Provocation
We repeatedly provoke. The act of provocation is one which is designed to cause a strong and often unwelcome emotion in the recipient. On one level, it can be said that everything we do is provocative because we are always looking to cause you to be emotional, to react in an emotional fashion to what we do and as a consequence give us the fuel that we need. Thus when we tell you that we have finally found our soul mate, we are provoking you into generating an intense feeling of being loved (or at least thinking that you are being loved) which causes you to exhibit your love towards us and thus we gain our fuel. We pay a friend a compliment in order to provoke that person into at least thanking us, thus a small dollop of positive fuel or more hopefully (and indeed more likely because this empathic secondary source is well-mannered, honest and decent) we pay them a compliment so they will pay one to us and thus more fuel is garnered. There is no unconditional giving with our kind. We only give to receive.
Thus all of the things that we say and do, the manipulations, the chicanery, the machinations and the mind games are all designed to provoke you into giving us fuel. However, in its strictest sense, we provoke you in order to generate that intense response and one which is negative in nature. We provoke you so that you will explode in anger, erupt in a stream of profane insults and vent your frustration through a slap to the face or a mug hurled towards us.
We will push and push and push. Yes, many of you have a remarkable capacity to absorb these pointy sticks which jab you. Your kind are well-versed and skilled in the turning of the cheek, the adoption of the high ground and the making of allowances. You will bury the hatchet and we will dig it up again in order to give you a dig from the sharp point. You will let bygones be bygones and we will resurrect the memory of an age-old issue in order to rankle you.
Nothing is off limits in terms of provoking you. It might be focusing on a vulnerability of yours that we know about (having acquired this information when we seduced you) so that we remind you of a frightening episode from your childhood or capitalise on your terror of spiders. It might be homing in on your sensitivity about the size of your nose, the shape of your head, the bright red of your embarrassment. If you owe us money, we shall remind you of it and comment on your poor financial position. We may flirt because we know how much you hate the notion of us being unfaithful. We may repeatedly turn up late because you are an advocate of punctuality. We may criticise your parents, your choice of film, your culinary skills, your attempts to loser weight; whatever we have identified as a means for causing you to erupt at us we will do it.
We know which buttons to press. We have a knack and an instinct for doing so. This is because we are able to gather information about you when we seduce you which will be stored away and used against you at a later stage. This is also because empathic individuals are more likely to respond in an emotional fashion. Yes, you will soak it up at first by making allowances for our behaviour and indeed making excuses, exhibiting this selfless understanding for which you are famed. This will not dissuade us. We know that everybody has a limit of what they can take before they snap. Sometimes it is bursting into tears, running from the room or screaming. Other times it is exploding with a volley of curses, coming at us with flailing arms or shouting and screaming at the top of your voice about how awful we are.
Push, prod, niggle. Aggravate, rile, irritate. Ruffle, vex, bug. Irk incense and annoy. We will chip away at your defences, jabbing and poking as we look to make your blood boil, get on your nerves, get under your skin, work you into lather and try your patience until you can take no more. We can sense the emotion rising in you. We notice the slight tells, the narrowing of the eyes, the rolling of the eyes, the sighs, the shake of the head, the hands on the hips, the raised palm, the jutting jaw and so on. The more you try to tell us that we are not getting to you, the more we are encouraged. We know that your emotion is building up inside of you. We know that it is increasing and no matter how much you are trying to maintain that cool exterior, we understand what is building up.
We not only have a medley of ways by which we provoke you, but we are experts in choosing precisely the best (worst) time to engage in this behaviour. Do any of these instances seem familiar?
When you are trying to get ready to go out.
When you are trying to have a telephone conversation with somebody else.
When you are trying to cook.
When you are trying to perform some chore.
When you are trying to get to sleep.
When you first come through the door after a long day.
When sat next to us in the car on a long journey.
When sat across from us in a restaurant.
When at some event of your choosing.
We will pick an inopportune time to commence our provocation so that you are caught off guard, when you are tired, when you are hungry, when you are anxious or stressed. The moment must be right for us and wholly inappropriate for you and then we can unleash the relevant form of provocation. We know what really gets to you. It may be the subject matter. It might be the way of conveying it, for instance patronising you or acting in a condescending fashion. It could be jabbing you with a finger on the shoulder to punctuate or words or giving you a dig in the back as you lie on your side in bed, after each savage sentence.
Eventually comes the eruption. You can only take so much and invariably when this provocation comes allied with an emotional state which makes you more susceptible to our provocations the explosion is all the more satisfying. Copious amounts of negative fuel fountain from you as you shout, scream, bang doors, slam your hand on the work top, swear and so forth. Inside we are soaring with the power that comes from the provision of this most excellent fuel. You, the paragon of virtue, the most patient of saints has been brought to boiling point and we achieved it. You have responded to our control. Our superiority is once again affirmed, we are the puppetmasters, we are omnipotent in our actions and you have responded as we wanted. Such marvellous fuel that sprays from you and we relish every drop.
Of course as it fountains and flows from you we will not want it to stop and the provocation will continue. Not only are we ensuring that we get to bathe in your overflowing fuel, we are using this eruption as evidence of how unhinged you are. Do not be surprised if this niggling, poking provocation occurs where others will see it. You can expect the whispered and insidious provocations to be used, the acts which are open to interpretation (although we both full well know exactly what was meant by our remark, our look or our gesture) and our good friend plausible deniability will be given an airing.
“Who me officer? I did nothing. She just exploded. I get this all the time, she has an anger management problem. John here will confirm she just went mental and started hitting me.” (Cue obliging Lieutenant).
“I don’t know what gets into her dad, she just erupts. You saw what she was like at mum’s birthday party. That is what I have to live with.”
“I feel sorry for you Mrs Johnson, having a daughter with a temper like that.”
We will provoke you. We will draw the delicious fuel that you will provide to us and then we will use your eruption against you as evidence of your unhinged mind, nasty temperament and unbalanced mental state.
Provocation is a mainstay of our behaviour. It comes in many forms, it is used in many different ways and on a range of occasions but its effects are always the same.
- The provision of a massive dose of negative fuel from a primary source;
- The exertion of control over you;
- The reinforcement of our image of superiority, lack of accountability and omnipotence;
- The creation of an emotional state in you which hampers your ability to think clearly and logically;
- The creation of a situation where you can later be made to feel guilty for erupting in the way you have at us;
- The manufacturing of a scenario which is used to reinforce our façade – we were calm and bewildered by this outburst.
- The manufacturing of a scenario which is used to smear you to third parties.
Provocation is a very useful tool to us. It is used extensively and repeatedly. Know why it is being used. Do not try to outlast it and exert your capability for patience, tolerance and understanding. You are just goading us to try harder. Remove yourself before your threshold is reached to avoid giving us points 1-7 above.
Provocation will always be used against you.
Anyway, who do you think you are looking at?
4 thoughts on “Provocation”
Vent Your Spleen! (Please see the Rules in Formal Info)
This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.
Here were some I went through.
After he put me in crutches with an Achilles injury I gained some weight because I could no longer do my daily jog, hell I could barely walk. So what does he do? He buys me a size 4 in some really nice boutique jeans. A size 4 is far off from a voluptuously curvy size 8. I was a 4 but after weeks of crutches and months of healing, not being able to do much more then sit / lay / stay / good girl, here’s a treat behavior I couldn’t have fit in them if I soaked them in a water bath and slipped them on with coconut oil.
I love to cook / bake and share. People were always complimenting my dishes and trays. If he heard a compliment he would whisper to me something like … “This shit is terrible. It’s too bitter and why is it red?” “Trust me, they’re just being nice.” “The chicken is raw are you trying to poison people?” But on the opposite spectrum when alone he would always compliment my cooking or tell me how the other men at work or on the ship would envy him because he had an old fashioned wife like me. He just didn’t want me to do for anyone else. In the very end he knew by purposefully leaving his homemade breakfast and lunch behind would make me feel bad that he wouldn’t have anything to eat. Day two, make me question why. Day Three, start asking if he was getting breakfast and lunch out, Day Four …
In the beginning I was guilty of falling for the manipulation of the things I loved to do. Some days he would praise and others he would destroy. Eventually I just quit doing them all together, that way he had nothing over me. In the very end, I was despondent and would just stare at him as though I was watching a horror flick. He would yell and scream and stomp and tell me I wasn’t reacting accordingly to his ‘bad news’ or his behavior, therefor he took the victim role and told me I must never had loved him at all.
If his mother bought me anything what so ever it would all of a sudden come up missing or be torn, maybe find a few holes in them and I would discard them as rubbish. But in the end when a beautiful sweater his mother gifted me got huge gash holes I did not throw it away, in fact I still wear it to this day. It was my way of quietly fighting back.
One day he literally asked me to start meeting him at the door with the dogs. When I asked him why he said he had absolutely no doubt in his mind that the dogs loved him by the way they greeted him at the door. “If you’re asking me to meet you at the door like a dog wagging its tail, licking your hands and sniffing your crotch, you can go f yourself because it will never happen.”
He came home the next night and I didn’t meet him at the door with the dogs he threw a fit, packed a bag and left for several days to punish me. Then text me later each night to tell me I was making him sleep in the truck. Lmao. Really?
Can you please do something on when the narcissistic abuser is found out about outsiders and why they react as they do when questioned about the treatment of the victim?
“On one level, it can be said that everything we do is provocative because we are always looking to cause you to be emotional, to react in an emotional fashion to what we do…Thus when we tell you that we have finally found our soul mate, we are provoking you into generating an intense feeling of being loved (or at least thinking that you are being loved) which causes you to exhibit your love towards us and thus we gain our fuel.”
This ‘provoking’ of positive emotions is what – even if I grasp it myself – is one aspect of the dynamic that other people fail to recognize when I attempt to explain it to them…even when it plays out post-formal relationship…in small gestures on his part that appear as benign or ‘caring’ behaviour towards me.
People seem to take it as ‘So what?’…he must feel remorse…his heart is in the right place…or I’ve even had a third party (from a helping profession) just write it off as ‘Oh, he is still infatuated with you’ – which is probably the most accurate observation someone (who is not in the know) can make.
At least, fortunately – or unfortunately – he stills exhibits the same types of behaviours; but those designed to provoke a negative response as well. He is revealing himself more and more…
So incredibly true you motherfucker
.. you even got my fucking name right
. It’s all good baby you know I love you. 🙂
Maybe it’s just my experience, but it seems that with my family narcissists the midrangers more often deliberately provoke me in private, just the two of us. Whereas the greaters do the most provoking of me in a group setting, where others can witness it.
I have wondered if this may be because the greaters know what they are doing and they know that when they attempt negative fuel, I will leave, so there is not much benefit to do this when we are alone. They also know my leaving will be more difficult in a group setting, especially at a family function. And this leaves them behind to make up whatever reasons would best serve them for my precipitous departure, not to mention deriving fuel from the others present.
This is very obnoxious and very present in my mind because we have a major family reunion coming up next week in Virginia. But I am driving my own car, have my own hotel room and plan on letting my happiness and empathic light shine brightly to all.
One benefit of having a family that’s nearly half narcs is that the other half is empaths. We can glow and support one another!