How Narcissists Use Amygdala-Focus

One of the things I find most irritating is that I know how truly outrageous the Narcissistic psychology is, and worse, I know that because it is so outrageous, few people will believe the unvarnished truth about it. Yet if you understand it, the wildly uncontrollable, bizarre forces which drive it, and the detail with which their seemingly illogical behaviors are thought out and planned, you can harness the very weapons the Narcissist uses against you. Here we will try to enter the mind of a Narcissist, going about their day.

Imagine you have Narcissistic Personality Disorder. You actually get pleasurable feelings when you see other people bothered. You have been like that since you were a child. As a result, you have spent all of your time experimenting, and you have developed irritating techniques to annoy people, in much the way that we have tried to analyze the amygdala hijack here, and standardize its application. You know set-ups, methods, themes, amygdala focusing techniques, and exactly the things which will irritate other people most. You’ve practiced them at every opportunity, because irritating people and not getting caught, is the only pleasure you get.

Now you are in the grocery store. You are about to irritate people, to assuage your own cognitive agony, and feel better at their suffering. The first thing you do, is figure out how you will irritate them. The checkout lines are long, so you decide to stall the checkout line and hold people up. You’ll wait on line, start to get your stuff checked out, then remember one little stupid item you wanted, like a single tub of yogurt, and run off to get it, thereby holding up the entire line.

There is a problem with this plan. Done by itself, you have found that this is only minimally irritating to people, because many are not paying sufficient attention to realize what you are doing. So what do you do, to increase the irritation factor? You spend five minutes focusing everyone’s amygdalae on how irritating it is to be held up in a checkout line, and you get them irritated by their being held up, so their amygdala is fully focused on being irritated due to being held up. Only then, do you add to that irritation, and hold them up some more with your own spur-of-the-moment desire to buy one single tub of yogurt at the last minute, and your selfish willingness to hold everyone up while you run off to get that one tub of yogurt that you could easily do without.

In your defective Narcissist mind, it is perfect, unless one person unemotionally screws up your plan, Hannibal Lector style, everyone laughs at you, and then they all just goes on their way happily. Then, you freak out.

Old Birdface in this story is the Narcissist, and yes, Narcissists put this much conscious thought and effort into irritating people they don’t even know. There are those who will say that all of this must be unintentional. It isn’t, and moreover, it originates with a very specific psychological nature that is innately programed to derive satisfaction from the discomfort of others – and to seek to create that discomfort around them. This psychology is far more common than you would think. You just don’t notice it, because it reflexively camouflages itself at every opportunity, and it is so weird and contrary to your own, you tend to think it must be rare.

I can’t tell you how many times I have seen this specific strategy, (ie. prime someone for irritation by focusing them on how irritating something is, and then do it to them “accidentally,” due to temporary “inattention.”). It does work, though not as effectively as the Narcissist will think, based upon their projection of their own damage upon you. We aren’t nearly as sensitive to this type of irritation as they are, which is why understanding this can provide such a powerful weapon to you. Using it on them is a low-cost way to produce a high-value cognitive agony in them.

And yes, I expect you to think that this is all crazy, because the very idea of doing all that purposefully is insane. But it is not by chance that Old Birdface is the guy who bitches loudly for five minutes about being held up (right before he holds everybody up), or that he is the one guy who “forgot” his single tub of yogurt, (which was written on a very small shopping list he brought), or that he suddenly remembered it by chance, without even consulting his list, at the very moment that he had already begun to check out, or that he is unbothered by holding everyone else up after he just got done bitching about how long all of this is taking. He is not oblivious. That is just the camouflage he uses.

Hear me – ***That***Was***All***Planned***. This discomfort-desiring-psychology actually plans this pointless irritation, all so they can smile later at having left the people in their wake emotionally irritated.

But even if you succeed, how irritating could it all be? I thought the same thing, before seeing my Narcissist’s brain shut down, as if stroked-out, due to me doing this same type of petty irritation to him. Now I know, to a Narcissist, this appears as potent torture. For some reason they don’t realize we are only mildly bothered by it.

Not unrelated is the fact that as Narcissists strive to make you emotional, you can go hyper-unemotional and freak them out, or that if you laugh at them (and get others to laugh at them) they can begin a cognitive collapse that will terminate in a nervous breakdown (Listen to the end of this crank-call (It’s a NSFW captioned video). At the end of it, the girl begins a physical breakdown produced solely by her brain, in response to the repetitive, hyper-unemotional delivery of the phrase “I’ve got balls of steel……” among others, but her amygdala is initially tripped earlier in the tape when her friends first laugh at the situation she is confronting at around 35-50 seconds in).

Narcissists seem to do this for fun. However the truth is, it is actually driven by a need to flee from a much darker force that is stalking them constantly, and you can unleash that force upon with suprising ease.

Liberals are driven by these same behavioral drives and cognitive weaknesses. They have a deep psychological need to destroy happiness and irritate those around them that is so fundamental to their nature, I am not even sure they are consciously aware of it. The state of our nation under their leadership is no accident – no matter how outlandish that may seem. If you don’t like seeing people happy, you find the rich, and the successful, and the happy, and the contented, and you set about screwing up their lives under the guise of their happiness being unfair, their behavior being wrong, immoral, or inconsiderate, and them being evil.

Many of the most committed Liberal ideologues are actually deriving joy from how they are reducing the happiness in the nation, and destroying our social organization. Whether it is screwing up the healthcare of people who enjoy having their healthcare, or trying to make everyone render their families equally vulnerable to crime, or taxing the happy rich people on the grounds that their success and happiness is unfair, Liberalism is more about diminishing the happiness of the happy, than alleviating the suffering of the unhappy, no matter what any Liberal tells you.

Liberals are a truly evil enemy, every bit as much as the Narcissist, and we need to view them as such.