I was today year’s old when I learned about clinical narcissism.

Well, technically I was yesterday year’s old, but I don’t think that is a saying.

Frankly, given the impact over my entire life, even the statement that I was this year’s old would work.

I grew up around flaming-red-hot-undeniable clinical grade narcissism, but really didn’t know what it meant.

I mean, I had vague awareness that there was some self-centeredness involved, and a tendency to manipulate things to suit their own prioritized wants and needs. My friends and I have used it in active conversation often when discussing someone in our lives (a friend’s husband/wasband, or one of my family members).

We would use it more as a dismissal than anything “well, you can’t expect anything more from a narcissist!” while either justifying ourselves to either tolerate or not tolerate the behaviour depending on where we were at in our relative journeys.

I’ve now determined that I was traveling with the watered down colloquial meaning – I really don’t think I understood that there was a true clinical disorder called narcissistic personality disorder (NPD).

Oddly enough, this epiphany happened as a result of a weird circular reference error with one narcissist (henceforth known as “he/brother”) spam texting me about another narcissist (henceforth known as “she/mother”). I was trying to find a word for the conversational pattern. I’d used the word “onslaught” when asking him to stop, in an “I feel” statement just like therapy has taught me.

He, of course, took offense to this, and “sorry-not-sorry”ed it, attributing it to his writer’s high “brain-to-fingers processing” and expressed his sympathy that I didn’t feel I could keep up.

It was seeing my words in text, that I didn’t feel safe to write my words, that I had to censor myself if my story was in any way at odds with his truth, that precipitated this journal-blog-therapy-mental-vomit or whatever exactly this is. I knew that my family couldn’t be a safe place, and in all honesty I was tired of ladening my willing-but-likely-tired-of-hearing-about-it friends.

In a thread about spam texting, someone referenced “DARVO”. I won’t get into it, as I found there are a million places on the internet that will do it greater justice than I could, but holy crap if it didn’t describe a pattern I’ve been seeking to describe my entire life. And it was freaking liberating to see it written down so clearly. Advanced calculus turned into a crayon drawing and suddenly everything clicked into place.

Note: if you think you might be involved in any way with a narcissist go google DARVO now. Start the car. Do not pass go.

I consider myself a reasonably smart person. I fucking aced mental health first aid at work. The depth of the AHA! I’m having is perhaps akin to the clarity of someone leaving a physically abusive relationship and going “well, damn, it really wasn’t okay for them to punch me in the face!. For the record, I’m deeply sensitive to the plight of those who have suffered physical abuse and in no way trying to diminish their experiences. It is the degree of shift of awareness that I’m trying to compare to. The transition from its all your fault, your fault it happened, your fault you stayed – to holy fucking crap that was hands down (or hands up I guess?) full on physical assault that cannot be right in any conditions. I would take his emotional bait, hook, line and narcissistic sinker – and I’ve been living with it inside me my entire fucking life, growing around it, until I didn’t know any different.

I even went to therapy and did an entire BWRT¹ session to lessen my physiological responses to his texts. It actually worked and I no longer get cortisol surges if there is a message from him. I quickly realized that though I could temper the physical response to the initial alert, which was great and what I set out to do, it didn’t negate any kind of reaction to the assholery itself. That said, I was quite pleased that it wasn’t disrupting me physically any longer and morphed to an “oh, look at him, being a prick again” with somewhat detached incredulity.

Growing up, I used to dismiss the difficulty I had conversing with him (that we couldn’t fight “fair”)  down to him simply being older and smarter than me.  In hindsight, this was probably because he told me so. His ability to twist words was internalized to the point that I believed I wasn’t smart enough. Smart enough to find the right word, the word that couldn’t be misinterpreted. The word that couldn’t be shot down. As I got older, and even the therapist-approved “I feel statements” failed. Nothing. Ever. Fucking. Worked.

In my latest text dance with my brother, I reviewed all of our correspondence going back decades – and my courage started to build,  that I needed to simply disengage.  There was a pattern there, but I couldn’t quite put my finger on it, but I knew I didn’t like it. Reading up about NPD & DARVO was an awakening. I’ve never found God so I can’t compare. It did remind me of discovering an existing formula in a later-in-life statistics class that I’d spent the first few years of my corporate career trying to invent, not knowing that one existed for the very same purpose.

Looking back at words I wrote just yesterday, I look at them like I was an infant. Like the stick figure drawings of my youth (though admittedly I’m not much better now) or a piece of code one wrote when just learning a language or a really old excel workbook.

In my home growing up, mental health issues weren’t taboo – family members would talk about their depression, their manic episodes, their bi-polar. Traumatic events dismissed as drug interactions. Failure-to-adult dismissed as “doing the work”. No one ever put their hand up and said “oh, by the way, I have narcissistic personality disorder.” 

Generally people seem way more comfortable calling out other people’s narcissism than their own, which I suppose makes sense. I doubt that it is helpful to anyone’s ego to realize that they might be the fucking problem. I’m not going to lie – I went down my own spiral of self-reflection trying to assess my own degree of narcissism, but I’ll leave that story for another day.

For today, I’m going to bask in clarity my research has given me – a validating reinforcement and approval of my strategy to disengage from a narcissist. That there isn’t much to be gained from remaining on this mad carousel. I will try to start to look at it as courage and not cowardice; not a “failure to face the hard truths”  as my brother has coined it, meaning of course, his version of the truth.

1. BWRT = BrainWorking Recursive Therapy. I’ll describe it as an exercise where you recall something that causes you stress of some kind, and rapidly move between it, and a different image that brings you comfort or peace. I believe the theory is that you basically mix up the wiring a bit, so that the thing that caused you an pre-conscious negative physical response is now wired to a different path (the positive one you supplanted). Sounds a bit wacky (or did to me anyhow), but it really worked for me. I worked between a vivid image I had of receiving a text from my brother that caused me stress and the image of my dog guarding the bathroom door when I pee. Silly image, but made me smile and definitely had the she’s got my back feeling I needed to counter the cortisol surge. Google for actual real descriptions of what it is. ↩︎