Sometimes the narcissist becomes emo, hyper-emotional. He gushes all over you. He is fuzzy and warm. He is supportive. He is attentive. He is caring. He is affectionate. In short, he is the perfect ideal partner.
Too good to be true, and therefore, of course, not true.
When the narcissist complements you, when the narcissist uses emotionally charged language, when the narcissist becomes sentimental, dewy-eyed, he does not mean that he is attracted to you. He definitely does not mean that he is attached to you or that he cares about you because remember he is a narcissist and of course he applies to she half of all narcissists are women.
So when the narcissist becomes a wet rag, when he disintegrates on you with emotions, engulfs you, encompasses you, when he is all over you, when he can't help himself but become romantic, write poetry, and tell you how much he misses you and loves you, that you are the center of his world. No, scrap this. You are his world.
When all this happens, remember, he's doing all this merely because you are useful to him or to her in some way or ways.
I repeat, such behaviors, compliments, hyper-emotionality, sentimentality, nostalgia, and nostalgia, yearning, especially when they are expressed in an exaggerated way. It's a caricature. It only means that you are useful, that the narcissist needs you to fulfill some function.
He is maintaining you. He's maintaining you in working order as he would an appliance or a device. He is recharging you and occasionally he's cleaning your pipes and your parts.
To the uninitiated, this is a reference to sex.
The underlying disorder in psychopathy is anxiety.
Psychopathy is compensatory to anxiety. The psychopath anticipates the worst. He believes that the world is hostile. Everyone is out to get him. There is an element of paranoid ideation in psychopathy. It's all about anxiety.
Not so with narcissists. With narcissists, it's all about anger. And I call it generalized anger disorder, similar to generalized anxiety disorder.
Here, let me offer to the DSM6 a set of criteria for generalized anger disorder, which is extremely common in narcissism.
The hyper-emotionality, the sentimentality, the caring, the affection, the compassion, the simulated empathy, sometimes convincingly, all these are intended to disguise internal, volcano ranges of rage and anger, unrequited, unexpressed, perhaps inexpressible. This kind of anger consumes the narcissists from the inside, is corrosive.
And so here are the criteria that I suggest for generalized anxiety, anger disorder.
Excessive anger occurring more days than not for at least six months, about a number of events or activities, such as work or school performance, or a romantic or intimate relationship, or in any other setting.
Number two, the person finds it difficult to control the anger. It's impulsive, and it overwhelms the narcissist. He is unable to contain his or her anger. It takes over.
Number three, the person attributes the anger to ever shifting, often contradictory causes. Today you act in one way, makes the narcissist angry. Tomorrow you comply with his expressed wishes, and again it makes a narcissist angry.
The narcissist is angry. He's just looking for a reason or a cause to be angry. And if there is none, he would confabulate and invent one.
The anger is associated with three or more of the following six symptoms, with at least some symptoms present for more days than not for the last six months.
Restlessness or feeling keyed up or on edge, being easily fatigued, difficulty concentrating or mind going blank, irritability, muscle tension, and sleep disturbance, difficulty falling or staying asleep, or restless, unsatisfying sleep.
This disturbance, this anger disturbance, is not better explained by another mental disorder.
And remember, in the diagnostic and statistical manual, we have, for example, explosive disorder. We have variants of anger disorders, but they are all non-generalized, highly pinpointed in specific.
I claim that there is a mental health condition, there is a pathology, where anger is all pervasive, ubiquitous, all permeating, ever present, and the anger just seeks, it's exactly like lava or magma in a volcanic eruption. The anger seeks a way out, six a vent or a tube to emerge from.
And so the anger colors the totality of the existence of the narcissists and pushes the narcissists to behave in highly specific ways in order to construct situations which would justify the anger and render it egosyntonic.
Narcissists are therefore very abusive, very provocative. They use projective identification, projection, and a variety of other infantile primitive defense mechanisms, all intended to render the narcissist right or even righteous.
His anger, narcissist anger, is powered by a hidden morality. And this is a morality that has to do with efficiency or lack thereof.
Narcissists get angry when people are not efficient, when they're not forthcoming, when they don't cater to their special needs, or when they don't get special treatment, entitlement, and so on so forth.
So there's a worldview, there's a Weltanschauung, picture of the world, coupled with an internal, highly private code of contact.
And if you transgress on any element in these highly compound internal pictures the narcissist erupts.
The anger or physical symptoms cause clinically significant distress or impairment in social, occupational, or other important areas of functioning.
The disturbance is not attributable to the physiological effects of a substance, drug of abuse, medication, etc., or another medical condition.
So this is a rough draft of a new pathology, a new mental health issue, generalized anger disorder.
Anyone who has lived with a narcissist, anyone who has interacted with a narcissist for more than one day recognizes the existence of this disorder as a foundational layer in the pathology of narcissism.
I am not angry at you. I promise. I am not. Don't defy me. Don't contradict me. Don't argue with me. I'm telling you I'm not. Don't defy me. Don't contradict me. Don't argue with me. I'm telling you I'm not angry with you.