SELFISHNESS (narcissism). Selfishness is something we all do, of course, and projection and confirmational bias, and we can be stupid, even if we are not prone to being stupid. These are all human traits, and are healthy, but only healthy when to a certain point, for it is unhealthy when these become abusive and harmful.

It always amazes me that in the workplace or in general society, there are checks and balances, courts, police, solicitors, watchdog bodies, employment law, the law, the endless debate of those whom form the law. But in the family, or personal relationships it has none of this as it is usually never heard or seen, yet clearly these are the same people , humans, who are subjected to the Law in general society, so clearly they get up to the same things in family and personal relationships. So family and personal relationships are naturally going to be a very difficult, to say the least, place to have to deal with.

Selfishness, well it is fairly obvious what it is, but as i have thought about it i have found that it is quite a wide field, and sometimes very subtle. There are things like someone wishing to protect themselves from the awful burden of guilt, say, and in doing this they can go to extreme lengths of selfishness, putting themselves first at whatever cost to anyone else. They just what to get whatever it is they want, their own way, whether it is fair or unfair, moral or immoral, and at any price to anyone else.

Ideally they could just write a script and the whole world would act it out for them, so they could do whatever they wanted, have things perfect to suit their self. But they cannot write such a script, so they use whatever they can use, so they will attempt to manipluate, control, and this can involve emotional blackmail, or lies, or smears, or whatever.

Naturally it is better for such a person to use stealth, to be unseen, unsuspected, unexpected..so they have to keep a 'face' which the world will not notice their real agenda.

Involvement with such a person can be devastating, totally draining. It can be extreme and prolonged bullying, totally upsetting and draining. And the victim is not able to see what is going on, so they just have to keep taking it.

I believe that these people have mal-developed personalities. They are fixated in a stage of infantile development where most of us all left that stuff behind as we got empathy, etc. But they still have infantile traits, and they think that the reason why nobody else does what they do is because everyone is stupid and not clever like them. The truth is that they are mentally ill, but they don't see it that way.