A Lack Of Support
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.”
11 thoughts on “A Lack Of Support”
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This explains why the same man, who in the beginning nursed me through a flu, years later did not offer to drive me to the hospital despite being in excruciating pain. He visited me only twice after my surgery, briefly, and the second time only after I called asking why he wasn’t with me. I had accepted the excuse of his needing to be there with our kids (despite overwhelming evidence around me of entire families being welcome with the patient.) Somehow, I feel better having read this and understanding that it wasn’t because I was an undeserving wife. I nursed him through two surgeries and a cocaine overdose that put him in the emergency room but still felt I was wrong for asking him to be present during my emergency. Thank you for enlightening me again.
This post comes at the perfect time. I just had a cortisone injection in my spine, which required me to need a ride home and also not to bend, squat, twist or lift anything for at least a few days, especially the first day. My hub knew this. He gave me a ride to the doc, dropped me off and went to work. (He worked the day of my surgery also.) I got an Uber to get home. (Warning, the next part is kind of gross!) When I arrived home, our elderly dog had pooped on the floor and much of it was already hardened, I was in excrutiating pain due to the numbness wearing off, and there was no way I could spend an hour trying to clean the floor. I removed what I could, wiped down our dog, and as for the rest, I put two towels over it to prevent the dog and me from stepping in and tracking it. Gross, I know, but that’s the best I could manage. I texted my hub an update and told him I’d done the best I could.
When my hub arrived home, he did not speak to me. He barely spoke a word that evening. The poop stayed in the floor under towels all night and through the next day. I asked my hub if he has a plan for dealing with it, and he said he’d not even noticed it. It’s impossible to miss! We step over the towels everytime we go outside which is often to take our dog out. He acted like he had no idea what I was talking about. Eventually it was cleaned after it had been in the floor almost a full two days.
I know historically, he has left things overturned on the stove for days that he spilled in a rage, waiting for me to clean it since I “made him do it.” I honestly think he was angry with me and punishing me for not having cleaned the poop up when I wasn’t able to do so. In general, we both would have tried to get up any mess as soon as our pet leaves it, but in this case, it was like he just left it on purpose because he considered it *my* responsibility and I had failed to do it. WTF is that?!
You are in devaluation. He has no sense of obligation to clean up as this feels like control to him, hence he rejects the need to clean and with it any suggestion that he knows that he must clean up the dog mess, all driven of course by his narcissism. If you want to understand this dynamic in greater detail, I recommend that you book an email consultation with me.
Thank you for your insight on this, HG. It makes total sense that he would feel like it is control and thus reject it.
You are welcome.
Oh HG, I could write a book on this topic alone.
A few years ago, current Narc contacts me to let me know his IPPS is in the hospital. Of course he must have forgotten all the lies he had told me before. How their relationship was over, they were going their own way, no sexual relations between them. Finally after what seemed like much persuasion from me he divulged the reason why she was in the hospital. She was having a miscarriage. There was lots of bleeding and her life was in danger.
He stated that, “she had gotten herself pregnant”. At first I was not understanding what he meant and then he clarified. He was so nonchalant about the whole situation. At this point, I was feeling so sad for her. The pregnancy was of course from him.
A few weeks later, he tried to see me, complaining how his IPPS was depressed and he had no clue why. He did not understand that I couldn’t be with him at this point. That was a huge wake up call for me. His lack of empathy for her, his lack of empathy for the situation and his failure to understand how I would feel about the whole thing. My heart was broken for her and for realizing that something was off about him.
So sad. It’s always when you need them the most, they break your heart with their nonchalance, or their disappearances. Then suddenly they re-emerge and pick up as if nothing happened, with the expectation that we will forgive and forget. Always
“I don’t have time to deal with this right now, you’re not the only one with a stressful life”
“Why are you telling me this right now, you know how busy I am”
“I honestly don’t know what you expect me to do”
“You bring all of this on yourself”
“I told you I didn’t have time for you today, yet here you go dumping your problems on me…. My God, you have zero respect for my time”
Yep. Yep. Yep. If you want any form of emotional support from a narc, then you’ll be waiting a long and disappointing time after the GP.
Most couples are drawn closer by confiding in each other and selflessly giving emotional support through difficult periods…… an entanglement with a narc does the complete opposite.
“Why are you crying? I have had worse happen to me”- my mother used to say this. But it was true. I saw it with my own eyes. I hated the fact that i couldn’t do anything those times as i was little girl.
“Do not let yourself get provoked. It is a sign of weakness” – my ex narc
HG, don’t some narcissists enjoy being around people they perceive as weaker than they are since they can control them?
In effect yes, albeit “enjoy” is purely a manifestation of the sense of control.