Dear Hello:

Your attitude is excellent: to not rush; to take it slowly, one day at a time; to observe, to reflect and enjoy simple pleasures and your new home with your 12 and 13 year old daughters.

“I’m reading a book titled “malignant self-love” and it’s helped me tremendously. It’s considered one of the best books written on NPD“-

– I was curious so I looked up some quotes from the book, and I hope you don’t mind if I elaborate on them a bit (as part of my own self-help work):

“Narcissists like being feared. It imbues them with an intoxicating sensation of omnipotence“- this is an accurate description of my mother. I remember that Power Intoxication on her face and in her voice when she raged at me:  she enjoyed it.

“Faced with other people’s genuine emotions, the narcissist becomes suspicious and embarrassed“- my mother was definitely suspicious of me, and in regard to my genuine emotions: she stepped all over them with her feet, as if my emotions were dirt.

“In the narcissist’s world being accepted or cared for (not to mention loved) is a foreign language. It is meaningless or even repellent“- she rejected my genuine love for her, and repeatedly; stepping on it with her feet, like it was dirt.

“They are aware of what they are doing to others – but they do not care“- she didn’t care.

“[Abusers] blame the world – circumstances, other people – for their defeats, misfortune, misconduct, and failures… he has an external locus of control“- true to my mother, absolutely: she blamed the world and I was part of the world she blamed; in her mind, it was her against the world.

“The narcissist has to defend himself against his own.. shame, and anxiety.. (via) false modesty. The narcissist publicly chastises himself for being unworthy… not (formally) schooled… cognizant of his own shortcomings…  This way, if (or, rather, when) exposed for what he is, he can always say: ‘But I told you so in the first place, haven’t I?’ False modesty is, thus, an insurance policy“- this quote makes me understand something about my mother that I didn’t understand before: I never considered her a narcissist because of her expressions of low-self-esteem expressions, like saying that she was ugly, uneducated, etc., I never thought of it as an insurance policy.

“Narcissists are said to be in love with themselves. But this is a fallacy. Narcissus is not in love with himself. He is in love with his reflection. There is a major difference between one’s True Self and reflected-self”- Now I see that she really did project a REFLECTION of herself, that of a very, very good person, a very friendly and kind person, and “the best mother in the world“,  as she used to  say. These were not her True Self traits; these were traits of a reflection that she projected to the world.

Thank you for mentioning the book, Hello, and blessing back to you!

anita