Divide and Conquer

[NOTE: please read the second and third paragraphs from this post before continuing. Important–don’t skip reading them!]

Last time when I wrote about narcissism in my family, I discussed smear campaigns. I pointed out how no truly loving parent would ever spread phoney gossip about his or her sons, daughters, nephews, nieces, or anyone in the family. There is a huge difference between legitimate criticism of a family member, on the one hand, and slandering him or her, on the other…though many a narcissist can make the latter seem like the former.

Narcissists also love sowing division among people, and the family is no exception. Constructing a phoney reality, and manipulating people into believing it, gives great narcissistic supply in the form of a power trip. Narcissists love to conquer people by succeeding in deceiving them, making them believe whatever the narcissist wants them to believe…especially when it makes them fight with each other.

Narcissistic supply doesn’t have to be all about flattering the narc: it can also be negative…as long as it draws attention to him or her; being the centre of everyone else’s universe is what the narc wants. Narcissists love to create drama, and while they may sigh and pretend to lament all the fighting around them, they secretly love having been clever enough to have tricked people into fighting.

This is especially so if the fighting is over who gets to have the narcissist’s love or favour; if family members are competing over which one is ‘the worthiest’ of the narc’s love, the narc’s supply must feel like a cocaine high.

Note how, in these situations of conflict, it’s all about the narcissist. He or she craves being the centre of attention. The winner in the competition is usually the ass-kissing golden child, and the loser is usually the ass-kicked scapegoat. I’ve already gone over, in many blog posts, how I finished last in these competitions.

My older sister, J., was the golden child, who was in first place in these contests. Now, I heard my late (probably) narc mother on at least two occasions say that my older brother, F., was her favourite (because he’s the ‘quiet’ one, though I always found his bullying of me rather loud, to put it mildly); I’m convinced Mom was lying about him, for her favouring of J. was obvious.

I’m sure she’d said she favoured F. over even J.–which, incidentally, she said in front of J. on the second of the two occasions–to stir up more rancour and division in the family. As I’ve said in previous posts, I suspect she lied to J., F., and R. (my eldest brother), telling them she favoured me in order to stir up jealousy in them, to give them all a motive to bully me.

I’ll bet that was her motive, conscious or unconscious, in telling me on R.’s cellphone (i.e., in front of him) that she’d given me “the most love” during my preteen years…when she’d actually been lying repeatedly about me having an autism spectrum disorder that I don’t have, as well as winking at my siblings’ bullying of me…and likely doing smear campaigns against me behind my back!

I’m convinced she got a secret thrill out of the idea of all four of us trying to outdo each other in being “the worthiest” of her love. Being the scapegoat, and knowing I’d never get first place, I had little motive to compete…which probably made Mom want to scapegoat me all the more, for having caused her narcissistic injury.

J. jealously guarded her first place position, often either helping Mom berate R., F., and especially me, of course, whenever our love didn’t measure up to expectation. J.’s phoney virtue is what I’ve always despised about her; she fancies herself as having been as perfectly loving to me as she supposedly is to everyone else in the family, such self-flattery being an example of her own narcissism, actually, since her self-righteous, condescending attitude to my faults was far too hurtful to be anywhere even approaching love.

J.’s barking at me to say goodbye to grandpa at the end of grandma’s funeral; her yelling at me for being late in buying Mom a birthday gift; her nagging me to visit Mom in hospital back when I was in university, and I desperately needed all the time I could get to work on a difficult essay (my shortened time after the visit surely contributed to my lower grade)–all of these, and many more, were examples of J.’s virtue signalling to get our mother’s favour.

Our mother loved all this division and competition so much that she called our part of the family “the team” (for which one would “score another point”), as opposed to my cousins’ family, whom she not only despised, but also worked tirelessly to get the rest of “the team” (and me) to loathe.

The streak of seven lies she told me, the summer before she died, were a magnum opus of triangulation, all done not only to upset me, but also to sow more division in the family. She claimed my cousin, S.–the revelation of whose mental instability gave her a convenient excuse to include him on her list of ‘undesirable’ family members–was again ranting and raving about how I’d ‘wronged’ him (when he actually hadn’t said anything against me–certainly not directly to me, which he surely would have done, at least online–in at least a few years, so why now, all of a sudden?).

On top of this, Mom tried to stir up antagonism in me against my aunt (S.’s mother) by falsely claiming she couldn’t bear reading any of my “over-the-top” emails (which I’d never sent her…but had sent a few, I admit, to my provoking mother!) and that my aunt supposedly thought I’d surely been “a burden” for my mom to raise. In all likelihood, it was my mother, not my aunt, who’d thought of me as a burden.

As you can see from the above examples, Dear Reader (click on the above links provided, to get the complete story behind each example), stirring up needless division in a family is no way to hold it together, but that stirring is exactly what my late mother was doing. And yet, her flying monkeys, my siblings, regard her as just a few cuts below sainthood. They can’t see her malice because they’re too busy believing her every word uncritically.

They fail to understand that she mixed lies in with the truth, a cunning trick every good liar knows how to do. Just because my cousins and I, the disfavoured members of the family, manifested some of the faults she catalogued, doesn’t mean we manifested all of them.

Parents are supposed to love their sons and daughters unconditionally. While complaining about their children’s faults is appropriate under reasonable conditions, cultivating bitterness between them–especially through little, almost imperceptible lies peppered in with the truth, often a truth taken out of context–is unmotherly in the extreme.

If you fear, Dear Reader, that your family is being critical of you in this kind of unreasonable way, and you know that this has been an ongoing problem lasting over many years, even decades, you shouldn’t feel guilty about getting away from those people in a permanent way.

I’m not condoning the idea of teenagers capriciously running away from home after one or two fights; I’m talking about thinking carefully about what’s going on in your family, seeing if you can reason it out with them, and judging if their response is empathic and non-manipulative.

If you’re young and you’re having family troubles, don’t jump to any rash conclusions. Don’t make any decisions while upset; you may regret them later in life.

I came to my conclusion about my family after decades of emotional abuse, gaslighting, scapegoating, and bullying…all from a family that never listened to me, never empathized (except for the rarest of exceptions), never validated my experiences, and generally stopped at nothing to undermine my ability to develop self-confidence. I thought it through for years before finally deciding to go NO CONTACT no sooner than when I’d reached my forties.

Once you’ve gotten out, you’ll have to do healing work. I’ve written a number of blog posts with meditations and philosophical musings that I think can help people put their shattered world back together again. If you don’t agree with my ideas, there are plenty of other writers out there who may have advice you’ll like much better.

Once you get away from all the division and mind games, you’ll feel your inner fragmentation reunifying and merging, and in time, you’ll conquer your emotions, instead of being conquered by them.