Category: Narcissism

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Take Responsibility

I ran across this excellent short essay about The One Sentence That Gets My Kids to Take Responsibility.  It reminds me of the old marital advice to not use “you” statements in arguments, which has stood me in good stead over almost 20 years, so there must be something to it.

Their sentences are filled with the words: he, she, they, and what they did to ME!

They’ll try to say “I . . . am really mad because so and so hit me.” We back up and I tell them to start over. We’ll stay there until they’ve filled in the blank with their own actions.

The other sentences that use the word “I” are just as important. “I’m sorry. I did this _____ to you.” Those sentences can be equally hard to spit out.

For relationships, for careers, for parenting, for taking responsibility and for advocating for yourself – the word “I” matters.

It’s not about taking blame, it’s about owning our actions and moving on.

Ever tried to have a conversation with someone who has mastered the art of deflection and passive aggression? Nothing gets solved.

How much faster does something get fixed when someone admits that it’s broken and how it broke?

Owning our actions is important.

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Two Little Words

There is a world of difference between

I didn’t do anything wrong

(therefore any problem that exists is your fault, because I am perfect, how dare you suggest that I am not perfect, you are wrong)

and

I didn’t mean to do anything wrong

(but I’m human, I made a mistake, I was rude and disrespectful, I didn’t listen to what you were asking for, I’m sorry, and I hope you can forgive me)

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Do you want to know why you are so afraid to acknowledge the truth?

To the adult child of the psychopath/narcissist: Do you want to know why you are so afraid to acknowledge the truth about your Mom or Dad or both? About maybe even your siblings if they are disordered too? Because you know they don’t love you. This truth is the most devastating of all. Acknowledging this truth is the most painful experience you will ever live through…

(quote from here)

Yes.  Yes it was.  Yes it is.

And yet… I am living through it.  In fact there is a sense of relief, of knowing that yes, my instincts and my intuition and the things I have learned from being around normal, loving people were all correct, absolutely on target.  That my desire to seek out health, instead of abuse, is what has led me down this path of learning and understanding, instead of excusing and blaming.  That going no contact with my siblings was the right thing to do in pursuit of that health, and in the rejection of that abuse.

I [don’t] exist as a human being to them, worthy of love and respect.

Yes, it sucks, but the only alternative they are willing to make available sucks worse.

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The Other Side of the Story

There is a recent article by an obviously narcissist mother about “boo hoo, my kids have cut me off and I JUST DON’T KNOW WHY!!”

The rebuttals on the article itself, and here, and here, are so incredibly validating to read.

She did write one thing that I can agree with 100%:

“When something, or more specifically, someone, no longer supports the view you have of yourself — get rid of them!”

I have at least one sibling who has opined, in writing, that my personal choices in life are “big problems” — one example is choosing not to have kids, when I have never, ever, had maternal leanings, and have known that since childhood.

Perhaps he thinks I’d be better off (no wait, strike that, it has nothing to do with his concern over my welfare)
Perhaps he thinks I ought to have made myself miserable, and then dumped that misery on my children. At least then I’d be in the same boat as him.

… if you are an unhappy, unfulfilled person yourself, you are not going to want other people to be happier than you are. The Dalai Lama teaches us that.

No, in contrast, I learned from our experience. My mother was distant, cold, and said awful things to my face — things that make people with normal mothers physically flinch.

But yes, she too was right about one thing: she once told me that I didn’t want to have kids because, “You had your own mother taken away from you.” She meant taken away by the divorce, and thus it was dad’s fault — I know differently.

Reading so many comments, seeing so many other stories that have things in common with mine — so much damage done by so many broken people.  So sad.

A couple of things in the comments on these pages really spoke to me:

Excellent remedies may be made from poisons, but it is not poison upon which we live. ~~ Voltaire

My mother’s mantra has always been, “If I was such an awful parent, why are you and your brother such happy, successful adults?”

The answer: “Because of Dad.”

Thank you, Dad.

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Scapegoat Complex

Found a book that I need to read:  Scapegoat Complex: Toward a Mythology of Shadow and Guilt (Studies in Jungian Psychology By Jungian Analysts)

From the reviews:

As long as women especially are scapegoated within dysfunctional families and collective circles, the universal insights and examples from Jungian Perera’s own practice will never go out of style.

I had no idea there was so much fall-out to being ‘a family scapegoat’ as i would not look at how it affected my life, and have always pushed it under the rug as i was not important enough to matter. Another guilty scapegoat trait, not important enough to face the reality of what was done to me and to actually matter enough to heal and reach for a better life. Now i see, by reading this, the myriad ways this complex affects a person, and i see myself on every page. [Hell, I am seeing myself in the reviews.]

I picked this book up because I needed to do some research on archetypes that come out of narcissistic families. Wow, did I find the right book for that. It was written in 1986, but rings true now as much as it did then. It is painfully accurate on the psychological makeup of those who suffer from being scapegoated.

We scapegoats can recount the most shocking details of our lives that horrify others while not being emotionally connected to our tales and then being surprised that others are horrified when we speak our stories… Those messengers of the shoulds and musts can still make me uncomfortable at times, awakening old feelings of not belonging and yearnings to belong and be normal like everybody else… seeing the complexity of being a scapegoat and that one does not have to be crushed by the burden we have carried.

The practice of Scapegoating, or sacrificing a being as a symbol of casting out sin, has not been left behind. Rather it has evolved along with our species into a more sophisticated, less conspicuous, perhaps far more dangerous practice. Rather than carrying out acknowledged rituals among and for the public, we have begun subconsciously attaching our shadows to those we then hold far from us, thus cleansing ourselves of the sin. We may worship different gods these days, and in some different ways, but the act of ridding is still alive and still hurts many of those among us... At the heart of the solution, as with all therapy, is understanding. Of course with scapegoating, this solution is particularly challenging, and important, because the entire point of scapegoating is the refusal to understand – to in a way, attach the painful side of truth to a person or being other than oneself rather than to try to understand the truth at all.

There are several ways of treating anomalies. Negatively we can ignore, just not perceive, or perceiving we can condemn. Positively we can deliberately confront the anomaly and try to create a new pattern of reality in which it has a place.

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Gifts

Wow.  Susan has always been a shitty gift-giver.  Joe used to be superb at choosing presents, but then he got married and Susan took over and that was the end of that.

Quoted excerpt is from here.

My mother didn’t give gifts to me in the same way she wanted to receive them for herself. Once again this is an example of how controlling and manipulative people live by two different sets of rules.  The rules that apply to her, and the rules that apply to others…
If my gifts to her defined my love for her and her worth in my eyes then I thought it would stand to reason that the same was true for her when she gave a gift to me.When it came to me and the gifts that my mother would choose for me, the gifts always seemed practical or convenient.  She hated those kinds of gifts for herself, but she bought them for me.
It seems odd to me that she would buy me gifts that would have disappointed her; gifts that would have “defined her” as less than worthy of a major splurge gift.If my gifts to my mother defined or proved my love for her and made a statement TO her about HER worth in my eyes then it would stand to reason that the same was true for her when she gave a gift to me.
Today I realize that her gifts to me were in fact another way of keeping me defined as less valuable than she was.  Upon closer examination, if my gifts defined my love for her and her worth in my eyes, than judging by the gifts she chose for me, it would stand to reason the same belief actually WAS true for her.
In truth, she was giving me gifts according to her own belief system. She believed that I was not worthy of thought and consideration in the way that I had to prove she was worthy of thought and consideration.Her double standard (in her view) wasn’t odd at all. It was actually a truth leak about the way she regarded me as “less” than herself.

So the best story I can tell about Susan’s gift-giving was the year I was getting married.  I had gone to their house to have dinner, by myself, which probably means my husband (at that time, my husband-to-be) was traveling.

After dinner, I was talking about wedding plans and so on.  Now, we got married in October, so presumably this has to have been at least September, but probably even earlier in the year.

At one point Susan looks at Joe and says, “Should I ask her?”  Joe says, “No, she’s got enough other stuff on her mind.”  Susan replies, “I’ll ask her.”

Susan then explains to me that she has gotten my name for the annual gift exchange, and wants to know if I would like one of these? And she shows me a vest she has sewn — you know the type.  It is made out of tapestry fabric and has some kind of Santa Claus holiday print on it and it is very folksy and it is just obviously absolutely not my style at all.

So what do you say to that?  “Geez, Susan, what on earth would make you think I’d ever wear a thing like that?”

Of course not.  You’re a guest in their home, you’ve just been fed a nice meal, you say, “Well, that’s very nice.”

I even wore the damned thing a couple of times, and I think when someone complimented me on it I gave it to them.

It was the first time I realized that Susan was manipulative.  The words I came up with to describe it were, “She asks questions in such a way as to get the answer that she wants.”

Or, as in the first part of the story — with my brother, who gave an answer she didn’t want to hear — she just ignores it.

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You’re right, they’re wrong, but they won

Once again, Seth Godin gets inside my head.

Why is that? Is the world so unfair?

As Seth points out, it’s because they have a story, a narrative that they have learned since birth, a set of explanations that starts with “Mom was a saint, Dad was a bastard” and then looks for evidence to support that theory.

They do have a tribe:  the Triumvirate plus One, the one minor kid who didn’t choose Dad to go live with after The Divorce.  (The family legend says that he chose Mom, but according to the actual filings, he refused to make a choice.)

But mostly, it’s because they were prepared to spend a decade (or two or three) to change the culture of their part of the world in the direction that mattered to them.
Or, they had it done for them, by one selfish woman who laid the groundwork, and another who took advantage of a made-to-order setup.
It has taken me a while to accept that I’ve really lost my family.  That in fact, I had them taken away from me by that bitch of a SIL.  (And, that in some ways I never had them to begin with.  But it turns out that the loss of something you thought you had is just as painful.)
I have tried to figure out what her motivation for this could be.  I mean, why did she need to ruin everything for me?  Wasn’t there room enough in this family for everyone?
Well, no, there isn’t — not from the narcissist’s point of view.  To allow everyone to share, to allow everyone to have a place at the table, you need to care about someone other than yourself.
And especially in my case, Susan can’t afford to have someone around who sees through her bullshit, who will speak up and call her on her inappropriateness.
To a narcissist, other people are like parts in a machine that only get noticed when something goes wrong and they stop “working.” Once someone suggests they’re not perfect or experiences some other narcissist injury (something that reminds him he’s just another faulty human being) he will turn from Dr. Jeckyl to Mr. Hyde, raging, criticizing, blaming, giving others the silent treatment, and projecting his own deficiences onto others.
She can’t be comfortable around me, because to her I am a ticking time bomb.
Narcissists need attention (and sometimes pity) and want complete agreement with their wishes. They ignore or oppose people who refuse to supply them with these things, and they turn their attention instead to those who can offer these three things in unlimited supply. This is what’s at the heart of narcissistic supply.
I can’t be counted on to act the way I am “supposed” to act — because I wasn’t trained to it over a lifetime by our mother.  I am not a very good flying monkey.
Add to that, Susan comes from a family of two sisters.  I have no idea if her sister has her figured out or not.  But it is obvious that in terms of narcissistic supply, more people are better — and here is this big ol’ family of well-trained suppliers, that she can manipulate oh-so-easily into acting just how she likes it.  It must be like heaven for her.  There is no way she would ever give that up.
And, she won’t have to.  She’s got them all solidly on her side, or at least too cowed to speak up and do anything.  Because, you know, it might make trouble in the family.  For them, it’s only a little bit broken right now, and she’s got them scared to break it any further.  In fact, they managed to get brother #3 and his daughter to attend last year’s reunion for the first time ever — I suspect they see that as kind of “patching up” what’s missing, and, probably, further evidence that I am in the wrong.
For me, though, it’s completely shot.  I know too much about what is really going on now, and I don’t see any way that everyone else will work together to fix what is really wrong.
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Tribal Narcissism

 

How do narcissists do what they do?

You have to be able to appeal to people’s biases and appeal to their sense of grievance and on a positive level appeal to their sense of hope and aspirations, even if you’re going to betray those promises. You have to be able to sell who you are to people, and people have to come along and lend you the power that you need. Or lend you the support that you need initially to attain power.

…tribalism in this case really is just narcissism, the grandiosity of the group… There’s narcissism of the individual and there’s narcissism of the group, and in both cases it’s essentially the same thing. We are better, we are more entitled, we are different or at least less interested in the people around us, or the tribes or nations around us, because we’re worthier than they are.

I think I just found a new phrase to describe The Triumvirate.  I’ve said before that “some pigs are more equal than others.”  Some of my siblings can be just fine on their own, but when the three eldest encounter the prospect of going against one of the other three — or in my case, going against one of their spouses — oh hell no, that’s just too difficult.  Not even for an actual, flesh-and-blood sister.

There is a phrase I have heard all my life:  “Well, the divorce was really hard on [brother #3].”

And, “The divorce was really hard on [brother #4].”

Never once in my entire life have I heard anyone say, “Well, the divorce was really hard on [me].”  And I have confirmed this observation both with my husband and with brother #3.

So why exactly do you suppose that is?

Is it because the divorce really wasn’t hard on me?  Anyone who intends to claim with a straight face that the divorce of a 6YO’s parents wasn’t hard on her can just kiss my ass.

The only other option is that we are willing to make excuses and cook up defenses for the behavior of brothers #3 and #4 — but little sister doesn’t get, doesn’t deserve that same defending from her siblings.  No, what she gets, what she deserves, is all the fucking blame.