Whether on the playground, in the workplace, or on the home front, we all have experience with jerks: insensitive, self-serving people we’re better off without. Whether they’re self-righteous bigots, snarky critics, or cynical naysayers, they burden our lives with dead weight. Such people are part of the human tribe, and when we encounter them it is at best unpleasant. If we happen to have a relationship with such a person is can be highly debilitating, with contact best kept to a minimum if possible.
So what’s the different between a regular ass maggot and a narcissist? These days the label “narcissist” is readily ascribed to run-of-the-mill Joe and Jane jerk. But the fact is that people with narcissistic personality disorder (NPD) are a different animal from your typical turd bucket.
Understanding NPD
People with NPD have a profound mental impairment derived in early childhood. Possibly genetically predisposed to develop NPD if traumatically activated, some children adapt to negating experience—whether abusive, negligent, and/or overindulgent—with their caregivers by forming an alter-identity that they use to scaffold shaky emotional foundations.
Such children attempt to compensate for unmet needs with primitive tools at hand. Unable to develop a resilient inner identity and self-worth, they adopt an exaggerated facade of superiority and entitlement. Depending on whether the narcissist is introverted (covert) or extroverted (overt), the facade maybe be well-hidden or obvious.
NPD Characteristics
NPD is characterized by the following major impairments in personality functioning:
- Excessive reliance on others for self-definition and self-esteem
- Lack of empathy
- Exploitative of others
- Grandiose and condescending
- Exaggerated entitlement
- Attention seeking
- Admiration seeking
Read more details about NPD traits here.
Narcissist Baby Monsters
Above all, the narcissist is ruled by primitive emotions. Developmentally arrested at a young age, the narcissist is essentially still a child, with a child’s persistent self-focused need for attention and affirmation and unformed empathy for others’ feelings and perspectives. As I have said in other articles, what makes the narcissist personality so devastating to deal with is this toxic mix of primitive neediness and undeveloped empathy. Such people continuously demand validation externally from others while having little to no concern for how they treat others except as a means of getting what they want.
While narcissists are real people who are in fact not monsters, they often act monstrously. They are like giant baby monsters, walking around in adult bodies with adult capabilities but infantile motives and behaviors.
Whether you are their child, spouse, or other family member, their needs trump yours, and if you push back you will unleash the baby monster’s rage reaction and punishment. Imagine a three year old’s feelings of outrage combined with an adult’s ability to strike back psychologically and physically.
Average Jerk Versus Narcissist Jerk
While garden variety jerks manipulate and abuse for a wide range of reasons, narcissists do it to feed their insufficient self-esteem and need to prop their false self. But, whatever the underlying reason, abuse is abuse, and narcissists have dished out some of the worst in human history.
Julie L. Hall is the author of The Narcissist in Your Life: Recognizing the Patterns and Learning to Break Free from Hachette Books.
Need support? Julie provides specialized narcissistic abuse recovery coaching to clients around the world.
Related Articles by Julie L. Hall
- The Narcissistic Family: Cast of Characters and Glossary of Terms
- Healing a Sense of Foreshortened Future in Adult Children of Narcissists
- The Narcissist’s Caretakers: Caught Hook, Line, and Sinker
- Narcissist Parents Are Hurt Machines to Their Children
- Identifying the Covert Narcissist in Your Life: A Checklist
- How to Protect Your Children from Your Narcissist Spouse
- Why Narcissists Will Never Love You and It’s Dangerous to Love Them
- Horrid and Shocking Things Narcissists Say and Do
- The Overt Versus Covert Narcissist: Both Suck
- Seven Things Narcissists Will Never Do
- The Hidden Trauma of Neglect in the Narcissistic Family
- Enabling the Narcissist: How and Why It Happens
- How Narcissists Torture Others and Believe They’re Right to Do It
- Seven Sure-Fire Ways to Spot a Narcissist
- Maddening and Bizarre Things Narcissists Do Explained
- Behind the Narcissist Mask: The Bully, Coward, Liar and Fraud
- Why You Should Not Feel Sorry for the Narcissist
- Adult Children of Narcissists Face Trauma-Induced Health Risks
- Raised by a Narcissist? 11 Healing Things to Do for Yourself Right Now
- The Dilemma of the Golden Child in the Narcissistic Family
- Narcissism 101: A Glossary of Terms for Understanding the Madness
- The Narcissism Disease Cluster in Families and How to End the Cycle
- A Daughter’s Story of One Hell of a Narcissistic Mother
- The Narcissist Parent’s Psychological Warfare: Parentifying, Idealizing, and Scapegoating
- Raised by Narcissists? Why You Can’t Afford the Wrong Therapist
- 4 Insidious Ways That Narcissistic Abuse Isolates the Victim
- It’s You and Me Baby: Narcissistic Head Games
- The Strength of the Scapegoat in the Narcissistic Family
- Life in the Fun House: Narcissistic Mirroring and Projection
- The Paradox of the Narcissist’s Unrequited Self-Love
- 9 Best of the Worst Narcissist Mothers on Screen
- Understanding the Narcissist’s Disrespect, Envy, and Contempt
- How and Why Narcissists Are Highly Skilled Abusers
- The Narcissist Parent’s Psychological Warfare: Parentifying, Idealizing, and Scapegoating
- 7 Defining Traits of the Narcissist
- The Narcissist as Human Parasite: Are You a Host?
- The Challenge of Setting Boundaries with Narcissist Parents
- Understanding Narcissistic Rage and Why It Is Not Your Fault
- What Raging Narcissists Break: A Damage List
- The Dos and Don’ts of CoParenting with a Narcissist
- What the Narcissist Fears Most
View Comments (1)
These are very good articles one of the things that I think you’ve described well here is the insidiousness of the persecution. This is how they fix themselves rather than self healing; and they look to others to leverage their humiliation and shame to elevate the self, expand the delusion of grandiosity, as we are all worthy of respect. In fact, they do not believe that truth, they are conversely, unable to afford regard, love, respect, dignity, or anything they feel they were deprived of: it is a cycle. Many real life empaths have the capacity to love and feel deeply sorry for these individuals and woe to them if they do. I think the element of trafficking and grooming, as well as the concerted focused attention are misperceived as someone who really does care about you, and that is a big mistake they do not care and are incapable of it. They care about themselves, however, and will leverage other people as weapons against each other, unmercifully, in an attempt to look good, I was married to a passive aggressive narcissist for many years. He just can not win because they never engage, not meaningful intimate capacity. It is like a rape. In fact, once they are identified and you understand who they are and they know it well run, they will not ever give up. Make sure everyone knows @ it as light is your only protection. Also make sure that they know you will fight to the absolute end for your life, it will deter them if you mean it and they will know. Masters of manipulation, they really do want love and stop the very thing that could make it happen. They do this to others as well; it is beyond frustrating as their fragile psychological condition is that of a reduced being and they know they lack a conscious and cultivate cruelty believing that it gives them power. Their goal is to dominate. There are always sadistic sexual connotations, and their target victim typically is everything they are not, and while they do not admire someone who is concerned with others and has Highground, they must acknowledge, and they hate them for it. They do not change. They will hunt for sport.
One last thing, the reason you can’t catch them is because they always lie. They have false alternative lifestyles and persons and realities.
The alarming thing is the DSM sanitizes, this kind of behavior under the guise of sexual play.
These people are predators. Their goal is to hurt you and use you and take advantage of you and make you think they really are vitally important to your life. They are just not in it. RUN and never go back for any type of reason.
Once you understand, you are dealing with someone who has rejected all humanity. You will not be willing to be subjected to their covert shame. One last thing for anyone, dealing with this, people will not believe you and therapists are not trained to understand long-trauma as a consequence, the victims have to inform and educate, law-enforcement, lawyers and judges, and other people who are subjugated to their will. Most are very clever, but they never get it. There is no peace without human dignity and conduct that supports each other. Then we will survive. They are constantly trying to do that, but it will be at your expense as well as society.
They are sick and they are criminals. Straight up I was a psychologist for 45 years and find their portrayal in modern DSM traced history to be a travesty by our psychological community.
Trust yourself, stand your ground; stay away, please. Your very life depends on it! Donna.