Narcissistic Personality - Seriousness of NPD

Seriousness of NPD

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The first human being who hurled an insult instead of a stone was the founder of civilization.

— Sigmund Freud

Just because narcissists seldom get arrested doesn't mean they are harmless. It doesn't even mean that a narcissist has committed no crime.

What's more, people in general, and many healthcare professionals (who have no excuse for such ignorance), seem to think along the lines of that old childish chant Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me. Hence, toward even the most sadistic mental cruelty, they seem to take the referee's stance: No harm, no foul.

No harm, eh? I agree with Sam Vaknin (see below): I think people are so callous because they (nearly everyone) is guilty of being a bystander for bullying. By pretending that humiliation is no big deal then, they "cleanse" their consciences.

One of the Oldest Tricks in The Book: Make light of a weighty matter.

Perhaps you have done it too. In the schoolyard, the family, the workplace, and the public forum. Nearly everyone has been a participant in abuse by consent to it; virtually everyone has blamed and alienated the victim, for fear of the bully's wrath. So, I too think this marvelous collective obtuseness is an outward sign of suppressed collective guilt.

For whatever reason, most people, including many mental healthcare professionals, think mental cruelty is nothing compared to a physical blow, which they duly abhor, even if in self-defense by a victim. That notion is deplorably simplistic.

Recently, advocates of the sexually abused have won some consideration of its victims, but society's marvelous obtuseness has somehow managed to unsee that sexual abuse is just a form of psychological abuse. Result? They still make nothing of psychological abuse, unless the abuser touches you sexually.

I know of a high school counselor who blamed the victim for it. Whenever a teacher came to him about a student being picked on and alienated from the rest of a class, his reply was that he would "have a talk with" the ringleaders but that we had to understand that there wasn't much he could do about it because the victim was . . . you know . . ."vulnerable."

That attitude is all too common in schools. The moral fault found is in the victim's vulnerability, not the abuser's conduct.

Because hard evidence and witnesses are lacking, making prosecution impossible, people conveniently act as though psychological abuse is just something people have a right to do to you. Wrong, denying you human treatment is denying you a human right.

Whether it can be prosecuted or not, it should be punished with opprobrium, not winked at, by those who know it's going on

Anyone who has been the victim of both physical and psychological abuse (emotional and verbal abuse) will tell you that the psychological abuse is worse. It does damage. Psychological injuries are real, and they often require treatment. Much more treatment than a broken nose.

If insurance companies had to pay for that treatment, and pay for quality treatment (= treatment by practitioners as highly qualified as those who treat the body must be), psychological abuse would stop being nothing, and bullies would lose their de facto right to psychologically abuse others, even to the point of driving their prey to suicide.

Let's hear what a narcissist himself has to say on the subject:

Is sexual abuse worse than emotional abuse? Is verbal abuse less deleterious than physical abuse (beatings)? Somehow, the professional literature implies that there is a hierarchy with sexual mistreatment at its nadir. ...Yet, these distinctions are spurious. One's mental space is as important to one's healthy development and proper adult functioning as one's body. Indeed. the damage in sexual abuse is hardly corporeal. It is the psychological intrusion, coercion, and the demolition of nascent boundaries of the self that inflict the most damage. Abuse is a form of long-term torture usually inflicted by one's nearest and dearest. It is a grievous violation of trust and it leads to disorientation, fear, depression, and suicidal ideation. ...The abused are deformed by the abuser both overtly - many develop mental health disorders and dysfunctional behaviors - and, more perniciously, covertly. The abuser, like some kind of alien life form, invades and colonizes the victim's mind and becomes a permanent presence. In a way, psychological abuse - emotional and verbal - is harder to "erase" and "deprogram". ...Social attitudes don't help. While sexual and physical abuse are slowly coming to the open and being recognized as the scourges that they are - psychological abuse is still largely ignored. ...Abusers find refuge in the general disdain for the weak and the vulnerable which is the result of suppressed collective guilt. ...The professional community is no less to blame. Emotional and verbal abuse are perceived and analyzed in "relative" terms - not as the absolute evils that they are.

— Sam Vaknin, The Gradations of Abuse

So, it's time to start appreciating the seriousness of NPD.

Besides, many, if not most, narcissists are physically violent. But physical abuse in the home, or by siblings, seldom gets reported.

Furthermore, NPD makes those who have it predators who bully, slander, calumniate, and otherwise use others to feed on, like the mythical character of a vampire does. Not harmless. NPD is a serious threat to the health and well being of others, especially any children or employees at the narcissist's mercy.

Psychopaths and other narcissists leave a trail of human wreckage in their wake.

First let's notice what they do to their own children. The way they treat their children can pass the curse of this disease to the next generation, often leading one or more their children to become malignant narcissists. In addition, they leave deep psychological scars on all their children, scars that do real damage to their whole lives.

They also abuse their spouses and friends. They are love thieves. They con people, parasitize people, get siblings disinherited, and commit all kinds of theft and extortion, inflicting psychological injury that others end up needing treatment for.

They vaunt themselves on others for the same reason a drunk drinks: to feel better. And like a drunk, they develop a tolerance for their drug. The more powerful they are on you, the more they humiliate you, the better they feel. So they are wanton. They go hog wild and ruin whole lives and careers. They make people social outcasts by spreading vicious lies about them. In positions of power they don't just bully and fire, they blackball. Their bullying or slander in the school or workplace are often crimes but seldom reported.

Your pedophile and child molester are usually a malignant narcissist. And, like all narcissists, they are con artists who get away with it.

For, these spiders commit the perfect crime — the one so incredible nobody believes it. Because it's wanton, bizarrely evil, and targets the last people you'd think the narcissist would want to hurt. So, nobody believes Angelface would do such a thing.

Thus people with NPD enmesh their prey in a web that is a Catch-22: Nobody will believe the victim. In fact, a narcissist often taunts the victim by daring him or her to try to get anyone to believe their complaint.

Indeed, when a victim does report the bizarre brand of unprovoked abuse narcissists dish out, she is sorry. Minds and ears slam shut in her face, because, as she feared, she is assumed to be the crazy one. Unless there is a dead body, rape kit, or X-ray evidence that cannot be ignored, even police dismiss the complaint with a "Now why would anyone do that?"

Unknowing they've ever heard of a motive called "malice."

But they know very well that many people need no reason to commit a crime, that they just do it to do it and even do it for anti-reasons, such as to "punish" the good deed of loving them or being their benefactor.

We all know that there are many twisted people in this world and that twisted people have twisted motives that make no sense to the rest of us. Indeed, the judicial system would get nowhere with the most serious crimes if it didn't acknowledge that malice/predation alone is sufficient motive, an ancient principle of jurisprudence.

In fact, malice is the only motive authorities can ever propose for many purely predatory acts, such as rape or serial murder. When they discover a corpus delicti or a raped woman walks in the door they don't ask, "Now why would anyone do that?" They wouldn't dare. So why don't they stop acting too stupid to know that some people need no real reason to hurt others?

Narcissists can and do control themselves when someone's good opinion is sought — in front of a judge, for instance — and are skilled at presenting a respectable, even admirable, public face; some are actually meek and mild in public. Most of us who've lived with narcissists have had the experience of being disbelieved when we dared to tell what goes on in private; in some ways, we can hardly believe it ourselves. Life with a narcissist is like a bad dream that you can't wake up from. As a child, I used to be dazed by my narcissistic parent's public demeanor — I wanted to take that person home with me or else live our entire family life in the protection of the public eye — so attractive, modest, and sweet that even I could hardly believe that this same person could be the raging fiend I knew at home and had seriously thought, for a while when I was about ten, might be a werewolf. But truthful reports about narcissists' private behavior are often treated as symptoms of psychological problems in the person telling the tale — by naming the problem, you become the person with the problem (and, let's face it, it's more gratifying to work on changing someone responsive than it is to tackle a narcissist). And I'm talking about the experience many of us have had with "the helping professions," including doctors, teachers, clergy, counselors, and therapists. This stuff is hard to talk about in the first place because it's weird, shameful, and horrifying, and then insult is added to injury when we're dismissed as overreacting (how many times have we heard "You're just too sensitive"?), deluded or malicious, as inventing stories, exaggerating, imagining things, misinterpreting — it goes on and on.

— Joanna Ashmun, Narcissistic Personality Disorder: Aftermath

Psychiatrists are in a position to rectify this deplorable state of affairs. First, by treating NPD whenever it walks in their door and, second, by educating law enforcement and the professionals of other 'helping' agencies.

People within the mental health profession are finally speaking out against the failure to take malignant narcissism (NPD) seriously, conveniently con-fusing it with mere (benign) narcissism that is acquired and cultural or situational.

How serious is NPD?

A person with NPD driving an old beater may run a stoplight and blame the victim. How? Because the victim didn't yield the right of way to God Almighty just because of who he is or how old he is or what sex he is or whatever. Why did he bash the victim's car? Because it is a luxury car, not worse than the narcissist's old beater. Next, the big child flees the scene to escape responsibility, heedless of the likely consequences. For, like any child, he cannot think past lunch.

A person with NPD may abuse his wife until she leaves him and then murder her for doing so.

A surgeon with NPD may walk out of surgery to do some banking.

A person with NPD may burn down her house to kill one of her children for insurance money, framing the other for her crime, without a twinge of empathy or conscience.

A 19-year-old may murder his parents when they discover he has gotten 13 credit cards in his father's name and plans to go on a spending spree abroad with them.

Those examples are not fiction: they all have happened. NPD is no minor matter.

I get the impression that psychiatry is stumbling in the dark with NPD. That is understandable with such a mysterious disorder that puts anyone who tries to deal with a narcissist in Catch-22. Also, there has been very little research on NPD to guide mental health workers. But I do not understand how authorities can know that narcissists are two-faced pathological liars and yet be unaware that their self-reports are unreliable.

Consequently, different psychiatrists often diagnose the same patient differently. Also, they tend to look for and find attention-getting behavior in women and diagnose them as histrionic rather than narcissistic, because they do not notice the abusive denial of attention that distinguishes Narcissistic Personality Disorder from Histrionic Personality Disorder. On the other hand, in men they tend to miss the attention-getting behavior altogether unless it's overtly childish. Moreover, they sometimes attribute several personality disorders to the same patient. All this clouds the picture. And, I'm sorry I can't demystify it. Let's hope that someday someone does.

© 2004 � 2008, Kathleen Krajco � all rights reserved worldwide.
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It was last updated on 3/9/2008.
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