Narcissistic Personality - Case Study in Dissimulation

Case Study in Dissimulation

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A narcissist began telling her family the following story about her best friend: This other young woman's mother was dying of cancer. The narcissist said that her friend was astonishingly cold-hearted — crass even — that she had no feelings for her mother, that she even ignored her mother when they went to visit, nosing through her jewelry instead of joining in the conversation, as if she couldn't wait to have her mother's things.

Truth? No, the future proved it to be projection. It was the narcissist who wished her mother dead, presumably for two reasons: because her mother was the only family member who had a reign on her and because she wanted her mother's things. A few years later, she was the one who showed that she had no feelings for her mother.

This example also illustrates how a narcissist deals with unwanted awareness of her moral turpitude. Whenever her efforts to keep knowledge of it repressed fail and it surfaces to consciousness on her, she just tells herself, "No, I'm not like that...SHE is!" projecting that fault or failing off onto the nearest target. You might say that this is how she cleanses herself of sin — by smearing it off on someone else.

A few years later, this narcissist's mother got leukemia and was already in great pain and unable to walk, awaiting the horrible end when only massive doses of morphine have any effect. The narcissist behaved normally while other people were around, talking endlessly about every detail of what she did in caring for her mother.

She bought this pill case for her mother and that storage caddy. You got a demonstrated lecture on how she prepared the chemotherapy syringes. She showed you where she stored them in the refrigerator and why she prepared them at the precise times of the day she chose. You got the complete rundown on the list of medications, the times, and dosages of each. And she told you that the visiting nurses said her efforts "to save" her mother were "heroic." Nonetheless, they didn't know some stuff she knew from college biology so she doubted their competence and didn't trust them to administer chemotherapy right because they had made a huge mistake in loading the syringe once, one that could have killed her mother. You had to butt-in on this saga to ask her to tell you how her mother was. That took about ten seconds, and then it was back to the adventures of the star of the show. You learned that some people don't dispose of used hypodermic needles properly. But she had managed to figure out a complicated way to do it just right — make a nurse she knew dispose of them at the hospital. Et ad infinitum.

By having nothing else to talk about (not even her mother's condition or prognosis) and not letting you get a word in edgewise, she was energetically painting a picture of herself as devoted to the exceptional care of her sick mother. But it was just, as the poet T.S. Eliot would say, 'a face you prepare to meet the faces that you meet.' The doctors, friends and family, visiting nurses, and so forth.

But, in private with her mother the narcissist underwent a shocking transfiguration. I myself wouldn't believe what I'm about to say if I hadn't later seen this narcissist do much the same thing to someone else and if I didn't have enough of the story from her own lips to know that it's true.

Her mother's illness had turned the tables. Suddenly her mother was dying and needed her and therefore couldn't kick her out of the nest to go pay rent somewhere and buy her own groceries and cook her own meals and do her own laundry from now on. No need for the loving-daughter act anymore.

The rein was off.

In addition, her mother's emotional vulnerability at this time was all it took to trigger an attack.

If they are able to recognize the needs of others, they tend to view these factors as signs of weakness and vulnerability (DSM-IV™, 1994, p. 659) (Oldham, 1990, p. 96). When able to perceive this vulnerability, individuals with NPD behave in a dominant and coercive manner (Birtchnell, Costello, ed., 1996, p. 186).

— Sharon C. Ekleberry, Dual Diagnosis and the Narcissistic Personality Disorder

She responded to her mother's need and vulnerability with (of all things) rejection and contempt. For, to a narcissist, everyone is nothing but an object to get a step up on. In doing this, she was just doing behind closed doors what every narcissist does in secret to anyone dependent and defenseless — withholding attention in the form of greatly needed love and affection.

Presumably in shock at this bizarre reaction, her mother asked why the narcissist was treating her this way. "Please! Why are you mad at me? Why won't you even just come sit beside me?" There, immobilized on her deathbed, her mother was obviously afraid to be left alone in the dark. But her daughter refused to even be in the same room with her.

Within weeks of her mother's death, she mentioned this to me for the first of several times, over drinks. Just a few well-chosen lines about some mysterious goings on between her and her mother near the end, one night in particular. She said it had been bothering her. It was as though she was trying to confide in me and NOT at the same time. She was so vague and sketchy you couldn't even tell what she was trying to say. In fact, opposite interpretations were sometimes possible. She prefaced it with how big an ordeal her mother's death was for her and then tried to get me to agree that, in spending yourself for others, it just gets to be too much. I knew how that was didn't I? Then she complained about her mother expecting too much, bothering her by needing something constantly. I knew her mother was like that, didn't I?

I got the impression that she was puzzled by her own behavior and wanted me to me to help her countenance it by pronouncing her behavior — what, I don't really know. Okay? Normal? Justified? Whatever.

What did I think? About what? She hadn't yet told me anything to think anything about. She must have really needed absolution, because she returned to the subject on several occasions. But it was like going into a confessional and saying, "Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. I stole two sticks of gum from the candy store" and failing to mention the bank you robbed. If you're under the age of seven you think that swindled "absolution" counts, but that's why they don't let kids under the Age of Reason go to confession.

I don't judge deeds without knowing what they are, so I didn't give her what she wanted. Without realizing it, I was thus pressuring her to reveal more and more of what she actually did to her mother.

Piecing it all together, the narcissist's full account amounts to this: Her mother's need for all this attention was "tapping her out." The narcissist said that as if it's a perfectly normal and appropriate thing to say.

She said her mother was "expecting too much" and that she felt as though her mother was thus "sucking her lifeblood." Yes, that's right: her mother has leukemia and the narcissist thinks she's the one whose blood is getting devoured.

So, her flawed mother just had to stop preying on her by "needing" so much.

She whined at me that her mother had whined at her. That's when she told me that her mother had asked her why she was treating her the way she was. And that's when, for the first time, she let slip a detail that divulged the true nature of what she'd done.

Her mother's last night at home. The sudden onset of the terrible pain of the end. The daughter decides it's time to go upstairs to bed!

Yes! She decides to leave her dying mother in the dark and go to bed!!!

She said that in bed she heard her mother keep calling out that she was in pain and crying, "Help me! Help me! Why won't you help me?"

I suppose the look on my face let her know she'd said too much.

"Well," I asked, "why wouldn't you help her? What did she want you to do?"

"Well, I had already given her all the pain medication the doctor's prescription allowed, and I couldn't call him at 2 AM?"

If it hadn't been too late to help her mother, I do think I would have flown across the table at her throat. But it was too late. Everything just went all black inside me, and I didn't say another word.

She continued, saying that it's too bad she had to get "pretty nasty" with her mother to make her be quiet.

I've seen "nasty." I've seen what she does when someone she can really hurt lets their soft underbelly show. One would swear she's fighting someone who is trying to kill her. She goes way over the top in shocking viciousness. Just sadistic.

In fact, years earlier, in telling me how she had broken up with a man on the night he asked her to marry him, she told me that she doesn't know what comes over her at such moments, but that she just tears into someone and doesn't stop when she sees she's hurting them, not until she's "ripped to them shreds" and "there is just nothing left of them at all."

Kinda like Mr Hyde coming out of Dr. Jekyll, eh?

Proposing marriage is a man's most vulnerable moment, so I suppose her teeth and claws couldn't resist a chance to do maximum damage at this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for trampling someone to make herself feel grand.

I've since compared notes with that man who got ripped to pieces and reduced to tears for professing his love to her and asking her to marry him. All you see is her wide-open maw when the dragon inside roars out, because it seems to fill the whole room. So I know that the heartrending pleas of a dying mother that would draw pity from a stone turned this narcissist TO stone. They touched nothing human in her.

That's how this woman treated her dying mother in the dark. Compare it with the elaborate fraud she put on about it in the light of day.

I suppose this woman thinks such opportunities are a chance to redeem herself for having a soft underbelly herself when she was a little girl and her narcissistic Daddy eviscerated her for it. He'd be satisfied with her now if he could see her being just like him — ripping the soft underbelly of anyone who makes the mistake of letting her at it.

Then this narcissist got her only sibling disowned and threatened with the police for trying to see their father. Within six months she had sole possession of the house and property. During this time she started gobbing make-up on her image a mile thick: she suddenly became very religious, started going to daily mass, started teaching Sunday School, started taking Communion to elderly shut-ins, and carved out for herself a widespread reputation as a devoted caretaker of her helpless, aged father. And she devotedly tended to her mother's grave.

And so, appearances can be deceiving. Narcissists are a Mr. Hyde hiding behind a Dr. Jekyll facade. How they behave behind closed doors in the dark, is radically different from how they behave in the light of day. It took no great intelligence for this woman to construct her facade. Narcissists are con artists who go to extraordinary lengths to portray themselves as the very antithesis of what they really are. In every detail.

That's how they "block the kick," as one narcissist I know of puts it. It's how they make sure nobody will believe their victims' complaints. They cover every dirty deed with a grand display that makes them seem like the kind of person who would never do precisely that kind of thing. Moreover, since they identify with their image instead of their true selves, they think that by doctoring this particular aspect of their image they expunge that particular sin. And when you consider that they've been at this game since they were six or seven years old, they've had a lot of training and experience and are very good at it.

This diabolical behavior is so characteristic of narcissists that, if you know a person is a narcissist, you can tell what she's done in the dark from she does in the light of day. Her true image will be the exact negative of her projected image in every respect. If she acts as though she on someone's side, her knife is in their back. If she acts as though she's tenderly caring for someone, she's abusing them. If she says she's afraid of someone, she's contemplating murdering them. And so on.

© 2004 � 2008, Kathleen Krajco � all rights reserved worldwide.
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It was last updated on 2/23/2008.
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