He Triangulated Me With a Dying Woman

This incident happened at the very beginning of my relationship with my ex, Jamel, who is a malignant narcissist.

I was visiting campus to see some friends when my malignant narcissist ex, Jamel, called me while he was at work.

Jamel was a DSP worker in a residential home where he worked with incapacitated elderly people.

He was actually one of the supervisors and took great pride in his status and the notoriety he got for his “charity work”.

In the middle of our conversation, he suddenly cut me off to say,

It’s okay baby, it’ll be okay sweetie. Here, sweetheart. Good girl.

I froze because I was caught off guard.

The disrespect was direct because it was very clear that he was definitely talking to another woman. The question was why was he boldly talking to whoever she was so affectionately with me right there on the phone?

And who the hell was he talking to?

It was Amanda.

Amanda Was My “Competition”

She was a 33-year-old resident who was nonverbal and incapacitated.

Her story is very sad:

Amanda had been abandoned by her family because they didn’t want the responsibility of taking care of her anymore so one day they brought her to one of the three residential homes Jamel supervised and left her there.

They never looked back.

Amanda was prone to UTIs and was constantly hospitalized for them because she couldn’t communicate when her symptoms started or alert anybody to how bad they were progressing until things were so severe that she needed to be hospitalized.

In some cases, this involved her peeing blood.

This was one of those cases.

Amanda was being transferred to the hospital from the facility and Jamel was assisting in transporting her. What I heard was him talking to her as he did it and something about it felt wrong — because it was excessive.

Jamel kept speaking to her in this unusually soft voice.

It’s a tone of voice I’ve only heard in people who are comforting beloved pets they’re putting down.

Every single sentence contained terms of endearment that would catch your attention.

Something about him doing this to a woman who was incapacitated and nonverbal made this very creepy, and I got the feeling he was doing this to affect me.

One reason is because he’s in the middle of moving her from a bed to a wheelchair, and then into a van.

Yet, I heard no movement through the phone and he was unusually close to the phone as if to make sure I heard all of his words clearly.

Plus, as I said earlier, Amanda was nonverbal so she couldn’t respond back and it’s not totally clear she even knew what was happening.

This made all of his actions, and the likely intent behind them, even creepier so I said something to him about it.

Immediately.

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He Gaslit Me When I Established My Boundary

I told Jamel that the way he spoke to Amanda made me feel weird and uncomfortable.

He claimed this is how he talks to women and that it shouldn’t be a problem because it’s not that serious.

He also suggested that I stop being insecure.

This response rubbed me the wrong way for two reasons:

He minimized my feelings.
This was the first time I expressed an issue with his behavior and once I made it clear he was crossing a boundary he gaslit me by using my valid suspicion to draw attention to my insecurities.

2. None of his reasoning involved Amanda at all.

He made no mention of him trying to comfort her or his approach being an attempt to let her know that she was going to be okay as being the reason behind his creepy delivery.

He was strictly dismissing how I felt after going out of his way to make it seem like he was flirting with another woman who was both, incapacitated and nonverbal, to make me look like I was overreacting — strictly off of the strength of Amanda’s condition.

This was actually Jamel’s first unmasking.

Because the truth was he was intentionally trying to trigger me in a way that he thought would make me look crazy and “insecure” — and he was about to regret it.

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I Issued Jamel a Triggering Ultimatum

If you can do it then I can do it too.

I brought up how friendly and affectionate I naturally am with other people, including men.

I said this before reminding Jamel how out of respect for our relationship I stopped being so friendly; distancing myself from some very cool friendships in the process.

(Jamel met me on Tumblr where I was very friendly and very extroverted. He would go on to admit he got jealous of how friendly I was with other men, even when we weren’t acquainted yet.)

I made it clear that if he was going to do it, even though he himself didn’t like it, then there was no reason for me to stop doing it.

I also pointed out that since he was unwilling to have enough respect for me to respect my boundary then I wasn’t actually obligated to respect his should he ever point a behavior out to me that he didn’t like.

That got his attention.

I told you in my last article

Never Laugh at an Overt Narcissist
I got called a bitch and it was all Fleetwood Mac’s fault.
medium.com

Narcissists do not enjoy the taste of their own medicine. Often, they will treat you in ways that they, themselves, cannot handle.

What’s good for the victim is not always good for the narcissist.

Jamel’s willingness to stop the behavior in fear of me doing the same to him was unknowingly a subtle submission that he knew what he was doing was actually across the line, and purposely so.

It was time for me to bring Amanda into this because insecurities or no insecurities, Amanda needed an advocate; one who could speak up on her behalf for her. And I was willing to do just that.

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His Creepy Triangulation Method Backfired — Badly

I turned the tables on his triangulation strategy with one statement.

After Jamel said he could see what’s I was coming from I actually ignored his statement and turned my attention over to Amanda and told him,

I’m gonna be honest, it looks very creepy for you to hover over an incapacitated woman calling her ‘baby’ and ‘good girl’. Especially because she’s nonverbal. You look creepy doing that and honestly, if the wrong person sees you doing that you could easily lose your job because it makes you look predatory and weird. I might have insecurities but you’re taking advantage of vulnerable people instead of actually being professional. You’re a supervisor. This looks really bad, man. I hope you know that.

That did it.

That changed everything.

It was this comment that made the real impact and the reason why is because narcissists care about their appearance, especially covert and malignant narcissists.

The covert narcissist needs their mask to stay glued on (and believable) because they need to make sure everyone sees them as inherently decent people because they need to be socially accepted and liked.
The malignant narcissist, like Jamel, however, needs their mask to remain believable because they get off on taunting their target in a manner where only they are aware of their true nature.

Malignant narcissists don’t mind unmasking themselves at the right moment to the right person.

They need everyone else to buy into their facade in order to make the intended target look crazy and to thoroughly enjoy their calculated game of cat and mouse.

(it’s this key factor that makes them extremely dangerous.)

Jamel only cared about what I said in terms of his benefit looking creepy to Amanda because he realized that other people at his job were highly likely to catch onto this inappropriate behavior and develop a predatory view of him.

He didn’t actually care about triggering me or being inappropriate with Amanda because he knew what he was doing.

Amanda’s safety didn’t matter because Jamel was only using her to mentally put me in an imaginary competition but now he was scared of the consequences this particular course of action was destined to cause if he kept this up.

This is why the moment I was done talking, Jamel’s tone got very serious and almost slightly alarmed as he promised he would never do that again.

And he never did.

(Sadly, it wouldn’t be long before it was discovered that Amanda’s kidneys were failing and that she was actually dying.)

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If you’ve made it this far, thank you for giving my words your time. If you love my work and want to support it you can also tip me below. Be safe❤.

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This post was previously published on medium.com.

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