August 28, 2003

• A brief aside to leafylady before I get into the topic burning a hole in my mind today:

  
  

  You asked if I had blogged about kicking my sugar addiction.  Oh, yes!  And HOW!  If you will go to the little calendar thingie and look at my very first blog, you’ll see that I started this journal with that addiction in mind.

  
  

  Yesterday, your question reminded me of a neglected ongoing project, and I went back and worked on it some more.  I worked on it most of the day, and managed to save the first part of that work.  Then, before the job was done I hit a glitch and lost most of it.  I will, sometime, return to indexing the “healing journey” blogs as I did with the memoirs… that will be the Virgo-complete, long, answer to your question.  If you are having an addictive crisis and can’t wait, you can get mucho info from two sources I have used:  the book, End Your Addiction Now and the website www.dietcure.com.

  
  

  Today’s topic is NPD: Narcissistic Personality Disorder.

  
  

  My spouse, soulmate and partner in crime Greyfox has NPD.  He and I have been working at getting him over it.  It wasn’t until he detoxed from his last alcoholic binge that he acknowledged the disorder and recognized how it synergized with his addictions.  For the past three months plus a bit we have been studying the literature on NPD and observing it in Greyfox and others around us.  We have been doing it together for that long, but I had been doing it a few years longer, ever since my daughter drew my attention to it.

  
  

  NPD is widespread and easy to spot in the 12-step addiction support groups we attend.  The psychological literature says that people with NPD often self-medicate.  I get a little tired of writing out “people with…”, but we can’t call them sufferers, victims or patients.  They are short on patience as a rule, and they seldom seek treatment for their disorder.  Those who end up in treatment seldom stay with it very long.  Rather than suffering, they usually tend to inflict suffering on others. 

  
  

  They are usually (but not always) victimizers rather than victims.  One big website devoted to the disorder heads each of its pages, “Should we call them human?”  They lack empathy, and will often rely instead on a set of social axioms to get by.  A narcissist who practices the golden rule can get along well with other narcissists but often has a very hard time with those whose egos are healthier.  One of  Greyfox’s big “AHA!” insights came when he realized why treating me as he wanted me to treat him never worked.  I hate being told what someone thinks I want to hear:  fed pretty ingratiating lies instead of being told the truth.

  
  

  Some of them believe themselves to be above common sense and they indulge in a lot of magical thinking.  They have a lot in common with sociopaths; those diagnoses overlap.  Anyone who loves one of them can probably see the humanity in them.  They have feelings that are very easily hurt.  Psychologists call this “narcissistic injury.”  You can hurt a narcissist’s feelings by treating him like an ordinary human being.  They are hurt when anyone really sees them as they are and tells them what he sees, or simply fails to buy into the false persona they believe in and project.  It hurts them greatly to be disillusioned, because their self-concept is based on an illusion.

  
  

  When couples with NPD pair off together, or when they become friends or associates, they form intense and stormy relationships.  I can think of several short-lived celebrity marriages between pairs of narcissists.  In their good times, they reinforce each other’s grandiosity, give each other narcissistic supply.  When some competition develops, for example when there is only room in the spotlight for one, the one who gets left out takes a narcissistic injury and can react in one of two basic ways:  either rage or ingratiation.

  
  

  Greyfox and I, in our observations, have seen that some people habitually go one way or the other.  The ones who more often rely on ingratiation to get back on the pedestal are usually women or gay men.  The men who tend to take that pacifistic route often have some astrological or familial influences toward peace and harmony.  Perhaps it is not surprising that both large, deep-voiced and well-muscled men and the short, slightly-built “bantam rooster” type men tend to respond to a narcisstic injury with rage rather than ingratiation.

  
  

  This is not to say that women and gay men don’t fly into narcissistic rages.  They do.  Straight men can be ingratiating, too.  We’re noting generalities here.  A personality disorder is not the whole personality.  Personality, the person’s underlying nature, often determines or at least colors how the disorder is expressed.  I have also seen other factors, the same ones that can affect anyone’s mood and reactions, such as low blood sugar or sleep deprivation or “being in love”, affect the way a narcissist chooses to react to a perceived slight. 

  
  

  I enjoy being in this privileged positon as the trusted confidante and therapeutic associate of a highly intelligent and articulate man with NPD, getting the inside view.  Having a self-concept not easily wounded is a big help to me in this.  Even though Greyfox is committed to transcending his addictions and the narcissistic and histrionic personality disorders, he has not yet reached full transcendence.  He still falls into the grandiosity and impracticality sometimes. 

  
  

  Although he almost never takes a narcissistic injury from what I say and do (that’s where the trust comes in on his part–and he knows I love him) he can still be triggered by other people, generally by other narcissists.  And that’s where I come in.  Early on, I asked him to help me come up with a code word or phrase I could use to signal him when I could see that he was falling into some grandiose narcissistic behavior or when he was resisting my attempt to clue him in.  His first suggestion, “no harm, no foul”, would not work for me.  It was just too hard for me to insert it into a conversation with a straight face. 

  
  

  Accidentally, I discovered the magic words.  One time when he was being particularly difficult and the discussion was dragging on and on, I said, “I thought we were supposed to be allies in this.”  He immediately stopped the querelous ingratiating bullshit he was running, his backhanded attempt to lay a guilt trip on me for robbing him of his precious illusions.  On one subsequent occasion, I cut such a head game short with the “allies” line.  We fortunately don’t run into many of those occasions, but I have my magic words ready next time we do.

  
  

  

  • 5:53 pm
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