The Mark of Malignancy

 

Sometimes we hear about the so-called “malignant” narcissist compared to the regular narcissist. I’ve had some revelations about this topic so I wanted to do this episode on the mark of malignancy to help you recognize the #1 sign of malevolence in people. 

 

In this episode, I’m going to define this term and how it shows up in abusive and manipulative people. This will help you get more insight into the narcissists in your life to better understand those who are malignant and those who aren’t. 

 

You’ll be able to understand how you could unconsciously let evil take over your heart and mind if you’re not careful. 

 

You’ll also find out about a silver lining that you can find after having contact with evil. This shift is important in the later stages of healing so you can thrive in life. 

 

Malignancy is a term that’s used in medicine to describe the uncontrolled growth of a tumor. It’s synonymous with terms like cancerous, invasive and metastatic. 

 

The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines malignancy as “tending to produce death or deterioration; tending to infiltrate”. Beyond medicine, malignant is defined as "evil in nature, influence or effect; aggressively malicious.” 

 

One of the synonyms of malignant is malevolent. This term is defined in the Merriam-Webster dictionary as: “evil; having, showing or arising from intense often vicious ill will, spite or hatred." Dictionary.com defined malevolent as “wishing evil or harm to another, showing ill will, evil, harmful, injurious; the deep-seated often unexplainable desire to see another suffer.”

 

The term malevolent comes from Latin, originally meaning “wishing for bad.” 

 

If I simplify that, I would say that a person who is malignant or malevolent either wants harm to come to someone else or causes harm to someone else deliberately. 

 

The tricky part is that malignancy is often very well disguised as just the opposite. 

 

Jordan Peterson says that evil is betrayal. That betrayal can be of self and others. He said a betrayal first requires trust. When I heard him say that I started seeing the puzzle pieces fit together on this topic of malignant narcissism and evil. The differentiating point between regular narcissists and malignant ones is betrayal. In order for someone to betray you, you first have to trust them. 

 

Peterson says, “To betray someone, you first have to get them to trust you. Trust is a moral virtue. Betrayal is like a knife in the heart through the back, especially if they betray you for your virtues.”  Peterson said he got these insights from Dante’s “Inferno” because as Dante takes the reader through the levels of evil, at the bottom, or center of malevolence, is betrayal. This is usually what happens in abusive relationships. Abusers betray you for your virtues of kindness, trust, empathy, generosity, caring and love.

 

Betrayal can happen in intimate relationships, friendships, among colleagues and other social relationships. In those situations the person who betrays you first had to earn (or in some cases, extort) your trust. 

 

When we look at the family, we see something different. In the family, there is a built in trust. We are conditioned since birth to automatically to trust our family members simply because they’re family. This is very dangerous when there are evil people in the family who betray our trust. Abuse in the family is easy because of that automatic trust. Is that not then, the ultimate form of betrayal when your own family has ill will toward you, when your own mother, father or other family member wants to see you fail and suffer? If you’ve been abused by someone in your family you can probably relate to that. The betrayal of lovers, friends and coworkers hurts a lot yet it pales in comparison to the betrayal that comes from our own families. This is why families get away with abuse. It’s very difficult for a person to realize that the people who are most meant to love and support you are the ones who are trying to hurt you. It is in fact our familial relationships that set us up for other kinds of interpersonal relationships in life. When the betrayal starts in childhood, it can follow us for a lifetime in adult relationships. It’s the gift that just keeps giving, and well, you know how shitty narcissists’ gifts can be. 

 

So how do we tell the difference between a regular narcissist and a malignant one? 

 

Narcissism is a spectrum disorder. On the one end there are people with some light narcissistic traits. They might be self-absorbed, grandiose, superior, arrogant, entitled, have a lack of self-responsibility, spend a lot of time in front of the mirror or taking cringe-worthy selfies. These narcissists don’t go out of their way to intentionally hurt others bu that doesn’t mean you won’t be hurt by them. They will usually unintentionally hurt others because they are self-absorbed and lack awareness of the people around them as well as how their behaviors are hurting or using others. 

 

As Walter Riso describes, being in a relationship with a narcissist is like being a tree that’s withering away because it lacks water. There may be some hope that people on the lighter end of the narcissism spectrum can become more aware of some of their behaviors that hurt others and there might even be a small chance that they will change some of those behaviors. Their personality, however, will remain the same and there will likely be continual setbacks as they return to who they are because, it’s simply who they are. A person can work on modifying their behavior but by the time they are grown adults, their personality is usually set in stone. You might be able to manage a low-contact relationship with someone like this. It doesn’t mean you won’t be annoyed, drained and even hurt by them. Even though they don’t set out to hurt others, it’s just that hurting others is a byproduct of who they are. 

 

On the other end of the spectrum of narcissism is malevolency. These are the types who intentionally plan and want to see others hurt and suffer. They are sadistic and very dangerous to those around them in the family, in relationships, friendships, at work and anywhere else in life. These are the types that are far gone. There is zero hope for change with these people. These are relationships of inevitable harm. 

 

Psychologists say that malignant narcissists are usually those who have traits of narcissism and psychopathy. Psychopathy is where the malevolence, or evil, comes in. 

 

As I described in my video, "What is a narcissist?," I use the term narcissist (instead of malignant narcissist, psychopath, sociopath or other terms) because this is the #1 keyword that people search online when they’re looking for information to help them figure out what’s going on and how to get better. Essentially I use the term narcissist as a place-holder for a self-absorbed person who hurts and uses others, whether intentionally or unintentionally. 

 

The term malignant narcissist as it’s used by the institution of psychology seems to lack depth. When they mention malignant narcissists, they tend to describe people who are overt, brash, vulgar and in your face bullies. However, they don’t even account for the covert type in their DSM book. So I think their definition of malignant narcissist is wrong, just as their definition of a narcissist is only a half-truth, focused on the overt types. The overt type, no matter how ugly they may sound and look on the surface, is still transparent. You know you’re dealing with a wolf from a mile away because they don’t really hide who they are. They simply can’t hide. Now, they’re not usually going to admit they’re narcissists, even when confronted. However, they betray themselves. They just have to open their mouth or get on social media, and instantly they reveal who they are. 

 

Now that I understand at the core of malevolence, evil, and malignancy is betrayal, I think it’s the covert types who can be the most malignant ones because they pretend to be something they’re not. They pretend to be decent, humanitarian, caring and altruistic when they’re actually doing just the opposite. That’s betrayal and that's evil. You think you’re dealing with a sweet sheep but really that’s just their disguise. They know in order to get away with it, they have to hide who they are. Betrayal implies that you must earn someone’s trust and then hurt them. That’s exactly what the covert types do. It’s like they say, if there’s going to be an anti-christ, it’s not going to be someone who looks ugly and vicious on the surface. It’s going to be someone who looks like an angel or savior but is a devil inside. That’s malignant. 

 

Some people have a parent or parents who are on the lighter side of the spectrum. Their parents have narcissistic behaviors and that affected the kids into adulthood, for sure. However, when it really came down to it, they were on their kids’ side. They had their back even when they got in trouble. That’s very different than the experience a person will have when they’re raised by someone who was not on their side. When you’re a kid and you have that realization about your parent or parents, it’s devastating. Most kids will have the fantasy of loving parents long into adulthood before someday the truth suddenly shatters your denial and you’re left standing among the broken, jagged shards of your existence trying to figure out where you go from there. 

 

I want to give some specific, real life examples to illustrate this so you can see how the concept of malignancy applies to the narcissists in your life or not. 

 

A close friend of mine here, someone I consider to be my Mexican sister, has parents who are on the lighter end of the narcissism spectrum. She tells me about her parents who were definitely on the narcissism spectrum. However, when it really mattered they were on my friend’s side, even when she got in trouble. 

 

For example, my friend was being bullied in middle school. When her dad found out, he went to the school and said to the administration, "I don’t care what you do or how you manage it. I just want a public apology. And the next time it happens either you suspend those children from the school or I will personally come and beat up the parents of those students when they come to pick their kids up after school.” Her dad was 100% on her side when others were hurting her.  

 

Later my friend got some bad grades and they kicked her out of that school. When her dad found out, he didn’t say anything to her about her flunking. He didn’t shame her or punish her. He simply said, "I’m here and we will work through this. If you need special tutoring or something just let me know what you need." He enrolled her in another school and helped her succeed. He was on her side when she got in trouble. 

 

So what were some examples of his narcissism then? He would shame her in other ways. For example, when my friend lost a tennis match, her dad would be pissed at her. Why? Her dad probably wanted the narcissistic supply of saying his daughter won and the status he gets from that so when she let him down by not giving him that supply, he was angry and shamed her. But it was a tennis match, it wasn’t that big of a deal to her. He would also critique her weight. Even though she was thin, he wanted to see her more skinny. 

 

Are those examples of malevolence? No. He’s definitely narcissistic, but not malignant. Now these are not good good qualities but they’re also not evil. A child could develop eating disorders or emotional eating habits when a parent is critical of their physical appearance and weight. A child could feel not good enough at sports if their parent is upset when they lose a sports game. All of these could affect a person into adulthood. However, these traits are still at the lighter end of the spectrum. 

 

My friend told me that her dad specifically told her, “If you are ever in real trouble, I don’t want you to think: Dad is going to kill me. I want you to think I want to call dad.” He meant it and you could see that in his actions when he had her back when it most mattered. That is definitely not malignant. At the core, most of the time, her parents actually cared about her wellbeing. They had her back when it really mattered. 

 

On the other end of the narcissism spectrum is malevolence or malignancy. As I mentioned, the core of malignancy is betrayal. This implies that someone betrays your trust and has ill will toward you. When you have family members who want to see you fail in order to feel better about themselves or to maintain their superiority and narcissistic supply sources, that’s when you know you’re dealing with malevolence. 

 

That was the experience I had in my family, where they kick you when you’re down. They set you up to fail because they want to watch you struggle and hurt, even when they pretend to help you. The experience I had with my mother, one that several of my cousins also had with their mothers or fathers, was based on the malignant narcissist not being on the side of their kids. 

 

If you have a parent like this, when you’re in trouble, they don’t have your back. They take the other side. When it really matters, they betray you. They will even take proactive measures to screw you over, just for spite. They will also threaten betrayal in order to keep you afraid of stepping out of line. When you have a parent like this, you learn from a very young age that your narcissistic parent is not a safe place to go when you get in trouble or have a problem. Those are in fact, the very moments when you will be most betrayed.

 

For example, when I was 14yo I went to a high school football game with my best friend. A female bully started to target me, falsely accusing me of liking her boyfriend. I didn’t care about her boyfriend and only knew he existed because he lived down the street. That didn’t matter. So the bully threatened to beat me up in front of the crowd, then started following me as my friend and I walked away along the track. When we got to the entrance to the part of the stands where my parents sat, I walked up into the stands and stood in the aisle near my parents. My dad was really into the game and not paying attention to anything else. I was too embarrassed to admit what was happening so I acted cool like I just wanted to say hi. My mom very quickly figured out what was going on. Her whole face lit up like a Christmas tree, “Are you hiding from her?! You’re hiding! Get down there and face the music.” You know you’re dealing with evil when your own mother throws you to the wolves. And not only that, but she loved every minute of it including the shaming that followed. 

 

In Nov 2015 when I had to go back to my parents’ house to get on my feet again after massive betrayals in Peru, I was just coming out of the bottom of the bottom PTSD crash. I had finally found a new sense of purpose and a reason to get out of bed. I was working on building a new website for my coaching business and went to share my excitement with my mother. Sitting at the table with piles of catalogs, she looked up at me sideways and said, “I can’t believe you’re thinking about doing that coaching thing again. It’s never worked before. Why would it work now? Why don’t you just go to the mall and get a job.” At 37 years of age, I finally understood in that moment that she wasn’t capable of emotional support even when she pretended to be supportive. Four months later, I had left her house and my YouTube channel was starting to take off. I made the mistake of sharing my excitement with her about helping people around the world and how they actually wanted to hear what I had to say. She acted supportive but something felt off. A couple weeks later on my birthday I got a card in the mail from her. It had a Mother Theresa quote, “We can do no great things in life, only small things, with great love.” My mother added below, “And this is how we see you living your life." My stomach dropped as I understood the message of very covert, sophisticated betrayal. She didn’t want me to do anything great in my life. She felt I belonged working retail at the mall, living at home where she could use and abuse me to satiate her sadistic whims. 

 

That’s malevolence. It’s ill will, it’s a betrayal and it’s evil. That’s the malignant end of the narcissism spectrum, overlapping with psychopathy, and a very sophisticated version. It doesn’t have to be murder to be evil. Evil can be very covert and even seemingly supportive on the surface but that’s only the illusion of trust that they extort from you in order to betray you. 

 

While I was in Peru the year before going to my parents’ house when that conversation took place among the piles of catalogs, I dreamt that I was being chased by a group of armed men who want to kill me. I ran to my mother’s house to hide and she said, “Sure come on in! Go hide upstairs!” Then the band of armed men trying to kill me showed up at the door and with a giant smile my mother said to them, “She’s upstairs” as she welcomed them into the house and motioned toward the stairs. That dream was symbolic of the betrayal of our entire relationship. 

 

Even a couple months after going No Contact with her in 2017, I still had dreams about her betrayal. I dreamt that I was trapped in a hospital. Now I don’t go to doctors or hospitals so that alone was terrifying. Then I saw the nurse turn around and look at me sideways with her clipboard in her hands and I shuddered in terror. It was my mother. She felt my terror and smirked. She handed me a medicine bottle and told me that I couldn’t leave unless I took the drug. I had to get out of there but I also knew that if I took the drug she was forcing on me, I might lose my mind and not be able to escape. I opened the medicine bottle and pulled out the dropper to look closer at it. Suddenly I became lucid in the dream at that moment because I was trying so hard to maintain control over my mind as I took a small dose so I could meet the requirements and get out. I looked at the bottle and it said Diazepam. I later looked it up and it’s an anti-psychotic. But if you aren’t psychotic and you take it, it will make you act psychotic. So afterward I understood it was a terrible double bind. I was either stuck in the hospital under the care of my evil mother if I didn’t take the drug or I had to take the drug in order to get out but risk losing control of my mind, acting psychotic, being branded crazy and then never being able to leave the hospital and her control. I woke up in a puddle of cold sweat as I was putting the dropper in my mouth. I don’t have a lot of memories of childhood but my body and subconscious remember. 

 

When you have a malignant parent, your wellbeing is less important to them than the gratification of their ego. All narcissists can be dangerous because of their black hole effect, how they suck people into their life. In Spanish they refer to narcissists as black holes or black suns. You don’t want to get too close to the event horizon because once you’re sucked in past the point of no return, there’s no escaping the gravitational pull of their drama and need for narcissistic supply at the expense of your wellbeing. 

 

If you’re evaluating whether someone in your life is malignant or not, the bottom line is this: Do they have your back when it really matters? 

 

When the cards are stacked against you, are they by your side or do they take the other side just to delight themselves while watching you suffer? 

 

When you’re raised by a malignant parent, you feel quite alone in the world. As a kid you can’t really use your logical brain to figure that our or articulate what’s going on. Parents are supposed to love and support their kids but in these cases, that belief is in direct contrast with reality.

 

Even in adulthood, it’s very difficult to be able to admit that one or both of your parents doesn’t love you, they just pretend to sometimes, when it’s convenient for them or serves their agenda. When you’re betrayed by your family, you end up internalizing the belief that you’re worthless.

 

You end up in a lot of adult situations of betrayal and until you figure out the connection to childhood, you’ll keep wondering why so many people betray you. Betrayal will become your biggest fear in relationships. You could get to the point where you don’t even know if you’re being paranoid or if the other person is really betraying you, even when you’re looking at hard evidence of betrayal. The worst part though, is how you’ll learn to betray yourself. You’ll do this over and over again, including when it really matters, and you’ll only blame yourself, continually reinforcing the belief that you’re worthless and people can’t be trusted, including yourself. 

 

if you’re not careful, you can get caught up in this evil energy of betrayal. When you hang out with malignant people, that evil can contaminate your life and decisions as well. Psychopaths are especially adept at planting ideas in your head that you think are your ideas. You can end up doing something that betrays someone else you love, playing right into the agenda of the psychopath who orchestrated the whole thing just to sit back and watch the chaos unfold. You might do things that weren’t like you, things that were totally out of integrity. That will cause you to have deep shame, guilt and regret because you didn’t show up as a better version of you. That only reinforces your belief that you’re worthless and the psychopath is the only one who will accept you. 

 

You can get sucked into that malevolence without even realizing it. You’re not choosing to be evil because it’s not like you want to see someone hurt, but you let evil take you over and you can end up hurting someone you care about. This is how evil can come to possess ordinary people. These are the things that we later regret and feel haunted by for years or decades because we can only blame ourselves for the actions we took. 

 

Did you ever betray someone? 

Can you identify the moment when you made the decision (albeit unconsciously) to betray them?

How did you feel afterward?

How do you feel now about it?

How do you know you won’t do that again? 

 

No one is immune to evil. Evil can take over the mind and heart of anyone who isn’t paying attention. 

 

Guard your mind like your life depends on it, because it does. There is a war on for your mind. It’s not just the narcissists and other manipulators you can come across in your personal and professional life. It’s the evil energy that creeps in when you’re not vigilant. If you let your mind drift, you will find that negative thought patterns automatically take over your mind. Those negative thought patterns become your actions, which become your habits and your habits become your personality. You can drift your way into being a drone of evil without even realizing it until it’s too late. Take ownership of your mind or something else will. I highly recommend reading the book "Outwitting the Devil" by Napoleon Hill to understand more about this concept. 

 

Jordan Peterson says, “Take responsibility for the malevolence in your own heart.” Peterson also talks about how deep knowledge of evil changes people and wakes them up. This, I believe, is the silver lining that we can find as we move through the healing process after abuse. 

 

Your contact with evil was an awakening. It was very painful and unpleasant, as most awakenings are. While you will never be the same as you were before encountering evil, that’s not necessarily a bad thing. You’re awake now. You’re no longer naive. You’re fully cognizant that evil exists in this world because you’ve been touched by it. That was the end of your childlike innocence, which no longer serves you as an adult anyway. 

 

Your contact with evil might have been severe enough to destroy your faith in humanity. That’s a precarious moment because if you go too far down that path, you can end up turning into the monster who hurt you. If you find yourself nearing that point, ask yourself who in your life can you count on to be on your side? 

 

My saving grace was one person in my life who was on my side. Always. That was my grandmother. I let her down twice. Big time. When I was a senior in high school, I skipped school on her watch because my parents were traveling on my birthday week, as per usual. Since my parents wouldn’t allow me to participate in senior skip day, my boyfriend and I created our own ritual and cut school. After she found out, my mother got grandma on the phone and provoked her emotions to try to pit her against me but it didn’t work. Grandma was crying when my mother called me to the phone to apologize to her but to her surprise (and mine), grandma forgave me. Then in my early 20s as I became a recovering Catholic, I decided I was atheist for a period of time before finding my spirituality. Grandma was very Catholic. No one thought that was going to go well. But she accepted me anyway and told me that what most mattered to her about her religion was being kind to others. She reasoned that since I’m kind to others, it’s okay that I don’t believe in her god.

 

If I hadn't had someone in my corner like my grandma, when it really mattered, when I got in trouble, when I had a problem, I probably would’ve gone to the dark side. Now my grandmother wasn’t a healthy person but she certainly had more capability to love than my mother. However, she scapegoated my cousin, which revealed her narcissistic traits. She was petty with her but not malevolent. I didn’t realize all of that until the recent years but the most important thing for me was that she showed me she was on my side. That affected my brain development and the formation of my personality in a positive way. 

 

That is probably the most damaging thing to a child’s psyche, not having any adults they can trust to be on their side when it really matters. Kids are learning how to socialize, they’re going through the process of domestication training at home and at school so they can become responsible members of society. If no one is on their side, that creates a deep sense of betrayal that can set them up to become  monsters as adults. 

 

The betrayal wasn’t fair. And if it started in childhood for you, it was written into your neurology and programming. That determines what you expect to see in the world and what you often find. But it doesn’t have to be that way any more. You can work on processing and healing the betrayal. As you release that, you change your mental programming and your neurology responds to those changes through a process that the 40-year Harvard study called, neuroplasticity. 

 

The wound of betrayal since childhood can become bitterness in adulthood if you don’t find some kind of silver lining lesson in there. That’s not going to be where your head is at in the first stage of recovery and probably not even through most of the second stage, but as you work through those heavy emotions caused by betrayal, you can release them before they make you stuck and feeling bitter. Bitterness freezes you in your recovery process. It also turns off healthy people who don’t want to be around that energy. It makes you guarded. When you’re closed, you’re likely to accept another emotionally unavailable person in your life. Bitterness just doesn’t help you heal or make meaningful connections with people.

 

In the early stages of recovery, it’s really helpful to take time to yourself to focus on healing. But, if long-term you block out the possibility of ever letting anyone in again, then you won’t be able to really thrive in life. We thrive through our meaningful connections with others. And that is the antidote to the bitterness caused by the betrayal of evil.