Narcissist’s Romantic Jealousy and Possessiveness
Narcissists experience anxiety when they become aware of their possessive and jealous tendencies. Anxiety characterizes all their interactions with the opposite sex, especially in situations where there is a possibility of rejection or abandonment. The narcissist’s envy of their female mate is a result of an unconscious conflict, and they exercise their imagination to justify their negative emotions. Narcissists often strike an unhealthy balance by being emotionally and physically absent, which drives their partner to find emotional and physical gratification outside the relationship.
Narcissists Hate Women, Misogynists
Narcissists view women as objects and use them for both primary and secondary narcissistic supply. They fear emotional intimacy and treat women as property, similar to the mindset of European males in the 18th century. Narcissists frustrate women by teasing them and then leaving them, and they hold women in contempt, choosing submissive partners whom they disdain for being below their intellectual level. The narcissist projects his own behavior and traits onto women.
Victims’ Malignant Optimism and Rescue Fantasies
Victims of narcissistic abuse often exhibit a form of magical thinking, where they refuse to believe that some things are unsolvable or inevitable. They see hope in every fluctuation and are deceived by their need to believe in the ultimate victory of good. This is a defense mechanism against the realization that humans are insignificant in an indifferent universe. Narcissists abuse and leverage this need for order and meaning, using it to maltreat and harass their victims.
Narcissist Reacts to Criticism, Disagreement, Disapproval
Narcissists are hypervigilant and perceive every disagreement as criticism and every critical comment as complete and humiliating rejection. They react defensively, becoming indignant, aggressive, and cold. The narcissist minimizes the impact of the disagreement and criticism on himself by holding the critic in contempt, by diminishing the stature of the discordant conversant. When the disagreement or criticism or disapproval or approbation become public, the narcissist tends to regard them as narcissistic supply.
Narcissistic Defences and Personality
Narcissistic personalities are prone to depression, anxiety, shame, self-destructiveness, or rage when their habitual gratifications are threatened. Narcissism is an evolved version of the psychological defense mechanism known as splitting, where the narcissist either idealizes or devalues objects. The narcissist is obsessed with securing a reliable and continuous source of admiration, adulation, affirmation, and attention, and will become an evil person if they cannot secure positive supply. Narcissistic personalities slide the meanings of events to place themselves in a better light and maintain logical consistency while minimizing evil or weakness and exaggerating innocence or control.
Mourning the Narcissist
Victims of narcissistic abuse often struggle to let go of the idealized figure they fell in love with at the beginning of the relationship. When the relationship ends, they experience a cycle of bereavement and grief, including denial, rage, sadness, and acceptance. Denial can take many forms, including pretending the narcissist is still part of their lives or developing persecutory delusions. Rage can be directed at the narcissist, other facilitators of the loss, oneself, or be pervasive. Sadness is a paralyzing sensation that slows one down and enshrouds everything in the grave veil of randomness and chance. Gradual acceptance leads to renewed energy and the narcissist being transformed into a narrative, another life experience, or even a tedious cliché.
Narcissist: Masochism, Self-destruction, Self-defeat
Narcissists exhibit self-defeating and self-destructive behaviors that are pernicious and subtle. These behaviors include self-punishing, guilt-purging behaviors, extracting behaviors, default behaviors, and frustrating, negativistic, and passive-aggressive behaviors. Narcissists are terrorized by intimacy and interpret it as co-dependence, emotional strangulation, and imprisonment. They are also fiercely independent and want to be free to frustrate themselves by inflicting mental havoc on their human environment.
Narcissist: Confabulations, Lies
Confabulation is a common human trait, but the distinction between reality and fantasy is never lost. However, the narcissist’s very self is a piece of fiction, concocted to fend off hurt and pain and to nurture the narcissist’s grandiosity. The narcissist fails in his reality test and is unable to distinguish the actual from the imagined, the real from the fantasized. The narcissist’s countenance, no disagreement, no alternative points of view, no criticism. To him, his confabulation is reality.
Narcissist’s Cognitive Deficits
Narcissists lack empathy and are unable to relate to others, instead withdrawing into a universe populated by avatars. They are incapable of holding an external dialogue and all their dialogues are completely internal. The narcissist attributes their failures and mistakes to circumstances and external causes, while regarding their successes and achievements as proofs of their own omnipotence and omniscience. The narcissist pays a dear price for these distortions of perception, developing paranoid ideation and fading the reality test.
Domestic Family Violence and Battering: Up or Down?
Domestic violence has declined in the last decade, but the number of fatal incidents has not. Rates of domestic violence and intimate partner abuse vary widely across societies and cultures. Mental problems of some offenders play a part in domestic violence, but cultural, social, and historical factors are the decisive determinants. Women are most likely to experience domestic violence and abuse, especially those who are young, poor, minorities, divorced, separated, or single.