It is part of being human to want people to think you are absolutely fabulous.
Even if you’re just an Ordinary Joe, or a wallflower wife or the bloke who works down the chip shop, you want to be thought of as something special.
But what if – in the lardy, oily, fiery, fat-dripping confines of the chippy – your boss gives you a good battering every day?
Or what if you are a good wife?
You know you are loving, caring, nurturing. And above all else, honest. But in reality, behind your nice middle-class white UPVC front door, there is a war of attrition being waged against you by somebody you loved.
And when you go out to Tesco with your handsome, Mondeo driving middle manager husband, do you hide your disappointment, fear, heartbreak and despair behind a Benidorm smile?
Do you feel suicidal? But above all, believe your children need their daddy in their lives come what may?
So, you spend your life feeling lower than your Labrador’s feeding bowl…
Or what if you are Ordinary Joe – or Ordinary Dave, or Jeff, or Pete – and you work shifts and overtime at the local pie factory and get lunch six times a week at Greggs for convenience?
After all, that’s your role isn’t it ‘mi old sausage’!
But what do you do when you get home a bit tired – looking forward to a cuddle with the kids and a couple of hours with Judge Judy and the Simpsons perhaps – and you are met with a flying pan, plates spinning through the air, slashing nails, snarling teeth, insults and hysteria.
And your kids are cringing in fear.
Or what if your elderly mother has Munchausen’s and blames you personally for the cancer she had 67 years ago and has never shut up about since? What if your Dad is a drunken bully without a brain who tells you still, on a daily basis, what a waste of space you are?
However, what if all of these people are actually in your lives right now and have been for decades?
There they are squatting inside your mental health, using it as a rooming house for their own very dark hearts…
Yes! There he is, the narcissistic boss who controls your future. And there she is! The hysterical wife who controls your children. Oh! And there, having a Pinnocollada at the tiki bar with a plastic palm tree, is the show-off husband who controls the roof over your head with a cowardly iron fist hidden inside a kid glove.
And worst of all, right there by your side are your twisted parents, those who deliberately arrested your childhood development so they could control you forever.
With all these demonising evil people in your life, how are you ever going to feel absolutely fabulous again?
Or even remotely happy.
Narcissism, in simple terms, is psychotic selfishness … a rabid sense of entitlement, a disturbing lack of empathy, a no-holds need for admiration fished for with a poisoned hook, a vicious fantasy and unbridled aggression.
Munchausen is also psychotic selfishness but these people use real and imagined illnesses as their weapons of choice. These people trap you like a fly and keep you in a jam jar on their nicely polished sideboard for their friends to see.
Sadly, there is very little hope of a Narcissist or Munchhausen-ist ever being cured – they never want to be, you see, because all would be revealed. Besides, controlling is far more fun than caring.
The other reason there is very little hope of them ever being cured is simply this; to a man and woman they are inveterate fantasists, liars and abusers.
But that is exactly what they accuse you of.
#narcissists #munchhausen #abuse #control