Abuse

9 Types of Revenge to Expect During Narcissistic Rage

Survival isn't guaranteed.

If you unmask and leave a narcissist, the narcissist is going to experience two things:

A narcissistic collapse: this is when you’ll see them scream and cry. This is the narcissist’s true self: a confused, grieving child. They'll be suicidal at this time, and it’s extraordinarily dangerous.
Narcissistic rage: the narcissism as a trauma defense mechanism will return and the narcissist will seek supply through revenge, so that they can reassert their dominance and power over the victim. The narcissist has no empathy, and they think the trauma of their abandonment is the worst offense possible, so they will have very few limits during their narcissistic rage.

Here are some of the worst things that happened to me during narcissistic rage:

Rape:

Several narcissists used this abuse on me as revenge. The worst one drugged me and raped me for three weeks. I didn’t even date him. He was my apartment maintenance man and he was married and he heard me say to my therapist on the microphone he installed in my apartment that I thought he was a narcissist breaking my appliances (she agreed) and that I would start avoiding him. Narcissists are very sensitive, so they still experience a sense of rejection even when they never had the victim's consent or any type of romance. This is because they interact with their victims through fantasy scenarios of power and objectification in their minds. Narcissists reject reality to protect their false self.

Theft:

My ex-husband stole my credit card and charged $20,000. He’d cheated on me our whole marriage with men and women and he hadn’t had sex with me in over a year when I left. I believed that in leaving, I was doing him a favor because I was so disliked. I was dumbfounded to get so much backlash.

Stalking:

Nearly all of them stalked me and would show up at my job, at the store I was at, when I was out with friends....
Narcissists stalk throughout the whole relationship. You often won't realize it if you are in love or trusting of them, but they generally try to have access to their supply's electronics and have the ability to track their whereabouts at all times. They may have a tracker on your vehicle. However, their stalking REALLY amps up when supply leaves them, both because they want to take away supply's sense of safety and because they're desperate to restore a sense of control.

Physical violence:

Several of them beat me.
You always know that the narcissist feels that their supply is winning when the narcissist becomes violent. Their violence unmasks them and shows that their conscience and love was completely fraudulent. Violence is never power: it's always fear. It's someone DESPERATE: violence is a sign of a person who has lost control.
Violence always gives the victim the upper hand, especially with courts. So document it thoroughly.
Do not underestimate this disorder: during the rage phase, many victims of narcissists become MURDER victims. Survival isn't guaranteed.

Breaking an entering:

I had to get a restraining order on one who climbed my fire escape and broke my window and broke into my home and started breaking things. He did this after his mistress and I showed up to the bar he was at and showed him our text messages to prove he was lying to us and cheating. As he broke things in my home, he said we were BOTH crazy liars (projection).
When police came, he told them I punched him (which I did) and had me arrested for domestic violence too. A judge determined it was self defense after being questioned and police saw my apartment.

Revenge porn:

One sent all my nudes to my boss. She was a feminist and found it horrifying and was glad I left. In high school, my boyfriend cheated with my best friend. I broke up with him, and he later participated in video taping me having sex with a boy, and they sold it to the school. I was 15.
When a narcissist is broken up with, they feel humiliated. Also, their sexual power depends on their sense that supply is ADDICTED to them. Therefore, they will often seek to sexually humiliate their supply to relieve their bad feelings.

Smear campaign:

They told people that I did to them what they did to me. The worst betrayal and most unimaginable was my sister calling my therapist after I unmasked her. (And I’d never even told her my therapist’s name, so she stalked me somehow to do so). My therapist wouldn’t even tell me all that she said, because she didn’t think I could handle it knowing how much I loved her more than anyone. I kept saying, “Are you sure it was her?” thinking it must be my mother or something. It was really hard to imagine coming from someone I survived a horrific childhood with and would’ve given my life to protect.

Gang stalking:

My stalker who was my neighbor paid other people to stalk and threaten me after I escaped.

Contacting past abusers:

My stalker also contacted a man who assaulted and stalked me in the past, which he knew of having heard my therapy and read my journals. That man drove across the country just to join in on gang stalking me once to terrorize me. (But he was always a weak man who didn’t scare me, and with the trauma I’ve had, I’m pretty numb in the fear category).

Narcissists use any means necessary to hurt those who have cared about them when they feel they’ve lost control.

Discarding a true pathological narcissist is an incredibly dangerous endeavor—especially a covert one—because when you no longer subscribe to their narcissistic fantasy, they’re triggered to their core wound of whenever their narcissist parent no longer believed them to be the golden child. And if they’re covert, they can recruit more flying monkeys to attack you.

You’ll need receipts and evidence: get used to documenting everything. I even have cameras inside my own home when I never let anyone in my home now, just because of the break ins I’ve experienced. I even have one on my car and outside my home as well. If you’re planning to leave, get surveillance for yourself first.

If you DON’T have a horrific ordeal after, then they’re likely not a narcissist. Narcissists themselves call their exes abusers or “crazy” or even narcissists, but a dead giveaway is that they never experienced vengeance because their partner just wanted to get away from abuse and move on, and those with empathy don’t think with vengeance, though they may have reactive abuse in moments of extreme abuse that they feel guilty for after.

(Narcissists do not experience guilt as a feeling; though they may SAY they feel guilty to manipulate you to stay, they don’t feel it, as evidenced by their repeated behaviors. Guilt and empathy are emotions that stop you from harming those you love, because it causes you pain to do so.)

A person with real guilt will try to make REAL reparations for their wrongdoing to remedy the feelings of guilt.

A non-narcissist will feel guilt after reactive abuse as well as grief. Narcissists don’t grieve. It’s part of their disorder. If they discard you, then they simply move onto new supply quickly and don’t grieve. I generally still loved the people and left broken-hearted. It took me time to love again because I had to grieve and heal.

And without doing the work to understand my own BPD and the NPD of my partners, I’d walk right into the arms of the next narcissist and trauma bond.

Hell would begin again after brief visions of heaven and illusions of a reciprocal love.

I never quite understood the logic behind obsessively looking to abuse people you dislike. My mindset has been to distance myself from those people to have peace. It’s also hard for me to hate anyone I once loved.

But the reason narcissists do it is because they need to hate others so as to love their false self.

They can't function without a scapegoat, someone to blame, someone to die for their own sins that they can't face.

They hate anyone who doesn’t believe in their narcissistic fantasies or points out evidence of lies and hypocrisy.

They're most threatened by those who live in truth and reality.

They drink the poison of their own anger and hope you’ll be equally poisoned by trauma.

Two narcissists in a relationship will engage in vengeance going tit for tat like an obsessive game. Often narc-narc relationships last longest: they both enjoy toxicity and can’t handle being alone. Narcissists marry not for love, but for live-in scapegoats, so they like having spouses they can project on and it is true.

Like Anne Rice’s vampires, they can’t be alone but hate the other vampires they nest with. They’ll even stick by the parents they hate who abused them and caused their disorder rather than be alone. (They’ll either tell you their parents are “all good” saints or “all bad” evil abusers: split thinking, no nuance).

Narcissists feel that if they’re broken up with, even when they’ve clearly abused or deceived, then they’ve lost a game with someone.

It’s never a relationship to a narcissist. It’s always a game.

They are competing with you and trying to assert dominance and control over you or dupe you, never love you. They want your love, because that’s winning the game.

But they disrespect you for loving them too, because they think anyone who loves is weak and dumb, ESPECIALLY if they have secrets you haven’t discovered, which they most likely do.

But if you discover them, they then think you won, which they can’t endure. Being the golden child means being THE BEST.

Duper’s delight is an extraordinary high for them, as it tells them you’re stupid and they’re smart.

If you’re an empathetic person, they’re competing with you for your identity.

Narcissism is spiritual identity theft.

They use your traits to mimic you and help design their mask to become covert. They know love is power, so they want to convince people they’re loving and moral to attain power. They can’t compete with authenticity though and they don’t have morals or integrity, so your lack of hypocrisy will agitate them by bringing shame.

So they’ll seek to dominate you through trauma. They believe if they break your spirit, then you’ll never meet your potential. They aren’t emotionally mature or resilient, so they don’t understand the way empathy allows for resilience and is a key ingredient.

The worst revenge you can get on them is to heal.

They’ll become even more enraged if you get educated and forgive them while also having strict boundaries and going entirely narcissist-free: no more toxic enmeshments or trauma bonds, even to friends.

The reason forgiveness agitates them to anger is because they don’t have empathy so they never forgive. Their grudges are lifelong and obsessive due to their mental illness. Forgiveness also proves you’re genuinely as loving as you seemed, which brings more shame.

Even so, they’ll still claim you deserved everything they did, that it was justice, that they were the victim to you. And they’ll RARELY apologize. Even for illegal things they did, even if CAUGHT for illegal things they did.

Even if they do apologize, it's often to manipulate, and I've never actually seen it lead to changed behavior, even if they seemed truly ashamed over their actions.

They’ll instead think of themselves as masked vigilantes: Batman. They won’t see their vampirism.

They’ll sometimes name their scapegoat children after supply who unmasked and discarded them. They use that child to further re-enact their fantasies of revenge and power over that person. Two of my exes named their children after me, which was really creepy to discover.

Other names for scapegoat children will be someone who died tragically or someone in the family who they hated. They will pretend the name is “in honor” but narcissists are in competition with all family members too, especially the family scapegoats and REALLY ESPECIALLY their parents who they didn’t have control over. (It’s why borderline Britney Spears is named after her father’s mother who committed suicide, but her narcissist sister is named after her father and mother both—the golden child).

There is a huge irony that narcissists abuse narcissist scapegoats, borderlines, and hate us so passionately when they’re the ones who created us in the first place. Narcissists hate narcissists, but they create them too, but they don’t think of that.

They feel they are victims to their scapegoat kids as well and they perceive adult borderlines like parents who could give them consequences, which evokes more hatred.

All of us relive the horror of our childhood over and over again unless we awaken and heal, which is rare for all cluster b’s, who operate mostly in denial. Narcissists are the rarest of all to have self awareness or healing. Their denial will go so deep that it turns into delusion and pathological projection.

When you read about people who kill their spouses or their whole family, you’re reading about a narcissist who was unmasked and discarded, whose envy and rage at supply caused a full mental break.

Many victims have near death experiences with narcissists, and the trauma affects our mental and physical health lifelong, often to the point of frequent suicidal ideation. Borderlines, scapegoat children like myself, have an average life expectancy of 39. That’s in part due to suicide but more often due to the physical health effects, especially cardiovascular health problems, that result from trauma and cPTSD.

I’m still here because my attempts on my life failed, both from my own hand and by narcissists. So I believe there’s a purpose for my heart in this world. Though I don’t always trust or understand it, because this life is very depressing, to say the least.

If you’ve unmasked a narcissist, the best thing to do is to find a way to have them discard you.

If the narcissist discards you first, they’ll feel they’re in control and they’ll move on to new supply. If you can make it seem like the discard hurts you, they’ll be satisfied.

Then go heal.

Photo by Aarón Blanco Tejedor on Unsplash

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A.M. Champion is the author of 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, and a Barbara Deming Memorial Grant recipient. She has degrees in Behavioral Psychology and Creative Writing.