Narcissists are Out, Avoidants are In!

(Or I'm sick of this Therapish Era.)

I have noticed Narcissists are slowly being replaced – at least when it comes to social-media rants about crappy exes (or sometimes simply just exes who you were incompatible with) with a new, shiny crap-ex moniker: Attachment Avoidant! I don’t want to minimize the actual horror that is having a Narcissistic Personality Disorder partner – or usually an ex-partner – but I do think that there was a big tendency to start pulling that my-ex-is-a-narcissist trigger very fast a few years ago.

Sometimes, if the “Narc” was actually a nice person, they’d be dubbed “Covert Narcissist,” which actually meant that they were doubly manipulative; not only hiding their narcissistic tendencies but hiding them under the disguise of a “nice person,” which would be so confusing and deceptive and truly machiavellian of them.

Today, some of the Narcs, and especially the Covert ones, are getting the Attachment Avoidant label (a lot of stuff out there about how Avoidants are “Narcissists in Disguise) (whooohooo the plot thickens!). A lot of their behaviours are similar to what Narcs used to be accused of, for example “breadcrumbing” – which means intermittent attention – or preoccupation with not wanting to appear vulnerable or being afraid of deep intimacy or being self-centered, or avoiding accountability or engaging and then withdrawing from “love bombing,” which is when they shower you with attention, affection and words of affirmation. They both use distance to manipulate you although Narcs do it on purpose and Avoidants do it because …they just do it (WAIT! UNLESS THEY ARE NARCISSISTS IN DISGUISE, OK?!). It’s very hard to tell which is which and what you’re specifically dealing with.

At the same time, if you think about it… what does withdrawing from a relationship imply? Or avoiding deep intimacy? Or no longer paying compliments? Or distancing yourself? Or sometimes getting a hold of you after they swore off they only want you as a friend or however your breakup looked like? Is it… possible that they’re just not that into you anymore? Or that they’re human and got distracted with work or maybe there’s something else that has nothing to do with you?

Or are they really mentally ill and/ or suffering from personality disorder?

I know we are solidly in the Therapish Era (possibly my word, too lazy to check, and it stays) where every human behaviour is getting a label attached to it or seems to be some evidence of chemical imbalance or childhood trauma or some antisocial tendency masked by deeply manipulative behaviour of keeping up good appearances – and this is most apparent when it comes to romantic relationships and dissolution of them. I’m wary of the world where everyone is walking around just waiting to secretly diagnose each other or excuse sometimes the simplest explanation (for the people in the back “they were just not that into you”) as evidence of a severe mental issue. I also think this is damaging for how we want to view things that honestly need to become destigmatized, meaning mental illness; in a way all these lazy labels are “cheapening” mental illness where it becomes some sort of a weapon to excuse things like the shittiness of people (yes, those ridiculous exes included) and lack of compatibility. Personally, I have only encountered one partner who could easily Pass Go straight to collect DSM-V on Narcissistic Personality Disorder scale and one who was Patient Zero in Attachment Avoidant Lab when it was founded in Vienna in 1971, but beyond that?

Nah.

P.S. I want to rant about another Therapishspeak, which is “Love Languages” but let this suffice as my rant: Stop it. STOP IT.