Narcissistic Personality Disorder

10 Things that Trigger a Narcissist's Anger

Frequent anger and irritability is a main criteria for a diagnosis of NPD.

Frequent anger and irritability is a main criteria for a diagnosis of NPD. Anyone who has been enmeshed with them knows they're extraordinarily sensitive people. They're the definition of being able to dish it out but not being able to take it.

WHAT DOESN’T ANGER A NARCISSIST?

They only have the emotional intelligence of children, so they are constantly bored and agitated, prone to tantrum.

Since I have pissed narcissists off since birth despite loving them more than myself, I can tell you what upsets them most.

1) BEING ABANDONED

All Cluster B's are children of narcissists or people who lost their parents in childhood or were adopted, so our core wounds are abandonment.

If you try to end the abusive relationship with a narcissist, you will be met with BEGGING, LOVEBOMBING, COLLAPSE, NARCISSISTIC RAGE, AND THE SMEAR CAMPAIGN.

Rejection from their NPD parent who they crafted their entire identity around is their core trigger.

So they don't like to lose you either--part of their enmeshment with you was for identity theft.

It puts them into a mental collapse. The collapse is short lived: their brains use denial, delusion, and then projection to cope with it.

They convince themselves you are the abuser and you deserve revenge. They’d like to kill you or drive you to suicide.

They absolutely never get over it. Even when they move on quickly to new supply, they continue to stalk, harass, and obsess over your existence.

They feel the same hatred and obsession for you as their NPD parent.

2) EXPOSING THEIR SHAMES

They do not feel guilt for what they’ve done, but they have a real fear of exposure.

Their masks and fantasies of perfection are only as real as they can get other people to believe. And they need to feel adored.

Any exposure of behavior that they can be judged for feels like a threat to their survival.

Because if others don’t believe their mask, then how can they?

When I found the evidence of the microphone in my apartment, escaped, and reported my rapes, my maintenance man who stalked and assaulted me tried to kill me.

NO WAY he was he going back to prison.

The lengths he went to to find me, you wouldn’t believe. I mean, I really did almost lose my mind, so that tells me exactly how pissed and afraid he was.

Last time he went to prison as a teen, it was for deadly intent. This time, it’d be for stalking and rape.

In prison, a stalker is the same kind of creep as a pedophile (He was a pedophile too).

He wouldn’t even be respected by the worst of the worst people.

He can’t survive that unmasking.

This is also why they do the smear campaign.

I had an ex who I wanted to marry. I was loyal and madly in love. He cheated repeatedly, and would stalk and lovebomb and assault me when I tried to break up with him, so I had empathy for him and went to couple’s therapy (paying for it myself).

When I found out about his new secret gf and called her, she said he told her I’d do this. I’m his crazy cheating EX who he couldn’t get rid of.

I suggested we both confront him at the bar he was at.

When we walked in, he just put his head on the table and started to CRY.

She was shocked and broke up with him. I did too. He crawled up my fire escape, broke my window, broke my computer, and hit me, saying she was a liar and that was not his girlfriend.

So, which one of us is the crazy cheating ex he couldn’t get rid of?

When I reported my maintenance man to my apartment, many in the office did not believe me, not just because he was covert, but because he told them that I was obsessed with him.

Mind you, I was drugged, crying, and traumatized beyond words at the time. They thought I was NUTS.

I had to bring my bloody sheets, the microphone, the pictures of the crow bar marks on my door, and my journals to prove that he both attacked me and that I had written in my journals (which he read and wrote in) that I thought he was a narcissist who wanted to cheat on his wife and I was avoiding him.

He installed a microphone in my apartment and shared my phone settings to his while drugged to GPS track me, and I’M THE ONE WHO IS OBSESSED?

They smear campaign just to project and get ahead of their shames should you want to unmask them.

3) MEN ARE OBSESSED WITH THEIR PENIS SIZE; WOMEN ARE OBSESSED WITH THEIR WEIGHT AND BEAUTY

Narcissists have no inner self, so they care about outer, superficial things as markers of self worth.

They’re extraordinarily sensitive, and male narcissists are obsessed with their dicks. They see it as a representation of their power and worth.

EVERY NARCISSIST I KNOW WITHERED TO HAVE THEIR DICK CRITICIZED.

They’d lose their damn minds over it.

I knew one narcissist who is still the most beautiful man I’ve seen in real life. He could be a model. His dick was HUGE. It was DIVINE.

But he was so insecure about it.

I’d tell him all the time it was the best I’d seen, and huge, and I even got a tape measure and measured it for him and then we looked up dick size averages just to prove that, indeed, 10.5 inches is a big dick.

After sex once, he said he wanted to go to the sex store and get a strap on.

Why??

Because I don’t feel like I can satisfy you. I’m not big enough. I don’t last long enough.

Meanwhile, I’m lying there with my vag feeling like shredded chicken.

So, when he and his cousin assaulted me years later, I told him he had a little dick.

HE CRIED.

4) DISAGREE WITH THEM

One reason I get attacked by npds so much is because I’m intelligent. I can identify faulty logic and I have my own opinions that are resistant to gaslighting. THIS MAKES THEM SO SO ANGRY.

If one single fact triggers their shame, they do the wildest logical gymnastics to convince you they are correct.

They can’t be proven wrong about anything and they can’t process shame, so they must win.

They must feel better and smarter than you.

They don’t have emotional intelligence and they react with childish emotions, prone to easy tantrum and anger. (They will tell you, however, that they are simply rational and not emotional because they think anger is rationality and love is emotion, and love is shameful because it’s for weak people).

They’ll never stop with the gaslighting either, no matter how dumb they begin to sound. They need YOU to be convinced they are right because they need YOU to regulate their fantasy of superior perfection by believing in it.

5) TELL THEM THEY'RE JUST LIKE THEIR PARENTS

They can identify their parents were abusive, even that they were narcissists. AND THEY HATE THEM.

Even if they’re still attached, they hate them.

Just like they hate you.

So, if you call them this, prepare for a strangling.

THEY REALLY LASH OUT.

6) TELL THEM THEY’RE BEING CHILDREN

They confess through accusation, and narcissists LOOOOOOVE to call people “snowflakes,” to whine over “cancel culture,” and to say people with developed empathy who can process rather than project pain are “big babies.”

That is EXACTLY WHAT THEY ARE.

Literally.

Their emotional intelligence is stunted to toddler years.

So, when you identify this, they’ll just throw themselves into a tizzy fit.

7) BE A VICTIM OF ABUSE

They hate victims.

If you admit, for example, to being raped, they immediately victim blame.

They hate people who process pain and don’t project it. They enjoy seeing you in pain and making you feel you deserved it.

BECAUSE ONLY THEY CAN BE VICTIMS.

They're abusers, so being innocent victims is their greatest fantasy. And only their pain matters.

And you better care about it too. You better slit your wrists and drain your empathy dry for them.

OR ELSE.

8) SUGGEST THEY GET HELP

They are PERFECT!

They had trauma, yes, but they are NEUROTYPICAL! (A fantasy — there’s no such thing. There’s such a variety of brain chemistries that neuroscientists have not a clue what a typical brain would be categorized as. There is no “normal, healthy” brain that most people have).

And everyone has trauma damage.

But suggest they may benefit from some health care for that bodily organ, and you are the devil.

YOU ARE CRAZY! I AM NOT! You crazy borderline! Shrinks are crocks! NOTHING IS WRONG WITH ME.

They can’t be convinced there is nothing “wrong” with having an illness and needing treatment.

Even though it’s one that leaves them miserable, lonely, and prone to suicidal collapses.

They’re terrified of healing.

They’re terrified of FEELING.

They felt love once: it was unsafe, and they were shockingly and sadistically betrayed.

They never want to feel love again.

They do not trust you.

In fact, the fact you even suggested they need help makes them think….No, you’re crazy. You’re the narcissist…

Then they’ll try to convince you of that.

This works on many borderlines, as we are prone to extreme guilt.

I’d be with my therapist every week like, “Is it possible I’m becoming a narcissist? What do I need to do so he doesn’t feel abused by me? I upset him to rage so often. I must be the worst girlfriend in the world but I can’t figure out what will make him happy, but if I say we should break up, he says I’m discarding him like a narcissist!”

My therapist was really concerned about this relationship. She likened his behavior to OJ Simpson, and, indeed, it did have to end in restraining order.

She had to teach me to name the specific abuses happening — gaslighting, word salad, projecting, breadcrumbing, devaluation — and she had to keep defining consent for me, because I had not a clue about bodily consent.

I was legitimately shocked.

“You mean if I told him I don’t want anal sex and he forces it during regular sex, that is assault? He mocked me for crying about it…”

“Am I allowed to say I don’t want to be choked until I pass out if I am in a relationship with him? Doesn’t the relationship mean I consent to everything? He says if I say no, I’m being abusive because I’m disordered.”

I was a straight A student getting a degree in psychology, and these things blew my mind.

They’ll take the most vulnerable people — borderlines, children, the senile, the mentally handicapped — and convince them THEY are fundamentally rotten.

The fantasy and power only exist as much as others believe in it….

I truly believe this is a major problem with many borderlines. We internalize so much narcissist abuse and have been made to feel worthless lifelong, so we really do believe it’s our fault our relationships fail.

I think any treatment for any cluster b is incomplete without a full, nuanced education on abuse and consent. (Even better, teach it in schools).

Because we were not raised in environments that understood that.

But for a narcissist to willingly get treatment: very rare or short lived.

It does happen. I had an npd friend that did it because I always sang therapy’s praises. She never talked about what went on there.

Sometimes narcissists become therapists…

9) EXIST

Narcissists hate themselves.

They can’t process this, so they project their self hate onto others and they tell themselves that those around them are all the things they are.

So then they can abuse themselves, via you, and regulate their own emotions.

They make you feel the shame they can’t bear.

Then, they feel better than you and can love themselves.

BUT ONLY THEMSELVES.

Everyone else, they despise.

Should you be better than them in any way — richer, happier, smarter, kinder, prettier — they fantasize about killing you, and abuse you relentlessly in hopes you will FAIL, become UGLY, or DROP DEAD.

They don’t call it toxic for nothing…

(Famous borderline 👆🏼)

10) Forgive Them With Boundaries and Distance

This one riles them up like a bumblebee loose in their brain.

They don't grieve, so they never forgive people.

They hold grudges against people who THEY ABUSED. They blame victims for THEIR OWN BEHAVIOR. In essence, they're mad at you for how they mistreated you. This is why it's a mental illness.

When a person forgives, heals, and moves on, this means they empathetically move through the stages of grief.

It also means you're emotionally mature.

This will bring a narcissist shame.

And they can't metabolize that, so they'll be ANGRY that you showed emotional maturity.

They'd much rather have your hatred or fear, because those things give them power over you. Your maturity creates a contrast with their fantasy of you as their own projected all bad object.

It'll confuse them and fling a mirror in their face about the truth of their false self's delusion. They'll never metabolize that.

But it won't matter, because you'll be free, and they'll be irrelevant to you.

No longer a wound--just a scar, a memory, a learned lesson.

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Anne M. Champion is the author of This is a Story About Ghosts: A Memoir of Borderline Personality Disorder (KDP, 2024), Hunted Carrion: Sonnets to a Stalker (KDP, 2024), She Saints & Holy Profanities (Quarterly West, 2019), The Good Girl is Always a Ghost (Black Lawrence Press, 2018), Book of Levitations (Trembling Pillow Press, 2019), Reluctant Mistress (Gold Wake Press, 2013), and The Dark Length Home (Noctuary Press, 2017). Her work appears in Verse Daily, diode, Tupelo Quarterly, Prairie Schooner, Crab Orchard Review, Salamander, New South, Redivider, PANK Magazine, and elsewhere. She was a 2009 Academy of American Poets Prize recipient, a 2016 Best of the Net winner, a Douglas Preston Travel Grant recipient, and a Barbara Deming Memorial Grant recipient. She has degrees in Behavioral Psychology and Creative Writing.