Ten Red Flags That You Are With An ASP

Posted by Marion Trent on with 0 Comment

Most people have ignored the warning signs or red flags, that appear early on in a relationship with an antisocial person.

Here are the most obvious — and most likely — red flags that appear within 3-6 months of the relationship, sometimes much sooner. Your potential mate/friend:

1. Valued and quickly devalued you depending on how much, or how little, he/she can control your behavior; especially your behavior towards other people. For example, he or she may perceive someone significant in your life as a potential threat and will manipulate situations to cause you to doubt that friend or family member. He or she will try to build mistrust in you, and then quickly turn around and “save you” from the situation he/she created. Or, he will blatantly demand whom you can or cannot like or love.

NOTE: Pay close attention when he shares situations from past relationships.  It’s highly likely that your relationship will end up looking like his previous relationships. Every relationship picks up where the last one left off. Take your time before you get intimate. It makes things easier if the relationship doesn’t work out. How long should you wait? The short answer is at least 6 months.

2. He tells you straight-up he’s antisocial. No one who is mentally and emotionally stable will call himself an antisocial. Unless you crave a wild and bumpy ride in your relationship, throw this fish back in the water and find love elsewhere.

3. See how he lives. Is his house cluttered, or a pig sty? Lots going on within when someone hoards and lives in filth. “As within, so without,”

4. He uses the system and doesn’t repay debts. Has a sense of entitlement.

5. Tries to micro-manage people in his life. He’s controlling  and acts like he’s the only caring one in the relationship or household.

6. Perceives the world in a very peculiar way. There is no winning for losing. He won’t compromise with you. End. Of. Discussion.

7.  His responses don’t match what is going on in the room. For example, it’s early morning and you get up first. You’re sitting at your computer He walks in and you cheerfully say: “Good morning!” He, in turn, is frowning and doesn’t reply. Instead, he might start some unrelated dialogue because…

8. He lives in his paranoid mind more than in the real world or any rational world for that matter.

9. Most of your actions are met with suspicion or opposition.  Example: Watching a cute and wholesome video on YouTube featuring a friend of the opposite sex might be seen as you being completely obsessed or infatuated with your friend.  All the explaining in the world won’t change his mind. Does he really believe it, or is he trying to control your happy mood by bringing you down to his level? WHO CARES! Get away from someone who is a harmful, toxic person. Love him from a distance. Wish him well and move on.

10. You are constantly walking on egg shells and have to justify your words and actions. Then, you’re told not to justify yourself. You never know what you’re going to get. Ever. It’s a mystery why he acts the way he does,  but the most important thing is to remember that you will never be able to be yourself. Ever.  Do you want that type of relationship?

Narcissist Crumbles without Narcissistic Supply

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Handsome narcissisticNarcissist Crumbles without Narcissistic Supply

By Sam Vaknin
Author of “Malignant Self-love: Narcissism Revisited”

The Grandiosity Gap (between a fantastically grandiose – and unlimited – self-image and actual – limited – accomplishments and achievements) is grating. Its recurrence threatens the precariously balanced house of cards that is the narcissistic personality. The narcissist finds, to his chagrin, that people out there are much less admiring, accommodating and accepting than his parents. As he grows old, the narcissist often becomes the target of constant derision and mockery, a sorry sight indeed. His claims for superiority appear less plausible and substantial the more and the longer he makes them.

Pathological narcissism – originally a defense mechanism intended to shield the narcissist from an injurious world – becomes the main source of hurt, a generator of injuries, counterproductive and dangerous. Overwhelmed by negative or absent Narcissistic Supply, the narcissist is forced to let go of it.

The narcissist then resorts to self-delusion. Unable to completely ignore contrarian opinion and data – he transmutes them. Unable to face the dismal failure that he is, the narcissist partially withdraws from reality. To soothe and salve the pain of disillusionment, he administers to his aching soul a mixture of lies, distortions, half-truths and outlandish interpretations of events around him. These solutions can be classified thus:

The Delusional Narrative Solution

The narcissist constructs a narrative in which he figures as the hero – brilliant, perfect, irresistibly handsome, destined for great things, entitled, powerful, wealthy, the center of attention, etc. The bigger the strain on this delusional charade – the greater the gap between fantasy and reality – the more the delusion coalesces and solidifies.

Finally, if it is sufficiently protracted, it replaces reality and the narcissist’s reality test deteriorates. He withdraws his bridges and may become schizotypal, catatonic, or schizoid.

The Antisocial Solution

The narcissist renounces reality. To his mind, those who pusillanimously fail to recognize his unbound talents, innate superiority, overarching brilliance, benevolent nature, entitlement, cosmically important mission, perfection, etc. – do not deserve consideration.

The narcissist’s natural affinity with the criminal – his lack of empathy and compassion, his deficient social skills, his disregard for social laws and morals – now erupt and blossom. He becomes a full-fledged antisocial (sociopath or psychopath). He ignores the wishes and needs of others, he breaks the law, he violates all rights – natural and legal, he holds people in contempt and disdain, he derides society and its codes, he punishes the ignorant ingrates – that, to his mind, drove him to this state – by acting criminally and by jeopardizing their safety, lives, or property.

The Paranoid Schizoid Solution

When narcissism fails as a defense mechanism, the narcissist develops paranoid narratives: self-directed confabulations which place him at the center of others’ allegedly malign attention. The narcissist becomes his own audience and self-sufficient as his own, sometimes exclusive, source of narcissistic supply.

The narcissist develops persecutory delusions. He perceives slights and insults where none were intended. He becomes subject to ideas of reference (people are gossiping about him, mocking him, prying into his affairs, cracking his e-mail, etc.). He is convinced that he is the center of malign and mal-intentioned attention. People are conspiring to humiliate him, punish him, abscond with his property, delude him, impoverish him, confine him physically or intellectually, censor him, impose on his time, force him to action (or to inaction), frighten him, coerce him, surround and besiege him, change his mind, part with his values, victimize or even murder him, and so on.

Some narcissists withdraw completely from a world populated with such minacious and ominous objects (really projections of internal objects and processes). They avoid all social contact, except the most necessary. They refrain from meeting people, falling in love, having sex, talking to others, or even corresponding with them. In short: they become schizoids – not out of social shyness, but out of what they feel to be their choice.

“This evil, hopeless world does not deserve me” – goes the inner refrain – “and I shall waste none of my time and resources on it.”

The Paranoid Aggressive (Explosive) Solution

Other narcissists who develop persecutory delusions, resort to an aggressive stance, a more violent resolution of their internal conflict. They become verbally, psychologically, situationally (and, very rarely, physically) abusive. They insult, castigate, chastise, berate, demean, and deride their nearest and dearest (often well wishers and loved ones). They explode in unprovoked displays of indignation, righteousness, condemnation, and blame.

Theirs is an exegetic Bedlam. They interpret everything – even the most innocuous, inadvertent, and innocent comment – as designed to provoke and humiliate them. They sow fear, revulsion, hate, and malignant envy. They flail against the windmills of reality – a pathetic, forlorn, sight. But often they cause real and lasting damage – fortunately, mainly to themselves.

The Masochistic Avoidant Solution

The narcissist is angered by the lack of narcissistic supply. He directs some of this fury inwards, punishing himself for his “failure”. This masochistic behavior has the added “benefit” of forcing the narcissist’s closest to assume the roles of dismayed spectators or of persecutors and thus, either way, to pay him the attention that he craves.

Self-administered punishment often manifests as self-handicapping masochism – a narcissistic cop-out. By undermining his work, his relationships, and his efforts, the increasingly fragile narcissist avoids additional criticism and censure (negative supply). Self-inflicted failure is the narcissist’s doing and thus proves that he is the master of his own fate.

Masochistic narcissists keep finding themselves in self-defeating circumstances which render success impossible – and “an objective assessment of their performance improbable” (Millon, 2000). They act carelessly, withdraw in mid-effort, are constantly fatigued, bored, or disaffected and thus passive-aggressively sabotage their lives. Their suffering is defiant and by “deciding to abort” they reassert their omnipotence.

The narcissist’s pronounced and public misery and self-pity are compensatory and “reinforce (his) self-esteem against overwhelming convictions of worthlessness” (Millon, 2000). His tribulations and anguish render him, in his eyes, unique, saintly, virtuous, righteous, resilient, and significant. They are, in other words, self-generated narcissistic supply.

Thus, paradoxically, the worst his anguish and unhappiness, the more relieved and elated such a narcissist feels!

People of the Lie: The Hope for Healing Human Evil

Posted by Marion Trent on

By M. Scott Peck, M.D.

confrontationThere can be a state of the soul against which Love itself is powerless because it has hardened itself against Love. Hell is essentially a state of being which we fashion for ourselves; a state of final separateness from God which is the result not of God’s repudiation of man, but of man’s repudiation of God, and a repudiation which is eternal precisely because it has become, in itself, immovable.

The varieties of people’s wickedness are manifold. As a result of their refusal to tolerate the sense of their own sinfulness, the evil ones become the uncorrectable grab bag of sin. They are, for instance, in my experience, remarkably greedy people. Thus, they are cheap- so cheap that their “gifts” may be murderous. In The Road Less Traveled, I suggested the most basic sin is laziness. In the next subsection I suggest it may be pride –because all sins are repairable except the sin of believing one is without sin. But perhaps the question of which sin is the greatest is, on a certain level, a moot issue. All sins betray – and isolate us from – both the divine and our fellow creatures. As one deep religious thinker put it, any sin “can harden into hell”:

There are analogies in human experience: the hate which is so blind, so dark, that Love only makes it the more violent; the pride which is so stony that humility only makes it more scornful; the inertia – last but not least the inertia – which has taken possession of the personality that no crisis, no appeal, no inducement whatsoever, can stir it into activity, but on the contrary makes it bury itself the more deeply in its immobility.

So with the soul and God; pride can become hardened into hell, hatred can become hardened into hell, any of the seven root forms of wrongdoing can harden into hell, and not least that sloth which is boredom with divine things, the inertia which cannot be troubled to repent, even though it sees the abyss into which the soul is falling, because for so long, in little ways perhaps, it has accustomed itself to refuse whatever might cost it an effort. May God in his mercy save us from that.*

A predominant characteristic, however, of the behavior of those I call evil is scapegoating. Because in their hearts they consider themselves above reproach, they must lash out at anyone who does reproach them. They sacrifice others to preserve their self-image to perfection. Take a simple example of a six-year-old boy who asks his father, “Daddy, why did you call Grandma a bitch?” “I told you to stop bothering me,” the father roars. “Now, you’re going to get it. I’m going to wash your mouth out with soap. Maybe that will teach you to clean up what you say and keep your mouth shut when you’re told.” Dragging the boy upstairs to the soap dish, the father inflicts this punishment on him. In the name of “proper discipline” evil has been committed.

Scapegoating works through a mechanism psychiatrists call projection. Since the evil, deep down, feel themselves be faultless, it is inevitable that when they are in conflict with the world they will invariably perceive the conflict as the world’s fault. Since they must deny their own badness, they must perceive others as bad.

In The Road Less Traveled I define evil “as the exercise of political power that is, the imposition of one’s will upon others by overt or covert coercion – in order to avoid…spiritual growth. (p.279)

Strangely enough, evil people are often destructive because they are attempting to destroy evil. The problem is that they misplace the locus of the evil. Instead of destroying others they should be destroying the sickness within themselves.

*Gerald Vann, The Pain of Christ and the Sorrow of God. (Temple Gate Publishers, Springfield, Illinois, copyright by Aquin Press, 1947, pp. 54-55).