75 to 80

Love blinds us. If it doesn’t blind us, it’s not love.

Narcissistic personality disorder (NPD) is a personality disorder characterized by a life-long pattern of exaggerated feelings of self-importance, an excessive need for admiration, a diminished ability or unwillingness to empathize with others' feelings, and interpersonally exploitative behavior. Narcissistic personality disorder is one of the sub-types of the broader category known as personality disorders.

Speaking from personal experience.

Love, by its very nature, creates blindspots in your field of view. In these blindspots lay everything you won’t believe a loved one is capable.

It’s also in these blindspots where narcissists reside. It’s the one place you would never look to find out why there’s so much chaos, confusion and negativity in your life. It’s the perfect cover, the perfect place for narcissists to thrive and play their mind games, perform manipulations.

“Narcissists do unloving things to you then duck back into your blindspot to hide. They play a sick version of peekaboo.”

~ Paul Rubino, just now

If a narcissist catches you rummaging around in your blindspot, flashlight in hand, looking for them, they are quick to reassert their control by invoking the power of love. “How dare you think that of ME! What’s wrong with you? I would never do such a thing! Are you crazy? I am your MOTHER! Here, have a cookie.”

Had the narcissist caught you rummaging around your blindspot looking in the direction of anybody else other than them (the narcissist), the narcissist will encourage you to keep looking. The narcissist may even suggest places for you to begin your search. “I think your brother is jealous of you.” Narcissists always deflect from themselves.

Narcissists will shower you with love. But this shower of love has nothing to do with you. The purpose of showering you with love is to reinforce your blindspot of them, to help them stay better hidden from you.

Stay too close to a narcissist and you’re prone to inexplicable bouts of confusion, an internal sense of dissonance, guilt, paranoia, shame, pending doom, helplessness and worthlessness. It can seem like there’s an unseen force in the house – like a malevolent spirit. What you’re really experiencing is a narcissist manipulating you from within your blindspot.

Ironically it’s these destructive feelings of negativity that can draw us even closer to, and more dependent upon, the narcissist. Where else to seek support, protection and stability than in the arms of the person who says they love us and are trying to protect us, right? Love is blind.

My father was at work. It was morning. I did something wrong.

When dealing with my mother, what is “wrong” today may not have been wrong yesterday, and it may not be wrong tomorrow, but she said it was wrong now, so I’m in trouble. It was probably something like not taking my shoes off when I came into the house. Yesterday? Nooo problem – wear football cleats for all I care. But today is not your lucky day, kid.

“Wait til your father gets home!” I heard this all my life. I knew what it meant and I knew damn well what was coming.

I spent the entire day walking on egg shells, trying to talk her out of telling my father. I would cry and beg. “There’s nothing I can do, it’s too late, you’ll just have to wait until your father gets home.” My fate was sealed.

This was in our first home, so I slept downstairs in the bedroom I shared with my older brother. The upstairs was the main level with the kitchen, living room, dining area and the other bedrooms. When you entered the front door it was a split foyer. Upstairs is to the left, downstairs is to the right.

It was now the middle of the night, I hear my father come home and walk upstairs. I’m in bed, in the dark, listening. Is Mom going to follow through on her threat? Shhhhh. I hear footsteps. Damn, she’s out of her room. Mom is talking to Dad. I can hear her saying my name. Oh no. Her voice is getting louder. She’s really selling it. They’re going back and forth and back and forth. This is not good. All hell breaks loose.

My father charges down the stairs with my mother in tow. She’s screaming. My father comes into my room, grabs me by the shirt, lifts me up and slaps the shit out of me. It was like a 3 Stooges movie sans a laugh track.

The whole time this is going on my mother is behind my father screaming, “Don’t honey! What are you doing? Oh my God, stop!” – sounding like George Costanza’s mother.

For as long as I can remember, my mother has drilled it into us that my father was a monster – a hair triggered, unpredictable madman who was to be feared.

If my mother truly believed her own words – that my father was a trigger happy monster – why would she make a point of getting in his face with a list of trumped up charges at 2 o’clock in the morning just as he’s walking through the door after a long shift?

If you believe a gun is loaded, why would you point it at somebody and pull the trigger? It doesn’t make sense. She couldn’t wait a few more hours until morning and talk to him over breakfast? No, she couldn’t.

There’s so much more going on here.

Everybody has a temper and everybody has had a pebble in their shoe. Everybody knows the two don’t mix.

My mother knew how to be a pebble in my father’s shoe. When she really needed to get results she would become a rock in his shoe. If he still wouldn’t comply, she would escalate until my father was hopping up and down mad, with both his shoes filled with her rocks.

My mother would do anything to have control. She will wear you down and she will break you. You’re up against a waterjet cutter.

When my mother would say to me, “Wait til your father gets home,” it was Mom code for, “By the time I’m done with your father he will eat your skull.”

For my mother, the ability to put rocks in my father’s shoes gave her instant street cred with us, her children. We knew who was in control. “I’ll tell your father” was a very real threat if you didn’t fall in line. That is, if you even knew where the line was today.

It was emotional blackmail, manipulation and abuse.

She needed control. It gave her superiority.

“For any narcissist, the primary goal is control. The only thing more important than control, is getting control. To that end, everything, anything and anyone is fair game.”

~ Paul Rubino, just now

What was everybody thinking?

MOTHER: “… little bastard won’t play by my rules? He will. I warned him. He keeps talking back to me. You never talk back to your MOTHER! He doesn’t listen – I’m THE MOTHER. He will listen. He will do what I tell him. His father must take care of this, it’s THE FATHER’s job to teach THE CHILDREN everybody must obey THE MOTHER!”

DAD’S DAY: Wakes up. Coffee, breakfast, shower, drives 60 miles to work. Typical day at work – looking at a decapitated head in a dirty toilet. (My father was a homicide detective) Get’s home very late. A face of fury appears and it’s screaming. Something about Paul making trouble … again. She’s absolutely hysterical. Omg, my wife, my poor wife. That rotten kid.

THE NEIGHBORS: Here we go again . . .

BROTHER: Dad is REALLY kicking Paul’s ass – HARD. That’s what I call a steel cage match. Goddamn, those slaps sound like thunder claps! I wonder what Paul did wrong this time? Did I just see Dad pile drive him? On the floor? Oh hell no. Dad needs to go fucking chill.

SISTER: “As hard as my mother tried, she couldn’t save Paul. Poor Paul. Why does he always do bad things? Mom is trying so hard to protect him but Dad is just too strong and out of control. Poor Mom.”

This was a magnificent orchestration by a narcissist. To pull this off while staying in everybody’s blindspot? Masterful.

This cycle repeated itself for years. I never knew when the cycle would begin and I never knew how it would end. I didn’t know what would happen from one moment to the next.

This pattern of weaponizing my father repeated itself over and over until I was about 10 years old, when my father sat me down, eye-to-eye, and told me he would never hit me again. By this point he realized my mother was using him as her “heavy” – as he would say in his cop lingo later in life. He drew a line in the sand and promised to never hit me again. And he never did.

But as you may have already guessed, dear reader, this would require my father to disobey THE MOTHER, and we all know what happens when you disobey THE MOTHER.

THE FATHER is about to get blindsided.

Stay tuned.