I seriously doubt my mother ever knew that my father was a narcissist. My mother was diagnosed in 1991 with Lou Gehrig’s disease, or ALS. She was 47 when diagnosed, and passed when she was 49. I only knew my mom one way – as the strongest and most caring person I’ve ever known. My mom married an alcoholic narcissist and successfully raised two children while unbeknownst to her, her partner was trying to setup the classic narcissistic golden child / scapegoat dynamic. I think few before her have successfully been able to hold a marriage together while raising children under the same circumstances.

My mother knew my father was an alcoholic, but I don’t think she knew he was a narcissist. My guess is, if she had lived into her fifties, she would have figured him out.

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My father started targeting me when I was a kid. Like I wrote in the post titled “The Golden Child and the Scapegoat,” my father positioned himself over me and provoked me into lashing out at him so he could play the victim. When I was younger, my father tried to portray me as dumb or stupid. Most of the time, my father would do this with me when we were one-on-one. But occasionally he would try this with me in front of my mother and she would take him away from me and argue with him behind closed doors.

Once, when my family had borrowed my grandparents’ motorhome, we were all driving across Idaho when it broke down along the side of the road. My father needed another set of hands to help him turn some bolts or screws, and my mother said, “Take Tyler with you.” My father immediately lashed out: “Tyler doesn’t even know his right from his left.” My mother yelled back at him and it became an intense verbal fight.

Because of the tight confines of the motorhome, and the stressful nature of the vehicle’s breakdown, my father’s shaming and my mother’s shield all played out in front of me. I remember simultaneously feeling my mother’s love and experiencing what it meant to be targeted by a narcissist. I titled this post “A Familiar Story” because this happened to me all the time.

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There have been several things over the course of my life that, like my mother, protected me from my father’s targeting in strange and sometimes contradictory ways. The first, obviously, was my mother. After she died, my father’s advancing alcoholism may have protected me in a bizarre way as well. Alcohol clouded his thinking, made his behavior more chaotic and disorganized, and ultimately made him less effective and deliberate in his attacks. He was simply too much of a mess himself to target anyone with precision or consistency.

Then, of course, I went no contact, which protected me in the most direct way possible: I removed myself from his reach. But looking back over the years, I have also begun to see my Aunt Shy in a more complicated light. I believe she enabled my father, and I still believe her role in our family was ultimately destructive to my brother and me. At the same time, however, she provided my father with enormous amounts of validation and, in narcissistic terms, supply. In doing so, she may have satisfied enough of his emotional needs that he had less reason to come after me – or less of a reason to be destructive in general. In a strange, enabling kind of way, my Aunt Shy may have kept my father from doing a lot more harm. Did she? Or would he have just been outed earlier as an abusive father? I guess that’s the enabling dilemma.

The Narcissistic Spectrum: Narcissism is on a spectrum, and people can move along the continuum of narcissistic traits over time. The spectrum starts with accentuated narcissistic qualities, then moves towards borderline narcissism. From there the spectrum goes to subclinical narcissism, and finishes with clinical narcissism.

The Four Subtypes: Narcissism has four subtypes: grandiose, vulnerable, communal and malignant. Diagnosing narcissism is mostly for expert clinicians and psychiatrists. They use a series of questionnaires (using the DSM-5-TR and the MMPI-3), have studied pathology and have practical experience with personality disorders. In assessing where people are on the spectrum, clinicians consider how debilitating the patient’s pathology has become. They ask questions like: Can the narcissist work? Have their relationships with friends and family members suffered? Can they apologize? Can they hold themselves accountable?

Another consideration when diagnosing narcissism is how long patterns have existed for the narcissist. My father’s patterns have existed my entire lifetime. Because of this, I believe he’s somewhere between subclinical and clinical.

Without self-awareness, accountability, and a sustained self effort to change through psychotherapy, a person with significant narcissistic traits will have difficulty moving towards the healthier end of the narcissistic spectrum.

This podcast episode really covers the question about whether narcissism is nature (hereditary), nurture (abuse), or both.

Here’s an analogy my friend sent me. It’s sad but true….

“A farmer wanting to clear his fields of pest devised a brutal experiment. He threw a dead pig into a deep, dry well and tossed in a dozen rats.

Initially, the rats feasted on the carcass in harmony. But when the meat was stripped to the bone and the days of starvation set in, survival instincts took over.

Trapped in the pit with no way out, they began attacking and devouring one another. Slowly, the numbers dwindled until only one rat remained. It’s eyes were wild, its nature fundamentally altered. It was no longer a scavenger; it was a killer.

The farmer then hoisted this lone survivor out and released it back into his field. The rat ignored the crops entirely – instead, it hunted and killed every other rat it could find.”

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“This is the darkest, most accurate metaphor for how a narcissist uses triangulation and divide to rule and maintain coercive control.”

As a shadow work and narcissistic abuse recovery coach, I see the aftermath of such abuse every single day.

The hardest truth to swallow is that you cannot win by becoming the toughest rat in the well. You only win by recognizing the well, refusing the bait, and setting an impenetrable boundary against the farmer.

– Therapist Unknown

My friend also wrote to me this….

“If narcissistic abuse wasn’t a thing there wouldn’t be literally thousands of us, from so many different countries, religious backgrounds and genders, all posting and seeking therapy for the same things: near identical experiences with these predators, these perpetrators. Don’t let anyone invalidate your lived experience. The more awareness we raise about how these individuals operate, the safer our world will be…..”