Trait one – Craving Admiration
I cannot say that I crave to be admired, but I do crave to be loved and to be known. The need to be loved and known is woven deeply within me to the point that I sometimes thirst for someone to understand me in a way that no one does on the surface. This need to be loved and known often leads me into accepting relationships with others that are toxic. I have found myself often falling into connections with narcissists. I do not always look for love in the wrong places, but when I do, I find myself caught up in the snaring web of a narcissist.
Trait Two – Exploiting Others
It is common for narcissists to exploit others. They use others for what they can gain for themselves. They only seem to be interested in others for specific uses. They have no interests in people themselves. They are only interested in people’s gifts, talents, material possessions, statuses, and whatever else they can get from them. They are with people for selfish reasons. They take until there is nothing left to take from their targets, or they take until they have met their needs. Then they are off to exploit someone else.
I love to be in relationships with others where there is mutual giving and taking. I do not want to be the only one giving, but I also do not want to be the only one taking either. Yet, I have been told in the past that I have drained others, particularly with my changing moods. I do not want to use mental illness as an excuse, but I do have a tendency to wallow in self-pity when I am battling depression. When I have reached out to others in the past, I never had the intention of dumping things onto them and then walking away, but apparently this has been seen as the case.
To alleviate being a dumper of my issues onto others, I began journaling and participating in cognitive behavioral therapy. Doing so made me less of a burden to others and gave me less of a reason to share my trials with them too. It was my way of not using friends as a dumping ground for my problems especially when they were dealing with their own issues. No one could possibly accuse me of exploiting them even though on some level I may have very well been guilty of this unintentionally. I closed myself up as a drain source but remained the ever-present sponge.
Trait Three – Grandiose Fantasies
I have always been the daydreamer – never quite living in the present but always in my head. I have always daydreamed as a way of escape. There’s nothing like escaping problems by fantasizing about something grander. With surmounting debt, I daydream of winning the lottery. With toxic and lacking relationships, I daydream of being loved for me. I escape to another time and a different space where I am free and happy. These are my grandiose fantasies.
In those fantasies I am admired for qualities I could never freely express during my childhood, adolescence, and young adulthood phases. I live and can be me. That is the glory that I seek. It is the fame of what happy endings for me are made of – the land of where I matter just because I exist when this is often not the case for me in reality.
Yet, grandiose fantasies often consist of delusions and thoughts of invulnerability and superiority. I often have to snap out of these fantasies and face that facts of my reality. I cannot live in my fantasies. My fantasies give me a break. In fact, those fantasies were the ways in which I learned very early on in life to dissociate.
Trait Four – Self-Importance
I am kind. I am smart. I am important. I am confident in my abilities. However, I do not believe I have such self-importance that I am above all others. In fact, I know that there is always someone else who is above or below me in kindness, intelligence, importance, and confidence. In other words, there will always be someone better than me or worse than me. That is just a fact. I can only do what I do and do it to the best of my abilities. When I know I am good, then I am good. When I know I am bad, then I am bad.
When someone critiques me on my performance, I take what they say into consideration. I am always looking to improve myself. When I have to think about comparing myself to others, I am quick to remember that I am not going to be the same as anyone else no matter what I do. Someone will always be better or worse. I can just be me and go with bettering myself for the next time. I am my own competition, my own motivator, and my own worst critic. I do not seek to lord my importance over anyone. I was taught this in a narcissistic home environment. I am no better than anyone else.
Trait Five – Envy
I have brown eyes which slightly have specs of gold at night. Yet, there have been a few times when my eyes have cast a green shadow of envy. I recall a time when the discovery of envy within me was hard to live with and placed me in the light of guilt. I was in second grade. At the time, having a pencil pouch was the prize to have in possession. I desperately wanted one, but for some reason my dad purchased school supplies with his own fancy in mind – none that ever contained a pencil pouch.
My pencils were always kept snuggly within a zippered compartment of my backpack. When I saw a friend of mine with a pencil pouch that I desperately wanted, my eyes became green with the most wicked envy. I plotted my way into getting one. The more this friend seemed to brag about her pencil pouch, the more I wanted to have one. I settled on taking hers. While we were all outside at recess, I plotted my way to the bathroom with the hopes of gaining access to the friend’s pencil pouch.
Luckily, I was able to use a thieving friend who dared to gain access to an open classroom. This was a teachable lesson when exploiting another person for my gain worked to my disadvantage. Seven is an impressionable age to learn the price of how hurting others truly damages them. I learned a hard but valuable lesson. Needless to say, while we were able to gain access into the classroom, the friend pried her way into the belongings of others. My heart was set on my other friend’s pencil pouch. In fact, I remember how envy had taken over me. I had to have that pencil pouch, and I stopped at nothing to get it.
The supposed hatred I had for this friend who bragged about her pencil pouch had sent me over the edge, but I was also in a place of desperately hating the amount of love she appeared to be given during show and tell about it. That was my perspective on what I thought I saw. That is what envy does. It creates a picture of grandeur that clearly deludes its victim from seeing the truth. It creates within the victim an overwhelming desire to be greedy and take hold of something that the victim has no right to changing the status of the victim to a predator.
While in the class, my eyes became green with envy and I preyed upon my target’s pencil pouch to take possession of it and make it mine. I was overwhelmed with an instantaneous emotion of guilt, but instead of walking away, I stole the pencil pouch and placed it in my bookbag along with all of its contents of pencils, erasers, and pens. The other friend and I then crept back outside as if nothing had happened … as if we had not been creating a silent havoc that would eventually explode amongst our classmates.
I had never stolen from someone else before that time (and not ever after with intent). The feeling of intense guilt was unbearable for me, but I weathered on because the deed was done. When the friend discovered that her pencil pouch was missing, she cried painfully. At first, I felt a sudden pride in having taken something that she so gleefully paraded around in front of everyone, but then I felt horrible that I was the reason for her grief. I had caused a friend an enormous of amount of pain, and I had intended it without understanding the full consequences of my actions.
For days, I harbored this pencil pouch pridefully within my possession. I had obtained it under false pretenses and accepted it as mine when it was not mine to take in the first place. I had not earned it. It was not mine but I had willfully taken it and showcased it as if it were mine. As my friend looked on in dismay, there was a look in her eyes that let me know that she knew I had stolen her pouch, and I could not look away from her without guilt and shame. My envy of her for her pouch had become even greater shame for me. I had wronged someone all for something I could have asked my parents to buy me. My own envy placed a foreboding and glaring spotlight on me in the end.
When it was discovered that I had taken the friend’s pencil pouch, I was banished into an utter despair of my own creation. Yet, in many ways I expected to be pitied as if I were the injured party. I will never forget the internal realization that I deserved no pity for causing someone else pain for something that they possessed which was not mine to take from the start. The feelings of guilt punished me enough but no less than the feelings of shame. My exposure to what I had done made my punishment even worse because the friendship I thought that I had with this girl was lost.
Up to this day in time, the classmate that I envied and stole from never forgave me for my transgression and never trusted me again. At the time, I thought it was a punishment from her that was far extended, but then again, I now get it. Envy does great damage to others. It does enormous damage to its victims and even to the predators that utilize it for their advantages. It leaves the predators either callous to even greater occurrences to envy or shakes them to the core that they see envy for what it is – a damaging evil.
At first I took pleasure in taking what did not belong to me, but in the end, there was no pleasure for me at all. Some classmates stopped speaking to me for a long time after this until the situation was forgotten. I lived under the shadow of shame for a while. I hated it. I hated how I felt on the inside, but I hated even worse the pain I caused someone else. I was so sorry and wanted to desperately undo what I had done to the classmate. Yet, no amount of apologies, feelings of remorse, or pleadings to make things right had changed the classmate’s mind about me. In her eyes, I would always be a thief, and even worse an envious foe. I had ruined things beyond repair all because I allowed green to color the original shading of my eyes.
Stay tuned for the next post in this series on Inheriting Narcissistic Traits.
My Voice Unchained 