Resurrection After Rape Community Group
Discussion, question-and-answer, general social support, and journal processing for progress-oriented rape survivors. No crisis, no damaging or triggering conflicts--this is for individuals who want to contribute to collective, cooperative action toward the goal of making actual PROGRESS through rape trauma. Much of this work is based on the book "Resurrection After...
From Psychology Today - http://www.psychologytoday.com/articles/201106/how-spot-narcissist .
Proud of my teen sister. Former twilight addict now hates the series for suggesting girls cannot live without a boyfriend and recognises the abuse patterns there. Only slightly my influence since she ignored me during the love phase :)
The cards themselves are ghastly.
This is what hell looks like: http://thechive.files.wordpress.com/2011/08/we-need-to-talk-18.jpg
I was really disappointed.
I think that the majority of this article is very very undermining of what a narcissist really is. They speak in terms of relationships which, according to the article, narcissists never really have. When I know, in reality, this is a severely untrue conclusion. Narcissists strive for something better by creating a false world. Sure, I assume some of them fit the criteria of this article, but the overwhelming majority of the time you hear people speak about narcissistic people it is adult children speaking of their parents.
Narcissists are more worried about creating a "perfect image" of themselves than being promiscuous. They would rather create a perfect monogamous situation through manipulation and control. Society has a very victorian prude way of looking at sex in terms of people's lifestyles, and a very provocative abusive way of looking at sex in mainstream media and advertising. Even an article about the terrors, hurt, and abuse that narcissists cause in our society was switched around and geared towards sex.
Every picture in the article is a sexually charged picture. There was no need for that. Regardless that males and females are equally portrayed, an article about a narcissist should not be focused only on sex and relationships.
I found another article.
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-legacy-distorted-love/201105/narcissistic-parents-contact-or-not .
I think this one is a much more viable reflection.
"Narcissists are more worried about creating a "perfect image" of themselves than being promiscuous."
Yesterday my daughter and I were hanging out and she mentioned a phone conversation she recently had with my mother. Until recently, I've only said the most positive things about my mother to anyone, especially my kids, and I've certainly never hinted, "I think your grandmother might be narcissistic." But my kids have been amazingly immune and amused by her manipulation attempts. They can see through her in ways that astonish me. Obviously they are way smarter and more together than I am.
But anyway, I responded to something my daughter said by saying, "My mother used to tell me repeatedly not to give any thought to what other people think," and I began quoting what she would often say.
My daughter started laughing. "Oma's entire life is based on what other people might think!"
Which fits, Anthem, exactly in with what you wrote...I still remember that chat we had because you were able so quickly to "get" my family dynamic. In the same way, while my daughter and I were laughing over what was mostly a light-hearted conversation, I was looking at her and trying to figure out how something like that could be so obvious to her, while it's taken me all my life to reach some of the same conclusions...and I've fought against accepting every single one of them.
My mother's "perfect image" is of a godly woman, a very strong Christian who is far above the sorts of things that tempt the rest of us. She dresses attractively but not at all sensuously or in a way that is provocative. At the same time that she presents herself as someone who is sickened by the very thought of sex with anyone but my father, she seems to enjoy male attention while acting bewildered by it.
Just one story: after we came home from a shopping trip when I was a kid, I discovered my mother furtively re-wrapping the meat she had bought. It seems the butcher had drawn hearts on the packages. "I don't understand why he would do such a thing!" she said. She liked to pretend that she was oblivious to her own beauty as a way of getting compliments...but at the same time, she liked to brag to us about her best features...which was everything but her height. Anyway, I was sworn to secrecy lest my father confront the butcher and cause a scene. I said something like, "Well, we can't ever go back there again!" only to be told that I didn't understand...they had the best meat. Years later she would drag me to a hardware store, supposedly to keep the young guy working there from flirting with her. I think it was really so I could observe it first hand.
"I do nothing to encourage them!" she would say, yet she seemed to enjoy telling me about them. It fit with her "perfect image"...the beautiful woman who, without wanting male attention, inadvertantly attracted it everywhere...but was so godly and pure she was never tempted for a moment...she had long ago purposes to do the "right thing" and her resolve never faded for a moment. She could have any man she wanted, but she remained loyal to my father, because she had the strength of character to do so, and she simply can't understand anyone without her high standards...
I think it is important to distinguish between narcissism and narcissistic disorders.
We all have some degree of narcissism and in the main it is a good healthy thing to have. Narcissism simply means that we are aware of ourselves as a 'self' distinct from others and that we embrace that identity and act proactively on behalf our our 'self'. That is a GOOD thing.
Narcisstic disorders are when that sense of self goes amouk. Most often it is because the self as a 'self' is actually very poorly defined. This commonly expresses itself in one of two ways: (a) feeling like/fearing the self is non-existent unless it is constantly reflected in the eyes of others (b) being unaware of the boundaries between oneself and others so that their needs and feelings become ours and vice versa.
If one fails to feel and own a 'self' it is next to impossible to tell what is "me" and what is someone else. This can look like selfishness, but it isn't really. The narcissistically disordered person really really can't tell very well the difference between their needs and others, especially others they are attached to (spouses, children, parents, best friends ). Love under any circumstance blurs boundaries, but for a narcissistically disordered person, this blurring makes an already ill defined sense of self even more ill defined.
The nasty promiscuous gradiose stereotype of a narcisstic disorder is usually due to constantly needing a reflective mirror. Another criticism I have of the article is that it really only discusses what happens when narcissistic disorder and extroversion meet. There are lots of way people seek out mirrors and promiscuity is only one of them. For non-extroverts or people that get something out of being part of a system, there may a very different expression of reflection seeking. For example, the person who always needs the approval of a boss or the community and gets depressed, anxious and irritable without it, is just as much dependent on reflection as the person who can't stop boasting about their great sex life or fabulous ability to close deals.
But in many ways the second dynamic, blurred boundaries of self is much harder to live with. It is what makes the narcisstically disordered person feel invasive to those around them.
On a practical level, If they are hot, everyone else is hot. If they are hungry everyone else should be too. If they are not hungry than everyone who feels hungry is just being annoying. They can't REALLY feel that way. If they find a situation challenging, so should everyone else. If they are happy so should everyone else be. Anyone who doesn't feel in tandem with them isn't part of the "team" or is failing to be supportive and understanding. They aren't being selfish because there isn't a real other who has needs different from them, let alone in conflict with them.
A similar thing happens when a loved one upsets them. Instead of feeling like someone _else_ hurt them, a person with dysfunctional narcissim can actually feel like they hurt their very own self. Depending on their personality style, that can result is heaps of self blame or alternatively rejecting and pushing away the person - just as one might reject and push away a hurtful or painful part of ourselves. It is important to realize that the person isn't actually rejecting "Joe" as a separate person but rather Joe as an extension of themselves.
The possibility of saying "Hey, Joe, that hurt when you said that" is usually way down on the list of responses because as simple as it sounds, it requires an awareness that the other person is not inside of "me" and is not me and so can't experience his own actions the way I do.
It goes without saying that if a parent is consumed by the need for reflective material and can't really tell the difference between their needs and those they love, children of narcissists don't get very good feedback for the development of their own self-hood.
As a result we survivors of narcisstically disordered parents, tend to have a certain amount of disorder ourselves. That doesn't mean we are nasty people. Rather it means we have wounds in our sense of self that we need to take care of.
For children of narcisstically disordered parents, narcissistic disorder can also take a third form - being only aware or conscious of the parts of the self that were reflected in our parents eyes. Thus we walk around with half a self, mostly unaware of the strengths and hopes that our parents couldn't own or admit to or nurture because of their own limitations. Or if we vaguely are aware of them or even intellectually certain of them, we still have difficulty on an emotional level. Emotionally, we disown and de-legitimize them because they weren't part of what was affirmed and reflected by key people in childhood and adolescence.
Or we own them, but only by distinguishing between the bad/weak child and the good adult. Only our adult selves are lovable. The problem with this way of "owning" our strengths is that all of the supportive energy for those hopes and strengths comes from the energy and groundness of knowing something is a part of you from the very moment we are born. Eventually, we burn out.
That last one is me all the way. There are huge parts of myself I'm only barely conscious of because until fairly recently, it never occurred to me that I was only seeing the parts of myself that had either (a) come in conflict with my parents or (b) were needed and depended upon by my parents or (c) were supposed to replicate my parents into the next generation. Even when I saw those parts of myself, I treated them as second class citizens in the inner world of the 'self'.
I'm the kid who always survived, but I did it by becoming an adult way too early. I never really let the adult self grow out of the child self but rather developed it in place of the child self. I don't hate my child self - I actually have a fair bit of compassion and kindness towards her. But all the same, I don't rely on her for the source of strength and energy she can be. As a child whatever energy she had to give was constantly directed outwards to her parents and eventually to her clients and peers. It never really occurred to me that those parts of myself were also there to take care of me, not just others.
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As I write this, a small lightbulb is going on in my head. I've been griping recently that I don't have a therapist to help me and that without that I find myself not being as disciplined or daring in pushing myself to work through the things that are getting in my way. However, this experience is also forcing me to apply coaching and counselling skills to myself that I happily give to others.
Over the years, I've had more than one friend say to me "You need a beth". Although they literally mean another person in my life that does for them what I do for them, there is an obvious implication that I am not being "beth" to myself. Maybe for me, my needing to do this on my own for now is God's way of forcing me into awareness of these issues and start applying my talents and strengths on my own behalf?
I'm not saying that we should all go out and counsel ourselves, but in my particular case, it may be just the right medicine to put me in touch with myself.
The poisonous jellyfish (for those new here, the name Heptet gave to the rape counsellor I worked with after the rape ) did the damage she did because I didn't really own my own skills. When she took an approach thatt I knew was obviously wrong, I didn't run. Part of that was because I was in shock post rape. But part of it was also that I saw my ability to do "meta-analysis" and form a counselling strategy was valid only when it was reflected in the eyes of others. It was valid when it helped others (reflection) and valid when a therapist or authority confirmed it (also reflection). But when alone or when a therapist went against it, I saw those same skills as uncertain or presumptuous. To the child of a narcissist nothing can be worse that being "presumptuous" (because that makes you selfish and bad).
Only when Matt wrote a book that put on paper the very same process my gut had been telling me to do since day one, was I willing to own that maybe, just maybe, I was right all along about what was needed to heal. But until then, I treaded water and it makes me sad, because all along I had the answer but was afraid to rely on myself or my ability to carry it out.
If my period of conselling myself is really the medicine I need, then I need to think about being bolder and push harder because this is actually how it needs to happen. Also it isn't really true that I have no one to catch me if I were to bump into something so painful I couldn't cope. I have many loyal friends both on and off line who wouldn't want me to be hurt in any way and whose care is because they are really interested in me as me and not just me as a mirror in which they can know themselves.