Why does she do it?

Since discovering narcissism and coming to understand that my wife is a covert narcissist I’ve been really struggling to understand why. Why is my wife so cruel? Why does she do the crazy things she does?

I’ve since made peace with it. There are a huge number of reasons for why she does the things she does.

• She has low empathy which allows her to be cruel without getting the emotional feedback pang to tell her to stop.
• Her entitlement is high, it is often so high that it morphs into exploitation.
• NPD (if she qualifies) is a mental illness, as with all mental illnesses, her perception of reality can be way off. She perceives threats where there aren’t any.
• She is easily injured and responds according to her hurt. Her hurt is more than normal and her response is proportionate.
• Her negative projections cause her to perceive negativity where it simply is not.
• Her bad behavior is just habit. A lifetime of it.
• Quite simply, she’s just bad. Some people are good, she’s bad.
• There is definitely a real bad streak in her.

And a thousand other reasons that comprise her warped personality.

It’s a mixed bag

Sometimes the horrible stuff she does is deliberate to punish me, other times it’s just habit, and other times it’s reactive. I’ve come to understand that she does what she does not for a single consistent reason but for a mixed bag of reasons. It’s situation to situation, case by case and it’s impossible to predict because generally she…

just happened to be feelin’ that way without warnin’

_{Bob Dylan, The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll}

However, it took me a very very long time to make peace with that.