Stalked: Your Getaway – Planning and Executing It
Victims of abuse should prepare thoroughly before leaving their abuser, especially if the partner is violent and paranoid. The province of Alberta in Canada recommends copying all important documents and storing them in a safe place, making a safety plan, and taking essential items such as prescribed medication, personal hygiene products, and money. If fleeing with children, bring their various medications, favorite toy or blanket, and clothing. It is also important to secure transportation, agree on codes and signals with friends and family, and avoid confrontation over the departure.
Domestic Violence Shelters
Before moving into a domestic violence shelter, it is important to ensure that the shelter’s philosophy aligns with your own. Check if the shelter caters to specific ethnic minorities or neighborhoods, and if you can abide by the house rules. Gather intelligence and be informed before making a move, and talk to battered women who spend time in the shelter. Ensure that the shelter is secure, and that it provides counseling for abusers as well as ongoing support for their victims. Remember that shelters are temporary solutions, and plan your life after the shelter.
Narcissist: Is He or Isn’t He?
Narcissism is a spectrum of behaviors, from healthy to pathological, and the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual specifies nine diagnostic criteria for narcissistic personality disorder (NPD). A malignant narcissist is someone who has NPD and wreaks havoc on themselves and their surroundings. They feel grandiose and self-important, exaggerate accomplishments, and demand recognition as superior without commensurate achievements. They require excessive admiration, adulation, attention, and affirmation, and are interpersonally exploitative, devoid of empathy, and constantly envious of others.
Self-Aware Narcissist: Still a Narcissist
Narcissism is pervasive and defines the narcissist’s waking moments, infiltrating and permeating their dreams. Narcissists only admit to a problem when they are abandoned, destitute, and devastated. Narcissistic behaviors can be modified using talk therapy and pinpointed medication conditioning, but there is a huge difference between behavior modification and a permanent alteration of a psychodynamic landscape. Narcissism may improve with age, but it is rare.
Narcissists Have Emotions
Narcissists do have emotions, but they tend to repress them so deeply that they play no conscious role in their lives or conduct. The narcissist’s positive emotions come bundled with very negative ones, and they become phobic of feeling anything lest it be accompanied by negative emotions. The narcissist is reduced to experiencing down-steerings in their soul that they identify to themselves and to others as emotions. Narcissists are not envious of others for having emotions, they disdain feelings and sentimental people because they find them to be weak and vulnerable.
Compulsive Narcissist
Narcissism is an all-pervasive obsessive-compulsive disorder, with the narcissist seeking to recreate and reenact old traumas and conflicts with figures of primary importance in their life, mainly their parents. The narcissist develops a unique defense mechanism, constructing a story, a narrative, and another self, which is perfect, brilliant, omnipotent, omniscient, and omnipresent. The child worships this new deity, succumbing to what they perceive to be the false self’s wishes and needs, making sacrifices of narcissistic supply to the false self. The narcissist’s compulsive acts are merely an element in their complicated personality, and shaving them off does nothing to ameliorate the narcissist’s titanic inner struggle for survival.
Over-sexed: Histrionic Personality Disorder and Narcissism
Histrionic personality disorder is more commonly diagnosed in women, leading to questions about whether it is a real mental health problem or a reflection of a patriarchal society. Histrionics crave attention and are uncomfortable when not at the center of it, similar to narcissists. They are preoccupied with physical appearance and sexual conquests, and often act flirtatious and seductive. Histrionics are enthusiastic and emotional, but their behavior can be exhausting and off-putting to others.
Narcissists and Negativistic (Passive-Aggressive) Personality Disorder
The negativistic, passive-aggressive personality disorder is not yet recognized by the committee that is cobbling together the diagnostic and statistical manual. People diagnosed with a negativistic passive-aggressive personality disorder resemble narcissists in some important respects. Despite the obstructive role they play, passive-aggressives feel unappreciated, underpaid, cheated, discriminated against, and misunderstood. Passive-aggressives may be sullen, irritable, impatient, argumentative, cynical, skeptical, and contrarian.
Labile: Borderline Personality Disorder and Narcissism
Borderline personality disorder is a controversial diagnosis that is often found among women. Some scholars believe it is a culture-bound pseudo-syndrome invented by men to serve a patriarchal and misogynistic society. Patients diagnosed with the disorder have chaotic lives and stormy, short-lived, and unstable relationships. Borderlines are impulsive, reckless, and display wildly fluctuating self-worth, self-image, and affect.
Antisocial Psychopath and Sociopath: Antisocial Personality Disorder
Psychopathy is a personality disorder that is characterized by callousness, ruthlessness, extreme lack of empathy, deficient impulse control, deceitfulness, and sadism. It is frequently ameliorated with age and tends to disappear altogether by the fourth or fifth decade of life. Psychopathy may be hereditary and has a strong genetic, biochemical, and neurological component. Psychopaths are abusively exploitative and incapable of true love and intimacy, and they are irresponsible, unreliable, vindictive, and hold grudges forever.