All About Me: Loving a narcissist. Simon Crompton

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СКАЧАТЬ grown up reading Wuthering Heights and my romantic ideal was Heathcliff – someone who was volatile and made big gestures. In my teens, my boyfriends were very dull – I thought at the time they’d all become accountants, and actually I was right. I started going out with John when I was nineteen and just starting at art college. I was very idealistic and wanted something real, wanted to be with people who really lived and did real things – though ironically, in the end, that all turned out to be rather false.

      John was exciting because his social background was far less privileged than my own, which meant there was something rebellious about going out with him. But he also made me feel the most special person in the world. That’s how narcissists get hold of you and keep you. I was made to feel special with incredible letters and poems, and little thoughtful things like him remembering everything I said I liked, and then weeks, possibly months later, buying them as presents. I mentioned that I used to collect hippos as a child, and he went out and bought as many toy and model hippos as he could find. And I heard from mutual friends that he talked about me admiringly all the time, which was very flattering.

       John was very good-looking, and lots of people flocked around him adoringly, and others wanted to be his girlfriend, and that made me feel very special.

       He kept on saying that I would never have another relationship like this – and I felt that too. The trouble was, I came to realise that this was his way of keeping me emotionally tied in with him at the times when his erratic and sometimes cruel behaviour was making things impossible for me. He was breeding a kind of dependence that was impossible to live with, because you were constantly up and down according to his whims. He would take up a persona and totally live it, and then move on to something else – one week he’d be into chill music, and the next he’d be totally immersed in hip hop. Everything was always extreme, and at the beginning that was very attractive.

       But it was complete attention-seeking. We lived in the same student house, and one day a girlfriend from home came to see me, but John refused to meet her. He locked himself in the bedroom and refused to come out. He’d just sneak out when he needed to use the bathroom or get something to eat, but he wouldn’t see me until she’d gone, and wouldn’t say why he was doing it. He had to be the centre of attention.

       And sometimes he had to humiliate me too. He’d have these depressions, where he wouldn’t eat anything or talk. He said that if I left his side, he didn’t know what he’d do – so of course, I’d stay with him for days on end, during which time he’d be just vile to me. Once John got really angry – I can’t remember what it was about, but I think he felt that I was neglecting him, or hadn’t understood him. He punched a wall. What was interesting was that he was right-handed, and he punched the wall with his left – it was obviously considered, rather than impulsive, and he was careful not to hit himself somewhere that mattered. And he made a point of doing it in my student house, while all my friends were around.

       I’ve read about narcissism since, and I think narcissists behave like this because they want to show that the world revolves around them. If they are nice to you, it’s because they want you to love them. That adds to their sense of self-importance. But then they also have to prove that they are better than you, and that you have to be at their beck and call.

       So yes, John made me feel wonderful, but he also made me feel absolutely terrible. We were both really into painting, but whenever I painted anything, he said it was rubbish. He was incredibly competitive. I really liked films and knew quite a lot about them, and as soon as we started going out, he had to get into films and become the world’s greatest expert on them. He certainly had to prove he knew more than me, and would buy books and swot up.

       I don’t know what made him the way he was. Maybe it was his family. He hardly ever spoke to his dad, and had no relationship with him. His mother was incredibly close to him, and thought the sun shone out of his arse.

       John and I split up after two years, and I didn’t see him for three years. Then I called him because I wondered how he was. We met a few times and he wanted to get back together again. He said he’d changed, and part of me wondered whether he had. But then I met him with some of my friends around, and he made it clear he wanted me to himself and that he didn’t want to share me. Then it all came back, and I remembered how he’d been about my friends in the past, and how isolated I felt, and it made me realise that he hadn’t really changed at all. I went round to his house and, despite him insisting that we’d get back together one day, I told him that we really were finished. He took me to the station, and my last image was of him weeping hysterically on the platform as my train drew out.

      This is a portrait of a narcissist. You can see what a classic case Rosie encountered when you turn to the criteria that American psychiatrists use to identify people they believe have narcissistic personality disorder. They are found in the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fourth Edition – a manual that covers all mental-health disorders for both children and adults.

      The manual says that people who have five or more of the following traits can be classed as having a narcissistic personality disorder:

      

has a grandiose sense of self-importance

      

preoccupied with fantasies of unlimited success, power, brilliance, beauty or idealised love

      

believes that they are special and should only associate with special, high-level people

      

needs excessive admiration

      

has a sense of entitlement

      

exploits others

      

lacks empathy

      

envious of others, or thinks they are envious of him

      

haughty, arrogant behaviour.

      It’s not a pleasant combination, but for all his charms and attractions it fits John like glove. Perhaps his strongest narcissistic traits are as follows:

       A preoccupation with fantasises of unlimited brilliance and idealised love

      John genuinely believed that Rosie and he constituted something unique and special – no one had ever loved like that, no one could feel stronger, nothing could be more romantic. For Rosie, however, it eventually became clear that this glamorous image of the romance was illusory because it involved a man who had no genuine interest in how she was feeling, and who depended on humiliating her to make himself feel better.

       A belief that he was special and could СКАЧАТЬ