Monster Mythologies that are Metaphors for Cluster B Personality Disorders
Maybe that's why we love them so much...
I woke up and hurriedly got dressed, rushing downstairs just in time: my sister was already curled into a ball on the couch, twirling her hair and mesmerized by the haunting music.
We were addicted to the old gothic soap opera Dark Shadows, which was playing in reruns on the Sci-Fi channel. It was a soap opera with a twist: most the characters had some kinds of supernatural powers, and the ones who didn’t were haunted and hunted.
My family loved horror. I’d begun writing my first short stories — vampire romances — based on the show. I was 9 years old; my sister was 5. She was golden child to my mother and I was scapegoat. Both of our parents had NPD and ASPD.
I used to always say to anyone who asked me why I loved horror: “Because real life is much scarier and much uglier.”
This was a common theme throughout my life while I trauma bonded to other cluster b’s. I cannot tell you how many sociopaths I watched horror stories with, ironically.
“What do you think is gonna happen?” I asked my sister, excitedly.
“She’s gonna die. He’s a vampire,” she said flatly.
“God, I feel so SORRY for him. He loves her, but he’s cursed to be alone forever.”
“You shouldn’t feel sorry for vampires. You’ll die just like she’s about to,” my sister replied.
“Good thing they aren’t real!” I quipped.
If only I knew…
Feeling sorry for vampires would be the curse that plagued me for the rest of my life.
After I was drugged and sexually assaulted for several weeks by my sociopathic apartment maintenance man, I spent the next year locked in my new apartment, alone in a new city, working from home and reading everything I could about Antisocial Personality Disorder.
I understood that a good predator knows its prey, so a good prey needs to be crafty and understand their predator.
I was prepared to psychologically mine him bare, just as he’d mined me by stalking me for eight months. I had books upon books, from criminal psychologists to survivors to self aware sociopath memoirs.
Then I decided that something else might be illuminating: I decided to re-read the horror stories my stalker told me he loved. I also picked up a classic I’d never read before, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.
Jekyll and Hyde was so illuminating that I decided to look up if its author, Robert Louis Stevenson, was named after a parent. This would be a sign that they may have been a golden child — a narcissist — and therefore the book was a metaphor for his own suffering.
Indeed, he was.
His middle name was his mother’s maiden name, which was a name he dropped by adulthood. (This is very common for narcissists: they’ll go by initials, go by their middle name, or change their name entirely to distance themselves from the parent who golden childed and abused them). His first name is his paternal grandfather’s name, which would make him scapegoat to dad and golden child to mom.
When someone has two narcissist parents and they’re scapegoated by one and golden childed by another, what happens is the same thing that happened to my parents: it’s a cognitive dissonance so severe for a baby that they become sociopaths.
My father was a covert malignant narcissist, a colloquial term for covert ASPD; otherwise known as a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.
This made me look at Stevenson’s most famous quote in that book in a new light, “If I am the chief of sinners, I am the chief of sufferers too.”
I then looked up some horror authors, like Anne Rice, whose real name was Howard, named after her father. Or Stephen King, who shares a middle name with his father.
It dawned on me that so much of our monster mythology are narcissist artists’ ways of confessing their shames while also glorifying themselves through the fantasy of power, fear, and grandiosity narcissistically.
Narcissists are pretty honest in their art. It’s the only way they CAN be honest — through a persona, a performance, a mask, a PROJECTION of denied shames onto others.
Now I can’t read ANY monster literature without connecting it to the horror of being raised as a cluster b.
And that makes sense: our concepts of narcissism are in our literature for millennia — even the term itself is traced to Greek mythology, and the stories there are also perfect examples of the tragic plight of cluster b’s.
Here are the ways our contemporary monster mythologies serve as metaphors for Cluster B mental illnesses:
WEREWOLF: Antisocial Personality Disorder and PTSD.
I was on the phone with my friend who’d just gotten out of his second stint in prison. He’d just confided to me that he’d shot his friend years ago and gotten away with it. He’d already confided his NPD/ASPD diagnosis in prison.
“Did this happen on July 26th?” I asked.
“Actually, yeah, around there. How’d you know?”
“Because it’s the same date you committed the crime that got you in prison as a teenager.”
“How do you remember that?”
“Because it’s the anniversary of when your brother committed suicide.” His brother was my first love, and he killed himself at 15 years old.
“Shit,” he said. “You’re right.”
“Have you ever heard of anniversary PTSD?” I asked. I knew about it because my own panic attacks and suicidal ideation came on anniversaries of traumas, as if my body had an internal record that my mind didn’t have.
“No,” he said, “They just give us surveys in prison and then give us a report with our disorders, but they don’t explain anything or help us.
“Of course,” I said, “It’s state sanctioned slavery. It’s meant to be predatory and traumatic, not to actually solve social problems,” I said bitterly.
I’d recently seen, while watching a true crime show, a story of a girl whose boyfriend strangled her, but she survived. One year later — to the DAY — she strangled a strange man and killed him.
Another story I read detailed a man who recreated his childhood rapes repeatedly, doing the exact same things to victims that his stepfather did to him — he did it around the same time of year every time: it was the time the trauma occurred to him.
The more I read, the more stories like this I found for people with ASPD.
Furthermore, on the one year anniversary of the first day I was raped by my maintenance man, I looked him up and found that his wife left him that day, saying that she could no longer take his violence.
A few weeks later, on the anniversary I escaped, he attacked her physically in revenge for leaving him. She began posting rage posts.
I wonder why no one talks about the way PTSD manifests for someone with NPD/ASPD, I thought. It’s not like my PTSD, which manifests as panic, flashbacks, and physical incapacitation.
Why not?
BECAUSE A NARCISSIST BRAIN CANNOT PROCESS SHAME.
This means they can’t GRIEVE.
This means that for every trauma that happens to them, they must project it.
For every narcissistic collapse they have, starting from childhood, they experience PTSD that manifests as physical violence. They PROJECT their pain. They give it to someone else to grieve to expel it from their own bodies.
Often, as they do this, they’re able to temporarily grieve. My own rapist cried as he raped me, and he called me “mama.” In that moment, I knew who made him become a predatory stalker and rapist.
This also allows them to relive the trauma feeling as if they are the one in power and control, which soothes their PTSD, making them feel safe and less vulnerable. Emotionally, they’re only children, so an offensive violence is a way they ensure they feel protected.
Like wolves who were stranded with no pack, they become lonely predators.
They have no idea how their PTSD operates or why they do the violent acts they do. They often black out their violent acts and come back to consciousness in shock at what they’ve done. Men who’ve murdered their families and failed to complete their own suicides have described this psychological horror. O.J. Simpson also described blacking out when he murdered his ex-wife in his “fictional” confession of her murder.
This starts when they’re children. It’s why many of us, myself included, have stories in which we were sexually assaulted as children by other children.
It’s the only way they can expel their despair: the werewolf shift.
No treatment for PTSD deals with treating this aspect of complex PTSD as it manifests for those with ASPD. It’s a pattern documented clearly all over the literature, one I found in case study after case study, but we act like it doesn’t exist, because it’s uncomfortable and we don’t know how to deal with it.
It’s easier for people to cling to the mysterious “all bad” monster than understand the nuance of psychological trauma in those who are perpetrators of abuse. In denying it, we become monstrous and guilty ourselves.
VAMPIRE: Narcissistic Personality Disorder and Antisocial Personality Disorder
Vampires are a grandiose fantasy monster that narcissists create. They’re sexy; they’re irresistable; they’re beautiful; they never age; they love wealth and material things; they stalk; they feel no guilt, but they’re sympathetic nonetheless.
Our culture LOVES the tales of the sympathetic, lonely vampire who hates their eternal curse. We have a plethora of stories of women trying to beat the odds and mate with their vampire lover in eternal bliss without being turned into their lover’s nightly Happy Meal.
We ROMANTICIZE the myth of the vampire — the men cursed to abuse and kill those who love them, slowly draining their life force from them. This is also similar to how we often frame narcissism as ONLY a romantic form of consensual abuse, rather than understand that it also manifests as non-consensual abuse, like child abuse, animal abuse, and rape.
My own stalker fed on me much like Dracula coming to Mina’s bed at night. He also smiled to explain to me that he understood his mental health by thinking of himself as a vampire. We bonded over loving Interview with the Vampire. He loved Lestat, the heartless, ruthless vampire.
Narcissists live on supply (blood) in the form of abuse. They can’t live without it. It’s why narcissists can’t be alone and have horrible abandonment issues. Anne Rice explains this in her books as their main flaw. They end up nesting with other vampires they hate just because they can’t endure being alone. She also explained how some vampires liked to “play with their food” by getting their victims to fall in love with them.
For VERY few humans, they found something to admire and love in them, but if the vampire fell in love with a human, it always ended in tragedy or death.
Rice’s books also hint at some of the more shameful and hidden aspects of narcissists. Lestat and Louis were clearly bisexuals, for example. They also created a child vampire, Claudia, and her story is illuminating to the psyche of NPD. She discovers within years that she’ll never be able to grow up, (narcissists are always emotionally children) and she develops a sick obsession with grown women, as she saves their naked corpses in her room as souvenirs, much like sociopaths collect souvenirs of those who they stalk.
She also flew into a rage to discover how she was made into a vampire. “You FED ON ME?” she exclaims. This is also how narcissists are made: their parents feed on their golden children. For example, they rape their child. (Think: the Menendez brothers). The shame hinted at with Claudia is that of pedophilia.
(Many people can’t handle the truth that the narcissists they loved were also pedophiles. My own discovery of my parents was so horrifying I thought I’d die of a broken heart, so I get it. But still, it’s true. They feel at the level of children and they’re usually sexually attracted to children too. It’s one of their shameful secrets. This is why it’s important to break your trauma bond to their false self: it simply isn’t real. They’re predators).
Rice also discusses how vampires can live on animals, but they don’t like to. Many sociopaths I knew were also hunters and sometimes animal abusers. Killing animals also gave supply, just not as potent.
Furthermore, Interview with a Vampire illustrates a narcissistic collapse and rage. At the death of Claudia, Louis succumbs to a bottomless grief in his coffin for several days. Then he emerges with RAGE and VENGEANCE, and he kills all the vampires who he deems responsible for snatching away his supply. It’s an EXTREME revenge scene. Unforgettable and grotesque.
Anyone who’s entangled with a narcissist, especially romantically, walks away with the knowledge that vampires are actually real.
And we understand that what they do emotionally to drain us of our lives is much worse than what they do physically in the mythology.
But, as True Blood aptly said about humans who love vampires, “Anyone who comes to us wants to die. That’s what we are — death.”
Narcissists prey on a lack of self love, so those who trauma bond to them actually want to die, deep down.
Anne Rice also showcased this psychology of a narcissist victim’s self hatred. As a human was paraded on stage at the vampire’s theater and publicly fed on, the vampire whispers in the human’s ear, “What am I?”
“Death,” she says.
“And what does death mean?”
“It means…no more pain,” she swoons.
This is why healing from narcissistic abuse and trauma bonding requires real self love and internal reflective work.
FAIRIES: Histrionic Personality Disorder
In the HBO classic, True Blood, the main character is a half human, half fairy hybrid, whose blood is so delicious that she’s basically vampire crack.
Her blood even allows them to temporarily walk in the sun.
In general, narcissists like to date other narcissists best, because they’re unconsciously trying to get revenge on their parents through romance.
But they attract to ALL cluster b’s because we feel like family, and histrionics were the invisible children of narcissists.
Histrionics trauma bond to narcissists exclusively because what they lacked in childhood was attention from a narcissist, and they stay loyal to the fantasy of the narcissist’s mask, no matter what horrors they discover in their partners. They generally idealize their narcissist parental figures too, though they sometimes recognize the abuses or the NPD in their family. One of my histrionic friends recognized her mother and brother’s narcissism, but not her father’s obvious sociopathy, and she only dated sociopaths.
They’re notorious for their rock solid denial, because the histrionic only survives through their fairy-tale happily ever after fantasy.
It’s literally a FAIRY-tale.
The histrionic’s perception of romance is unicorns and rainbows. Some famous histrionics that exhibit this behavior are Kim Kardashian, Mariah Carey, and Pamela Anderson.
Still, while histrionics may be flitting around like Tinkerbells in Lala land, they aren’t stupid, and they have their own powers, including the abilities to sometimes read minds and the abilities to create a ball of light that can repel vampires.
Fairies are also EXTREMELY sexy, and I’ve never known a histrionic who wasn’t SEX ON A STICK.
One of the criteria for diagnosis is that they “act innappropriately sexual with nearly everyone they meet.” My histrionic FP would flagrantly flirt with our married professors in class. As a child, she used to answer dating ads written by old men and have sexual banter with them, pretending to be an adult.
In True Blood, fairies are so sexual that having sex with them just one time produces multiple babies — they’re incredibly fertile. And they live in a perfect fantasy land that’s wholly outside of any vampire’s reach.
While watching histrionics trauma bond to narcissists and sociopaths, what seemed to upset narcissists to no end was how impenatrable a histrionic’s happiness is. At the same time, this insulates the narcissists, because no matter what they do, the histrionic HATES to leave their fairy tale prince to enter the Hell that is reality.
WITCHES: Borderline Personality Disorder
When I was a child watching Dark Shadows, I adored the witch Angelique so much that I wrote to the actress and told her that it was unfair how hated her character was. (She sent me a signed photo).
As a teenager in the 90s, The Craft was all the rage. It resonated deeply with me, and my FP and I would walk through the hallway as the bullies would taunt, “Don’t they look like those witches from The Craft?” We decided to dress like them for Halloween.
The movie details four girls in high school who are all bullied and oppressed in some way. They’re considered “freaks” or “outcasts” and they eventually use their powers to enact justice upon those who harmed them, from stepfathers who raped them to school bullies who taunt them.
All people with BPD go through lifelong scapegoat abuse. The witch is the figure of the powerful scapegoat, who can use their power for good or evil, because they have justified reasons to seek vengeance or magical protection.
Borderlines are deemed scapegoat at birth by narcissist parents, so we exist as a place for our parents to project their shame. As we wander out into the world, we’ve been groomed for abuse by our parents, and we’re vulnerable, sensitive, and people pleasing.
We’re shark’s chum to narcissists, especially CHILD narcissists. The child narcissists are school bullies, and they target us like our parents do. In adulthood, we experience this from narcissists in our jobs and in our friendships and in our lovers as we trauma bond and seek love and approval from narcissists, the thing we never got in our childhood.
Another element of BPD that’s frequently mentioned in case studies and scholarly literature is our LUCID DREAMING and PREDICTIVE DREAMS.
My dreams are so heavily symbolic and predictive, whether they happen when I’m awake and meditating or asleep, that I considered for a time if I was psychic. I discovered things like affairs my partners were having or how to escape a sociopath’s attack all through dreams. I’ve also had a couple of occurrences, starting in childhood, in which I’ve seen ghosts and they’ve told me things that shocked those around me when I reported them to others.
Then I started leaning in to spirituality. I created an altar and began doing rituals.
AND THEY WORKED.
EVERY. TIME.
They worked so well that narcissists who knew my spirituality, like my stalker did, acted in fear towards me, recognizing my empathy as a sort of supernatural power. My stalker FLINCHED when I tried to read his tarot, exclaiming, “NO. That shit is REAL.”
Narcissists hate empaths because when an empath can see beyond the mask into their true pain, they feel vulnerable, small, powerlesss, and exposed. (Like the little man behind the curtain in The Wizard of Oz). This is why they frequently mask as empaths (they want that power) or why they gaslight that empathy isn’t real or that people with BPD are crazy. (This is projection: NPD is a mental illness and their empathy isn’t real — it’s a cognitive performance, not emotional).
Emotional empathy makes abuse feel revolting and prevents us from harming our own kind, because we’re a social species that needs each other to survive.
Empathy, and their own lack of that ability, make them more fearful than anything else.
This is why the battle between an empath and a sociopath is so epic, just as vampires and witches are powerful foes in all our monster mythology.
Our supernatural tales are chock full of vampires and witches being entangled in complex romances. A Discovery of Witches details a vampire who experiences a craving for a powerful witch, while all the witches try to warn her that vampires are a danger to their kind.
In True Blood, witches are just about the only supernatural creature who can give narcissists a run for their money.
This is true in real life too. No one collapses a narcissist more than a borderline, because when a narcissist loses a borderline, they lose true, unconditional love, which is the most powerful energy force in the world.
It’s also a more rare force, since narcissists have far more golden children than they do scapegoat or invisible children, never wanting to be outnumbered by scapegoats. In tracing the naming pattern in dozens of family trees, it was an average 66% golden/narcissist, 23% invisible/histrionic, and 11% scapegoat/borderline.
This accounts for why true emotional empathy is rare in our world.
(And a real empath is someone who has empathy for even the WORST of people — sociopaths — like our parents. Someone who hates narcissists and sociopaths is not exhibiting empathy. In fact, that’s a sign that the person is a narcissist, because narcissists hate themselves and project that self hate. They also engage in split thinking, in which they see narcissists as “all bad” and they are “all good.” Forever the golden child).
The witch’s true magic comes from their connection to the divine, and the divine is actually just the energy of UNCONDITIONAL LOVE and FORGIVENESS.
We can see nuance. We know no one is all bad or all good.
That’s why literature’s most famous scapegoat and empath — Jesus Christ — ends with a story of crucifixion, resurrection, and forgiveness/mercy.
The scapegoat feels cursed for being ostracized lifelong, but their curse is also their source of magic. Their powerful empathy is born of powerful pain.
Still, narcissists won’t hesitate to burn them at the stake alive in utter terror of love, because vampires are love phobic and envious creatures.
Regardless, desperate people — including narcissists — come to witches for wisdom and healing, just as they flock to empaths when in crisis.
DEMON POSSESSION: Cluster B Disorders in Children
As a teenager, my little sister wanted to know why I was so scared out of my wits over the movie I’d just rented for Halloween, The Exorcist.
So I popped in the VHS and watched her get traumatized the same way I had.
I couldn’t get over the way that movie spooked her. Yes, she was younger than me, but horror stories were a staple in our lives since before we could talk.
Yet, my sister was so spooked that she slept in my bed clinging to me for a month.
She kept saying, “Please, sissy, don’t let the demon get me.”
I held her and said, “It’s just a movie, I promise.”
The terror in her eyes has never left me. Sometimes I feel her ghost of an inner child rattling my ribcage with the full weight of her childhood suffering.
Now I understand, having read several books by people with NPD who detailed that in childhood they recognized that everything people said was “evil” was actually what THEY were.
They didn’t want to be evil. They wanted to be good and perfect.
But they kept doing things compulsively, like stalking, stealing, hurting animals, hurting other children, sexually abusing people…
They couldn’t control their compulsions or understand their trauma, and when they tried to communicate their struggles to adults, they were met with punishments that were often violent, which brought them shame and mental collapses and confusion over their identities.
They were alone in the nightmare of their own death of their soul, and no adult saved them.
No adult exorcised their demon.
Thus, the false self was crafted to protect the mentally ill child inside them who scared people so much that they felt they’d be met with only persecution, not help.
ASPD isn’t diagnosed until 18. Before then, the diagnosis for child sociopaths is ODD — Oppositional Defiance Disorder.
The logic is because they say a personality disorder can’t be determined until adulthood. It’s hogwash, as a personality is lifelong, and all the research shows that cluster b’s have our disorders lifelong. Those with ODD grow up to be some form of cluster b.
But it’s not only ASPD children acting out. NPD, BPD, and HPD children all tend to act out in their childhoods.
I definitely had a good-girl syndrome in many ways, but as I trauma bonded to narcissists, so I found myself bucking authority with them. I’d skip class with them, try drugs with them, have reckless sex with them, shoplift with them, allow them to cheat and give them answers to the test.
My histrionic FP’s also have bonded with me over our turbulent “wild child” pasts.
All cluster b’s could be diagnosed with ODD in childhood.
This is because in childhood, the brain is too vulnerable to process despair. We all do so in the same ways — we enter into the first stage of grief: denial.
Then we cycle through only two stages, unless we awaken in adulthood, rescue our inner child, reparent them, and heal — which VERY few of us do.
Many children of narcissists are adamant that they have NO trauma effects from it and NO personality disorder, but we’re ALL disordered. (If they deny mental health effects or only claim PTSD, then that is a red flag for a narcissist. They’re the ones MOST resistent, because they see mental illness as a shame, and they believe in the delusion of the false self of perfection).
Narcissists will cycle between denial and anger, struggling to suppress their anger. Their anger will manifest in their relationships in a toxic way.
Borderlines will cycle between denial and depression, struggling to suppress or hide our depression. Our depression will take us close to suicide many times, threatening our lives with our compulsive self-harming behavior.
Histrionics will cycle between denial and bargaining, struggling to suppress their fantasies of romance and a happy ending with a narcissist. Their bargaining will keep them trapped in a cycle of lifelong abusive relationships.
As children, we’re locked in the mental hell of our grief over being abandoned by our narcissist parents like a prison.
The grief manifests as a type of demon possession that we can’t control.
It’s a pitchfork chasing us lifelong, reminding us we’ll never have access to heaven; never be perfect, angelic, or good.
It flings us, orphaned, at the feet of evil who we marry and worship as false idols.
ZOMBIES: Narcissists without Self Awareness
In Anne Rice’s vampire chronicles, Louis and Lestat seek out other vampires who know what they are to understand their history and their powers.
They find that there are a good chunk of vampires in the world, but most of them are mindless monsters.
They’re vampires, but somehow they have not a clue that they’re vampires.
They operate as if totally braindead…like zombies.
Tales of zombie apocalypses, like The Walking Dead, are fictionalized reflections that reveal that, deep down, we know damn well that we’re living in a massive MENTAL HEALTH CRISIS.
We can see it in our wars, in corporate greed, in our sociopathic politicians, in climate change, and in forms of evil such as racism and sexism, which are evidence that we are a truly broken species living in fear, lacking a heart, and consuming each other like cannibals.
We’re the only species who kills its own kind, the only species whose offspring are treated with brutality by their parents, not nurturing.
The glue to human bonding is empathy and love.
Without empathy, we die.
And our studies on our loneliness epidemic and psychology will send more chills through you than any horror story.
Without empathy, humans are no more than zombies. They lose the thing that gives us our humanity, that places us at the top of the food chain.
In a world overrun with zombies, we’re tasked to find something worth living for in the daily trauma, and we become skilled warriors against those who wander towards us with their rotted psyches, hungry for our brains.
The zombie apocalypse isn’t some supernatural fantasy: it’s the HERE AND NOW.
Go watch Congress convene and you’ll see a bunch of bloodthirsty, mindless, old zombies that never seem to die — in both parties. We’re already overrun. This generational trauma is already too far gone. This is why most our taxes fund things like genocide: because the zombies are hungry and they’re feeding on human blood and fantasies like money and power — both made up, toxic things.
The stats about the prevalence of cluster b disorders are a massive gaslight. It’s MUCH more prevalent than we admit, because we’re a culture operating in denial.
GHOSTS: All of us
You haven’t recognized that you’re living in the afterlife yet?
You don’t remember dying in your childhood with YOUR abusive parents?
You don’t know you’re wandering in denial, reliving the story that killed you again and again with the same ending every time?
Why else would you be reading about this topic?
All my readers are the living dead.
You haven’t realized the monsters aren’t myths yet?
You haven’t tapped into your own supernatural longings and wanderings?
You haven’t found your own grave?
You don’t recognize purgatory?
You can escape it, but you have to learn certain lessons, reject the false idols, and find your way to the light.
Are you brave enough for that or are you going to stay in denial and pretend we’re all alive and human here?
Come now, be honest: what monster are YOU?
My memoir, This is a Story About Ghosts: A Memoir of Borderline Personality Disorder, is now available on Amazon.
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For individual coaching to recover from narcissistic abuse, BPD, or sexual assault, visit https://am-champion.com
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Anne Champion is the author of 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, and a Barbara Deming Memorial Grant recipient. She has degrees in Behavioral Psychology and Creative Writing.