Wow Bridey! That guy was freakin' dangerous! How awful for you. Don't be so hard on yourself. They get us hooked on them first. Everything looks peachy. Then the bad stuff starts showing up. But since we're soooooooo in love with these charmers, we figure, how could there be anything wrong with them? We love them because they're so wonderful. There must be something wrong with us. We must have done something. They're so perfect and all. (or have been) So, along with their devaluing us, we devalue ourselves, inch by inch until we are immobilized. In my case, I was not immobilized and I had enough self esteem to be strong. But not so much that I didn't get out sooner. It wasn't until I became educated on this subject and realized that he had it without a doubt and that was why, why, why...all my questions answered... that I started to get strong. I hung around too long too, about a yr. and a half after the weird stuff started, two years total. This was a guy before, not this jerk who this post is about. This jerk looks like a saint next to your guy and this other guy who had NPD. Anyhow, once I became enlightened about NPD, I realized what had been going on and that I was basically brainwashed. I cut the rope I was hanging myself on and pulled myself up by my bootstraps.
How does an otherwise nice mature person resort to violence and name calling at the slightest conflict?
Because the otherwise nice mature person is not the guy's real self. If your guy had NPD, for example. (he probably didn't but there are some classic signs and that is one of them) But even if not that disorder, a looser jerk will be similar in some ways. NPD individuals (mostly men) have two selves, the real guy and fake guy. Fake guy is wonderful and charming
at first. Real guy is a black hole who is replaced by fake guy, who is merely a reflection of other people whom he has observed and learned almost his whole life how to act like, how to respond to things. If someone makes a joke and other people around laugh, then fake guy knows that he should laugh. If you tell him so and so died, he say's, in a level voice "well, he shouldn't have smoked." He shows little emotion. (because he has no empathy at all) He has learned to copy reactions from people, but he gets a lot of them wrong so weird inappropriate responses pop out. He looks through sometimes as if you aren't there and if you do not give him constant adulation, admiration, attention, he becomes injured, wounded and either depressed or goes into a full blown rage. If he doesn't get enough of this supply which makes him feel like he exists, he rages because without it, he loses fake guy and all that's left is real guy who is nothing but a black hole. His real self long since became obliterated and replaced by fake guy. But fake guy can melt away without narcissistic supply constantly coming in. He is grandiose, better than anyone about everything and has to be the center of attention. Most people who act like they're so good at every single thing are just insecure and are over compensating. But the NPD person really does think they're all that because they've actually redesigned themselves over the course of years, usually starting about adolescence.
The "victim" feels like she has to walk on egg shells, but doesn't quite realize that she's doing that at first. You scratch your head and mutter to yourself, "something isn't quite right" but you love the person so you keep on going...I mean the list goes on. It's way too much to comprehend in one sitting. But it is possible that your guy had that or maybe the usual reasons for such an anger problem. Did he have weird, inappropriate responses to things? And a look of underlying anger just below the surface a lot of the time and for things no one on the plannet would ever be peeved about?
Well, this is way off topic. Sorry, but isn't it weird and interesting....and when you really think about, super pathetic, really sad actually. And these NPD people cannot get help, the prognosis is very poor because they know more than their psychiatrists and they only go to see them for depression. Other than that, how could anything be flawed in them? They have an extremely inflated, grandiose image of themselves. An image. That's why it's called narcissistic personality disorder. Everyone has some narcissistic traits. That is called healthy narcissim and it's necessary for survival. You have to love yourself and care for yourself. But this disorder is where the person doesn't actually love himself. He loaths his real self and so has obliterated it and replaced it with the fake self....completely replaced it. The weird things, the fake stuff is not consciously planned out. Like if we need to fake out someone at one time or another, we think about how to do it. These people do not have to think because it is virtually their new self. And it's all made up of images, reflexions. Weird, huh.
