malignant narcissism — a phrase i did not know in 2019

in 2019 i did not have a vocabulary for what was being done to me. i had a tie. i had a man who emailed me at eleven p.m. asking if i was a team player. i had no word for the specific shape of his cruelty. i have one now.

desk on a wednesday. carla is on the third floor at the leadership offsite prep — the meeting about the meeting. i have, generously, ninety minutes before anyone wonders why the cursor sits in the wrong document.

so. malignant narcissism. i’d like to say i picked the term up from a book. i did not. i picked it up from a podcast a man at the bar named mike was listening to on one of those nights where mike does not want to talk and just wants someone to sit next to. mike has a system for taxes. mike has not filed since 2019. mike, on this particular tuesday, was nodding at his phone with the slow, solemn nod of a man hearing his own life described by a stranger. i asked what he was listening to. he handed me an earbud. it was about malignant narcissism. i kept the earbud in for the next eleven minutes and i did not enjoy them.

malignant narcissism: a severe pattern of behavior that combines the self-importance and lack of empathy you’d expect from a regular narcissist with three extras — antisocial conduct, persistent aggression, and what the manual they reference on the shows i watch calls a paranoid streak. it is, in plain english, the version that does not just bruise feelings. it leaves a record. (i looked it up. the looking-up was uncomfortable.)

MALIGNANT. IS. NOT. A. SUFFIX. YOU. WANT.

i need that on the record. narcissist is already a heavy word. people use it on a tuesday to describe their boss. fine. i’ve used it that way myself. but malignant is the word a doctor uses about a thing they want to remove, and adding it to narcissism is, frankly, the kind of upgrade you do not want in your vocabulary or your inbox.

what malignant narcissism is, in the clinical sense, by someone who is not clinical

i am not a doctor. a doctor is a man with a job. i write blog posts on company time. these are different jobs and they pay differently. with that disclaimer in cement, here is what i pieced together from the podcast, the four pages of a book i read on the train, and a forum i should not have opened.

malignant narcissism is, in the literature i’m fairly sure exists, the overlap of four ingredients in one person. one: the regular narcissism — grandiosity, entitlement, no real interest in the inner life of anyone else. two: antisocial behavior — rules are for other people, the rules being broken are someone else’s problem. three: aggression — not always physical, but always present, sometimes dressed up as honesty. four: paranoia — the conviction that everyone is out to get them, which is, conveniently, also what justifies the first three.

the technical word i kept seeing was syndrome. it is not a single disorder. it is a constellation. you do not have one symptom of malignant narcissism. you have a weather system. and the weather, i suspect, is what makes it different from the regular kind.

the difference from regular narcissism, which is plenty bad on its own

regular narcissism is, in my limited and self-administered experience, mostly exhausting. the regular narcissist takes the conversation. they take the air. they take the credit. they do not, however, take active steps to ensure that you doubt your own memory or that you stop calling your friends. that’s the upgrade.

the upgrade, in my earlier post on the gaslighting pattern from a relationship that ended in 2019, was the calm voice. the calm voice is malignant narcissism’s house style. the calm voice says “you’ve remembered this incorrectly” while watching to see if you will, in fact, remember it incorrectly the next time. the calm voice keeps a tally. the calm voice is keeping score in a game you did not know was being played.

regular narcissism has bad tuesdays. malignant narcissism has a project plan.

i’d like to say there’s a clean test. there isn’t. but there’s a feeling, and the feeling is this: regular narcissism leaves you tired. malignant narcissism leaves you smaller. if, after three months with someone, your friends are saying you seem quieter, your laugh is shorter, and you have stopped mentioning the thing you used to mention every dinner — that is data. that is the receipt. trust the receipt. the shrinking, in my own case, was helped along by a steady drip of gaslighting i did not have a name for at the time.

examples i collected from a relationship i’d rather not relitigate, plus tom for contrast

i will not go through the folder again. the folder still exists. it is still on the phone. the phone is still at 23%. some things, in my life, are constants.

i will, however, contrast two people, because contrast is how the brain learns. exhibit one: the ex. exhibit two: tom. tom is not in this story for himself. tom is here because tom is the control group.

tom. tom owns a house. tom has a wife. tom has two children, both with names i can spell. tom drives a volvo. tom has a pension that, when described, made me feel like a man who had been doing his finances inside a microwave. tom is not interesting. that is exactly the point. tom believes credit cards are a personality trait — he said this to me once, at a wedding, near the dessert table, with the easy smile of a man who pays his off every month. tom is wrong about a lot of things. tom is, however, not malignant. tom is just boring, and boring people, as a rule, do not maintain a project plan to dismantle anyone’s reality. they are too busy choosing a paint color.

the ex. the ex is a different category. i will not name them and i will not describe them in any detail that the volvo guy could subpoena. but the ex’s defining trait was the calm. the calm during the disagreement. the calm during the apology that wasn’t an apology. the calm during the moment they corrected, in front of three of my friends, a story about my own life. tom would have nodded along with the wrong version of my life. the ex used the wrong version on me, on a wednesday, with three witnesses, and not one of them, as we say, smelled gas.

that’s the difference. tom is wrong. the ex was strategic.

i was, around that time, three cafés deep into a conversation with a woman named maggie who runs a small business now — she has employees, payroll, a tax person, the whole adult arrangement — and maggie said, in the way she says things, “the difference between someone difficult and someone dangerous is whether you keep finding new ways to apologize for them.” i wrote that down. i lost the paper. i remembered the sentence. that is how maggie’s sentences work.

how to spot it before you’re three years in (i was not faster)

three years. i’d like a different number. i don’t have one.

this is what i’d hand to the version of me from a few years back, if my younger self picked up the phone, which he would not, because the voicemail has been at capacity for the better part of a year and i’m not going to be the one to clear it:

• mind the temperature of the denial. a denial that arrives without friction is a denial that has been rehearsed. genuine arguments come with heat; the cool ones are running on a different motor.
• count the friends you’ve stopped calling. if the answer is more than two in a year, ask why. the answer is rarely “i got busy”.
• notice the tally. a person who keeps score on you in arguments — bringing up something from 2017 in a fight about the dishwasher — is running a database. databases are not built by accident.
• watch for the paranoia. regular narcissists think they’re the best. malignant narcissists think the world is out to get the best, which is them. when their version of every story has a villain and that villain is always somebody else — that’s the fourth ingredient.
• watch your own size. have you, in the last six months, made yourself smaller in rooms? quieter? less likely to mention the thing? that is data. the body keeps the receipt even when the brain misplaces it.

the embarrassing part is that none of this requires a degree. the embarrassing part is that the friend who tells you, gently, after wine, that they’re “worried about you” — that friend has done your diagnostic work for free. you can listen to the friend in year one. you can, alternatively, do what i did, which is listen in year three, having spent the intervening period rehearsing arguments in the shower.

verdict — i rest my case, again, calmly, with the tone

carla glided past the desk. window minimized. no comment from her side. statistically that lands in the okay column. probably.

the phone, on the desk, is at 23% and there is a missed call from a number i do not recognize. it could be tom, ringing to tell me about a new tax-advantaged account he’s discovered. it could, more likely, be the man who calls, whose calls i let go to the voicemail i do not check, for reasons i would rather not specify on this site. i’ll get to it. probably tomorrow.

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