When you least expect it

Narcissism marches to the beat, then it marches to a different beat for a moment, then returns to the beat again.

The off beat blips are mysterious. But all is well that ends well, right?

My wife Susan and I are next in the queue for the supermarket checkout. Things are good.
Then as I’m about to be served, the checkout guy apologizes and explains that there’s a spillage on aisle three that he must attend to. He informs us that we can go to checkout two instead then he dashes off. We have to queue again for a couple of minutes at checkout two. My wife is not happy, not happy at all. She’s rude to the next checkout person over it, giving her a snide remark as she pays for the groceries. I apologize to the checkout person and then confront Susan about it.

I reason with her explaining that the guy had to attend to a spillage, that somebody could have slipped etc. I point out that we got served a couple of minutes later anyway, no big deal right?
But it is a big deal apparently. It’s unacceptable that we should have been treated like that.

Eventually she comes round and is back in good form again. The rest of the day is good and I dismiss the blip. After all, she has a point, maybe they could have been a little more courteous to us, perhaps somebody else could have dealt with the spillage. After all, my wife is entitled to her opinion too, I’m not always going to agree. All is well that ends well.

What was the blip?

As somebody who was unaware that my wife is a narcissist, the unpleasant behavior was not ideal but I gave it yet another free pass. It’s done with now, let’s keep the peace and move on.

Here’s what actually happened

Me and my wife had exactly the same experience in the supermarket but we both interpreted it differently. I have a normal perspective, she has a narcissistic perspective. To me the situation was reasonable. My wife however saw things very differently. She saw a person reject her for something more important. The narcissism does not like this at all. In fact, the narcissism sees this as an attack on her.

Why?

The narcissism’s high expectations were not met on this occasion (eEntitlement. Belief that she is special). The disordered personality is also emotionally immature. These two things combined lead to her inappropriate behavior. To me the situation was perfectly reasonable, to her it was a personal attack.

Secondly, I invested time and energy into appeasing her and calming her down. That was me providing narcissistic supply.

Didn’t notice?

To me it was just a weird blip in an otherwise peaceful day. The blip was out of context with the rest of the day. I saw:

Happy morning -> happy afternoon -> blip -> happy evening -> happy night.

The blip is out numbered there, lots of other stuff to focus on. I had become so used to these blips that I hardly saw them anymore. They were unpleasant, I’d prefer to put them behind me and that is exactly what I did, time and time again. These blips were significant but because I don’t know what they were, I keep missing what was really going on, over and over again.

Confusion

Leaving the example behind. When I am engaging in some way with my narcissist wife, perhaps stating the truth during a conversation, I have certain expectations that her response will align with the conversation. Therefore when she responds in some way that doesn’t actually correlate in the way that it should, I either fail to spot this or it confuses me, or both.

This happens because we have two different perspectives. She has the narcissistic perspective, I have the normal perspective.

Another example

She asks me how my day was. I respond with some positive news about some success. I semi-subconsciously assume she’d be happy for me and that she would respond accordingly. I do not expect my wife to be jealous of my minor achievement. She is jealous of my minor achievement. She responds with one of the following:

• “Well I did XYZ today”, and seeks praise and recognition (leveling, haughtiness).
• “Well that’s great but maybe you could start putting your family first sometime”. (passive aggressive).
• “Oh that’s fantastic”. But two days later pulls the “you seem to have so much time for work but no time for me” card on me.

Either way, I did not expect my wife to actually be envious of my success. Therefore all I see is the hostility shown to me, the motivation and reason behind it was lost on me. Hence, I keep missing the blatantly obvious fact that she was 100% jealous of me and hence decided to get one up on me. I then miss the fact that she proceeds to extract “narcissistic supply” (attention seeking) from me to bolster her ego that was injured by my success.

One more example

I put on a wash. I’d kinda expect her to be pleased about that. Reality check: That’s her thing, it gives her a sense of superiority over me. She’s the one who does that, she is valuable for doing it, she is powerful for doing it (Validation is external. Control).
To a naive me, this is bonkers. To recognize that her narcissistic perspective is different to mine sets me free to understand this stuff. Her illogical bullshit is quite logical when you think of it from her perspective (empathy).

Unexpected

There are things happening the whole time and I simply don’t recognize them for what they are. We are both engaged in the same thing. We are both looking at the same thing. We both see the same thing. I therefore do not expect her to have seen a completely different thing.

Crucially, she does not expect me to have seen a completely different thing to her.

But the reality is, we will have processed what we saw in two different ways. The narcissistic perspective versus my normal perspective.

Until I understood that the narcissistic perspective was ever present I was continually blindsided. I was being continually met with hostility or attention seeking that was driving me crazy. I didn’t understand where it was coming from or what was causing it. Therefore I was completely lost and confused.