“I will.”
Abby got out and closed the door behind her. As she walked toward the house, she sensed something familiar, something visceral like the creaking of floorboards in an old familiar hallway. Abby heard them—these echoes from the past, which had been here the very first time she met Judy Martin.
When she was in graduate school, she’d written her dissertation on narcissism, which was the colloquial name for narcissistic personality disorder. Her advisor was aware of her family history but agreed that this very history could benefit the work if she could remain objective. For two years, she read studies, interviewed doctors and compiled her own set of data from sources around the world. The disorder was relatively rare, affecting only 6 percent of the population. The majority of that 6 percent were men, so the data became increasingly limited as she focused on the issue that resulted in the paper—“Daughters of Mothers with Narcissism: Can the Cycle Be Broken?”
The paper was enormously successful. She received high grades from the examiners, but more important, the work was widely published and became the cornerstone of several Web sites seeking to help women impacted by the disorder. There were so many misperceptions. So much ignorance. Abby had broken with the formalities of her profession and written something that could be understood by anyone willing to take the time. In plain words, she described the symptoms: grandiose sense of self-importance; fantasies of unlimited success, power, beauty, brilliance; requiring excessive admiration; elevated sense of entitlement; takes advantage of others to achieve their own ends; lacks empathy; unwilling to recognize or identify needs and feelings of others.
She went beyond that to explain the pathology, and the cause. Contrary to our cultural perceptions, these people were not arrogant and self-centered. They did not truly believe they were exceptional to their peers. It was the exact opposite. They were so profoundly insecure, so fearful of being injured because of their perceived inferiority, that their minds had created an alter ego to protect them. This alter ego of perfection shielded them from their fear of being harmed, of being powerless, of being victimized. It was a fear so profound, it was unbearable. Unsustainable. And so the mind did something about it.
But it was not easy to support a fake alter ego. Narcissists had to become master manipulators. They surrounded themselves with people they could control and dominate—and they developed an eye for them. They learned how to be charming and appear confident so people would find them attractive, drawing near enough to be pulled into the trap. For men, it began with his wife and extended to subordinates in the workforce. Cult leaders were invariably pathological narcissists. For women, it often centered around her children.
Men chose submissive, codependent spouses. Women sometimes chose insecure men to dominate, but other times they sought out powerful men who were drawn to women for sexual promiscuity and deviance. Narcissistic women learned how to be enticing that way, and so they could lasso these powerful men and feed off their significance in the world.
She went on to address the most crucial question—how did these people get so profoundly insecure in the first place?
It began in early childhood.
She had tried to explain this to Leo: “It’s like a bone, self-esteem, self-confidence. We take it for granted, but it’s like anything else that develops after we’re born. There’s a time that it has to happen—in the first three years. From that first breath, a baby starts to learn that when she cries, someone feeds her, and when she smiles, someone smiles back, and when she babbles, someone replies. And she learns that she has power to get the things she needs to live—food, shelter, love. That’s the bone, that’s where it starts. And if that doesn’t happen, if the bone doesn’t develop, it never will. Everything done to remedy the defect is just a splint.”
Leo had pushed back. The Tanner sisters were not left to cry all day, or to starve. There was no evidence of abuse or neglect. “Those are the easy lines to draw,” Abby had responded. “But there’re not the only ones.”
Imagine the infant who one day cries and gets fed, and the next day cries and goes hungry. One day smiles and is kissed and hugged. The next day smiles and is ignored. This is what psychologists called “preoccupied or unresolved attachment” with the primary caregiver—usually the mother. There was love one minute and disdain the next. Affection that was given in abundance for no reason and then taken away without cause. The child has no ability to predict or influence the behavior of the parent. The narcissist loves a child only as an extension of herself at first, and then as a loyal subject. So she will tend to the child only when it makes her feel good.
Without that bone, there was no way for that child to develop confidence within any other relationship, no foundation to build on when that child grew up. Without that inner confidence, love, friendship, intimacy—the things we can’t live without—that person always felt vulnerable. Only absolute dominance and control of other people could alleviate this perception. That was how the narcissist was created.
Abby had concluded from her research that these primary caregivers in the early years—again, almost always mothers—who were incapable of sustaining a healthy attachment to their children were often narcissists themselves. She matched the indicators of narcissism with the indicators of preoccupied or unresolved attachment—they fit like a lock and key. These were the cases that lived in the shadows. On the outside, these mothers appeared normal, exceptional even. Because the children were seen as an extension of the narcissist mother, they were not physically abused. They were not starved. They were, to the untrained eye, loved, adored, well cared for. But the narcissist does not experience real love or empathy, and desperately needs to keep the child in line—admiring the parent, worshipping the parent so that parent can feed her alter ego. So begins the unpredictable roller coaster for the child. Any deviation from this total admiration and love of the parent results in punishment—from the withdrawing of love and affection to acts of outright violence.