Narcissistic Baiting

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

Supply is food to a narcissist, even if it’s negative supply. All that matters to a narc is the attention that he or she is getting. That ability to stir things up, to push people’s emotional buttons, gives the narc the high that he or she craves, the power trip that feeds his or her otherwise starving, impoverished ego.

This coveted supply, which must be provided constantly, is what pushes a narcissist to engage in baiting (verb definitions 11 and 12 here), that is, putting on the charm, then cutting you down; or provoking negative emotional responses from victims, then gaslighting by feigning no malicious intent whenever he or she is called out for engaging in this slimy behaviour.

I knew a guy at work in the English cram school where I used to teach, from 1996 to 2006. I’ll call him Z. He’d start off all charming, but then throw smart-ass remarks at me as soon as I said something he didn’t dig. Z. used to engage in this kind of baiting and switching all the time, and not only with me, but also with almost everyone else who had the bad luck of entering a conversation with him. He fancies himself an “incisive,” daring truth-teller, yet he fails to admit to his most obvious faults: Z. is an overt narcissist and a misanthrope; hence, he’s a hypocrite.

He would provoke, and provoke, and provoke people until they finally got fed up with him; and when they showed their anger, he’d pretend he meant no ill will by his bitingly sarcastic comments and needling. He’d make it look as though we’d ‘walked into’ receiving those comments, yet he’d never admit to having walked into receiving our wrath. I blew up at him with especial fury one afternoon in the office, and predictably, he did his usual denial routine. We all have to take responsibility for the bad things we say, but the narc never does. Pathetic.

Now, there are unskilled hunters of narcissistic supply like Z., then there are much more skilled ones, as my late mother was. As I’ve explained so many times before, and in so many different ways, she subjected me to emotional abuse my whole life. She also indulged in a lot of baiting.

Though she probably engaged in baiting with my older brothers, R. and F., and with my older sister, J., to at least some extent, I doubt that she did it to them anywhere close as much as she did it with me, the designated family scapegoat, or identified patient. My siblings would have learned the pantomime, so to speak, that I failed to learn, and they learned it from an early age: never displease Mother! On top of that, J. especially, as the golden child, would have learned the effectiveness of what Dr. Ramani calls ‘narcissistic fluffing’: sucking up to, kissing the ass of, the narcissist as a strategic form of self-defence against Mom’s dreaded narcissistic rage.

But as I said, I never learned the pantomime of carefully walking the minefield of Mom’s capricious way of reacting emotionally, nor was I supposed to learn it; for no matter how hard I tried to be a good son, I’d always be the scapegoat in her eyes, for thus was I determined to be by her. And so was I determined to be in the eyes of her flying monkeys, R., F., and J., who enabled her scapegoating of me, out of a cowardly and selfish wish to avoid her wrath themselves.

Anyway, let me now give you a number of examples of my late narc mother engaging in the bait and switch tactic of getting supply from me and avoiding responsibility for having driven me crazy.

One early example I recall, and which I wrote about in a previous post, was when I was a little kid back in the late 1970s. Mom would come home from shopping with a big paper bag in her hands. She’d get my attention with a look of wide-eyed excitement, making a whooshing sound between her lips. This is how she’d get my hopes up, making me think she’d bought me a super-cool new toy or something. Then she’d remove the item from the bag.

It would be a pair of pants.

Why would a little kid get excited about a new pair of pants? Showing gratitude to one’s mother for having bought something one needs is fine and appropriate, but showing excitement? It’s safe to assume that she was getting my hopes up and disappointing me for her own personal entertainment; what’s more, she could use my look of disappointment as a pretext for emotionally abusing me later, as ‘punishment’ for my ‘ingratitude,’ which caused her narcissistic injury.

All those times when she, around the late 1970s and early 80s, was prating on about ‘my autism’ (which I would eventually learn she’d lied about–<<scroll down to part 3 in the link), speaking in such extreme, even melodramatic terms about it (The shrinks would have locked me away in an asylum and thrown away the key! Would I even make a good garbageman?…as long as I was happy! It was a miracle from God that I turned out OK!) that her narrative was extremely improbable, these were also, in all probability, motivated by a wish to bait me. After all, she presented this narrative in a feel-good, by-the-grace-of-God, ‘What joyous news!’ way, with a big Cheshire-cat grin on her face, to make me think this was a good thing, rather than just gaslighting.

Years later, she’d push my buttons in other ways. As I mentioned in this blog post, she once said, with a sparkle in her eyes as though she was enjoying it, that J. claimed I fill my shelves with books only to look impressive…and my resentment would be shifted onto J., rather than onto the real source…Mom. I shouldn’t shoot the messenger, apparently.

There was one occasion, back in the mid-1990s, when I was about 24 and in the reserve Canadian army, having just returned home after a tasking, and Mom did one of her many things to upset me. We, the RHLI troops, were in our unit (the John Weir Foote VC Armoury in Hamilton, Ontario) cleaning our rifles (if I remember correctly), and she–instead of just waiting for me to return to our apartment–decided to surprise me by showing up, in the flesh, in front of all the other troops to say ‘Hello,’ with a great big sweet mommy grin, in advance!

Now, I’m not trying to promote a macho attitude of keeping a man’s mother as far away from him as possible, but her presenting herself to me like that, in front of all my peers, meant that I was going to be the butt of endless ‘mama’s boy’ jokes! As a sensitive young man already rattled by years of bullying in and outside the family, I wasn’t going to find that kind of razzing and teasing easy to take.

At the time, I’d assumed Mom was just making a social faux pas, meaning well but embarrassing me unintentionally; but now that I know of her pathologies (how she had done this kind of thing to me way too many times for it to have all been accidental), I have every reason to believe she’d done that on purpose. Who doesn’t know of the he-man mentality of army grunts?

She would behave similarly if she needed me to help her with some kind of errand, for example, to move something, and I had no time to change out of my military uniform and into my civilian clothes. I’d be in the home of some stranger’s family, all in green garb and feeling extremely self-conscious, and she’d make sure to say something like, “He wants you always to address him as Private.” This would be said in an ‘innocent’ attitude of levity, of course, but she must have known how it made me feel.

Other provocations of hers, as I’ve discussed previously, included grabbing me by the ear and leading me out of the room (on a few occasions when I was a teen, and once when I was in my late 20s!). Her worst provocations, however–those that pushed me to question the conventional narrative that, despite her flaws, she loved me and only wanted what was best for me–were her insistence that I have Asperger Syndrome (AS), despite having no authority to make such judgements (and narcs love to pretend they’re smarter and know more than they actually do), and that ‘my AS’ gave her legitimate reason to reject my wish to make a visit. See Part VII of this post for the full story.

As of the time of these provocations, the mid-2000s, I’d been living in East Asia for almost ten years, and I’d made only three visits to Canada. Any reasonable, loving mother would have been thrilled to get yet another visit from her son; but Mom decided she didn’t want me around (claiming I’m ‘tactless and insensitive’ because of ‘my AS’), and she claimed that J. didn’t want me around, either (to see her terminally ill husband, who was really agitated about his soon-to-come death, and easily made upset by any inappropriate remark; but apparently, I’m the only one in the family to make such inappropriate remarks). Mom crossed over the line this time: I explicitly told her so in an ensuing email, but it didn’t seem to matter to her.

More provocations would come in the 2010s, all the way to her death in 2016. I’ve discussed these all here (scroll down to parts 4, 5, and 6), so there’s no point in repeating it. Suffice it to say, she must have enjoyed baiting me the whole time, pretending she was just trying to be helpful, but actually knowing right where to jab me, like a skilled surgeon, scalpel in hand.

Her lies about my mentally-ill cousin, S. (discussed here–scroll down to Lies #1-7), are a case in point. Since I’d been giving her the cold shoulder during the 2010s, she was obviously feeling narcissistic injury over it; and instead of just admitting to herself that her previous lies and other provocations–which I’d told her in my emails were upsetting me–had caused me to be so icy with her, she must have been feeling vengeful instead of wanting reconciliation with me.

She knew I’d been worried about S. and wanted him to get psychiatric help (though she’d adamantly refused even to try to talk to his mother about it, nor did she rally the family to get him that help), so she used my worries to lure me into a conversation on that subject…not out of a wish to help him, of course, but just as a way to get a rise out of me, to give her some attention and narcissistic supply. Though I was a bit skeptical of her motives, I still fell for it. More fool me.

When her lies had become obvious (i.e., her claim that my aunt had claimed I’d recently sent her a series of “over-the-top” emails [which I’d never sent to my aunt, though I had done so to my ever-provoking Mom, thus inspiring this lie about my aunt…see Lie # 4 here), I stopped all communication with her. Still, she kept pressing and pressing me to reply, just as she’d pressed and pressed me about AS in the 2000s, even after I’d repeatedly told her to stop bringing it up.

Finally, not able to take the pressure any more (now she was pushing me to make another visit to Canada, even offering to pay for my airplane tickets!), I bluntly told her in an email reply that I didn’t want to visit her, or to talk to her by phone or by email, because she was such a liar. Predictably, she pretended she knew nothing of what I meant by lying, and got all the flying monkeys of the family on her side. After her death, I’ve since gone NO CONTACT with the rest of them, needless to say.

So, you see here examples of how narcissists can bait you for their own personal entertainment, then play dumb when you call them out on it. Always remember: the only way to win against them is never to play their games.