You Can’t Kill A Narcissist With Kindness
People don’t believe me when I talk about my maternal grandmother, Evelyn. If you have never lived in the shadow of a truly narcissistic or sociopathic person, chances are you won’t believe me either.
I don’t know if my grandmother was a true sociopath or merely a narcissist. According to an article in Psychology Today:
While sociopaths qualify as narcissists, not all narcissists are sociopaths. What drives them differs. But the main distinction is that sociopaths are more cunning and manipulative, because their ego isn’t always at stake. In fact, they don’t have any real personality.
Using this definition, I would define Evelyn as a narcissist. But the label is not what matters. What matters is the effect she had on the people in her life.
People don’t believe me when I talk about my grandmother because grandmothers aren’t supposed to behave the way she did. Human beings aren’t supposed to behave that way. I find that people will blithely use the word “sociopath” to describe politicians they despise, but ordinary little old ladies? Not so much. So, people think that I am making things up — or, at the very least, exaggerating — when I use the word to describe my grandmother.
Sometimes, I have caught myself downplaying her awfulness. Trying to find a version of my grandmother that people can believe enough to empathize with me. When she died — at the age of 99 — I found myself telling my boss that she was “difficult” (Possibly the nicest thing I have ever said about her). I was trying to explain why I didn’t want anyone else in my office to know that I was taking the day off for her memorial service. Because people would then offer me their condolences and I didn’t have it in me to thank them and pretend to be sad that this toxic person was finally gone.
With people closer to me, I am not so diplomatic. One of my daughters remembers me saying about Evelyn’s death, “Someone finally threw her ring into Mount Doom.”
I can see how that might make me sound like a stone-cold bitch. But you didn’t know this woman, so you don’t believe me.
People who only met my grandmother once or twice are almost less likely to believe me than people who have never met her at all. She was perfectly capable of being pleasant — even charming — when it suited her. With new people — people whom she hadn’t yet antagonized; people she might still be able to manipulate — she could seem merely eccentric. This is, apparently, typical behavior for narcissists. Another Psychology Today article says:
“Narcissists can be beguiling and charismatic. In fact, one study showed that their likable veneer was only penetrable after seven meetings” [emphasis added].
Some things my grandmother has done which you probably won’t believe:
She returned (to the gift-giver, not the store) every gift she ever received that was not chocolate or booze.
She became jealous and petulant if anyone else was the center of attention. This included newborn babies.
The day before I was married, she told my sister that my wedding was not about me. (This was because my sister was spending time with me, rather than with her.)
After my dad had a serious heart attack, she got annoyed at my sister for being upset because she [Evelyn] had “known him longer.”
When my mom was away at college, she took the family dog to the pound because she no longer felt like taking care of him.
She has gone entire holiday dinners without saying a single word that was not some sort of insult or passive-aggressive comment (typically aimed at my mother). This is a woman who never said, “please pass the potatoes.” She said, “Well, I guess I don’t get any potatoes!” It was as if she invented her own version of Jeopardy where, instead of phrasing things as questions, you had to phrase them as criticism.
People who don’t have experience with narcissists frequently encourage me to view her behavior through the lens of normal experience. They suggest that the physical pain associated with old age was affecting her mood (except, she had been this way her entire life). They would wonder if she was socially awkward and, thus, unintentionally rude. (Do they seriously think that being socially awkward is the same as being verbally abusive?)
I get it, of course. Everyone behaves narcissistically sometimes. You can, no doubt, remember many times when you acted like a jerk. When you snapped at a loved one for no reason. When you were rude to waitstaff. When you cut someone off in traffic. You know that there was an external cause for your behavior. Maybe you had a headache. Maybe you just found out your car needed an expensive repair, which you couldn’t afford. Maybe you were up all night with a fussy baby.
Then, later, you felt bad about what you said or did. Maybe you apologized. Maybe you didn’t because you were so embarrassed by your own behavior that you just wanted to forget it and hope the other person would also.
And so, when you hear about my grandmother, your impulse is to come up with a rational explanation for her behavior. To encourage understanding and forgiveness, because that is what you hope for yourself, on those occasions when you act like a jerk.
There is, however, a huge difference between acting like a jerk — between being a flawed human being who sometimes behaves badly — and being a narcissist.
Which brings me to the worst, most infuriating advice that people gave me about my grandmother (when she was still alive): Kill her with kindness.
God, the number of times people said this to me! But killing with kindness, turning the other cheek — these are strategies for dealing with nice, normal people who are having a bad day. Yes, if I was having a shitty day and said something rude — and if the object of my rudeness turned around and was kind to me — I would probably think: Wow, that was nice. I would think: God, I’ve been acting like a jerk today. I should stop doing that.
Do you know what a narcissist thinks in this same situation? She thinks: About damn time!
Some characteristics of Narcissistic Personality Disorder:
- A grandiose sense of self-importance
- Requires excessive admiration
- Lacks empathy for the feelings and needs of others
- Expects special, favorable treatment or compliance with his or her wishes
- Exploits and takes advantage of others to achieve personal ends
In other words, the narcissist believes she is entitled to special treatment just by virtue of being herself. Kindness and favors and generosity — these things which elicit feelings of gratitude in the majority of human beings — are, to the narcissist, simply the bare minimum she deserves. You cannot kill a narcissistic person with kindness because she doesn’t understand the concept.
Okay, you might be thinking, killing with kindness may be ineffective with narcissists, but what’s the harm in trying? Here is the harm: dealing with a narcissist or sociopath is a mind fuck. Trivializing the experience of a narcissist’s victim just adds to the fuckwittage.
My mother spent almost 70 years trying to kill her mother with kindness. By the end of Evelyn’s life, my mom was literally the only person in the world who cared about her happiness or wanted to have any sort of relationship with her. My grandmother had spent a lifetime alienating every single person in her life, except my mom. My mom, for her part, was constantly trying to reconcile her mother with estranged family members. How was she rewarded for this? My grandmother accused her of turning the rest of the family against her. My mother was the central target of Evelyn’s verbal and emotional abuse, simply because she was the only person left whom she was capable of hurting. And she knew it.
My mom — who always defended the people she loved against her mother’s abuse — seemed incapable of defending herself. I can only assume that a lifetime of trying to please a woman who treated her like shit had worn her down to the point where she didn’t know how. Or maybe she thought there was no point in fighting because she could never win. Or maybe — and this is the saddest possibility — she actually thought it was okay.
Of course, my mom knew it wasn’t okay. Just like she knew she hadn’t turned the family against her mother. But it is easy to know this on an intellectual level. It is quite another matter to be told your entire life — by the one person who is supposed to be your main protector and nurturer — that you are ungrateful and treacherous and, just generally, a huge disappointment. How could my mother not have wondered: What am I doing wrong? What can I do to change this?
I wonder how many friends she confided in, over the years, about her mother’s behavior. And I wonder what those friends said. How many suggested that she must be exaggerating — because my charming grandmother could not possibly have done those horrible things? How many shrugged it off as ordinary mother-daughter conflict? I realize that my mom grew up in a very different era, but did her friends ever tell her: “this isn’t normal”? Did any say: “this is abusive”? Did they instead ask my mother: Have you tried killing her with kindness?
In the last several years of my grandmother’s life, I tried to encourage my mom to distance herself emotionally from her mother. I tried to convince her that her obligation was to make sure Evelyn had food and shelter and medical care. That she was not responsible for Evelyn’s happiness.
I didn’t do a very good job. To the end, my mom continued her quest to make her mother happy. Possibly, my ineffectiveness was because I could not be in a room with my grandmother — could not listen to my mom talking about her “poor mother” — without getting incredibly angry. I refused to mince words about my grandmother. Refused to give her the benefit of any doubt. Maybe this was the wrong tactic. If my words had been gentler — more conciliatory — maybe they would have carried more weight. But, at the time, I felt an overwhelming need to be the voice of harsh reality.
I suspect that it wouldn’t have mattered anyway. How could I hope to undo seventy years of damage with a few pragmatic words? My grandmother has been dead for almost ten years now. A few years after her death, my mom finally started admitting that her mother was “not a nice person.” The understatement of the century, but I guess it’s something.
My point is this: pretending that a narcissistic person can be won over with kindness is victim-blaming. It adds to the psychological damage that the narcissist has already done. So, the next time a friend tells you an unbelievable story about a person in her life, tell her you believe her. Tell her, “That’s terrible.” Encourage her to minimize the impact of that person on her life. But please, please don’t say, “kill her with kindness.”
