Perhaps not in the overt case Welcome to planet psychopath, although entirely human I was raised here and lived most of my life here so let me be your tour guide. While some of these people are not true psychopaths most of their mindset is essentially psychopathic in nature.

To tell a beautiful warm loving woman that it is "her loss" if she declines to supplement the usual diet of pornography and cybersex IS VERBAL ABUSE.

Just not of the overt conventional kind. I also find myself wondering how many of the real people here have suffered pretty conventional verbal abuse and ceased to see it as such?

However politely someone tells you you are useless and inadequate when this is not true, you have been verbally abused. When someone lies to you they use words to abuse you, they steal reality from you. That is verbal abuse.

A lot of these people regard being caught, pinned down by the nature of their actions as an error to be avoided.

They are experts at unmissable implication, manipulating the connotations of everything they say. A favourite game is to use covert abuse, playing on your triggers, you worst fears, comparing you (in a completely invalid way) to that which you most despise, all kinds of games that would mean nothing to an observer, they provoke you into what will be seen as overt abuse. In extreme cases to the point where they can use every system intended to protect your rights as a weapon against you and they do.

Never try to interpret them by the standards that would apply to yourself. That is the biggest mistake you could make.

You know the way that someone ineffectual will sometimes try to make themselves feel smarter by putting YOU down as ineffectual?

The overall, really deep grained, agenda of most of them is to prove themselves warm and human by "proving" (mainly to themselves) that you are as bad as they are or worse.

Always focus on the games AS games, sleight of hand, coercion.

Study HOW they are doing it, not WHY. "Why" won't help you at all, and YOUR WELLBEING is too important to waste time in futility.

I think it is possible that their actual motivation does not translate into normal, healthy human terms at all.

There are many different causes. Nature, injury (physical or deeper), learned behaviour....but once a person lives that way they CANNOT change, because they cannot perceive what it is they must change to. The transition would render them far more helpless than other people. Without having a notion what they are to change TO, I do not see that many would physically survive it.

Within this is a hint of another frequent motivation. That of studying you to "BECOME" you. It doesn't work, because they only capable of perceiving the surface behaviours, not the underlying nature that motivates them. So that everything about you genuinely appears "senseless" and self destructive to them.

At heart they BELIEVE you are just like them, because they cannot conceive of anything else, they have no option.

When you care about your child, they THINK you are just ensuring no one can accuse you of being "uncaring"......as they would be

When you are hurt, they really think you are making a move in a game, raising the stakes.

People often ask, in one way or another "can they be hurt?" I would be more inclined to ask if they can tell the difference between hurting and not hurting. I am not sure they can. They aren't hurting you, they are playing a complex game, your pain is like the reward noise in "packman" or "space invaders" to them, it tells them they are getting ahead. Some get warmer fuzzies than others from it is all. The pain of another is a control point in most games (except they are all played to very individual rules).

hey do not communicate information, they manipulate reactions. Even in the smallest ways. Any information that does pass is incidental, not the point, or the focus of their behaviours.

The worst of it is that they GENUINELY believe you are playing the same game against them, because they cannot conceive of anything beyond that, or any other form of motivation you could possibly have.

What would an N think reading this?

Most probably: "That's a neat line, must see how I can use it".

Or if they pertain to me personally: "Ok, nice one, now......what countermove?"

That is how alien they are. It is also why I advocate isolation from the greater society as soon as it is realistically possible. They won't suffer, they'll hardly notice the difference except in terms of the restriction of movement, and stigma. But a far larger quantity of people in the greater society will cease to suffer, and never suffer again.

That objective would, in itself, be completely meaningless to an N. Because at heart they believe everyone is just like them, playing the same game, they just want to be the winner.

In the meanwhile get yourself free, and if you have time after that, protect anyone you can.

In the past, polio, smallpox were a part of life you had to accept and avoid at all costs, until someone found a way to change that.

"Narcissism", "Antisocial" and all other forms of psychopathic mindset should be seen the same way.

If the one you believed you loved with all your heart were a smallpox carrier, you would not let that one raise your children, nor try to share your life fully with that one.

It IS much the same. Except that a smallpox carrier would be unlikely to attempt to entrap or coerce you.

Unless, of course, he were also an N from planet psychopath.

http://narcissism-support.blogspot.com/2009/01/how-do-they-do-it.html