Knowing the Narcissist : Even Better Than The Real Thing

Many of our kind, admittedly not all, strive to be the best. We want to be the best for all to see and this is very important to us. We need to be even better than the real thing in order to achieve our multiplicity of aims. For us, being the number one is what it is all about. We need to win. Achieving success is integral to our needs and our outlook. There are numerous ways we do this to achieve this success and these methods are not just confined to our kind.

Sometimes it is about being first. Not coming first but being the first to act, for example, being the first to seduce you in the way we have, the first to amaze you and draw you close. The first person to ever treat you that way. The first to say certain things, take you to certain places, the first to make you feel the way that you do and this will secure the win at times.

Other occasions it is about being the smartest and certainly those from the cerebral chapter of our organisation bristle with intellectual magnificence. Our razor sharp minds help us scheme, plot and plan so that what we want is achieved through this careful application of our brain power.

More often than not however, we achieve this success by cheating. We cheat by identifying those who we want to be like, those people we regard as natural companions for thrusting, dynamic people like ourselves. Those leaders, pioneers and achievers are our natural bed mates and we make it our aim to ingratiate ourselves with them. Using our charm and magnetism we inveigle our way into their circles and once there we steal certain characteristics we regard as desirable and use them as part of our construct which we show to the world at large. Accordingly, the achievements of sports people, artists, writers, industrialists, financiers, professionals and so on become our achievements. The traits that they exhibit of excellence, success and brilliance are copied and added to our construct so we portray them to others.

It isn’t just pop stars, captains of industries and polymaths we do this with, it includes you as well. Now, you may well happen to be the manager of a successful hedge fund, a championship winning equestrian or a well-known broadcaster, if that is the case so much the better, but even if you might not belong to the ranks of the great and good you still serve a purpose for us. Leaving aside the requirement for fuel, which is naturally the number one reason for engaging with you in particular as our primary source, you also serve a valuable purpose in providing us with traits too. It might not be for the repeated trophies you won playing hockey or football but your emotional achievements are very much prized by our kind. As I mentioned above, in order to secure the win, we will aim to be first, be smartest or ultimately cheat. We always have a primary source of fuel attached to us (save in the most desperate of circumstances) and this means that there is always somebody from whom we can purloin your emotional traits. We are unable to feel many of these emotions but we want to be able to replicate them.

There is nobody better than someone from the empath family to assist us with this valuable task. Attuned to the world and the feelings of those around you, you are able to experience a wide range of emotions and to a heightened extent as well. This is fascinating for our kind and we will observe you exhibit these emotions so we can study, replicate and use them for our own purposes. You are in effect training us by showing us how these emotional expressions sound and appear. The movement of the eyes, the setting of the jaw, the curling of the lips, the flaring of nostrils, the raising of eyebrows, the lowering of tone, the expansive arm gestures, a thousand upon a thousand different combinations to relay a vast array of emotions and we are keen students. You demonstrate them to us. It is especially those which emanate from the positive range of the spectrum that we seize on, expressions of happiness, joy, ecstasy, love, compassion, caring and kindness. Show us guilt, remorse and regret. Demonstrate to us delight, wonder and warmth and we will lap up how to compose those features. We do not always get it right straight away but we are fast learners as we steal these emotional traits and add them to our range of masks. We never quite get it as seamless as you, there is often a delay, it is only very short and one has to watch for it, but it is there alright. A delay as we work out which expression to adopt, which emotion to fake and then we work it out, set our expression accordingly and proceed. These emotional traits come from you, our empathic primary source. Whilst the trappings of apparent success and achievement might be stolen from those people who we have secured a social alignment with, the emotional theft will come from you because you are a fountain of emotion and this is of course why you have been chosen. This cheating at the portrayal of emotions then allows us to appear more like you and other people. It grants us access to further targets. It enables us to move amongst you with greater ease, scoping out potential victims and drawing fuel as we show we are just like everyone else. Only more special. It is a clear cheat but a necessary one to enable us to win.

This cheating to secure the win does not end with this emotional robbery. It continues through everything we do. We are not especially patient. There is a pressing need for fuel. There is a desire to entrap you, him and her, lining up all the various source of fuel and we want them in place and functioning quick sharp. You take your time to develop relationships. A repeated exposure through positions of mutual interest and the natural effluxion of time enable you to develop friendships, familial ties, working bonds and romantic attachments. The rate at which these progress varies from person to person as well as with reference to the type of relationship, but it is safe to say that they always lag behind the pace at which we operate.

We fall in love within two dates. We are best friends with someone we only met last week. Our team at work is the best ever even though they were only put together a month ago. It does not matter to us because our perception of time is different to yours. We move at a far quicker pace and therefore everything needs to happen within a short timescale in order to allow us to succeed. To accelerate the cementation of these various relationships means we have to cheat. We cheat by pretending we love you beyond anything else the world has ever known. We cheat by finding out lots about you and pretending that it is a spiritual connection between you and I. We cheat by bribing you with flattery, compliments, gifts and fabricated passion. We push the relationship – whether intimate, friend or working – along at a frantic pace, but it just seems exciting and breath taking to you so there is no sense of alarm. We cheat because we cannot (and indeed do not know how to) allow a relationship to evolve at a natural pace in an organic way. It must be forced, hurried along, manipulated. Our relationships come fully formed from the spawning vat, they are not born and then grow and develop. This enables us to create our coterie of supporters, our loyal lieutenants and our façade in double quick time, so that the flow of fuel is in place and extensive and thus we win. We appear popular, successful and magnetic as we cheat our way to gather traits from everyone else and create near enough ready-made relationships (at least in our minds) to secure that all important win.

Yes, we are occasionally first in what we do. There are many of us who are certainly smart and apply our considerable minds to achieving great things but it is without doubt an ever present amongst our kind that in order to secure the win and ensure we are even better than the real thing to you and everybody else, we cheat.