Daniel Shaw has published a full length book on this subject, too.
His term for this type of abuser is 'traumatizing narcissist".
Traumatic Narcissism
[
www.google.com]
Corboy note:
We must be use this term narcissism, with great care.
First, narcissism exists on a continuum. We need a sense of 'healthy narcissism" health entitlement to form boundaries and coherant selves.
When narcissim is much more severe, then it enters the category of what clinicians term 'personality disorder'.
Personality disorders are also a matter of degree, on a continuum ranging from less to more severe.
Heinz Kohut, a clinician who greatly clarified how to understand and heal narcissism made a very important distinction between two categories of narcissistic character disorder.
Narcissistic Personality Disorder
Narcissistic Behavior Disorder.
Heinz Kohut made a careful distinction between Narcissistic personality disorder vs Narcissistic behavior disorder.
In Narcissistic personality disorder one may experience others as extensions of oneself or as objects, but one does not TREAT other persons that way.
Narcissistic behavior disorder, is very much more severe. In NBD one uses/abuses other persons not only as
objects, but as as despised objects, despised aspects of the abusers own self.
It is as though the abuser unconsciously and simultaneously regards the abusee, as feces to be extruded and the toilet into which the and flushes the despised self away.
After this, the abuser feels relief, temporarily freed from despised feared aspects of his or herself (weakness, fear, vulnerability, etc).
However, that relief is temporary. These despised aspects of the abusers own self accumulate once more. Pressure builds until the NBD abuser needs to split off despised self, extrude them onto an abusee and repeats the process of psychological defecation.
A very egregious abuser needs a "psychological household" of persons to provide shelter, affirmation of specialness, money, PR, emotional supplies -- and subordinates to recruit support staff and manage them.
Developing this metaphor further the type of abuser who must split off and violently deny feared loathed aspects of self also needs abusees to serve as garbage disposal and toilet and plumbing.
Thus, some of the disciples function as garbage disposal to identify scapegoats, get rid of troublesome disciples or dissenters. The scapegoats serve as the toilet and plumbing system,colostomy bag when the abuser fills with a sense of weakiness and loathesomeness and needs to crap
it out.
Some of us may serve several functions - validate the abusers specialness, others to soothe and make excuses for the vile behavior and do PR, others to maintain discipline in the ranks and deflect the abusers attention towards scapegoats, and yet others be objectified as garbage and garbage disposal units.
Outsiders who come in for classes, who only see the abuser being nurturing and charming in public will have no idea of the horror behind the scenes. They will get only the bliss and invalidate those who have been treated as toilets and are now warning the world to beware.
The term narcissist/narcissm must be used carefully.
All of us, as a result of early childhood have a bit or a little more than a bit of narcissistic personality disorder.
But this does not translated into treating others horribly. '
In Narcissistic behavior disorder there is a trail of wreckage left in that persons wake--other persons who have been used as objects, then discarded
when no longer interesting or useful.
Popular literature on narcissism in most cases, fails to mention this careful distinction between NPD and NBD.
I cannot yet find anything online giving this information. This distinction between Narcissistic personality disorder vs Narcissistic behavior disorder is referred to in Ullman and Paul's 2007 book, The Self Psychology of Addiction and Its Treatment:Narcissus in Wonderland.
These authors stated that Kohut's writings span many years and they had to systematically study Kohuts output as part of the 10 plus years it took for them to complete this book.
THe distinction between Narcissistic personality disorder (merely experiencing people as extensions of onself without actually treating them that way) versus the more severe Narcissistic behavior Disorder in whicth the person actually uses/abuses other as objects is a very important one to make.
Ullman and Paul see addiction as a form of narcissistic behavior disorder.
It may be (and this is my layman's guess-Corboy) that the abusive leaders we dicuss on RI.com are addicted to using other people to regulate their own moods and sense of self worth. Hence the need for more and more and more recruits to the people-addict leaders group.
Edited 3 time(s). Last edit at 12/23/2019 10:00AM by corboy.