Is a narcissist evil or a victim of a mental illness?
It's the age-old question...
Is a vampire evil or victim to a curse out of his control?
Both things can be true at once.
Narcissists feel very evil to certain people in their lives.
Both my mother and father have NPD and ASPD, colloquially known as sociopaths. Narcissists have split thinking, so they categorize their children on sight at birth: scapegoat child, invisible child, or golden child.
I was scapegoat to my mother: she felt evil to me my whole life. It was disorienting. She did cruel, sadistic things to me, and she hated me passionately. She even had my favorite cat (only friend) killed to put me in grief at 9 years old. She told me she hated me as long as I can remember and accused me of hating her, so I’d scramble to prove my love. It was incredibly traumatic, and my heart is forever broken by 18 years with her. She was also very delusional, incredibly detached from reality, obviously unwell. She had not a friend in the world until the internet was invented and she found chat rooms and became addicted.
I got 22 years of therapy and my own psychology degree to heal my Borderline Personality Disorder.
I was invisible child to my father: he didn’t feel evil to me. I idolized him. I recognized he had a temper, and his racism seemed obviously delusional. I recognized something was very wrong with his mental health—a part of having BPD as the scapegoat child is your ability to feel the feelings of others becomes uncanny. Like a sponge, you absorb their emotions and process them. I believe it comes from having to walk on eggshells as a scapegoat. My father felt like the saddest man in the world. But sometimes he felt pretty normal: taciturn, solitary, a fan of sports and late night talk shows. He enjoyed painting model airplanes and learning about history. He mostly acted like I didn’t exist.
There are memories I have of both of them in which it felt like they were trying to be decent parents. And we didn’t starve, as some narcissist parents do to their children.
They made some decisions I’m grateful for: I tested high in reading at a young age, so they agreed to never ground me from books. I was even allowed to read adult books as a child, black authors (they were both racist), and taboo stories about teen pregnancy or drugs. I could read about romance and sex if I wanted to. Nothing was censored. In fact, when my teacher tried to take away a book that was too mature for me, they raised hell.
And for as much as my mother terrorized me, which can’t be understated, she also never spared a dime on my books. I’d come home with my Scholastic book club newsletter having circled thirty books, and I’d hand it to her and apologize, “So many look good. Just choose whatever you want.”
And then I’d come to school and there were 30 books on my desk.
That decision shaped my life. It gave me joy, wisdom, poetry, and connection in the darkest world.
Books were my escape from...HER.
Memories like that hurt even more than the abuse, because you see a glimmer of a chance that maybe…somewhere inside that broken woman…she loved the girl she gave birth to, the first blood relative she ever knew in this world, having been adopted.
But the house was full of crying, violence, crazymaking, and rage more often than it was not. The emotional, physical, and psychological abuse was extreme.
And that doesn’t include the horror they did to their golden child…
If I didn’t have a younger sister with NPD, I might have never gotten over my anger at narcissists and my parents, because once I unmasked her and retraced our childhood memories to identify why I couldn’t save her with my love, I re-entered a haunted house.
I saw what made a narcissist, heartbreak by heartbreak.
I cannot stomach to even tell the full story of horror that happens to a child who goes from golden—best in the world—to nothing, plummeted into a bottomless pit of shame.
I was always nothing—it’s all I knew. She was the center of the world, and then cast into hell.
Brought back, and cast into hell again. It emotionally mutilated her.
My sister screamed like a wild animal, she tore the skin off her hands, she banged her head on the wall with a force that chilled me.
That baby, cast into a pit of despair that not even adults can endure…and no one came to comfort her.
I tried.
For a time, we were very close in our childhood, though coming from our dynamics, we knew how to fight.
But she felt the furthest thing from evil to me.
She was monumentally insecure and moody. But I felt we both were, and we were aware we were mentally fucked from what we survived together.
In some ways, all Cluster B’s overlap like a Venn diagram. But in some ways, we’re in opposition.
But I thought she was smart, funny, beautiful—she was my first favorite person enmeshment as a borderline.
I was her first supply.
My sister didn’t do things I considered evil to me. She did things I considered selfish.
And she made me feel abandoned and unloved.
Just as she felt, locked in her room, banging her head on the wall as a child...
They project all their pain from childhood.
She’d eat my roommate’s food when she came to stay with us on breaks from college. She signed a year lease with me, and then she moved out after four months with no warning, leaving me with an expensive rent.
She stopped calling and texting. When I reached out, I begged for my sister back. For 15 years I begged.
She never asked about my life, never celebrated my accomplishments, got me generic, impersonal gifts for holidays. I felt I didn’t know her anymore, and I didn’t know what to get her either, but I tried. I knew she liked birds, so I kept getting bird things until she said no more birds.
Then I made her a wire wrapped necklace with the stone of our home state, and she told me she hated jewelry.
So she didn’t seem evil; she seemed cantankerous, and like she thought I was boring, worthless, unlovable.
It seemed she was too good for me. And indeed, I was chronically suicidal—it’s a part of having BPD. I felt like my yearning to have my sister back must be annoying because I was so depressed, and I needed help. I’d been conditioned to think that if my grief got too big, I’d be too much.
Unlovable.
The whole family made me feel like that.
So, to me, my mom felt evil; my sister and dad, no. They made me yearn to prove myself lovable though.
They birthed the trauma bond.
In which I gravitated to narcissists as friends and lovers.
I gravitated most to all Cluster B’s; my relationships with histrionics and other borderlines are still in my life today, and they were not as fraught.
But the narcissists…yes, I’ve seen the face of evil.
And I know that there are people in this world that saw evil from my sister and father in ways I didn’t see too.
I know murderers, sexual abusers, child abusers, thieves, frauds, cheaters, addicts, pathological liars.
I’ve seen mental health collapses that would shock you.
One ended in suicide—my first love.
My father attempted it.
And suicide doesn’t happen to someone mentally well. It’s one of the most severe signs of mental sickness.
I know firsthand just how sick it feels. I felt it chronically myself.
But before you get to feeling too sorry for them, as I did, it’s worth noting that when they do the most grievous harm, they typically smile, gloat, relish in extremes.
Where the borderline suffers from suicidal ideation, the narcissist is only suicidal in a collapse state. This is where the Venn diagram separates.
Narcissists most often suffer from homicidal ideation.
And they know what they do; they know enough to hide it.
A narcissist has no self at their core, and when a person has no self, then dominance becomes the self.
The philosopher Hegel noted that the definition of evil is anyone who believes themselves without flaw.
This was also noted in studies on Nazi atrocities: they were people who generally believed themselves to be exceptional and flawless.
You could ask them about murdering a child, and they’d assure you they were a victim of the helpless, unarmed children. And they believed their bullshit.
This is true of all narcissists (Nazis/fascists/colonizers/slave owners/human traffickers are typically narcissists and sociopaths, which shows you how widespread the problem is and how much the public loves to elect them and doesn’t see them as evil).
But if you were going to ask the general public to define the traits of evil, they’d fit the bill. They’d fit it even by their own definitions.
But they can’t see it in themselves. They project their self hatred onto victims, and then they reframe it in their minds as deserved, consensual, heroic, or self defense. They’ll tell anyone who will listen that they are the victim and everything that they accuse of the victim is actually what they did to their victim.
While their victim sits in a whirlwind of trauma that will last for life.
It feels absolutely diabolical.
And they’ll do it to the nicest people, to innocent children, to the elderly, to the autistic, to people who love them dearly, to helpless animals.
And they’ll never show an ounce of guilt or a desire to change behavior.
BUT…do they hate their behavior?
Often yes.
Many sociopaths find borderlines trustworthy enough to tell some of (not all) their darker shames. They’ve confessed really atrocious things to me. They weren’t proud. But their brains would almost knee-jerk begin to excuse or deny it to expel the shame or lessen it. Their trauma responses and compulsions were a quicksand.
And they want love; they sabotage it in fear. They know if you knew the true extent of their deepest shames, you couldn’t stay—not if you’re someone with empathy and morals.
So, like vampires, they often nest together and hate each other.
If you’re not a narcissist, the worst outcomes of loving one long-term is that they culminate in death. They're the embodiment of the living dead, because their inner child died in childhood. You either unalive yourself, or they unalive you, or you get chronically ill from stress or STI’s.
The relationship dies early on. You lug it around and cover it up like a corpse on a gurney after a murder.
The betrayals will cut so deep that they’ll show you how extreme it is possible to hurt.
And as they do so, they project the unprocessed grief of their murdered inner child to you.
If you escape and can heal, you’re lucky and you’re in the minority.
And yet, will the narcissist vampire cry over you?
At times, yes, they will.
In collapse states, they cry for everything they’ve done to those who loved them.
Those states are short-lived, but the outbursts and their intensity prove that guilt does live in their psyche: it’s just chronically repressed because they’re avoiding shame.
They will regularly transform love and truth into hatred and lies to survive the shame they feel over hurting those who were good to them.
And when they do that…they feel evil again.
They’ll stalk, they’ll follow, they’ll terrorize and threaten, they’ll go so far as attempts on the lives of those who loved them.
They have no empathy, which means they have no limits.
They can’t grieve; they never developed that emotional capacity to process grief. So they hold grudges for life.
And they believe in revenge. They’ll seek revenge on you for what they did to you.
You’ll feel brain damaged trying to make sense of it.
My mother tried to sit me down after I moved out and explain trauma in her childhood. She said it was why she treated me how she did. At the time, she looked vulnerable and ashamed, explaining a man at church who touched her. I stopped her and said I didn’t want to hear it: “I went through hell in my childhood, and I don’t hurt children.”
She hung her head in shame and said nothing. She tried to say she was sorry. At that time, I had custody of my sister due to the extreme abuse. And I tried to forgive her.
And I lived to regret it.
We will never speak again. We’ve been no contact for many years. She crossed a line she could never possibly come back from.
So are they evil? Yes.
They’re evil like a possessed child.
Are they victims of mental illness? Also yes.
Did they choose their mental illness? No, no one does. We’d all rather be at peace. It takes most of us decades to even realize what’s happening inside us, and some never learn the language or mechanisms of their own pathology.
Do they know their actions? Usually yes. They can slip into delusional states such as parasocial fantasy relationships that are only in their head, but more often they’re fully aware.
Would we be better off finding a treatment rather than further traumatizing and punishing the mental illnesses in prison? Also yes.
We also shouldn’t ignore it and let them have positions of power as we do now. What they do to victims are severe, monstrous crimes.
The truth needs to be faced.
So, it’s nuanced. You feel your brain is playing ping pong.
Welcome to the mental strain of cognitive dissonance, the fraught reality of having sympathy for the devil’s fall from heaven.
But don’t get it twisted: don’t let your love and your grief over their tragedy be a crack in the door. Have boundaries, and weapons, and cameras. And many, many locks.
Because a zombie who’ll eat your brains is behind that door.
We live in a mental health apocalypse hellscape.
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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.