If you suspect that a person you are dealing with has a Cluster B personality disorder like Anti-Social Personality Disorder, Borderline Personality Disorder, Histrionic Personality Disorder, or any form of Narcissistic Personality Disorder, it is crucial to downplay your interest in working with a counselor, mentor, or spiritual adviser. It is even more important to keep them out (yes, we said out) of your therapy sessions.
Why?
Because toxic people with Cluster B symptomatically will use your candid admissions against you without hesitation or mercy. Trying to make intellectual headway with one or fleeing a persistent stalker is very much so like striving to reason with and show compassion for a robotic Terminator.
Unable to control their impulses to pathologically lie, meddle, mislead, manufacture chaos, and harm others to derive their own sense of “peace”, they delight in misleading those seeking to help.
In 100% of the Cluster B cases we’ve heard primary source clinical history about, not only have predators used information gleaned in therapy sessions to hurt a targeted victim with greater ease (due to insight about them they gleaned directly from a therapist who had no clue they were ENABLING).
Almost all clinical or true Narcissists, Narcopaths, Malignant Narcissists, Borderlines, Histrionic, and Anti-Social Personality cases, abusive and/or narcissistic partners or family members abuse post-relationship-mortem even more aggressively than they did during the time they were with their partners.
It’s common for them to have engaged in social acts of emotional terrorism to destroy, isolate, and manipulate their devalue and discard pile targets using one, several, or all of the following systematic and abusive “torture” patterns.
As such, if you choose to confide to a Narcissist about how you feel regarding your own life, any social interaction, your life history, or personal insecurities and fears, understand that the people you are essentially giving the key to your heart, spirit, and mind are the types of individuals who are emotionally and psychologically capable of betraying those who love and care for them the most.
Here are just a few things one can expect to have happen when and if an abusive person can worm their way into a counseling session:
- situationally abuse and terrorize victims — most oftentimes covertly but always with an overt, grandiose manner if and when they have the chance to impress fellow narcissistic people with their clever, manipulating, cold, calculating, and dominating personality publicly (including lying to and manipulating an unsuspecting counselor)
- leaked their victim’s personal information about things like childhood abuse, sexual abuse, intimate relationship details, and physical abuse maliciously
- gossiped and demeaned while attempting to intellectually, emotionally, or socially invalidate
- blame shifted while promoting shame
- encouraged Flying Monkeys to ridicule, laugh at, mock, or otherwise humiliate and/or embarrass a target
- intimidating and menacing (if overt); spreading false rumors, stalking with the intent to cause duress on a victim, or cyberstalking explicitly to anonymously violate privacy rights of a victim (if covert)
- attempting to forcibly estrange or socially isolate a victim
- bullying
- fear-mongering
- smear campaigning
- pathological lying for amusement, sport (conning), or self-interest
- stealing or financial abuse
- mood swings with narcissistic rage routinely prospective
- encourages or deliberately triangulates
- claims they were the abused party despite having been the primary catalyst, triggering person, or aggressor — “false victimization”
- try to con their own victims into believing that the victim is narcissistic, self-centered, or being abusive for reacting with anger or frustration to having been abused, had civil or human rights boundaries violated, or for developing C-PTSD “stressor-induced” triggers
- sleeping with a therapist or starting a romantic entanglement with a person who they know has inside information about a victim
- targeting the therapist for social or professional destruction, even going so far as to blackmail counselors (i.e. one Sociopath we personally know took great pleasure in picking a therapist because he knew that he had — while married to his first wife — had sex with the man’s daughter — and the man, a protective father of a well-endowed teenage female from a very prominent family and religious tradition, did not know)
- they learn to push buttons faster and more efficiently than Dee Dee on “Dexter’s Laboratory” cartoon show
Narcissists destroy people in the most extreme and cruel ways humanly imaginable. Their number one goal (aside from “winning” whatever illusory competition they have created as a social scenario in their head), is to emotionally, socially, physically, and financially cripple their targets, scapegoats, and even the occasional collateral damage victim as much as possible.
For that reason alone, protect your rights to privacy and to seek guidance from an outside source by minimizing what you do say or share with any person who acts abusively or who openly supports your abusers. Few medical professionals or therapy-promoting people will come out this way and say it because most are profoundly uneducated about C-PTSD, Cluster B personalities (in the flesh), and have a fiscal motivation that compels them to “sell” you on the idea that family therapy or group therapy with such a subject is healthy, helpful, enlightening, or (from a safety standpoint alone) prudent.
If a counselor advises you to stage an intervention or confront your abuser even after being openly told of your suspicions, run (don’t walk) to the nearest counseling room exit. Unless they are encouraging you to do a mental exercise involving creative visualization ONLY — helping you picture saying what you want and feel you need to in order to heal from abuse by confronting your abuser(s) — they are giving you unsound advice that actually puts you at risk of being targeted for social, emotional, spiritual, mental, or physical abuse in such a way that may be lethal.
Narcissistic abuse, whether mildly inspired by cultural acceptance or extreme in nature perpetrated by criminals, is always equally wrong. Victimization happens not only to the person targeted for abuse but to every person forced to witness the trauma, as well as every person denied the victim’s presence when they withdraw or are unable to maintain the “NOW” perspective [or time-specific focus].
Mothers damaged by angry fathers are effectively estranged emotionally from their own children. Fathers damaged by angry mothers are deprived of the opportunity to connect on a full, ongoing, or functional level with their own children. Sibling rivalry manufactured by parents separates family and robs all current family members and future relatives the benefit of living under one communal family roof as something supportive. Home life has become a prison for many of the “Walking Wounded” from both this century and all that pre-date it.
Don’t be a victim of Narcissistic Abuse — but more importantly, don’t become a passive (or active) enabler. There is nothing virtuous about keeping domestic violence, workplace bullying, or schoolyard bully behaviors a secret. Keeping secrets for abusive people to protect their reputation and theirs only makes you a willing victim with Stockholm Syndrome. Or worse.
Don’t become a Flying Monkey torturing yourself for the idle amusement of narcissistic people or persons who align themselves spiritually, morally, and intellectually with callous and unempathetic, self-promoting abusers. You are who you decide to be… and no matter how many times they tell you their toxic catch phrases and buzz words like “no pain, no gain”, “life isn’t fair”, “this is how the world works”, or “get over it”, that you are “too sensitive” or something is alright because something has always been done a certain way, don’t buy it.
If you want to buy something from circus monkeys, ask them to sell you one of those bridges they claim to own in Brooklyn.
