Psychopaths vs Narcissists
Narcissists get a lot of bad press these days as they truly are the scapegoat of the Cluster B family. All of the other disorders seem to slide by without much noise unless there is something really high profile occurring in the news because of a particularly bad crime or public breakup.
When I refer to narcissists in this article I’m talking about the regular run of the mill narcissists, not the malignant narcissists as those ones truly are a real menace. No, in the case of a regular narcissist they are pretty easy and pretty simple to deal with once you have them figured out.
Narcissists need to protect their ego at all costs, and they need to avoid shame at all costs. So, when you’re dealing with one, just make sure that you're pumping up their ego as much as you can and avoid confrontations with them as much as you can, then you should be able to work with them just fine.
In a relationship it’s a bit different because they erode your self-esteem and self-worth over time. They also can’t deal with their own negative emotions, so they pick fights and do toxic things in order to offload those negative feelings onto you by finding your faults and getting angry with you. If you recognize that you’re dating a narcissist though you will immediately get psychological armor with that realization. That acknowledgement can render their attacks and strategies useless if you can emotionally detach from them.
In fact, if a narcissist doesn’t get a reaction out of you then they’ll eventually leave you as you’re no longer any good at unloading their emotional baggage onto anymore because you don’t react.
Psychopaths on the other hand are a very different group of people. For the most part they’ll avoid you quite happily and have nothing to do with you. You won’t have a clue that you’re dealing with any from the short moments you come across them and exchange a few words. In fact, you likely work with psychopaths or have one in your extra-curricular activities you do that you’re totally clueless about. They are largely harmless and can’t even be bothered with you.
That is unless you become the obsession of one of them.
Whether you anger them, or they see you as unique enough that they find you curious and entertaining, either way you’re in for a life changing experience. If they become obsessed with you; then you can count on being put through some trials and tribulations that are going to push you to the brink of insanity.
A psychopath who loves the way you react to things will go to all sorts of extremes to get those reactions from you. They will install cameras in your house, and you become their favorite TV station where they watch you 24/7. They will hack into your phones and computers and help themselves to your passwords, and your private photos etc.
One of the main common traits of psychopaths is a complete disregard for other people's rights or privacy. They just help themselves to you in the most exploitative and vulnerability revealing ways and they won’t care.
The psychopath is a person with an insane gift at finding your weaknesses. They will find the things that trigger you and will expose you to them over and over and over again until you either break or you become immune to the experience. Then they’ll move onto the next trigger of yours.
The psychopath will plot and plan things to an extreme level — to the furthest ends of your imagination and because what they are doing is so surreal you doubt your own perspective on what you are living through. They will plant noise makers in your house and pretend that they can’t hear anything. It’ll seep into your mind that you are hearing things.
The Psychopath will hire the local high school kids to honk their horns incessantly outside your house to remind you that you’re always being watched, and they’ll make sure that they tell you that ‘they’ll always be there for you’ which to any regular person that will seem a comforting comment, but you’ll recognize it to be that the harassment will never end.
Psychopaths will find ways into your life and expose you to your biggest phobias at the most inconvenient of times just because your reaction is so emotional and over the top to them that they find it interesting to watch and absorb. You will become their favorite TV time host as you struggle through each puzzle, each mind-numbing riddle, each stress inducing incident and they will salivate for that moment where you snap, and you rant and rave like a lunatic.
The Psychopath may decide to push you with gaslighting and sadistic scenarios relentlessly subjecting you to experiences or people that invalidate your perception of reality.
They will invest all kinds of time into making you doubt what you perceive and then they’ll start to introduce the idea to you that you are schizophrenic just to see if they can get you to check yourself into a mental hospital or if they can ride you long enough that your natural defenses are broken down to the point where someone else checks you into a mental hospital.
If you become the target of obsession with a psychopath, then you too will agree that regular narcissists are pretty simple by comparison. I would take a regular narcissist to deal with any day of the week over an obsessed psychopath hell bent on teaching you a lesson. I guarantee if you find yourself in that situation, you’ll without a doubt never repeat your mistake which triggered them. You’ll be cured.