Now let's look at some of the sneaky ways narcissists hijack attention.
Normal people politely face someone talking to them, to show attention. The narcissist finds ways to make the most of the ego gratification he gets from this. He makes others go out of their way to afford him this courtesy.
For example, he might avoid facing whomever he is talking at. In a pinch, he may stare intently at a wall or ceiling (as if studying it) to avoid looking at you. He may maneuver around the room like a sidewinder to speak to people from behind their back. Doing so actually kills two birds with one stone. It not only makes people turn way around to politely face him while he's speaking, it avoids showing them the polite attention of facing them. I think this behavior is also a bit Freudian, having to do with a narcissist's main mission in life: talking behind people's back.
One old narcissist I know of would arise right in the middle of something his visiting daughter was saying and leave the room. As if unaware that she was even talking to him, unaware that his guests were even there. Thus it wasn't enough that she and her children had come hundreds of miles to see him. He made them chase him from room to room to talk to him.
He also made his daughter "talk Cesky," which she hadn't heard or spoken in forty years. When she protested, he lied that he had forgotten English. Thus he (a) excluded his little grandchildren as though they were not present, (b) made it hard for his daughter to understand more than the gist of what he said, and (c) made it practically impossible for her to talk to him at all. Thus he sucked all attention to himself alone.
Though the tactics are different, the strategy is the same in the local "old man" of the community in a workplace. He ignores colleagues, looking right past them as though they are not there when he meets them.
Though the tactics are different, the strategy is the same in a person who can't shut up in a theater. He or she is upstaging the play.
Though the tactics are different, the strategy is the same in the woman who can't let anyone get a word in edgewise during a conversation. She is monopolizing the conversation to monopolize attention.
One slick technique I have observed is what I call the Drive-By. Here's how the stunt works.
The narcissist barges into a room loudly talking to drown out and stifle the extant conversation. Thus he butts in on it to take attention away from whoever is talking and suck it all to himself. That's the easy part, that's how he commands the attention of everyone present. But to do this he must get in the same room with them and say something to them. How can he pull that off without having to pay them any attention in return if anyone should try to say something back to him?
Ah, the ingenious Drive-By Technique. He is only passing through, you see, so he risks no return fire. That is, he needn't be there for a reply to his announcement or remark. Nobody can get him to pause long enough to hear one short sentence. He just accelerates to exit the other end of the room faster if someone draws a breath and opens their mouth to speak to him.
Narcissist wins again: he gets all attention without having to pay any in return.
We see variations of the Drive-By technique in administrators who find innumerable ways to always have their unanswered say.
The narcissist avoids situations he can't maneuver in and control with such devices. So, most of the time he's a ghost. At home, for example, he prefers seclusion in the basement, in bed, behind the wheel, or anywhere to presence in a room where anyone is getting any attention. There is no way, short of demanding it at gunpoint, to get him to pay one bit of attention to his wife or children.
Correction: He pays intense attention to anyone busy doing anything, literally breathing down their neck and telling them that every move they make is wrong. Negative attention, critical attention he is extravagantly generous with.
The lengths to which narcissists go to avoid paying attention to those near and dear is perhaps most telling, because it is most mysterious and weird. I knew one, for example, who would be with his family only in four places: in church, where it looked good, at the table while there was food on his plate, in an automobile, and in the living room while football was on TV.
Why was he able to stand being with them in these four places? In these four places he could be with them and still ignore them. By focusing on the altar, his food, the road, or the TV. It was a bit tricky in restaurants though, because he had to arrive before his food. So there he sat with his chair angled away from them and became fascinated with some fixture in a far corner of the ceiling.
Even more telling is what he did to prevent others present from paying attention to each other. Narcissists know that this is easy to do. You just stifle any conversation people try to have.
He brought a radio to the kitchen table. If anyone tried to talk, he kept turning up the volume. When that didn't suffice, he broke up conversation by hijacking it with some obnoxious statement he butted in with — something too obnoxious to pass over or ignore, something that sucked all attention to himself.
His favorite bombs were (a) something outrageously malignant, like reacting to the deaths and injuries cited in the radio's accident reports by saying that the victims "deserved it" for "going like hell," (b) something outrageously racist, or (c) something outrageously stupid, like incoherent bitching that always ended in boasting that he had told his boss off. The moment his food was gone, so was he. His family couldn't beg him to stay in the same room with them one minute longer.
All narcissists have their favorite conversation-busting bombs. One I know of liked to bomb a conversation by attacking the character of his younger son, whom he had disfigured by leaving a loaded shotgun buried among sacks of apples in a wagon where his seven-to-ten-year-old children played, and whom he had then targeted to take the brunt of his abuse. He constantly outraged his other son and daughters by changing the subject with the boldfaced lie that Emil had never paid him for the farm.
Old narcissists know that society gives the elderly a carte blanche to say and do anything they want.
As mentioned above, an automobile is one place a narcissist can abide those near and dear, because they can't come between him and the only thing he will pay attention to, the road. To keep his passengers from paying attention to each other, he can bust any conversation they try to have by flying into a road rage. He is so compelled to make them stop talking to each other that he can seldom tolerate their talking long enough to find some ostensible excuse. Hence, they usually can't even tell which other driver he is supposed to be mad at, though it probably goes without saying that it's for the usual offense of "cutting him off." To get their attention off each other, he yanks the vehicle around, making reckless moves. Naturally, his passengers fall silent and shift their attention to him and everything he could crash them into.
Of course, a person so stingy and avaricious about attention is going to play Keep Away with all forms of it. A narcissist cannot even give you an example of what would constitute praise for someone else. The closest he ever comes is a formal toast to a child for "making HIM proud."
Nobody can pry a compliment or thank-you out of him with a crowbar. He acts like that is sticking him with a hot poker or something. He doesn't touch his children except to hit them.
Unless he is a "doting" narcissist who inundates his children with critical attention to improve them, he pays none to them at all. He never plays with them. He is disinterested in their grades, activities, aspirations, social lives, majors, degrees, professions, and problems. As often as anyone tries to inform him about these things, he forgets them. He never sends anyone on this planet a card or a letter. He never gets anyone on this planet a gift. (When absolutely necessary, he has his wife, his sister, his daughter, or his secretary get it for him.) He never comforts a grieving person. He sheds no tear for any other human person, though he readily sheds tears for the flickers of light on a television or movie screen.
His children never see their parents kiss or embrace or even sit close to each other. His daughters see nothing really desirable in marriage and nothing in themselves that any man should love. Their dreams about marriage are not sweet. They arise from deep fear of a life like their mother's.
I know of one narcissist who went so far to withhold affection that, while his children were little and their mother made them kiss him good night, he wouldn't even lean forward. He leaned his head a little back to make it even harder to reach him. He wouldn't even pucker his lips.
One way to pay no attention to others is to be asleep.
One narcissist I know jabbers your ear off for hours talking about herself and every trivial thing she does. However, within fifteen seconds of the moment you start to tell her something about yourself, no matter how important or out-of-the-ordinary, she rudely acts bored. If that doesn't shut you up, she hits a brick wall of testy sleepiness, like a grumpy child past her bedtime. This example illustrates that boredom is a classic way people express aggression when they wish to maintain deniability.
Another narcissist I know of became nocturnal upon retirement. He slept most of the day and got up in the middle of the night. How's that for making sure you never have to pay any attention to anyone?
Actually, this weird behavior started before retirement. After an aneurysm left him unable to use her, his wife's getting into bed drove him out. Being thus treated as abhorrent was bad enough, but having to submit herself to him for this moral kick in the gut every night affected her like rape. It was moral rape. She couldn't fall asleep in her bed and seemed to have an irrational fear that she'd die in it.
Eventually, this narcissist was up and about the house only in the night, while everyone else slept. The normal waking hours he wasn't in bed, he spent in the dark, damp, unfinished basement, where he had made a nest for himself of a desk, an easy chair, a portable TV, and a stack of magazines. He had all sorts of diversions to keep his mind aimlessly occupied while awake in that nest.
Yet they were not enough. So, his dread of being alone with himself for a moment of self awareness gave him a compelling, even frantic, need for a drink and drive four or five times a day. A creature of his habits, he made the same rounds every time. To the same bar (until something mysterious would happen and he'd have to start haunting another), to the same place by the river to watch "his" geese. And to the same place in a park, where he watched "his" squirrels and gathered nuts to feed those back home.
He paid no end of attention to those geese and squirrels. He was fascinated by those geese and squirrels. Such a kind old man, he worried constantly about those geese and squirrels.
Home
Contents
