You Are an Object

An infant in a crib is unaware of the fundamental difference between people and the other objects that revolve around it in its world. Both its mother and the mobile overhead are just objects to it. It quickly learns that when it cries, the mother-object appears and fulfills all its needs. Ooh, power!

So, it uses its vocal chords as a remote control for the mother-object.

It assumes that the mother-object exists for its sake. It quickly learns how to operate the mother-object. It pushes the buttons on her control panel largely through big demonstrations of displeasure whenever she does not anticipate and fulfill its needs in advance. She is just one object in a world that revolves around it, for it. Mark Twain delightfully reminds us of what we are at this stage of human development:


"I do not remember my first lie, it is too far back; but I remember my second one very well. I was nine days old at the time, and had noticed that if a pin was sticking in me and I advertised it in the usual fashion, I was lovingly petted and coddled and pitied in a most agreeable way and got a ration between meals besides. It was human nature to want to get these riches, and I fell. I lied about the pin — advertising one when there wasn't any. You would have done it; George Washington did it, anyone would have done it. During the first half of my life I never knew a child that was able to rise above that temptation and keep from telling that lie. " — Mark Twain


A narcissist remains forever such an infant. His world revolves around him. The people in it are but objects for him to use and control — existing for his sake, not their own. Like levers on a control panel or tools to be damaged through heavy use or livestock to be consumed. There to fulfill his needs and enhance his image. Beyond that, they have no importance. It never occurs to him that he owes them anything in return or that he should consider the effects of his actions on them.

An object has no feelings. It is not a person. It is not even a being in the usual sense of the word. You might grab an object like a screwdriver and abuse it by using it to pry something open, knowing that by using it this way you might break it. But you think nothing of breaking a screwdriver. Damaging that screwdriver is nothing. There are plenty more where that one came from.

The only thing that matters is what you want = getting open that thing you're trying to pry open with the screwdriver.

That screwdriver is of no account. It would be absurd to regard it as a having a right to better treatment. In fact, it has no right to be: it exists for your sake, for you to use and abuse as you please. It's basically just an extension of yourself, a tool, an executioner of your will, not its own.

That's what YOU are to a narcissist.

Narcissists (and psychopaths) just use other people, all other people. Any way they please. In other words, they don't relate to other people. Which is an abbreviated way of saying that they don't relate to other human beings as a human being.

To relate to other human beings as a human being (i.e., humanly), you have to be a human being. You must experience your own humanity and know it. Only then can you recognize the image and likeness of humanity in others and relate to it in them as our common humanity — something we share with all other human beings, even mortal enemies. We relate to it.

Relating to it IS humanity. Otherwise known as empathy. It's what prompts soldiers who were fighting ferociously a minute ago to kneel down and tenderly care for the enemy's wounds. In fact, because the extremity of battle often makes it hard to switch gears the moment the fighting stops, humanity toward the fallen foe was regarded as the Christian soldier's highest virtue. In Italian it is called pieta, which sublimely shows that piety and pity (empathy) are two sides of the same coin.

But ours isn't the only species that relates in a special manner to its own kind. Many species of higher animals do. And it's easy to see why: that's how Nature keeps them from preying on their own kind (as sometimes happens, especially among lower species of animals). Even when they do fight, once one contestant for what they're fighting over backs off, the fight is instantly over and all hostility vanishes.

So, though remembering our humanity in extreme and unnatural situations like combat may be a virtue, normally it's no virtue at all. It's just natural.

But it's a learned behavior.

To illustrate: You've certainly seen a toddler delighted with some chick or puppy or bunny or other cute little animal you place before her. Then, on a whim, she shocks you by grabbing a stick and pounding the poor thing. The look in her eyes is the most shocking part — nothing there but fascination with the effect she's having on it = fascination with its agony.

Picture an adult instead, and you are watching a psychopath or other narcissist.


"The narcissist feels entitled, and when he is thwarted, he acts out, just as young children, who are supremely narcissistic, act out. "Think of a toddler raging against an object that won't do what he wants," says [forensic psychologist J. Reid] Meloy. "I have this image in my mind of a 2-year-old squeezing a puppy's feet. He's attempting to control the animal's behavior, and probably deriving some pleasure from that." — Hollow Men by Stephen G. Michaud


A little child does this because her person-ality isn't fully developed. Her sense of person-hood isn't differentiated so that she distinguishes between your personhood and hers. Between that puppy's living soul and hers. She's so brutal because while pounding Puppy she feels no pain. All she feels is powerful. So Puppy might as well be a nail she's hitting with a hammer.

This is why parents must closely supervise that little child, especially when vulnerable animals or other small children are around, and teach her that other living beings have feelings of their own and feel like she would if someone did that to her. She must be taught to respect other living beings as beings in their own right and to empathize with them.

For whatever reason, psychopaths and narcissists never learn.

How could they? They identify with their image — a work of fiction — not their true selves. So, they don't relate to themselves as human beings. They don't know the human being within. They don't know human being. So, how can they recognize humanity in others? How can they relate humanly to human beings?

The narcissist doesn't conceive herself as of our kind: What god with nothing but contempt for mere mortals does? So, expect no more regard for your feelings from her alien mentality than you should expect from an extra-terrestrial who abducts you to use as a specimen for an experiment. No more than a lamb should expect from a wolf, a mouse from a cat, a baby seal from a killer whale, or a cockroach from you.

In other words, narcissists relate to us as predators do.

And so perhaps they are right: they are NOT of our kind, humankind. For, except in primitive species, predators don't prey on their own kind. Because they identify with their own kind. They like their own kind. That affinity makes predation unthinkable. What use of force we observe among the members of a species is limited to what's necessary to protect individual interests and goes not one step further.

True, narcissists and psychopaths are not the only people who can turn off their humanity. All people can turn it off like a light-switch, thus becoming guilty of inhumanity. In fact, Man's inhumanity to Man is an age-old theme of literature, and history is full of examples of people turning off their human sensibilities en-masse, as during the Holocaust or the Inquisition. What makes people with narcissistic personality disorder (and psychopathy) different is that they have theirs turned off permanently for everyone but themselves.

And everyone means even their own children. Narcissists are as unfeeling toward whomever they abuse as you or I are toward a spike we are pounding with a sledgehammer. This is a hard truth to accept.

The good thing about accepting it is that there is no hating such a person. You can't hate what you can't relate to. You can no more hate a narcissist for being a narcissist than you can hate a snake for being a snake. You don't take it personally when a snake bites you. Don't take it personally when a narcissist does, either. It wasn't you. It wasn't anything you did. You were just there, that's all. Handy.

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Arrested Child Development

What's the pain that the drug of attention kills?

It is widely believed (and my own experience with narcissists bears this out) that it is the pain of being judged as something to be ashamed of as a little child, during that crucial stage of personality development when the ego is all and fragile to boot. Being judged a disappointment. Not-good-enough to be acceptable to at least one parent.

Because something's wrong with you. What? Good question. That's The Big Mystery.

But you've always known that nobody holds and cuddles you or picks you up when you cry, or comes around just to giggle in your face and talk to you and play with you for a while. And you're finding out that you can never get it right, because you're always too "this" or too "that." You never say anything worth listening to. You never do anything worth noticing. You never deserve a compliment or praise. You shouldn't be encouraged to aim high, because that would give you the wrong idea and make you think you have what it takes to achieve something out of the ordinary.

But you need plenty of negative attention and criticism. Because you screw up all the time. Wet the bed? O God! That's worse than spilling milk. Over that the ear-piercing screaming will run for ten minutes straight.

Then she'll tell you that she has problems so you shouldn't be doing anything that bothers her.

How can a little child live up to that standard? They are always getting muddy or spilling milk or something. And notice the perversion of roles in that twist. In other words, you must see to it that Mamma has no trouble. She isn't here to take care of your needs and troubles: you are here to take care of hers. Because Mamma is a big baby. And, you are defective because you have problems that give Baby Mamma trouble.

Ah, the abuse that takes on a life of its own and keeps on abusing.

At this point, I must pause to point out that an abusive home life as a child is not a cause of NPD. It may be a temptation, but normal children come out of the same homes as malignant narcissists. Moreover, malignant narcissism is the foundation of psychopathy, and research on the psychopathic prison population strongly indicates that psychopaths come from both good homes and bad ones. Though an abusive home life is a big family secret that defies discovery by anyone on the outside, the amount of this research is so great that it must be taken seriously.

Therefore, this pain may be no more than any little child feels when his parents are too busy for him or when a parent makes the common verbal mistake of condemning the child, instead of the child's behavior, as "bad." We all got some of that, no matter how loving our parents were. So, it may be that malignant narcissists and psychopaths are just people who chose to carry a grudge, at a crucial age when it stunted their growth as human beings.


So, though she's dead and gone, Mamma becomes his demon. And here Narcissus is, an adult but still feeling the shame and trying to get right for her. He too is a case of arrested child development: he is still that child and still in that child's abyss of unbearable pain, doomed to forever try to claw his way out of the dungeon of her low regard.

Like his narcissistic parent, he rejects that child. He has replaced it with an imaginary self. It is perfect, godlike, mighty. Indeed, he cannot bear to look within and know his true self. So, he pulls the wool over his eyes by portraying a false, grandiose image of himself to gaze upon in mirrors.

Rather like a child playing "Pretend" — dressing up in his daddy's clothes before a mirror or imagining that he's Superman. Hey, nobody hurts his feelings!


But that isn't him. That's an imaginary him. The ideal him. Of course, this is a normal stage in child development. Children easily lose themselves in this game of "Pretend."


Kitty, dear, let's pretend --' And here I wish I could tell you half the things Alice used to say, beginning with her favourite phrase 'Let's pretend.' She had had quite a long argument with her sister only the day before — all because Alice had begun with 'Let's pretend we're kings and queens;' and her sister, who liked being very exact, had argued that they couldn't, because there were only two of them, and Alice had been reduced at last to say, 'Well, YOU can be one of them then, and I'LL be all the rest.' And once she had really frightened her old nurse by shouting suddenly in her ear, 'Nurse! Do let's pretend that I'm a hungry hyaena, and you're a bone.'

— Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass


Some children get stuck in the Land of Pretend and don't distinguish between fantasy and reality, creating an imaginary, ideal friend. Children do this because they feel so small and insignificant in our world. So they "pretend" a different one, one more to their liking. Their principal aim is to be important and grand like grown-ups.

Important enough to be worthy of some attention. They will actually die for want of attention, because their budding personalities cannot take the damage being disregarded does to their tender self-esteem.

Once fully formed, the person-alities of children outgrow the need to create an imaginary, "dream" self. They then become themselves. It's as though they accept and marry themselves, merging with themselves, as their person-ality integrates. In their thoughts they normally refer to themselves as "I" — not "you" or that imaginary "he" or "she."

But the dysfunctional person-alities of people with NPD remain forever in this disordered, half-formed state. They are in a permanent identity crisis.

They don't identify with themselves! They still identify with that imaginary self — a fictional character!

Consider that — in their thoughts, normal people never refer to themselves in the same terms that an author refers to the characters in a novel, as "he" or "she." We never step that far outside ourselves. And only when bawling ourselves out do we distance ourselves by addressing ourselves as "you."

How can anyone who doesn't have a proper relationship with himself have a proper relationship with anyone else?

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