5 Narcissistic Myths
I always read views propounded about me and my kind, with considerable interest. I see many intelligent and well-reasoned observations about what we do and why we do it. Many carry considerable force. Other views are purely driven by the understandable anger and hurt that is engendered in people by us, although as I have repeatedly sought to explain, when one operates through emotion, poor decisions are made and the clear picture is not observed. I also come across comments which are made about us which are inaccurate. I am not referring to the disagreement one might have in terms of an ad hominem attack against us. Many people consider us to be arseholes and bastards. I understand that viewpoint, many of my kind would disagree, but it is not that kind of value judgement that makes its way to becoming a myth about us. There are other more important misconceptions. As part of my ongoing work in explaining what we are, why we do what we do and your involvement in this narcissistic dynamic, it is just as important to explain what we are as detail what we are not. With that purpose in mind, I turn to five myths about our kind.
- We have no emotions
This view has gained some traction owing to the fact that my kind function with a considerable emptiness inside of us. The existence of this void can cause people to believe that because we are a shell and a husk that we are devoid of emotions. The fact that we feed off other people’s emotions also supports the view that we have none of our own. We need to steal the emotions that other people experience to enable us to feel.
The fact is that we do experience and feel certain emotions. We experience annoyance, anger and rage. Indeed, the churning fury which is always there beneath the surface, ready to be ignited, is a prevailing emotion of ours. We know boredom, disgust and loathing. We are very familiar with jealousy, envy, shame and hatred. Malice, malevolence, anticipation, contempt, aggression and power are further ones. Our stable of emotions is dominated by negative emotions. These are the ones which have been allowed to develop and that is because the force behind these emotions has been harnessed to allow us to achieve our aims. Our hatred for being devoid of fuel, drives us on to extract it. Our disgust at weakness causes us to always want to maintain superiority and strength. It is these emotions which make us effective and ruthless.
By contrast we do not experience joy or happiness, sadness or regret, serenity or love, remorse or guilt. These are alien to us along with others. We either have never known them or they have been stripped from us in order to allow us to operate with greater effectiveness, free from encumbrance and hindrance. We understand emotions because we want yours directed towards us. We understand how to mimic them and we understand when they should be exhibited (although some of our kind are better at this than others) but ultimately we do experience some emotions, just nowhere near as much as you.
- Copying us infuriates us
No it does not. If we are angry with you and shouting, if you decide to mirror this behaviour, all you are doing is providing us with fuel. If you parrot what we say to you, if there is any emotion attached to it, even if it is said with sarcasm, a sneer or contempt, it is fuel. If you decide to fall silent because we have, we may realise that the silent treatment is not reaping the fuel that we expected, but it does not infuriate us. Instead, we will just switch to a different form of manipulation in order to cause you to provide us with fuel. You find it hard after a while to keep mirroring what we are doing, your emotional capacity is such that it usually breaks through in some form and thus fuel is provided. We also recognise what you are doing and if you are giving us fuel, we will let you continue to mirror us. If you are not, your mirroring is not a criticism therefore there is no wounding, but we will shift to a different behaviour to bring forth the fuel.
- We miss you when you are gone
No, we miss your fuel, not you. That is what we miss most of all. We may also miss the traits that we were able to steal from you and also the residual benefits that you provided. It is something that victims of our kind find very difficult to accept. Surely some of what we said and did was genuine? It seemed that way, so surely it must have been? It must be the case that we liked somethings that you did? We did; the fuel, the traits and the residual benefits. We did not care about whether you were humorous, save that your sense of humour was appropriated by us for the purpose of making us seem better with other people. The radiant smile is only missed because it gave us fuel. Your extensive knowledge about wine was again another trait which made us look better.
Not only is it only these things that we miss when you are gone, the simple fact remains that if we discarded you, we decided that you were no longer worth the effort in keeping around and in most cases, we had identified and seduced a replacement. With this person in place, we focus on them, only turning to you to dole out Malign Follow-Up Hoovers (or Benign ones later when the replacement begins to turn stale). There is little doubt that you loved us with everything that you had, that you thought the world of us and nobody could have done for us what you did, but that is all from your perspective. Once we have discarded you, that all counts for nothing. You became a malfunctioning appliance and you have been replaced. We miss nothing about you.
If you escape, we will miss the three items that I detailed above and indeed we will look to recover them through the Initial Grand Hoover and Follow-Up Hoovers but do not think that our protestations of being unable to live without you, how we cannot imagine another day with you and we miss you so much, have anything to do with you as a person. They do not. We are unable to live without your fuel, we cannot imagine another day without using your traits and miss your residual benefits so much. All of these declarations, pleas, begging gestures and so forth are only designed to recover the three principle reasons we attach you. You can tell yourself that we miss you terribly if it makes you feel better but you are misleading yourself.
- We hate being alone
We need people. There is no doubt about that. We need people because we need the three principle benefits, chief amongst which is fuel, but that is not the same as saying we hate to be alone. In this instance, there is a degree of truth in the above statement but it requires considerable qualification. If we have been well-fueled we are able to be alone, engage in solitary activities and spend time in our own company without difficulty. Of course, the longer this goes on, eventually our fuel level drops and we will need to seek out people, but we do not hate being alone in such a situation.
Furthermore, the advantages of technology mean that although we may not be physically proximate to somebody, the advantages of Skype, text messages, telephone calls and even hand-written letters allows us to be on our own but in contact with many fuel sources. Add to this Thought Fuel and you have a situation whereby we can be physically isolated but with such connections we can manage perfectly well extracting all of these variable fuel types.
Remove such connections however and in a situation when our fuel levels are already low and we are physically isolated with no means of contacting people and that is when you shall see that we hate to be alone.
- We have a conscience
We do not. We think only of ourselves, our needs and how each situation can benefit us. We may appear to exhibit a conscience in order to con people and this is something more witnessed with the Mid-Range and Greater Narcissist, in order to fit in to a situation and people’s expectations but we have been created without a need for a conscience. If we had one, we would not be able to trample on people in the way we do. We would not be able to always be moving forward, never caring for what has gone before us. If ever you witness a situation where one of our kind appears to have had our conscience pricked, all it means is that we see an advantage in pretending that this is the case and we wish to dupe you and others for our own benefit.
39 thoughts on “5 Narcissistic Myths”
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You say that you and your kind experience and know what ‘shame’ is and that it is a ‘negative emotion’. Can you explain what you mean, and give some examples?
Hello Ul, please read the book “Your Fault”.
Well HG, I do appreciate your insight. I must be honest to admit that I disdain your kind. My experience was in the form of a woman. Everything you mention in most of your posts were spot on. It just seems like I was in love with a vampire. I went nc after the discard. Thank you for your posts. I could never be like you.
Hallo HG,
I do not agree, that you have no conscience. Take a look at this definition:
„Conscience is an aptitude,faculty, intuition or judgment that assists in distinguishing right from wrong.Moral judgment may derive from values or norms (principles and rules). In psychological terms conscience is often described as leading to feelings of remorse when a human commits actions that go against his/her moral values and to feelings of rectitude or integrity when actions conform to such norms.The extent to which conscience informs moral judgment before an action and whether such moral judgments are or should be based in reason has occasioned debate through much of the history of Western philosophy.“ Wikipedia
So, you follow your own rules and norms and values. Parts of these norms were created by your early surrounding (parents). I believe, that you have a bad conscience, if you do not follow your own created rules. For example : If you do good things to people without any advantage for you, you have a bad conscience, because you do not follow your egoistical aim. lt is your moral judgement. So, it seems to be a perverted form of conscience.
Conscience depends on the society in which you live.
Another example: The making of the film „Fitzcarraldo.” Klaus Kinski behaved bad at the film set, always looking for fuel. He was loud, making trouble, looking for attention. He had to be in the middle of everything.
After finishing the film, the people of Amazonas ( a tribe) asked the filmmaker seriously and without remorse whether they should kill Klaus Kinski. For them Kinski seemed to be worthless,useless, not important for their and our society, loud and not polite. The filmmaker had problems to convince them not to do it. Kinski had shown only his normal behaviour. He did not harm anyone, only shouting and things like that. But the tribe decided in agreement with their norms, that he should be killed.
What do you think about my theory?
.
Hello Mona. Thank you for that observation it made for interesting reading and I understand the point you are making.
I regard conscience as feeling “bad” about doing something, for instance stealing from somebody or failing to invite a friend to a party. Of course, I have no bad feeling if I did either of those things. Indeed, I regard it as my right to do as I please and to do so without accountability. However, when you frame the concept of conscience in the way of having a perverted form then I can see that there is force in such an argument. Thus I would maintain I have no conscience in the usually understood sense of the word, but I could be described as having a perverted conscience. I found it interesting to consider that. Thank you.
“If ever you witness a situation where one of our kind appears to have had our conscience pricked, all it means is that we see an advantage in pretending that this is the case and we wish to dupe you and others for our own benefit.”
Can you explain the logic behind this? Very confusing! so he become considerate because he want to dump you? I had thought he always want to control us! Thanks!
If we show some form of contrition it is being done to dupe you, make you think that what we are doing troubles us, causes you to give us fuel. Thus if we see an advantage by pretending that our conscience has been pricked in some way, then we will make it look like that.
HG
Can you comment on this.
They cannot be happy, they also cannot be sad. They are empty. They can only be temporarily filled up by adoration, but they are full of holes and it leaks out very quickly.
A person who normally resonates at a 6 or 7 on our energy scale in regards to behavior easily understands love, compassion, selfless-ness Someone at a level 1 or 2, such as a narcissist, can not contemplate nor relate to extremely high energetic values.
I picture narcissists in this way as a pane of glass. Given the right frequency, sound can make glass shatter. To me narcissists are panes of glass waiting to explode. Present a narcissist with love and compassion (as so many of us have done) and they simply can not handle it. The higher energetic frequencies cause the fragile narcissist to lose it.
Hello Romeo, I partially agree with your second paragraph but more than adoration fills us up.
I do not understand the energy scale to which you refer.
I do not agree that the higher energetic frequencies (whatever they are) cause us to lose it. Criticism and wounding cause us to lose it, they ignite our fury.
What exactly do you mean in #3 by stealing our traits? Please explain. I often wondered about this since encountering your works. Thank you.
Hello Renee, let’s say I talk to you and you are an accomplished pianist, you talk about some of the things you have done associated with this. I absorb this and use this knowledge elsewhere to portray that I am a pianist (of course I wouldn’t do it near a piano as I know I might be found out, but a Lesser might) to somebody else. If you have travelled to Australia and tell me about it, I pretend to someone else I have done this so I appear well-travelled. If you tell a joke or anecdote that amuses the group, I use that elsewhere and claim it as my own. There are lots of different ways this is done from using it to embellish an existing trait, to exaggerate out achievements to out and out fabrications.
Hello HG,
What happens to these traits when we are gone? Do u still use them? Do they become a collection of yours to use in the future?
I know you have an excellent memory so they must be in your memory bank.
Hello SW, yes they can be used later or we just acquire new and different ones from other people.
Thank you. I’m guessing since I’m a Christian and he’s drilled me over that he’ll start his own church. Honestly wouldn’t surprise me! I appreciate your reply.
:).. Its ok ill wait until you write about it if you ever grow a big enough pair to go through with it. Im here to learn.
HG
Not to detract from the gravity of the message, but It makes me giggle
every time I think of your lovely and proper voice issuing the word arsehole.
Hey if that makes you laugh so be it.
Hello HG, surely there must be something real?
HG Tudor, one question. In idealization phase, when you get high-quality fuel, what do you feel? It has to be positive emotion? You sound like you can feel only negative emotions, but there is new research showing narcissist experience some ‘love,’ even if this is just infatuation. Great quality fuel must give you positive emotions? If not, why you need a positive fuel? Also, narcissists can go through manic cycles, similar to those in bipolar disorder because this is their reaction to excessive or high-quality fuel. I witnessed this too. It looks like happiness, but it is very disturbing. The man I knew got literally high on fuel.
Power. High quality fuel can be positive or negative.
Power! YES, that is what most of my narcs have said.
I remember an ex narc and I play-wrestling in bed. Well I thought we were playing. He began to choke me, going a bit hard. I don’t think I have appropriate responses because I started laughing, thinking it was all so much fun. He immediately stopped and looked at me in an odd manner. Play time was over and he walked away. I suppose my reaction disappointed him?
Politician!
So what does bother you?
Being ignored.
HG, are you still planning on doing a fuel-free run? If so how soon? Also if you would be OK answering this: do you feel like you are dissolving when you are very low on fuel? (may be a double post, not sure what this site is doing.. im confused with the log-in status sometimes, so if double post, sorry.)
Hello Anteah, yes but no date has been organised yet. My other commitments will preclude this happening in the short term. Yes dissolving is one way of describing it.
Hello HG!
You speak as well about the narcissist “wound”… then you should feel “pain” . How can you describe such “wound”..”pain”?
Thank you…
It is a sense of feeling crushed, the emptiness appearing and threatening to engulf, a sense of shame at not being able to keep such criticisms at bay, a fear of the construct tumbling.
So the feeling of emptiness is not always with you?
Not when fuelled.
Thank you HG…do you feel shame just before yourself or before others as well..?
Do you mean do I feel shame on my own or in front of other people?
Hi HG,
I am just wondering about your definition of “shame”. If you define it as: ” a painful feeling of humiliation or distress caused by the consciousness of wrong or foolish behaviour.” then that means that you feel remorse ? Do you feel shame because?
A. You did not suceed to keep out / avoid a criticism?
B. You let yourself ” feel criticized ” although you know it is just your own perception?
C. Do you keep your sense of shame to yourself or do you show it to other people?
I am just wondering if your perception of “shame” is the same as for us Empaths? The use of the term “shame” did indeed surprise me when you defined the Narcissistic wound..I thought You and Your kind did not have such feelings😳
Hello Superxena,,
I feel no shame for the things that I do to achieve what I need. I feel shame if I fail. The shame is part of the wounding which arises when we fail to keep out a criticism because this offends our construct and instead drives into the heart of the very thing which we prefer to keep locked away. Thus he deep-seated shame that is locked away begins to leak out, but there is also the shame because of the failure. I know it is my perception but that is my reality, you have a different perception which is your reality. Shame manifests through the ignition of the fury and blaming other people. I go into detail about the role of shame in Your Fault.
I would suggest that our shame is different from your idea of shame.
Thank you for your answer HG! I will certainly read Your Fault as well. It is a liitle bit hard for me to accept that it is just a matter of “You” and “Me” having different perceptions…I feel that it goes deeper than that.It feels like You are looking at the world behind/ through a “caleidoscope”…😳 I rembember reading something that you wrote on one of your books that the main difference between You and Your Kind and “Us” is that We can refuel ourselves while You can’t?
So is this so difficult then to take that negative experience and imagine that other people feel the same when they are crushed by the wrongdoing? I understand the concept of not caring about it, but at least the malice could be managed with a bit of effort. Positive fuel is always a fuel. Give up negative one to not hurt others. Rely solely on positive fuel. This will benefit your kind in long term, nobody wants to die alone, without a single soul around them. Psychopaths seems to be smarter as they do not care about others but they can adopt their behaviors to survive among neurotypicals. The smarted the psychopath, the better actor he or she is. You could assume that not hurting others is like following a standard operating procedure in the company. One seriously do not care about the SOP but knows it has to be followed to avoid negative consequences. I know, boredom calls for negative fuel. But I really think that greater narcissist can be smarter than that and have a long term plan for life that excludes deterring everyone and everything and dying alone? Hmm?
So you are never empty. But I wonder if fuel truly fills you, or is it just a bandaid over the void?
One is never full.
Very interesting. Your kind (at least the higher level ones) always talk about the emptiness.