Some time ago, I was involved in a relationship with someone who was a narcissist. As the word is more commonly used as a slur and not diagnosis, I have to clarify what this means: I would happily make a multi-thousand-dollar bet that were she to ever seek clinical treatment, and she told her clinician the truth, she would be diagnosed with narcissistic personality disorder (NPD).
To be diagnosed with narcissistic personality disorder, a person must be diagnosed by a clinician with at least five of nine symptoms, ones which include “a grandiose sense of self-importance,” “a lack of empathy,” “exploitation of others,” etc.
Not all narcissists are psychopaths but almost all psychopaths are narcissists. Psychopathy is clinically termed "antisocial personality disorder," and to be diagnosed with APD, a person must be determined by a clinician to have at least three of seven symptoms which include “engaging in deceitfulness (lying, using aliases, not paying off debts),” “repeated failure to follow social norms resulting in grounds for arrest,” etc.
My ex had all of the traits that you would need to diagnose someone as having NPD. It is arguable that she had at least four of the traits that are necessary to diagnose someone with APD. When someone can be diagnosed with NPD and APD together, like my ex might be, they can be clinically termed a "narcissistic psychopath."
All of this is by way of saying that, as you might imagine by the term, I've seen some shit. I must decline to relate any particular stories out of concern for her privacy and mine (and embarrassment), but I can confirm that such people are maddening, frightening, and deranging.
As a result of the disease, she does not interact with reality like a neurotypical person. Instead, she lives in an archipelago of fantasy worlds in each which she believes that she is the only living entity, a kind of God, and the rest of us exist as supporting actors. She assumes an entirely different role in each of these worlds and she works ceaselessly to avoid overlap between them. In practice, this works itself out as an authoritarian compartmentalization of friends; one set cannot be allowed to meet the other, lest the entire enterprise be toppled. She cannot behave consistently in any individual world due to the lies she must tell people in that world about her others. Her deceptions and manipulations are in service to not revealing to herself that she is living in fantasy, because reality is just too painful, and she cannot cope with it.
Our relationship was chaos. My ex told lies constantly. She denied that she was lying with convincing earnestness. She could not hold a job. She did not understand money or business. If she felt entitled to a thing, she sometimes took it if it was not given to her. She sometimes weaponized peoples' sympathy for her against them and harmed them when they tried to help her. She was sometimes violent. She believed in literal magic and wore the cloaks of various spiritualities to act it out. She displayed symptoms of something like a schizophrenia, splitting personalities between vulnerable little girl one day and sadistic madwoman the next. She was convinced of her own absolute superiority despite compelling evidence to the contrary.
You might believe I am exaggerating. I am not.
The root cause was heartbreaking. She had a horrible childhood filled with abuse, and, as a result, she emotionally stopped growing somewhere around the age of a first-grader. Although she presented as an adult and moved around the world convincingly miming one, she was not. Although chronologically in her thirties, in emotional terms, she was a terrified child. Any attempt to help her was met with increased symptoms of the disease: manipulation, lying, entitlement, distortions of reality, gaslighting, etc. She was a hermetically sealed box of unfixable. Whomever did this to her should be jailed.
You might imagine what my responses to these symptoms were. It was not pretty. At the time, I had no experience dealing with narcissism and had no way to make sense of her behavior. It would never had occurred to me that she was “a narcissist” because she was not loud, nor did she ever seem to have to be in control of a conversation.
The world conspired to make her this way, it was not her fault. I hope whomever made her this way eventually gets what they deserve, and I hope, however unlikely, that she finds peace. But, at the time I was with her, it posed a problem. My solution to the problem — and the only real solution to anyone with the same problem — was to figure out a way to avoid being deranged by her. In my case, it meant splitting with her. In order to stop being deranged, I had to take positive action to get away from her.
Having had the experience has given me a set of perspectives that feels valuable. What happened in our relationship was so outside of my conception of what could happen that when it happened, it expanded my mind enough to possibly better understand the world. So I'll blather on about that understanding.
I think the the perverse stations we occupy in our contemporary political and public lives can be explained through the lens of clinically diagnosed narcissism better than almost any other lens.
I believe that Trump is a narcissist. He is often referred to colloquially as a narcissist in the media. I agree with the diagnosis. But somehow people seem to believe that branding him a narcissist is a moral judgment, and that the judgment itself is in some way useful. It is not. Mouthing the word is absolutely useless and counterproductive unless you understand what it means. Being a narcissist does not make him a bad person. He is not. He just is. He is who he is, who he will always be, like waves against a shoreline. He does not share your morals. Your judgment is useless. Your righteous anger is pointless. Once you believe this, you will know the key to ending his relevance.
Narcissists will never seek help, and even if they do, the slipperiness of the disease paints a grim picture of any conceivable path towards becoming more neurotypical. Their current state is their permanent station. They are largely unfixable.
Someone with narcissistic personality disorder cannot be talked out of their narcissism, a narcissist cannot be judged out of their narcissism, nor punished out their of narcissism. Coaxing, judging, and punishing a narcissist will leave the narcissist still a narcissist. In fact, this coaxing, judging, and punishment might cause the narcissism to grow and become more potent, acting as a "supply". If the narcissist was denied this supply, he or she would still be a narcissist, but would be less grandiose, less convinced of his or her superiority, less powerful, and less dangerous.
While I was with my ex, there were times when, if any of you saw me in the moment, that you would have thought unironically “oh my, he is a crazy person.” You would have taken a look at a freeze frame of some unlikely situation that we had found ourselves in and branded me in your mind as forever unlikeable and perhaps even an irredeemable force of evil. And delta being privy to the whole story, or otherwise being able to gain some rounded understanding of what was happening, your instinct to do this would not be wrong. In those moments, I was a fucking crazy person. I was deranged. That I had been driven crazy by an ex is irrelevant, a detail uninteresting to the observer in the frozen frame.
Narcissists gain their power through codependents. They often derive energy and strength by driving the codependent absolutely bugfuck bonkers crazy. Responding to a narcissist with your own derangement never causes their behavior to change. Derangement is often the desired goal. Your derangement, while seeming righteous, will almost never damage the narcissist, but will always damage you. The consequences of derangement are almost always more dire than simply allowing the narcissist to "win" (which, ironically, they do not). The ways that you display your righteous anger will later only cause you shame and make you weaker. And they will cause the narcissist to become more narcissistic.
If causing your negative response was unintentional, the negative response itself usually just convinces them that they are special. They may not even believe you exist. They might believe they've cooked you up in their head. Your human-noises, to them, are the soundtrack of a game between the only two people that they care about: them and them. The drama you create just adds to a mildly interesting inner fantasy. Your condemnations never communicate the moral valence you intend, because they do not share your morals.
If causing your negative response was intentional, then, well. They got what they wanted. You don't need to understand why they want that thing, you just need to understand that they want it, they got it, and that getting it makes them more powerful.
Before a codependent understands narcissism, it feels so right to push back against a narcissist, to accuse, to judge, to mock, to shame, to use their own tactics against them ("see how it feels?!"). But once he or she understand how a narcissist works, a codependent begins to have a choice. He or she can choose to continually be deranged by the narcissist. Or he or she can recognize their very real part in the chaos caused by their narcissistic relationships, and stop becoming deranged.
In the personal sphere, the derangement of a codependent is simply ineffective and embarrassing. Its worst manifestations can cause the codependent shame and guilt and can amplify other emotional and mental problems. At its worst, it can be ugly and nasty. But, in a public sphere, it is downright dangerous. The derangement caused by a narcissist in the public sphere has additional social cost to the cost of private derangement, and the cost is downrange derangement.
While the primary derangement of a codependent has its understandable origin in the actions of the narcissist, the derangement itself ripples out downrange when it's in public. The primary derangement causes a secondary wave of derangement. And a tertiary. The derangement waves feed back on themselves, creating a feedback loop of derangement even more powerful than the sum of their parts. The energy potential of each wave is vast. Left unchecked, a runaway nuclear derangement chain reaction may occur.
You become Donald Trump's codependent when you become publicly upset by something he or one of his proxies does. You voluntarily enter into a form of narcissistic abuse when you do this. When you behave like a maniac when he does something insane, it does not hurt him. When you are toppled by an ocean wave, you don't get angry at the wave; the waves don't care about you, they don't even know you exist. The same is true of Donald Trump.
But unlike against an ocean wave, which is more powerful than you but doesn't care about you at all, you actually have power in your relationship with a narcissist. Narcissists live for your derangement. Baiting for derangement is the goal. You are their "supply." They cannot get away with what they do without you. It is only as a result of your derangement that they can continue to do what they do. It as if they are an ocean wave that simply reduces itself to a trickling stream once you exit the water.
As a codependent, you have power. In fact, you are the only one who has any power in the situation. Your control is absolute. No one else has any.
Exit the water.
Trump won in 2016 because he deranged enough well-meaning people, whom, in their derangement behaved like complete and utter assholes. Their derangement rippled out across the landscape, across television, across social media, and became exponentially amplified. The election caused a shaken postapocalyptic snow globe of derangement. It is still on display, a global storm.
It is difficult to fault a codependent when they first become deranged. They haven't had enough experience to understand how the narcissist works, or maybe they just don't know that he or she is one. But once they know that they are dealing with a narcissist, and they know the narcissist cannot change, any continued derangement is no longer caused by the narcissist. It is caused by the codependent. And the codependent is also responsible for any downrange derangement.
We've had enough time to understand how this all works. The blame can no longer be with Trump. If Trump wins in 2020 (the election is three days hence, as I write this), it will be the fault of the deranged, not Trump’s. And if they burn the country down when he wins, it will be because they have become so deranged, and perhaps themselves have turned into what they claim to hate.
Current signs of primary derangement include:
a call to end police (the call-sign of which is "ACAB", "all cops are bitches")
within the call to end police, a call to bring into being within the U.S. a utopian communist state
undending protests which see daily property destruction
cover provided online to destructive protesters by well-meaning but useful idiots
"end justifies the means" thinking; unconscionable acts disguised as unadorned good, such as baiting cops and militia into using force in order to play the victim, calls for censorship, calls to punch people whom have been judged "nazis"
inventing reasons to call people whom in your heart you know are not (or at least you can't be sure are, because you've never met them) slurs like “racist,” “<x>phobe”, etc.
propping up discredited stories like the "Afghan Russian bounty"
These primary derangement cause secondary derangements in people who otherwise might have been classified "normal" before becoming politically involved.
Secondary derangements I see include:
politically detached people voting what they consider least-worst ("at least he will uphold law and order") despite Trump’s clear incompetence
dudes with military-style rifles in my town acting as "protection" against property damage during protests
Online popularity of crazy-ass "patriots" who are themselves psychopathic narcissists
Qanon-style conspiracy theories
Tertiary derangements I see include:
media outlets making bank on your outrage, amplifying it beyond reason, using it as a huge engine of commerce.
huge corporations cashing in "woke culture" as if it wasn't just a naked cash grab, and had anything to do with a common good.
I'm not claiming that any of these derangements go one way. The derangement is omnidirectional, and endless, and each expression of derangement feeds back into the other. It does not matter which derangement caused which. It does not matter. The only way out of it is to stop being deranged. The only way to end narcissistic abuse is to stop being deranged. There is no other way out.
Being right and getting closure is incompatible with ending a narcissistic relationship. It does not matter that you’re right. It does not matter. You will never get any closure. Part of the disease is that the narcissist cannot offer any closure. It is a matter of self-preservation; to give you closure or admit that they were wrong would literally end them. You will never get an apology. Instead of allowing this to derange you further, you just have to walk away. Step out of the water.
Your online outrage is useless; a hundred times worse than useless. Your show of solidarity with people who are themselves deranged is a form of downrange derangement. Stop replying daily with outraged snark to politicians and movie stars who express opinions others than yours. Stop calling people out to dogpile and shame them, or supporting people who do. Stop "raising awareness" of issues that you barely yourself give a shit about. Stop trying to demonstrate online to your tribe just how aligned you are with them by performatively condemning another tribe. Stop being so fucking smug; if there is one thing that is a derangement-mother-of-all-bombs it is smugness.
Stop being a victim. You don't have to do this. You can get better. You don't have to be this codependent.
If you already don't do these things, and you are simply silient, good for you! That's much better, it works! You are not adding to the derangement. However, showing opinions which are reasonable is even better. Asking for civility and and end to the derangement must be done. Overcome your fear of saying what you know is right if you believe it can end the derangement.