 My name is Sam Ragnin and I am the author of Malignance of Love, Narcissism Revisited. The holiday season should be a time of family get-together, love shared, and relatives and friends brought up to date. Holidays are supposed to be the reification of their apparent contradiction in terms, mass or group intimacy. Instead, for victims of family violence and abuse, holidays are recurring nightmares, replete with danger and duplicity. Holidays become a theater of the observed, with menacing overtones. This is especially true when the offender also has narcissistic or anti-social, psychopathic, personality disorders. It is therefore important to understand the mindsets of such abusers during the holidays. First, there is the envy. Holiday blues are common occurrences, even among the mentally sound and balanced. But in abuses with narcissistic or anti-social personalities, holidays provoke a particularly virulent strain of pathological envy. The psychopathic narcissist is jealous at others for having a family or for being able to celebrate, or even for merely possessing the right festive mood. The narcissist keeps telling himself, look at these inferior people wasting their time pretending to be happy. Yet deep inside, the narcissist knows that he is the defective one. He realizes that his inability to rejoice is a protracted and unusual punishment mitted out to him by his own hands. Though the narcissist will never admit to it, the narcissistic or psychopathic abuser is actually sad and enraged. Consequently, he wants to spoil the party for everyone else. He wants them to share his misery, to reduce them to his level of emotional abstinence and absence. Holidays remind the narcissist of his childhood, of the supportive and loving family he never had. The narcissistic and psychopathic abuser feel deprived, and coupled with his rampant paranoia, he feels cheated and persecuted. To the narcissistic and psychopathic abuser and offender, holidays are a conspiracy of the emotional haves against the emotional haves not. And then there is passive aggressiveness. Holidays and birthdays are injurious impositions and reminders of vulnerability. The abuser ruins such events in order to make everyone else as miserable as he is. He rages in order to induce rage. Holidays create in the narcissist an abandon of negative nihilistic emotions, the only type of feelings that he is intimately acquainted with. On holidays, on birthdays, and even on his own birthday, the narcissist makes it a point to carry on routinely. He accepts no gifts, does not celebrate, or obstructively and passive aggressively works till the wee hours of the night. Such pointed withdrawal is a demonstrative refusal to participate, a rejection of social norms and in-your-face statement. While such unusual conduct emphasizes the narcissist's uniqueness, because very few people behave this way, it also makes him feel even more deprived and punished. It feasts the furnace of hatred, it feasts the anger, the all-engulfing scorn that the narcissist harbors. The narcissist abuser wants to be drawn out of his sulk and pouting, yet he declines all offers and opportunities, and he evades all attempts to draw him out. He hurts those who try to make him smile and to forget. In times like these, in holidays and birthdays, the narcissist is reminded of a fundamental truth. His voluptuous, virulent, spiteful, hissing and spitting grudge is all he has. Those who threaten to take this away from him with their love, with their affection, compassion, empathy or care are nothing short of his enemies. And then there is control-freakery. Psychopathic and narcissistic abusers hate it when other people are happy if they are not the cause of such jubilation and joy. Narcissists and psychopaths have to be the prime movers and shakers, the center of attention and the cause of everybody's moods. In contrast, the narcissist believes that only he should determine how he should feel. He should be the sole source and cause of his own emotions. He, therefore, perceives holidays as prescriptions, impositions, instructions coming from above as to how he should behave and how he should feel on given days. Narcissists abhor authority and resent it. They are counter-dependent. That's why they abhor holidays. The psychopathic narcissist projects his own desolate inner landscape onto others. He is convinced that people are faking and feigning the happiness, that it is forced and forced. He feels that they are hypocrites, dissimulating joy when where there is none. Envious is the narcissist is. He is humiliated by his own envy, and he is enraged by this humiliation. He feels that other people are the recipients of gifts that he has been deprived of, the ability to enjoy life and to feel joy. So besieged by this knowing inadequacy, the narcissistic abuser does his best to destroy everybody else's celebratory mood. He's a party-booker. He brings bad news and tidings. He provokes a fight. He makes disparaging or snide remarks. He disappears suddenly. He projects a dire future. He sows uncertainty in relationships. When he has rendered his family in social circles sour and sad and downcast, the narcissist is at last elated and relieved. His mood improves dramatically, and he tries to cheer everyone up. In other words, to control how they feel. Now any joy would be real because it is his own doing and it is controlled by him. So what can you do about such travesties of human beings? You should act against your better instincts. Do not try to involve your abuser in festivities, family events, birthdays, special occasions and gatherings. Such attempts will only infuriate him further. Instead, leave him be. Let him sulk, mired and immersed as he is in his self-picking. Let him dwell upon his seething envy and martyrdom complex. You go out, join friends and family at their abodes, and celebrate to your heart's content. Chances are that by the time you have returned, your abuser will have forgotten all about it and things will revert to normal. But admittedly, not always. Some abusive intimate partners will be spoiling for a fight no matter what. There is nothing you can do about it except set boundaries and punish misbehavior and maltreatment. Whether you choose to involve your abuser in all the activities or not is immaterial. He will torment and haunt you all the same. With a narcissistic and psychopathic abuser, no good deed goes unpunished. Happy holidays.