“We are getting divorced and you need to decide who you want to live with”.

This was the opening statement from my father during a “family meeting”. My three siblings immediately said they wanted to go with him. I have no idea what I said. By this age (early tween) I was an expert at disassociation and repression, both of which sprang into action. What I remember about this day was the sofa. We had an L shaped sofa, with a gray/black tweed pattern. It was scratchy, and I remember hyper focusing on that pattern. I ran my fingers back and forth across the grain of the fabric, keeping my face down, willing the “family meeting” to end. I also remember the explosion in my brain; the sense that my head would explode if I continued to engage the conversation. So I didn’t. I disengaged. I didn’t talk about this with my siblings until 40 years later.

Had my parents actually divorced I would not have gone with my father unless forced by the courts (at which point I would have run away). It was true that my mother was a mess. She was unstable, depressed, angry and disillusioned. She was an educated woman in a world that minimized women. She was captive of a man who hated anyone with an opinion that differed from his. She was surrounded by children who nagged and pulled at her, in ways that were relentless and exhausting. She lived on edge. As a result, she erupted on a regular basis. We called her the Dragon Lady. She breathed fire at us, every single day. Anything could set her off. Table set wrong? Fire. Dirty sock on the floor? Fire. Coat not hung correctly? Fire. Onion chopped too thick? Fire. Our home was on fire. All of the time.

My father was different. He was stalwart. He was the true Head of the Family. The tone of our home changed when he returned from work. The angst that filled the kitchen during meal time prep changed when he was there. I can’t say it went away; it never did. It was as if my mother was the sun, but rather than emit warming light she emitted flames. My dad though, he was the moon. He could block her fire. When he came home the reach of her flames subsided, and our home took on a different tone. I say different deliberately. The tone did not feel better or safer; it felt different.

I was never more afraid than when my father was home. He was terrifying. He was a dark man. Yes, he had dark hair and a dark mustache, and outsiders sometimes interpreted this as the reason he appeared scary. Everyone thought he was scary. Cousins, friends, neighbors, strangers – people I didn’t know would comment to me that they thought he was scary. My friends wouldn’t come over if he was home. He was a terrifying presence in a confusing way.

My father didn’t say much, but when he spoke it was with a fierce snarling voice. He never asked, he commanded. He tolerated no deviations from our norm. The regimented nature of his existence was meant to be the way for all of us. At the time I believed it was my mother who set the rules, established the tone in the household, enforced the parameters of our system. We all thought that. Hence the nickname “Dragon Lady”. How ashamed I feel now when I think of the times our father invited us to complain about the “Dragon Lady”, only to claim he would fix it. Yet somehow, it never got fixed.

The question came to me: how did he keep control over us? How did he keep control over her?

The answer is quite simple: My father is a covert narcissist. My father was the commander of our clan. He decided everything. As children we didn’t know this. We thought that when my mother came to us with a new rule it was her decision. Now I know that nothing was ever her decision. She was my fathers foot soldier. She did his bidding. At night, when we heard whispering from their bedroom, it was his monologue, most likely reviewing her failures, the areas of her “performance” as a wife and mother that were not up to his standards. He spent his evenings and weekends indoctrinating her towards his way of thought. If she had any of her own thoughts or opinions, they were long gone by the time I was an adult and able to ask her. I spend time with her now and wonder who she really is; who she might have been had she been allowed to self actualize. Despite her talents (in addition to intelligence, she is an incredibly talented cook, seamstress, organizer, etc.) she played the role of foot soldier for the majority of her life.

The question then is this: How did he keep her? Why didn’t she leave? What power did he have over her? The answer is RAGE.

Rage is terrifying. If you’ve never been on the receiving end of rage, count your blessings. If you have, you know that rage is debilitating. Imagine you are walking down an alley. It is daylight so you are not afraid. You are mindlessly walking down the alley, perhaps whistling, definitely daydreaming. You’ve been down this alley many times and have no reason to worry. The day is going well, you have no major issues, you are minding your own business and all is calm and right with the world. You have no reason to expect anything bad will happen. Suddenly, out of nowhere, a rabid dog attacks you. You didn’t see it coming. You heard nothing, saw nothing, didn’t even know rabid dogs could be anywhere near, but there is no denying that a rabid dog is attacking you. You are powerless. You are trapped. There is no one to help you. As suddenly as the attack started, it stops. The dog looks at you with an expression of disgust, a look that seems to say “you aren’t worth my effort” and he walks away. The attack is over. You are safe.

Yet still, you are worried. Are you safe? Where did the rabid dog go? Will it come after you again? Why did it come after you? Why did it stop? You look around, trying to figure out what just happened, but there are no answers. As time goes on you start to relax. It was a one off you decide. This will never happen again. As long as you avoid the alley you have nothing to fear. You create a new path that avoids the alley, and you go on with your life. Eventually you start to whistle again; all is well. Then one day, out of the blue, the dog shows up again. This time you sense it as it approaches and you ready yourself. You know it is going attack but you have no idea how bad the attack will be, or how to make it stop. You stay very still and, just as before, the dog eventually tires, looks at you with disgust and walks away. Even as it retreats though, the growing realization that you are not safe gnaws at you. What did you do wrong? Was this a fluke, getting attacked twice by the same dog? Will it happen again? How can you prevent it? Or, if you can’t prevent it, how can you protect yourself? The third time it happens you glean some important answers. Answers like this:

• you can’t prevent these attacks
• you can’t predict these attacks
• you can’t lessen the severity of these attacks
• you can survive these attacks.

Knowing that you can’t prevent, predict or lessen the attacks leaves you with one option: learning to survive. Assuming you don’t want to leave the town (I.e. separate from the family) you develop a plan. You’ve noticed that if you make yourself small and quiet, unworthy of attack, the dog walks away. The dog only attacks you if you appear worth attacking, so you slink away. You become quiet and small. You go out of your way to make sure the dog doesn’t notice you, because if the dog doesn’t see you, if it doesn’t feel you, it won’t attack.

There is one huge difference between the rabid dog and the covert narcissist. That difference is control. The rabid dog, much like my mother, is not in control of his emotions, his prevalence towards attacking. The infection raging in his blood stream has crossed over into his brain and he is no longer in command of his actions. His attacks are as constant as the foam that streams from his jaw. As an observer, you can look at this dog and know that he is angry. You feel his angst as he approaches, and you learn to back up. Since you know who he is and what he is capable of, you learn to tiptoe around him, to hide from him. This was my mother. Her angst was relentless, as were her attacks on all of us for digressions that constantly changed. There needn’t be a reason to attack. The mere fact that we were there and she was there was reason enough. To live with my mom was to be attacked by my mom. Disturbingly, there is comfort in knowing. Predictability is one of the cornerstones of a happy life. If we know it will rain, we carry an umbrella. In my home we knew we would be attacked by mom, so we all carried an umbrella. It differed for each of us. For me it was the umbrella of perfection. If I was perfect enough, the fire left me alone.

With my father though, there was no predictability (at least I thought that as a child). The narcissists rage is a tool. It is a weapon they keep, like a holstered gun, hidden yet readily accessible, and always there. The narcissist is ready to draw and fire that weapon at any time. Once fired, the victim is paralyzed. They are decimated. There is no escaping that bullet, just as you could not escape the rabid dog. The only difference is that you never expected the bullet. Later, when you had the presence of mind to do so, you would ruminate over the firing of the weapon and wonder how you might have stopped it. For me the plan was to fly under the radar. I spent my energy becoming invisible. An unseen target is not a target at all, right? I became my mother. I was perfect in all of the ways that mattered to the narcissist. I carried this perfection into my adult life, making me the unwitting target of a new narcissist.

My first experience of Narcissistic rage with my soon to be spouse was both terrifying and comforting. I brought up an issue he did not like and before I knew it he had backed me into a corner, using his body to shut me down. It was a genius attack. The issue I’d brought up was one that would plague us for our entire marriage, yet in that one instance he’d taught me to tread very carefully. In that one moment he taught me that he had rage, but that rage was My Fault. Yes, he carried a weapon. Yes he was poised and ready to draw that weapon at any time. I though, was the one who could keep that weapon in its holster. If I did and said the right things, that weapon would never be drawn. If I towed the line and behaved the way he wanted me to, I had no reason to fear that rage; I’d never be on the receiving end of an attack. It was all up to me.

As the years went on, I began to breathe fire. As my fire grew, his rages subsided. As long as I was mired in the heat of my shame he was safe, because of the one thing I’d never understood about my mothers fire: it was burning her alive. She, and later I, were the proverbial frogs in the pot of boiling water. If the water had been boiling when we first found ourselves there we would have jumped out. But the narcissist knows his way around this. At first we are immersed in a pot of cool, comforting, all encompassing water, like a deliciously cool swimming pool on a steamy hot day. It is a relief, a salve on an otherwise weary soul. We sank into this abyss, unaware that the heat would soon begin. As the heat rose we dismissed it. An “over active imagination” we were told. This was On Us. We controlled the temperature of the water. And in a disturbing way, we did. We could control the rage by not activating it. We could tamp down the temperature quite simply: by never challenging.

My mother is still boiling. She will boil until the day she dies. She has no idea that she is boiling, She is so comfortable in that pot that there is no longer any reason to leave it. I can’t imagine a scenario in which she looks around and realizes how trapped she is. What would be the point for her?

I though, got lucky. I got cancer. I thought I was dying. I couldn’t see the pot but I knew I didn’t want to be boiled to death, so I risked the rage. I allowed him, in fact forced him, to draw his weapon. When he did I stared him down, dared him to pull the trigger. I was not afraid for I was already looking at the end, at the worst that can happen. I was already looking at my own death, so what did I have to fear? Not him, that was for sure. And once I’d left the pot, I started to see the world in a new light.

It has taken me a long time to come to this conclusion: The Narcissist knows exactly what he is doing. He is methodical, calculating and devious. He knows what he wants and he will do whatever it takes to get it and keep it. He carries that rage deliberately and with forethought. While I sputtered around in an increasingly hot pot, grabbing at the edges, trying desperately to escape, he calmly watched, turning up the heat whenever I gained traction, whenever I got close to escaping. He was in total control, every step of the way.

The narcissist’s rage is, like everything else about him, an illusion. The narcissist cannot feel. The narcissist does not feel. And without a doubt, the narcissist will turn up the heat, they will fire upon you, without hesitation. The narcissist will not stop until you are the rabid dog, out of your mind, completely out of control, completely under their control.

I am out of the pot now and I’ll never go back. Unfortunately, my burns will never completely heal. They remain part of me. They are a constant reminder of how easy it is to drown under the watchful eye of the covert narcissist.

Slogging through my life, one cliche at a time.