Watching You Crumble
We don’t provide support. We are too concerned with ourselves and our daily hunt for the fuel that we need to be concerned about you. We are engrossed in our own world and have no interest in yours. The only time we pay attention to you is when you are providing us with fuel or you stop providing us with fuel. Everything we do is focussed around us. This is because we have to obtain fuel, as without we will disintegrate. The hunger for this fuel is never ending and accordingly all of our energy must be applied towards obtaining it. This leaves us with nothing left over for anyone else.
Being a caregiver yourself, you would like to think that the person who you share your life with, or who you work closely with, would be amenable to providing you with support. That may mean giving you emotional support when you are experiencing a difficult time or taking the strain allowing you to lessen the burden on yourself. You give and you are happy to do so, therefore why should they not do so as well? That is the outlook of someone normal operating by the norms and rules of your world. Those do not apply to us. We cannot provide you with support since we have nothing available to do so.
Added to that we do not know how to provide emotional support. Yes we can see how chores can be done and the like. We also have observed the ways that you provide emotional support to other people and we know the phrases that are used, the expressions that are formed on people’s faces and the gestures that are made. We have seen all that and we could trot all that out. In fact we have done in the past. We did this when we were seducing you. When we wanted you to divulge about your weaknesses and vulnerabilities this will have invariably saddened you and upset you. It may even have caused an episode where you need emotional support. We were happy to go through the motions then because we were at the stage of investing in your in order to get our fuel. We were content to make the right noises, give you a hug and make the panacea that is the cup of tea. All of this was learned from others. We did not feel anything for you. We could not put ourselves in your shoes (heaven forbid that would ever happen) and we could not empathise with what you were experiencing and nor can we ever do that. Yet again, we conned you into thinking that we are a caring and selfless person. We demonstrated such an approach when we were first together and that attracted you to us. This raised expectations that you could rely on us and turn to us when the need arose. It is all false.
Furthermore, when you need support and expect it from us, you are showing to us how you are weak. We despise weakness. You will find that our kind is rarely found near children, the infirm and ill and the elderly. This is because they are all weak and want support regularly. We do not want to be reminded of that fact. We cannot be bothered with you cluttering up our route to fuel. An exhibition of weakness infuriates us. A normal person would see someone in a position of weakness and deign to help and assist. We have seen how this is a natural reaction in normal people. It will not happen with us.
If you are fortunate, we will absent ourselves from the situation in an instant. We will generate some urgent reason; find a pressing engagement we had forgotten about in order to ensure we can get away from you and your ailment, woe or injury. You probably will never see us move as quick when it comes to getting away from somebody who needs help. If we are unable to exit the situation then we may just stand and look at you. You could be reaching out to us, eyes filled with tears of pain, asking for help and we will just give you a blank stare. We know we ought to be helping you, convention and observation has told us this, but we cannot do so. We are unable to leave but we are also unable to help you. This requires compassion and we do not have any. It requires us to us our energies to help you out and we are forbidden from doing so.
Our ultimate reaction where you need support from us is to go on the offensive. The uncomfortable feeling that you have generated inside of us makes us feel less powerful and smacks of inferiority. We know of only one way to banish such a sensation. We need to reassert our power and that means we must lash out at you. It becomes necessary to subject you to further insults and denigrating comments, at a time when you are feeling hurt and vulnerable.
“What are you crying for? I have had worse happen to me.”
“I am sick and tired of you being pathetic. Deal with it.”
“I bet (insert name of triangulated individual) would not make such a song and dance about it like you do.”
“It’s only a dog, you can get another one. Seriously, what a display over a dumb animal.”
“You are hysterical, you need to get help.”
“Stop crying or I will give you something to cry about.”
“That’s right; make it about you on my special day.”
We will lash out at you with these words in order to make you feel worse and ourselves feel better because that is all we care about. We fooled you into thinking that we care about you. That is a fallacy. Do not expect us to support you.
Demonstrating our legendary hypocrisy we will expect you to always be there for us. When we have a need you must attend to it straight away, even if you are experiencing difficulties yourself. When we have a scratch we expect you to make it better even though you might be bleeding to death before us. As with so much of our behaviour we do not regard the way we act towards you as meaning you should behave the same way towards us. If you chopped us in half you would most likely find this stencilled through us like lettering on a stick of rock
“Do as I say, not do as I do.”
16 thoughts on “Watching You Crumble”
Vent Your Spleen! (Please see the Rules in Formal Info)
This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.
Typo “requires us to us our”
At first he actually seemed supportive. I started to realize it was only because he was going to gain from what I was doing and the mask was still on at that point.
He saw dollar signs over my head because I made him look good and would bring people into the private practice AND he would profit from me.
I quickly found out he never really was supportive or understanding AT ALL. WOW am I glad I didn’t stay in that situation or join his practice.
He would often talk about us being a power couple and how he saw us that way and what not….
Supportive my ass
Hi, i hope you don’t mind me asking but did you know about cluster B and Narcissists through your work, prior to dating one ?
Hey Lisa,
Yes I did. I knew about them through both. I actually suspected when I was 14 years old one of my guy obsessions was a narcissist. What I would find out later in life was that he is a borderline psychopath. I actually believe that he is a narcissistic borderline psychopath because of his need for fuel. He is not as high functioning as HG. I knew quite a couple narcissists and probably a sociopath and a psychopath growing up before I was formally educated. I also found the topic very interesting and would read about it a lot as teenager and would no joke read the DSM for fun instead of doing my H.W. lol. I had both personal and professional experience prior to my engagements with narcissists. The problem is that I did not know (when I was younger) that the same criteria of behaviors could manifest in these other low key covert kinda ways…(ex: mid-range narcissists). During my masters program I became involved with a psychopath – he was actually pretty nice to me even though we disappeared on each other lol – he tried to come back and reappear but I never answered. All of the others were narcissists except for the narcissistic borderline psychopath who pops in and out of my life. I had a friend who i recently cut off who is psychopathic – we had an awesome friendship until he started to become emotionally abusive and said screw this. I work with cluster b’s everyday. I had a lot of borderline friends in high school and a histrionic who i hate now. Some of my most exciting youthful more risky experiences were with my borderline friends. I’ve actually remained friends with a few while others were toxic and needed to be cut off.
Lisa,
Oh man lol now I’m getting all nostalgic – reminds me of some of the fun times I had with a few of the borderline I had….
https://youtu.be/941DmatcK8M
Dr HG, thank you for taking the time to respond
“You will find that our kind is rarely found near children, the infirm and ill and the elderly.“ My MMRN is a nurse. He’d read this and take that line and run away with it. Then he’d go on about how he used to be co-dependent. Insert eye roll here.
OMG. That explains the nervous twitches, nervousness, restlessness, and weird facial expressions, I noticed every time I told my ex narc about one of my patients suddenly developing a complication and circling the drain (dying), particularly the ones who had the same health issues he had!!!!!!! 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣 I was torturing him and I didn’t know! Omg now I know exactly what I will post on my Facebook to get both: torture him and get rid of him!!!! 🤣🤣🤣🤣
HG, you are the BEST, my friend. The best!!! I am laughing so hard I can barely type!
I apologize if I sound insensitive to some of you who actually experienced real illness at the hands of a narc. My laughter is not about that. My laughter is at my narcissist’s terrified reactions. Oh boy I wish I had recorded in a video to show you guys. It looked like the man had Tourette’s! 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣
After more than 10 years together, I still can’t get over how my husband is there for me at all times. He can’t get over how grateful I am for what he thinks of as tiny things that anyone would do. My narc father and severely codependent mother taught me that I would never get any kind of support from anyone. Thank goodness for cats and books, or I don’t know how I’d have turned out.
When I was a child, my father and his drunken coterie called me selfish and spoiled for crying at night because I couldn’t sleep through their loud, smoke-filled parties. My mother did nothing, and I knew not to expect her to. That happened a lot, and so much more. My extended family saw what was going on too, but again, I got less than nothing from the older generation. My cousins were better, but they were kids too, so what could they do?
To have someone who treats me as a person in my own right and not an extension of my father — well, that was what I thought I had in my first boyfriend, who turned out to be a narcissist himself. But now I’ve got someone real. It still astonishes me.
Her favorite saying, “you/he/she did it to your/him/herself.”
Oh, this is helpful.
HG what do you mean you have nothing available to do so ?
Context please.
we cannot provide you with support because we have nothing available to do so ? i think you’ll say this is this energy thing which i’ve never understood
As in no emotional empathy.
ah i see thanks. this post is so accurate nothing interfered with his ridiculous routine and it wasn’t necessarily that his routine included fuel gathering all the time it was just that they are not interested in anything that is not a direct benefit to them nor are they interested in anything that is about something good for us that doesn’t include or benefit them. their whole attitude is like a big stroppy sulky baby and everything is tit for tat , the small ridiculous things that he ever did do, he would bring up constantly and was too thick to even cringe at how minimal and embarrassingly lacking he was in doing anything . They seem to be missing the cringe gene …….