Parasite and the Boogeyman (eBook)

Jen Kovacs Burkett (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2025 | 1. Auflage
532 Seiten
Bookbaby (Verlag)
979-8-3509-9299-1 (ISBN)

Infos

An abused child spends her days searching for love, acceptance, and safety wherever she can find it. After finding it in every corner of her world, she spends her adult life fighting to be better than the person she was raised to be.

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An abused child spends her days searching for love, acceptance, and safety wherever she can find it. After finding it in every corner of her world, she spends her adult life fighting to be better than the person she was raised to be. This memoir details the author's life as she grows up as the scapegoat in a narcissistic family, the experiences she has when she encounters other narcissists who cause her harm, and the ways she works to overcome her trauma.

Textauszug

Chapter 2: The Scapegoat

 

 

There is no one person who is definitively credited with coining the term “family scapegoat.” Sociologists tend to credit Emile Durkheim with discovering and bringing awareness to the role. In the present day, leading experts in the field of narcissism, narcissistic abuse, and narcissistic systems include Dr. Ramani Durvasula and Dr. Jay Reid. If this were an academic paper, this whole chapter would be citation after citation of their work throughout the years. However, it’s not. It’s my dumb little memoir. So just trust me here, I did my homework.

In a narcissistic family system, there is at least one narcissistic parent. However, it is possible to exist in a double narcissistic parent household. Dr. Jay Reid, a psychotherapist and expert in this narcissistic family system, likens being the family scapegoat to being “saddled with all of the narcissistic parent’s problems and sent into exile.” However, he says, the only way for the scapegoat of the family to survive is to have a bond with their parent or caregiver. This is essential to survival. Therefore, the family scapegoat must internalize beliefs such as:

“If I’m not being productive then I’m worthless.”

“I don’t deserve protection.”

“I am defective.”

“I am unattractive.”

I internalized all of these statements because it was the only thing I could do to be somebody to someone. I was the scapegoat for a malignant narcissist mother and a grandiose narcissist father. My older siblings formed an alliance against me when I was six years old and maintained it into their twenties. But the benefit of being so young when I internalized these beliefs was that I knew I had the rest of my life in front of me. I knew my life could begin at eighteen when I would be legally allowed to make my own decisions.

In the meantime, I searched for the blueprints of the person I wanted to be. I read the Harry Potter series on a continuous loop, “playing” a different character in my head each time. I received the advice my parents should have given me through television shows like Full House, Lizzie McGuire, and Boy Meets World. I found feminist inspiration through the girl power movies of my youth like Cadet Kelly, Legally Blonde, and Mulan. I learned to navigate the world as the quirky, intelligent, independent woman that I was destined to be by watching Gilmore Girls, but more on that later. Let’s talk about these goddamn narcissists.

Not every single narcissist is a bad person. However, narcissism is strongly linked through clear and consistent research to all forms of violence and aggression. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition (DSM-V) says, “The essential features of a personality disorder are impairments in self and interpersonal functioning and the presence of pathological personality traits.” A narcissist, a person with a narcissistic personality disorder, is defined by the following patterns of behavior over a period of time:

Grandiosity or inflated sense of self-worth.

Lack of or low empathy.

Excessive need for admiration.

Poor sense of self and self-esteem.

Exploitative of others.

Grandiosity is one of the most common traits that people attribute to narcissism. The wealthy businessman bragging about the cost of his car. The PTA mother throwing lavish children’s parties to best the other parents. The church pastor or social services worker that uses their altruistic career to hide their true nature.

On the flip side of grandiosity is the vulnerable or covert narcissist. The narcissist who is sullen and pathologically envious. The involuntary celibate internet troll. The chronically single woman who believes they are owed admiration and lavish dates from men simply because they are beautiful. The underlying characteristic of this behavior pattern is an over-inflated sense of self-worth. Either the world owes them admiration because of how great they are, or the world owes them admiration because they have had their struggles.

A lack of empathy is one of the key features of narcissism. It is both what defines it and what makes it so dangerous. A misnomer about this lack of empathy is that narcissists do not know how people are feeling. On the contrary, narcissists tend to score higher than average in cognitive empathy.

Cognitive empathy, simply put, is the ability to understand what another person is feeling. Emotional empathy, on the other hand, is the ability to put yourself in another person’s shoes and feel what they are feeling. It is the ability to connect to another person, to attempt to understand their perspective. It is an emotional response. Cognitive empathy is an intellectualization of the human experience. Emotional empathy is the human experience. It is our soul.

The excessive need for admiration is not exclusive to the narcissist. It goes hand in hand with the excessive need for external validation. All humans, to a degree, need external validation and admiration. It is in our nature to seek human connection and to be comforted by others. For the narcissist, their inner world is tormented by a poor sense of self. In turn, they overly rely on defense mechanisms to avoid self-reflection.

These defense mechanisms include projection, gaslighting, arrogance, aggression, blame-shifting, and manipulation. Throughout my story, you’ll see these narcissistic defenses woven in and out of relationships. Not every person who uses these defense mechanisms is a narcissist, but every single narcissist uses these defenses.

What makes a narcissistic personality most dangerous is its inclination to exploit others for personal gain and feel no remorse about it. Like autism, narcissism exists on a spectrum. On the far end of the spectrum is what some people call a “healthy narcissist.” In simplest terms, this is a narcissist who has learned empathy and has the ability to form true social connections.

On the other end of the spectrum is malignant narcissism. As Dr. Ramani says, this is one stop away from full-blown psychopathy. Malignant narcissism has what is called the dark tetrad. It is the combination of narcissism, Machiavellianism, and sadism. Of course, there are malignant narcissists who have comorbidities with sociopathy and/or psychopathy.

Take my mother, for example. Peggy Kovacs is a goddamn psychopath and a goddamn malignant narcissist. Everyone who has met her knows that. They didn’t know that was the word for it, but they knew there was something … off about her. Much more on that later. Believe me.

Narcissism runs deeper than just being a personality disorder. The problem with narcissism is that it is everywhere—in our friend groups, our schools, our fraternities, our universities, our workplaces, and our non-profits. A much less paranoid person than me would also say that it’s in our governments. At face value, claiming that the government is run by a bunch of evil soulless narcissists would get you involuntarily committed to a mental hospital for a week and diagnosed with delusions of grandeur. Just trust me on this one.

Non-profit organizations, start-up companies, universities, local and state government offices, fraternities, sororities, and even marching bands. All of these are organizations where communal narcissists thrive. The brute force psychopath is easy to spot, but the most sinister kind of narcissist is the one who uses relational aggression, control, and manipulation. They are the coworker who spreads workplace gossip to undermine your career. The boss who steals your ideas and passes them off as their own. The classmate who takes their volunteer leadership position too seriously.

Once an organization is infected with narcissism, it becomes embedded in the bones of the system. It continues cycles of narcissism even when the original narcissist is long gone. If you’re ever trying to figure out if the company you work for or the fun workout class you spend your free time doing is a narcissistic system, ask yourself this question: Does this feel a little “culty” or is it just me?

As with a narcissistic family system, every group of narcissists needs a scapegoat. In simplest terms, a scapegoat is a person or group made to take on the blame of others. In interpersonal and sociological terms, the scapegoat is the person or group that is made to bear the blame or take the punishment in place of another. In Leviticus, a goat is released into the woods, metaphorically carrying away the sins of the people from the community.

In practice, a scapegoat or scapegoats can be found in families, social clubs, non-profit or charity organizations, workplaces, etc. They are the oldest sibling who is punished for every transgression while the younger siblings can do no wrong, the middle managers caught between disgruntled employees and executives, or a specific ethnic group or race that is blamed for a country’s economic downturn.

  Phillip Zimbardo (yeah, the Stanford prison guy) defines evil as the exercise of power in his 2007 book The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil. He emphasizes that that is the key—power and control. Erich Fromm argued all the way back in 1964 that malignant narcissism is the “quintessence of human evil” and “the root of the most vicious destructiveness and inhumanity.”

Moving forward, I’m just going to ask you to remember that I was raised by narcissists and a psychopath. Everything from here on out makes so much more sense in that context. I was the family...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 13.2.2025
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Literatur ► Biografien / Erfahrungsberichte
• ISBN-13: 979-8-3509-9299-1 / 9798350992991