Resistance is Futile - Excerpts Part 25 - Narcissism and Relationships

Written by Sam Vaknin

You both over-indulged your daughter.

Indulgence is a form of abuse. It is through catering to the child's every need, whim and desire that we chain her to use. We transform our children to extensions of our selves by being subservient, submissive, overbearing. Your child needs a PARENT, not a servant, not a frightened slave.

Don't you think that your daughter is angry BECAUSE you were too good to her - because you never really existed? Because instead of drawing clear limits and making rules - you receded and annulled yourselves?

Do not be afraid even now to refuse, to set rules, to draw the line.

She might throw temper tantrums and try to commit suicide again. If this is her chosen mode of communication there is little you can do about it.

Your daughter must repossess her life. Give it back to her - by making the boundaries clear.

Your daughter is not merely narcissistic.

She seems to be suffering from a cocktail of personality disorders (this often is the case). Judging by your description she is clearly NPD (though diagnoses should be made only by a mental health professional with experience in the specific disorder). But she most definitely exhibits non-narcissistic behaviours (suicide attempts is a borderline trait, for instance, and threatening to kill you is an antisocial PD trait).

She should be treated intensively and it should not be her choice. Do everything you can to make sure that she receives proper talk therapy and medication.

It is often our fear of being abandoned that leads to our abandonment. Our fear of being hated provokes hatred. We cling, we subsume, we walk on eggshells (heard the expression before?), we vanish, we merge with the meaningful other.

It is your life, your house, your peace of mind, you have your problems and you have two other daughters. If your daughter cannot live with that - then make her face the consequences of her own behaviour.

Perhaps for the first time in her life.

Take care, fear not, and do the right thing.

7. Falling in Love with Ourselves

It must be difficult to always like the sources of our frustration and to be drawn to them.

It is a narcissistic thing, this - a punishment meted out by an already gone or absent parent.

We are drawn to our reflections ("he is so much like me!") and, being narcissists, we fall in love with ourselves through their agency and mediation, vicariously, by proxy, as it were.

These doppelganger, these alter egos, these suddenly significant others with whom we experience such resonance, such depths of empathy - legitimize our need to engage in the most distilled form of incest - infatuation with our selves. By "loving" or "being attracted" to THEM - we actually fall in love and have (emotional and often physical) intercourse with ourselves.

This is never sustainable because, deep inside, we harbour a burning hatred, resentment, and sadistic urges directed exactly at our very selves - the selves that we so crave, that we are so enamoured of.

Thus, loving our reflections terrifies us. It leads us closer to the sources of our emotional (and sometimes imminent physical) demise. By loving OURSELVES through THEM - we provoke our idealized, sadistic parents, buried deep inside our psyches - to attack us relentlessly, ferociously, mercilessly.

Of course, we blame our significant others.

Who dares stare the abyss in the eye? It might stare back at us.

So, we attack and we withdraw and we avoid and we blame and we apportion guilt and we suffer and we torment and are tormented and then we divorce ourselves, assisted by our False Self.

We call all this - "relationships".

next: Excerpts from the Archives of the Narcissism List Part 26