The Mind of a Narcissist
Abuse
By Sam Vaknin
I hate the term "physical abuse." It is such a clinical term. My mother used to burrow her fingernails into the soft, inner part of my arm, the back of my elbow and drag them, well inside the flesh and veins and everything. You can't imagine the blood and the pain. She hit me with belts and buckles and sticks and heels and shoes and sandals and thrust my skull into sharp angles until it cracked. When I was 4, she threw a massive metal vase at me. It missed me and shattered a wall-sized cupboard to very small pieces. She did this for fourteen years. Every day. Since the age of 4.
She tore my books and threw them out the window of our fourth floor apartment. She shredded everything I wrote, consistently, relentlessly.
She cursed and humiliated me 10-15 times an hour, every hour, every day,
every month, for 14 years. She called me "my little Eichman"
after a well known Nazi mass murderer. She convinced me that I am ugly
(I am not. I am considered very good-looking and attractive. Other women
tell me so, and I don't believe them). She invented my personality disorder,
meticulously, systematically. She tortured all my brothers, as well. She
hated it when I cracked jokes. She made my father do all these things
to me, as well. This is not clinical; this is my life. Or, rather, was.
I inherited her ferocious cruelty, her lack of empathy, some of her obsessions
and compulsions and her feet. Why am I mentioning the latter? In some
other post.
I never felt anger. I felt fear, most of the time. A dull, pervasive,
permanent sensation, like an aching tooth. And I tried to get away. I
looked for other parents to adopt me. I toured the country looking for
a foster home, only to come back humiliated with my dusty backpack. I
volunteered to join the army a year before my time. At 17, I felt free.
It is a sad "tribute" to my childhood that the happiest period
in my life was in jail. The peaceful, most serene, clearest period. It
has all been downhill since my release.
But, above all, I felt shame and pity. I was ashamed of my parents: primitive
freaks, lost, frightened, incompetent. I could smell their inadequacy.
It wasn't like this at the beginning. I was proud of my father, a construction
worker turned site manager, a self-made man who self-destructed later
in his life. But this pride eroded, metamorphesized to a malignant form
of awe of a depressive tyrant. Much later, I understood how socially inept
he was, disliked by authority figures, a morbid hypochondriac with narcissistic
disdain for others. Father hate became self hate, the more I realized
how much like my father I am, despite all my pretensions and grandiose
illusions: schizoid-asocial, hated by authority figures, depressive, self-destructive,
a defeatist.
But above all I kept asking myself two questions:
WHY?
Why did they do it? Why for so long? Why so thoroughly?
I said to myself that I must have frightened them. A firstborn, a "genius"
(IQ-wise), a freak of nature, frustrating, overly independent, unchildlike
Martian. The natural repulsion they must have felt, having given birth
to an alien, to a monstrosity.
Or that my birth fouled their plans somehow. My mother was just becoming
a stage actress in her fertile, narcissistic imagination (actually, she
worked as a lowly salesperson in a tiny shoe shop). My father was saving
money for one of an endless string of houses he built, sold and rebuilt.
I was in the way. My birth was probably an accident. Not much later, my
mother aborted my could-have-been-brother. The certificate describes how
difficult the economic situation is with the one born child (that's me).
Or that I deserve to be punished that way because I was naturally agitating,
disruptive, bad, corrupt, vile, mean, cunning and what else.
Or that they were both mentally ill (and they were) and what was to be
expected of them anyhow.
And the second question:
WAS IT REALLY ABUSE?
Isn't "abuse" our invention, a figment of our febrile imagination,
when we embark upon an effort to explain that which cannot be explained
(our life)?
Isn't this a "false memory," a "narrative," a "fable,"
a "construct," a "tale?"
Everyone in our neighbourhood hit their children. So what? And our parents'
parents hit their children, as well, and most of them (our parents) came
out normal. My father's father used to wake him up and dispatch him through
hostile Arab neighbourhoods in the dangerous city they lived in to buy
for him his daily ration of alcohol. My mother's mother went to bed one
night and refused to get out of it until she died, 20 odd years later.
I could see these behaviours replicated and handed down the generations.
So, WHERE was the abuse? The culture I grew in condoned frequent beatings.
It was a sign of stern, right, upbringing. What was different with US?
I think it was the hate in my mother's eyes.
Previous
Entries from The Mind of a Narcissist:
How I "Became" a
Narcissist
In Search of
a Family
Why Do I Write
Poetry?
Skopje
- Where Time Stood Still
Portrait
of the Narcissist as a Young Man
I Cannot
Forgive
My
Woman and I
The Music of
My Emotions
A Great
Admiration
Ghost in the Machine
No One Counts
to Ten
The Disappearance
of the Witnesses
Being There