The Narcissist’s Army

Whilst we consider ourselves omnipotent, mighty and all-conquering it remains the fact that we are unable to do much of what is required to gather our fuel, execute our machinations and exert control without the assistance of our supporters. These are the people that form the Narcissist’s Army. Gaining supporters is important to us and it is not difficult for us to do so. Much in the same way that we seduce the person who we install as a primary source of fuel, we seduce people to become our supporters. What does it take to become one of our supporters? You must provide fuel, that is paramount and something that we expect from all those who we recruit to be our supporters. Predictably enough however we want more than just fuel. We want your obedience, we want you to speak well of us to others and accept our views over those advanced by other people. We want you to provide us with character traits which we can purloin for ourselves and pass them off as our own to the rest of the world. We want you to carry out our orders. Not everybody that we recruit is able to carry out these requirements and therefore this results in us having different classifications of supporter.

Where do these supporters come from? When you first become entangled with our kind you will notice that we have family, friends, colleagues and acquaintances who think highly of us. There will be occasions when someone who appears to be a stranger will stop and say hello to us on the street. We receive particularly good service from a waitress who evidently knows who we are. Our supporters are drawn from everybody around us. They do not all have to be friends with us, many supporters remain in the ranks of acquaintances, colleagues and minions without ever advancing to the status of being an inner or outer circle friend, but for every category of proximity of supply of fuel that exists, those people are our supporters. There will be an impressive infrastructure of supporters in place when we first interact but it will not end there. We want your supporters to become our supporters. Of course, those who support you are your supporters for completely different reasons to our supporters. That does not matter. Your supporters will also be subjected to the charm, pleasantness, kindness and magnetism in order to draw them into our sphere of influence and anoint them as one of our supporters and to place them into the relevant category. We regard it as fundamental that we recruit your supporters to be ours. At first it is not a mutually exclusive arrangement. Indeed, since you are firmly in the golden period then it is easy for these people to support you and I. It is once the devaluation begins and especially when a smear campaign is launched that the value of your supporters to us becomes greater. It is then that those supporters show their true worth to my kind by altering the way that they deal with you and/or refusing to alter the way that they deal with us. We always aim to recruit from your ranks.

So, what are the categories that we classify these supporters into?

The Façade – I regularly make mention of how the maintenance of the façade is important. We want the world to think we are kind, wonderful, interesting, charming, generous and an all-round decent person. Those people who are assigned to the façade provide us with fuel and think well of us. The façade is supported by a cast array of people ranging from family, friends, colleagues all the way through to strangers. We want all your supporters to buy into this as well, as a minimum, so that when the time comes to devalue you, smear you and dis-engage from you, you find that you run into a wall of unimpeachable individuals who all believe that we would never hurt you, that we are decent and you must be making it up, exaggerating or taking things out of proportion.

The Coterie – this is our stable of highly visible supporters. They can be relied on to provide us with fuel, more often and to a greater degree than those who are in the façade. This group will contain people who can provide us with those character traits which we like to steal. They believe everything that we say and are very difficult to persuade that the façade is just an illusion. They will gladly do things for us but are not engaged to directly carry out our machinations against you. We do not regard their loyalty and blind obedience to be that great. However, if we ask them to tell the world how great we are, they will do so. If we want to borrow money, get a lift somewhere, have them pick up a parcel and so forth they will willingly do so. The coterie is a competitive place where its members vie against one another for our favour, in order to show that they get to spend longer with us, or time with us alone, or that we have praised them over someone else. The coterie can be relied on to always agree with us, disagree with you, laugh at our jokes, stand and listen to our anecdotes and marvel at our magnificence. The coterie will embrace you warmly when we begin our seduction of you but do not be fooled. None of them like you. They only pretend to do so in order to gain our favour. They are jealous because they want to be our favourite, they want to be the primary source. They do not know what a primary source is, in the same way that you don’t, but they want to be regarded in the same way as the way we regard you during the seduction. This promise of a more intense golden period to the one that they already enjoy keeps them in line. Imagine a royal court and these courtiers are always to hand, gossiping, scheming and pretending in order to gain some royal grace and favour from their monarch; us. When we give the signal this group of people will turn their backs on you, happily disseminate our propaganda about you and support our smearing of you.

Turncoat Coterie – this group is as the above Coterie but contains those people who were once your supporters. Initially the person is admitted to our coterie because they are content to support both you and I and during the golden period there is no difficulty. This person has been earmarked for the Turncoat Coterie because they naturally promote the façade but they want more. They often contact us and not you, they talk to us without you being around and as time progresses we ensure that their loyalty to us becomes greater than their loyalty to you. To put it in your parlance, they start off as one of your friends, become both our friends and then decide they want to be my friend rather than remain friends with you. This person’s status is never apparent until it is time for them to make a choice between you and I, which is usually around the time of a smear campaign and discard. They will not actively do anything against you, but they will promote our smear to others and turn their back on you when we decree that ought to be done. Not only do we revel in such a recruitment since it bolsters the number of our supporters, but it also means that you will be hurt by their treachery and this provides us with fuel and emphasises our power.

Lieutenants – the agents who believe what we say, remain loyal and will carry out our demands in order to retain our favour and receive other tokens of our appreciation and largesse. Our lieutenants are not only those who will provide us with fuel, carry out favours for us but they will actively assist us in our machinations. Whether it is finding out information about a prospective target before we engage, administering one of our devaluing manipulations by proxy or utilising the lieutenant in a hoover, these are the elite of our supporters. They may not number many in nature and they do not know what we are, other than they regard us as a brilliant and magnetic person who has also done right by them. We will have undertaken favours for them in order to secure their loyalty. We will also have some “dirt” on them as well which we will use to apply pressure if we have any concerns that their loyalty is wavering. The Lieutenant can be called on for fuel in times of emergency, to assist us in our smear campaigns, to gather information for us and to remain loyal. I like to keep one lieutenant that you do not know about so that he or she can be used with impunity often during a hoover. Unaware that this person is connected to me, your defences will be lowered and this will enable my lieutenant to acquire information from you and initiate contact for me to improve the prospects of the hoover succeeding. You may find that not long after you have escaped us that you are approached by someone who seems interested in you romantically. There is a good chance this person is a hitherto unknown Lieutenant of ours. Not only does this improve the hoover prospects but if you happen to succumb to it and later escape or evade it in the first place and realise that a Lieutenant was involved, this will cause you to remain anxious about anybody else who engages with your romantically. This causes you to struggle to move forward and find someone new who will distract you from thinking about us.

Turncoat Lieutenant –  the ultimate supporter. This person is a friend or family member of yours who you think that you can rely on and trust, but in actual fact they are loyal to me and not only that they are actively briefing against you. It is this person who enables me to acquire your new mobile telephone number after you have changed it post escape. It is this person who tells me where you have moved to, where you will be on a particular evening and who you are fraternising with in order to maximise my attempt to hoover you. This person will operate on our behalf so that during devaluation when you are seeking solace from them and trying to understand what is happening this Turncoat Lieutenant will be advancing reasons which support my position and undermine yours. You can expect them to tell you.

“Are you sure that is what really happened?”

“I think you are over-reacting to be honest.”

“Maybe if you tried x or y, he may calm down.”

“Well, is it any wonder, he works really hard, he is probably stressed.”

“That’s not something to worry about, trust me.”

“You are becoming fixated with something that isn’t a problem.”

“He does a lot for you you know, often you don’t know about it.”

“I find that hard to believe, he is always fine with me.”

“He wouldn’t mean that. I think you are seeing something which isn’t there.”

“Take it from me, I know he has your best interests at heart.”

If you start hearing comments which sound as if they could be uttered by my kind, you are most likely dealing with a Turncoat Lieutenant. Often this individual has fallen for the lies we have told about you and the charm we have sent in their direction. If this person is of the opposite sex (or same if we are of that particular sexual orientation) there is a good chance they are your replacement and the reward for their loyalty to us and betrayal of you, will be to replace you as our primary source and as our intimate partner. This person will advance any smears against you and also persuade others amongst your supporters that we are right and you are wrong, causing confusion and doubt. Their impact is significant and we always aim to recruit such a person. They will often remain undetected, waiting for when we need to activate them and then they will cause havoc in your camp, undermining you to others, turning people against you and having you doubt yourself. A Turncoat Lieutenant is a dangerous weapon once recruited by us.