In Jail - Excerpts Part 29 - Narcissist Personality Disorder Overview

Written by Sam Vaknin

Or that I deserve to be punished that way because I was naturally agitating, disruptive, bad, corrupt, vile, mean, cunning and what else.

Or that they were both mentally ill (and they were) and what was to be expected of them anyhow.

And the second question:

WAS IT REALLY ABUSE?

Isn't "abuse" our invention, a figment of our febrile imagination when we embark upon an effort to explain that which cannot be explained (our life)?

Isn't this a "false memory", a "narrative", a "fable", a "construct", a "tale"?

Everyone in our neighbourhood hit their children. So what? And our parents' parents hit their children as well and most of them (our parents) came out normal. My father's father used to wake him up and dispatch him through hostile Arab neighbourhoods in the dangerous city they lived in to buy for him his daily ration of alcohol. My mother's mother went to bed one night and refused to get out of it until she died, 20 odd years later. I could see these behaviours replicated and handed down the generations.

So, WHERE was the abuse? The culture I grew in condoned frequent beatings.

It was a sign of stern, right, upbringing. What was different with US?

I think it was the hate in my mother's eyes.

5. Success

Research shows that education IS a determinant in how much money you make (it seems that this is your way of measuring success) - but less than people believe it to be. Intelligence matters much more - and of this latter commodity you have aplenty.

Unfortunately, intelligence is only one of the parameters. To be consistently successful in the long term (and you and I have been successful - scales are irrelevant to the discussion) one needs more. One needs stamina, perseverance, self-awareness, self-love, self-nurturing, some egotism, a modicum of ruthlessness, some hypocrisy, some narrow-mindedness, and so on.

You and I have a "bad" cocktail inasmuch as "classically defined success" goes.

You are good hearted, almost altruistic. Too altruistic. The word is sacrificial. You sacrifice some of your health and sleep and food to maintain your support lists. Sure, part of it is narcissistic. You like gratitude and adulation - who doesn't? But the bigger part is that you love people, you are generous and you feel compelled to help because you know that there are some things that you know and others don't.

You cannot be hypocritical. You are real. You stand up to "authority" because you know it is unadulterated BS in most cases. So, you get into conflicts with the system, with the establishment, and with its representatives. But the system is omnipotent. It holds all the rewards and metes out all the punishments. It eliminates "perturbations".

You are curious, like a child (it's a huge compliment. Einstein compared himself to a child on the seashore). To become an "expert", a "professional", one needs to kill parts of oneself, limit one's curiosity, deaden one's tendency to sample the variety of life. You can't do that. you are too alert, too full of life, too aware of what you are missing. You can't bury yourself intellectually.

And you are not ruthless, lacking in conscience, egotistical, and narrow minded. You do have self-awareness but I am not sure how much you internalized what you know, how much you have assimilated your vast fund of knowledge about yourself and the human psyche. I do get the impression that you know yourself - I don't get the impression that you love yourself, or that you nurture yourself - at least not sufficiently.

So, what does all this add up to?

Superficially: you lack some important components on the road to success.

You lack the necessary stamina, you are too non-conformist and anti-establishment, you are too generous, you are not sufficiently selfish perhaps because you don't love yourself (though you know yourself), you are not narrow-minded, etc.

But this is not the way I see it at all.

I believe in making a list. WHAT am I. Then finding the profession/vocation/occupation/avocation that fits best my traits, inclinations, propensities, properties and predilections. Success is then guaranteed. If you have a good match between what you pursue and your ability to pursue it - you can't fail. You simply can't go wrong.