Is Rachel Dolezal a Narcissist?

You know how it goes...once you've learned to identify something, you see them everywhere.  For instance, once I saw one bluejay in the park, I started seeing them every day I went to the park.  It's just being alert to their existence.  Now, I am aware of narcissists, I have read up on their traits...but, still, I am not a psychologist or a therapist.  Soooo, no, I don't know whether Rachel Dolezal is a narcissist or not.  But, she seems to have some traits.

1) Biggest trait of all: she cannot admit she is wrong.  The whole world knows that she is not African-American by birth (even if some are befuddled by her BS about being transracial).  Yet, she is fine going on national television and declaring that there is no proof that Lawrence and Ruthanne Dolezal are her biological parents.  In other words, she is so determined to be right that she is willing to disclaim her own parents on national tv.

2) She co-opts the pain of others.  Obviously, she co-opted the pain of black Americans.  She co-opted their pain, then she became an authority.  When she was outed, she then co-opted the language and the suffering of the transgender community.  That bit where Dolezal claimed that she draw herself black as a child: children who identify as the opposite sex do this.  Or how she talked about being isolated, alone, and thought she would one day be able to become her self-proclaimed identity in public: again, from the transgender community.  The part that really got to me was when she came near crocodile tears saying she finally read about Caitlyn Jenner.

3) Acting a role.  Not the race role, but the "poor me" role.  It's too convenient.  Dolezal waits as long as she can before she says anything about her race.  It's as though she waited for as many think pieces and articles to come, then read all the ones that were sympathetic, and then coalesced the language into a PR role for herself.

4) Drama queen.  The appropriate place for Dolezal to first talk about the situation after her parents showed her birth certificate would be with the NAACP.  In fact, she cited the NAACP as the reason why she was waiting to do interviews.  Yet, when Dolezal resigned from the NAACP, she did not explain why she had disguised herself as a black person during the time she was president for the Spokane chapter.  The very people to whom she owed an explanation did not receive one.  Instead, she preferred the larger stage of national tv.

5) Using people.  Her parents are dropped because they are inconveniently black.  The adopted brother who is complaint is used as her oldest "son".  The other adopted brothers who don't want to play along are told to keep their mouths shut.  An elderly, affable black friend becomes her "father", to be posted as such on Facebook.  Does she genuinely care about any of them, or are they all to be used as props to her story?

6) Insinuating blame on others.  During one of her national tv interviews, Dolezal said how her parents did what they did because it would make her life inconvenient.  In truth, the reason why this all happened was because Dolezal might have fabricated a hate crime.  The Spokane media got in touch with Lawrence and Ruthanne Dolezal as part of their investigation into the hate crime story.  But, of course, it's now convenient for Rachel Dolezal to blame her parents rather than seeing how making up crimes for one's own personal gain can have unintended consequences.

7) Lies.  Can we even count how many have been uttered by this woman?  Race is the tip of the iceberg.  She lied about her father not once, but at least twice.  She lied about her oldest "son".  She lied about being whipped as a child.  She lied about being born in a teepee.  She lied about living in South Africa.  She most likely lied about hate crimes.  She lied about her hair.  She deserves not to be believed.        

Family

I am currently addicted to a Korean drama called Dandelion Family.  One of the main characters is a woman married to a man with Narcissistic Personality Disorder.  The husband can well be said to be malignant.  He needs to control every single aspect of his wife's life: her weight, finances, daily movements, what she wears, the food she eats.  Of course, the control happens behind closed doors.  To her family, he is the perfect husband, an amazing son-in-law, a phenomenal brother-in-law.  Even while her every move is being controlled, the wife is uncertain about why she is unhappy because she cannot take apart her husband's machinations.  Finally, he stands revealed for what he is when she discovers he had a vasectomy without her knowledge.  During the eight years they were married, she desperately wanted a child.  When she tells her parents about her husband's betrayal and asks for their help in leaving him, the husband turns the table on her by insinuating to each family member that his wife has been having an affair, that he still loved her, that he would forgive her and take her back.  (If you choose to watch this drama, please do so with caution, particularly if you are suffering from any trauma in the aftermath of a relationship with a narcissist.  I found the husband so believable and creepy that it was hard to watch.)  The wife's family begins to believe the husband and encourage her to return to her husband.

I bring up my tv-watching to talk about the complicated scenario one might face in going No Contact with a sibling.  When I started having serious and continuous arguments with my sister (the multiple phone calls and emails sent to me at work cursing me out), I never sought to place my parents in the middle.  However, my sister thought otherwise.  She immediately called our mother and told her that I was treating her unfairly, that I was angry at her for no reason whatsoever.  When my mother called me, I gave her specific instances of what my sister had done: yelling at me in a bar because she thought she should dictate who I was dating; yelling at me in the street merely because I happened to fall out of step with her on the sidewalk; calling me at work to tell me I needed to quit my job immediately and get a job in an industry that she, my sister, approved of.  My mother then asked me if I couldn't apologize to my sister.  I asked my mother why I should apologize when I hadn't done anything wrong.  She answered that because I was the more compliant one, that my sister was the strong-willed one.

As the problems continued through many years, my mother eventually stopped urging me to reconcile with my sister.  Perhaps the urgency of the situation became clearer when I told her to never give out my address to my sister, that if any harm ever came it me, it would most likely be from my sister.  This is my perspective, but from my sister's side, she still urges my parents to act as mediators.  She still insists that she did no wrong.  She tells our parents she apologized ("I am sorry even though I don't know what I did wrong") but that I refused to accept the apology.  To my mother's credit, she now tells my sister: "What can I do?  You are both adults with families of your own.  Just worry about that."

My mother's neutral answer angers my sister.  My sister has written multiple times on her blog about how "weak" our parents are, how "disgusted" she is with them.  When I first read such posts about my parents, I found myself crying for my parents, sad that they were being publicly derided by my sister for no reason than for not agreeing to abide by her wishes.

After reading my sister's blog post about our parents, I lessened my tone with my parents where my sister is concerned.  I don't ask them to take sides.  I just ask them to not share any of my personal information (address, work location).  I request that they not involve themselves in my problems with my sister.  I think, too, how difficult it would be if my parents had to take sides with one or the other of their daughters.  Inasmuch as possible, I want to spare them that pain.

I also know now that they can never see my sister the way I see her.  To them, she is a dutiful, good daughter.  She has had many years of practicing image-management whereas I rarely prioritized my image.  I always tried to behave sincerely and honestly.  I do not want to change my values and lower myself to my sister's standards and appear more than I am.  I once thought my parents would someday see the pain my sister caused me, and perhaps it is disappointing to not have justice in that regards.  But I'd rather compromise with them than do what my sister did on her blog.  Therefore, I am now content to have a reasonably good relationship with them on other grounds.
      

I am Not a Saint: Some Thoughts on Forgiveness

Just a few minutes ago, I stumbled across a forum about siblings with narcissist sisters in which some of the posters wrote about working on forgiveness.  I do not forgive.

Why?  Because I do not feel forgiveness in my heart.  In my heart, I feel aggrieved and wronged.  Intellectually, I know I was emotionally abused and that the abuser still writes on her blog about how she did right and I did wrong.  

I have read about forgiveness as being a way to move on, but for me to forgive, I would have to manipulate my emotions and expend a great deal of energy to make them submit.  It would be the opposite of moving on.  

Narcissistic Personality Disorder is a mental illness but it does not mean that the narcissist does not know what she is doing.  There are clear choices my sister made in our relationship.  I move on in knowing that she chooses her self-image over me.  I grieve for the loss of my sister but I rejoice in regaining myself.  It is the self I lost a decade ago when I went to live with my sister, at her invitation, and allowed my every action to be under her control.  This self is valuable, it is precious to me.  Becoming familiar with that self again helps me move on.  

I am not perfect -- I can live with that.  I admit that I am not one of those saints of old who forgave their aggressors even while they were being drawn and quartered, pierced by arrows, broken on the wheel and whatnot.  I give myself permission to not forgive the sister who has not acknowledged her wrongs to me.  I give myself permission to prioritize myself before familial harmony.  I give myself permission to be angry at my sister.             

The Narcissist in Your Head, Part 1

No, I don't mean that you are a narcissist.  But chances are that if you have been abused by a narcissist, an internal loop will keep playing the insults, threats, and insinuations...even for years afterwards.  This is the way it's been for me.  For close to a decade, I reread emails between my sister and me, looking for some logic, some turning point to which I could return and correct our relationship.  I tried to see it the way she said the disconnect happened, that she was well intentioned, that our relationship was important to her.

There were emails in which she wrote, "I am sorry.  I don't know what I did so wrong that you are treating me wrong but let's forget it."  Or the email in which she wrote about how her son would grow up never knowing me and that she regretted that I had only met her husband a couple of times.  Those emails worked to some degree.  I felt guilty: it was as though some one had grabbed me in the guts and were twisting my insides.

What I couldn't understand though was why she insisted she didn't know what she had done wrong.  She had once tried to have our parents put me in a mental institute.  During a period when she kept calling me at work and emailing me vitriolic curses, I asked her to stop because her harassment was causing me to hyperventilate.  The next day, my mother called me, sounding very concerned.  She said that my sister had rang her, saying that I told her I was going to commit suicide and that I needed to be hospitalized to prevent me from harming myself.  Fortunately, my mother believed me when I told her I said no such thing.  As I once wrote in an email to my sister, this is a wrong she did me.

The other part I kept thinking about when I read her email in later years is how she always mentioned her family, her children and her husband -- that I was missing out on being part of her life.  Never once did she ask about my life, about my husband.

So, why did I keep hearing her in my head?  I think it's because it took me a long time to unravel what she was saying.  She always couched her words in terms of our family, of her good intentions.  I am the type to overthink things.  I try to be conscientious, even if I don't always succeed.  She knew her target.

Most likely you are reading this because you also have (or had) a narcissist in your life.  Recognition of the person's illness is the start of letting go of these words.  Once it started to dawn on me what ailed my sister, it was as though my perception of our relationship had shifted, as though I was seeing our past interactions through a different-colored filter.  I understood that my sister never asked about my life, my husband, or anything about me because my value to her was as a spectator to her life.  I saw that my sister decided to deny any wrong-doing on her part because it conflicted with how she viewed herself: perfect.  This idealized sense of herself is more important to her than our relationship.

It is only two months since I started to think my sister was on the far end of the narcissist spectrum.  There are still days when I hear my sister in my head but they are less now.  Many things that have been missing in my life have returned to me: my sense of valuing the present moment; enjoyment in the small things of life such as taking walks, reading novels, cooking; the ability to concentrate; and most important of all, slowly, I am working on my regaining my confidence.  

To Begin

Recently, I realized that I am most likely the younger sister of a woman suffering from Narcissistic Personality Disorder.  I've been estranged from my older sister for close to a decade now.  The decision to sever contact with her was not an easy one.  There were times in our lives when we were tight, shared good moments, and laughed together.  I came to a crux in our relationship when my sister insisted that she had the right to dictate who I chose for my boyfriend, a job, and whether I could continue to write creatively or not.  When I replied that I was an autonomous being, she emailed me that I had hurt her feelings by insinuating that she did not allow me a free existence.  She followed up with multiple emails and phone calls, sometimes fourteen emails and phone calls to me at work, each following upon another loudly insisting an immediate response.  This behavior culminated with a threat to stalk me.  She acted upon this threat by showing up at my work place under an assumed name.  

In hindsight, I see how fortunate I was to move to another city.  Yet, my physical distance has not deterred my sister from her behavior.  I do not respond to her emails or phone messages.  She has let me know her displeasure by portraying me on her blog as a cold sister who has estranged her for no good reason.  Herself -- she was the loving sister who did everything for me, without reward or recognition.  Her readers believed her and commented on what an awful sister I must be.  For that, she thanked them.  For years, I felt demoralized and humiliated by what she wrote about me publicly.  It took me a long time to discover the disorder by which my sister has ruled her life.  

This blog is not a revenge blog, although it will most likely have bitter posts.  There will undoubtedly be moments when I will be unable to reflect but will rant and rave with anger.  But I hope that such posts will be interwoven with genuine resources.  Since coming to consider my sister a narcissist, I have spent quite a bit of time looking at other websites, blogs, forums and resources.  In general, most of these resources are dedicated to children of narcissists and those involved in romantic relationships.  If this blog can affirm the experiences of other siblings who have been emotionally or physically abused by their brother or sister, I will have contributed something worthwhile.  

About the user name: I had considered Echo first but it seemed too defeated.  Instead, I chose Athena, a Greek goddess known for so many of the better things in life.  May you too find these better things in life as you journey out of whatever mire and confusion that you might have suffered in the hands of a narcissist.