I grew up with a narcissistic father. He could be such a hard ass sometimes, but he could weep uncontrollably at the most ridiculous things. I learned not to trust signs of emotion from him; they were just farcical manipulations trying to fit whatever image he was trying to project, not sincere responses to normal stimuli. He was so erratically hot and cold about everything. I hated how unpredictable that made my life. And he always kept score, even for some of the bad stuff about himself. I think he actually spent his whole life resentfully trying to put more hashmarks under the "good" column than the "bad," just so he wouldn't have to hate himself. I say all of these unrelated things just as context for this next point:
Whenever I wanted to enact justice, he was always opposed. The situation could have nothing to do with him. I could be having a dispute with a friend or even an enemy and if I did the slightest bit of retaliation, he would disapprove or actively fight me on it. I was never molested by priests or anything, but I have had enough things happen to me or my siblings that screamed for justice to know that if I was, he would have said something like, "Just let it be." He had the most ridiculous reactions, and it wasn't any religious turn the other cheek thing either.
You see, whenever he saw a perpetrator, he always identified with him. Every time I was out for blood, he thought about himself. He was afraid. He was afraid that someday someone would come after him for something he had done, just like I was going after other people. In his world he wanted actions to not mean anything. He wanted to think he was above any consequences, above any causal relationship between his actions and the results of those actions. I don't know if he actually believed that he was above them or maybe he just had to think that way in order to live with himself, but the gist of it was that he wanted to be able to do whatever he wanted and still think whatever he wanted about himself. I hated him for that. I interpreted it as more of his up is down, down is up delusional propaganda, a way to slip out of blame for anything. And he hated me for wanting the world to be one predictable flow of cause and effect.
Anyway, now I'm fine if that's how people want to live their lives, and I know that people who are like that are deaf to any attempts to reason with them, but I still get the most pleasurable sensation of schadenfreude when I see them getting exactly what's coming to them.
Anyway, now I'm fine if that's how people want to live their lives, and I know that people who are like that are deaf to any attempts to reason with them, but I still get the most pleasurable sensation of schadenfreude when I see them getting exactly what's coming to them.