Playing The Victim:
A very successful version of narcissism is playing the victim. The rewards are protection and lot of sympathy, and this can run for years. Many tools are used that are misleading and fool innocent people into thinking that a person needs help and is desperate. The victim status is a way of controlling well intended people into wanting to help the so-called victim. The people who help the so-called victim have no idea that they are being manipulated or controlled and they feel good about helping someone who is in constant need (for a while anyway).
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We tend to see manipulators as strong, forceful, mean, hard etc. But those who play the victim do it in a gentle way mostly. they can shake, cry, act meek and in need of help, love, and affection. t is natural for us to want to help the underdog, and the person who plays the victim knows this deep down inside and knows that in playing the victim he or she can seduce people into helping them, motivating them and giving them lots of attention. The real victims are all the people around the victim who think that they are strong willed, in control of their lives and able to cope against any form of narcissist.
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The wife or girlfriend can play the victim in arguments, and when she breaks down in tears, he gives in due to feeling sorry for her and lets her get away with what she wants to get away with, something that she will achieve in no other way but by playing the lost, sad victim of circumstances, of life, or even of his so-called bullying. As a narcissist she simply sees that playing the victim is a way to get what she wants. I had a girlfriend who admitted that she faked tears. I asked her how (believing that one cannot ‘cry on demand’) and she said that she would dig her fingernails into her palm until she felt great pain and then squeeze her eyes very tight and some tears would come out. I cannot do this, but I have read of other ways that people can cry on demand, and some wet their hands and eyes to give the affect of tears etc.
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A female can claim to be stalked or to be abused and uses tools such as pathetic crying, sadness, looking scared, shaking, and the like. A female who appears innocent can easily take in people into believing that she cannot cope without help, cannot cope without their help in particular, is lost, unable to function in normal life and is in constant fear of someone or something.
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If the narcissist-type is allowed to get away with playing the victim for a period of time he or she will come to believe that it is true. And with that they will fit-into-the-role so convincingly that he or she cannot be helped out of it. They gain far too much by being weak, pathetic, needing help in sympathy and people gathering to help.
Another form of this is the male playing weakness and using this on females and the maternal instinct in the woman is activated and she feels sadness and pity for him and wants ‘to mother him” with love, sex, and over doing it. He delights in the attention and finds it most satisfying but the relationships never last because they are built on sand and collapse with time. So he goes to the next female and does it all again because he longs for that feeling of being mothered and looked after, and eventually it becomes all that he knows and wants even though it always ends in disaster and sadness.
This relationship gives the females a feeling of being wanted, loved and helping someone. She may have had a life with little love in it and she longs to give and give, so she is an easy victim for this type of male who is the very essence of spiritual weakness himself. The relationship folds because one day she realizes that she wants a strong man to help her build a good worthy future, and this weak-minded male is not going to be able to give her that.
Playing The Victim seems very profitable, but in the end people tire of protecting and helping the person who just never seems to be cured of their troubles.
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I have known many people who fit the above description and most of them became so convinced of their victim status that they believed in it completely. They all suffered for many years and had to wake up and find the truth within themselves to change. You cannot change or even help such a person find courage, they must do this themselves, and that could be after many years. These types can stay in therapy for years, on medication and have become so immersed in their own false beliefs that this has become their own Belief System of which they base their life on.
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All the best from
James M Sandbrook.
March 7, 2017.
Thank you for your sharing. I am worried that I lack creative ideas. It is your article that makes me full of hope. Thank you. But, I have a question, can you help me?
You have ideas, they are there. 🙂
What is the question?
All the best from James Martin Sandbrook.