1.
There seems to be a particular energetic signature common to all forms of oppression and abuse. It is apparent in hierarchical structures, and interwoven through power relations. It manifests within both individuals and collective entities in a variety of ways and to varying degrees. It is the madness that underpins empire; the dangerous, currently flailing paradigm that seeks to separate and divide in its desperate bid to conquer and profit.
Inherently narcissistic, this energy characteristically holds itself out as superior or special. It perceives itself to be uniquely deserving, or entitled, or hard done by. Incapable of admitting fault, it never truly apologises or takes responsibility (its occasional mea culpas come only when expedient). It engenders fear, and instills a sense of urgency where none actually exists. It defends against shame by shaming others; unable to tolerate its own vulnerability, it preys on the vulnerability of others.
Cognitively, it adheres to the rigidity of certainty, reducing nuanced issues to simplistic categories. Binary and polarised in its thinking, it has a particular intolerance of fluidity, subtlety, uncertainty, complexity, and challenge. It defines itself – I or we – in contrast to a threatening or inferior you or them. It excludes, sometimes viciously, in accordance with its right-wrong, good-bad categories. It is fundamentally incapable of seeing the designated other as anything but an object to be used, abused, corrected, exploited, policed, commodified, bettered, scapegoated, subjugated, reformed, or made into an imagined cipher onto which its myths can be projected in order to legitimise its own narratives. Ultimately, it may come to deny the existence of the other as fully human, annihilating them to the extent that it can. (Evil might be defined as treating the other as an object to be disposed of or done to according to one’s whim, having no mind to their personhood.)
When its grandiosity is challenged, or its need for power or admiration thwarted, it retaliates with aggression, hostility, or rage. It degrades and dehumanises, punching down even as it dresses up its out-of-proportion reactions as necessary and righteous retaliation, or self-defence, joking, rationality, common sense, doing it for your own good or you brought this on yourself. As it doesn’t see or care about the realness of the other-as-human-subject, it constantly denies the harm that it inflicts. It lacks empathy, and is bent on demolishing any viewpoint other than its own. (In the grip of narcissistic group dynamics, otherwise thoughtful people become defensive and dissociated in relation to the other specific to their particular group functioning. They lose their capacity for relationality, and may end up obsessing over the other they are defining themselves against.)[1]
It can be difficult, if one has not been in its cross-hairs, to see or imagine the devastating visceral impact of this energy’s attacks. At times, it operates in the shadows, visible only to those on the receiving end of its overt or covert hostility. Vulnerabilities gleaned, or previously willingly shared, may be cruelly weaponised. To be at its mercy is to be shamed and humiliated. Even worse, it is to have one’s relationship with oneself powerfully distorted, such that one’s instincts and self-trust are eroded. After prolonged exposure, particularly as a child, it is common to turn on ourselves in the belief – inculcated by the narcissistic energy itself – that it must be my fault. Thus begins the often frantic search for what it is that’s wrong with us, because for things to be this painful, we surmise, surely something must be.
When our psychic status quo is held together by denial, avoidance, or minimising (as it so often is, for reasons of survival), it can be shattering to face the reality of what happened, of what has been done to us. It can take years to slowly let in just how bad it was and difficult, too, when we are so often told to forget, or forgive, or let go, or some such. And because the narcissistic energy is impenetrable – real relationship or human connection with it is impossible – there is a pervasive hopelessness or futility about ever reaching any kind of change, understanding, repair, or healing. This hopelessness has often pervaded psyche and soma such that we are in an unconscious or unacknowledged state of collapse, or fixed in the patterns of flight, freeze, fawn, appease, defend, or disarm. It’s as if, even if we are no longer in proximity to the narcissistic energy, it continues to have us under its spell. We react as if it were still right here, within or around us. In my experience, breaking that spell, and extricating ourselves from the patterning which keeps us in thrall to it, requires us to come out of our self-blame and confusion – if only temporarily – sufficiently to see the energy for exactly what it is: the energetic through-line inherent in the power-over, dark triad[2] paradigm that is so evident in the world.
2.
I was intimately familiar with the energy of narcissism long before I learnt its name. Growing up, it was what my siblings and I called the atmosphere. At home, it was the air we breathed; returning from school, I could sense it even before I turned my key in the lock. Its frequent and scalding criticisms left me flayed and humiliated. Bewildered by its attacks, I would scan to gauge its mood in the hopes of taking evasive action, but I inevitably ended up stepping on its landmines, the resultant explosions infiltrating my still-developing nervous system. It told me that I was wrong, weak, at fault; it convinced me that I was the cause of its rage and the author of my own estrangement. “Why did you reject the family when you were six?” it once asked, oblivious to the import of the question.
It wasn’t until after I started to emerge out of the intensity of the dark night that I began to see how much of my pain and patterning led back to my entanglements with this energy. The painstaking disentangling of its various strands has taken years, and continues to this day. While it is commonplace now to talk about narcissism as a psychological trait possessed by certain individuals, my understanding is that it is more helpful to think of it as an energetic thread that runs through collectives and individuals to a greater or lesser extent. For example, numerous scholars and writers have framed white supremacy and other forms of oppression as manifestations of collective narcissism.[3] Cults, and many other social organisations, also operate as narcissistic entities. In our culture, none of us can claim complete immunity from this energy, but we can become cognisant of it, and willing to countenance both its presence within us and our reactions to it.
What might this look like, in daily reality? Here, in chronological order, are several extracts from my writings in moments over the last six years when this energy was making itself known within my system. These were moments in which I was viscerally feeling it, and writing whatever came to me about its nature, and my reactions to it. I had no idea what was coming next; I followed the promptings of sensation, emotion, imagery, and insight as they emerged over a period of at least thirty minutes. The first three extracts were written on subsequent days.
I’m aware of the rain and my body on the floor and my hand writing this and What’s all this been about? and What more do you want?
Then I feel my rapaciousness and its covert, manipulative, and never-ending wanting.
Now that I’m feeling this rapacious energy throughout my body, I can see that I cut myself off from it with good reason. It considers itself entitled to whatever it seizes. It wants to take things without making any effort. It wants to magnetise things; it can’t bear things being unmagnetised or unattracted to it. More than anything else, it can’t bear itself.
This rapacious energy needs to have its supplies cut off – that’s the only way to quell it.
This is probably what Buddhists call desire, but I think that’s the wrong word for it. Desire feels simple, natural, and gentle, while this energy feels like a perversion of instinct.
I’m aware of the rapacious, narcissistic energy in the world. It individualises, privatises, and separates. It abuses, denies, and gaslights, insisting on its own rightness. It eschews complexity, diversity, and multiplicity. It creates a sense of urgency, and weaponises vulnerability and victimhood, as if it were victim rather than perpetrator. It co-opts everything (including spirituality) for its own nefarious ends. It is underhand, scheming, conniving, and finds loopholes and get-out clauses. It thrives on exceptionalism. It doesn’t know where or what enough is.
Underneath, I can see that it’s really hurt. Oh my god, this energy is absolutely desperate to be liked, desperate for attention. Attention is its narcotic.
Memories come; a young me eating more than her fair share of doughnuts and lying about it; an older me kissing someone even though I knew they were married.
There’s another part here that can’t bear the rapaciousness because it’s so painful. I’m grateful to have realised this thus far.
The rapaciousness is exhausted. I get the sense that I need to lower it down gently.
Originally, this energy needed support in order to be itself, but didn’t get it. It had no choice but to become rapacious as a way to support itself. In other words, this rapaciousness is a twisted outgrowth of unmet need in early childhood. Underneath it lies the pain of spurned dependency.
It can’t articulate how beside itself it is.
As I feel it, I’m aware of the support of the wall and the floor.
I’m waiting or wanting to get out of this, and I don’t know how.
I have a felt sense of the particular prison that is a narcissistic mother. It was impossible to stay in connection with her because the conditions she imposed were impossible to fulfill without ceasing to exist. She distorted my relationship with myself.
There’s a nudge to move back a bit; I’m in too close, and I need to give this more space.
I can feel how much I don’t want to feel this, because it feels awful.
Suddenly, it comes to me; I wrote off the possibility of ever feeling this for myself. I’m not worth feeling this for. Nobody was ever meant to come in here. I’ve managed to keep everyone out, until now.
Standing on the steps up to the house, at five or six years old, biting my nails, I felt really bad about myself. I started to hate myself when I was five or six.
Oh god, it’s so obvious now that this is violent self-hatred. I’ve been living above or around this core of self-hatred. At times, it soaks my every waking moment. Self-hatred has been the elephant in this room. And it didn’t want to be outed or uncovered, because then it would lose power. This was not supposed to be uncovered, it screams.
An image comes; people beginning, very tentatively, to come out onto the streets and gather together after a dictator has finally fallen. (Dictators ban real connection because there’s no power in it for them.)
I see the little five or six year old me who hates herself violently. The self-hatred became essential; I needed it in order to stay disconnected because true connection was impossible in this dynamic, as above.
Someone or something was bound to penetrate the self-hatred at some point. Love was always going to get in, eventually.
I hear, Stay with your body. Random thoughts and images come and go.
There’s also a sense of, You can’t know this, and a spinning energy. I see a memory of being in the garden, in a lemon yellow dress, when I was five or six.
This is what broken – or very insecure – attachment feels like.
No-one is supposed to know this comes in again. I thought I’d put myself out of reach, beyond the possibility of being attachable.
There’s a hard, powerful, primitive energy throughout my body. It’s holding out, withdrawn, stiff. It hates everything and everyone that doesn’t conform to its will. Mistakes are utterly intolerable to it. In its eyes, life is a zero sum, win-or-lose game. Images come of people being slaughtered in battle; this energy denies the fact of the slaughter. (This is the deforming and immensely harmful energy of narcissism, which denies and resists its own hurt.)
It’s as if I’m in the inner workings now, the back room to which entry was previously forbidden.
I wonder if this horse has already bolted, but it seems important that I take this stand now. I need her (the anxious part of me) to understand that her freaking out is detrimental to me, and that it’s damaged and limited my life. I need her to understand that yes, there are times when things are hard, but her freaking out makes them harder.
Something rises up, a feeling of Oh, you’ll regret this. It’s as if I’m standing up to the narcissistic energy, and I can feel its familiar sting. There’s also a feeling of, I don’t care any more, I want my life back.
I also need her to understand that the shaming is detrimental. Yes, things have changed and yes, there are things that I did then that I wouldn’t do now, but the shaming is damaging. I need her to understand that the whole matrix – shame-guilt-regret-envy-fear – is damaging, and it doesn’t help anybody. Again, I get how it came about, and I don’t blame her, and I need her to know just how detrimental it is.
I’ve begged, pleaded, tried to do the right things, “worked on myself”, and finally, I’m taking a stand for myself. This means coming out of flight, fawn, and collapse, whatever the backlash. It means countenancing my force and vitality. It means stepping out of the play of inferior and superior.
I need her to know that I will no longer be partaking in any of that, I say.
A wave of the narcissistic energy comes, a So you think you’ll get away with this? It feels as if it will fling everything at me, and I can feel my resolve. I need her to know that this is the end of the status quo as it has been. I need her to know that none of the old ploys are going to work on me any more, because I’ve finally seen the truth of this. I need her to know that there is going to be a stepping out, come what may.
3.
An interesting thing happened when I was in my mid thirties. My mother had come to stay, and her usual drubbing had left me floored. (She would find a vulnerable, tender spot, stick her verbal knife into it, and cruelly twist. I would retreat, go quiet, try to appease or reason, all the while doing my best not to cry). The next day, I described the encounter to my friend, and she began to cry. Is it that bad? I asked. She nodded, and it was as if her natural, heartfelt response opened something within me. Later, on my own, I found a deep, gut-level, whole-body no. I’d never felt a no like it before; no as complete statement, no without justifying or pleading or expectation, just no. And from that day on, my mother’s attacks stopped. We never talked about it, but I knew in my cells that my no had somehow halted her automaton-like narcissistic energy in its tracks. I’d longed for it to stop, but it was never going to stop of its own volition. It could only be stopped by a crystal-clear, unequivocal no, that saw it for what it was, and drew a clear and unmistakable energetic boundary.
Over the years, and after many further encounters with this energy in a variety of forms, I began to see that it is partly fed by our reactivity to it, by our being in fight-flight-freeze states in relation to it, by our being horrified or shocked or hooked in or made to feel special or ostracised by it. It can’t bear a lack of attention or engagement, or more precisely, a lack of reactivity to itself. (In one salutary but painful instance, I came to see that my being the favoured one of a spiritual teacher was assuaging the pain of being the scapegoat as a child and, as a result, I had kept myself oblivious to the obviously harmful dynamics at play.) Becoming unhooked from this energy has meant seeing all the ways in which I seem to benefit from it, as well as all the ways in which I’ve been harmed by it. It has also meant seeing all my many reactions to it, including but not limited to fawning, appeasing, disarming, avoidance, and being in flight.
In my understanding, it is only by encountering and feeling the narcissistic strands within and around us, and our relationship with them, that we can really begin to dismantle the old paradigm, both inwardly and outwardly. Where and how, in both ourselves and our communities, are we perpetuating this energetic signature? Do we treat ourselves with love, from a place of clarity and kindness, or is our inner landscape one of scathing criticism or self-loathing? In what overt and subtle ways are we upholding or being taken in by the emperor’s new clothes, or spinning such cloth ourselves? What are we not standing up to? In this age of raging narcissocracy, it behooves us to extricate ourselves, to the extent that we can, from the old paradigm, so that together, we can begin to feel our way into the new.
[1] Two fairly recent examples of this are elucidated in a) the Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention’s Red Flag alert for trans and intersex rights in the UK – https://www.lemkininstitute.com/red-flag-alerts – and b) Reni Eddo-Lodge’s description of the ways in which white people can behave in conversations about race – https://renieddolodge.co.uk/why-im-no-longer-talking-to-white-people-about-race/.
[2] Machiavellianism, narcissism and psychopathy.
[3] For example, Miller, Arianne & Josephs, Lawrence. (2009). Whiteness as Pathological Narcissism. Contemporary Psychoanalysis. 45. 93-119. 10.1080/00107530.2009.10745989.