I knew this person for about 8 years from late 1989 but have had no contact with since early 1998. My very last contact was by phone when not for the first time he tried to extort an 'apology' from me by saying that we should not be friends any longer. I said yes and aside from some pathetic attempts by him months later to act as though nothing happened, not that he had the bravery to call me to express a wish that he should be my friend again, I have had no contact with him. At the time I was branded a thief because I had some of his property and a liar because I asked for something he had of mine. When I tried to return some of his personal property I was for the first and only time in my life actually snarled at by another human being over the phone. It was though a sub-human had come on the line.
It is very hard to say anything positive about this person, I have thought about contacting him in recent years but when I discovered his creative coaching website I knew that this was a delusional narcissist who had actually progressed from being somebody who had been totally corrupted by a degree of success as a computer programmer to somebody who was genuinely mad. It is fair to say that he probably started to become mad in the last two years that I knew him. Around that time I was having a very tough time trying to get a proper break in my dream job. I recall that when I complained about it to him his comment was 'well you chose it' and when I half-heartedly asked for some kind of opportunity in the large media company he worked in he wrote me off in three words 'no product knowledge'. That was coming from a friend.
He never failed to mention when he had received a pay rise, even when I was unemployed. In the last two years he started to cultivate pretentions as a creative person, musician, writer, etc all half baked and when he had an article printed about a physical health condition he and others suffer from in the Guardian 2 a supplement of a national newspaper, he never stopped talking about it. On the day it was published I bought two copies and showed it to my co-workers and then rang him to tell him I thought it was good. Some months later after spending a good part of an evening taunting me about some audio samples I had given him and which he had used in an avant garde jingle to be broadcast on BBC Radio 3 and trying to imply that I was some kind of Nazi because he felt like it, he then whipped out an attack absolutely out of nowhere about how I was the person who had been the coldest about his newspaper article, even colder than his mother and that he would keep on reminding me about it. He actually extorted an apology from me. I should have just walked away, which is what I would have done these days and have done.
One evening when we were in a bar he flew into a temper about how I think it was about plotting behind his back. He walked into the tube station and straight down the escalator without a backward glance. I completely accepted that as the end of the friendship and resolved never to have any contact again. However he called me with a faux apology and a lie about how he had waited for me. Rather than lose a friend I accepted him again. You may ask why I ever hung about with somebody as vicious and not to mention ignorant as this person. I should mention that again when I was unemployed, he would fizz about how London was like 'a great big playground' because he had a good disposable income and no children. I should also mention that he had ideas about becoming a counsellor, very very fond of diagnosing people even from when I first knew him, also chock full of class hatred to a degree I have not seen since and very touchy about being criticised himself to the point of choosing a type of counsellor who not tell him what to do. He frequently used to argue with these people.
Fortunately he lacked the commitment to become a counsellor or have access to genuinely vulnerable people, something which I have monitored and have told the webmasters of various self-help forums he posts on that I would make a very real complaint to the appropriate authorities about if I ever heard of it, citing my reasons why. Finally I must say that this person had another most unpleasant hobby, linked to his liking for one-upmanship and that was to undermine people which he did insidiously and once or twice with my friends as an audience. He liked to re-write history and attenuate projects and activities we had shared on a few years before as silly and worthless. He also liked to say things which had an innocent meaning but also a more damning double-meaning. I have recognised academic qualifications in psychology, nothing amazing, but something that this person on the strength of a few evening classes liked to undermine. I had happened to mention that the lectures of one academic we had to listen to were not that good, which was all he needed to start to discount me.
The last time I ever spoke to him on the phone he started ranting about how he was 'a counsellor'. Simply stating that he was NOT a counsellor stopped him dead in his tracks. I suppose I hung around with this person, because I was scared of being alone or losing a friend and I was pretty vulnerable at the time because of what was going on at work. He exploited the fact that I was tolerant of him for a long time and he acted as no friend at all. I find it horrific that he should now be in a position where he is giving advice to anybody and where he is able to propagate his frankly idiotic views about motivation. As long as confines his activities to a few people with more money than sense I suppose no real harm can be done, but there is a whole raft of psychopathology behind the guise of the happy motivational coach.
A long time ago he started to behave as if he was 'cured' and that everybody else around him was still 'f*cked-up', I suppose the delusion has grown so big that he needed to write a book with a silly and brash Mansonesque title about breaking out of the 9-5 world of work and of course validating the delusion of being an expert by making money out of the whole process. I think that this is how cults are started, from the needs of others, rather than the talent of the person who started the cult. More worrying is that since 2006 he has a diploma in coaching from The Coaching Academy (not an actual academic centre) and is moving in on the coaching and mentoring business which means access to vulnerable people.
I know that narcissists need to have people who they perceive as inferior to them, even better if they are sick and weak, which re-inforces their feelings of superiority and importance. They don't care about other people. The publicity for his book states that he was a counsellor and a psychotherpaist for seven years, all grandiose lies. One of his fake therapist friends actually indulged himself with a great deal of name-calling on Amazon.co.uk, no discussion of ideas at all, which is a strange thing for somebody in a caring profession to do at all. He called me a 'bully' and gave a dictionary definition of it because I had discussed and invalidated in a calm and logical way, the ideas in the book.
Knowing this person left me with some very deep scars and it took me a long time to learn to like myself by spending time alone and finding new friends. The funny part of it is that this person is such a wage slave, actually obsessed with money, that he is the last person who would give up a full-time job and become self-employed. I once suggested that he use some of his paid holiday time years ago to create music in and I received a very hostile response indeed because I suggested that creativity might involve something that did not flatter his ego and was in fact inconvenient in a practical sense.
I think that the lesson learned is that you must have no contact with a narcissist, the danger is that they can be so plausible that your boundaries need to be completely water-tight, no contact in that case. This is a good example of a narcissist who was not a full-blown narcissist for quite some years but then became insane when about 30 years old. I think what might have triggered it was the injections of growth hormone and testosterone he started receiving for hypothyroidism. Having witnessed the effects of medicinal steroids on somebody quite recently I think this was the trigger to give the psychopathology full reign. I witnessed the transition from somebody who had his faults just like anybody else, through a saga of arrogance and nastiness where the stock response to anything I said was 'NO IT ISN'T!!!'. I should have realised that I was dealing with the shell of a person by then. The thing to remember is that it isn't obvious that you are dealing with somebody who is very sick, but somebody who is very unpleasant from time to time, gradually getting worse and less similar to the person you thought you knew.