/is-there-a-cure-for-narcissistic-personality-disorder/