The Good, the Bad and That’s it
We all like to attach labels to people. People do it instinctively in respect of someone who they have just met, someone they have read about, a person they have known for a long time or someone they have seen on television. It is rare for someone to say that they do not have a view or an opinion about someone. Examples might include: –
“He’s a dependable chap, always there when you need him.”
“He’s a funny looking fellow.”
“She is very catty.”
“She is stunning looking.”
“A complete attention seeker.”
“A genius musician.”
“Really annoys me, I don’t know what it is but he does.”
Those are just classifications based on looks and personality. One can classify somebody by race, religion, birthplace, occupation, gender and so much more. Labels are used all the time as people are placed into boxes and compartments. Our kind do the same, but we differ in a fundamental way. We have an instant classification of people which is very straight forward. We will place people into further categories after this initial categorisation often using labels you would not and then we may well attach additional labels similar to the ones you use. What is this initial categorisation? It is simple. A person is either good or bad. That person is either with us or against us. They either do what we want or they do not. There are no ifs and maybes about these classifications. There is no grey with us when it comes to deciding into which camp someone should be placed. You are either white or black. You cannot be light grey, mid-grey or dark grey. We do not do the middling; it is one or the other. Let me give you some examples of those around me at the current time.
Julia (my boss) – Good
My mother – Bad
Paul (a lieutenant of longstanding) – Good
Andrea (predecessor primary supply) – Bad
Rachael(sister) – Good
Eric (colleague) – Good
Tania (lieutenant) – Good
Lesley (It Girl) – Bad
Elizabeth (litigious former girlfriend) – Bad
Phillip (lieutenant) – Good
Colin (competitor at work) – Bad
Not one of them am I indifferent to. You should be aware that this categorisation is based on my view of them irrespective of their behaviour towards me. Lesley for instance responded to a hoover a little while back and still messages me with pleasant comments from time to time. I play along as I am a far from finished with her but she is a bad person because of what she has done and moreover I know she will be looking for an opportunity to unseat me and seek some form of revenge over me as a consequence of my repeated thwarting of her ambitions. I know her game.
These categorisations are fluid. In fact, they are extremely fluid with some people, usually our intimate partners who are our primary sources of fuel. You may begin as a good person when I wake-up but by breakfast you are a bad person. Sometimes you will be utterly unaware of why your status has altered and it may appear capricious and arbitrary but it is not; you will have done something or failed to do something which has shifted your classification. Most often it is linked to your failure to provide me with fuel and therefore you will be designated a bad person and subjected to treatment in accordance with such a status; devaluation and denigration. Conversely, one can also move from bad to good in the blink of an eye. You won’t necessarily realise why this is, but we do. It is entirely logical to us.
As I mentioned once we have classified you as good or bad, we will classify you further, usually linked to the fuel you provide and how under our control you are. After that we will use similar labels to you – an interesting, handsome person and so on. Thus, take Paul my longstanding side kick. He is naturally a good person but I also regard him as a very good source of fuel, a highly reliable source of fuel and completely under my control, loyal and dedicated. My mother is a bad person. Whilst she is a good source of fuel for her emotional outbursts and temper tantrums, she is only fairly reliable. I have little control over her, she is a traitor and scheming to dethrone me, she has no concept of loyalty and is actively plotting against me. Thus whilst she may provide fuel the other factors cause her to be placed in the bad classification. I do not consider her to be grey just because she provides fuel but cannot really be controlled.
Why do we regard people in this manner? Why is it that we cannot take a holistic view of them? For instance, one might suggest that with the ex-girlfriend Lesley that she at one point was loving, dedicated and did much for me. Yes, she became a broken appliance and let me down, she also caused affront to me for which she must be repeatedly punished. She continues to try to be pleasant to me. Do I not look at this myriad of attributes and factors (plus more besides) and place her on some kind of spectrum between good and bad? No I do not. Why? Because my need of fuel is such I cannot have wishy-washy, amorphous classifications of people. This person is good – I can rely on them to give me positive fuel and do as I say. This person is bad – I can get negative fuel from them but I must be careful as they are plotting against me and seeking to avoid my control. This then enables me to apply my manipulations appropriately. It is also necessary to enable me to maintain my superiority and my self-worth. I need to keep those two aspects alive at all times. If you do not do what I want, you are calling into question my superiority. You are suggesting that I am worthless. Thus you are a bad person and I am the person who is admirable and worthy, you are wicked and evil. If you do as I want, you are confirming my superiority by submitting to my will. I am full of self-worth because you are acknowledging this by acting in accordance with my wishes. Deviate from that and you become a bad person.
You should have learned by now that because we look at the world through a different lens to you, there are many things that you will do (which you will not be aware about) which cause us to oscillate from regarding you as good to bad and then back to good, often in the space of an hour or less. This is all based on how we perceive your compliance to be. During our seduction of you, you are only ever a good person because you represent that wonderful potent source of positive fuel which we desire. You represent the prospect of an undimmed source unlike the bad person we are devaluing and about to discard. You always respond positively to our overtures, our love-bombing and you give us what we want. Hence you remain a good person. Those who are in our coterie, our lieutenants and those who form our façade remain good people. Challenge us, defy us or even worse see through us and you are challenging our need for superiority and self-worth and you must automatically be designated as a bad person, irrespective of what may have come before, that would create a more complex view. You failed to do what we want; you are a bad person. You then change and do what we want, you become a good person. It is a simple and necessary classification that we utilise.
Accordingly, everything is either good or bad with our kind. Admittedly, though it usually turns ugly as well….
46 thoughts on “The Good, the Bad and That’s it”
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Whoaaa! You are telling me that Lesley still reaches out to you after the stunt you pulled at your restaurant luncheon giving her Stephen King’s “It”? And you suspect her making contact is just to formulate a plot of Revenge? And of course you want to show her who will always win. Doesn’t the law of diminishing returns ever kick in on messing with someone?
Of course she does, she knows what she did and she is seeking both absolution and then revenge. Law of diminishing returns? Some people just don’t help themselves.
You guys crack me up 🙂 Its heartening to hear of others who survived (and thrived) through this horror. I always assumed you were “white” again when they hoover you…guess not. Getting hangup calls from strange numbers again. I think i’m still black though? Not sure. Just trying to move on the best I can.
This is why N3 must be hating life and hating me right now….I stopped fueling him on January 6th, 2016 when I went NO CONTACT! Aside from a few lame Hoovers, and a “fake” Match date he tried to fool me with…he’s out of my life!
You’re all bad too T , welcome aboard 🙂
Bad to the bone…..🎼😀
LOL…just pictured you driving round the bend in your fancy car with a license plate reading as:
NARC
😀
Ha ha, I think you will find it will me ME.
HaHa. I’m sure.
NO that’s Me, not YOU 😛
Ah hello Me, wondered where YOU were.
Surely you are an un-tatted man.
I am ink-free. We go for personalised registration plates instead. That is the middle class tattoo.
Middle class? You? Say it isn’t so!
Well landed gentry really.
I figured as such! I knew you would be devoid of any ink …for many reasons.
Wait…Middle Class? No embellishment? Aren’t you uber wealthy?
Landed gentry as mentioned. The reference to middle class was with regard to the middle classes need to have registration plates as their version of a tattoo. We have personalised registration plates as they are handed down.
Nice comeback HG, way to cover your tracks and stay on top😉
I’m obliged Bethany.
I’ve always thought that about reg plates. Even before I had any inkling about Ns.
That needs to go on the list of black flags !
Good poinr Alexis. That will shaft the DVLA for income when word gets out that owning a personalised reg plate is the mark of the narc.
Hahhaha true HG !!
Whilst on the subject of flags. Can we add BMW, Audi and Saab owners plus any prestige car.
United fans if they’re not from Manchester
If they say the latest buzz word and it doesn’t really fit into the sentence, they were just desperate to get somehow say it
Saab owners especially.
All Yernited fans.
Your last paragraph made me laugh. Word.
Bad is the new good😀
That’s tattooed on my forearm Bethany.
Well I do have a little curl on my forehead
I remember that children’s story about the girl…when she was bad she had a curl! Lol
Hahha yesT, that one is well and truly etched in my brain. My mother used to say it to me all the time.
So I know the MN’s perception of me must be right 😉
BbbbbbBAD…to the BONE!
https://youtu.be/IyhJ69mD7xI
Hahhaha this is so funny HG !!
I love this !!
I’m clearly epitomy of bad at the moment because I haven’t succumb to the hoovers.
Hmmmmm not sure if I can turn this one into good. We’ll see……….
You bad bad person Alexis.
I’m happy to be in the bad group if it means I’m viewed as unable to control, out of his sphere of influence and honest enough to call him out. Bad is good.
Ha ha indeed.
Oh yes the good & the bad and zero in between. I’m “good” when I do what she wants me to do, when I wear what she wants me to wear. But the minute I want to be my own person I’m “bad”.
Wow astonishing. I had never thought about but now that you mention all of the above then yes.. the opinions shift from moment to another.. maybe not within hours but days.. ? weeks ? something like that..
I want to remain in the good group <3
Don’t we all Nikita?
Sure HG. Sure …
I guess I lacked more content in my message, means I am very flexible and try my best to do what it takes to stay in the good group and I think no, I don’t think every body agrees to this.
this is what I really meant. Sorry for having been so short.
Hi Nikita. I agree with you…sort of. There are no empaths- at least not from what I can tell- in finance, meaning the actual subject matter of finance.
However, you CAN find empaths in finance companies- and they are almost entirely in HR (like I used to be) or marketing (like the ex). Those “soft skills” fields are where a lot of empaths end up. But the “hard skills” stuff like finance and anything number-crunchy? No way.
But I care about money, so there’s an empathic individual in the field of finance surely?!
Sure! Super empath!
Totally agree. I was talking also about the number crunching and number controlling .
Simply Brilliant. Oh, this is all helping me so much. I understand that I went from “Good” to “Bad” when I started my own Business and took my full attention off of him. That is when the pursuing other women began in earnest. He then had a good old time punishing me surreptitiously. Then upon my Discovery of his behavior three years later, it was important to him that I believe that he had changed and was sorry for what he had done. But guess what, from that point forward I would ALWAYS be considered “Bad” because I had the gall to remove the mask and see the real monster and his false façade. It actually is kind of funny to me to realize that his anger about having been caught has exceeded my anger at his repeated betrayals on the anniversary of my leaving him. One entire year of trying to fix this relationship. It occurs to me now that if he had behaved like that when things were “Good”…oh my God, what has been happening unbeknownst to me during this last year? I thought that I was showing him how much I loved him..how forgiving I was…how loyal I was. Now I realize that his ego needed me to stay. And yet I still needed to be punished for discovering the truth. DONE with this toxicity in my life. Thank you, HG.
You are welcome DDD
Good for you for starting your own business! How did you ever find the courage and strength after having been so beaten down (mentally- I hope not physically as well) by your N?
At first, G painted his ex to be this monster career woman whose corporate climb was more important than their family or precious child. (You know, the one who G always had to cancel our plans to take care of… yeah, right! What a convenient excuse!). But now in a weird way I admire her. I just don’t know how on earth she managed to reclaim enough self-esteem/self-confidence to get back on her feet while enduring his daily abuse and grow into a major power player at her company. It just doesn’t seem like the type of job a super empath would have.
At least she got herself into a financial position – I think she actually outearns G now! – to be able to divorce him!
Hi cody.
There are no empaths in finance. I putmy hand in the fire 😂😂😂
I worked there 2 years and was a horrible time. It was the offer I had when I finished uni because of networking. Lets say my dad got me the job.
Second our finance people here. They are military sargents! Really!!
Only yesterday my whole table was talking about that. 😂😂😂. They really are not liked when they are a support functiom in another department. 😂
No way an empath in finance. !!!