This post is part of the ongoing Alphabet Series. Listen along to my recording on YouTube and/or read the article below ♥♀

I had been planning to write about this topic for a long time as it ties into so many of the subjects I have already addressed and will bring up in future posts. As well, it is something that a lot of women have experienced as an unwilling participant, but have not been taught to recognize or deal with. And further, for many women trying to live a more feminist or gynocentric life, there are major challenges to overcoming abuse by women with NPD. Interestingly, this topic is coming up at a time when I’m currently experiencing some rather serious fallout from ending a year-long, toxic workplace relationship with an NPD woman and I’ll get into that in a bit.

As this is a huge topic, I plan to tackle it in three posts as follows:

Part I: This is going to be a bit of a personal story / discussion of characteristics of Narcissistic Personality Disorder.

Part II: Here, I’ll get into the people often found in the orbit of the narcissist and briefly discuss the results of my short poll, which is still open, if you haven’t checked it out yet.

Part III: In this final post, I’ll talk about how to deal with a narcissist, especially if she is female and you are trying to live a life focused on supporting women and girls.

So, let’s begin. And my story begins 51 years ago when I was born to a woman with Narcissistic Personality Disorder, who herself, was the daughter of a narcissistic mother. I can’t speak to the mother before that, but I can tell you that I myself don’t have NPD. I have other shit I deal with, but that is neither here nor there. What is important here is that like most to all psychological problems, there are both biological and sociological factors at play. So you can’t create a clinical narcissist out of nothing but a shitty environment, nor do all biologically predisposed narcissists behave the same way as if hot off an evil robot factory assembly line. So let’s give a rough outline of what NPD is, and then I’ll get into more detail about the traits and behaviours to accompany my story.

Like many descriptive terms related to psychology, the term narcissist is overused, probably thanks to the internet and sensationally titled pop psychology articles. Lots of people can be narcissistic and it just means ego-centric or self-centred and arrogant. We all know people like this and they are annoying, but that’s not really what we mean when we talk about narcissistic personality disorder. For a personality to be disordered, there has to be serious dysfunction in multiple areas of life, and no one knows this better than those who find themselves in relationships with them. To keep things shorter and simpler, I’m going to use the terms NPD and narcissist interchangeably.

A clinical narcissist displays a cluster of traits, namely manipulation, control, high emotionality, and cruelty. At the core, they have extremely fragile egos, and the protection of this ego dictates everything they do. They live in perpetual delusion about themselves, their importance and their abilities and have an irrational sense of deservedness. They are extremely manipulative in order to control the narrative and get what they need. They lack empathy and consideration for others, frequently overstepping boundaries. And they require constant attention and admiration and come across as arrogant and needy at the same time. And as I said, not all NPDs look the same. Some are very successful in life, and some are complete losers – although both are arrogant and feel like they deserve more than everyone else. Some NPDs are publicly aggressive and antagonistic and controlling, and others keep their abuse private and often come off as real victims to keep you off-balance, but under control.

At this point, you may be thinking, “Hey Storyending, this just sounds like a typical male to me.” And you are 100% right. No psychologist is ever going to agree with this, but I’ve come to think of NPD as Male Bullshit Syndrome or Permanent Male Syndrome (PMS), except in overdrive. All of the symptoms are typical of males, but are greatly exaggerated and extremely destructive. So males with NPD just seem like normal males, with a little bit of extra bullshit. This is probably the main reason is it vastly underdiagnosed in males. And afflicted females come across as total psychos to those who fall prey to them. Have you noticed that only the NPD female, not the male, is a favourite evil character in entertainment?

A Note on NPD Parents

Because society incorrectly sees breeding as a human right, any fucked up person, including NPDs are allowed to create, own and abuse children. Teachers and volunteers who work with children have to do criminal record checks (not that that achieves much), but prospective parents don’t. Makes sense, right? A narcissistic parent, especially when that parent is the primary caregiver, has the power to create some very, very fucked up kids – some with personality disorders themselves, and all with at least one other major issue such as anxiety, depression, addiction, etc. Narcissistic abuse, unlike other forms of abuse, is very difficult to describe to an outsider without sounding like one is crazy or ‘oversensitive’, and if the abuser is a mother, no one will ever believe you anyway, so most kids suffer for years and are gradually broken down and even come to think that they are the crazy ones. In adulthood, and in other types of situations and relationships, how one deals with narcissists will depend on how you dealt with the primary. And I’ll get into that in Part III.

Now, back to the story. So I was lucky enough to be born to a narcissistic woman and an enabling man who was also a fledgling clinical psychologist, and between them, they created an idyllic childhood defined by emotional abuse and manipulation. Once I was old enough, I was able to gain some control over my life, and I chose to deal with it by walking away from my mother at the age of 20 and from the rest of the enablers at 27. And I’ll talk more in depth about options for dealing with NPD in Part III and how there is no ideal solution. For now, let’s just say I have an inexplicable distrust of both controlling and domineering women and of psychologists, in general. And it has affected my professional life to this day, as I have a very low tolerance for narcissistic abuse and can recognize it almost instantaneously.

So I come to recent events. A year ago, in the wake of leaving China and other plans not working out because of COVID, I found myself badly in need of a job. And through a couple of friends, I ended up with an online teaching gig working for yet another sketchy and abusive Chinese and her Ukrainian husband. It very quickly became an emotional nightmare, first because the woman turned out to be a clinical narcissist with an abusive and enabling husband, and second, I needed a job, so I couldn’t just walk away despite my mind screaming at me to do so.

It was a year of almost daily manipulative and crazy bullshit, and while some people were able to brush it off, for someone who grew up with and managed to escape narcissistic abuse, it was so stressful that it ended up destroying my health. A year ago, although unemployed, I was healthy. I walked 8 km every day. I had lost weight intentionally. I had plans I was working on. I had a modest amount of energy. And I had found a place to live and adopted a rescue kitten. A year after taking the job everything good had been undone. I’d gained back all the weight I’d lost and put on more. I didn’t exercise at all. I didn’t sleep well. My breathing had become laboured even just playing with my cat or doing basic things around my apartment – something I’d not experienced before. I was having mild panic attacks regularly, and even benign messages from the employer were triggering anger and an elevated heart rate. I felt more depressed and powerless than usual. And I felt rage bubbling inside me with no reasonable outlet possible. In my mind, I kept setting quitting dates and tried to find psychological strategies for dealing with the stress. But finally, about a month ago, I woke up and experienced some odd symptoms, including a weird tight pain in my chest and back. But I went about my business and taught my classes sitting through it with a mild feeling of dread. Was this what is termed a ‘minor cardiac event’ – or a mini heart attack? I was entirely too young for this, and there wasn’t a history of heart disease in my family. Regardless, it was at that point that I decided that I was finishing the month and quitting this low-paying and highly stressful job. And as if to give me extra motivation that I didn’t need, the narcissist sent one of her most abusive messages to the teachers’ online chat group letting us know that we didn’t matter and she couldn’t care less whether we quit because she was so rich. She even made a passive aggressive reference to me letting everyone know that having years of teaching experience didn’t make one a good teacher. And she didn’t even know I was quitting at that point. Yeah, I was done. So, now I am once again unemployed. And the first week of November was like what I imagine doing a drug detox is like. I was very sick and couldn’t get out of bed. But I’m on the mend.

Anyhow, I’m going to get into some of the key behaviours that most to all NPDs engage in with their victims, and I’ll reference the asshole for whom I worked to provide examples. Remember that even normal people do these things sometimes. But NPDs do them regularly and they do them to protect their fragile sense of self and to control the narrative that gets them what they want and need.

1.. Bullying, belittling, infantilizing and humiliating. This can be done publicly and privately. It is about manipulation, control and putting you in your place and feeling small, embarrassed, helpless and worthless. It is also done to build up their fragile ego by highlighting your tiny faults, a single, long-ago past mistake, or by completely fabricating something that makes you look ridiculous and makes them look superior. They may even add humour to your embarrassment to curry favour with their supporters, or may try to show you and others how your faults victimize and burden them. My boss would regularly embarrass the teachers in online chats with students’ parents. Instead of supporting teachers if parents had questions or complaints, the boss would make nasty and embarrassing comments that we could see, but she wouldn’t address us directly. She would file away small things that we did wrong one time, and use it as evidence of our incompetence both in direct battles with us, and behind our backs in conversations with other teachers. Only in conversations with other teachers did I find out some of the lies she told about me. It was really weird, but I grew up with this kind of shit, so it wasn’t new to me.

2.. Gaslighting. This is a must-do for the narcissist. Here he or she rewrites history and causes you to question your version of reality. The sole purpose is to disarm you as you have clear evidence of their faults and mistakes. So they will lie about what happened, they will pretend they don’t remember what happened, or they will accuse you of overthinking or misreading a situation or comment. And they will do it in a condescending way or will fake concern over you stress and emotionality. In the end, you don’t feel clear about what actually happened, and the less sure you feel repeatedly, the less likely you are going to arm yourself with facts and fight back. My boss would regularly tell us that the technological problems we had with the software we were using were not real tech issues at all, but something we did wrong, the unspoken implication being that we were stupid or even lying to get out of working. She would always say that none of the other teachers was experiencing these problems. Of course, this wasn’t true. The software constantly had problems, and my boss didn’t want to deal with it or take responsibility for choosing shitty software.

3.. Externalizing responsibility or blaming others for their mistakes. NPDs can’t handle legitimate criticism or even just a statement of fact that shows them to be imperfect. Nothing is ever their fault. They are constantly victimized by the world and everyone in their lives. My boss demanded immediate responses to messages and would harass us. But these rules didn’t apply to her, even if we had emergency situations during business hours. Despite being very rich, she refused to hire administrative staff to handle communications or class emergencies. So what frequently happened is that she wouldn’t respond within even 24 hours, sometimes upwards of a week. And for me, towards the end, sometimes she wouldn’t respond to me at all. But there were always excuses. She would complain about parents sending her direct messages instead of putting them in the group chat so that the teacher could see it and handle it. She was in demand and over-burdened, the poor victim. No one would help her out or understand her situation.

4.. Disregard for boundaries. NPDs don’t feel empathy, even if they can fake it on a superficial level to garner admiration. They don’t see people as equals worthy of respect and consideration. For NPD parents, children are just extensions of themselves and aren’t treated as separate individuals worthy of privacy. So, to the narcissist, other people’s belongings and secrets and time are public property, which they can access, take, share or give away without permission. ‘No’ is not a word that has any meaning for the narcissist, and using it can inspire a lot of rage. This wasn’t a big issue at my online workplace, other than my boss feeling entitled to demand unpaid work or to schedule my time without asking me first.

5.. Shunning and grudge-holding. This is a common method of punishment used by the narcissist when someone dares to challenge them in some way or if you inadvertently manage to be better than them, especially if people see it and acknowledge it. This can be very confusing and devastating when NPD parents do it to their children. Withholding love or attention over what amounts to nothing is pure cruelty and I experienced this many times with both my mother and my grandmother simply for having contrary opinions on completely irrelevant topics. You learn very quickly not to have opinions. You can also be publicly humiliated and shunned at the same time – this happens when you are present in a group and the NPD has stopped talking to you, but talks about you in a negative way. Like I mentioned above, during the last month of my employment, my boss had stopped responded to my messages for some reason, but she would make passive-aggressive comments about me in the teachers’ chat group.

6.. Denial of your needs. If others have needs, then it takes attention away from them. Narcissists need constant acknowledgment, approval, attention, praise and admiration in order to keep up the version of reality that they are incredible human beings. To see that others have needs chips away at that false narrative. Relationships are not reciprocal, although narcissists can definitely paint them as so. But in reality, the energy must flow one way, and you will eventually find yourself depleted and unfulfilled in any relationship with a narcissist. My boss would not allow days off. Some of us were working 7 days a week, and that can get mentally exhausting over time. Myself, even if I only have 1-2 classes, I am thinking about work as soon as a I wake up. I can’t disengage. I never did ask for time off, but I know some of the other teachers did. And the rage it inspired in my boss was mind-boggling to me.

I’m going to end this here. As I mentioned, Part II is going to look at the players in the narcissist’s orbit. Again, if you haven’t done the short poll on NPD experience, have a look. I’ve also written about antagonism and there is an old post on male weapons against women, which has overlap with narcissistic tactics and lends support for my theory that NPD is just hyper-manliness.

See you soon for Part II.

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