Narcissistic Personality Disorder

Sigmund Freud

The mistreatment of people in contact with somebody that has narcissistic personality disorder which has manifested and a maladaptive defensive adaptation causing abuse either emotional or physical to the person who is the recipient from the narcissist. The abuse can range from gaslighting, physical harm, manipulation, intimidation, and more.

Gaslighting is a term when used to describe a form of mental abuse where you lie to a person to make them doubt their perception, sanity, or memory. It became a term after the play Gas Light featured a plot using this form of abuse.

The silent treatment is a form of emotional abuse designed to break the recipient of the silent treatment down. It is a passive aggressive behavior utilized to trigger a response from the recipient and get them to a act in a specific way that the narcissistic individual had in mind. It's a form of punishment that can last for hours to weeks to months. They literally will act like you are non-existent and it can trigger an abandonment complex within the recipient that causes them to become desperate for the silence to stop. It is in a sense emotional abandonment. It's cruel because it is insidious it takes zero effort from the narcissistic individual and it inflicts maximum damage on the recipient who is typically anxiously attached to the narcissist.

Narcissistic personality disorder has several components to its origins. One of them is biological, in the sense of what a child's temperament is like. That temperament will go toward the likelihood of them developing a disorder given some other circumstances and present. There's also the neurological biological component of the actual physical capabilities of what a person's brain is able to do and it's limitations. That as well factors in because there is some genuine alterations to the frontal lobe that tend to happen with narcissists and people with low empathy. Aside from that though, there is an attachment trauma which occurs. When they're in that very young age range they develop avoidant attachment style. And then later a trauma somewhere between the ages of 1 to 3 occurs and it creates a general conditioning that allows for the disorder to set in. The real key is around the environmental aspects but in connection with that biological and the attachment trauma. You get the right combination with the right temperament and that's how you can get one child becoming a narcissist and another child that's in that same family being completely fine. It takes just the right mix of each. Where one child might not get it because they are already passed that developmental milestone that the narcissistic child gets stumped on because of that trauma or because of something happening that prevents them from actually making that developmental milestone. It can happen to a child that is abused and neglected or can happen to a child that is overindulged with no rules. Grandiose narcissists seem to be impacted by a father with grandiose narcissism and vulnerable narcissist seems to be because by mothers with narcissistic traits. And in each case the other parent seems to have negligible impact on whether or not that condition would be present. In other words mothers seem to have no effect on grandiose narcissism and father seem to have no effect on vulnerable narcissism. In the end, one of the biggest indicators is whether or not they have object relations. Narcissists lack whole object relations and object constancy. That is an important milestone that they seem to miss and as such it causes them to think in black and white terms when they're upset. They can either only see you as good or bad. They have problems maintaining realistic perception of you and themselves so it causes them to have some very erratic swings in their behavior and in their actions and personality. They almost seem manic in nature at times. So, with that they need to work on object relations in order to better control their reactions. They also need to internalize and work within themselves more so than using their external environment to regulate their emotions. The crux of narcissism is the inability to regulate themselves so they use the external environment to do it.

The trauma bond is one of those terms that gets associated with narcissism but again can be found in any abusive situation. It is sort of like Stockholm syndrome but different. Usually the person suffering from the trauma bond has had some trauma in their childhood which makes them more susceptible to this type of relationship. It is characterized by extreme highs and extreme lows. When the abuser is happy and times are great the person feels like there on cloud 9. They are getting lots of natural hormones injected into them through natural processes so they get dopamine, they get norepenephrine, serotonin, oxytocin. When times are bad they get cortisol and adrenaline. These extreme highs and lows releasing extreme amounts of the hormones actually becomes addictive. So people can become addicted to the abusive relationship. Now, the person generally has low self-esteem as well so they can get hooked also into that pattern of trying desperately to get affirmation and acceptance and validation from their abuser who has no intention on really giving them many thing. These things can create a very powerful and inescapable almost like a gravity well or a black hole for that victim to try to escape from that abusive relationship. They literally feel like their soul is being torn up from them in trying to leave. Like as if they were leaving the world's biggest addiction. It's the reason why so many people look at an abusive relationship and say why doesn't she just leave or why doesn't he just leave, they can't. It's not that simple. They have to fight this massive addiction and this behavioral adjustment that they've been put through which makes them dependent on that abuser for emotional reasons or for even physical or financial.