In Jail - Excerpts Part 29 - Narcissist and Rejection

Written by Sam Vaknin

Following success there is the question of self-defeating and self-destructive behaviours, true. But this is a separate issue.

A personal tale:

For YEARS I tried to settle down. Bought a home, married, establish businesses, paid taxes. Went nuts. Acted out. My then p-doc (a brief affair) told me: why do you fight your nature? You are NOT built to lead a stable life. Find an unstable life which you can lead successfully. And I did. I became a roving financial consultant, roaming the globe. This way I balanced my inherent instability with my craving for stability.

I think that the first step is to take an inventory of the phenomenon called YOU. Then find the best match professionally. Then go for it. Then success will follow. Then try to avoid the pitfalls of self destruction.

6. Rejection

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I am afraid to write, yes, even to you because I am afraid to be rejected. I do not a pretty picture make. I feel estranged from myself. I love and pity humans while virulently holding them in contempt. I adore and cherish women while being a misogynist. I am a narcissist who failed. So many contradictions tend to put people off. People want clear definitions and tiny boxes and the clarity that comes only when life itself stops. So, all my life I experienced the cautious looks of others, their repulsion, their rage. People react with fear to the exceptional and then they get angry for having feared.

I am Sam. I am 40+, am the first born, followed, in intervals of 4 years, by one sister and three brothers. I am in touch only with my youngest brother (16 years apart). I seem to be his hero, untarnished by my constant failures and glaring failings. He has a personality disorder as well (schizotypal, I think, or mild BPD) and an OCD.

My mother was a Narcissist (spontaneously healed in her forties) and an OCD.

She was physically, psychologically and verbally abusive towards me and to my brothers. This shattered my sense of self worth and perceived ability to cope with the world - for which I compensated by developing NPD (though mild). I am a Narcissist ever since I remember myself. My mother regarded me as a supreme venue of entertainment and I performed for our neighbours, acquaintances and family daily. Until a few years ago, most of what I did was aimed at impressing her and changing her mind about me. Paradoxically, her judgement regarding the personality that she helped foster is accurate: I AM vain, in pursuit of appearances rather than of substance, dangerously pretentious, pathological liar, obdurate to the point of stupidity, highly intelligent but very unwise, shallow in everything I do, no perseverance and so on. But I feel the same about her: that Loving to her is a series of tedious chores, that she pretends, constantly lies and denies, still compulsive, opinionated to the point of rigidity.

My father is chronically depressed and hypochondriac. He comes from a violent family and is a self made man broken by adverse economic circumstances. But he suffered from depression and anxiety long before his economic demise. He was also physically, verbally and psychologically abusive but less so than my mother (he was absent during daytime). I strongly envied him in my early childhood and wished him ill.

My life is a pattern of renunciation of everything this couple stands for: petite bourgeois values, small town mentality, moral conservatism, family, home ownership, attachment. I have no roots. In the last 5 months I changed 3 domiciles (in 3 countries). All told, I lived in 11 countries in the last 16 years. I have no family (divorced, no children) - though I do maintain long and loyal relationships with women, no property to speak of, I am a gambler in disguise (stock options - respectable gambling), no continuous relationships with friends (but yes with my brother), no career (impossible with such mobility) or academic edge (the Ph.D. is of the correspondence type), I served one prison term, have consistently associated with the underworld in fascination mixed with mortal fear. I do achieve things: I published books (my latest one, a book of short stories, won acclaim and a prestigious award, I just published a book about narcissism) and am in the process of publishing a few more (mostly reference), have my websites (which, I believe contain original material in philosophy and economics), my commentaries are published in papers all over the world and I appear intermittently in the electronic media. But my "achievements" are ephemeral. They do not last because I am never there to follow up on them. I lose interest very quickly, move physically and disconnect emotionally. This is all an on-going mutiny against my parents.

Another area which was effected by my parents is my sexual life. To them sex was ugly and dirty. My rebellion led me to experience orgies and group sex, on the one hand - and (most of the time) asceticism. In between bouts of promiscuity (once a decade for a few weeks, after major life crises) I engage in sex very rarely (despite long term relationships with women). My non-availability is intended to frustrate women who are attracted to me (I use the fact that I have a girlfriend as an alibi). I prefer autoerotic sex (masturbation with fantasies). I am a conscious misogynist : fear and loathe women and tend to ignore them to the best of my ability. To me, they are a mixture of hunter and parasite. Of course, this is not my STATED position (I am truly a liberal - for instance, I will not dream of depriving women of their career opportunities or suffrage). This conflict between emotional and cognitive leads to express hostility in my encounters with women, which they detect, in some cases. Alternatively, I "desexualize" them and treat them as functions.

I constantly need narcissistic supply.

I probably could get a Ph.D. in psychology, treat patients (sorry, clients) a few years and then come out with a first monograph. But this is not what Narcissistic supply is about. NS is absolutely comparable to drugs, without any reservations. To maintain the high one must increase the dose, do the drug more often and pursue it in a any manner open to one. It is useless to try and postpone satisfaction. The reward must be stronger than before, immediate and exciting. The pursuit of Narcissistic supply spirals towards depths of degradation, humiliation and abuse - both of self and of others. Anxiety is a product, not a cause. Really, it is (justified) FEAR: what if there will be no NS available? How will I obtain the next shot? What if I will get caught? Actually, the symptoms are so similar, that I believe that NPD has some biochemical fundament. This biochemical disorder is CREATED by life circumstances, rather than the converse.

next: Excerpts from the Archives of the Narcissism List Part 30