Malignant

when a narcissist infects our lives, how do you stop the spread?

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Disclaimer for this post: I am not a psychologist or mental health professional, and this is just my own theory on things based on my personal experience with the subject matter. Please consult a mental health professional if you are struggling.

My no-tolerance policy on abuse in my comments section remains. Any violation will result in an immediate block and/or report, at my full discretion.

Thank you for being here.

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Photo by National Cancer Institute on Unsplash

As if this horrible week hasn’t been bad enough, a friend of mine was being harassed online by a person they know, who accused them of some pretty nasty things that they knew full well they did not do. However, they felt terror and shame, because what if they actually DID do the things people accused them of? Or what if they gave off vibes they didn’t realize?

I reminded them, having been through this before, that their strong reaction and self doubt is a direct result of gaslighting.

And my friend said something so apt that I must share it here:

“I’m reminded that gaslighting works because for people who try to engage with empathy, they try to see how they contributed to the problem and start self-guessing their own truth”

It should be said that my friend decided to ignore the bully and the bully finally got bored and did something else. But not before they made my lovely friend question if they were a shitty person. Which, they absolutely are not. And it hurts my heart that they were made to feel that way.

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Recognizing the cycle

I said in my post last week that, whether we like it or not, we are all caught up in a cycle of narcissistic abuse, with the future president (herein referred to as That Guy) as the primary narcissist. This includes the Democratic Party, who are now the scapegoats.

I understand that, for the most part, I am taking a controversial position here. I want to make it very clear that this is not an attack on anyone’s moral stance, nor is it the only problem we are facing. This is a conversation mostly about behavior, tactics, and communication which is one of the only things we can actually do something about immediately.

I cropped this chart from Psychology Today. I’ll be talking about this more in depth, but for now just take it in.

Think about how many things have gone this way when it comes to That Guy. And, frankly, in our interactions with each other the past many years.

I should be clear, this does NOT mean:

• that you are a narcissist

• that your family members or friends are narcissists

• that anyone being discussed has been clinically diagnosed

• that this cycle is the only problem or even the worst problem

I am not an expert, but I am well read on this topic (and yes, I read actual books). I needed to get myself out of a narcissistic family structure and out of an abuse cycle to survive.

I couldn’t quite see in 2016 that the problem with a narcissistic abuser taking power meant that we were all going to be victims of that abuse, and as with all abuse, some would become perpetrators. It became clearer to me over time what was happening, but I was so busy trying to keep myself from getting triggered/paralyzed that I didn’t realize how many people who we ostensibly share values with were being gaslit, and their reaction to that was to gaslight us. Which made us have to waste an awful lot of time questioning our own truths.

First, a note about gaslighting. The word is used incorrectly a lot. It doesn’t mean having a different of opinion. I disagree with people all the time. It doesn’t mean lying. Lying is different. Lying is just saying something that is false. It also isn’t the same as being called out on bad behavior, or confrontation, or conflict.

Gaslighting is more insidious than that, and it is the most effective tool of narcissistic abuse.

I’ll give you an example of gaslighting that has nothing to do with politics:

When I was 18, I had a wretched experience of my mother getting way too drunk (again) and basically I wound up fighting with an out of control drunk person for many hours. As my dad was also an alcoholic, I knew the signs, and that my mother needed help.

So, I did the only thing I could think of to do. I called her therapist in tears and asked her to help me stage an intervention, or to find someone to help me do that.

What I didn’t understand at the time was my mother liked this therapist precisely because this therapist did not challenge her. It’s untrue that narcissists never seek therapy; they sometimes do, they just find the ones who validate them.

The subtext of her therapist’s response to me was that my mother drinking half a bottle of Jim Beam and humiliating me in front of my friends wasn’t the problem. MY behavior was the problem. It was a mild version of “Mommy drinks because you are bad” couched as “your mother is going through a hard time and you have to be better at supporting her”.

I was actually a pretty decent kid. I was mouthy, delulu, and highly emotional. I was also smart and I didn’t suffer fools. But because of my very undiagnosed ADHD, my tendency to overanalyze everything I did, and the crushing shame I felt, I called off my plan. Was the therapist right? Was this my fault?

My lived experience was no longer the point. I questioned my own reality, and what I saw with my own eyes. The focus had been shifted onto me. I’ve never felt more helpless and crazy in my life.

The facts were the facts. That therapist was a shitty therapist. My mother was an alcoholic. And because my mother manipulated the therapist, the therapist was now unwittingly caught in my family’s cycle of abuse and wound up being an enabler.

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Getting stuck

A narcissistic abuse cycle is a spider’s web. Even “good people” can get stuck in it. That Guy lavishes praise upon his supporters and his sycophants. He treats them “better” than he treats his opponents or detractors, and he makes them feel special and deserving. Thus, he has set up a classic Golden Child/Scapegoat scenario, a common hallmark of a narcissistic family structure.

This is not the case for everyone, of course. As we know, there are also a lot of people in this country who are just really racist and hate women. There are also people who are just ignorant. I do not deny that this is the country we live in. But those people aren’t as confusing to me. We all had that person in our family, the uncle who would come over and drink all our beer and be gross to the teenage girls and yell about Mexicans, while your family exchanged looks and asked to pass the potato salad.

That Guy brought a new dish to the potluck, which was narcissistic abuse. The malignant kind.

That Guy is a bad dude, no question. But there are a lot of folks out there who know that he sucks and either don’t care, or genuinely think he’s actually a good person deep down. What both groups have in common is that they think that WE are the bad people, and that conclusion is based on how they respond to a narcissist (which is going to depend on their family life and their upbringing).

When he said he could shoot someone in the middle of 5th Avenue and meant it, he was signaling something we didn’t know yet:

I have figured out how to manipulate people more effectively than you know, and you are about to find out how great I am at it.

We tried to counter his lies with truth and outrage. We tried to counter his irrational bullshit with logic. But what we all unwittingly did (myself included, GOD I’m an idiot) was repeat everything he said, just louder. This goes for the Democratic Party, too. The pundits. The social media mavens. All day every day. What we actually should have been doing was ignoring his bullshit outright and trying to figure out how to counter the narrative he was crafting.

We did not do that.

The Gaslighting Olympics began in earnest in 2016. Fox News and right wing media went all in. And some Very Not Serious People like Will Menaker, Cenk Uygur, and other members of the “Dirtbag Left” began to parrot That Guy and use his tactics, until they were nearly indistinguishable from the right-wing manosphere.

They all wanted to be their daddy’s Golden Child.

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How we got trapped in the cycle

I won’t get into the obvious problem of Russian meddling in both elections, or the propaganda that we lapped up like milk. Whether or not the impetus for the arguments was meddling or just grifters out for cash, it doesn’t matter. What matters is how we reacted to being scapegoated.

Everyone reacts differently to being scapegoated, depending on our own history. Abuse begets abuse, and it is not a coincidence that the quality and tone of our social media interactions became more abusive over time. It came to a head in 2016. Before there was TikTok, there was Twitter.

In 2016, you may remember hearing a version of this:

If you don’t want to vote for a certain Vermont Senator¹, you hate poor people!!!

You wanna know how you immediately lose an argument with narcissists, or people enmeshed in a narcissistic cycle? By saying “I do NOT [wacky thing you accused me of]!”. Even giving it air means you lost.

But, sadly, we (myself included) spent hours and hours and hours arguing that no, we did not, in fact, hate poor people because we were leaning towards the Mean Email Lady. This bred a lot of resentment and wasted all of our time. I can’t get those hours of my life back. Neither can you.

This is just one example of the arguments we were having. The narcissists in power infected our spaces both online and off, inch by inch, and gleefully watched us tear each other limb from limb. They watched us lose, over and over again while they scapegoated us and purchased social media platforms.

And we did it again in 2024. Same cycle. Different subjects. One of which was Gaza.²

Many of us spent hours and hours and hours this year arguing that no, we did not support genocide just because we didn’t want That Guy to be President. And a lot of us found ourselves thinking the same thing: Maybe I am the problem.

From the jump, something about the way we were communicating about this situation didn’t sit right with me. I was disturbed by the anti-Semitic subtext on social media, and I grew scared for my Jewish friends and colleagues. I was also scared for the Arab communities who were already traumatized by what was happening, and I knew they would be the targets of violence. I lived through 9/11. I saw the virulent Islamophobia and the war we started based on lies, but I also know the devastation of living through a terrorist attack and how that devastation can be used to control a traumatized nation.

I tried to have nuanced conversations, which worked about as well as trying to do yoga on a Tilt a Whirl. So I gave up. I refused to participate, only to be called out on my “silence”.

Then, the RSD spinout: Do people think I support genocide? I don’t support genocide. I hate war. But if they think I support genocide, that means they think I am a bad person, and that means I AM A BAD PERSON, because why would they even say that?

For a moment, I was right back in the cycle. I was questioning my own reality. I wanted to choose the candidate who would best respond to the pressure being put on them (on a number of fronts). Throwing a well done steak against the wall and asking Putin what he should do was not the best option, in my opinion.

And the Facts: One of the two candidates would be President. There was no third option. No amount of mental gymnastics would make this true. We do not have a viable third party in this county, and the only people who even make it on the ballot are known grifters. This was also true in 2016. We were having the same exact argument. It was a horrible feeling of deja vu.

I stopped and asked myself why I was in this place. And I realized that I was reacting to covert gaslighting. The assertion that we should protest what was happening was not gaslighting - it was perpetuating the false belief that opting out of voting for Harris would do anything to solve that problem. Hurting people in this country - the poorest and most marginalized among us - will not create less suffering.

I do not think this was anyone’s intention. It’s just more evidence that we were in this cycle. It was an enabling of narcissistic behaviors and tactics, even if it came from a good place. I was having a weird sort of trauma response. That feeling that no matter what you do or say, someone is going to rage at you. I do not take well to feeling cornered, and it makes me more likely to lash out.

I just had to calm myself down and remind myself that none of this was about me. It sounds really self centered, but those of us who experienced this abuse cycle growing up and/or are neurodivergent, we can’t always parse that out right away, and that trapped, caged feeling is very difficult to neutralize.

The people who designed social media and the ones they let control it know this. They have all of us figured out. I’m sure they know exactly what makes me mad, and when I take the bait, the algo says let’s make her see how fucking stupid she was to give Mark Zuckerberg nearly fifteen years of her personal history.

I know that a lot of folks believed that a heels in the ground moral stance would be a big step towards solving the problem. A problem that they, on some level, felt was within their control. Add a dash of algorithmic targeting, a sprinkle of disinformation, and suddenly, you have a small portion of the electorate³ who were demoralized enough to stay home, vote third party, or really say “fuck it” and vote for That Guy.

It isn’t the entire reason Harris lost. It isn’t the entire reason Clinton lost either. They do have something very important in common, though!

The tech bros like Space Karen knew these tactics would work, because its been working. Whatever worked in 2016? They put a turbo engine in it. They created more division among us and deliberately sent us into a state of confusion. There is no way to draw a line in the sand when the sand won’t stop shifting. There is no way to connect and join together for a common goal when all we do is attack each other’s morality using the tactics of the person who put us in this position in the first place.

It makes me angry that they did this to people who just wanted to do the right thing.

So, here we are. The entirety of United States foreign policy will be decided by That Guy, who does not give a shit about what happens to anyone who’s name is not his. In fact, I bet he would give Bibi the green light to do his worst, and then just get him a frosty Diet Coke and tuck himself in for a Fox News marathon. He’d never let it trouble his mind again. Unless you give him money, power, or adulation, he doesn’t give a single fuck. And that is a person who should never, ever be in any position of power.

He has no stances because he has no empathy.

That is what scares me the most.

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Our families, friends and colleagues who voted for That Guy are also trapped in this cycle.

They may not think they are abusing you, but they have been taught to use abusive tactics when dealing with you, which eventually becomes abusive in and of itself. They may call you names or rub your face in their beliefs, and you’re expected not to react. If you do react, they call you crazy or melodramatic. If you present them with facts, they do not believe them. Or, they may not bring it up at all, which requires you to repress it. But if you don’t show up and smile, you’re the mean one. You lose either way.

If they didn’t learn this from their own abusers, they were taught how by That Guy, the people who support That Guy, the GOP, the tech bros, the entire ecosystem of the manosphere (the left and right, sadly), and finally, legacy media. They have been deceived too, and I remind myself of that in my less generous moments.

No one wants to be the Scapegoat, like they don’t want to be a “cuck” or a “simp” or whatever Neanderthal term they wish to slap on it over there in the manosphere. They want Big Orange Daddy to love them. And Daddy won’t be mean to them, because they have proved to him that they are special. That they are the Golden Children. They are about to find out the hard way how false that is.

People on both sides made a critical error: they fed That Guy’s (and his satellites) narcissistic supply, which fed the supply of the ecosystem that billionaires spent a lot of money to harness. That Guy and his obscenely rich cronies may be insane, but don’t think for one second that they don’t have people well versed in psychology working for them who knew exactly what they were doing.

There is a lot of talk about the possibility of Space Karen hacking our voting machines. First of all, the way to counter delulu is not with more delulu. Secondly, he didn’t even have to do that. He just figured out how to hack our brains instead.

We have a lot to answer for as people and as a society, no question. We all messed up. There are so many things I wish I had done differently. But the only thing we have control over now is us.

Let’s focus on what we CAN do:

And so my lovely readers, you kind people who tried to do the right thing - we now have to do not only what is right, but what is hard. You’ve got to get out of this cycle before you will be able to know how to help anyone else. There is no way we’re going to be effective if we are still doing this. That goes for me, too.

We cannot stop the narcissists or the people who are using their tactics.

But we can stop enabling them.

The first thing we can do immediately is to stop posting constantly about That Guy (you’ll notice I’m not promoting his brand), the crazy stuff he says, and his horrible cabinet appointments. There are writers out there who are good at it. Let them do their work. Stay informed, but only as much as you must. Being fixated on it now doesn’t help us come January 20th. Spoiler alert: This administration is going to be horrible, and it doesn’t matter how long you spend online worrying about it. If this means you deactivate social media for a minute, so be it. As of January 21st, things are going to go really fast. We need to get a handle on ourselves so we are ready - not just intellectually, but emotionally. Figure out how to react without feeding the beast. Or just yell about it with friends at the pub.

The second thing is to figure out what you want the rest of your year to look like. Just the next two months. This means deciding what to do about the holidays. I wrote about my choice to skip Thanksgiving. It has been controversial, to say the least. To some, my decision was read as as spreading hate. I reject that; this decision is showing love and respect for myself. It is not healthy for me to smile and cook a meal for people who did this, and frankly, it hasn’t been for eight years.

You’ll get more clarity on what your relationships with the That Guy supporters in your life will be going forward, but the only way to get that clarity is to take this space and time for yourself if you are able to. If you know - and I know this in my bones - that you cannot fake it and smile this year, please don’t do that to yourself.

For those of you who for whatever reason (new grandchildren, finances, personal safety, mental health, etc) cannot get out of a holiday - please read about some tactics you can use for setting boundaries and strategies like grey rocking. These will help you. The days will still be hard, but like I said, only you can control your behavior. Their behavior is not your problem.

And I’ve said this a million times: No contact should be a last resort.

Be ready - no matter what you do in terms of boundaries - they are all going to have an absolute shitfit. They are going to tell you that you are a bad person, that you are cruel, etc. They will guilt trip, cajole, threaten, you name it. They will find your buttons. They will push them. Don’t come back with threats or yelling or recrimination. If they violate your boundaries, hold firm.

The third thing: Stop fighting with people on social media. If you can. It doesn’t work. I am struggling with this, because I am so angry, but I know its unhelpful. We had our time to be Petty⁴. Now we have to focus. When some of the benefits of the economic policies that Biden put in place become more obvious, That Guy will take credit. When bad stuff happens, That Guy will blame the Democrats.

And for the love of god, do not try to fight with the fans of That Guy in your comments sections or on social media. That is giving them something they learned to crave - attention. I don't care if it’s a rando or your cousin. Just block, and report if it applies.

Don’t feed their supply.

And lastly…

Be kind to yourself.

We all fucked up, but we are all human. We made mistakes. We were manipulated. None of us are billionaires and none of us are in power. We had different ideas on how to stop it, and none of them worked, and it’s so hard not to blame ourselves. Maybe it was coming anyway and there was nothing we could do. I don’t believe that, but plenty of smart people have been saying we are doomed for years. It doesn’t matter who was right, we’re all in the same boat now. And what a shitty boat. No one comes out of this unpunished.

We have a long, long battle ahead. We need to make peace with ourselves, at least for now. We have to sit with the hurt, the fear, all of it. We have to learn how to be uncomfortable again and really look inward. These next two months are a pause. Take back your brain in the quiet. And for the love of all that is holy, PLEASE get off X/Twitter if you haven’t done. Fuck Elon Musk. He doesn’t deserve any part of you.

Find things that make you feel like yourself again. Put the phone down. Try to remember what you liked before we trapped ourselves in a tiny screen.

Thank you for reading if you got this far. I know this was A LOT, and I am certain this will piss people off, but like I said, I truly believe we can get out of this if we stop the cycle. We can’t take any of it back. Acceptance is key. All we can do is learn from it and somehow, some way, fight another day. And what a long fight it shall be.

For my fellow children of narcissists who had to relive the cycles they worked so hard to break free from, and especially for the ones who are still enmeshed - I believe you, I see you, and don’t let anyone tell you that we deserved it.

1. Please do not try to tell me Bernie Bros were not a thing.

2. I enthusiastically support a ceasefire, I have said this 1000 times, and I thought it was a better idea to vote for the person most likely to get this done. As of now, That Guy is installing the most pro-Israel folks humanly possible (not to be confused with being Pro-Jewish - they are pro-Netanyahu and his criminal behavior). He’s going to let him do whatever he wants.

3. Arab and Palestinian Americans had an impossible decision. Some of them could not bring themselves to vote for Harris, and I do not fault them for their rage and their distrust. It was up to us to do what they could not, it was up to us to stand up for them when there was no way they could bring themselves to do it. It was up to us to do what we could to help them. And we failed them.

4. Except, as I said last time, black women. 89% of those who turned out understood the assignment and now they get to say I TOLD YOU SO until the sun runs out of hydrogen.