I’m eyeball deep in a pit of narcissists and people with BPD. I can manage BPD, because in this case it is complex PTSD and I understand how things get twisted in a broken spirit.
The thing I can’t overcome alone is people with pathological narcissism that are delightful until they are ready to destroy you. They have big collections of people completely snowed. I’ve repeatedly been prey for pNs because of being used to BPD in my family. But when they grew tired of my supply, they became increasingly disgusting, and the excuses became obvious masks for underlying BPD.
How can a person fake sincerity so well? There is a darkness to many people that I cannot tolerate. But what do I do next then?
The world has changed so much.
I feel like I could have written this as my large extended family is full of people with BPD and narcissists who enable each other. I also have Complex PTSD. What has helped me more than anything is to work on knowing who I am, and doing my best to be present in the moment in my mind and body. I have found that how a person treats everybody is the best indicator of whether we are with someone who is authentically kind or we are just being manipulated by false kindness. I do get frustrated with getting fooled from time to time and then I look at what it was that made me ignore the narcissism and fall for the performance. The better you understand yourself, the better you will be at picking up on who is who earlier. Do not be too discouraged when you are fooled by somebody's false persona. We are meant to live in small bands of some forty people, and know everybody around us well. A person meets an average of 10,000 people in their life time. Everybody has a public persona because it would be unsafe to show all of ourselves to everybody. It can help to pay attention to the body language of the other person when you first meet them. Small micro expressions which last just a few seconds can often be quite revealing on how a person is really feeling inside. The best advice my therapist ever gave me was to notice how I was feeling inside when in the presence of a disordered person. Our bodies do tell us first that a person is not safe, yet we often feel we have to give everybody the benefit of the doubt until they do something really awful.
