The Wreckage of the Narcissist

  The Wreckage of the Narcissist Photo by  Marek Piwnicki  on  Unsplash Narcissism is insidious. Here you are cruising through life on a highway and things are going pretty good. There is the odd curve every now and then but it’s no problem for you to navigate through them. You feel quite confident you have this life driving thing figured out. Then one day you meet someone who creates this whirlwind of a situation when you first get together. It’s exciting, it makes you feel alive and excited. Your car is now speeding on that highway, but boy does it feel good to throw caution to the wind and push down that gas pedal. After a while, they start growing complacent with their ‘be on best behavior so the little potholes in the road that were there when they were testing you in the beginning have now turned almost crater like from their random temper outbursts. Still, the potholes aren’t all that common and you can typically steer around them, so you aren’t bothered by those red flags too m

Do narcissists feel happy inside when hurting someone?

 

Do narcissists feel happy inside when hurting someone?

Photo by Vince Fleming on Unsplash

This happy phenomenon is not a narcissist trait per se, as not all narcissists feel happy inside when hurting someone else. This is more of a trait of a sadist than it is of narcissism.

Narcissism is essentially an eternal quest to support a fragile ego and weak sense of self. Fundamentally, ego is the primary concern of a narcissist. Their concern is to avoid the pitfalls and landmines in life which will make them feel like failures or like they are inadequate. They must avoid that feeling at all costs because the dysregulation that it causes can create a feeling of dread that makes them feel like they are going to die.

This death feeling isn’t something just dreamed up either. When narcissists have narcissistic collapses their ego defense gets stripped away and they fall into a deep depression. This depression can be bad enough that it will potentially lead them to suicide.

Where this is in particularly risky is because when it comes to planned suicides, narcissists have the highest rate of successful suicide out of any other group. With Borderlines suicide is typically impulsive and is a knee jerk reaction, but with narcissists they plan out each detail to the letter and they are nearly always successful as a result of that planning.

So, you can see that a narcissists primary focus is going to be to avoid anything that will make them feel bad about themselves and risks them sliding into that depressive state.

When you look at the diagnostic criteria the main traits are: grandiosity, only associate with special people or institutions, preoccupied with fantasies of unlimited success, inflated sense of self-worth, requires excessive admiration, sense of entitlement, exploitative, lack empathy, envious of others or believe others are envious of them, and arrogant attitude.

As yo can see, within that diagnostic criteria there isn’t any sadism trait listed because not all narcissists have sadistic tendencies, so sadism doesn’t make the cut for diagnosis of a narcissist. However, sadism can be arm’s length away from their: exploitative trait, entitlement, and arrogance. Those are the three narcissistic traits that lead some of them down the path of being very horrible and toxic.

So, sadism when combined with narcissism and paranoid personality disorder comorbidity will result in what is called a malignant narcissist. The primary difference between a narcissist and a malignant is how they protect their ego and how they inflate themselves. With narcissists it’s through getting approval from people they admire and from getting compliments.

A malignant narcissist on the other hand will utilize those same methods for an ego boost but they also rely on negative energy from sadistically hurting and punishing people.

Malignant narcissists operate in the shadows. The victim typically will be unaware that the reason all of their bad luck has happened is due to the malignant narcissist that is in their life. That individual will sabotage and punish the victim in perpetuity as that is what builds the grandiosity of a malignant narcissist. It’s in being superior and out thinking their prey while never getting caught.

So, yes Malignant narcissists feel happy when they hurt someone.

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