Narcissists are infuriated by other people talking about their own trauma.   Trauma, like everything else, is a competitive sport for those grandiose souls whose suffering is always greater than anyone else’s.   I recall Gina’s rage, Flack’s rage, when I tried to describe how Gina’s anger had reawakened a trauma in me I thought I’d healed from.  In hindsight, if we take their insane behavior into consideration, they were both much more seriously traumatized in their early lives than I was.   They win, I give up.    This is a game for mad people.

I often think of this competition for greatest victim when I encounter comparisons of historical, and present day, atrocities.  Who had it worse, the millions packed into cargo holds for the deadly trip to slavery in the New World, the Armenians whipped and herded into the desert to die, or into raging rivers to drown, the Jews lined up at the side of a ravine and shot in the back of the head, the two year-old orphan in any bombed out, war-ravaged region of the world?   What a sick question to even pose.  Every one of them is the worst thing a human can experience, where does the need to compare and contrast them come from?

Being a victim justifies an aggressive counter-attack.  I killed thousands because they killed thousands!   I’m not evil, you are!

Bully for you, responding to mass murder with mass murder.   Way to make a more ethical world, Nazi.