In Jail - Excerpts Part 29 - Excerpts from the Archives of the Narcissism List Part 29

Written by Sam Vaknin

I abandoned it all: the butler, the antique furniture, the promising business - and followed her to Israel where we tried to live together and revive our flagging sexual fortunes in group sex, in Parisian orgy clubs (in the days before AIDS) and all the time I knew that I was losing her and I did, to a radio musical editor. When she went away, she said goodbye publicly, on one of his shows and I tore at the armchair with bent fingers, wet with tears and white with leather tearing rage. I had no money, lost all of it in London. I had no love. all I had was a few shabby replacement leather armchairs (the furniture store went out of business the day after I paid them).

Then I established a brokerage firm and transformed it into the biggest private financial services firm in Israel in two years. I met another woman who were to become my wife and I settled. But I was numb. I knew something was wrong, like the echoes of a distant war. I did not know the enemy, though and I wasn't sure this was my war, anyhow. I just listened at night with fascination to the rumblings. Piece by piece I was falling apart and I had no idea, no acquaintance with my own disembowellment. I watched the disintegration with morbid fascination.

Finally I acted out. I orchestrated a criminal take-over of a state bank, I cheated on my partners, they cheated on me, I sued the government, drawing the fire closer, drawing the war to myself, making it real. I was arrested a month after my wedding. My company was gone. My money was gone. I was back at square one. I was terrified, lonely and married. The ceremony was poor. I wanted to punish her for pushing me into a marriage so I sadistically imposed on her a grubby home wedding with almost no invitees. I didn't know what I was doing, who I was, the world was swirling erratically: marriages, high crimes, mortal fears and the inevitable crash. Five years later I was sentenced to go to prison and I did and the same woman left me while there and we divorced in a civilized manner (almost) fighting only over the music CDs, which I, too, wanted. When she left me, I planned to die. I schemed to grab the Chief Warden's gun and use it. I also compiled lists of lethal doses of medication in the prison library of which I was made in charge. But I didn't die. I wrote books, I saved my sanity, I saved my life.

4. Abuse

I hate the words "physical abuse". It is such a clinical term. My mother used to burrow her fingernails into the soft, inner part of my arm, the "back" of my elbow and drag them, well inside the flesh and veins and everything. You can't imagine the blood and the pain. She hit me with belts and buckles and sticks and heels and shoes and sandals and thrust my skull into sharp angles until it cracked. When I was four she threw a massive metal vase at me. It missed me and shattered a wall sized cupboard. To very small pieces. She did this for 14 years. Every day. Since the age of four.

She tore my books and threw them out the window of our fourth floor apartment. She shredded everything I wrote, consistently, relentlessly.

She cursed and humiliated me 10-15 times an hour, every hour, every day, every month, for 14 years. She called me "my little Eichman" after a well known Nazi mass murderer. She convinced me that I am ugly (I am not. I am considered very good looking and attractive. Other women tell me so and I don't believe them). She invented my personality disorder, meticulously, systematically. She tortured all my brothers as well. She hated it when I cracked jokes. She made my father do all these things to me as well. This is not clinical, this is my life. Or, rather, was. I inherited her ferocious cruelty, her lack of empathy, some of her obsessions and compulsions and her feet. Why I am mentioning the latter - in some other post.

I never felt anger. I felt fear, most of the time. A dull, pervasive, permanent sensation, like an aching tooth. And I tried to get away. I looked for other parents to adopt me. I toured the country looking for a foster home, only to come back humiliated with my dusty backpack. I volunteered to join the army a year before my time. At 17 I felt free. It is a sad "tribute" to my childhood that the happiest period in my life was in jail. The peaceful, most serene, clearest period. It has all been downhill since my release.

But, above all, I felt shame and pity. I was ashamed of my parents: primitive freaks, lost, frightened, incompetent. I could smell their inadequacy. It wasn't like this at the beginning. I was proud of my father, a construction worker turned site manager, a self made man who self destructed later in his life. But this pride eroded, metamorphesized to a malignant form of awe of a depressive tyrant. Much later I understood how socially inept he was, disliked by authority figures, a morbid hypochondriac with narcissistic disdain for others. Father-hate became self hate the more I realized how much like my father I am despite all my pretensions and grandiose illusions: schizoid-asocial, hated by authority figures, depressive, self-destructive, a defeatist.

But above all I kept asking myself two questions:

WHY?

Why did they do it? Why for so long? Why so thoroughly?

I said to myself that I must have frightened them. A firstborn, a "genius" (IQ-wise), a freak of nature, frustrating, overly-independent, unchildlike Martian. The natural repulsion they must have felt having given birth to an alien, to a monstrosity.

Or that my birth fouled their plans somehow. My mother was just becoming a stage actress in her fertile, narcissistic, imagination (actually, she worked as a lowly salesperson in a tiny shoe shop). My father was saving money for one of an endless string of houses he built, sold and rebuilt. I was in the way. My birth was probably an accident. Not much later, my mother aborted my could-have-been-brother. The certificate describes how difficult the economic situation is with the one born child (that's me).