Wednesday, July 8, 2009

Recover Your Joy



Grandmother's Garden by Claude Strachen, early 1900's




A friend from my trauma days commented on my entry, An Odd Blog, writing, "I get angry on those days when I come to your blog, again, and then again, and find you haven't written in awhile. Like what's with that?"

Well, what's with that my friend, is this:



Spring. Summer. Plants. Trees. Flowers. Manure. Lots of it.

Trowels. Shovels. Pruning. Nurseries. Wicked hot days. Lots of them.

Sunscreen. Straw hats. Garden hoses. Ice tea. Lemonade. Lots of it.

Garden gates. Retaining walls. Wheelbarrows. Pick axes. Ground covers. Roses. Sprinkler systems. Drip systems. Hanging baskets. Trellises.

Weeping trees. ChokeCherries. Crabapples. Urns, Sunburns, and Earthy Worms.

Sore feet. Creaky knees. Broken nails. Dirty socks. Birkenstocks. Lousy hair. Wrinkled skin. Aching joints. Stiff muscles. Screaming cramps. Angry Blisters. Searing headaches. Pollen allergies. Severe dehydration.

Joy. Sheer joy.

Lots of it.



Big hugs!

Lots of 'em.

Just don't stand downwind.

CZBZ

* * *

M.L. Gallagher included a special YouTube link with her comment that I'd like to pass on to readers. This video clip might bring tears to your eyes, especially if you've been following the work Louise has committed herself to doing for the homeless. You can read the wonderful essays she's written on her blog, Recover Your Joy.

Congratulations on an inspirational project, Louise! I watched the video with my nephew and he was thrilled. I promise to tell you all about his work with the homeless this winter and how it impacted his life.

"Stand By Me" Calgary Drop-In"

Homeless musicians from the DI and Calgary musicians stand together in this spirited rendition of Ben E. King's Stand by Me

Sunday, June 21, 2009

Why It's Hard to Heal: The significance of validation



The Sob by David Alfar Siqueiros, 1931

I believed my relationship with my spouse was ‘special’. That what we had between us was so far evolved from the ox-yoked marriages of our parents that we were pushing the millennial change forward, ushering in a spiritually progressive union between a man and a woman as peers, not unequals. A marriage a’ la Riane Eisler uniting the blessed chalice with the honorable blade. Me being the silver chalice of course, because I had a receptive womb bringing life into the world; and he being the blade because he could cut things in half. Like hearts.

We used to have deeply earnest conversations about spiritual beings having a physical experience and I lofted into reveries of the meaning of things which appeared for all intents and purposes to be shared by my partner. I loved sharing deep thoughts, probing the essence of being alive and questioning God’s purposes for his rebellious children, our fears, our insufferable pains and irremediable uncertainties. Talks like this were uncommon in my home as a child where the most pressing issue of the day was who was gonna make dinner and whose week it was to feed the horses. Pragmatic is how I’d describe my formation years, so when I met someone who introduced me to Herman Hesse and taught me all about Siddhartha and meditation, I felt as if God had brought the two of us together for a special purpose: to overcome the insults of our pasts and remedy gender injustice.

As I said, and you psych-savvy readers have already figured out most likely, this is what “I” was thinking during our conversations and what my partner was thinking was assumed to be the same. Only time would tell the vast difference between our ability to walk the talk instead of talking and talking and talking and then skipping over the walking part.

An anonymous reader commented on my blog entry titled Narcissists Lack Emotional Depth . She asked me why it was so hard for partners of narcissists to heal. Why we struggled with the grieving process and letting the narcissist go so we could move forward with our lives without being constantly reminded of our losses. I wanted to write a more thorough response than a comment; but before I continue, I'd like to say that my experience may be similar to some of yours---and it might be very different. One of the biggest differences to point out is that I was married for several decades and had two children and overtime, my spouse and I changed a lot. Perhaps it’s fair to say that we became MORE like the person we were when we met. Especially once the illusion of perfect love faded into pragmatic realities.

Infatuation diminishes, sometimes faster than ink can dry on the marriage contract. In a normal relationship, if all goes well and both partners do not develop psychological blocks to emotional maturation, infatuation grows into love. The relationship becomes ever bit as much about the ‘other’ and the ‘children’ as it is about the Self. Instead of feeling entitled to have our needs met by our partner, needs that might not have been met in childhood, we look for ways to meet our partner’s unmet needs, even if they’re unaware of how much they needed us to do this-or-that. I think we call it Growing Up as a couple. Moving beyond the immature selfish self into equalizing our needs on a par with our partners and then, very importantly, believing ourselves to be capable of meeting their needs without resentment, ambivalence or resignation.

When a relationship ends suddenly, when something we never expected to happen to us, DOES, we might have an arduous time processing the unexpected. Especially when other people are incapable of empathizing with and validating our experience.

It’s like the time my daughter was in a car accident on her way back to her apartment after doing laundry at my house. A drunk was speeding around a curve close to midnight and smashed into the driver’s side of her car. There she sat, trapped like a sardine, watching the little birdies spin around her head while her brain lagged making sense of the chaos. She was out of it for awhile.

Her adrenalin soared and she managed to kick her smashed door open, even after a man had stopped and said she’d have to sit there until a rescue team could cut her door open. The oncoming freeway traffic was swerving around her car, terrifying her of being hit again and she doesn’t even remember this part fully, but she escaped her car and then started acting like a crazy person dodging in and out of traffic picking up her laundry strewn all across the highway. The back of her car had been ripped off, like opening a box of Twinkies when you’re in a hurry.

In retrospect, picking up laundry was a stupid thing to do, even self-destructive and dangerous, but that’s about how crazy human beings can be when the unexpected happens. You say to yourself, “I cannot BELIEVE someone hit my car at 100 mph! I cannot BELIEVE what just happened!" and while you can’t BELIEVE what just happened, you’re acting like you’re Fruit Loops or even worse, Cocoa Puffs. You are not grounded in reality, you’re suspended above planet earth with one foot in LaLaLand and the other hopefully NOT on the accelerator.

The next day, after she had been released from the hospital with a broken collarbone and had to sleep in our family room easy chair for six weeks, she said to me with eyes full of horror, “What person in their right mind kicks their door open and races through traffic to save their panties?”

But that’s what she did and there’s no denying it. Lucky for her, she didn’t get hit by freeway traffic. Paramedics arrived in five minutes to save her from herself which they gladly did since she’d been serving them Starbuck’s coffee for years. They saw her pink punked-out hair and shouted, "It's the coffee shop girl! The one who calls us angels!"

My daughter believes they gave her extra-special care because she always called them angels when they came in her store. I tend to believe it's because they occasionally got a free coffee out of her. A good cup of hot joe goes a long way towards building a relationship.

The paramedics reciprocated her kindness and made sure she didn't have to lie next to the drunk while they took care of him. Thank God they were trained in emergency procedures and recognized a woman in shock, temporarily traumatized by what she could not see coming from behind because she didn't have eyes in the back of her head. Lucky girl. She'd never get asked out if she had four eyes. Not that she gets asked out a lot now but a mother can always hope, right? At least her hair isn't pink anymore.

Until our brains can put order to the chaos, we act unconsciously, outside ourselves. We do things we’d never do under ordinary circumstances. Other people who do not understand the shock of being hit from behind by someone we trusted, might look at us and assume we’re fools or that we are and always were one grain short of a full box of cereal.

Within short order, if we’re lucky, the little birdies circling our brains will stop going tweet and we’ll get ourselves off the highway and out of harm’s way. If we’re really lucky, an emergency vehicle will show up and well-schooled paramedics will check us for injuries and sooth us back to reality by taking charge because obviously, we can’t. At least not for a little while. We’re confused. We need help. But most of all, we need support that respects our temporary frailty and respects our weakness by promising under the Hippocratic oath to do no harm.

One of the first questions resolved by the police, and bless them for setting my daughter’s mind at ease, was the assignation of fault and blame. “It wasn’t your fault,” the cops reassured her. “He was speeding and driving drunk and now he’s in jail where he belongs for breaking the law and putting your life in danger.”

That settled her mental obsession wondering whose fault it was and how she might avoid a similar accident. What she had done wrong and how could she fix her driving if she’d been negligent in seeing warning signs and posted speed limits.
Well, she didn’t do anything wrong. She was obeying the law like a good citizen when someone determined themselves superior to the rules society sets to protect us from each other and like an intoxicated fool, smashed into the side of her car without even realizing what he was doing. He said in his defense that he had lost control. As if that's an excuse for almost killing someone. But the thing is, he let himself get out of control in the first place. He could have applied the brakes at the bar, in the parking lot, or stopped himself at numerous points along the way and he didn’t.

As they say, “Shit happens” and no matter how obedient, good, conscientious or courteous you may be, not everyone else is. People break the rules. They hurt others. They blame everyone else by putting up a good fight to avoid responsibility for their choices. In the end, the law decides who is at fault and who isn’t and who pays the price and who doesn’t. In a law-abiding and CIVIL SOCIETY, the guilty are penalized; thus releasing the innocent from their natural instincts to question themselves as to what they did wrong and how they can protect everyone in the future, including themselves.

The conscientious are driven to take responsibility, not avoid it.

The narcissist is a highway menace. A Good-Time-Charlie without brakes who endangers others because he-or-she doesn’t LIKE being controlled. Since they lack moral discipline, any restriction on their behavior is resented as control and nobody is gonna tell them what to do, especially not some road sign or social contract. It’s all about the narcissist’s freedom to do as they please and any taboo or rule regulating (and protecting the N’s freedoms, too) is rebelled against. The narcissist is a law unto himself. One who mocks social traditions and rules as being only for the minions, the followers, the muddle-headed sheep who obey street rules because they’re weak and inferior. The only way to negotiate some kind of reasonable safety in a society replete with narcissistic individuals, is to seek justice. That means assigning fault and blame where fault and blame are due and not expecting someone like my daughter to say, “Okay. I’m half responsible for my accident because I share the road with drunks.” That would be a legal injustice making a mockery of what we know to be true. It only takes one drunk to cause an accident and the only person responsible for that accident, is the drunk without a foot on the brakes.

What legal justice did to restore my daughter’s sense of safety again was educative. I was able to watch her start healing once she had been absolved of fault for only doing what millions of people do every day---driving on the same road as everybody else. She did not spiral into guilt and self-blame that cannot be resolved because it was based on a lie. She did nothing wrong. She cannot suffer remorse for guilt that was not hers to suffer. The law saved her from illegitimate suffering wondering how she could prevent this from happening again. She can’t. Not if she bore no responsibility for causing the accident in the first place. She’d go half-crazy if she started checking her rear-view mirror for fast drivers or refusing to drive in the dark because she couldn’t see dangerous drunks or never doing her laundry again because maybe that is why he hit her. She did nothing wrong and even with legal support telling her this, I had to remind her of the fact over and over and over again.

Sensible, good-hearted people are prone towards internal examination of the self as cause to the consequences in their lives.

I have said this before and it’s not always received with welcome arms but in my way of viewing the narcissistic relationship, it’s another accident on life’s freeway. Perhaps there were red flags and stop lights and street signs alerting me to danger ahead but then again, maybe there weren’t. Maybe anybody could have met and partnered with a narcissist, someone who for all intents and purposes, did not intend to cause an accident but refused to step on the brakes if he or she was having FUN.

As long as our society pretends there is NO FAULT and NO BLAME to be assigned to a broken marriage; as long as we purport the silly cliché that it takes ‘two to make a marriage’ without realizing it only takes one to break it; as long as people insist we had something to do with the DEMISE of our relationship, or that we didn’t work hard enough or try hard enough or care enough to work out the problems inherent in any relationship, we are prone to self-doubt and self-blame trapping us in an endless spiral of prolonged and complicated grief.

When we see judgment or indifference in other people’s eyes, we tend to isolate ourselves, withdraw into silence that may lead to depression and prolonged grief. It’s the betrayal or ignorance of the bystander that makes it hard for us to let go of self-blame and move forward. Here are four key steps to consider if you are grieving the shock and trauma of the narcissistic relationship:

1-Don’t isolate. You know you want too; but don’t!

2-Ask for support but make sure your support is experienced in trauma. You would not go to the bread store for a quart of milk. Don’t go to your neighbors for something thay cannot give.

3-Establish a daily regime. Getting back to normal will reground us in reality and occupy our minds when we might start obsessing. Sometimes keeping busy helps us feel better.

4-Take care of your health even though most of us don’t. Especially since a long grieving process might trigger depression and we won’t care enough about ourselves to get out of bed. Avoiding escapist substances like alcohol, drugs and especially anxiety-producing situations (like a new love interest too soon) graces us with adequate time to cope with our lives.

I believe with every fiber of my being that anyone with a generous heart, a moral conscience and the intention to create a safe relationship with a partner, is capable of being sideswiped by a narcissist.

I also believe that there is one person at fault for the stagnated or even abusive relationship, and that is the narcissist.

I will also be so bold as to say that there is no one who works harder to save the marriage and support their partner than the non-N spouse. When we have our reality validated by someone who shares the same experience and we know that that person is a GOOD person of integrity and conscience, then our healing process gets a kick-start.

Our truth must be heard in order to release us from illegitimate blame and guilt. Until our experience is validated and supported by experienced people like ourselves, it's far to easy to believe the lie that we are trapped in a wrecked self without any hope of escape.

Hugs,
CZ

Resources:

Definition of Trauma
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trauma

Healing Emotional and Psychological Trauma, http://www.helpguide.org/mental/emotional_psychological_trauma.htm

Tuesday, June 9, 2009

Humor: Angels and Acrobats



The Acrobat by Marc Chagall, 1930


“Humor requires the same delicacy as tightrope walking or building a house of cards. Unlike the mindless dissociation present in hysterical laughter, humor can never be deployed without some element of an observing ego. As any comedian knows, timing is everything…humor allows us to look directly at what is painful, whereas dissociation distracts us to look in some other direction…

"Humor, like hope, permits one to focus upon and to bear what is too terrible to be borne.” ~George Vaillant, The Wisdom of the Ego


I must be an acrobat. I didn’t know I was an acrobat but evidently, my performance in the family circus was strenuous enough to keep my ego flexible. Relational acrobats like myself are amazingly proficient at bending over backwards to resolve awkward situations even if we weren’t audition material for Cirque de Soleil.

The dictionary defines a funambulist as “a person who performs feats of strength, flexibility, balance and agility with their entire body, in many different forms, using many different things” and that’s why I consider myself to be a funacrobat because living with a narcissist hones death-defying skills like walking on tightropes, dancing on eggshells, balancing the Self between good and evil while dangling over a fiery hell without a safety net. Maybe we believed we had a safety net until we found out the narcissist had surreptitiously clipped our sturdy meshing. Suddenly, there we were, perched above the ground while an awe-struck audience witnessed our fall from grace. And who comes to our rescue, but none other than Angel Hilarious? I suppose if you’re doomed to tumble from a sky-high pedestal built by the idealizing narcissist, you might as well be grinning on your way down.

"At times we cannot bear reality. At such times our minds play tricks on us.”

Like angels.

My guardian angel is a farcical comic, an aerial comedienne descending from the heavens to kiss my brain whenever sudden change or conflict increases my anxiety, threatening another bout with depression. She nudges my inner reality to accept an uninvited outer reality but her timing is capricious, even flabbergasting, not only to myself but to anyone within laughing distance. Sometimes she arrives on cue and saves me from a rip-snorting outburst; other times, she tickles my funny bone when nobody else is amused which gets me in serious trouble like when I dyed my brother’s blond hair brown and he still, to this day, hates me for it. I secretly believe my passion for amateur cosmetology is why he became a lawyer so he could sue his older sister for the ruthless misuse of her little brother and a product called Clairol. Not to be used by minors.

There’s nothing very funny about the narcissist’s pathological defenses erecting an iron curtain between his-or-her self-image and the truth. But there is something incredibly amusing about healthy ego defenses anesthetizing and reducing pain. Immature ego defenses 'block' feelings while mature defenses ‘channel’ them, bringing relief to the subject in distress. If that subject is a people-person who loves to please others as much as herself, she’ll share her humor with wild abandon though some folks might not find her funny at all. Just wild. Like stinkweed. They might as well roll their eyes at the angel though, because people like myself cannot anticipate when or where the angel will appear.

We don’t control Angel Hilarious--we surrender.

The only thing we can predict is that she’ll arrive when we least expect it. Like when we’re arguing with our spouse and suddenly observe ourselves acting like animated characters in a LooneyTunes cartoon which always left me in a fit of laughter until my husband left me in a fit of his own. And he wasn’t laughing. By then, neither was I---at least not until the third day when Angel Hilarious was resurrected from the gravity of the situation. I mean seriously folks, what’s to laugh about when a woman realizes that for decades of time she had minimized the bad, maximized the good, idealized the pathological, devalued the logical, and rationalized the secrets, lies, and videotapes?

George Vaillant wrote a wonderful book called, The Wisdom of the Ego. In his book, he states:

“The ego’s greatest ally is other people, the use of defenses should attract people rather than repel them. The greatest distinction between the mature and immature defenses is that with the mature defenses the subject’s regulatory self-deceptions are perceived by those close by as virtuous and attractive. In the case of immature defenses, such self-deceptions are seen by others as irritating, wicked and repellent.” (page 105)

That just about sums up my thirty-plus year marriage. Not that my ego defenses were virtuous and attractive when we first met, but they grew into my psyche like wrinkles grew into my face. As anybody knows, laugh lines and self-deprecating humor are much more appealing than narcissists intent on defending their perfection.

This is what baffles me about ego defenses, though. Psychologists tell us that if we’re aware our ego is protecting itself, the 'defense' no longer works. So in order for the self-deception of an ego defense to be life saving, it has to come from out-of-the-blue. That’s what got me thinking about Ego Defenses being like invisible angels leaving lipstick marks on our foreheads but never making their presence known because if we could see them, they wouldn’t be angels. They’d be minions to our desire to control divinity.

Perhaps it's strange to suggest the divine touches our psyche. That in a mysterious way, the valiant ego defends our self-worth by gracing us with sufficient time to integrate truth. A truth we must cease resisting if grounding ourselves in reality is more desirable than tempting fate with our reckless and invariably destructive escape.

"Perhaps I know best why it is man alone who laughs," said Friedrich Nietzsche, "he alone suffers so deeply that he had to invent laughter."

A rousing blast of gut-rollicking laughter cracks the most rigid of self-pitying shells and expands possibilities we could not see through the blindness of our despair. A hearty laugh revitalizes energy, enhances cognition, mends the broken heart, and arbitrates the paradox of life as both meaningless and meaningful.

If you listen carefully through the rain of your sorrow, you may hear Angel Hilarious negotiating with your soul. “Give me your pride, O serious one,” she'll barter, “and ye shall be blessed with a never-ending supply of knock-knock jokes.”

Humor. 'Tis the kiss of the angels.


Hugs,

CZBZ



Resources

The Wisdom of the Ego by George E. Vaillant

Wednesday, June 3, 2009

An Odd Blog



George Gershwin by David Alfaro Siqueiros, 1936



A cyber friend recently told me she likes my blog more each time she visits which is about once every other month. Not wanting to sound defensive or insecure or anything, I never even winced though her comment insinuated she had initially given me a not-so-good review and for the sake of our friendship, didn’t want to kill my passion for writing about narcissism. If there had been an audition for narcissism bloggers, she’d have been forced to deliver the bad news and vote me off the cyber stage. But she’d do it kindly. Like American Idol's Paula Abdul, of that you can be certain. She’d smile gently, lower her lashes and let me down gently without letting me off the hook because lying isn’t kind to anyone but the liar.

As Paula says, if you can’t sing, don’t waste your life singing. Find something you can do and pour your heart into that. Does the advice also apply: if you can’t write you ought not spend your time writing and instead, do something you’re good at? At least stop annoying people or making them uncomfortable! Pick a more appropriate hobby for your peculiar disposition--like weaving baskets or making yarn octopuses in rainbow colors and lining them up on your fireplace mantle for all the people who will never come visit your home because they heard through the grapevine that you’re too odd for blogging.

I should have told my friend not to worry about hurting my feelings because it takes more than an occasional insult or criticism to threaten my loyalty to a friend. Just ask my X. It took him thirty-plus years to convince me we were incompatible. “Honey, I hate to be the one to tell you this but despite my hope, faith and charity, there is simply nothing even slightly redeemable about your personality.”

That worked. Clever, clever man.

I told my friend that in contrast to my authoritative demeanor and confident writing style, I was fully aware that the Narcissistic Continuum was an odd blog. I admitted it unabashedly without mincing words or apologizing profusely or any of the placating things we pleasing-types do when someone suggests they are NOT pleased.

I hope my friend can slowly work herself up to liking what she reads here ‘though I must confess: I don’t always like what I read here and I’m writing it.

My new goal is that by at least 2025, my writing will have improved, my knowledge about pathological narcissism will be so accurate and reliable that Kohut and Kernberg will call me for consultations, and my friend will REALLY like my blog. She might even dare post a comment, though far be it for me to question her grammatical presentation or the incompleteness of her disconnected and slightly neurotic thoughts.

I will be nice. Paula Abdul nice.



Hugs,

CZBZ

Wednesday, May 27, 2009

Paranoia


The Scream by Edvard Munch, 1893



I can remember as a child, wondering when my parents would tell me that after due consideration and much deliberation, all the doctors in the entire United States had consulted and determined my brain to be inalterably and fatally deformed. My parents hadn’t wanted to tell me of course because our Idaho Dr. Marcus Welby said the truth would make me feel bad about myself and medical research had proven that knowing my IQ score would reduce my mental capacity to a lethal level which meant my parents would be complicit not only genetically, but behaviorally, too.

Now that I was a budding teen-ager, acting as if I were so damn smart by questioning meaning-of-life answers that had been good enough for generations back to Methuselah, the time had come for my parents to break the sorry news: their daughter, the eldest in a family of five, was mentally retarded. I imagined how reluctant they'd be to tell me the truth but I had left them no choice. In addition to that bit of lousy news, Dr. Welby also suspected I had a terminal disease so horrible, so despicable he daresn’t speak the diagnosis aloud. What difference would it make? The disease would end up killing me whether I read up on it in Mom’s Funk & Wagnall’s encyclopedias or not. I had this creepy sense that everybody knew about my illness and questionable intelligence… even my siblings. And that’s why they laughed at my jokes and shared their ration of animal crackers without complaint or stinginess. They knew they wouldn’t be obliged to share crackers with me forever.

This childhood memory, which really wasn’t a conscious memory as much as it was a ‘feeling’, returned to haunt me when I was working through the inescapable fact that I’d been duped, scooped and rebuked. How many friends, family members, and neighbors had known about my husband’s affair and why didn’t they tell me or at least send an anonymous cut-and-paste letter in the mail? Segmented words clipped from Woman’s Day and People magazines would have been a compassionate gesture even though it’d hurt at first, but I’d at least question my belief that I’d married my best friend. Maybe clipping words from The National Enquirer would have been more appropriate since my life had degraded into fodder for tabloid news; only the saddest commentary I can make about our society is that affairs are not headline news and don't motivate grocery shoppers in the checkout line to fork over hard-earned dollars just to read about two average-looking people cheating on an everyday housewife with a middle-aged spread. Unless I was ‘somebody’ and my husband was ‘somebody’ and his girlfriend was ‘somebody’, nobody really cared and nobody wanted to know the details. Except for the wife of course. She wanted to know even if she didn’t because she probably already knew but couldn’t put her feeling into words and so it stuck with her, poisoning her innards and shrinking her brain and making her feel as if she were alienated and defective and deservedly so.

It’s humbling admitting to yourself that you’d been talking with people who were privy to more information about your life than yourself. That sometimes, not always, but occasionally, people conspired to keep the wife out of the loop her husband was hanging her with. Perhaps they believed it was the compassionate thing to do, which I can relate to since that’s my excuse for silencing myself when I suspect a woman’s being cuckolded by the man she professes to be her best buddy. Let a wife live in blissful denial for as long as she can because wouldn’t we all like to pretend infidelity only happened to narcissistic movie stars and nagging shrews and the more everyone colludes ignoring the facts, the less likely it will be that it’s true.

All my life, I’ve had these ‘knowing’ feelings that couldn’t be put into words; well, some writers can put treacherous feelings into words and that’s why their books are at Costco and they get paid to say what most of us can’t. I find it painfully difficult containing miserable feelings long enough to even know they’re there, much less describe them to other people. Which is why I use an adjective like ineffable when I cannot cram big, huge feelings into alphabet letters. Still, the average person doesn’t use a word like ineffable. Maybe not until they try to communicate with other people and share their truth so that none of us feels alienated or defective or alone with feelings defying description. When we attempt to define our feelings, that’s when must-write-or-die-people search a thesaurus for a word that accurately says what really can’t be said in the first place. We cop-out of a frustrating exercise in futility by saying our most profound emotions are ineffable. Because they are.

What I have learned in writing about my life is that you cannot be literal and get anywhere close to the truth of the human experience.

So when I read this poem by Philip Lopate, I felt a rush of relief accompanied by a liberating sense of gratitude because he described the teenage angst that had followed me into adulthood. He said what I’ve secretly thought more times than I probably ought admit on a blog about narcissism. And he made me smile. Okay, laugh. Okay, howl with laughter.


We who are your closest friends

By Philip Lopate



We who are

your closest friends

feel the time

has come to tell you

that every Thursday

we have been meeting,

as a group,

to devise ways

to keep you

in perpetual uncertainty

frustration

discontent and

torture

by neither loving you

as much as you want

nor cutting you adrift.

Your analyst is

in on it,

plus your boyfriend

and your ex-husband;

and we have pledged

to disappoint you

as long as you need us.

In announcing our

association

we realize we have

placed in your hands

a possible antidote

against uncertainty

indeed against ourselves.

But since our Thursday nights

have brought us to a community

of purpose

rare in itself

with you as

the natural center,

we feel hopeful you

will continue to make unreasonable

demands for affection

if not as a consequence

of your disastrous personality

then for the good of the collective.


Hugs all,

CZBZ


Resource

Philip Lopate http://www.philliplopate.com/

Thursday, May 14, 2009

Video: Narcissistic Parent: Collateral Damage





"Being the child of a parent who has narcissistic personality disorder or is simply a narcissist is extremely challenging.

"The person grows up deferring to the parent as the main person in the room always. They are not at all allowed to feel or have problems. They are consistently having to fight for any and all attention as the parent is the only one allowed to have problems of feelings.

"This video talks about this syndrome and also about how people might begin to free themselves from this type of suffering existence in their own adult relationships."

Hugs,

CZBZ



Resources:

Thank you to HolyWaterSalt for bringing this video to my attention.


Sunday, May 10, 2009

Mother's Day 2009



Farm Courtyard in Normandy by Claude Monet, 1863



A Southern belle donned her best attire, packed a stylish suitcase and boarded a train for a Western town where she would marry the man of her choosing for time and for all eternity. With infinity as a destination, this was no time for her to have cold feet. She was committed. She knew in her gut that leaving her beloved Louisiana would be worth it in the end. She abandoned the comfort of southern hospitality and headed towards the unknown, trusting her yet unborn children would benefit from her sacrifice. In her mind, she was making the right decision and nothing would deter her from doing the best she could to make her children's lives better than her own. Nothing could crush her determination. Not even her mother-in-law. Or, a patriarchal order prioritizing men over women.

My mother has been a transitional woman modeling self-respect through successive hardships and even what we might define as ‘calamities’. She was and continues to be, willing to sacrifice everything---short of renouncing her values and principles. She deserves far more credit that she’s given. Not that it’s easy to give Mom credit since she reprimands anyone showering her with compliments. It’s embarrassing, she says. She only did what any woman would do in similar circumstances.

Mama? I don’t think so.

The day after my mother’s 1940’s honeymoon to Niagara Falls, she awoke in her husband’s parent’s home and descended the stairs to join his family for breakfast. Her new mother-in-law was serving half-a-dozen farmers wolfing down pancakes and eggs while their apron clad wives and sisters scurried in the kitchen. Once the men had finished eating, the women ate their left-overs. If there were any left-overs. Milking cows and cultivating sugar beets takes a lot of energy. Plus, my Grandma was very frugal. If women got eggs for breakfast, it was only because she’d found unmarketable cracked ones in the coop. Grandma was parsimonious about her ‘egg money.’

My mother says this Wild West Breakfast was her initiation into a lifestyle so unique from her own that she considered purchasing a return ticket for the bayous. She could not believe her idealized groom would be so arrogant and lack such consideration for his equally hungry bride. Well, Dad had no reason to question the way things had always been done since my grandparents assumed their traditions were the Right traditions and if anybody wanted to argue, they could take their disagreements to the Almighty. Get on their knees and pray until they saw things my grandparent’s way because that was the way their parents had done it and theirs before them and theirs all the way back to Adam and Eve and whoever had fixed breakfast for them. Probably Eve. My mother did her part to break the chain of subordination. Her daughters never ate scraps.

Dad may have had a less troublesome life had he married a local woman rather than traipsing through the southern states for a bride. He met a Louisiana gal with a spitfire temper one might say was only matched by Scarlett O’ Hara herself. Mama was a beauty, too---though I can’t say it would be fair to compare my father to Rhett Butler. Their wedding day pictures put one in the mind of a marriage between the luscious Vivien Leigh and an impish Ron Howard. My daughter, the only granddaughter in the family, resembles my mother’s side of the family: smoky eyes, plush brows, dark hair and skin so white and smooth you can only think about peaches and melted ice cream when you look at them.

I look like my father, which used to make me queasy but the older I get the more I resemble his mother. I wish I’d grown into the soft fair frenchness of my southern bellish mother but God didn’t ask my permission when blending Mom’s French blood with Dad’s hardy genes bred in Switzerland. In honor of my mixed ancestry, I cut the ham for southern jambalaya with my fine-edged Swiss army knife. I’ve got my father’s temperament, his out-swinging walk, his down-sweeping eyelids carrying the weight of the world relieved only by upturned corners of his smile. When I see myself in the mirror, I see bits and pieces of people from the sepia images on our family’s genealogical tree. We’re all connected, those Swiss and French ancestors of mine. I see my great-great grandfather whenever my son winces.

“My southern Daddy always put women first,” Mother complains. “Imagine your father treating me like that! And Then! And Then!” she fumes, “To think he thought it was normal for women to eat leftovers! Well, I nevuh!”

Oh yes. My siblings and I grew up in what can only be described as The Civil War. We're still waiting to see which side will win. Their union has lasted sixty-plus years which must mean they’ve negotiated a secret truce none of their kids are privy to. Dad recently purchased a family plot in our hometown cemetery. My Mom’s headstone will be engraved with the Confederate Flag and Dad’s with the Stars and Stripes and I don’t know what kind of flag my sisters and brother's tombstones will bear, but I know the color: White.

In thinking about what I wanted to say in honor of Mother’s Day 2009, the one theme that came up over and over again was Self-Respect. My mother blessed us with Self-Respect. We may have lived on a farm in the middle of nowhere with pigs rooting through flowerbeds and wind storms covering furniture with grit, but one thing we had was our Self-Respect. Spit-polished linoleum floors, crystal on the table, delicate china in the cupboards and fine literature on the bookshelves. My mother has loyally attended monthly book club meetings for over forty years. FORTY YEARS. Forty years of dutiful cleaning and Betty Crocker recipe testing for desserts she could serve her friends in a living room so sanitary you could forgo the rose petaled snack plates and eat off the floor.

As kids, we were required to work hard but we were also encouraged to do things we loved. Passions that declared our authenticity and built our self-esteem. Like making mud pies concreted to wooden planks since they were mixed with eggs from Dad’s chicken coop insuring them the longevity of steel.

My mother refused to let the indignities of life rob her of her self-respect even when financial losses would have wilted most magnolias. We always had a new dress to wear sewn by her competent hands and later our own; Mom lined up a row of her five kids’ shoes on Saturday night and polished them ‘til they looked brand new for Sunday morning. She insisted on personal grooming as a sign of self-respect and everyone followed suit. Except of course, for my mischievous father in overalls. He had a good haircut though. When we walked into the chapel on Sunday morning, all five kids had shiny hair, freshly pressed clothing, polished shoes and smiles on our faces. We knew we looked good and could be proud of ourselves ‘cuz we were the daughters of Mrs. Z.

She deserves a medal for organizational skills considering there was only one bathroom for the seven people in our home.

I never knew the reason we ate saltine crackers crushed in milk was because her pantry was bare. I never knew we ate venison because we couldn’t afford beef. I never knew we ate spotted bananas because they were cheap. I assumed she wanted her girls to perfect banana bread baking skills when you couldn’t eat the blackened fruit without a cup of sugar and a pinch of salt. My mother protected her children from a reality that was her parental responsibility, not her children’s. And I never, not ever, saw my mother blame God because she didn’t reap the promised rewards of her good behavior. Instead, she upheld cherished principles sustaining her self-worth in the belief that the most valuable legacy she could leave her children was their trustworthy relationship with God.

In my mother’s home, there was never an acceptable excuse for self-pitying kids to faint on sofas as long as furniture needed dusting and tomatoes needed canning and neighbors needed a friend to talk to. If you felt bad about yourself, the answer to feeling good wasn’t ruminating on your misery until you made everyone else feel miserable, too. The answer was to put a smile on your face and act ‘as if’ and then see where you might be of service. See what difference you could make with the talents and blessings you’d been given and for heaven’s sakes, stop that infernal belly-aching. Go make dinner. Make a dress. Make happy. In other words, “do what you can and can what you do and always take responsibility for your life AND your feelings.”

Many, many years later, I was accused by someone who said to me, “You really LIKE yourself don’t you?” as if that were a sin. At first, I felt a flush of shame for deeming myself as good enough when obviously, I had been judged lacking of whatever it is that makes someone worthy of self-respect. I thought and thought about what it meant to like oneself and how I had come about liking myself since I never grew up in the lap of luxury, wasn’t about to be photographed in Vogue, didn’t have any special medals or accomplishments worthy of fame or celebrity, and even lacked credentials assuring people my opinions had merit to be considered. But what I did have was a deep and abiding sense that my life was of value and I, no matter what the circumstances may be, had something valuable to offer others. To this surprising result from a woman’s life that did not bear significance in a worldly sense, I thank my mother. The southern spitfire belle who accepted the things she could not change and changed the things she could believing the whole time that she could make a difference in her children's lives by living up to her calling as their Mother.


Hugs,

CZBZ