What are the dangers of feeling sorry for a person who suffers from Narcissistic Personality Disorder, Anti-Social Personality Disorder, or a person who suffers from a comorbid condition that combines the two — known in pop culture psychology circles as a “Narcopath”?
The more kindness and compassion a targeted victim elects to show them, the more likely Narcopaths are to feed off them, and subsequently, abuse almost inevitably tends to escalate.
Wondering how to stop feeling sorry for a Narcissist, Sociopath, Psychopath, or Narcopath? The answer is simple but not completely obvious. One absolutely has to engage the full use of their own logical BRAIN… and perspective is necessary in order to provoke internal Narcissistic Abuse recovery inspired change.
On May 23, 2016, one of the more insightful and kind-hearted readers over on Narcissists, Sociopaths, and Flying Monkeys — Oh My! (TM) shared the following sentiment with page mods, eloquently stating what breaks the hearts of empathetic people most. They shared what nearly every domestic abuse victim or person who has been systematically targeted for social extinction has collective felt or expressed at one time or another when going through Narcissistic Abuse patterns and recovery stages.
The reader shared the following complex emotional thought while making a candid healing admission. As a kind-hearted individual who feels powerless to invite their abuser into an elevated state of loving civic communion, they shared the following lament as a confession:
“I actually begin to feel sorry for them. We all have been given one life in this world. We only live once. At the end of our life ,when we know we gonna leave this world,we will look back at our life we have lived, all the joy, love, happiness, sadness, etcetera we grow, we learn to become a better person, we give what we can back to society, we achieve little things in life to build up our confidence… [Are] we going to someday say we lived a fulfilled life but what about them? Sad to say, they’ve wasted their precious life living in anger, hatred, resentment, abusing, and destroying others… It’s really sad that these are the things they had live for and to bring it to their grave… No living person will speak goodness of them [after they die]. and in all reality that’s pretty sad.”
— NSFM reader quote
As Narcissistic Abuse recovery advocates, arguably the hardest part of dealing with Cluster B people has to do with our own tunnel vision when and if it comes to matters of the heart. Before doing extensive studying, most of our staff went through literally decades of wistful behavior striving to help narcissistic people see the psychological and emotional error of their ways (so to speak).
Making a fundamental error in judgment, most Empaths and spiritually in-tune people who have suffered at the hands of an abusive person has wrestled internally with the decision whether or not to keep trying to make a relationship work with a predator. Hoping to help them transcend the barrier between their grandiose and entitled sense of self, we’ve overlooked and passively (if not actively) enabled predatory people to feast on our pain.
Causing other human beings a proverbial shit-ton of internal angst, physical pain, spiritual anguish, and emotional grief is the hallmark trait of proverbial calling card of a Cluster B person. Whether they are a toxic parent, and unruly child with conduct disorder, a teen with Oppositional Defiant Disorder, or a full-grown adult with excessive traits of narcissistic couples with a healthy dash of sociopathy or psychopathy, their song remains the same.
Hurt people don’t HURT PEOPLE. Broken and incomplete people with an attention-seeking nature love to make mischief and manufacture chaos to alleviate boredom for themselves routinely.
Hurt people tend to develop a wide variety of physical ailments that reflect stress, post-traumatic disorder affectations like developing PTSD flashbacks or full-blown C-PTSD, or they themselves become healers. Why? Because unless Highly Sensitive Personality types [or “HSP” learn to recognize what predatory people are by nature and stop thinking they [meaning Cluster B people] are missing the boat by not being in emotional sync with a sense of appreciation for social beings, they are likely to waste years of their life accidentally turning themselves into narcissistic supply sources for absolutely NO REASON.
Hear us out and think things through carefully on this, FMD readers.
When a person who has the natural ability to feel complex emotions like empathy and we use them, what happens? We have a pleasurable rush of chemically-based emotions surge through our bio-housing based on feeling connected to what our specific neurological structure and cultural biases tell us should biologically be perceived as warm and fuzzy emotions.
It’s a fundamental truth observed worldwide that kind people across ages, generations, and socioeconomic boundary lines all tend to report feeling good when and if they help another. It does not matter if that person is someone 20 generations down the line who hopefully will benefit from small acts of our daily kindness like not wasting resources or efforts to recycle.
It could be an act so simple as helping a turtle cross the road by stopping your car, putting it in park, turning on the hazard lights, and helping the little one get from hither to yon in a more expedient fashion or petting a dog and seeing its tail wag to and fro. Or, it could be something as simple as paying a compliment to a stranger — telling them something simple like you love their smile without implying a need for further contact.
Sometimes it’s paying forward a human kindness — like making up flyers or business cards with the domain for this website listed and leaving them with a little note in a lady’s room or on a company bulletin board saying, “NARCISSISTIC ABUSE RECOVERY IS POSSIBLE. Visit this website to learn how and show support.” But it could also be taking that extra moment of your day to sit with a loved one experiencing grief, a friend going through a tough family crisis, or a stranger you happen to strike up a conversation with while in the supermarket checkout line discussing celebrity headline news that seems to disconcert them the most.
When a giving person gives, it biochemically produces a surge of pleasurable sensations throughout the body, mind, and soul. In a healthy giver, when energy resources or moral spirit are feeling low, most of the time all it takes to re-activate the feelings of safety, security, and spiritual comfort is to think back and remember a happy thought. Sometimes, reading things like positive thinking articles or seeing a motivational meme online can truly instantly reactivate HOPE.
The more of a People Pleaser a person is by nurture, the more likely they are to self-sacrifice in order to self-fulfill their nature. People Pleasers are the ultimate problem solvers, noting that finding solutions to OTHER people’s problems truly is their number one pleasure.
Oftentimes, people who are People Pleasers are actually born into the most toxic of family genetics. As science gets closer to identifying what causes a person to develop egocentric and predatory behaviors by nature they are likely to confirm what many intuitive abuse survivors may already suspect… that sometimes from the most unexpected cracks in the pavement a seed planted will take root and sprout. With the right DNA, two Cluster B parents can, in fact, produce a tolerant, kind, and loving offspring that is emotionally intuitive who is able to transcend.
That’s where the concept of nature comes most dramatically into play. Philosophers, mystics, and scientists have debated the topic for all human decades.
If a person is a People Pleaser by nature — capable of understanding primate brain, lizard brain, and complex emotions in such a way their thoughts, emotions, and biological responses to external stimuli provoked by social systems theory resembles spherical (rather than linear or circumspect thinking styles) — the more likely they are to strive to help people. But a person who by nature simply cannot self-actualize in Maslow’s hierarchy of needs sense because they are surrounded by takers who by nature will seldom if ever admit to being pleased or sated, then they get stuck.
Stuck, as in hopelessly intellectually, emotionally, psychologically, but more so SOCIALLY enmeshed in something that resembles a quagmire.
A People Pleaser who fails to consider the very accurate and distinct PROBABILITY (rather than possibility) that other human beings’ brains could simply be wired differently can be easily duped into falling into patterns of a rescuer or person with Stockholm Syndrome. The more the Empath mourns for the Cluster B person’s loss of warm fuzzies, the more likely they are to spend an inordinate amount of time worrying, grieving for the other person’s loss, and trying their dead level best in every social interaction possible to help the other person realize the error of their ways.
When a human being competes to win a point, victory for either side can never truly be accomplished. Likewise, perceiving a Cluster B person as lacking or missing out on the pleasure of giving or being kind simply because their bodies are wired differently by grand systems theory elements of design is not only tunnel-visioned, it’s EGOCENTRIC.
Now, understand what that means is a person who expects the same reward stimulus to excite a Narcissist, Sociopath, Psychopath, Narcopath, Enabler, or even an Empath is simply falling what they were taught to think when they were little about what it truly means to be a good person.
A Narcissist will derive pleasure from showboating or being the center of attention, crushing the lives of their narcissistic rivals and preferred scapegoat targets under the weight of their own grandiosity.
A sociopath typically likes to take a more quiet and controlling lead, while a Psychopath prefers to brag on putting the “hot” in the word PSYCHOTIC (meaning they tend to have an anti-social nature coupled with a flair for the dramatic when it comes time for them to replenish narcissistic supply by scheming to pull an emotional vampire style feed.
People with HPD are typically the person who rolls into a room, dominates the environment by making a conspicuous fool of themselves, then leaving. They are the ultimate “pay attention to ME” drama queens, with only Malignant Narcissists who have a somatic streak topping their wild, attention-seeking antics. Seriously… think of Nathan Lane’s character in “The Birdcage” with Robin Williams if you are not completely sure how to spot a person with HPD.
An Empath will strive to connect on an emotional level with nearly every person with whom they meet. To them, leaving every person, place, and thing better than they found them or it truly makes their dreams come true with respect to producing all the happy feel-goods.
But what strikes the fancy of one is NOT always going to stimulate the same pleasure areas of the brain in others. A Sadist might get off on personally striving to torture another living, breathing, sentient creature or harming a person’s reputation directly by concocting some ridiculous smear campaign to defame while a Sociopath might truly enjoy the sensation they derive from aggressively and skillfully stonewalling.
In the mind of an AVERAGE to above-average intellect person who has the ability physically to process complex emotions, things like getting a promotion at work or buying a new house that meets their family’s needs might give them pleasure. For a Somatic Narcissist, buying a new house is seen as a competitive act — something that is done simply to compete with and ultimately provoke shame and envy in the Joneses.
For a person who is Cluster B, every social interaction and effort they make personally or professionally in life is driven by an abject competitive streak. Pack animals are predatory by nature biochemically, they tend to nurture their offspring to compete and behave in egocentric manners just like they do — compulsively.
Why?
Because just like an Empath hopes everyone will someday evolve into the magnificent spiritual beings and loving creatures they are, a narcy or anti-social person who has absolutely no sensation of pleasure helping others but who enjoys being hurtful wants to pass that same “gift” onto their friends and family. Only the difference of perspective that considers long-term results of competitive socially damaging behaviors can ever truly philosophically or psychologically define which perspective will help perpetuate the human species.
What is clear is that what produces pleasure in one type is likely to produce a big ho-hum, boring, “Meh…” for another when and if the brain lacks the capacity to perceive the other person’s reason why. Therein, an Empath who was born and raised to be ruthless — but ISN’T — is likely to be the next generation of humans (from an evolutionary leap perspective) to survive and thrive.
While Cluster B families breed like rabbits, constantly seeking to multiply in number to sate the parents and grandparents need for new narcissistic supply, their rebel genetic children are the proverbial recessive gene species that show up like a blue-eyed person from brown-eyed parents. Think back to science class when your teacher had you running fruit fly experiments and charting the likelihood of DNA recombination to get the gist of what we are saying and why.
If you are a People Pleaser by nature or an HSP who absolutely agonizes over feeling sad because you think a Cluster B person is missing out on something, understand you have been DUPED. Whoever at your earliest age told you the lie that mean people are not happy by nature, have deep-seated insecurity, or emotional issues that cause them to miss out on all the positive emotional sensations YOU experience when and if you elect to do good, understand that person was most likely a Flying Monkey striving to be an Enabler. Or, even worse — was themselves a Covert Abuser actively striving to evoke your pity.
Cluster B people tend to their own needs first and at the expense of everyone. That means the Alpha Lion in the family eats first, then his lioness, and scraps go to their children.
When a Cluster B person makes targets prey, all their pride comes tromping after the leader to assist in the kill. Once their meal for the day is secured, then they will lurk about, taking bites of the prey — but typically not until after the elder or stronger animal has eaten their proverbial fill.
Such is the way toxic families operate. The person in the family who is the most emotionally sensitive and intuitive by nature is targeted for repeated emotional, psychological, and oftentimes physical assault by an Alpha social predator. Following that person’s lead, other toxic members of the family will swoop in to actively engage in mobbing, provoking, ridiculing, shaming, gaslighting for fun, or helping add to the crazy-making.
Making other people miserable stimulates the pleasure center of a Cluster B person’s brain much the same way being successful helping someone out of a jam or through an emotional crisis helps an Empath turn what should be stressful feelings of angst into gain. What gets one person off (in the proverbial intellectual rather than sexually perverse sense) is truly only amongst other human beings of the same genetic and social predisposition sense the same.
Empaths who presume someone else is lacking the ability to feel pleasure or connected simply because they respond to different stimuli are not being ethically or morally honest. One simply cannot presume with an arrogant sense of presumption that their notion that what pleases them floats another person’s biological boat the very same way according to evolutionary theory quite the same way.
If Empath DNA is cultivated socially and biologically by forward-thinking scientists and the pattern can be used to do things like program quantum computers or robots with empathic Artificial Intelligence [or “AI”], then humanity as a spacefaring culture is likely to morph collectively into something akin to a living, breathing, kind-natured, alert, and self-aware but community respecting Borg-like intergalactic family.
On the other hand, humans who choose by free will to wear out their welcome on the planet and socially destroy one another for fun and sport are likely to devolve into a lower vibrational nature that ultimately will end up producing a Skynet global weapons systems take over by an unbeatable computer with twisted programming… or to end up seeing things like the Zika virus, crops genetically modified by Monsanto, and the chemical agents and pollution in the atmosphere create people who act like they are on Bath Salts (for the most part).
When one thinks things through critically, it seems likely that a civilization with an epidemic of predators competing is likely to ultimately devolve into something more akin to the creatures in the hit television series “The Walking Dead”… and by that, we mean more of them acting like Shane and the Governor than they ever do like Empath Carol or even like rebel brother Darryl (the Ruthless Empath played by actor Norman Reedus).
Should we respect other people with regard to accepting them as they are rather than striving to change them? Absolutely.
Does that mean those harmed in general as targeted scapegoats for abuse and mistreatment by people who by nature embrace their egocentrism and lash out at others competitively while engaging in acts of social terrorism should in any way, shape, or form feel compelled to overlook abuse, tolerate, or enable toxic behavior? ABSOLUTELY NOT.
What it does mean is that people who are Cluster B by nature truly require handling with proper kid gloves at all times. Anything they say should absolutely be treated like an airborne virus that infects thought patterns and causes social and moral decay in any person who their words and abusive manipulations impact — noting that hate speech does the most subliminal damage when and if it’s ignored and consciously tolerated.
What that means is that the larger group of body populous has the opportunity to collectively decide to nurture more future thinking and pro-social habits in themselves, their parents (if capable), and in their own children, noting that nearly every WWII Generation person alive or Baby Boomer was grievously impacted by social propaganda spewed back in the WWI and throughout the mid-century Cold War political heydays.
Because people were generationally trained to embrace nationalism, racism, xenophobia, and class war between socio-economic strata and genders back in the day, many people in positions of power within families and communities are still reacting to the phobias their own ancestors and governments or religious organizations taught them outright to promulgate.
The right way to feel when and if the wistful feeling of harboring sympathy for a Narcopath or Narcissistic Sociopath or Malignant Narcissist / Psychopath bubbles up is wishy-washy. Consider the feeling a passing emotion stemming from a subconscious prejudicial belief system that says somehow to have the ability to have a positive response based on feelings of connection is denied to a Cluster B person in some way.
People with Cluster B feel VERY connected to the victims they hurt. It’s actually the foundation of why they tend to obsess over people who simply are not impressed by their power or status, striving to socially harm or fiscally damage them in some way.
It’s the same sensation of pleasure most humans get from being part of a group that truly loves and respects them or from helping other people, animals, or life continue on the planet more gracefully on any given day.
Pleasure seeking to the extreme, suffering from impulse control issues, and behaving in ways that are pound-foolishly egocentric does put most Narcopaths socially and emotionally in the position that when they get bored feeling noting that they tend to be willing to cut off their own proverbial noses to spite their own face.
With boredom at the root of most addictions, some choose to drink or drug compulsively while others like to rubberneck watching catastrophes other people are involved in or they themselves have created as purposefully manufactured chaos in some way.
The best way to handle any interaction with a Cluster B person is to learn how to spot the warning signs they are of a different social and emotional sort right away then to learn the mind control tricks they use to keep narcissistic supply source troughs open for them to feed on any given day. Once you learn how to spot the warning signs and disengage, understand that any time wasted feeling sorry for the PREDATOR is truly one more notch on the bedpost of their “screwing everyone on the planet over” game.
You see, by feeling sorry for them for not being able to feel pleasure actually excites and stimulates the pleasure areas of their brain. Granted, conning people into treating them like wounded birds holds it’s own appeal to their nature if they are malignant, but truly any amount of time you spend thinking about them, feeling sad rather than happy, or worrying about them is their attention-seeking GAIN. If you feel compelled to feel sorry for anyone, let it be the victims of Narcissistic Abuse who have had their lives destroyed or inextricably bonded to memories of social, physical, or spiritual pain.
A truly good person understands that while it might give someone pleasure to be in control or to feel powerful, that those sensations are fleeting. In order for the pleasure area of the brain to be stimulated, one must repeat the moment of victory in competition — making it an ultimate waste of time in the grand scheme of things.
People who are kind — no matter how upset, unhappy, or emotional they might be feeling in a negative context — can always be spiritually and emotionally rehomed to a pleasure state simply by reminding them of all the kind things they have done or the beauty in the world in its natural state. It’s truly a gift not to be able to forget that things like flowers and kittens and puppies exist or to understand why hugging a tree can help a soul connect energetically to a higher biochemically induced altered neural network state.
Think of an Empath’s gift being the ultimate, portable weapon against feelings of lack, insecurity, vulnerability, fear-based thinking, and hate. While Narcopaths and Cluster B people have to labor tirelessly and seemingly endlessly striving to recreate some form of emotional high by doing things like conning other people, lying, manipulating, provoking fear or toxic shame in others, or by actually harming people directly to self-stimulate, the ultimate effect they seem to produce for themselves as a group by nature is a cosmic circle jerk.
You are who you decide to be. The grass is always greener on the side of the fence where loving caretakers water and tend to it. Otherwise, the picture might appear to be prettier and more uniform on the opposing side… but only if it’s nothing more than artificial turf.
Time is better spent wasted contemplating belly button lint that a single thing that goes on in the mind of a Narcopath or their navel. Trust your gut when it comes to sensing something about one is not quite right, disengage their psychic cording by any means necessary to make yourself less like Agent Smith and more like Neo in the “Matrix” movie series, and put your time to better use than feeling sorry for them. Truly, learning how to stop oneself from letting emotional pity take control of the body (rather than pragmatism and intellect with regard to common sense) can help a moral person avoid the trap their earliest of generational predecessors who chose to enable in order to secure protection from OTHER warring factions or hostile environment threats have by free-will choice elected emotionally and physically to set.
Truly, learning how to stop oneself from letting emotional pity take control of the body (rather than pragmatism and intellect with regard to common sense) can help a moral person avoid the trap their earliest of generational predecessors who chose to enable in order to secure protection from OTHER warring factions or hostile environment threats have by free-will choice elected emotionally and physically to set.
