Cool, Calm & Contentious

by Merrill Markoe

  But Enough About Me: Narcissism for Echoes*

  EVERY YEAR, AT CHRISTMAS, MY MOTHER WOULD BUY ME AN expensive piece of clothing that I would never wear. Or, if luck was smiling on me, several pieces of expensive clothing meant to be worn together that I would never wear. I describe the clothing as “expensive” because when my mother gave me these gifts, she would make a point of telling me how much each piece cost. Not only that, she would also detail how much effort she had put into traipsing through stores, braving ungodly crowds of holiday shoppers in order to score this rare and superior-quality item for me.

  “You need to be especially careful with this one,” she would say, as I unwrapped the box. “That’s a hundred and thirty-five dollars’ worth of mohair.”

  “Wow, it’s beautiful!” I would exclaim, trying my hardest to cover any honest emotion that might be sliding onto my face. Because the most difficult part of this ritual was that every year, without fail, my mother would miss the mark of my taste by such a wide margin that I thought she might know an alternate universe version of me who dressed in ethnic print skirts with gathered waists and blouses with Peter Pan collars festooned with appliqué ducks holding umbrellas.

  I began to dread her gifts because from December 26 on they hung in my closet unworn, glaring and fuming, causing me shame for having squandered my mother’s time and money. There was also the looming fear that she would find a reason to go poking around in my closet someday and discover that all the clothes she had bought for me looked too pressed and untouched by the elements to have ever been worn.

  Of course, the holidays always allowed our fraught relationship to blossom into a full-blown drama, courtesy of the potent combination of leisure time and forced festivity. But no such special occasion was needed for my mother and me to fill our time together with tension.

  “These can’t be the only knives you have?” my mother might say on any visit, her irritation and disbelief joining forces to create the tone of voice I carried around in my head to berate myself with at all times. She had programmed me well. I knew instinctively what she would dislike, but that didn’t mean I could necessarily correct all her areas of complaint before her arrival. It was easier to predict what she wouldn’t like than to guess what she would.

  So I was resigned to coping with every Christmas in as genial and low-key a way as possible. Then I had an idea.

  It came to me in the middle of the night as I lay awake, a thirty-five-year-old woman fretting about what would happen if she didn’t get all-new place settings before dinner on D-day.

  The following morning I phoned my mother and suggested that we try shopping for my Christmas gift together. I didn’t expect her to go for it. I was thrilled when she agreed.

  Best of all, I already knew what I wanted: a black fitted blazer that I could wear with everything—a noncontroversial selection that couldn’t get shot down as a “ridiculous choice.” It would be stylish, versatile, and just expensive enough for my mother to be able to boast about how much she had spent on it. It would herald the end to my guilt about unworn presents. My mother would buy me something that I actually wanted! What an exhilarating idea!

  On the appointed day, my mother and I walked around crowded department stores for hours on end as she waved hangers full of ethnic print skirts with gathered waists and blouses with Peter Pan collars at me as though she were some kind of naval officer on the brig, signaling to the rest of the team on the shore. Reluctant to fire the first shot, I made sure to smile and say, “Yes! Lovely!” or “Wow!!! Beautiful!” as she displayed each new ensemble.

  But I stood my ground.

  After dozens of inappropriate selections from my mother, I held up an example of what I had come here to find. “I could really use a new black blazer … like this!” I said, trying to seem jaunty and casual. My mother made one of her patented grim faces. Hers was the expression of a displeased banker in a Charles Dickens adaptation, accompanied by a curled-lip “yecccch” as she insisted that I at least try on the clothes she’d picked out first.

  I played along, thinking to myself, as I viewed her selections, that if my goal was to look fifteen years older and thirty pounds heavier, these were definitely the outfits I would choose.

  At the end of the day, as closing time was requiring us to wrap this party up, I took a deep breath and said, “Mom, as much as I love all those things you showed me, I really need a new black blazer for work.” I saw her sigh deeply. “It’s the perfect gift for me right now,” I went on. “I’ll look capable and no-nonsense but feminine at the same time. I can wear it to a meeting or dinner or on the rifle range, you know … if I ever have a reason to go to a rifle range. Or a dinner.”

  My mother rolled her eyes and exhaled such an exasperated gust of air that it almost caused all the clothing on the racks in the women’s sportswear department to sway. Then she muttered bitterly, as she handed her Visa card to the cashier, “This is the last time I am doing anything like this. I get no pleasure from buying you something I don’t happen to like.”

  A few minutes later, as I followed her out of the store, carrying my “present” in a garment bag, she could barely look at me. Somehow I had gone and done it again: ruined Christmas for my mother.

  How had it all gone so horribly wrong?

  Some of the most valuable lessons I’ve learned in life are the small ones. For example, someone once told me, “When you have your picture taken, smile. If it turns out to be a bad picture, at least you don’t also look like an asshole.”

  And then there are big complex lessons. Comprehending the mechanism of the narcissistic personality was one of those for me.

  The subject was brought to my attention after I made an appointment to see a shrink, seeking, among other things, an explanation of the aforementioned Christmas mystery, which was really just one of many bafflingly similar incidents that had cluttered my life for years. I had begun to notice that my parents and boyfriends had similar complaints about me. For example, the boyfriend I had at that time would become enraged if I stayed up to watch a movie by myself instead of going to bed at the same time he did, whether or not I was sleepy. He felt that my actions, unconcerned as they were with bearing witness to the innate majesty of his slumber, proved that I cared only about myself. “Why does everything always have to be done your way?” he railed.

  This puzzled me because it didn’t sound like what was going on from my perspective. Staying up late didn’t feel like an act of teenage rebellion. I wasn’t refusing to follow orders because I was competing with him for the title of sleep captain. I was only staying up because I knew that something boring on television would eventually put my brain to sleep. Few things in life could be predicted with more certainty.

  There had to be, I said to myself, something I was missing. It couldn’t be a coincidence that people in two totally separate areas of my life were hammering me for being “combative and contrarian.” As far as I could tell, there was no common denominator in these very different relationships. It seemed to behoove me to put myself in the shop for repairs.

  So I signed up for therapy. At the top of my list of problems was how to make all these fights stop. “I hate fighting,” I said to my shrink. “My mother insists that I intentionally provoke her. The boyfriend says I pick fights with him. Obviously, I’m not totally innocent. If I’m causing all these problems, I need to know how to knock it off.”

  “It is not that their opinion of you is the same. It is that they are the same,” said the shrink, turning all my assumptions upside down, while at the same time demonstrating why she was able to charge so much money. “Your parents and your boyfriend are narcissistic, so they cannot tolerate that you are separate.”

  I had no idea what that meant.

  My parents were a middle-class man and woman who dressed in complementary-colored permanent-press clothing. They were bound to each other by their twin passions of criticizing their offspring and picking fights with waiters. In what way could the
y be considered similar to my weird, offbeat, creative boyfriend in the cowboy shirt and motorcycle boots?

  The shrink gave me a pile of books on narcissism to read, and when I was finished I became obsessed with buying more. Any story anyone told me about someone who was causing them problems got pushed through this new prism. “He sounds like a narcissist,” I would say to everyone about everything. I began to feel like I had just joined the plot of Invasion of the Body Snatchers in the middle of Act 2.

  Coming to a real understanding of how a narcissistic personality works took persistence. For a while, it just didn’t add up. It was counterintuitive. One reason may be that some experts believe that the narcissist’s emotional system becomes fatally damaged at about the age of three, maybe from something as common and inevitable as failed initial attempts at independence from Mommy. The freshly wounded three-year-old, unable to make the right adjustment, continues to cling to the infantile idea that baby and Mommy are the same all-powerful person. Sometimes he keeps clinging to this fallacy and applying it to everyone he meets for the rest of his life. So say goodbye to the development of empathy. Since everyone else is, in his view, already part of him and his system, there is no need to worry about other people’s feelings. For the eternally infantile narcissist, there is only one person and one correct opinion: his.

  Finally I could see how my mother (like every narcissist in good standing) was chained to a seesaw of two behavioral extremes: grandiosity and rage. Anything that happened to her inspired one reaction or the other. Things were either all good or all bad. If it wasn’t summer, it was winter.

  Here, at last, was an explanation for that mysterious fight on Christmas.

  When my mother was allowed to be the one to pick out my clothing, it fed her grandiosity and she was pleased. But when I suggested that I had an idea I liked better than hers, I was calling her worthless and therefore humiliating her. If I wasn’t feeding her grandiosity, then I was provoking her rage.

  But how could I have possibly known, without talking to a shrink, that according to the unbendable rules of the narcissistic personality disorder, if I was not paying homage to my mother’s taste by embracing the clothing she picked out, then in her view of things I was picking a fight? I didn’t understand that narcissists never roll with the punches because I didn’t know that narcissists can never be wrong. Or that, for my mother, the act of buying me a present was not about finding something I might like but a way for her to pump up her own sense of self-worth.

  Had I just shut up and let her waste her money on another gathered skirt decorated with appliqué ducks that I would never wear, I would have provided her with more evidence that she had all the right answers. Instead, by thinking that my opinion mattered too, and that I was showing respect by helping her buy me something I would find useful, I had ground her face in the dirt and triggered her rage.

  “In the Greek myth, Narcissus fell in love with his own reflection. But narcissism isn’t actually about self-love,” my shrink explained. “More like self-obsession. Anyone who isn’t part of the pillar of support is part of the abyss around it.”

  Or, as one of my friends once explained this credo: “I’m the piece of shit the world revolves around.”

  Here’s how it works: When a narcissist admits you into their inner circle, you haven’t just made a friend, you have been annexed by an imperialist country with only one resident. Your borders have been erased. The subtext of all future interactions with this person, forevermore, will be: “What’s mine is mine and what’s yours is mine.” Welcome to a world where there is no you!

  A narcissist cannot tolerate seeing you as separate because he is a jumbo-sized three-year-old child who must be at the center of your world as well as his own. Either your needs are perfectly aligned with his or you can expect some kind of a tantrum.

  Once you are involved with your narcissist, there are only two acceptable ways for you to behave with them: you become part of the admiring support team or you become the fall guy. If you are not mirroring your narcissist by reinforcing what they stand for, then you are proving that you are a separate person with a separate agenda. That means you are a threat.

  So here are your choices: the Fan Club President with rose-colored glasses or the Incompetent Boob who is ruining everything and is, therefore, the enemy. If you choose the latter, you offer the narcissist a chance to release decades of pent-up unexamined rage. This works out well for them, since they are continually looking for a way to vent.

  It will not, on the other hand, be so great for you.

  To survive your beloved narcissist flipping out and screaming at you, it may help you to know that their personality is a mask of fake superiority covering up a deep sense of shame. All that arrogance is a fit thrown by a plus-sized infant who is furious at Mommy for not banishing every problem before it began to bother baby. It was eye-opening to realize that what I thought was a roller coaster of unpredictable behavior was instead a predictable system.

  For years I could never tell if the time I spent at home was going to be unexpectedly pleasant or deteriorate into a fight that seemed to come out of nowhere. Now I learned that those unexpected fights, which looked to me like unfortunate breaks in the normal pattern of stability, were the pattern. The placid periods and good times were the exception.

  Even if you have made yourself the designated Fan Club President in the ongoing scenario with your narcissist, you can still count on their disposition to keep flip-flopping between grandiosity and rage. That’s just the way it works. It has almost nothing to do with you or your choice of actions. It is based on tiny fluctuations in their mood, as they react to whatever is available, real or imagined. At two o’clock: happy and grandiose; three-fifteen: furious and raging. Within the narrow boundaries of this extremely fragile self-system (which, don’t forget, was created by a frightened three-year-old), everything that is not pumping the narcissist up is trying to destroy them.

  At last I had a reasonable explanation for why my brother and I, even armed with perky outfits, tidy haircuts, and carefully selected topics of conversation, always seemed to be wearing and doing and saying the wrong thing at family gatherings.

  Now I had insight into what was behind three decades of embarrassing restaurant incidents in which my parents, behaving like aristocracy, treated the stammering waitstaff with barely disguised contempt.

  “That’s a very meager amount!” my mother would say, offended by the size of the complimentary crudités tray the waitress placed on our table. It always seemed strange to me that she would make this kind of hostile announcement rather than simply ask for a few more when she was finished. In retrospect, it is a wonder that the members of my family survived so many dinners that must have been drenched in the spit of humiliated, revenge-seeking waitpersons. Perhaps our bodies learned to embrace and process other people’s saliva as an essential nutrient, like riboflavin.

  Ultimately, the biggest lesson that came from my narcissism-related reading was learning how to identify members of this annoying tribe when they are encountered in their natural habitat. Like a perfectly camouflaged salamander, almost invisible when he rests on a matching granite boulder, narcissists can be difficult to see. Especially at first, when they wrap themselves inside the charm they use to make themselves attractive in the world. This, of course, means that the charm-intensive arenas of show business and politics are as natural a habitat for narcissists as marshlands are for ducks.

  Perhaps the most obvious and familiar red flag is the doting coterie of yes-men. In narcissism talk, these people are called “narcissistic supply.”

  Spotting a narcissist is kind of like spotting a bear. Much the way naturalists tell you not to look a grizzly bear in the eye lest it detect a challenge and attack, you are better off not staring down a narcissist. To engage them is to play by their rules. Don’t forget: they are always right. Which means that the only defense against them is to remain aloof or not get involved in the first place.
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  Rising above my mother’s baiting was an exercise in Zen I could only intermittently remember to perform. When she was in the mood to vent, I would watch her fishing around for things about me that pissed her off. Talking too fast? Check. Unflattering hairstyle? Yep. Never heard of the book she was reading? Check check check.

  In the end, it was wonderful to have a clinical explanation for all of this puzzling stuff. It was also distressing to learn that there was no way for me to single-handedly control or repair all of our conflicts. Gone was the dream that handling my mother with kid gloves or talking to her honestly might transform her into someone more enlightened. Instead, the further I got into my stack of books, the clearer it was that I had to face a depressing reality: interacting with her unguardedly meant entering a one-sided conversation that would sooner or later spiral into a petty personal attack. The fantasy that she would one day accept me on my own terms was officially dead.

  Since no true board-certified narcissist is ever going to change, the only variable under my control was my ability to stop reacting to her. Even then, she might initiate some fisticuffs just to stay in good form. As every book on the subject of narcissism eventually explains (in CAPS, italics, and underlined with bold exclamation marks!!!), the only method for coping is to maintain emotional distance. Change your expectations. There’s no pleasing unpleasable people.

  But forewarned is forearmed. So from that point on, when my mother provoked me, I refused to bite. When she raised one eyebrow at me and said for the millionth time, “You really don’t get out to many cultural events, do you? Not the opera, not the ballet, not the theater,” instead of coming back at her with “Well, neither do you. Plus, you didn’t just finish writing a book,” I smiled and said, “Well, no. I guess I don’t.” When she tried to follow it up with a list of other things I wasn’t doing, I said, “Yep. Well, I guess I better go take a shower or I’m not going to get much done today, either.”