Narcissists and Family Gatherings, Rosie O’Donnell Edition

I have no idea if it is true or not, but here is a great article on Rosie O’Donnell and her Thanksgiving house of horrors.

When these things are happening, they are not funny at all. The sight of an adult, totally losing emotional control trips very primitive neural circuits, usually driving an overwhelming urge to quickly brain them with a blunt object, partly as an act of mercy and partly to keep them from hurting anyone. That braining urge then immediately conflicts in the amygdala with circuitry designed to help you avoid an extended period of incarceration for murdering someone.

The result is an amygdala conflicted, without an acceptable immediate solution to a possibly life-threatening situation. Amygdalae do not like being caught without solutions to potentially life-threatening situations. It is cognitively uncomfortable, in a very primal way. Years later, when you can look back on these chaotic events with the safety of distance however, they are golden moments to laugh at.

Note how many things you see in the story which are common to dealing with narcissists. A happy family is giddily sitting down to a happy meal. The miserable narcissist feels isolated by the cheer, and their amygdala begins to ramp up. Seeing all the happiness they suddenly become even more moody and irritated than usual, without reason or warning. Although they don’t rage yet, the inevitable pall descends as they sit and stew. Finally deciding to act, they first focus attention on themselves. Then they calmly ruin everyone’s mood by announcing, totally absent any emotion, that they are divorcing the family’s daughter. Everyone is miserable and the narcissist feels better. The narcissist will often follow this with a totally unaffected, “Now let’s eat!”

Then the awkward silence happens, as everyone confusedly says to themselves, “What the hell just happened? Where did that come from? Are we being put on? Is this a joke?” Deep down the narcissist realizes they just let their mask slip, and they begin to get irritated again. Once again, the pressure begins to build.

When inevitably challenged, the narcissist erupts into a volcano of rage, makes a beeline to the booze, and then runs around yelling, “Where’s my Xanax, Bitch?” while beating on barricaded doors as people desperately cower behind them, in fear for their lives.

I blame the criminal justice system. There is no reason for it not to have developed a set of modified guidelines, loosening the restrictions on the use of firearms to apply deadly force in the case of Narcissistic Personality Disorder. Even just liberalizing the use of blunt instruments or bladed weapons would be an enormous help, to say nothing of grandfathering in the use of older historically significant weaponry like maces or pikes.

A few moments later, as the narcissist reflects on how awful their behavior makes them look, their amygdala fires off again. They can confront how awful they’ve appeared, and confront that something might be wrong with them, but that will only send their amygdala into stratospheric levels of anxiety and angst. The fear of this amygdala activation causes their brain to cognitively rewrite the event, wiping the outburst from their memory, so they don’t have to experience that horror. At this point, they literally don’t know that what just happened even happened. Their brain actually lies to them, and tells them it didn’t happen to make them feel better, and they happily believe it.

If actually forced to confront their behavior somehow, their brain will then resort to modifying the memory, telling them it was a meaningless case of saying something you don’t really mean. If anyone took it too seriously, they must have some sort of mental problem. I can hear Rosie now. “Well, I was trying to find my Xanax, and nobody was helping me. I was just trying to get your attention. What was wrong with you, that you were just ignoring me? All you had to do was tell me if you had seen it!”

Explain reality to them and they will experience the same cognitive discomfort you would experience being told of how selfless and good for the nation liberalism is. Their brain will adopt a fantasy as reality to shut off that pain, in the same way you use avoidance of that pain to push you toward reality. It is the same circuitry, pursuing the same painless objective, just wired differently.

Once they rewrite their history to exclude the pain produced by an honest memory of the offending event, it is as if the rage a moment ago never occurred. Calm and giddy, they begin planning the family boat excursion the next day as if nothing happened. “Oh! I want sandwiches! Make mine a roast beef, but hold the mustard! Oh, that’ll be yummy!”

Everyone else is slowly tiptoeing backward toward the door, praying to God about how much they have to live for and how much more they want to do in life before dying. Meanwhile the narcissist is now happily going about their business as if the near death experience they just inflicted on everyone never happened. Years later it is funny as hell though in the heat of the moment, not so much.

If you are in that situation, you have to get away from it, on a permanent basis. There is no way to compartmentalize that angst and anxiety, when it can unpredictably penetrate any moment of your life. Life is too short to spend it braced 24/7, and our criminal justice system is far too strict to effectively maneuver within the vicinity of these monsters.

Choose freedom.