When Hate-Mailers Are Narcissist Predators

Recently, I attended a class on writing columns for newspapers or magazines at the San Francisco Writers Conference.  Our leader, Suzette Standring, did a marvelous job, but at the very ending of class something happened which needs further addressing: Recognizing narcissist-predators who hate-mail you.

A lady near me expressed concern that, while her blog had received 4.5 stars, the half-star-down was due to one individual’s enormously unhappy comments about her, her ideas, and ending with an actual personal attack on the author.

I could see the hurt on her face.  She wondered aloud what she could have done differently and sought advice from her class members.

There was genuine compassion for her.  Feedback included, “You cannot please everyone,” and all comments were in the direction of commiseration and getting past it.  Yet the woman’s experience was so grave and disheartening.  

I wanted to solve this potential hazard because my perspective came from an entirely different experience.

I had worked counterintelligence in the FBI for nearly three decades.  Along with that came a certain degree of profiling of personalities.  With it was a rather different perception of when such things happen and what they mean.

It is not a matter of taking the attack of a nemesis to heart, feeling bad about it, and suffering at some level, sometimes even questioning if one should continue to write columns.

Granted, some readers will make comments that truly are intended to be constructive criticism, and you should be thankful for them.  But there is a clear distinction between those individuals and the one who makes a hate-filled attack.

The man who wrote so violently was, of course, a bully, which everyone understood, but he was much more than that.

The category in which this person fits is a combination of two defective personality traits—narcissist and predator.  When married in the same brain, they become one of the worst that you could ever deal with—a narcissist-predator.  

The personal psychological outlook of these individuals—be they men or women—is: 

It is all about me, and I don’t care whether you live or die.

I used the example of macho drivers in Miami who, from the far-left lane, cut diagonally across four lanes of traffic, just so they can make their right turn off the highway.  Almost anyone else confronted with this problem would either prepare better in their lane choice, or drive on a little farther and make the turn when it is safe.  But not these individuals.  They feel they have the right to do whatever they choose, and then go about doing it—the rest of you be damned.

Reactions from fellow drivers are yelling at the crazy man, tooting their horns, and showing the car and driver their middle finger, as they are left in his dust.  Hopefully, there will have been no accidents as byproducts of this atrocious behavior.  Then all will resume with the man dangerously on his way.  But my take is different.

I will sit, right where I was as the man tore across the road, and begin to laugh.  

Sometimes the person in a nearby car, and always those in mine, still upset at what had happened, cannot possibly imagine what I am thinking.  But it is quite simple.

In ten seconds, the seeming madman has given us his personality profile.  It is all about him, and he doesn’t care if we live or die.  Further, I explained to my fellow classmates, this man would be going home that same night and would likely beat his wife—because that is what he is.  His world does not just revolve around himself; his entire world is him, and no one else is even in a close second place.

With this, my instructor and classmates seemed surprised, but took it all in.  

My point was partially summed up by another student, “Haters gonna hate.”  But it is really more, and a bit different.

The narcissist-predator brains do not really hate, although it may look like that to the unschooled.  Their actions have nothing to do with the thoughts or feelings of the one being hurt.  Those left in their emotional wake are far from something they would even consider.

My admonition to my classmates was not to feel the hurt and then get over it, but to realize—and as immediately as possible—that their nemesis is really a narcissist-predator.  He is not trying to be constructive in his criticism, and he doesn’t really have a point that is worth making, you see, because his perspective is so far off the mark from “the rest of us.”

Assess him quickly, fast enough so you don’t let his so-negative vibes ruin your day.  Keep yourself standing outside of whatever box he is in, and if you begin to find yourself there, quick like a bunny, jump out of it, then turn around to see the death and destruction that these defective personalities leave littered behind them.  Don’t let yourself get caught in the jetsam-filled waters.  

If you can, mentally, stand back, with a psychological-first-responder’s brain, and realize almost immediately what you are dealing with.  You, too, might be able to laugh at what has happened, because nothing he has written or said is really about you.

Not even, “Ignore it,” is a proper reaction, because then he has made it in under your skin.  Don’t let him in.  And it isn’t even like the water running off of a duck’s back, because that still puts you near to him, far too close to his personal variation of crazy.  

The goal of this essay is for you, the writer, to be able to analyze what has come at you, perceive the emitter of the information, and realize this has nothing to do with you, what you have written, and is so far away from the meritorious validity of your piece that you actually can laugh, because you do understand what just occurred.  You have escaped the clutches of a narcissist-predator and are better off for it.

Then when a nearby friend, somewhat astonished, asks you in a bewildered fashion, what you could possibly be laughing at, now you can tell her.  That friend, too, might be able to laugh when this happens in her future.