SNUFD

The Moment

It was morning. He was still asleep. I walked over and stood above the bed...watching the dormant lunacy recharging... hmmm, how often have I fetishized his...hmm...dematerialization, and how sweet it was...         

(**subchapter 3.1: point of no return)

But orange is not really my color, so homicide is not really my thing. Plus, the side effects could last 25 years... so, no. It was gonna have to be something more elegant. Something brainy. A soft kill. 

An old Japanese (or maybe Korean) proverb bubbled up in my mind:

How handsome is the receding image of [those] who know when to walk away....

Yessss... You do the deed, drop the mike, cat-walk away...If done well - this could be the image he will have etched in his brain forever while squirming on the floor in [emotional] agony, as I languidly saunter into the sunset, drunk with triumph and all squared out...

This book is written and edited by a human who wants to spread the wealth but values the integrity of her bone structure. I Am Goldfinch.

Reading Suggestions, Disclaimer and, Prologue

*  Reading Suggestions   *

Look – it flames up like a riot. You might think fuck, this is Machiavelli playing dress-up. Fine. Think it. Just remember – it's all modular, adjustable, customizable. It's all about reframing your experience in a way that is empowering and beneficial, rather than depleting and sacrificial, and then ACTING from your newly renovated perceptual space. There are some medium length explanative parts in this opus. I wrote them for orientation, to make sure we're on the same page. I tried to jazz'em up for a fun reading, not sure it worked. It's not easy to bedazzle theory, but they are important. So please bear with them. 

Chapters 4 and onwards are the actual instructional parts (4.4 is a particularly fun one) which make up the methodology and the general advice. You can just skip to those parts, but I would suggest that if you do, once through with them, come back and read the rest, there are plenty of inferential wisdom nuggets you can pick up there. 

If you're gonna do that, you should note that I don't like the abbreviation Narc used by many, it can be confused with police officers working in narcotics – let's call them Farcs (fucking assholes/raving cunts). Farcs. I also like this abbreviation 'cause it sounds like a portmanteau (blend) of Fart and Fuck, which are fair associative references...

Let's go.

*  Disclaimer  *

None of the lyricists and the individuals mentioned and quoted here – Sigmund Freud, Sam Harris, Brene Brown, David Whyte, Tina Fey, Groucho Marx etc. – which I admire – reviewed the content of this book. Whether they support the claims and methods outlined here is thus unclear. I have quoted them from publicly available sources, and if they ever happen to run into this book and feel I have ill-appropriated their words – I apologize, but at the same time, misinterpretation is unalienable, as it is a naturally emergent phenomenon of our nebulochaotic mind and its decidedly subjective perception of reality, as well as a Freedom of Speech derivative and hence protected by it.

So, guys (those amongst you who are still alive), sorry if you find some of my directives unsavory, but – butt.

Also – I'm not a shrink, don't have academic credentials, so my riffs can't be construed as professional advice. Just a friendly one.

Also 2: A precautionary note about psychopathic narcissists (instrumentally, methodically violent) or explosive narcissists (impulsive, reactive); If you so much as catch a distant whiff of a looming physical threat to yourself, your children, and loved ones – Decamp. Scoot. Skedaddle. Immediately! Because it's almost sure to transpire. This warning will be reiterated again and again throughout this book. There is no way to overstate this. That said, we're not dealing with those. These forms of life require highly invasive neuropsychiatry which is still in nascent development stages.

Buckle up, this one you're riding shotgun. 

* Prologue: In The Shit-pit   *

It was a timing fluke. The perfect synch. You know how it's like...when all the stars line up to make you dance, light-footed and delirious, straight into a trap.

When an adult sinner (the redundant type, nothing fancy, just slightly coloring outside the lines), is faced with the loss of her/his taken-for-granted privilege, it's like the universe trying to say this ain't random ducky, it's payback. Which is exactly what I was thinking as my shocked ego first hit the pavement, because this was some next-level bad Karma juju.

... replaying scenes that might have implicated me...I musta run over Santa's reindeer during one of those sloshed nights, whose memory you pray Alzheimer's takes first... Or maybe I robbed some old lady in my past life.... da fuck I know, but for whichever badness I brought into this world, the Karma-popo came-a-knocking, and like a broiled dimwit, I opened. The door.

Now, I'ma assume that if you're here, reading these words, you know what Narcissists are, and how they tango. I'ma also assume - ya bleeding.

Presumably, the responsible party for your bleeding – is the Narcissist, who needs you to bleed so he/she can feed.

This is enough to set the stage. It's the baseline for belonging to this inglorious club of hazed dingbats, myself included. As the mousy Groucho Marx once said: PLEASE ACCEPT MY RESIGNATION. I DON'T WANT TO BELONG TO ANY CLUB THAT WILL ACCEPT ME AS A MEMBER."

Well, not ANY club – but this one for shit sure.

PARTIALLY ADAPTIVE Narcissists can be confusingly functional on the surface – for a while. One thing must be pre-established: those disorders are incurable and highly resistant to treatment. In fact, conventional therapy causes a negative uptick of their natural traits. This book will give you tips on dealing with narcissists – the relatively simple to gauge and evaluate kind.

Cluster B (borderline, histrionic, narcissistic, anti-social, psychopathy – and all their adaptations and spill-overs) brought many nasty variants of DNA and neural structure and function to our world. Popular culture and old lore describe them as monsters, demons, vampires, mutants, blood-suckers, tormentors, and other forms of human junk.

Criminal history has them under tabs like mass murderers, serial killers, rapists, sadists, torturers, war criminals, mass shooters, supremacists (of all kinds), and the many other forms of person-to-person felonies that require varying levels of emotional detachment.

Social scientists have them under maladaptive, at-risk, abused-children-turned-bullies-turned: politicians/ lawyers/ stock-market traders/ mafia/gang members and other professions that all too often employ Machiavellian thinking and operating methods.

Epistemologists have them under Solipsists.

Psychiatry finds their common denominator to be empathy deficit with low to no reward responsiveness which puts them on the range from toxic but tolerable, to downright lethal. Psychopathy / Anti-Social personality disorders are the most dangerous pathologies known. Again: They are not to be toyed with and they usually come with a narcissistic aspect, but not always.

Neuroscience backs this up.

Their case is evidently nuanced and ontologically layered – especially through the prism of evolutionary biology where one can ask – why haven't they been selected out?? They're shart-spray. A menace to society. They're bringers of pain and destruction – so why are they still here?

Evolutionary biology offers the following: "Aggression (psychological and physical) has the conserved function across taxa in obtaining critical resources such as food and mates" (₁)

In psychological terms: When women confuse aggression with survival skills – asshole genes get transferred on the double helix (hilariously portrayed online, we're really talking about a learned behavior propagated by predispositions). Interesting and important neuroscientific work is being done today scraping the surface of those extreme predatory and anti-social behaviors, coming up with some pretty nifty data.

Of course NOT ALL Narcissists are aggressive in the physically violent sense of word. Some are covertly aggressive, and most use a host of psychological debasement tactics as their go-to, in their imperialistic advances on your psych. It may not qualify as aggressive behavior per se, but it's an unauthorized stealth take-over on your self-referencing, and what if not aggression should we call that?  

I'll link to research and I encourage you to look up the neuroimaging results online, there's plenty. When you see with your own eyes how their brain looks comparably to a neurotypical brain, you understand that this is NOT something you can fix. It's not a disease – it's a neuronal (pre)disposition. It's baked in. And what's baked, can't be unbaked.

Yet. 

With the advancement of science, maybe tomorrow we'll find a way to rewire them – but not today. And your life is TODAY.

It's ALWAYS today.

SO SOBER DA FUCK UP. 

(₁) (Sex differences in aggression: Differential roles of 5-HT2, neuropeptide F and tachykinin, PMID: 30695038 PMCID: PMC6350964 DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0203980, 2019)

Setting the Perimeter: important notes and references

"You can't tell that you're bigger than the sea that you're sinking in, and you don't know what you got, but you got it at your fingertips.  

I know you think your fire is burning out, but I still see you shining through"  

Banners/Bandsintown

Beautiful...isn't it? Bigger than the sea that you're sinking in...

The following notes are here to frame the situation. They're not entirely linear, but they give a good reference about the perceptual design of the human that wrote this book, yours truly. 

· A personal note:

I wish I could hold your hands, gaze into those eyes of yours, that know the pain of being slowly erased, of losing the conviction that your life can be reassembled and restored, that you somehow have to live out this horror flick because it has to mean something (otherwise, WTF?!). That it has an elusive, but very real intrinsic value hovering at the seams of your perception, just outside your grasp...But it doesn't. I wish I could look inside those eyes of yours and transpose my knowledge and spare you the pain – I can't. What I can promise you is that choosing to stay in a relationship with a narcissist, reliving the raw anguish of watching a human you love and are committed to, get jacked up on your pain, is a losing proposition. 

100% of the time. 

I wish I could just grab your hand and whisk you away to safety. ...can't do that either. Too many hands, too much pain. Trauma bondage is a mother fucker.

What I can do, is create a protocol for you to follow. A set of rules that worked for me – underscore: for me – and that is exactly what I will attempt to do and hope to succeed.

If I failed – which I easily can – because there are so many variables, both of narratives and of personality types, know that I did my best with the best of intentions, and other than my personal story, I curated some pretty interesting research. I hope some of what you read will indeed give you some value and my task shouldn't be too difficult because...

You are now at the bottom of a manhole, aka The Shit-Pit.

Chin-deep in shit, and probably so emotionally wrecked or bewildered, it's all but paralyzed you, or worse – you've become indifferent to yourself and your future. If you voluntarily accepted this bitch-slapping, as I did for 8 years, maybe deep down you believe this pain can purge you, ordain you, cleanse you, atone for some crap you pulled in your past life, or in this life, and that one day the flogging you take, via proxy (aka – the narcissist) will redeem you, calm the burn of regret, and make what you're doing matter.

But trust me – this voice is the voice of self-deception, born of self-estrangement, born of self-loathing. This inner voice, designed by a myriad bias, and nourished by those who gain from your confusion and debasement – needs to be silenced.

The biases, well, we all unwittingly inherit and internalize them by simply living in societal hierarchies. Those can be dealt with for the most part. Once gleaned out - you can get a pretty decent handle on the worst of them. But getting away from the kind souls, at whose mercy you leave your heart, who leverage them against you, who use them as means of control, or worse – oppression - is more complicated. These assholes are what I want to help you weed out. If you are willing to take a hammer to this prison wall, you will significantly increase your chances of coming out swinging and hopefully, you will be set free.

I tried to make it as enjoyable as possible – please forgive my crude language, I write the way I talk... no ill-will intended.

· A Supremely! important note:

If you share children with a narcissist – things of course are much more complicated. You should know that your children are vulnerable to becoming narcissists themselves (by exposure, or by some hereditary effect), or alternatively, become super-empaths – and as such, at risk of becoming willing victims of abuse. You must be TRIPLE-EXTRA smart and cautious when preparing an exit plan under these conditions.

There are developmental reasons, co-morbidly determinative with personality types, why children become narcissists. I suggest you learn them in order to grasp the urgency of getting them the fuck away from their narcissistic parent. As it may not always be legally or realistically possible, you must take them to therapy, and spend time with them explaining the situation. To explain well and age-appropriately you'll need to understand it yourself, and that requires putting in the effort. The more you know the easier the decision and the execution becomes. That's a rule of thumb here.

An informative note:

This is