How to spot a narcissist.
Narcissism or narcissistic personality disorder is a mental disorder. The scale of this behavior can vary greatly and the narcissist could be your parent, your spouse, child, boss, coworker or neighbor. For years, people would only look up or educate themselves about mental disorder if someone they knew was displaying odd behaviors or had been diagnosed with some kind of mental illness.
Tonight I am here to answer your calls and to help you learn how to spot a narcissist. As a former victim of a narcissist abuse, I hope I can help you think differently and find the answers that you’re looking for. I’m not a doctor. I’m not a therapist. I speak from a position of having been a target of narcissists.
I don’t use technical terms. I use terms that I know, recognize and understand. I have learned that people have emotional disorders because what happened to them during their childhood. These childhood patterns can change their lives forever. Events that happened are going to shape your person’s behavior and in that you can be categorized into like the good guy mental illness or the bad guy of mental illness and those can happen in your adult years. One of the labels given to the good guy behavior is codependency. I, like these people are people pleasers and we suffer from a lack of self love and we put others first and very often to their own detriment. As with any mental disorder, there’s a spectrum of symptoms and patterns displaying in a varying degree of intensity. Narcissist, sociopath and psychopath are the labels that are given to the bad guy behaviors. These are struck hard for their identity because they don’t really have one. They suffer from an inability to show love and empathy for anyone.
A popular notion of a narcissist is someone who likes to look at themselves in the mirror but it’s very limited and it only scratches the surface of what narcissistic behaviors are. Narcissists, sociopaths and psychopaths live lives of lies and they use people as a means to an end. Resulting victims of this type of abuse are called supply and I didn’t know this but now I do. Used for supply can vary quite a bit but the common uses are sex, money, control and fame. Narcissists are chameleons and they can mirror the characteristics of their targets. That’s another word for people who have been narcissistically abused as targets, supply targets. If you say that you like cupcakes, they like cupcakes. If you like to cook, they might like to do that too. If you compete in fitness challenges then that will become their new pastime too. What this does it allows the illusion to grow of them being your perfect soulmate or romantic partner. Now, this being said, what I am talking about here is primarily to do with the romantic partners that are narcissists.
In Dr. Craig Malkin’s book ‘Rethinking Narcissism’ is something called the Three E’s and these are things that we should look for when we’re looking at how to spot them and what the signs are. So first is exploitation. Its meaning is an action or fact of treating someone unfairly in order to benefit from their work or the action of making use of benefiting supply. They do exactly.. exactly what they have to do in order to get their needs met and this may include creating false relationships to get money, sex and status but people are completely disposable to a narcissist because they’re not capable of a real relationship with anybody, even their children, they are hundred percent fake. That’s entitlement. Entitlements are what we’re going to talk about now and entitlement means the fact of having a right to something inherently deserving of privileges or special treatment.
A narcissist acts as if the world owes them everything and their goal is to collect what they want without caring about who they step on in the process. You know the type. The Third E, Dr. Craig Malkin wrote in his book is called empathy. The actual meaning of empathy is the ability to understand and shared feelings of another and impairment or inability to show or feel empathy. Doctor say that empathy is a choice but the narcissist is not willing to be vulnerable because of childhood of traumas. My mother was a narcissist among others that had been in my life but I think I understand it more when I look at how she became who she is. Her mother was killed, murdered in front of her when she was twelve and then she was raised in like twenty six foster care homes. So I think that was her way of preserving herself. We all have baggage. We all have something that happened to us. I’m not saying forgive them because you can choose good over evil but that’s what I figured out about my mom and yesterday was the one year anniversary of her death and so that was a sad day.
Anyway, here are some other things you should look for. A narcissist has a very charming personality and they use it as a form of manipulation. Everyone that they charm thinks that they are wonderful but they used this charm to get what they want and they get it from their families, the victim, friends. Love is among another term that you hear when you are talking about a narcissist and this is a stage in their relationship and it involves constant communication, compliments that are designed to burn the victim into some place back into their relationship. This stage is designed to convince the target that they have found their soul mate but the person that is telling you everything that you like is what they like it’s.. it’s not.. they’re not real and later on it leaves the victim like searching for that person again.
Mirroring is the next step and this behavior is when the person consciously imitates the gestures, speech patterns, attitude of someone else. They become everything that you like and they can be targets that love everything that you do. It’s a deliberate manipulation to gain trust. Crazy. Triangulation is when the narcissist manages two people, usually rivals and themselves into a space where they hear bad things about each other. He tells lies. The narcissist can be male or female. Tell us lies about each other to the other people so that they can keep them from ever speaking to one another. An example would be like a man. His new girlfriend and his ex-girlfriend or a mom and two sisters. This tactic keeps the rivals from wanting to meet and it protects the narcissists lies. Watch my other videos for that.
The grand finale is something that you need to understand if you know anybody that has been through a breakup or just out, if it was really a relationship with a family member. That’s not right. This is really a big sign that they have been with the narcissist. Usually their relationship end with the narcissist and goes out with a bang, crazy, unexplained, unwarranted behaviors that destroy the victim because of the horrific length a narcissists will go to break a relationship, more than that to destroy the victim. Divorcing a narcissist is often called a high conflict divorce. Again, if you have somebody that has had every trick in the book pulled on them as a weapon, that’s another sign and so many people think that they will have known that the narcissist was a narcissist all along. Most victims never know. Flying monkeys are when the narcissist gets coworkers and family and friends and they conned them into believing that the narcissist is the victim in every situation, but really they’ve created them. Now, what this does is the victims loses their support system and it.. it’s usually like the last straw before they finally break.
Now, I should have said this first but there are three stages of narcissistic abuse and they are called idealize, de-value and discard. We’ve come to talk about some of the steps that are in these, but I’m going to go through a little bit more. The idealize stage is when they.. a narcissist chooses a target for many reasons but to qualify as a really good one, they are looking for your vulnerabilities. I have a YouTube video on what the vulnerabilities are and you should really watch that because it could show you what might be.. what they saw in you that made you a good target. Anyway, it’s all showing them what you’ve tolerated before and targets you chose because of their status, their attractiveness, their job, their popularity, their success or their love. Once they’ve decided that you hold value as a supply, they’re very vigilant in their pursuit. This is the love bombing stage showering your targets with loving attention and compliments and they will most likely tell you that you’re different than anyone else they’ve been in with.
Okay. The next step is the devaluation of its victims of abuse are often unaware that this has even begun but your intuition niggles at you and we know that something’s not right and or something’s changed but you can’t quite put your finger on it. Now, narcissist play a public and a private game, which really makes it harder to understand because if you’re with narcissist and they’re out in public and they’re holding you on their arm and they’re showing you off and you think that’s real love but it’s part of the game. Expressing your concerns to the narcissist will have them you will turn into the jealous partner and they’ll make you doubt yourself. When he or she becomes cold and uncaring like overnight, this is what we call when the mask falls and you’re going to see the real person in there. They start to make excuses and if you don’t accept their excuses then you’re deemed crazy. They managed down your expectations from constant contact to next to nothing. I used to call this like the darkness and it was so bizzare to me, so intense and then down. Often this far verbal and emotional abuse is very hurtful.
The last stage of this narcissist abuse is called the discard stage and many victims say that this came out of blue. Everything was fine. Everything was perfect and then the next thing you get a phone call or text or even a friggin Facebook message dismissing you in a cold and hurtful way. In the devaluation phase the narcissist moves from hot to cold and it’s important to know that the narcissist will target your strengths and make them your weakness and this is called a smear campaign. This is when their goal is to bring in someone new. Many victims are thrown into C.P.T.S.T which is post-traumatic stress syndrome but complex with a C in the beginning and the victims suffer greatly trying to put their lives back together.
