Narcissists

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My ex also also turned me off of sex for years. After which, I started dating quite a lot. Maybe 2 dates a week for many months. Even though many of them were very nice, I couldn't make a connection. When I finally felt a connection with someone, it frightened me so much that I had to "steel" myself for each date with him. He treated me like a lady, he was very interesting and I thought he was handsome. Eventually I felt safe enough to have sex with him. But I tried very hard to keep my distance emotionally. I was too afraid I would get caught up in the same trap. I left him twice when I thought he was withdrawing (This was my exes' tactic). The fact he still wants to even be friends amazes me.

I have trouble talking about the littlest emotions because I refused to talk to my ex about it for so long to let him know it wouldn't do any good. He lived with me until the end. Keep trying OJani,every step in the right direction will prepare you for the real thing. Practice makes perfect! Sitting around waiting for the right one isn't going to give you the skills to do it right.

I'm so confused. By your comments, I'm taking it that narcissism is a bad thing. These people ought not exist. Hmmm, I guess it would have been nice had Hitler or Stalin not existed, but then you have your J.F.K.'s, Peter Sellers and every rock star who ever made it big onstage.

I do agree that Aspies can be easily taken advantage of, especially sexually - girl or boy.

Are men who beat their women narcissists?

I hate to be so dense, but I've studied people all my life. I really have trouble with narcissism. I think either I must be one or can't recognize them.

Would an honest and fair judge be narcissistic? If he were unkind? If he seemed unkind? Would a judge have to be greedy to be considered narcissistic?

Would the difference be motivation? The me first/best/most obsession?

I'm the best of all the narcissists.

My stepfather was a narcissist in the worst sense. Whether or not he was on the spectrum was completely irrelevant. I suspect he was not. He was really rather pathetic. He couldn't work for anyone else, but his business ventures were utter failures. He had to make himself feel better by beating everyone else down. He was it and everyone else was sh*t. There was no appeal. My mother supported his sorry butt plus 6 children, but he convinced her she was trash and no one else would want her. When he decided to go to school to become a psychologist she had to watch him study. She couldn't read, or watch tv, or anything but watch him. A psychological sadist becoming a psychologist--there's a scary thought. She eventually came to her senses and left him when I was 17. She was the first of his wives that left him. To this day, 24 years later, he can't believe that anyone could actually do this and still calls her.

I'm sure he had some issues in his childhood. I know that at one point his Jewish family declared him religiously dead. I don't care. I've known people who had far, far worse childhoods who didn't leave such devastation in their wake.

I used to work with a total narcissist (lets call the person N). This was in a collective run business, where all the workers owned it and had to make decisions by unanimous consensus every week. The person would emotionally bully other people and subtly turn them against each other to get people to "vote" N's way. Wanted to have total power over a business that was supposed to share power equally.

The most obvious thing I noticed about N was that N was only nice to someone when N thought they were useful, usually meaning that by "befriending" a cool person, N would gain social status in "the scene.". Until then, they didn't exist, and N would give them "silent treatment." It was a brutal situation.

Even with "friends," N would bully them into doing what N wanted...if N wanted to go to the beach and a "friend" didn't, it was just horrible to watch. I became N's enemy by accident when booking an art show. Apparently, I should have included N in the exhibition because I was including "everybody else." N had never said two words to me about anything ever, so I didn't even know N made art at all. Just a stupid misunderstanding... but the show was a smashing success, a great party, and from that point on, N was at war with me (but I didn't know it.)

I've known a few and they were worthless human beings. And no, they do not ooze charisma - they just think they do. Everything is oriented toward maintaining a high status. It basically consists of lying, boasting and putting down other people to give a flimsy appearance of superiority. I was briefly friends with one and he told me that the purpose of friendship is to make each other look good. The guy was a complete a**hole - no sense of humor, rude, know-it-all, tried to humiliate me in front of others (and would throw a hypocritical temper tantrum when I did the same to him). Avoid these people if you can, they'll bring you nothing but frustration.

Yes I once had one that fitted the pattern quite well. Details:

There was a strong whiff of the "too good to be true" thing from the start. She was mind-bogglingly warm, tender and agreeable. She was initially so easy-going and almost deferential to me that I felt concerned about it. She often looked rather stressed, but when I asked her if she was OK, she would always say yes. I often asked her to talk to me if there was anything she didn't like, but she never showed any assertiveness and never did complain in anything like a normal, measured way.

Her feelings for me collapsed very suddenly and without explanation. She clearly didn't enjoy the ending, but nor did she show any trace of compassion. When I told her that if she was sure she didn't love me then she should go home, she made straight for an ex who was still lovesick for her.

However patiently and generously I reasssured her, she would fly into a rage if a faraway ex of mine contacted me at all, convinced she was a dangerous stalker who I would succumb to. Meanwhile she was freely meeting alone with an ex of hers. But a couple of seemingly minor thoughtless actions on her part sent him into a jealous rage. He bombarded her with petulant and abusive messages about both of us and asked her not to tell me what happened between them. It was hard to see why he was still so attached even though she'd ended their relationship several years ago. It was hard to see why she hadn't noticed before. It was hard to see why, as she knew him so well, she seemed to have gone and tweaked that sensitive spot in him. And it was rather suspicious that she'd originally introduced him to me as "a friend who doesn't have suitor problems."

She seemed quite sensible in dealing with the situation, though she occasionally reneged slightly on understandings I thought we'd agreed, and I found myself having to calmly complain and air my views about it. She stopped replying to him, he kept texting her every few days so she removed him from our lives eventually, but until she did that there had been a large imbalance between the boundaries we were giving each other with regard to exes, and I had to argue my corner quite firmly to get something like parity. I've read that narcissists like to keep spare victims hanging on strings. Also odd was that she never showed any compassion about the poor guy when she finally did tell him to clear off, and no outrage or surprise at his insults to us.....as if he were just an object to be used.

She had also begun to fly into rages about imagined persecutors who had stolen her life. Her anger got so bad that she was interrupting everything I said after the first few words, before she could have heard my meaning, which was usually light of touch and sympathetic. Yet when I finally stood up to her and gently but firmly warned her that I would need to leave the room for a while if she kept doing it, and that I wasn't going to tolerate feeling humiliated by it, she barely lost her temper with me again.

When angry, she sometimes tried to fight me by tweaking my anxieties, e.g. threatening to break her agreement to keep her ex at arms length. I told her not to say such horrible things to me, but she continued, until I threatened to end the relationship, after which she gave me no more trouble of that kind.

She said some spooky things about past relationships, e.g. remaining in relationships until she developed a crush on somebody else, and then moving on.

She accused me of being unfaithful to her at a time in the past before we had even met. She seemed to confuse me with past partners sometimes, saying things to me in anger that could only apply to somebody else.

I never knew her to deliberately tell a downright lie to me, but her statements often proved incorrect.....I think she lied to herself a lot. She would announce things in a vague, "headline" form, but could rarely back up her claims with specific events, places, people or times.

She had totally cut off from her mother, for reasons she never explained beyond expressing a fear of falling under her control. There was no known trigger incident for that decision, in fact their last meeting seemed to have gone quite well. But she wouldn't even text her to let her know she was OK, and showed no compassion for her, saying that she wasn't her real mother anyway, even rejecting her own forenames.

The end happened a day or two after the problem with her ex had been at least temporarily fixed, and we had no real problems. I rather think that her narcissism had been feeding on those problems, as a psychological game to keep her the focus of attention. I had kindly but firmly faced down her abuse and her unfairness, but rather than strengthening her bond with me on, it killed her raison d'etre. A controller has no use for the uncontrollable.

Although they say it's hard and slow to get over a narcissist, I did pretty well there. There had been some "cat-and-mouse" games in the run-up to the relationship, where I was allowed to get near to the bait and then it was removed, and that had left me wondering if she was really up to the job. Mostly I think it was the realisation that her need for me was totally narcissistic, not based on who I was. And the realisation that she was incapable of compassion......I'd suspected as much for some time as the evidence mounted, but the heartless way she left me removed all doubt. We had more good times than bad, but a lot of the good had been fake, and I knew that I was only craving for something that had never really existed. You cannot love if you have no compassion.