Mask or Cloaking Device?

What motivates a narcissist?

Standard thought: an insatiable need for external validation, a craving for social dominance, and a deep-seated fear of worthlessness and exposure. Beneath a confident exterior, a narc has a fragile ego in hypervigilant mode to protect itself. 

Several interconnected psychological factors can be at play: 

• Need for narcissistic supply
• Fear of exposure and shame
• Control and manipulation
• Lack of empathy

I have asked myself that question frequently, especially over the last year since my mother, Gretchen, passed away. I have avoided labeling others for most of my life, especially since Gretchen and her father, Konrad, labeled others as mentally ill if they didn’t like what that person had to say. I didn’t want to emulate either one of them.

Today I call Gretchen a narcissist. But what made her that way? What creates a narcissist? How are those characteristics formed?

Is narcissism innate, or is it learned behavior?

She was vicious to some people, specifically her sister and me, but she hid it well. She was a high-functioning, covert narcissist. She seemed driven by fear of exposure and shame. She hid behind victimhood, manipulated subtly, and avoided direct confrontation.

Other narcissists don’t bother to hide their traits. Overt narcissists openly display arrogance, dominance, and self-promotion. They can be very direct in their demands and control.

The Klingon Cloaking Device

Yes. I’m a Trekkie.

Psychology talks about a narcissist having a mask, a public image the general public sees. To the average person, whether family or not, my mother was the 89-year-old grandmother and the polite neighbor. She was a charming hostess, a pillar of her church and community, a worthy member of society.

But to her targets, she was vicious, calculating, lying, unwavering in cruelty, inflicting intentional harm, and completely dedicated to destroying anyone who saw her vindictive side.

That’s the covert narcissist.

And at this point in my life, I am rejecting the psychological explanation that a covert narc hides behind a mask. I no longer believe in the public vs. private split.

My experience in dealing with Gretchen is that narcs employ the equivalent of a Klingon cloaking device. 

A cloaking device works by bending light, electromagnetic radiation, and sensor beams around the Klingon Bird of Prey (their starship). 

Narcissists bend perceptions and beliefs. They twist societal norms and expectations to create an illusion. It’s not a mask covering a true self, the real ego.

And just like a Klingon Bird of Prey, once the cloaking device is enabled, the weapons system cannot work. It consumes too much energy. In order to attack, the Bird of Prey must disable the cloaking device and become visible, even if only briefly, to fire its missiles.

A narcissist cannot simultaneously hide and attack.

In the brief moment that the ship disables the defense shield, some people will catch a glimpse of the Bird of Prey, the narc.

Viciousness as a Defense Mechanism

Just as a cloaking device is a defense system, cruelty for a narc is a defense mechanism.

For my mother, it was:

• Threat Response: If someone challenged her authority, outshone her, or tried to hold her accountable, she likely viewed it as a personal attack. Being vicious was a way to regain control and “put them in their place.”
• Lack of Empathy: As she became older, these traits often calcified. She lacked the ability to truly care about how she hurt others; there was no internal “brake” to stop the viciousness.

Innate or Learned Behavior?

The viciousness that I experienced at her hands was the only way she knew how to navigate a world where she felt she had to be the most powerful person in the room.

But why? Why was she this way? Was she simply born that way? 

Perhaps.

But I also consider who she targeted: her sister and her daughter. 

Examining who the narcissist targets provides insight into whether the narcissist was born or created, in my opinion.

Both of us knew the family secret and went public rather than accept and promote silence and secrecy: her father, my grandfather, was an incestuous child molester.

Perhaps a better way to answer is to compare the mask and cloaking device metaphors.

A mask hides the face, but it does not hide the eyes. When you look at a person wearing a mask, they cannot fully hide the emotions and expressions found in the eyes. The eyes remain the portal to the soul. That person cannot fully hide himself, his motivations, his desires.

But with a cloaking device, an observer doesn’t see anything of the attack ship. What that person sees are reflections of the stars and planetary lights around the ship.

With a narcissist utilizing a cloaking device, you see the reflections of people around them. And in an odd twist, you see their projections onto others reflected back by the cloaking device.

People don’t actually see the narcissist.

They see:

• reputation,
• social proof,
• church standing,
• community approval,
• reflected projections.

The True Narc

Is it possible that her narcissism was in actuality a learned behavior?

What about her father, the family child molester? Wasn’t he the true narc? Narcissism can be a learned behavior. But he was also a pedophile. Aren’t pedophiles born and not made?

Let’s take a look at an overt narcissist from science fiction, from another Star Trek episode and movie: Khan Noonien Singh from both the original series and the second movie, The Wrath of Khan.

Khan Noonien Singh is one of the most adeptly written antagonists in science fiction, very powerfully portrayed by Ricardo Montalbán.

Khan was created through genetic engineering for superior intelligence and physical strength. He was a superior human being – created that way.

Yet, his need for dominance led Captain Kirk to leave him, and his crew was marooned on Ceti Alpha V. Six months later, neighboring Ceti Alpha VI exploded, thus killing Khan’s wife. When Khan was discovered 15 years later on Ceti Alpha V, he was a man with an intense desire for vengeance.

His narcissism, lack of empathy, need for control, and need for vindication knew no bounds. Ultimately, he destroyed himself, his crew, and his ship in his efforts to kill Captain Kirk.

Innate or learned behavior? I don’t have the answer, which is why I keep asking the question.

With Khan, the story suggests he was created. With my mother, unless I know what she was like as a child, her story seems to suggest that her behavior was learned as a mechanism to survive child sexual abuse.

However, one big difference is that Khan wasn’t cloaked, but my mother was. We saw Khan in all of his anger, retaliation, obsession, depravity, and cruelty. Most people saw the image that Gretchen projected and protected for decades.

And that difference leads me back to my grandfather 

His lack of empathy, need for control, hunger for narcissistic supply, and terror of exposure were his own. So was his need for perverse sexual gratification and the elaborate system of secrecy required to protect it. 

Whether those traits were innate, learned, or some combination of both, I cannot say with certainty. What I can see more clearly now is how thoroughly he projected them onto the people closest to him.

One of his victims — my mother — never broke free of that projection. She absorbed the need for secrecy, the fear of exposure, and the willingness to destroy anyone who threatened the narrative. 

She became both the product and the enforcer of the system that protected him.

Two other victims — my aunt and me — chose a different path. We chose truth, even when it cost us belonging.

That is the deepest irony I have sat with since my mother died. In her lifelong effort to bury the truth and anyone who spoke it, she remained the most thoroughly manipulated manipulator I have ever known. 

The cloaking device she used so skillfully was never entirely her own invention. It was an inheritance she could not, or would not, set down.

And in the end, it hid her from herself as completely as it once hid her from the rest of us.

Rejecting The No-Win Scenario

For years I lived inside what felt like an impossible choice: tell the truth and lose my family, or keep the family and lose myself. It seemed there was no way to win. 

That is when another lesson from The Wrath of Khan became important. The movie introduces a now-famous training simulation used at Starfleet Academy: The Kobayashi Maru, aka the No-Win Scenario.

No cadet could beat the simulation. It was designed that way to test character and determine how a cadet might act when facing death.

The movie also tells us that Captain Kirk is the only cadet to defeat the Kobayashi Maru.

How?

He surreptitiously reprogrammed the simulation in order to defeat it. He rewrote the coding. 

For years I believed I was living inside a no-win scenario.

Tell the truth and lose my family.

Keep my family and lose myself.

Captain Kirk famously said, “I don’t believe in the no-win scenario.”

Neither do I.

The first step wasn’t escaping the simulation.

It was realizing I had the capability to rewrite the code.

Photo Credit: Unsplash

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