I dag blir det et innlegg om hvorfor narsissisten gjør seg selv til offer. Og dette innlegget er jeg inspirert til å ha på bloggen, etter mange samtaler med klienter som forteller at «deres» narsissist stadig vekk gjør seg selv til offer istedenfor å ta ansvar for egen destruktivt adferd. Men hvorfor skjer dette vanlige fenomenet, at narsissisten gjør seg selv til offer istedenfor å ta ansvar? Dette spørsmålet får du svar på her. For i dag gir jeg alle dere lesere av bloggen min, utdrag av en fagartikkel som forklarer hvorfor dette skjer.
Fagartikkelen er på engelsk, og er skrevet av den anerkjente amerikanske gestaltterapeuten Elinor Greenberg Ph.D., CGP. Hun har spesialkompetanse om narsissisme, og har publisert mange gode fagartikler om dette temaet. Hun gir her en flott forklaring på hvorfor narsissisten gjør seg selv til offer, framfor å ta ansvar for mishandlingen de utsetter sine ofre for.
Hva er en narsissist?
Her er først 8 kortfattede og enkle kjennetegn:
- Uvanlig høyt behov for oppmerksomhet og beundring.
- Unormal lav terskel for å oppleve seg krenket
- Sliter bak fasaden med dårlig selvfølelse.
- Søker makt og status.
- De kan være sjarmerende utad.
- De mangler empati.
- Skylder på andre, istedenfor å ta ansvar for egen adferd som skader andre.
- Utnytter andre.
Artikkelen starter med disse ordene om hvorfor narsissisten gjør seg selv til offer
«Have you ever wondered why so many narcissists devalue and humiliate their mates and then claim to be the real victim in the relationship? Some of them even accuse their non-narcissistic mate of being the real narcissist. Many of my clients report that during a fight their narcissist mate will lie and mischaracterize what is going on in an attempt to seize the high ground. These abusive mates conveniently forget the many nasty things that they said and did during the argument and instead fixate on the one harsh thing that their abused mate said in their own defense….»
Artikkelen sier videre om skam:
«One of the ways that you can understand narcissistic personality disorder is in terms of shame avoidance. Narcissists invent a fake persona in which they present themselves to the world as perfect and always right in order to avoid feeling shame about their defects. That is the reason that in the above examples, the narcissists are shifting the blame for their bad behavior onto their mates. They need to see themselves as totally in the right.»
Les også: En bok om psykisk vold og hvordan reise seg igjen
Greenberg sier dette om hva narsissisten mangler
«Narcissists need to portray themselves in this fake way because they lack whole object relations. Whole object relations is the technical term for the ability to form an integrated, fairly stable, and more-or-less realistic picture of themselves and other people that contains both good and bad traits. From an object relations theoretical point of view, one of the criteria for diagnosing someone with a personality disorder is that they lack whole object relations and can only see people in a split way as either all-good or all-bad.«
«Most people develop whole object relations in childhood if they are treated in a fairlyconsistently positive way by their caregivers and still shown love even when they make mistakes. If the parents have whole object relations, the children are likely to develop this capacity. However, if the parents do not have it, the parents will switch back and forth between loving and hating their children. This prevents the children from developing a stable sense of self. It is as if the children spend their childhood looking into two different equally distorted mirrors. One shows them as perfect an the other shows them as irredeemably flawed.«
«In the narcissist’s world, all-good equals perfect, special, omnipotent, and never wrong and all-bad equals worthless, defective, and stupid. If you are all-good, you are entitled to be treated as special and the usual rules do not apply to you. If you are all-bad, you are entitled to nothing. You are one of life’s losers.«
«This extreme form of splitting creates a situation where people with NPD cannot admit to any failings without losing their ability to see themselves as all-good, perfect, and always right. Denying their flaws and shifting the blame for their mistakes is their only alternative to feeling like worthless garbage. There is no in between point where they can have some flaws and make a few mistakes without seeing themselves as all-bad. If they cannot avoid seeing their errors or publicly being exposed as imperfect, they are likely to fall into a shame-based, self-hating depression. In this state they become much less functional and may even become suicidal.»
Avslutningsvis sier artikkelen dette om hvorfor narsissisten gjør seg selv til offer
«If you have a narcissist in your life who is abusing you, yet often claims to be the real victim, it is usually because they learned early in life to feel that making a mistake, any mistake, makes them imperfect and invalidates any successes they have had in life. This extreme and distorted view causes them to do whatever that they can to avoid seeing themselves as the abuser. Despite all evidence to the contrary, they will twist the truth until they can find one small “fact” that they believe justifies seeing you as the abuser and them as your innocent victim.»
Hele artikkelen kan leses her:
