Control by Temper Tantrum

Let's pretend you're a steer and I'm a cowboy. I am peaceable enough when you're doing what I want. That is, mainly, when your behavior is in the direction I want. Due north, toward Kansas.

But when you get out of line, I throw a temper tantrum. That is, I ride my big horse at you, waving that big, attention-getting thing (otherwise on my head) at you, yipping and yelling and making other loud, sharp, threatening noises and whistles at you. I may even brandish my lasso at you. If necessary, I will cut you off. But usually that isn't necessary, because the moment you see me start to act up, you just veer back into the right direction. Due north, toward Kansas.

The fancy name for that trick is "behavior modification," through "negative reinforcement."

It's what you housebreak your puppy with. It works like this: if Puppy does something other than what is wanted, make him miserable. You know, loud noises, scowls, nasty tone, antic and threatening gestures — a temper tantrum. Just make his whole little world totally obnoxious.

When, by chance, he happens to do what you want, give "positive reinforcement" by making his existence pure bliss.

Wouldn't you give in and develop a preference for pooping and piddling outside?

Here's another example, when training Mamma, point at a candy bar in the grocery store. The moment she starts to say "No" erupt into screaming and bawling as loud as you can so Mamma fears that everyone in the store thinks she's beating you.





Then the instant she hands you that candy bar, break off mid-"WAAAAAH!" and burst into the biggest, cutest, sweetest smile she ever saw.

She may be slow, but she'll learn.

Note that the temper tantrum in each case is a put-on. Yes, Cowboy may be a little ticked off at Steer, and you may be a little ticked off at Puppy, but not that ticked off. Your act is just a grossly exaggerated and menacing display of displeasure that unnerves the object and makes him anxious to turn it off and avoid triggering future replays.

Even a spoiled three-year-old child's temper tantrums are put-ons. For, they occur exactly as I described the one above. The spoiled brat switches the temper tantrum on and off in the blink of an eye, with no warm up or cool down. Which means that he isn't that upset over the candy bar: he's just mask switching.


He uses the temper tantrum as a stick to regulate Mother's behavior. The sweet, adorable smile he breaks into when she conforms to his specifications is just a carrot (positive reinforcement) to reward her for being a good Mommy by doing what he wants.

Even infants catch on! They sometimes throw a temper tantrum, not because they're suffering with hunger or a soiled diaper or for any other conceivable reason. They just do it to get attention:

I do not remember my first lie, it is too far back; but I remember my second one very well. I was nine days old at the time, and had noticed that if a pin was sticking in me and I advertised it in the usual fashion, I was lovingly petted and coddled and pitied in a most agreeable way and got a ration between meals besides. It was human nature to want to get these riches, and I fell. I lied about the pin — advertising one when there wasn't any. You would have done it; George Washington did it, anyone would have done it. During the first half of my life I never knew a child that was able to rise above that temptation and keep from telling that lie.

— Mark Twain

This may be hard to hear, but your narcissist is controlling you with a device no more sophisticated than the good old temper tantrum.

Throwing temper tantrums to manipulate your behavior is but an aspect of narcissists doing everything for effect, an aspect of them going through life playing to mirrors so as to get the wanted looks and behaviors in reaction. In other words, remember that this is what he's doing the whole time...

You get the temper tantrum the moment you aren't doing that, the moment you aren't playing along with his game of 'Pretend.' In it he is God. He is the center of your universe as well of his own. You are to be in awe of him, to admire him, to see to it that the King lacks nothing he needs or wants, and to change his diaper regularly.

Since all narcissists do 24/7 is play Pretend, and all they want is for you to play along, they never needed to mature and find other ways to interact with people. So, they just use . . . and use . . . and use . . . and use the temper-tantrum technique. The moment you stray from his script, he raises an obnoxious ruckus.

You know what he wants. If not, keep trying things, like you do with a baby, until you hit on the right thing and the ruckus stops. This is extortion. Give him what he wants, or he won't let you have any peace.

One thing that will push a narcissist's temper-tantrum button for sure is objecting to their abuse. You mustn't do that. You must docilely submit to abuse from God Almighty. In fact, it isn't abuse for God Almighty to treat you like dirt, because that's what you are relative to God Almighty, so quit insulting him by expecting him to treat you as an equal.

By Kathy Krajco

You Are Not the Cause of Anger or Abuse

You Are Not the Cause of Your Partner’s Anger or Abuse. Anger and abuse in relationships are about blame: "I feel bad, and it's your fault." Even when resentful, angry, or emotionally abusive people recognize their behavior, they are likely to blame it on their partners: "You push my buttons," or, "I might have overreacted, but I'm human, and look what you did!"

Angry and abusive partners tend to be anxious by temperament. From the time they were young children, they've had a consistent sense of dread that things will go badly and they will fail to cope. They try to control their environment to avoid terrible feelings of failure and inadequacy. The strategy of trying to control others fails even if they are powerful, for the simple reason that the primary cause of their anxiety is within them, not in their environment. It springs from one of two sources: a heavy dread of failure or fear of harm, isolation, and deprivation.




The Silent Abuser

Not all emotional abuse involves shouting or criticism. More common forms are “disengaging” – the distracted or preoccupied spouse - or "stonewalling" – the spouse who refuses to accept anyone else’s perspective.

While verbal abuse and other forms of emotional abuse can be roughly equal between men and women, stonewallers are almost exclusively male. Biology and social conditioning make it is easier for men to turn off emotions. The corpus callosum – the part of the brain that connects its two hemispheres is smaller in men, making it easier for them to shut out information from the emotionally-oriented right hemisphere. On top of that slight biological difference, social conditioning promotes the analytical, unemotional male on the one hand or the strong silent type on the other.

The partner who stonewalls may not overtly put you down. Nevertheless, he punishes you for disagreeing with him by refusing even to think about your perspective. If he listens at all, he does so dismissively or impatiently.

The disengaging husband says, "Do whatever you want, just leave me alone." He is often a workaholic, couch potato, womanizer, or obsessive about sports or some other activity. He tries to deal with his inadequacy about relationships by simply by not trying – no attempt means no failure.

Both stonewalling and disengaging tactics can make you feel:

Unseen and unheard

Unattractive

Like you don't count

Like a single parent

What All Forms of Abuse Have in Common. Whether overt or silent, all forms of abuse result from failures of compassion; he/she stops caring about how you feel.

Compassion is the lifeblood of marriage; failure of compassion is its heart disease.

It would be less hurtful if your partner never cared about how you felt. But when you were falling in love, he/she cared a great deal. So now it feels like betrayal when he or she doesn't care or try to understand. That’s not the person you married. Failure of compassion can feel like abuse.

Harmful Adaptations to Anger and Abuse: Walking on Eggshells The most insidious aspect of abuse is not the obvious nervous reactions to shouting, name-calling, criticism or other demeaning behavior. It's the adaptations you make to try to prevent those painful episodes. You walk on eggshells to keep the peace or a semblance of connection. Women are especially vulnerable to the negative effects of walking on eggshells due to their greater vulnerability to anxiety. Many brave women engage in constant self-editing and self-criticism to keep from "pushing his buttons." Emotionally abused women can second guess themselves so much that they feel as though they have lost themselves in a deep hole.


Recovery from walking on eggshells requires removing focus from repair of your relationship and your partner and placing it squarely on your personal healing. The good news is that the most powerful form of healing comes from within you. You can draw on your great inner resources by reintegrating your deepest values into your everyday sense of self. This will make you feel more valuable, confident, and powerful, regardless of what your partner does.


No One Escapes the Effects of Abuse


Families do not communicate primarily by language. That might surprise you, until you consider that humans bonded in families for millennia before we even had language. Even today, the most sensitive communications that have the most far-reaching consequences to our lives occur between parents and infants through tone of voice, facial expressions, touch, smell, and body posture, not language.

Though less obvious than interactions with young children, most of your communications with your older children and with your husband also occur through an unconscious process of emotional attunement. You psychologically and even physically tune in your emotions to the people you love. That’s how you can come home in one mood, find your husband or children in a different mood and, bam! – all of a sudden, out of nowhere, you’re in their mood. Quite unconsciously, you automatically react to one another.

Emotional attunement, not verbal skills, determines how we communicate, from our choice of words to our tone of voice. If attuned to a positive mood, you are likely to communicate pleasantly. If you’re in a negative mood, your words will be less than pleasant.

Now here’s the really bad news. Due to this unconscious, automatic process of emotional attunement, your children are painfully reactive to the walking-on-eggshells atmosphere between your husband and you, even if they never hear you say a harsh word to one another.

Everyone in a walking-on-eggshells family loses some degree of dignity and autonomy. You become unable to decide your own thoughts, feelings, and behavior, because you are living in a defensive-reactive pattern that runs largely on automatic pilot. No fewer than half the members of these unfortunate families, including the children, suffer from clinical anxiety and/or depression. (“Clinical” doesn’t mean feeling down or blue or worried, it means that the symptoms interfere with normal functioning. You can’t sleep, can’t concentrate, can’t work as efficiently, and can’t enjoy yourself without drinking.) Most of the adults lack genuine self-esteem (based on realistic self-appraisals), and the children rarely feel as good as other kids.
When it comes to the more severe forms of destructiveness, purely emotional abuse is usually more psychologically harmful than physical abuse. There are a couple of reasons for this. Even in the most violent families, the incidents tend to be cyclical. Early in the abuse cycle, a violent outburst is followed by a honeymoon period of remorse, attention, affection, and generosity, but not genuine compassion. (The honeymoon stage eventually ends, as the victim begins to say, “Never mind the damn flowers, just stop hitting me!”) Emotional abuse, on the other hand, tends to happen every day. So the effects are more harmful because they’re so frequent.



The other factor that makes emotional abuse so devastating is the greater likelihood that victims will blame themselves. If someone hits you, it’s easier to see that he or she is the problem, but if the abuse is subtle – saying or implying that you’re ugly, a bad parent, stupid, incompetent, not worth attention, or that no one could love you – you are more likely to think it’s your problem.


Important questions to ask of yourself:

Do I like myself?

Am I able to realize my potential?

Does everyone I care about feel safe?

Do my children like themselves?

Are they able to realize their fullest potential?

Do they feel safe?



Source- Oprah Website

Witholding - The Psychopath/Narcissist As A Spoiled Brat.

By not giving you what the narcissist knows you want, he can make himself feel important. This is called "With holding" for example: A child can be bored with a toy and about to put it down when he notices that some other child wants it, then he plays "Keep away" by keeping the toy to himself even though he is bored of it or finished playing with it.


If the other child happens to plead for it, he just becomes more and more determined to keep the toy away, clutching it tightly to himself and yelling "NO"








The narcissist is a fully grown person but every bit the three-year-old, and not a sweet one either.


This stunt is a power play too, of course. For example: When someone says "Will you...?" or "Can I..?" the first thing out of his mouth is "You'll have to wait". However long you can wait, the narcissist will make you wait longer or they will often make you beg or grovel for what you want also.


When the narcissist sees your eyes light up on something you want, they look at it and see nothing but a stick to use a leverage on you. God Almighty wants to make you pray to him for it.



Narcissists do this with every aspect of your needs or wants. These can be your sexual needs/wants, money, attention, conversation etc


If a narcissist finds out what you like , he is sure to take it away from you. For Example: You tell the narcissist you love going to the movies, from that point on you notice you never go to the movies together again.


Why does he do this? Because he wants the whole world to revolve around him and his wants and needs. He doesn't give a flying fig about yours.


Many victims of narcissists have told me that the narcissist would ask them what they wanted for a birthday/christmas present and to write out a list, on the special day in question the victim found that absolutely nothing she asked for on the list was chosen. In fact some victims have been given as a gift something the narcissist knew she didn't want.


Sometimes he punishes by withholding what he knows his partner wants most, affection, attention, companionship, children, sex, money, his presence, whatever will cause her the most distress. Sometimes his reaction to criticism or whatever else he is punishing is so extreme that his partner never dares do it again and tiptoes around his delicate ego.


These sadistic acts are his way of punishing them for not being docile, obedient, admiring and adoring as he expects them to be in view of his uniqueness, cosmic significance and special entitlement.


Withholding (the silent treatment), countering (refuting or invalidating the spouse's statements or actions), discounting (putting down her emotions, possessions, experiences, hopes, and fears), sadistic and brutal humor, blocking (avoiding a meaningful exchange, diverting the conversation, changing the subject), blaming and accusing, judging and criticizing, undermining and sabotaging, threatening, name calling, forgetting and denying, ordering around, denial, and abusive anger.


During periods of frustration which are brought about as a result of their needs not being met narcissistic people will certainly make you aware of your inability to meet these needs. Such as with holding or the "silent treatment" , sulking, discussing things they know upset you or behaving in ways they know you find hurtful regardless of whether or not they are related to the frustration he thinks you have "caused"


If their frustration stems from their own inability to meet their wants and needs e.g. not getting a promotion, losing at sport, receiving criticism for work they have done etc. the frustration is usually transferred onto the people they interact with (often their nearest and dearest)


The Narcissist can with hold anything he wishes. Like Gareth Rodger did, he can use the silent treatment, switch his phone off , refuse to talk , then blame shift or project this back onto me and leave me with the guilty feelings.


He wants you to take what he offers and be satisfied with it even if it isn't what you asked for or is inappropriate. In other words: He will give you a gift he knows you hate but expects you to praise and adore him despite this fact.


It all amounts again to ..self, self self with the narcissist.


You can try with holding your (the victim) own attention, physical closeness and gifts, but playing and stooping to the narcissists level just to "teach him a short lived lesson" or "A short lived lesson he will ignore anyway, then punish you for inflicting upon him" is a bad idea.


Or you could try and show no interest in things you really are interested in, you can bet your bottom dollar the narcissist will then give you the things you want, but it's a backwards-ass way of doing things and why should you tolerate it!


Kick the dirty dog to the kerb where he belongs and never look back. The only way to get away from the narcissist is to abandon him.


Parts of this article were taken in part from Kathy Krajco