The Narcissistic Continuum

Christmas 2011: A Pictorial

2012-01-05T15:43:00.000-08:00

I've been searching for an image that captured the essence of Christmas 2011. This one appealed to me, except we didn't go on vacation and I don't have a toddler, nor a husband, and the exhausted woman is w-a-y younger than myself. Last but not least, my toes point outward like a duck, not a pigeon. Which isn't an attractive sight for anyone other than ducks and you know what they say about ducks, right? You do not want to be attracting those folks.

The Death of Socrates

Normal Rockwell paintings always come to mind when waxing philosophic about family and Christmas. Oh, you cannot believe how I can go on & on & on about the meaning and purpose, the values and principles of family. Then reality clashes with idealism and the image in my head is forced to adjust. SO, in the interests of personal integrity and sanity, Christmas 2011 would be better represented with this picture---->

Christmas 2011 was a dramatic Christmas as it generally is when my family-of-origin gets together. If you can bear thinking about this frightening fact, all my siblings are in their fifties (YIKES) and I am the only one who freely and without court order, sought professional therapy when John Bradshaw warned PBS audiences back in the eighties, that every family was dysfunctional. It was only a matter of degree. My family, lest you underestimate our competence, has a masters degree in dysfunction.

Ballerina at the Handrail by Botero

As the tension began to build and knuckles turned increasingly white, I danced around the kitchen making panettone, macaroni, potato rolls and pumpkin pie. Roasted turkey, glazed ham, prime rib and cheesy gratin dauphinois. Pound cake, apple pie, poultry stuffing with spicy sausages and sage. Sweet potatoes, mashed potatoes, pecan potato pie. My finale? Perfectly crafted homemade caramels wrapped in waxed paper. Then I set a crystal bowl of Antacids on the counter next to the Prozac and you can guess which bowl was empty after ten days in Hell's Kitchen. Not the Prozac. SO, in the interests of personal integrity and my sanity, Christmas 2011 would be best represented with this picture. Look left but do not post comments about stress and belly fat, nor links to crash diets or even healthy ones. Thanks in advance. Much appreciated. Some folks use drugs to get through holidays. Some folks drink, others exercise to escape family. Me? I like to share my coping methods in the spirit of community. "Sit here. Take some bread. Have some pie. Eat. Feast on your life." We won't feel better in the morning but at least we can blame acid reflux and grab the Rolaids for a quick fix.

Cinderella

With family-of-origin issues, there are no quick fixes. Try talking candidly with your fifty-sumthing-old siblings and you'd rather they'd eat themselves into oblivion and sedate their 'siblingus rivalus' with sugar. We don't live in Philidelphia, we four girls with conflicting personalities and varying degrees of maturity. I am constantly shocked at my sisters' immaturity. Their regressive blindness. Their six-year-old jealousies and petty competitive superiority. I was so distraught by their childishness that at one point, I grabbed my bag of caramels and went home. Well, that was kinda hard since I was home already. SO, in the interests of personal integrity and sanity , I imagined the kitchen to be a castle and denied entry to my big-footed sisters. Which worked fine for them of course, because it meant I served the meals and did the dishes and mopped the floors while they played games with their fellow retrogrades, polished their nails, and shined their jewels. I was hoping to fatten them up just prior to shoving them in the oven, knowing never the wiser would they be (nobody ever suspects the maid, do they?) and then my conscience wouldn't let me go through with it. Besides, 'cheesy sisters dauphinois' would require gigantic roasting pans the likes of which only exist in fairytales.

There is nothing particularly interesting about my dysfunctional family. We're like most dysfunctional families---better than some, worse than others, comparatively speaking. I think what is interesting is Awareness. Consciousness. Introspection. Empathy. Imagination. Hope. Healing. Dancing between what was, what is, what could be.

What's even more amazing than all of the above?

Self-restraint.

Hugs,
CZ

Invalidation: "You are NOT funny!"

2011-12-15T09:57:00.000-08:00

Last night, a cyberfriend sent an email saying my “riotous sense of humor” was the highlight of my blog.

Yesterday, my nephew was rolling on the floor, arms crossed over tummy, grinning wide enough to swallow his ears, “You are soooooo funny, Tatie!”

A few days ago, I said something off-the-wall—bordering-on-bizarre to my daughter and she said, “Mom! You are so funny! I love you!” Last week, my son was ‘messaging’ back and forth with me as we often do since we’re each online a lot. “Yer so funny, Mom!” he said. “I <3 U!”

You know, it’s been a long time since I lived with a man who pronounced innumerable times, "You are NOT funny!" while giving me the patriarchal look of doom, forefinger poking my nose, his short legs coiled for escape. He didn't say, “You are NOT funny, I hate you!” But perhaps he didn't dare be so honest with me or himself.

The reason for this post is not to announce my new career as a stand-up comedienne because truth be known, I’m a dutiful and focused woman. Rather boring. Which may be why my random jokes evoke spontaneous gales of laughter. It’s the stark contrast. Why people laugh at my jokes is not the point of my post, either.

The reason I’m writing about my intermittently reinforcing humor is because I almost believed my x-husband more than myself when he insisted, “You are NOT funny!” He told me this so many times that I doubted my own perceptions. Someone would say to me, “You are hilarious!” and I’d reply, “No, I’m not.” Which is really funny when you think about it: me invalidating someone else’s reality because the God of Humor had invalidated mine.

Sometimes, when I was snarkily funny my x-husbaNd would say, “You are NOT funny! You THINK you are funny, but you’re NOT!” And if he were particularly sensitive that day, he’d slowly whisper between clenched teeth, “You are NOT funny and you’d better wipe that smirk off your face or I”ll do it for you!”

Those are the moments I cherish…when two hearts come together as one.

“NOBODY thinks you are funny but yourself,” he’d say. “You THINK you are funny but you know what? YOU ARE NOT FUNNY!”

After a particularly light-hearted dinner party when guests were hugging good-bye, he’d say, “People weren’t laughing at your jokes. They were laughing at YOU! You know why?” (He has my attention now) “Because you are NOT funny! You THINK you're funny but you’re NOT!”

There’s enough evidence to make a case for GASLIGHTING if he were intentionally manipulating reality and consciously denying my experience. Some people think narcissists are completely aware of their invalidating ways. I’m not convinced this is true for the majority of narcissists. I believe my X was reacting to feeling criticized. Which I was doing, o yea---albeit in a “funny” way, which works pretty well with normal people having an ‘off’ day. Not so well with narcissists. Joke with angry narcissists at your own risk.

Or he may have felt slighted because I didn't know about Rule Number One for dinner parties: Don’t get more laughs than the narcissist. Because he will, if he is a narcissist, even the ‘score’ by denying you the pleasure of feeling good about yourself. When your confidence hits the floor, his rises.

It just struck me yesterday that after having spent most of my life being told I was not what I was, and that I was what I was not, I’m finally accepting my peculiar sense of humor as an essential part of my charm. Love me or leave me, I’ll be digging through the shitpile looking for knock-knock jokes which lift my spirits more than ponies ever could.

When my kids share stories about their childhood, they focus on the funny things that happened of which there were more than enough to lighten the dark lord’s intensity. They reminisce about the times my jokes cleared the smoke, fire and brimstone choking the life out of our family. I figure my son and daughter will be telling lots of stories over the holidays because now my nephew can join in their fun.

Maybe my jokes were funny because of our situation back then? It was peculiar to be sure: the tense air shattered by a freckle-faced mother’s wicked sense of humor. What I do know is that my kids love me today just like they did when they were six and I painted their faces with decorator icing they refused to wash off. And then they got a skin rash bad enough to call the doctor.

“YOU SEE? Your mother is NOT funny!” their father said. “She thinks she’s funny, but she’s NOT!”

Don’t let the narcissist erode your sense of self. Trust your own judgments. Believe your own experience. Take it from me: the family that laughs together, stays together. We three, my daughter, my son, and I, plus my nephew and sister and other sister and her kids and their spouses and her husband and my parents will all be seated around the Christmas table, telling stories and validating the fact that we are just as funny as we think we are.

Hugs all,

Reference blog: Stop Walking on Eggshells by Randi Kreger

Kreger writes: "It's hard to tell the difference between a conscious lie and a conscious one. A man says, "It is like we both walk into the same movie theater. I thought that we entered into see the same movie. We sit together. We enter and leave at the same time. But afterwards, I learned that what she saw was entirely different from me, even though we sat and watched the same movie. Her version is no where even close to mine." ~Why some narcissists and borderlines can't seem to tell the truth

Feel like Spilling your Guts to the Narcissist?

2011-12-09T10:22:00.000-08:00

Are you reading self-help books telling you to spill your guts and Save Your Relationship? If so: the Royal Narcissist does a happy dance because YOU'RE finally admitting you're a mess!

<-----------Please note: King Baby's royal finger is pointing at YOU!

Keep your self-examination PRIVATE. Do not tell your spouse. Do not send him or her a letter of apology, listing your many flaws and faults. Many of us make that mistake before learning about pathological narcissism. There is a huge distinction between normal narcissism and pathological and one of the differences is introspection. When people who naturally introspect realize they have contributed to problems in the relationship, they take responsibility for themselves and alter their behavior.

In a normal relationship, both people recognize their 'shadow side': the things we do unconsciously that disturb us and confuse a partner. We see it and we change it and we grow as a result. We assume our relationship with a narcissist works the same way--that once we admit we were selfish or self-centered, they will do likewise.

Have you noticed how healing an argument can be when both people take a hard look at themselves, admit their flaws, and apologize? When people apologize, I've noticed that other people are quick to forgive because they also realize that despite their best efforts to love someone, they ALSO make mistakes. With the narcissist however, admitting your flaws LETS THEM OFF THE HOOK. What happens afterwards is that during another altercation, the narcissist USES every intimacy you revealed about yourself to justify WHY they did what they did. You feel like a failure and the narcissist is off the hook....AGAIN. As long as we admit to having contributed to 'the problem', the narcissist will AVOID (deny) his or her responsibility!

This is counter-intuitive for people who are NOT narcissists. So we apologize again, hoping the narcissist will mirror our behavior by doing likewise and they DO NOT. In fact, they will build on your humble admission of fault as a character trait. For example: everyone does things that are 'selfish' (insert whatever 'trait' you want here). You say, "I am so sorry for only thinking of myself!" and you expect this admission to trigger a similar response from your partner. Instead, each time you are taking responsibility for your behavior, the narcissist accuses you of being selfish. He or she doesn't say, "I feel neglected when you do such-and-such". No. Why not? Because "I feel neglected" is self-revelatory. Instead, the narcissist says, "You are a Selfish person. Even YOU admit it."

Most people who have written about their break-up with a narcissist, have learned to introspect and take responsibility for their part in the fiasco. Most people also learn over time, that the narcissist will use any excuse, ANY EXCUSE AT ALL, to avoid taking responsibility. Your short list of defects, mistakes, flaws, and weaknesses become the reason WHY the narcissist acted the way they did.

It may appear to others that we're pointing accusatory fingers at narcissists without examining ourselves. This is simply NOT true. We have learned, even if we aren't conscious of it, that our admission of personal weakness will be used against us.

In a normal relationship, people are LOATH to bring up any intimacy someone has revealed about themselves. They respect the person's willingness to be honest about their problems. They empathize with how it feels when your weaknesses are used like weapons of humiliation. There's an invisible line that we do not cross, even if we are angry and defensive. We do not use someone's painful revelations against them.

Most people have been taking responsibility throughout the relationship, catching themselves in the act and apologizing. They didn't realize the narcissist was gathering ammunition instead of examining him or herself. The narcissist may cry or weep or appear to be suffering when you apologize but sad to say, it's not real. You'll know that the next time you've done something really swell and the narcissist says, "You may have excelled at that project, sweetie, but that's because you are so incredibly SELFISH. Even YOU said so!"

During my divorce, I read a recommended book titled "Spiritual Divorce" and dutifully listed my mistakes, flaws, ignroance, blah-blah-blah and tried to have a 'closure' conversation with my spouse. I did not know about narcissism at the time. Do Not Do This if you believe your partner is narcissistic. It releases them from whatever introspection they are capable of and increases your VULNERABILITY. It's humiliating when your tender admissions, offered in 'good faith', used against you. Or shared with the narcissist's new rescuer.

You must be cautious when sorting through self-help books that are NOT recommended for pathological relationships. YOU, the non-N, may end up being humiliated, degraded, and your most spiritual aspects of yourself brutalized. If you want (or feel a need) to self-deprecate, please post to a support group that allows you to express your feelings whatever they may be. For some reason, most people WANT to admit the things they did 'wrong'. We need to purge and confess to being flawed. That's the good and the bad about having a conscience.

Remember: Pointing fingers at narcissists is difficult for Non-Ns. We want to be fair. We want to be honest. For every finger pointed at the N, we have three pointed back towards ourselves. So in order to feel good about ourselves, we can admit to having flaws, shadows and defects, too. But we CANNOT, SHOULD NOT, DO NOT need to admit this to the narcissist. It's not good for YOU and it's definitely NOT good for the narcissist.

When narcissists feel threatened, they cannot stop themselves from using whatever ammunition they have to defend themselves. Some narcissists regret their behavior afterwards but not nearly as much as we regret having trusted them.

Hugs,
CZ

Acceptance & Gratitude 2011

2011-11-24T06:26:00.000-08:00

Last year, Dad was supposed to make his traditional fried turkey and now for the second year in a row, he won’t be showing up with his fryer contraption and propane fueled blowtorch. We’ll miss his garlic infused turkey and Mom’s southern sweet potatoes with her perfected marshmallow crust. We will miss them most of all. I started feeling sad yesterday and today I’m crying. Just a little bit. Not enough to ruin my mascara or muddy the pumpkin pie.

It has finally happened. Our traditional family get-together has been altered two years in a row. My parents are spending Thanksgiving by themselves again. We can’t schedule a day that includes all the siblings and all the grandkids, which is what happened to my parents when they stopped visiting their parents and the pattern continues. We’re little kids. We’re old people. We turn eighty and pass the blowtorch to the young until they get old and pass their electric fryers to the next generation who may be cooking turkey with appliances we can’t even imagine yet. Or, maybe they’ll decide the old ways were best and revive the new-and-improved blowtorch. One can only hope.

We will be eating at my sister’s house this year. She has four boys, two of which are married and one of which is expecting a baby this spring. My sister and her hubbie are fixing the basic meal and the only dishes we’re contributing from our household are sweet potatoes (I’ll be thinking of Mom while lavishing them with butter), cranberry sauce and pumpkin pie. I am grateful for my sister’s willing heart knowing full well she’ll be exhausted by the end of the day and still, she’s doing her best to carry the tradition forward.

Thanksgiving isn’t just about heartburn, though. It’s a traditional time to express our gratitude which people have been doing long before we could buy Gratitude Journals, Gratitude books, Gratitude tapes and DVDs. Gratitude is a little bit too cool for comfort so I am grateful I grew up when gratitude came from the heart spontaneously--or it didn’t. I kinda liked it when old people expressed gratitude for their family, and the young people were grateful they never would be as old as their weepy relatives. Now kids are whipping out Gratitude Journals and the whole thing feels like a 1950’s Coronet film. O well, research says we're happier if we just go with the crowd, sooooooo:

Gratitude Journal Entry

November 2011

For all of you who are facing an uncertain future and can’t fathom being grateful for anything today, maybe you can be grateful that you haven't broken. That you are willing to accept a nasty reality you don’t like, didn’t earn, and did not attract into your life. Maybe you can feel grateful for your resilience because you’re beginning to find ‘meaning’ in your experience but please, do not thank the narcissist for coming into your life to teach you lessons about human cruelty, indifference, and malice.

The only lesson a narcissist wants to teach you is that YOU aren't as great as you think you are, you aren't as worthy of love as you believe, that people are mercenary, self-absorbed and heartless and Thanksgiving is a commercial conspiracy fostered by Turkey Growers of America, Inc.

This day, I am grateful for my daughter, what a wonderful woman she is. I am grateful for my nephew and the joy he brings into our lives. I am not-so-grateful for my sister who lives with me, though maybe a little bit and even more if she'll help us do the dishes.

I am also deeply grateful to WoN members who lifted my spirit and validated my worth and supported me whole-heartedly during the most difficult time in my life. And I am grateful for each of you reading my blog today: that you didn't give up and you didn't believe the lies you were told (or taught) about yourself. That you didn't escape reality, too. That you chose to do the hard work of creating a new life for yourself.

I am grateful that even when confronted with the worst that humans can be, we still believe in human goodness---enough to read strangers' messages and care enough about them to reply.

I am grateful for continued faith in human kindness even with adequate evidence to the contrary. I am grateful we do not allow narcissists to dictate our beliefs about human nature. This is a miracle for which we can be grateful. I think about it a lot...how tempting it was to believe human beings were selfish animals, self-invested, self-serving and self-admiring. Some humans ARE like that but most are not. I am grateful to know this today.

Love to all,

Cluster Bs on The WoN Cinema

2011-11-20T17:40:00.000-08:00

http://woncinema.blogspot.com/

I’ve been watching a LOT of movies lately. Lifetime movies. Yea, yea…serious Karpman Drama Triangles of the cinematic variety. The personalities are exaggerated and the storyline reduced to a viewer’s thirty-second attention span. The storyline is biased---sure to be a crowd pleaser since you can’t run a business without appealing to your market audience. The market audience for Lifetime movies is probably women like myself, stay-at-home-Mom-types with too little appreciation for their time, talents and temperament ‘cuz it takes a certain kind of person to maintain her self-esteem without salary increases and performance reviews. (The only performance review my husband ever gave me was a divorce with an automatic salary decrease and that didn't do much for my self-esteem. Studying mental-disorders-all-sorts was a way to restore my self-esteem and protect me from a repeat performance of a movie I didn't like the first time. )

I remember specific real life movies that expanded my awareness of 'bad folk'---leaving a lasting impression in my mind and my heart. Other people have said the same thing. There's something unforgettable about real-life dramas when we 'see' the actors, identify with some of the characters, and vicariously experience our emotions from the beginning to the end of the movie. It's cathartic when the hero triumphs over evil, faces her fears and overcomes her powerlessness. We love hero-conquers-fears type movies!

Movies like the ones you see on the Lifetime Network, reach a bigger audience than research articles about pathological personality disorders. So what I'm intrigued about today (I always have some kind of obsession going on) are movies portraying Cluster B Personalities without numbing audiences with psychoanalytic descriptions and pathology constructs. Movies showing what a 'pathological' looks like, how a pathological talks, how they operate. In two hours or less, you can download more information into your psyche by watching a film than two weeks spent studying Otto Kernberg's Aggression.

Something else I'm loving about Lifetime movies now is that pathologicals aren't hideous monsters with the cloven hooves portrayed in fairytales. Real life pathologicals look everyday average and the heroine is no Æon Flux either. Readers of my blog know that Cluster Bs don't manifest outward signs that anything is 'off'. You aren't suspicious because for all intents and purposes, this person looks normal. As long as we believe there is something sinister, something 'telling', something wicked the victim should have picked up on, Cluster B personalities will perpetrate inestimable damage to our society. People will continue blaming the victim (it's the path of least resistance) and society will, without realizing it, endorse pathological behavior rather than setting limits.

Everyone says the first place to effectuate change educating people about pathology. Realistically though, I know how much time it has taken me to start from scratch, not having had a psychology background. Without my researcher mindset (my family calls it 'obsessive personality'), most people won't have enough time or enough interest to read psychological literature. So I think one of the easiest ways to help people learn about pathology is through 'entertainment'. This was my thought when creating a website with a specific list of films portraying pathological personalities. It's called: WoN Cinema Presents: Ns & Ps & Cluster Bs.

If you have a basic knowledge about personality disorders, Cluster Bs in particular, the character traits portrayed in these films will be more meaningful. If you don't care to know which specific disorder a character is portraying (and I'll betcha even professionals disagree about a specific diagnosis), you can learn how a pathological personality style affects other people and how those people extricated themselves from the inevitable MESS.

I'd like to invite readers to use the Cinema website and link it to your blog if you'd be so kind. Each month, a new movie is featured and other movies are added when available. I also have several Featured Films listed (scroll down the page. You'll see them). Because October was Domestic Abuse Awareness Month, three of the featured films are about domestic violence: If Someone Had Known and the 1999 film, Black and Blue. A heart-breaking film about male abuse is also featured: Men Don't Tell, 1993.

If you have any suggestions to improve the site or have movie requests you'd like me to add to the website, please post a comment here. You cannot post comments on the cinema website but you can post them on my Narcissistic Continuum blog. I hope this new site will help people learn about pathology. I appreciate your help in achieving this cause.

Hugs,

Fall Harvest

2011-10-11T14:22:00.000-07:00

I’m making headway on my family's fall harvest of Anaheims, jalapenos, red chilies and green peppers; and Roma plus slicing tomatoes along with a tart bushel of Macintosh apples---all needing peeling, coring, and preserving.

Thank goodness my Aspie nephew is super-focused to a singular peculiarity, in precision peeling.

There are hidden gems in every diagnosis. You just have to know where to dig for gold and then recognize the shine. We have the most perfectly peeled little Macintosh apples you could ever hope to feast your eyes on. I felt guilty slicing the balded orbs into quarters perfect for pie filling, knowing full well they would mush into an indistinguishable mass after cooking. I might gild one of the peeled apples for our fireplace mantle...you know, like people do for baby shoes?

I can see it all now. Friends and family visiting from far and near during Christmas holidays. "Yup," I say meandering next to the fireplace, "This here gilded statue is a Macintosh apple from my father's orchard maintained and sustained by his 85-years-and-still-kickin'-ADHD. It was picked by yours truly with obsessive-compulsive-canning-disorder and Armageddon-stock-your-supplies-paranoia. And it was peeled with the super-sonic scrutiny of a high-functioning-Aspie who's more interested in unbroken peelings than oxidation time schedules."

Then I'll tell 'em with pride, "It takes an entire DSM* to raise our family."

When I gaze at our glistening jars filled with colorful tomatoes and peppers, it makes me wish I were a young 4-H'er again, hauling my work to the local fair to see who packed the prettiest jars in the county.

In the spirit of reciprocity, let me say that IF I must learn to tolerate agonizing peel times and brownish apples, my nephew has to learn to tolerate me. My long stories. My nostalgia for the good old times. My secret recipes. And songs like this one:

Hugs to all,

P.S. Thank you to everyone continuing to leave comments despite my absence. Once we get through this last batch of salsa and applesauce, there will be time to write about living with and loving someone with Aspergers; and living with and loving someone with a narcissistic personality.

*DSM=Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. What is often referred to as the psychiatrist's bible

Ehrenreich: Smile or Die

2011-09-22T16:07:00.000-07:00

Your partner left you for a soulmate?

Your child is suffering from mental illness?

You're 55 and no one will give you an interview?

You lost your life savings in the mortgage crisis?

Your 401K won't support your retirement?

You have breast cancer?

Change your Flippin' Attitude for crimenies sakes and quit yer bellyaching! You brought it on yourself. Which means in a narcissistic society: society is not culpable. You Are! Yes, YOU! And while you are dealing with your crisis, put a damn smile on your face, will ya? You have a rotten attitude for someone learning a lesson you didn't learn when you shoulda.

It is cruel to tell people all they have to do is change their attitude. It is cruel to tell people they ‘attracted’ abuse into their lives. That they wanted to be hurt. It is cruel to tell people that the narcissist was teaching them a lesson and once they learned that lesson, they’d achieve some kind of nirvanic enlightenment.

“It’s all in your head…just change your attitude.”

As Barbara Ehrenreich also says, "Believing everything is doomed to failure is delusional, too." She is not advocating depression, negativity, misery, and gloom. Her radical suggestion is embracing Realism by seeing what is actually happening in the world and figuring out what we can do to resolve 'Real' problems. Yup. That means all of us.

Full Version, if you have time or interest enough to watch it: 35 minutes duration

You may also be interested in this one-hour lecture even better than the above:
An Evening with Barbara Ehrenreich

Hugs,
CZ

The Meaning of Cows

2011-08-29T10:45:00.000-07:00

This is how I feel today. Like a hefty old farmer pulling an extra-heavy load when the damn cow oughta be walking by herself. Crimenies. Some cows are too lazy for words.

Not sure what cows mean to me subconsciously and I should give contemplative thought to the meaning of cows since my last post featured a Heifer spry enough to jump over the moon. I have files of cows on Photobucket because cows make me feel good and maybe that’s because I won a cow-milking contest once. Dad told me last week that his mother could out milk the farm boys with her left hand while baking whole wheat bread with the other.

No, you didn’t really want to eat my grandmother’s bread. Anything that wasn’t breathing went into the dough. “Gave it substance”, or so she said. Grand kids used to whisper around the table about which leftovers we could spy in Grandmother’s bread and ya honestly don’t want me to explain further. Let’s just say it was strange eating toasted spaghetti.

To be honest, I didn’t ‘win’ the cow-milking contest. Cow-milking was only part of the contest. The main challenge was proving your worth in the kitchen where my deliciously perfect cherry pie outdid my competitors. I hear tell judges were flabbergasted by my sour yet sweet filling with cherries so plump they made a grown man’s eyes water. My secret ingredient was Western Family-in-a-can which wasn’t against the rules ‘cuz I checked before buying two. They didn’t ask, I didn’t tell, and that evening I was crowned the FFA Queen (Future Farmers of America). It was a heady night for a farm girl, feeling my oats and all. And I figured once the word got out that my pie was to die for and my milking skills good enough, I’d never lack for weekend dates or proms. My future was secure.

Well now, that took fifteen minutes to write. My good friend Louise prioritizes thirty minutes and writes on her blog every single morning (unless her Internet service is down). I can’t imagine it.

I think there are real writers in this world as in naturally born-to-write; and there are writers who are writers by nurture as in learn-to-write. And there are some of us who are imbued with a little bit of both. So when a horrible, absolutely traumatic thing happened, my silent inner ‘writer’ gene was turned on like psychologists say happens with bipolar disorder. You’ve got it but you don’t know you’ve got it until something terrible happens and you do.

Many of my fellow bloggers say they never realized they could write until they felt so silenced by the narcissistic experience that writing saved their sanity. We’re compelled to express ourselves that much I know for sure. And since friends and family don’t wanna hear about our trauma more than three times or five if they’re generous, writing connects us to others and to ourselves. It’s therapeutic. In fact, what you write doesn’t even have to make sense when you write it. Those are the best ‘journalings’ because at some point, maybe that afternoon when your hands are immersed in pastry dough and Western Family pie filling is sitting on the counter, you’ll figure out why you were writing about cows and the sudden realization will make you smile.

Hugs,

Boo' ya Moon and Aspergers

2011-07-26T15:24:00.000-07:00

Hey diddle diddle

The cat and the fiddle

The cow jumped over the moon.

The little dog laughed

to see such a sport

and the dish

ran away with the spoon.

Be careful telling a nephew with Aspergers that the “cow jumped over the moon.” Instead of laughing at the absurdity, he'll say, "Don't you know the moon is 221,463 miles from Earth, its furthest point is 251,968 miles away with the average distance being 238,857 miles? So technically speaking Aunt Tatie, a cow cannot jump over the moon.” I suppose the dish running away with the spoon got lost in his moon calculations.

Speaking of moons, Stephen King wrote about an imaginary refuge called Boo'ya Moon in his novel Lisey's Story. With extraordinary concentration, people could transport themselves to an alternate reality if they needed escape, or privacy, or perhaps rejuvenation. I had just finished reading King's book the summer before my nephew's diagnosis and we were working outside together in the garden as we often do, when I noticed him staring into space. "Where are ya?" I asked, " Are ya smelling flowers on Boo'ya Moon?" He looked towards the figure interrupting his private time which would be me, the Aunt who has more patience than Epsom has salts. (I really need to update my clichés...perhaps something like The Aunt who has more patience than Microsoft has bugs would be more au courant.)

I ‘tease’ children gently, easing them away from viewing their peculiarities as serious defects of which there is nothing funny and everybody else has none. Having been an odd child myself, it was a revelation discovering what my kids loved about me the most, were my eccentricities---oddities not pathological in nature providing endlessly hilarious material for family reunions. I learned during childhood to take myself lightly which has been my saving grace during a hideous dump-and-run marriage after which the weight packed on like insulation around Alaskan water pipes. If it weren’t for my good-hearted self-deprecation lightening the burden of isolation (not insulation), I might not have found a nephew’s Asperger traits to be endearing. Obviously, other people weren’t fascinated with a boy who visited Boo’ya Moon when they told him to do three chores at once. Giving him one task at a time was fine. Two tasks was pushing it. Three was a Star Trekkian transport to Boo’ya Moon.

I won’t kid ya about visits to Boo’ya Moon being endearing or funny to everyone in his life. It wasn’t. Other people interpreted his blank stare as defiance. As if he were intentionally defying their authority, refusing to “Clean the catbox, empty the trash, and bring the mail in from the mailbox,” because he was a rebel. Or stupid. Too stupid to remember three things when he pondered ideas like ‘perpetual motion’ while the rest of us were stumped over the law of attraction. Or lazy. My nephew has been called lazy, too. If he managed to complete two out of three tasks but not all three, the only reason people could come up with was his characterological indolence, a sin, a fatal flaw---was he evil grab the Holy Water.

People psychologize other people’s behavior which is defined as a fundamental attribution error. That means they explain other people's behavior based on that person’s disposition or personality. (An error we don’t make with ourselves since we tend to view our ‘situation’ as the culprit more than labeling ourselves with personality deficits). In other words, people thought my nephew could not complete the three tasks as ordered because he was stupid, lazy, and/or defiant. He would be so stressed remembering all three things in proper order, that he automatically checked out. Boo’Ya Mooned it.

One year after giving a name to his stress and anxiety reactions, he was diagnosed with Aspergers Syndrome on the autism spectrum. When my nephew was undergoing diagnostic tests involving me in the interviews, too, I mentioned his visits to Boo’ya Moon as an answer to one of the psychologist’s questions. My nephew busted up laughing and the clinical psychologist was startled for a few seconds. I feared her next question would be directed at me: “How quickly can YOU could pack your bags for a stay in the mental hospital?!” Instead, she turned to my nephew and asked if he realized how lucky he was to have an Aunt who was comfortable with his occasional visits to Boo’ya Moon.

Then she posed a joke to see if he would laugh at himself which he did with only minor hesitation. “You are a peach!” she grinned at him and for a second, I feared he would teleport right there in the interview. Then he realized that a peach was a fruit and fruit grew on trees and he couldn’t actually be a fruit so obviously, the clinician was teasing him with an absurdity and wow, wasn’t that funny! Imagine calling a humanoid a peach!

P.S. I wrote about Refrigerator Mothers on the two posts linked below which might be interesting to people dealing with children on the autism spectrum. My nephew is high-functioning so I am not suggesting my methods for coping with Aspergers is a universal. As with all children, knowing them intimately, recognizing their limitations, and connecting with them as a trustworthy parent/nurturer is essential.

My nephew and his mother moved in with us when he was five years old. I divorced only a few years afterwards. He is almost twenty today.

Hugs,

Resources

Refrigerator Mothers

Refrigerator Mothers Commentary

ASC: Autism Services Center

Autism Society

Refrigerator Mothers Commentary on Bruno Bettelheim

2011-07-20T11:51:00.000-07:00

Please view my prior post: Refrigerator Mothers

"[Bettelheim's theory] suggested that autism may be related to a genuine lack of maternal warmth; women who were emotionally frigid and had “defrosted” just enough to produce a child." ~Carolyn Doyle

"There has probably been no group more crucified by the mental health profession than the mothers of autistic children. It is my own personal belief that it will rank high among the scandals of the twentieth century."~Dr. Ruth Sullivan

I'm old enough to remember Dr. Bettelheim. I even read one of his books, The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales. So after watching the 'Refrigerator Mothers' documentary on my prior post, I read further about this infamous man. He appears to have been a media huckster, promoting his Freudian-based theory that the precipitating factor in infantile autism was the parent's wish that his child should not exist. He managed to persuade lay folks, including the psychiatric community, into believing his theory about the etiology of autism. In hindsight, suggesting an emotionally cold mother could single-handedly cause her child's autism was a preposterous idea; at the time, it was plausible to both professionals and the public.

My last point is crucial because without an audience willing to suspend commonsense, Dr. Bettelheim would have been viewed as another nincompoop in a whole string of beard-stroking nincompoops. Had professionals and laypeople not collectively suspended their disbelief, they would have limited the harm perpetrated on innocent people and the generational harm caused by allegations that the mother had consciously or unconsciously rejected her child. What can a mother say to such an accusation? "The "unconsciously" caveat creates endless scope for over-interpretation." ~link

It's flabbergasting that Freudian-wary common-sense audiences would consider Dr. B's theory with more than a raised eyebrow. It's also curious that the 'Refrigerator Mothers' theory would embed itself in our culture so completely that remnants of this idea have lasted for decades. As a young mother in the early 70's, I experienced the fallout of blame-mama-pop-psychology and lest you think I was too brilliant to fall for that shit, I wasn't. Everything was my fault from the thin enamel on my daughter's teeth to my son's developmental delays. My doubts weren't neurotic hand-me-downs from a "patriarchalized" grandmother either. My self-doubt and uncertainty stemmed from consultations with family doctors. Oy Vey!

Rough days, those 1970's---when daughters inherited their mother's codependent survival traits and were forced to bite their tongues during Psyche 101 lectures on penis-envy.

In 2011, we might wonder how someone like Dr. B could popularize an idea so repugnant as comparing the homes of autistic children to Nazi concentration camps; accusing mothers of being the “pathogenic” factor in the development of autism when siblings were doing just fine with their mother’s “inadequate affection and mechanical caretaking.” Commonsense alone would counter Bettelheim’s cruelty. Had he been practicing in a small clinic, his theory may have been quarantined by limited exposure---rather than popularized through the media spotlight. His publicity smarts provided easy access to a wider audience. Curiously, Bettelheim's popularity hindered criticism because Dr. B was revered (even deified) by his audience.

Not everyone revered Dr. B, though. Audrey Flack, mother of an autistic daughter named Melissa, articulates a different point of view most people did not want to hear (and still don't, in some circles):

“It was while waiting in the lobby of Lenox Hill Hospital that I got acquainted with and came to love the other mothers of these sick children. These loving, selfless women not only carried the burden of their sick children, but had to bear the guilt, blame, shame, and accusations heaped on them by the medical profession, including social workers and teachers, as well as an entire society that shows little empathy for those who don’t fit in. Families were destroyed. Husbands left and wives stayed behind, becoming alcoholic or dependent on pills given to them because they were “neurotic.” Husbands who remained understandably escaped to their jobs, a relief for them, but not for the wives who were left to care for non-communicative, mute, and uncontrollable children.” ~Audrey Flack

The harm done to families of autistic children was indefensible despite Dr. B's "good intentions" and deeds. Nonetheless, we can't examine Bettelheim's culpability without examining our complicity. It's tempting to think of Dr. B as a charlatan deceiving innocent people to meet his misogynistic agenda. As difficult it may be though, we need to admit to ourselves that while Bruno Bettelheim was the spokesman for Mother-Blame, his theory didn't appear from nowhere. He didn't have power over others without being granted power over (m)others. He, like self-promoting narcissists, popularized an idea that was already in existence. The social soil was fertile. All Bruno did was 'drop the seeds' and allow us, a society, to reap the harvest of our collective contempt, our fears, and our vulnerability. If there's one thing we have in common no matter where or when we are born, it's the fragility of infancy when our life depends on a caregiver's good will.

“Bruno Bettelheim, a renowned professor of child development, was most prominent between the 1940's and the 1970's. He was also a great self-promoter, and often cited in the media.” ~About Autism

The popular Dr. B was a celebrity figure respected to the point of hero-worship, popularized in the media, promoted by the media, bringing profits to the media. As I read about his rise to success, it occurred to me that Bettelheim was a harbinger of things to come:

Celebrity Experts

When media presence supersedes presence of mind

Bettelheim's rise in popularity was founded on a savvy media presence. He was an opportunist, that's fair to say, whose self-promotion took advantage of a new marketing tool: television. He appeared on shows like Dick Cavett, in magazine articles, photo shoots, books and articles. Creating a 'wise' father figure with his Viennese accent, Freudian vocabulary intimidating most people, his vast connections to famous people and his status as a victim of the Holocaust, granted automatic respect as an authority. Had he been handsome and suave, we might question his motives but being a man of forgettable features, most people perceived him as credible. In addition, his focus on child psychology evoked public sentiment thus projecting onto Dr. B, the image of an intellectual with a heart.

In my experience, people revere doctors dispensing fatherly advice and tending our children the way 'we' wanted to an ideal father to care about us. We wish Dr. B into existence with a fervency that goes unquestioned, so much do we want him to be real. In a father-hungry society as we are even today, the public wanted Dr. B to exist as much as Dr. B wanted to exist for them. Yes, this is conjecture on my part though the same psychological mechanism creates and sustains celebrity experts today. The celebrity meets our needs (idealized as an expert or devalued as a scapegoat) as much as we are meeting the celebrity expert's narcissistic needs (an admiring audience---the approving mirror). Considering what we know about the symbiotic relationships, Dr. B's image was a narcissistic collaboration between Bettelheim and his audience. This celebrity relationship was not unlike our media-ated world today only we consider ourselves sophisticated---wiser than gullible audiences of the 50's and 60's and even 70's. (insert another oy vey! here)

We assume we're less vulnerable to manipulation because we know the media is a marketing tool, duh. Hell, we use the media to Bettelheim ourselves, i.e.: our lifestyles, our opinions, our persona. So are we less vulnerable to being misled by celebrity experts like Dr. B because we think more critically about media than people fifty years ago? Are we less likely to be misled because we accept self-promotion as a necessary albeit regrettable fact of modern life? I don’t really think so. For one thing, we’re so accustomed to celebrity experts that we expect doctors to be on Oprah and if they don't have a lay-out in People magazine or Time, we question their ambition. I think rather than eradicating narcissistic self-promotion, we've normalized it. Now we have an entire slew of Bettelheimed celebrity experts spouting slogans like secular scriptures. Make a list of all the expert doctors you recognize---celebrity doctors like Dr. Oz, Dr. Phil, Dr. Ruth, Dr. Pinsky, Dr. Chopra, Dr. Laura, and my favorites Dr. Evil. Dr. Who, and Dr. Seuss some of whom do not have doctorates in the field for which they are known with the exception of Dr. Seuss who had a doctorate in philosophy wasn't he genius?

We have legitimized entertainment as news and given the television network's stamp of approval to celebrity experts. With more information at our fingertips than we can possibly digest, we look for a sorting hat discerning the credible from the in-credible, culling opinion from fact. We hope credentials like Dr. means the Celebrity Expert is smarter and saner than the rest of us nincompoops. Not necessarily. Which means we should never:

1-suspend our commonsense

2-allow academic eggheads to intimidate us

3-stop questioning, criticizing, and thinking critically

4-rate someone's intelligence (or our own) by credentials

5-assume a psychologist is saner than yourself

We should never:

1-grant credibility based on popularity

2-confuse entertainment with news; legitimize entertainment as truth

3-stop questioning why we need/want celebrity Drs. to be who we 'think' they are

If there's anything useful I learned from Dr. Vaknin, it was exposing my deference to people with credentials. If I knew ‘lettered’ individuals personally, it was easier to gauge my respect. But with celebrity figures we will never meet (this is particularly true online), it's valuable to ask what traits we are projecting onto that celebrity expert. What are your motives? Does this person merit your respect? Are you transferring YOUR values and traits and beliefs onto the celebrity expert?

I had to examine my respect automatically given to authority figures upon whom I had projected what I needed/wanted to see. And I really needed/wanted to believe Dr. Vaknin was a reformed narcissist doing penance for his antisocial past. This belief gave me hope that the people I love might break through their narcissism, too. Then we could join the Peace Corps and hand out love buckets in between saving polar bears, whales, and coastlines.

Consider the popular Dr. Phil. Now who would watch Dr. Phil if they didn't need/want to believe the pop-cliche: "You teach people how to treat you". Which also suggests, "You can teach people how not to treat you." I believed that for a while after reading Relationship Rescue. Then I realized that if I could teach narcissists how to treat me, they wouldn't be narcissists and I'd still be married.

Who would watch Dr. Oz if they didn't need/want to believe death could be forestalled with pomegranate juice, positive thinking, and bran muffins stuffed with vitamin D fortified raisins? (News Flash: Dr. Oz was featured as a Time magazine centerfold when he had his first colonoscopy. I keep this magazine in my bathroom for visitors who might be interested in Dr. Oz's recent brush with death.) If you need/want to believe Dr. Oz has discovered the fountain of youth, you’ll be his avid supporter and sign up for his newsletter like I did.

In the same vein of reasoning, people believed Dr. Bettelheim because they needed/wanted to believe autism could be prevented with an extra dose of motherly love. Without realizing the harm they were doing to innocent families by accepting Bettelheim's theory, adherents were consciously-or-unconsciously protecting themselves because unlike those other mothers, they needed/wanted to believe their love would prevent autism. (Don't nitpick with me on this point. I used the 'unconsciously' argument).

During Dr. B's reign of terror, people needed/wanted to believe they could prevent or cure autism by loving their children properly. When you have a child with disabilities in your family, I can testify that you'll believe almost anything if there's a chance of cure. You may even relinquish your child to the good Dr.’s “perfect home” and submit yourself to soul-crushing psychoanalysis just to see if somewhere in the secret crevices of your unconscious, you wished your child didn’t exist. If you bring your unconscious hatred to light, or so we bargain, then perhaps your conscious love will heal their autism.

I am not suggesting the majority of people are misogynistic mother-blamers. I think most people needed/wanted to believe Dr. B’s theory in order to protect themselves---to reinforce their belief in a just world or at least a world in which they had a modicum of control. Every parent needs/wants to believe in prevention and cure because of course, they love their child. They may be challenged by the extraordinary demands they face as caregivers for a child with disabilities, but there is absolutely no doubt that they ‘love’ their child.

Bettelheim sold hope and thousands of people needed/wanted to believe he had discovered a fatherly cure to motherly deficits. ;-P

And yet, even after carefully managing his career and surrounding himself with loyal supporters, Bettelheim's empty fortress was eventually threatened with collapse. His 'Refrigerator Mother Theory' was refuted by Bernard Rimland who discovered a neurological cause for autism having no connection to unloving mothers or ineffective fathers, or concentration camps disguised a suburban homes. Perhaps Dr. Rimland was more motivated to question standard psychological theory when his son Mark Rimland, was diagnosed with early infantile autism. Call me cynical.

Eventually, former followers of Dr. B alleged abuse. Loyal devotees defected, giving the inside scoop to curious audiences because just like in 2011, inquiring minds wanted to know. Critical books annotated humiliating facts about Dr. B’s faked credentials, exaggerated accomplishments, and according to some: blatant lying. Depending on who was writing the article or book, Dr. B was a snake oil salesman, a charlatan, a prideful man whose success and power had seduced him; or, according to others, he was a genius of our times, a loving and tender man devoted to the autistic children formerly ignored by the medical community. As with most narcissists, people loved Bruno or hated Bruno depending on their willingness to minimize-deny-rationalize-ignore or explain his less-than-stellar behaviors.

When The Creation of Dr. B: A Biography of Bruno Bettelheim by Richard Pollak was published (a shocking expose), Jacquelyn Sanders wrote in the Chicago-Sun Times:

“The people who are so surprised are the popular media and people who believe in fairy tales. People who knew [Bettelheim] knew he could be a bastard. He could be charming, scintillating, extraordinarily [empathic], but also a goddamned bastard who could say horrible things.” ~Molly Finn

Did she really call Bettelheim a bastard? That settles it for me, then. The man was a narcissist. Pathology predominates the Rat Bazturd Philosophy of life.

In 1990, at the age of 86, a very depressed Dr. Bettelheim committed suicide having never apologized to families (mothers in particular) for the harm caused by his discredited theory. The true test of one's love for children may be whether or not a father figure is willing to sacrifice his theory in service of the child, or protect his theory in service of his ego.

“A feeling of relief and satisfaction came over me when I heard that Bruno Bettelheim had committed suicide. Justice had prevailed, the evil man was dead, and I was, after 40 years of torment, redeemed. Mountains of guilt collapsed like compacted garbage heaps but the emotional trauma remained…Today I persevere, searching for an answer, but I am no longer alone. A strong body of passionately committed parents, many of them doctors and scientists, is united in the efforts to find the cause and a cure.” ~Audrey Flack

Hugs to all,

Resources

Bruno Bettelheim, Wikipedia

In the Case of Bruno Bettelheim by Molly Finn

The Creation of Dr. B: A Biography of Bruno Bettelheim by Richard Pollak

The Mirror Effect by Dr. Drew Pinsky and Dr. S. Mark Young

Audrey Flack’s essay, “The Madonna’s Tears for a Crack in my Heart” (1999) Published in the book, For Women Only by Gary Null and Barbara Seaman. Pages 1167-1175

Refrigerator Mothers

2011-07-10T17:59:00.000-07:00

Documentary Trailer: 4 minutes

You can watch the 53-minute documentary here:

Refrigerator Mothers

PBS.org Article about the documentary: "If anything could be more devastating to a mother than having her child succumb to autism, it might be having to shoulder the blame for the affliction. That's what happened to a generation of mothers in the 1950s and '60s, when medical orthodoxy blamed autism on the mother's failure to bond with her child. Though wholly discredited today, the "refrigerator mother" diagnosis condemned thousands of autistic children to questionable therapies, and their mothers to a long nightmare of self-doubt and guilt.

In Refrigerator Mothers, the new film by David E. Simpson, J.J.Hanley and Gordon Quinn, and a Kartemquin Educational Films production, these mothers tell their story for the first time. Today, we know autism as a mysterious, even frightening neurological disorder that affects more than one in 500 American people. Typically its victims seem to begin life as normal, active babies only to slip into varying states of mental isolation, marked by speech difficulties, self-imposed social isolation and obsessive, ritualistic behavior.

In the '50s and '60s, however, an entirely different view held sway. In retrospect, it seems incredible — and not a little disturbing — that the medical establishment should have based its understanding of autism on a sweeping comparison made by one man. Bruno Bettleheim was one of the first child development specialists to focus on autism, but his explanation for its origin was breathtakingly wrong.

Bettleheim, who had spent time in a Nazi concentration camp, believed he saw parallels between the behavior of some camp prisoners and autistic children. This led him to posit that autism was a psychological disturbance arising from detached and "frigid" mothering — something akin to how prisoners reacted to the cold authority of camp guards.

The shock is not so much that Bettleheim could be so wrong as that it took decades before anyone in the medical community listened to the few lone voices, such as Bernard Rimland, Eric Schopler and the mothers themselves, who had been challenging the unfounded theory of mother-blame since the early 1960s.

Refrigerator Mothers shows that many of the women branded "refrigerator mothers" had successfully raised other children. Deeply shaken to be told they were the cause of such a nightmare in one of their children — a judgment driven home by the fact that one popular therapy was to remove the child from the mother — many of the women, over time, resisted the verdict of medical authority. Most tellingly, these mothers continue to care for and advocate for their autistic children today — a dramatic demonstration of a bond that has outlasted scientific error and unfounded accusation and blame.

Refrigerator Mothers compels us to closely examine how we understand the role of the medical establishment in our lives. It opens the door to an intimate, moving account of life with an 'invisible' disability — one that isn't always immediately obvious. Finally, the film serves as a striking cautionary tale about the tragedy that misdiagnosis can cause, and a dramatic portrait of women whom society rejected as mothers but who never stopped being mothers to their children." Link to Article on pbs.org

You can also watch the trailer in our theater, WoN Cinema Presents

Healing is not a race: s-l-o-w IS fast

2011-06-29T16:00:00.000-07:00

The whole crowd bet on the horses and nobody bet on the hare. Why'd the little boy pick the rabbit and not the red-white-and-blue stallion, or the mare with a garland of roses around her neck? Everybody knows horses outrun rabbits! The odds are against bunny rabbits---especially when the only person racing is the horse jockey whipping the flanks of his steed because he’s determined to win! “I’ll beat you, you wimpy wabbit! Move aside and let ME show YOU a real Winner!”

How long does it take get over a narcissist?

The first question on everybody’s mind when they find my blog OR they discover the WoN Forum is this: “how long before this stinking merry-go-round stops and I start feeling good again?”

As my father said, “It'll feel better when it stops hurting.” In other words, it hurts as long as it must and after that, you’ll feel better. Feeling better might take six months and it might take the rest of our lives, intermittently working through all the crazy shit we picked up when we grew up. If you’ve had a string of narcissists messin’ with your mind over the years, well, you’ll likely be confronted with unconscious bits-and-pieces of yourself that need conscious effort for a very l-o-n-g time to come. Don’t fret though. It’s not all bad. Hang out with bunny rabbits and think carrots. this is not a race.

Patterns: the Narcissists and Yours

One reason healing is protracted is because we need experience in order to notice our behavioral patterns. To see destructive/unhealthy patterns, we need time. We can’t read a book or watch ‘Kernberg Live’ and suddenly recognize unconscious patterns, learned from family and society. We learn about our patterns when we catch ourselves in the act which requires time, experience, and insight. If we lack the capacity for insight, we’ll repeat unconscious patterns until we decide everyone in the world is rotten to the core and our best defense is a Machiavellian offense. That is the narcissist's fate---continually racing on a merry-go-round going nowhere. For the rest of us non-misanthropists, the healing process connects us to other people and opens our hearts…even towards ourselves.

The positive thing about admitting we were in a narcissistic family and/or relationship is that we can’t lie about being unaffected. Like people who blissfully say, “My life is perfect. I’m not like YOU thank god, there but for the grace of God go I.” To which I reply, “It must be nice being so normal!” And then they go home and on the way, drive over stray cats and smash a few straggling pedestrians then sneak anti-freeze in their spouse’s meatloaf.

Seriously though, my issues won’t be resolved in a week since it took fifty years to grow my issues big enough to steal attention away from my iphone and Netflix. It’s a relief knowing imperfection is okay and that good-hearted people have issues--which IS what makes me lovable and human and an easy person for narcissists to feel comfortable around.

Narcissists like it so very much when they can be superior to other people. If you know you’ve got issues and you’re not prone to pretense about your flaws, you’ll probably have plenty of narcissists in your life to put your principles into practice. That’s how I look at my healing process: one narcissist after another (decreasing in severity) while building flexible boundaries, not rigid ones. The kind of boundaries that move and bend and grow in resiliency and this, of course, takes time.

Some people assume they are in race when they first learn about narcissism and embark on a ‘healing journey’. Their desire to feel better is tempting in a recovery group because everyone wants to keep up appearances as a sane and strong person (mostly to ourselves). They may boost their self-esteem by comparing themselves to others which is normal, by the way. When the comparison becomes dysfunctional however, is when people lift themselves up by putting others down. “O good laws! That person’s been crying for THREE years and it only took ME six days to complete all five stages of Kubler-Ross, the eighth stage of Eric Erickson’s human development and sitting on the peak of Maslow’s Hierarchy. Aren’t I amazing! lemme sell my secret!”

Their secret most likely is narcissism (self-deception) ---an easy and gratifying elixir with pathological side-effects. Beware of anyone selling secrets to suffering people. They know you will do (pay) anything to feel better, even if the relief lasts five s-h-o-r-t minutes. There is no secret to healing but telling you that won’t make you feel better and it won’t help me pay the light bill either. But we will both know what I’m saying is the truth and as crappy as it feels, this truth will set you free.

Self-deception is tempting because the emotional and psychological relief is immediate. We want to feel better, who can fault themselves for that?

A warning about entering Races

The ability to empathize with suffering people might lead to disconnection---not wanting to see ourselves in their shoes, nor feel what they are feeling. So we demean the other person, fault them; find a reason why they are different from ourselves. Why they deserve their fate. We aren’t harmlessly comparing ourselves to others when we do that---we are viewing ourselves as superior which is absolutely a narcissistic maneuver. Spotting our unhealthy narcissism is another important aspect of healing and before you write me hate mail, remember: everyone has narcissistic traits that need conscious attention. When it comes to healing, deep and miraculous healing unveiling layer upon layer of the self, s-l-o-w is fast.

“How do you feel about the race now?” the interviewer asked the little boy in the video. “Good,’ he said. “Why do you pick the bunny?” he asked and the boy replied, “Because I wanted to.”

Set your intentions on authenticity, clear-hearted living, and intimate trustworthy connections. Pick the rabbit.

Hugs,

Resources

Improv Everywhere

The Jekyl-Hyde Split

2011-06-21T10:49:00.000-07:00

"The mask slipped. When it did, and I called him on his abuse, he couldn't stand it. He turned on me like a cornered animal. Watching it unfold was truly enlightening, and frightening at the same time. I was shocked at how rapidly his verbal abuse escalated, and by how little it took to 'trigger' it. "~WoN Forum Member

The Jekyl-Hyde Split

“Man is not truly one, but truly two.” ~Dr. Jekyll

by CZBZ

It is a beautiful afternoon. You are strolling through a park, watching passersby who had also stolen a few minutes from work to appreciate a wintry day. You reach over to intimately squeeze your partner’s hand. He pushes your arm aside and seethes, “How DARE you!”

Now you are facing a madman who is accusing you of preposterous things for having spontaneously caressed his arm. You make the assumption there is an explanation for his anger and frantically search for a probable cause. You attempt to calm him down but your ministrations are perceived as trivializing. He doesn't need to be coddled by you, he insists, you are the problem! He accuses you of controlling him. You embarrass him with your clinging behavior, "can’t-you-won’t-you-will-you please grow up?" And besides, he accuses, you ALWAYS make a fool of him in front of other people. You ALWAYS act as though he's your possession, a plaything you can maul at your pleasure, he says. You are dumbfounded and maybe even scared but you're still looking a reason.

When the narcissist is raging, most people assume there is a rational antecedent but they underestimate the degree of irrationality they are dealing with. This is because narcissists use "primitive or immature defenses” preserving their inflated self-esteem, their perceptions of power, and their desperate need for control. Defenses are unconscious and there are several mechanisms triggering the rapid switch from Dr. Jekyll to Mr. Hyde. Maybe your surprise touch represented his loss of control. Instead of querying himself about his need for control, he accuses you of controlling him. When the narcissist sees in others what he cannot tolerate in himself, this is called Projection. Other defense mechanisms commonly used by the narcissistic personality are: denial, fantasy, idealization, even delusional projection. However, the defense that is particularly confusing is called Splitting. Splitting is a psychological mechanism that splits reality by dividing people (including the self) into All Bad or All Good extremes. There are no shades of gray. Reality is black or white, right or wrong. People are powerful or powerless; and reductively: winners or losers.

Splitting is a primitive defense. You can think of it in relation to an infant. The undeveloped baby cannot integrate both good and bad behaviors in one person. Seeing other people as both good and bad is complex, requiring psychological maturity. Until the child has accomplished this developmental task, baby will see mama as ideal (all good) or devalued (all bad). This is exactly what happens when the narcissist splits reality, seeing his partner-the-arm-toucher as an engulfing, rejecting, frightening object he must punish or control because she is BAD; and only later, after he has restored his equilibrium, praising her as a forgiving, perfect, empathetic and ideal woman for not having knocked his fool head off.

In addition to splitting, the narcissist’s lack of empathy means he does not understand your feelings. His sense of entitlement and exploitation means he can rage without remorse. He will not feel terrible about his rage because it makes him feel powerful. Besides, you must have deserved it. For narcissists, raging is Ego-Syntonic (they are comfortable with their behavior) which means, Dr. Hyde will never be denied visit.

So back to our January stroll through the park: When the narcissist has evacuated sufficiently and you have been sufficiently chastised, he vows never to repeat his monstrous performance. He apologizes not because he is taking responsibility for the harm he has caused, but because he is fearful you will leave---and he’s not ready for you to leave. Narcissists fear being abandoned by their ‘narcissistic supply object’, which means he will promise the moon to get you to stay. And you, having invested your heart and soul in this relationship, relent on your threat to leave. You feel sorry for him. Besides, you love the guy and like he said, maybe you were too needy, and too demonstrative in public, and now that you understand him better, you will work on being more considerate. This is the beginning of a dangerous pattern leading to the cycle of violence/abuse.

Yes, maybe you started walking with the kind and sensitive Dr. Jekyll but you ended up sharing your afternoon with Mr. Hyde, the unpredictable third party in every narcissistic relationship. Nearly every person writing about living with a narcissist has commented on the Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde split. The quick switch from professed love to undying hatred is crazy-making for anyone in the narcissist’s circle of associates, friends, and family. Still, the brunt of the narcissist's archaic rage is focused on his partner who is subjected to star performances by both Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. It’s amazing she isn't accused of bigamy.

The above depiction of Dr. Jekyll-Mr. Hyde is a classic interpretation of splitting as an unconscious defense mechanism. It is not a conscious manipulation terrifying victims into submission. When the narcissist is raging, making false accusations that have no basis in truth, and HE knows it, this is not unconscious splitting.

As Dr. Dr. George Simon writes, "Unfortunately, the term splitting has been used to denote the very conscious tactic of pitting one entity against another."

“An offense is not a defense.”

Rage as a BULLY Tactic

"I read somewhere that when a narcissist starts raging, you can stop it cold by mirroring that behavior back at them. I decided to try it when my N starting raging at me because I told him he sounded groggy. I called when he was taking a nap, he was groggy and cranky so I suggested calling him later. He exploded at me, raging that I was calling him a liar (he told me he was not groggy) and that I must not really love him if I think he is a liar. So I raged right back at him, accused him of calling me a liar and therefore he must not really love me. It was like flipping a switch. He stopped immediately and began speaking in a normal tone about normal conversational things, as if the rage episode had never happened. It was the weirdest thing I'd ever seen. It only took another week or so to convince me to go No Contact." ~WoN Forum Member

Narcissists use anger deliberately. Raging becomes a narcissist’s means to an end, reassuring their dominance. Thus, narcissists may be in control even when others perceive them as being out-of-control. We fear (and not unrealistically) that their out-of-context raging will lead to punishing retaliation or violence. As rational beings, we back down, take a more submissive stance, and the narcissist gets what he wants: power and control. Overtime, the aggressive narcissist becomes extremely adept at terrorizing people into submission because Dr. Hyde performs to the narcissist’s bidding. When Dr. Jekyll needs to 'put people back in their place', Dr. Hyde makes an appearance. At a certain point, after repeated performances, people are so well-trained the narcissist need only suggest he's displeased and other people alter their behavior.

When the aggressive narcissist is raging with criticism, insults and accusations that YOU are the devil's handmaiden, his extremist perceptions may appear to be defensive ‘splitting’. It is not. It is a deliberate fear tactic intended to disorient his victim(s). The more disoriented the victim, the more damage the narcissist inflicts. The more vulnerable his targeted victim, the more powerful and dominant the narcissist feels. Contrary to how most people feel when they hurt another person, the aggressive narcissist begins towering when his victim is cowering. In other words: the narcissist's need for power exceeds normal people’s relational need for intimacy.

The walk in the park is a good example of unconscious splitting versus anger as a manipulation tactic. The pathological narcissist might want to shout halfway through your stroll but he will wait until he has cornered you in a private place without witnesses. He will wait until the car ride home. Then he will turn on the rage spigot, showering you with criticisms so he can manipulate you into submission. Splitting, in the true definition of the term, is not consciously controlled. And a normal person cannot turn their anger off and on like a water faucet.

Whether unconsciously splitting reality or consciously pitting one person against another, you may get a hearts and roses apology afterwards. You will know if the narcissist's apology is sincere by his next choice. Does he seek treatment because his victims are afraid of him? Does he ‘admit to’ and ‘take responsibility for’ fixing his problem? If not, please accept the fact that he is comfortable with his behavior because it gets him what he wants: power; control; domination; an inflation of his self-esteem. In other words: He feels good when you feel bad.

Anyone for whom terrorizing others is Ego-Syntonic, is not a person with whom you can develop trustworthy intimacy. Unfortunately, by the time you question the health of your relationship, you will be so disoriented and beaten down that you won’t even believe you deserve better. You do. Anyone who is kind enough to care, who sticks around in the belief s/he can help her partner, deserves nothing but the very best.

Love,

CZBZ

Resources:

I wrote this article for The WoN Connection, published in February 2011.

The artwork on this essay is the result of my PHOTOSHOP class this winter. I love Photoshop. If you haven't Photoshopped yet, you may want to give it a try. It's a marvelous way to spend your lonely nights and solitary weekends AND, you won't even miss the narcissist. Say, let's consider Photoshop to be a method for sticking to No Contact. Photoshop your way to mental health and spiritual peace. That should be the title of my next essay! ha!

The Empathy Gene: are we born good or evil?

2011-06-13T18:32:00.000-07:00

After posting about 'Reading the Mind in the Eyes', I planned on posting the next test measuring the empathy quotient. So you know how it goes when a topic is on your mind. You start seeing 'empathy' articles everywhere as if they were magically appearing out of thin air. I prefer thinking they instantly appeared at my command because it's unsettling to admit that the articles were always there, I just didn’t notice them. With my attention focused on empathy, I found several videos that were intriguing.

“Empathy is the capacity to recognize and, to some extent, share feelings (such as sadness or happiness) that are being experienced by another sentient or semi-sentient being. Someone may need to have a certain amount of empathy before they are able to feel compassion.” ~Wikipedia link

Take the test: Empathy Quotient

We assume anyone can put themselves in someone else's shoes, and not just mentally. Emotionally. Really feeling deep down to the soles of their labile socks, precisely how the other person feels. Now we're learning that empathy may depend on a hormone called oxytocin. When the oxytocin is flowing, people feel empathetic, connected and bonded to other people. When you are empathetic, you are moral. A moral nature leads to being civilized because you know what's right and what's wrong without a list of rules, guidelines, and structures enforcing boundaries for your morally corrupt hormonal system.

But Dr. Zak also said in his talk that high-stress limits the production of oxytocin which diminishes the ability to empathize which further diminishes our capacity to trust, bond and build cities and there ya go. Western civilization crumbles from oxytocin deficits.

I’m one of those ocytocin-rich empathizers, bonding with friends and trusting……….most people. I used to think this was a learned behavior or out-and-out naiveté, but now…well, maybe it’s in my blood.

Oh by the way, Dr. Zak says in the video below that about 5% of human beings have an oxytocin dysregulation, traits of sociopathy, lack of reciprocity and trust. He calls 'em: Bastards. He also says empathy is in our genes. And empathy propitiates moral behavior so truly, morality is in the blood. Which means that, theoretically, psychopaths could be identified with a blood test.

Add that blood test to a marriage license, please!

Hugs all,

CZBZ

Look Into My Eyes (reading minds test)

2011-06-08T16:12:00.000-07:00

"Looook eento my eyes! Come closer, closer-----vut do you seeee?"

Reading the Mind in the Eyes

I discovered an eye test today. Took it. Aced it. Almost a perfect score, way above average it seems. Guess that means reading people's eyes is another hidden talent to add to my list. It won't do much for my resume but it sure does a lot for my self-esteem.

Oh, you know how it is when you've misread a rat bazturd's eyes for thirty years, assuming you were seeing love beams in his pupils. Then you find out it was a moat.

Click the Title. Take the test. See how well you score. Women are supposedly hard-wired for empathy so we may do better reading emotional nuances. Not many men stick around me for very long or we could compare male and female scores on my blog. ha! That's my life. Gotmy Dad, Got my son. Got my nephew. Got my whole bed to myself.

Some of you may know I absolutely love vampire movies, especially Hammer Films produced in the 1970's. Must have something to do with my age because the people in my house like zombies better: Dawn of the Dead, Night of the Living Dead, House of the Dead, Resident Evil, Zombieland, movies reminding us of family reunions and shopping with my SISTER.

A special treat: Dracula 1931

Check out Lugosi's mesmerizing gaze in this brief clip. Can you read his thoughts and feelings through his eyes? If you haven't seen the movie, you can watch it on my other blog: VampIre Scroll down the list of movies on the sidelinks. You'll find it.

Hugs all,

CZBZ

Processing Grief and Loss: After a while (it gets easier)

2011-05-27T07:44:00.000-07:00

you can end a relationship with a narcissist but it never fully ends. Not really. Not if you have children and familial bonds, linking family members for time and all eternity.

You can work through your feelings and move on with your life. BUT (and this is true for most partners of narcissists) you can’t erase the narcissist from your life. Not if you have children, who will marry and have children, and they will want to share their lives with both parents who have become their children's grandparents.

And there you are:

Standing in line at your daughter’s wedding

Waiting in the hospital for your grandchild’s birth

Christenings and blessings and family reunions with your X

Accepting lonely holidays when the kids are with your X

Watching him build a new life with a supposedly ‘better’ (younger) family

Being told of his happiness (at your children’s and your expense)

Breathing deep when pinched pennies are spent on a new relationship. (Isn’t it nice you were frugal for thirty years and didn't replace your lost diamond so she could have one?)

We do these things not because it's easy. We do these things because we are willing to bear our discomfort, making life much easier for our children. All these indignities and more are born with stoic grace by a woman who knows her worth.

This poem supports me on days when it is tempting to agree with the rat bazturd's beliefs that I'm replaceable. Like a toaster oven. Or a hat rack.

After a While
by Veronica A. Shoffstall

After a while you learn
the subtle difference between
Holding a hand and chaining a soul
And you learn that love doesn't mean leaning
And company doesn't always mean security.

And you begin to learn
that kisses aren't contracts
And presents aren't promises
And you begin to accept your defeats
With your head up and your eyes ahead
With the grace of a woman
Not the grief of a child

And you learn
To build all your roads on today
Because tomorrow's ground is
Too uncertain for plans
And futures have a way
Of falling down in midflight

After a while you learn
That even sunshine burns if you get too much
So you plant your own garden
And decorate your own soul
Instead of waiting
For someone to bring you flowers

And you learn
That you really can endure
That you are really strong
And you really do have worth
And you learn and you learn
With every good bye you learn.

Hugs all,

CZBZ

My Beautiful Mother (a repost)

2011-05-08T13:27:00.000-07:00

(Originally published 5/04/08)

"But Dr. Michael Alexander Salzhauer, a plastic surgeon from Florida, is a fan of honesty. He has written a children's book, My Beautiful Mommy, that bluntly explains it all.

"Why are you going to look different?" the girl asks.

"Not just different, my dear — prettier!" Mommy responds."

I never thought of myself as a rebel but there’ve been a few moments when my comfort with getting older was brought to my attention as being ‘odd’. One experience in particular comes to mind.

I was trying on flamboyant hats in TJMaxx one afternoon. A teenager was shopping with her mother and they both started talking about how much they loved hats but didn’t dare wear them because they felt silly. But they loved hats anyway. At least on other people. And they liked seeing women dressed to the nines with hats adorning their heads even if they were menopausal. I said, “Well, I just LOVE getting old because there’s nothing as marvelous as a middle-aged woman in a fancy hat.”

The slim-hipped teenager looked at me as if I’d landed a spaceship in the parking lot. “You like getting older?” she asked. She looked at her Mom. Mom didn’t say anything.

“Of course I like getting older,” I said. “Women are beautiful with wrinkles around their eyes and ridges in their cheeks from a lifetime of laughter.” Well, you coulda heard a pin drop and in a discount department store, that’s something to say.

“My mom hates getting old!” the girl blurted, at which point I realized my faux pas using both beautiful and wrinkles in the same sentence.

I replied, “I lived in Europe for a few years. Maybe that’s where I embraced being older with being sexy.” This comment deterred the conversation to life in France and how lucky we were to have lived there which was a nice reprieve from the direction we were headed talking about Old Women and They-Should-Just-Die. Or, “Why don’t they drop out of sight now that their cheeks aren’t rosy and breeding is no longer a status symbol of their worth?”

Yea, I have those kinds of thoughts but keep them to myself most times. I can still chitchat while imagining headlines in the newspaper: Oldish woman creates Panic Attacks in TJMaxx customers.

I really hate hearing women complain about getting older and losing their value in society. You’d think that once we moved out of the baby market and headed towards true sexual emancipation, we could finally love ourselves just for being ourselves and not because of our sex appeal. Besides, who decided wrinkles weren’t sexy? I daresay an older woman knows more about pleasing a man than any spring chicken could learn from watching Cinemax.

One thing for sure, both my daughter and my son know their mama loves getting older as a symbol of wisdom and worth. I’m not afraid of losing my taut skin, perky perkies and creaseless eyes. They served their purpose.

“You are so beautiful!” my children say---much to people’s bewilderment. I’m no beauty by Hollywood standards but I get the impression that what makes mama beautiful is the same beauty those babies saw when gazing into my face three decades ago. I’m glad they still recognize me.

I hope my daughter sees herself in me and knows that she is beautiful too, although neither of us will be walking runways anytime soon. We're two normal women who believe getting older is natural, wonderful, something to look forward to. Which is good because reality is: we get old or we don’t. And if we don't, we aren't gonna care about wrinkles anyway.

So my daughter and I are shopping for jewelry one day and she says (much to the clerk’s astonishment), “Mom! I love that bracelet on your wrist because it shows off your crinkly, soft skin!”

Yes, call us rebels. These days, accepting a woman's aging process is being a rebel. But to me, there is nothing rebellious about going under the knife to fit social demands. If people are uncomfortable seeing an old woman in a fancy hat, they can stuff themselves. I won’t manufacture content by avoiding public discomfort with aging women who think they're hot stuff.

Now all this came up after reading a few articles about a new book titled My beautiful Mother. I can understand someone hating a crooked nose but if every human being fixed the bump in the middle of their nose, I wouldn’t recognize my tribe. A bump in the middle of the nose is better than a DNA test for our family, though my nose is practically bumpless. I do have an outward familial swing to my walk, which is fodder for countless jokes about our Duck-Walking-Bump-Nosed family from the Rocky Mountains.

Maybe it’s just a familial thing but I never thought my Aunts were ugly. I figured the bump on their noses served dual purposes: a genetic marker and an eyeglass holder. They never fidgeted around pushing glasses back on their noses, that’s for sure. I suppose bumps are all about attitude and my family has plenty of that.

My Aunties weren’t exactly keen on gray hair, though. Most of them sported bright red coiffures well into their nineties. Bright red hair, duck feet, bumps holding up rhinestone glasses and more wrinkles than egyptian cotton and wow, they were beautiful to me. I wanted to be just like them.

Truth is: I’d hate going to family reunions with Barbie and Ken look-alikes. I’d feel out of place. Like I needed to change myself. I’d wonder what was most relevant in their lives: how they looked or how they lived? I’d probably feel like chopping, cutting, slicing and dicing any protrusions the world deemed unlovely. What messages would my mother have given me had she fixated on fixing her boobs? That relationships were so shallow that breast-height determined a woman’s shelf life?

You know, in thinking about my childhood, there was nothing that made me feel safer, more connected and secure than my hook-nosed uncles loving bump-nosed aunts and half the family walking with an obvious outward swing to their feet. They were my people. I belonged. And they loved me.

Resources

Salzhauer, Michael. My Beautiful Mommy
http://www.mybeautifulmommy.com/

Packaging Girlhood. My Narcissistic Mommy
http://packaginggirlhood.typepad.com/packaging_girlhood/

Chicago Tribune. Forever Young
http://www.chicagotribune.com/entertainment/chi-071211young-photogallery,0,936346.photogallery

Just to let everyone know...

2011-05-05T11:51:00.000-07:00

I am finally *gasp* cleaning up this atrocious blog of mine. It might look like a royal mess for awhile. The Narcissistic Continuum needs a serious remodel and that’s what it’s gonna get this week.

I also have two other sites you might enjoy but yes, they're a bit strange. Your opinion on their strangeness depends on whether you like old movies and fairies...or not.

The WoN Cinema

The first site is called The WoN Cinema Presents: Ns and Ps and Cluster Bs. It's connected to our message board so if you watch one of the feature films starring Narcissists, or Psychopaths, or Cluster B personality disorders, you can comment on an attached thread. We just opened the doors last week so we don't have very many movies in the theater but I'll be adding to the list each week. Check out this short film: Charlie Chaplin: Smile (4:40)

The WoN Cinema is a 'just for fun' website that allowed me to play on Photoshop (always a relief for pent-up frustrations. When it comes to Photoshop, my family knows it's ME time and they enter the room very very respectfully. haha!!) Depending on your computer, you may not see the full version of the WoN Cinema which is a shame 'cuz it's precious and has a Victorian opera theater background. I have a huge monitor with high resolution but always try out other computers to make sure people have a 'reasonable' view of the website.

WoNderLaNd

This site was created for people who need 'escape' from the daily frustration (or trauma) everyone goes through with narcissists. I have loved and still love fairy tales for many reasons which I've written about on the website. It's titled WoNderLaNd after the Web of Narcissism's acronym: WoN. This website features inspirational films, poetry and images. I hope to update it weekly but at this point, a new post is added...once in a while.

So this week, I'm cleaning up The Narcissistic Continuum and will be deleting some of the essays listed on my sidelinks. Please bear with me and Thank You for reading my blog. You have no idea (maybe you do!) how important your validation has been the past few years.

Love to all,

O yea...need I say anything more?

2011-04-10T16:58:00.000-07:00

Iris DeMent is one of my very favorite singers and like my other very favorite singers, she’s not nearly as famous as she oughta be. If talent were equal to fame, which it's not. Anyway, I was googling around looking for another of DeMent's songs called “Let the Mystery Be” and also found this one, "God May Forgive you But I Won't". What a thrill to find both songs on YouTube ‘cuz all I have is my old CD and unless you’re sitting in my office, you won’t be able to hear her great voice and her powerful songwriting.

Ten or fifteen years ago, I predicted she’d skyrocket to the top of the music industry but she hasn't done that, just like my other favorite singer: Ferron. So this morning, I had my nephew listen to this song by Iris DeMent. He reciprocated the favor by forcing me to listen to a band called Apocolypse playing Metallica music on cellos. Not bad. Not as good as Iris DeMent---but my ears aren’t bleeding so that’s saying something. Hope everyone enjoys this song as much as I did, do, and will. For years to come.

God May Forgive You

by Iris DeMent

You say that you're born again

cleansed of your former sins

You want me to say "I forgive and forget"

But you've done too much to me

Don't you be touching me,

go back and touch all those women you've met

Chorus:

'cause God may forgive you, but I won't

Yes, Jesus loves you, but I don't

They don't have to live with you and neither do I

You say that you're born again, well so am I

God may forgive you, but I won't

and I won't even try

Well, the kids had to cry for you

I had to try to do

things that the Dad should do

since you've been gone

Well, you really let us down

You may be Heaven 'bound

but you've left one hell of a mess here at home

(chorus)

and I won't even try.

Set Your Mind Free: Imagine the worst

2011-03-01T16:51:00.000-08:00

I just received a comment from a roving reader, suggesting my blog was very interesting and could be very popular but my lackluster moderation left a lot to be desired. If I didn't change my behavior (such as posting on a whim without consistency or discipline) I’d never make any money.

Well, first of all---in case the robot didn’t notice my disclaimer, this blog will never make money as long as I have anything to do about it. Second of all, DUH. As though I didn’t know infrequent posting would hinder my PPR: Potential Popularity Rating. Not calling people back on the phone or returning emails tends to put a damper on relationships too, so apologies to anyone in cyberspace who might be mad at me for placing a call and then ignoring my readers. Whom I care about very much. You have gifted me in more ways than you know. I’m almost interested in my opinions now.

I’d love to post more stories about my fabulously entertaining life in NarcVille and one day, I’ll do that. Right now, I am prioritizing the website I’ve threatened to create for nigh on five years. Each time I get close to going “live”, sumthin’ happens. Sumthin’ lousy. Sumthin’ traumatic. I have lost friends and made enemies over non-profit websites that didn't even exist. It’s traumatic for a woman who prefers people to plus signs, karma numbers, and popularity graphs. I announce my plans, lose friends, and go through a self-blaming process like most people do when they're rejected and then, a little voice whispers in my ear so comfortingly, so sweetly, “You aren't ready yet and that’s why there’s a roadblock. When the time is right, everything will fall into place.”

Then I breathe rapidly, shallowly, and noisily while thumbing through goal-oriented, Think Your Way Rich books compelling me to Buck Up because the only things worth doing in life must, of necessity, challenge an Earth student’s fortitude. At least to those woo-woo writers I confess to reading, a hefty roadblock is the Universe’s way of testing your mettle. How serious are you? Do you really think you can hit the wall and survive; or, are you thinking like a weak, negativistic, and victimize-ie loser? Gosh, what could be worse than thinking like a victim? Thinking like a narcissist IS the fashion of the day: “I can do it! I am great! Nobody and no thing will get in my way! God and Angels and Celestial Beings have joined forces in giving me what I want ‘cuz I am just so very very special! Nothing will stop me---not even my old wife crying in the bedroom ‘cuz Hera and Zeus decided it was time to send me the soulmate I really deserved!"

I make myself laugh after several rounds of hand wringing and anxious 2:00 am anxiety attacks and then it’s time to take stock of reality. Find my balance. Look for my homeostasis and no, I’m not dating.

Amidst the Go-Go hype of positive thinking and the No-No tripe of mystical spirits saying, “it’s time to back off, lay low, do nothing, and grow”, there’s a balance. It’s easy for me to swing one way or the other. Extremism, in my family, is as natural and normal as "Round-up Ready sugar beet seed".

When I find myself going paralytic, I let my mind escape, preparing for disasters that will never happen. My train of thought goes like this: “WHAT IF the roof on my house catches on fire and the postman delivers a bomb and my neighbor sues me for parking my car to close to her property line and my nephew decides to run away to Alaska or some other fearsome foreign country and my daughter tells me she’s quitting her job to be a pole dancer and my sister retires early to stay home with me and we have an earthquake like the one we survived in 1989 or a volcano like the one we survived when Mt. St. Helens erupted or the French rainfall we walked in after Chernobyl or…what else? O yes. WHAT IF the X calls and says he has a horrible disease that cut off both his legs and both his arms and his girlfriend abandoned him and now he needs to come home and since his x-girlfriend won't have anywhere to go after their ugly break-up, can she move in, too?” and then, my train of thought ends in gut-rollicking humor which always, always, grounds me in reality.

My imagination is a lovely and terrible place. But if unforeseen disasters should preempt the launching of my new site, what's to worry? A woman can always pick up where she left off because, or so the wise ones tell us, "Everything unfolds exactly as it should.”

Love to all,

Jane Austen's "Fight Club"

2011-01-09T14:28:00.000-08:00

Emily Janice Card, creator of this video says: "Everything Jane does is so comedy of manners and relationships and all the things that are unsaid or you can’t do, that when you throw something else into the mix, whatever it is, it’s instantly intriguing or funny because it’s so outlandish.” So does that mean that she’s planning on making a sequel?

“People are asking, ‘What’s next?’ I think the first thing that comes to mind is Emily Bronte’s American Psycho. Because that’s what Heathcliff was. Except British.” ~ Link to quote

Hugs,

Christmas 2010

2010-12-30T14:28:00.000-08:00

I was scheduled to spend my day in the car, taxiing my nephew hither-and-fro. When his appointments were surprisingly cancelled, my day was freed up to do something other than sit in my car watching Dracula movies on my iPhone4. What should I do with my unexpected gift?

1) Take down the Christmas tree

2) Re-organize the garage to store fake tree

3) Vacuum Christmas glitter out of the carpet

4)Throw out Thanksgiving leftovers

5) Apologize to readers and write something

Decision time: "I'm SORRY!!!"

And "Thank You!" to those who were worried enough to send an email asking about my absence. Not to leave everybody hanging ('cuz you just know how exciting a retired homemaker's life can be), but this has been the lousiest emotional holiday since my husband walked out with his soul-mate on Christmas Day.

Now my X's abominable behavior occurred so long ago it's hard to even remember the date. What I do remember is my optimistic assumption that since that Christmas was so horrible, every Christmas in the future would be joyous! If only by comparison. Well, pay attention to your assumptions, dear friends. Cherished assumptions may mask False Hope.

Never-and-nonetheless, this holiday season proved to be better than the year the Wench Stole Our Christmas. Or the year we spent Christmas in juvenile court. That was 2008 according to my blog entry. So gee, what happened in 2009? Did we sail through the holidays without a glitch in the festivities? Lemme check my archive.

..................................Checking archive...............................

Now you see this is why blogging is more valuable to the blogger than it is to readers: We document familial insanity. Insanity in the family is something I'm adept at denying or occasionally decorating. I must confess. I had forgotten about Christmas 2009 which either means I'm no longer plagued with neurotic guilt....or perhaps repetitive trauma has burned entire chunks out of my brain? Rated against this year's drama, 2009 was merely annoying.

Now Christmas 2010 has come and gone and though my mood is ruminative and sweet right now, I remember only two weeks ago when family members stared at me as if snakes were wriggling from my scalp. I even gave my sister the evil eye, hoping she’d turn into stone, whereupon I'd hang baubles from her Lancôme nose and string cheap and gaudy bangles from her perky, jiggling...you knows.

It all began when she purchased a dumbed down gingerbread-house-in-a-box advertised with the image of a family cheerily gluing pre-cut walls together with petrifiable frosting. In the picture, kids are smiling; Mom's got a grin a mile wide; and Dad's plumb fascinated with his nuclear family arranging peppermint bombs on prefabricated rooftops. It's a dream in a package for $9.95!

So one evening late after work time ends for family-oriented people, in the house walks my professionally coiffed sister with her Christmas contribution, gaily announcing how neat it would be if we had a gingerbread house. She left her new package on the center island and then as usual, escaped to her room where God only knows what she does for hours while dinner is being prepared. Her room is a nice escape after dinner too, when the maid is cleaning the kitchen ‘cuz gee whiz, what else ought I do with my time?

I found myself staring holes in that ridiculous box. Resenting that box. I wanted to smudge tuna casserole on those creepy Skittles Family faces grinning on that box. To me, buying a gingerbread-house-in-a-box is like purchasing Christmas from Stepford Inc., for heaven's sakes. You can pick the right logo, buy the product of your dreams, cut your time in half, but you stifle the soul of the whole. Don't people realize that or maybe they don't know what they're missing if they had never, ever lifted a DAMN finger to create a merry Christmas for others in the first gosh damn place.

Creating Christmas "for others" being the key to personal happiness despite what codependent pseudo-psychology tells people these days.

If you want to have a Merry Christmas with your family, do this: stand on your feet for hours, whip up a batch of cookie dough forcing you to buy eggs instead of lipstick, put on Dr. Demento’s Christmas Songs numbing your eardrums but delighting your kids, break a fingernail or two scrubbing cookie sheets, and splatter royal frosting in your $200 haircut that was styled by an 'artist' not a hairdresser!

In other words, two sisters with very different personalities do not a congenial Christmas make.

So what am I going to do about it? Well, first of all, I shan't waste energy focusing on HER issues (of which there are so many there isn't enough space in the blogosphere to list them one-by-one, or list them by the gross, as the case may likely be). I have learned and not without formidable resistance, that the only person you can change is yourself. Because my sister and I have lived together for nigh on to fourteen years, it is time to give up the assumption that mothering is instinctive, automatic, and gender-specific. Or that it can be absorbed like water on a dry sponge.

I must also crush the false hope that a mothering-type woman can teach her sister a thing or two--even though this mother doesn’t have an executive office overlooking the city skyline nor master's degrees and high-brow certificates framed and hung on inoffensively neutral colored walls.

But! IF she ever dares bring another Gingerbread-House-In-A-Box into my kitchen, expecting me to put it together and then thank her for such a generous contribution to family festivities, she is gonna get another royal earful. Of frosting.

Hugs all!

CZBZ

How to make "Mikey's Mocha Chocolate Cake"

2010-10-22T05:05:00.000-07:00

Reference post:

Birthdays, Fairytales, and Family

<-------------I took that picture with my iphone4. The cake is sitting on a manly pedestal hewn from rugged pine. No, I didn't chop down the tree myself but I coulda or at least i woulda tried if needs be. Once you get out of a narcissistic relationship, you find out that you can always do more than you 'think' you can.

I thought a wooden cakeplate would give a Paul Bunyan feel to an otherwise dainty dessert. ha! This was such a delicious chocolate cake that I’m breaking tradition and posting a recipe on my blog. You can frost this cake a day in advance, store it in the refrigerator, and wow your guests for dinner the following evening. If you like entertaining, you know how rough it can be preparing the appetizers, main course, and dessert all in single day. So here’s an awesome recipe to keep in your cookbook---in the event you feel like entertaining again. If you are dragging your behind to the computer to figure out what just happened to your life, you may consider baking this cake on grief nights when Kleenex and Xanax are the only guests at your table.

I used an extra-heavy cream for the frosting and whipped it into a frenzy (frenzy is how you feel when the narcissist rips through your life) until the cream has nearly turned into butter. A firm consistency will prevent the frosting from weeping in the refrigerator. The only thing that should be weeping in your kitchen right now is yourself and if you are sobbing uncontrollably, please remember: this too shall pass.

That's a promise from this veteran retiring from the Dept. of LoveUnrequited, Inc.

I call this recipe Mikey’s Mocha Chocolate Cake in honor of my nephew...the child who changed my life for the better.

Cake Layer Ingrediants

4 squares unsweetened chocolate

½ cup hot water

½ cup granulated sugar

2 cups sifted cake flour

1 teaspoon baking soda

1 teaspoon salt

½ cup butter or margarine, softened

1-1/4 cups granulated sugar

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

3 eggs

2/3 cup milk

Frosting and Filling Ingredients

3 cups heavy cream, chilled and un-whipped

1-1/2 cups confectioner’s sugar

½ cup unsweetened cocoa

1/8 teaspoon salt

2 teaspoons of Starbucks' Via (or any brand of instant coffee)

Fresh strawberries dipped in melted chocolate bark (or melted semisweet chocolate chips)

The Steps

1) In double boiler, combine 4 squares of chocolate and ½ cup hot water. Stir constantly over hot, not boiling water, to melt chocolate. Add ½ cup granulated sugar and cook for two minutes, stirring constantly. Remove from hot water and cool mixture to lukewarm.

2) Preheat over to 350 degrees. Grease and flour two 9” inch round cake pans. Sift flour with soda and salt and set aside.

3) In mixing bowl, beat butter at medium speed until fluffy. Gradually beat in 1-¼ cups granulated sugar beating until light and fluffy (about five minutes) and then add the vanilla extract.

4) Add eggs one at a time and beat well after each addition. At low speed, add flour mixture alternately with milk, beginning and ending with flour. Beat JUST long enough to blend! With a spatula, fold in chocolate.

5) Pour batter into pans and bake 25 minutes until center springs back when pressed with finger. Do Not Overbake. Cool in pans for 10 minutes. Loosen sides of cake from pans and turn onto cooling racks.

6) In medium bowl, mix heavy cream, sugar, cocoa, salt and Starbucks Via (instant coffee). Refrigerate frosting mixture for half an hour. Whip until stiff, the consistency of frosting.

7) Use a long, thin serrated blade and slice cooled cake layers in half creating four separate layers. Place one layer, cut side up on a plate and spread with mocha filling. Repeat twice. Top with last layer cut side down. With a metal spatula, frost top and sides of cake leaving vertical ridges on side of cake. If you have a pastry bag, you can pipe the edges of the cake to create ‘ruching’.

8) Dip washed and ‘dried’ strawberries in melted chocolate and cool on waxed paper. Once the chocolate has set, place fruit on the top of the cake. You can also dip almonds in chocolate and arrange those on the cake instead of fresh fruit. My nephew requested strawberries for his cake and even though I was hesitant, they were delicious! And beautiful!

If anyone actually makes this cake, please leave a comment. I'd love to hear from you! (even if you didn't like the cake but I'll wager a bet that you did!)

Hugs,

Birthdays, Fairy tales, and Family

2010-10-13T10:33:00.000-07:00

My nephew turned nineteen last week. Can you believe it? He and his mother have lived with me since he was five years old. That means it’s fair to say, “Mickey has two mommies.” Imagine two strong women joining households and you'll have a general sense of the challenges we face creating family. We’re aware of each other’s personal space yet just like marriage, we tread on one another’s toes before noticing they were barefoot and we were wearing boots.

This time, the problem-to-be-resolved was Mickey’s birthday cake. I assumed it was my responsibility to make the cake since my sister doesn’t bake. She buys. She assumed it was her responsibility to buy the cake because who cared if it was homemade or not? Once our assumptions were in the open, we discussed the taste of bought cakes, the limited availability, the banality of bought cakes, why homemade cake is better than bought cake, and chapter two in Cloud and Townsend’s pivotal book on Boundaries.

After dialoging about giving respect and dignity to bought cakes and bought cake buyers, we meandered down memory lane, recalling the special times we had as a family, when making the cake was more fulfilling than eating it. Most of the time, we couldn't remember what the cake looked like when it was finished. We only remembered the process and how we laughed and cried and got mad at each other and ran to the store for an emergency bag of powdered sugar to fill up the center of a sagging cake. After reminiscing about everything that happens in the family kitchen on a birthday, we finally made a decision. I would make the cake. Why?

1) I have the most experience (Seniority rules)

2) I laugh at my failures (less anxiety and stress)

3) I love working with people (so I can blame them, ha!)

4) Homemade cake is cheaper than bought cake (winning argument)

5) The meaning is in the process

For every birthday celebration since my children were born and that goes back thirty-plus years now, my cake-making skills have been put to the test. Whatever the kids wanted, their wishes were my command. They might not have an expensive gift in fancy paper but they had a fancy cake on the table.

The birthday cake was often held together with skewers and toothpicks, the worst side being hidden from the child basking in the glow of colorful candles dripping wax on icing. What's to worry about? Frosting marbled with wax never concerned me much. The kid blowing germs and cooties all over the icing was a bigger health risk than wax would ever be.

This year, my nephew wanted a chocolate cake with chocolate icing and chocolate-dipped strawberries arranged on top. He wanted fresh fat strawberries like the ones he says guys give girls on Valentine’s Day. The kinds of chocolate covered strawberries guys give girls when a guy needs to apologize for saying something stupid.

Kids are definitely more gourmet than they were a couple of decades ago. Back then, a request for strawberries meant sculpting sugary marzipan to ‘look’ like real fruit. (Which leads me to a clever idea. If you can’t get your kids to eat their peas and cauliflower, buy some marzipan. Then you can tell your narcissistic mother how much YOUR kids love eating YOUR homemade vegetables. They love fruit and vegetables soooooooo much in fact, they eat them on top of birthday cakes.)

I have made Barbie dolls in cake skirts, Teddy Bears sitting upright, plastic clowns lifting a second layer of cherry cake, and castles with entry doors made of chocolate bars. Whatever the child wanted, my job was to make their wish come true! I took a college course in cake decorating back in the 1970’s and who could have predicted Fancy Cakes would be as popular as they are today? I shoulda opened a cake bake shop but on second thought, my kids might have gone cakeless if this cliché is true: the baker’s kids have no cakes. What a sad story that would be if this cake baker's children had no cakes.

Once upon a time.......there was an old woman who made cakes for kings but never made even one lousy cupcake for her own children. One day, while scurrying to the bakeshop (her bakeshop was built in an old shoe a giant had left behind in his haste climbings beanstalks), she realized how foolish she had been. She ran back to her kitchen as fast as she could and grabbed her largest mixing bowl. The one with purple stripes painted on the outside and yellow daisies encircling the rim. She made a cake. Her finest cake with raisins and cinnamon and only the best of ingredients reserved for royalty. When it came out of the oven, she called to her children of which there were many, including tiny Tim and the Matchbook Girl; but nobody came. All the old women’s children had run away with the Gingerbread boy and were eaten up by a sneaky fox promising to carry them across the river to a franchised bakeshop in a building, not a shoe.

When I told this story to my sister, she offered to warm the oven and crack open the eggs. Just kidding! My sister didn't really offer to warm the oven or crack the eggs.

She ordered and bought the pizza though.

A great time was had by all,

CZBZ

None of us is as dumb as all of us

2010-10-05T10:38:00.000-07:00

Reference Post: Some days, all you can do is cry

“As Freud put it: 'The feelings of a group are always very simple and very exaggerated, so that a group knows neither doubt nor uncertainty.'" ~Fred Alford, Group Psychology and Political Theory

Meetings. Groups. Town halls. Family reunions. Chapels. Wherever people of like-mind gather together, the potential for evil is present. Group dynamics foster situations so powerful that unconscious forces compel us to behave in ways we would never do without feeling ‘safe’ within our group.

This post is not about deifying liberalism or demonizing conservatism. What this post is about is self-awareness protecting us from destructive (regressive) behaviors naturally arising from group allegiance. The past few years on message boards have reinforced for me the value of group participation when like-minded or like-experienced people become stronger through group affiliation. We come to know ourselves as individuals, connected to---and yet---separate from, the group.

Group participation can make us smarter by challenging our narcissism and increasing our awareness so we look outside ourselves beyond the narrow scope of self-preoccupation. Groups can also, as the above picture suggests, make us dumber: rigidify our narcissism; increase our defenses; narrow our information pool resulting in short-sighted and erroneous decisions. The more fragile our core self (immature narcissism), the more we view difference as a threat to the ‘self’, projecting demeaning attributes onto anyone with a different point of view. In a pathological definition, normal projection can escalate to ‘otherizing’, thus justifying inhumane treatment in the pretense of self-righteous morality.

Tell me what I want to believe

"Informative conformity often occurs in situations in which there is high uncertainty and ambiguity."

The more like-minded the group, the bigger threat we are to ourselves, so certain are we that our perceptions and beliefs are correct. When friends and family contradict our worldview, we retreat to the private safety of our oh-so-certain narcissism. When we only listen to talk shows corroborating our favorite illusions, when we only speak with people who validate our beliefs, when we homogenize ourselves in group certainty/superiority, we are vulnerable to self-deception. The truth is that the enemy is not out there, the enemy is within.

Group affiliation fosters an illusion of certainty if we isolate ourselves from conflict and break essential connections with others.

As Warren Poland writes, “…too often in the service of the self, we develop allegiances to our narrow views.” Diversity prevents polarization. Any group disrespecting difference through implicit or explicit ‘otherizing’, fertilizes the soil for destructive groupthink to take root and to flourish. A wise leader nurtures dissent as a beneficial means to healthier and better decision-making. A healthy leader encourages differing viewpoints, which curtail extremist and shortsightedness by minimizing self-righteous/narcissistic certainty.

The pathology of Otherizing

We define ourselves as a group by our similarity of thought, experiences, and beliefs. We differentiate ourselves from other groups in a process called ‘othering’. Othering is not pathological when members extend dignity and respect to those who have a different ‘voice’ from their own. But sometimes in our attempts to coalesce as a group, we lose ourselves in a rigid process of othering that includes projection of disowned qualities onto ‘others’.

The first video on my prior post illustrates the dangers of groupthink, polarizing fellow citizens into ‘us or them.’ Once an us or them polarity has rooted in our imagination, interaction is increasingly adversarial. There is no cooperation, no mutual understanding, nor sharing of opinions. People dig trenches for open warfare, ridiculing and even humiliating ‘the enemy’: enemy being defined as anyone with a different worldview. What is being threatened by this difference is one’s narcissism. The narcissistic belief that ‘we’ are right and ‘they’ are wrong; that ‘we’ are moral and ‘they’ are not; that ‘we’ are the answer and ‘they’ are the problem. Once someone has been pathologically otherized, we are no longer obligated to empathize, nor behave responsibly because ‘they’ do not merit our respect. The Other has become an enemy.

I’ve watched this polarity escalate over the years, especially as Americans become intolerably uncertain, fearful, anxious; our trust in traditional structures eroded by rapid change. We want to stop losing even more ground than we already have but recognize our limited power as an individual. We join a group aligning best with our beliefs and hope our contributions will make a positive difference. This like-mindedness with others is mutually beneficial. Commonality increases self-esteem, alleviates helplessness, hopelessness and despair. Group participation directs our energy and skills towards goals we believe will correct the errors of the past. However, we must be aware of our need for groups while remaining alert to unconscious defenses degrading prideful membership into hubris and disdain for others.

Loose Cannon or a 'planted' Land Mine?

“There are advantages to being slightly more extreme than the group average. It’s a way to stand out, to ensure others will see us as righteous group members.”

Like-mindedness may amplify animosity towards others (other=anyone threatening our identity). Members may be geared towards proving their loyalty to the group by scapegoating ‘the other’. In a twisted perversion of loyalty, aggressive/bullying behavior proves a member’s devotion to the group, an unhealthy form of image maintenance.

The interesting thing (as evidenced by the video clip) is that fellow bystanders were reluctant to counter the bully’s aggression. Social psychologists have observed and documented the Bystander Effect numerous times. People are reluctant to take action, even in life-threatening situations. The greater the number of people, the less likely an individual will intervene.

In this particular video however, were bystanders reluctant to intervene for fear of being ostracized? Would their intervention be viewed as betraying one of their own? Maybe it’s fair to say bystanders were reluctant to ‘rock the boat’ because they wanted to be seen as team players---even if they were uncomfortable with some of the team’s behavior. I am sure most Tea Partiers were uncomfortable when a team player humiliated a disabled man by throwing dollar bills in his face. The whole point of the dollar bill incident, at least in my view, was humiliation---a projection of the man-in-a-white-shirt's humiliation onto someone else now that his power and privilege in our society is melting faster than Alaskan glaciers! (Not that I can presuppose knowing what this man-in-a-white-shirt was feeling prior to acting like a bully on the playground though I’m certain we would not have gotten along, even in my six-year-old days).

When someone behaves aggressively, group members ought question precedents leading to behavior that is assumed, by the bully, to be acceptable even heroic! Unfortunately, what generally happens is the bully is viewed as a loose cannon, a freak incident, someone losing control in the excitement of the moment. There is no doubt in my mind that were a fellow liberal to throw dollar bills at Sarah Palin, he would be given the same benefit of the doubt conservatives gave the bully in the teapot. We are much more generous in our perceptions of fellow members of our own group. Thus, the situation escapes scrutiny as the group ignores precedents creating a volatile situation. They may even scapegoat the aggressive member as an anomaly. But you have to ask yourself the question: would this man have behaved the same way if he were by himself? Would he have behaved aggressively if he were in a diverse group tolerating opposing opinions? How much power did the situation have over the man-in-a-white-shirt? And who bears responsibility for his aggression?

“No one raindrop thinks it caused the flood"

Group leaders own responsibility for cultivating the environment, appealing to member’s emotions by stereotyping other people, thus creating pathological ‘otherizing’.

Group members bear responsibility for standing by and doing nothing. It was obvious in the video that some members were uncomfortable with man-in-a-white-shirt’s aggression though they did not confront the aggression, at least not in the widely circulated video.

We could examine the man with Parkinson’s Disease and ask why he felt compelled to attend the gathering? Did he hope people would empathize with him, broadening their view of social responsibility? I suppose that would be my interpretation of his motives. But then again, I am a bleeding heart or so my conservative friends and family suggest when needing my listening ear and compassionate support.

Each individual in the Teapot Incident bears responsibility. We are each responsible our behavior, no matter the situation, no matter the leader, no matter who gives the orders, who cheers us on, or who says nothing.

Situations of us-ness have the potential to make us wiser or regressively dumber. It's important to learn about the situational impact of a group on our individual reactions. It’s imperative to recognize Us-ness as a healthy connection while also protecting ourselves and others from the disconnecting power of otherizing.

Ever mindful of the pack,

CZBZ

Resources

Fred Alford, Group Psychology and Political Theory

Philip Zimbardo, The Lucifer Effect

Gale Warnings. Stormchild has written many blog posts about the dangers of groupthink. She was my mentor, encouraging further studies about the destructive and the creative power of 'groups'.

Some days, all you can do is cry

2010-09-07T11:56:00.001-07:00

"In shocking video taken by a Columbus Dispatch reporter Doral Chenowith, Tea Party protestors mock a seated counter-protestor with a sign indicating he has Parkinson's disease. They then proceed to hurl wadded up bills at him shouting, "I'll decide when to give you money!" " ~Link

Who is this man? A former nuclear engineer with a doctorate from Cornell.

All you can do some days, is cry...and pray for a universal mental healthcare plan.

Hugs,

CZBZ

Her Royal Highness is not your Best Friend

2010-08-16T11:37:00.000-07:00

Cleopatra by J.W. Waterhouse

A reader recently commented on this blog post: Gossip, Rumors and Smear Campaigns

She wrote: "Thank you for writing this post…I have been the victim of online gossip started about me behind my back by none other than my best friend of many years!! I was so shocked, but to be honest…It's like I was fighting a losing battle trying to get her to see sense. In the end after confronting her I got an apology which turned out to be false… making me out to be the bad guy as usual…

She often puts me down albeit in a sort of jokey way to make it look better than it is, she does this to all friends including her husband on a daily basis and nothing her husband does is ever right she is always moaning about how he does something it has to be her way or she has to be the one who knows better so you have to do what she says.

"We've been friends so long, she stuck around when I lost my family to cancer, others didn't stand by and I was on my own a lot of the time, I felt isolated and very vulnerable, but she was there to talk to...Now though, I know for my health that we should probably not speak, she is a toxic friend to have around, in fact---what friend is she to do that to someone? Not a friend obviously, yet I can't seem to just walk away.

"It was 5 weeks today since I spoke, and I went and sent her a text....it's not like I won't make other friends I know my trust will start to grow as I grow in confidence again. I think my family's passing has impacted upon my confidence in such a way as for me to think there's still something worth holding onto in an old relationship because it's an old relationship, despite how hurt I end up, sometimes I have actually felt I don't deserve a good friend, or I am so incompetent...etc. My self esteem is pretty low at the moment.

As i said in previous post self esteem is low, thank you for this article and this website as a whole I am starting to feel that I am not alone in this, and that I can loose these toxic friendships and go forward into better ones as I grow in strength. I also feel that I am now awake to these issues and can fully see the true colours of my friends. Now my rose tinted glasses are off!!!" ~Anonymous

To all my friends sporting rose-colored glasses, this post might explain why a friend cuts you down in front of others, talks behind your back, insults, diminishes your light, throws a bucket of water on your fire, sticks a knife in your back, slams home an insult, undermines your confidence, picks on you, jokes about things that aren’t funny, slights your character, and insists you’re best friends while treating you like an enemy!

Well, we may have rose-colored glasses on but we aren’t completely deluded. We’re just confused. We have a difficult time making sense of evidence contradicting our beliefs. In the case of someone we consider to be a best friend (or a lover, as the case may be), it doesn’t make sense to be insulted. Instead of putting all the pieces together and concluding this person is not our best friend, we question our perceptions and this, my friends, is how we stay entangled with a confusing, un-amusing, somewhere-on-the-continuum abusing narcissist.

I felt there might be something useful in my reply that would help other people recognize when a "best friend" is pizzing on your boots and telling you it’s raining. You can put the pieces together IF you understand the narcissist’s mentality. How he or she operates. How they use people’s most precious feelings against them.

I hope you are comfortable with me replying on a separate message, anonymous. Your situation is common and yes, I’ve been there too. Thank you for reading my blog and for writing to me. I appreciate each person who wades through my writings and finds something that’s useful!

Dear Anon,

It sounds like you feel obligated to remain friends with her because she was there to support you in a time of grief and loss. As callous as my comment may sound, narcissists feel superior to us when we are ‘low’. As long as they remain the strong one, the one we rely on when we’re suffering, they are feeding their sense of superiority.

We assume they are empathetic to our pain and for that we are grateful. However, when the tables turn and we are back on our feet, the narcissist will attempt to keep us in an inferior position---even if that means gossiping about us. Revealing our intimate secrets. Criticizing us. In a ridiculous way, asserting their superiority over a friend they need to be weaker than themselves.

You pulled yourself up by the bootstraps even if the narcissist was there to witness your recovery.

Remember this: The narcissist operates on a consistent drive to see themselves as superior to others. This includes being the person other people rely on for strength.

When a narcissistic friend listens to our troubles and supports us, we feel grateful---they feel grandiose. Then, when we are back on our feet, the narcissistic friend is ‘threatened’. Now he or she will react to our resiliency as if it were a threat to their superiority. We don’t need them the way we did. We can support ourselves and this threatens their grandiosity. Make sense?

If your so-called friend has shown you, through her actions, that she is willing to destroy you to serve her 'image', then take a hard look at your tender gratitude and question whether or not you are being haunted by obligation.

Narcissists ‘hook us’ into remaining humble and oh-so-grateful for their friendship. You can keep your appreciation to yourself. You don’t have to become her indentured servant simply because she was there when other people couldn't be.

Narcissists frequently come to the rescue because they are not overwhelmed by their emotions and empathy. Sometimes our really good friends are so impacted by our suffering that they withdraw--not because they do not care. But because they do. You hurt. They hurt. They feel helpless to alleviate your pain.

When our friends continue to suffer with us (because they have deep feelings and empathize with us), they may step back for awhile though they may regret not being able to support us the way we need them to. Their withdrawal opens a vacancy creating space for the non-empathic narcissist to step in like a hero and listen to us intently—not because they are suffering with us, of course; but because they are not impacted the way normal people are.

She helped you. That’s great. Narcissists aren’t complete assholes. What you have to pay attention to is how she treats you once you are back on your feet and don’t need her constant support. Her reaction to your resiliency tells the tale of the narcissistic do-gooder. Her royal highness. Get my metaphor here: HIGHness.

You might text her now and then because you appreciate what she did for you when you needed someone to listen. But please, have no illusions that her support was based on empathy and equality. And be careful with whatever you might say to her. Sounds to me like there is nothing she won't do to prove her superiority. Such as accusing you of using her; accusing you of being ungrateful; accusing you of being self-centered. As you know, this is how narcissists perceive other people because this is how they are themselves.

You will also find that by setting limits on your relationship, your self-esteem will increase. Maybe even dramatically. When we feel powerless to help ourselves or prevent being hurt by someone, our self-esteem lowers.

Setting healthy boundaries between yourself and someone who has proven she is not your friend, is Taking Exquisite Care of Your Self. Because YOU are worth it. Your feelings of incompetence will decrease when you trust your perceptions, your feelings, and your experiences and take appropriate action to protect yourself.

Hugs,
CZ

Knockout! Score one for Lucy!

2010-08-11T11:40:00.000-07:00

Do you have an Inner Boxer? The one who waits for an opportunity to take a swing? I hate boxing or any so-called sport reminding me of my inner Australopithecus afarensis. I’d rather think of my forbearer as an apple-biting, passive-aggressive woman who was willing to take the fall for her man. Her I can relate to. Lucy, my Australopithecus afraensis ancestor, rarely comes to mind. As a twenty-first century woman, being an entrée for a big cat’s dinner is not even on my top ten Fear list. I have a cat. He’s little. He has sharp teeth though he’s no threat to anyone other than my furniture. I smile at him. "See my teeth, kitty? Know your place! How about another of those ferocious growls? OOOOOOOOO.... I am so scared!"

Now that humans are on the top of the food chain and we breed cats for our amusement, we’ve become complacent. The days of fighting for survival are behind us. We live in a civil society with rules and restrictions and laws protecting us from one another. Only on the worst of my days do I see predators in the grocery aisles and even then, they are more interested in buying T-bone steaks than roasting me over their barbecue.

Now though, when human-eating tigers are a rarity and we’re not hyper-vigilent to external threats, we can bring to consciousness a very real and dangerous internal threat: The internal boxer delivering a punch to the real Palooka, the tenth rate good-hearted boxer who is no match for bare knuckled fighting since she sticks by rules and worries more about hurting Lucy than Lucy hurt her.

I get lulled into thinking I don't need to be on guard for sucker punches---slammed home by my own two fists. Then I wake up dazed, lying on the mattress, staring at the ceiling watching cobwebs grow, wondering how long I’ve been unconscious and why my face hurts so bad. I get up slowly, walk to the mirror and see not one, but two black eyes plus a few greenish bruises to my ego.

“Did I just sock myself in the eye?”

“Well, yes, you did, CZ! How’s that working for you?”

“I never saw it coming! That’s not fair!”

A modern American woman with pretenses of pacifism is no match for the low blow, pitty-pat punching Australopithecus who doesn’t obey protocol and doesn’t warn her opponent she’s preparing to take a swing. Bare-fisted and merciless, Lucy is a brawler. You’d best not ignore her presence or you’ll be down for the count in no time. Trust me. I know a lot about my inner boxer, the one who hits without any gloves on.

Still, I believe that overtime a Southpaw punch to Lucy’s glass jaw will teach her a lesson about picking on Nice Ladies. Imagine her picking on me, a woman who might kiss the canvas a time or two but always gets back up. No Matter What.

My boxing match with myself expands the meaning of Infighting.

This summer has been a knockout, memorial ten-count, down-and-out, referee waving hands in the air “she’s done!” summer. At least my internal audience has been entertained. A few of my more mercenary selves placed bets on Lucy. I’m putting my money on the Nice Lady. The one who took a fall, got back up and kept going. Over. And Over. And Over.

I was feeling pretty good about myself and what I’ve been able to accomplish, even when the chips were down and I could have easily given up. My nephew, the kid with autistic problems, is showing signs of reaching out towards me as his caregiver. We got him through high school---no small feat considering the help he needed. That was Score One for me, the nice lady helping with homework and talking to teachers.

My home and garden were finally looking like someone lived here who cared. Score Two for me, the woman who weeds and fertilizes and sews her own draperies.

My sister was pulling herself out of another bipolar mood swing. Score Three for me for not yanking her hair out by the roots but listening compassionately and then stepping in when she stepped out.

The WoN message board was going well with new people and long timers talking and helping each other cope with a narcissistic relationships and my blog was being updated consistently. Score Four and a half, maybe.

Score Five when my son called, the guy who might be a tad Aspergers himself, and tells me how much he loves me ‘cuz he doesn’t believe he would be a game programmer if his mother had not believed in him when he didn’t.

Life was going well and I was feeling pretty good about myself. Then Lucy sneaked into the ring.

“Your antiques are covered in dust! They lasted three hundred years and now YOU are killing them!”

“You haven’t written on your blog for a month! How irresponsible can you possibly be?”

“Your website is taking too long. Why can't you get it together? Are you stupid”

“You’re fat.”

That last hit-below-the-belt hurt, which really wasn't an easy target to miss, shall all of my selves agree on that point?

“We do! We do!”

Anytime I’m feeling efficacious, Lucy delivers a punch. She sees her chance to diminish my accomplishments by pointing out what I have not done well, or maybe haven’t done period.

I know some of you reading this essay will understand if you grew up with adult expectations placed on your little tiny shoulders. If you tried to please people by doing things that were age-inappropriate and yet, you were innately skilled, interested, or talented in those areas to some degree, you may have achieved some measure of success. Still, it wasn’t good enough because as swell as a kid might be, she can’t do an adult’s job simply because she isn’t one.

This high level of expectation has haunted me, triggering fears of incompetence because of course, I was. So anytime I feel good about ‘me’, Lucy steps in the ring for another round of “Hit yourself in the face. You suck.”

I could write out the internal dialog but most of you know it by heart. It starts with the thought that you are doing swell. You feel good about YOU. You believe you are making progress. You admit you are doing a t-e-r-r-i-f-i-c job considering the load you’re willing to bear. You notice positive improvement in your environment and your relationships and you notice the impact you’re having is rewarding, meaningful and satisfying. You start feeling safe because as far as you can see, you are.

If you aren’t paying attention to your internal dialog, you won’t notice when Lucy is preparing to swing until she’s swung. I often fail to notice self-deprecating thoughts until two black eyes are doing stare time. I don’t mean stair time as in exercising or anything productive that would counter Lucy’s complaint about the size of my arse. I'm describing Stare Time as: a non-blinking session with the bedroom ceiling.

The trick, I am thinking today, is to know the boxing ring exists. To acknowledge Lucy’s presence and insist that formidable woman lace up her padded gloves. There are rules, even for internal boxing matches and one rule she must abide by is: touching gloves with me, like good sports do, before taking the first swing.

I’m not kicking Lucy’s skinny arse to the curb though because she has squatter's rights on the territory, having moved in when I was six. I am telling her however, that she must abide by the rules and absolutely, no more sneaky, low-life, underhanded, undercutting, poor sport, sucker punches allowed.

I believe we'll become duly respectful friends if Lucy can 'take a punch' as well as she can give one.

Me, myself, and eye,

CZBZ

The Boiling Frog

2010-07-16T17:04:00.000-07:00

"Often we ask ourselves, how in the world did I get here? How did things get so bad? How did I not notice or react sooner? This story is helpful when I ask myself these questions because I realize that it happened so gradually, over such a long period of time - I simply did not react to the changes. That frog started off happily in the pot - loving life. He did not know about the burner underneath, he did not know that the heat was being turned up higher and higher, the changes were not felt and were gradual. When the frog realized his situation, it was very difficult to react or respond. It is a great analogy for my experience with abuse." ~WoN Forum Member

The Boiling Frog

Here's an interesting story that has been told several thousands of times and is still intriguing. It's based on a scientific experiment and is therefore repeatable.

First. A frog is put into a pot of water. The water happens to be boiling. The frog jumps out of the water immediately. If the water level is low, the frog still jumps as vehemently as he possibly could and gets out of the pot.

Second. The same frog is put into a pot of water. This time the water is pleasant. The frog is lying happily and enjoying his time. The water in the pot is slowly heated. At points, the frog does get upset but doesn't do much. The temperature keeps rising. There comes a time when the water is boiling, and it's too late for the frog to jump out since he can almost not do anything in water as hot as that. The frog is boiled. Alive.

Now, what really does that tell us? It has one of the most profound lesson related to change. That change is not noticed when it occurs over a relatively long timeframe, although the same change is taken notice of if the timeframe is shorter, is one of the most familiar mockery of life. And this story describes it in the most effective manner. We are all frogs, waiting to be boiled in water of some kind of the other - be it health, relationships, technical competency, or plain simple habits.

Think about one significant change in your life. Something that has changed your life profoundly. Now, try to recall a point when that change started, how long did it last, and when it was concluded. Most people would answer that the change did not start intentionally - or even if it did, they cannot point out the first moment "after the change". Most significant changes happen over a long or relatively long period of time. And finally, there are seldom examples of being able to point out a specific moment in lift when the change was concluded. To summarize this, the change is constant.

Now, what's new here? We have been hearing/reading/and even writing this "change is constant" thing all of our life! The point here is not to prove that the change is constant, it is rather to prove that the change is not noticed constantly. Let's see some examples.

Try to think of someone around you - or yourself if applicable - who from being a normal, healthy person gradually transformed into being overweight. When did this start? When was it noticed? Did all that transformation happen in a day or a week or even a month? Why was it not noticed all that while?

Try to think of a neighborhood that changed its identity - for better or worse. When did it start? You could recall now perhaps. But did you notice it at that time?

Try to think of an organization doing well and later going bankrupt. When did the descent start? How long did it take to sink?

And there are several more. The point is not when a particular change starts. The point is when the change is gradual it is often ignored or goes unnoticed. The change then accelerates and gets traction. Soon many more things around start changing. The rate at which things change is exponential, i.e. all the changes taken place so far provides further support and push to the new changes. Very soon complete transformation is noticed. Yes, noticed. That is when it is noticed. It is too sad that everything is beyond repair at this point.

The key to avoid it is to keep a constant watch on everything that is changing. Driving habits, eating habits, sleeping patterns, relationships and friendships, coding habits. Everything. One useful thing that could be done is listening to an external observer, like a close friend. The friend knows you, and can see the change externally and therefore notices it. It may seem paradoxical to read at first since just in the previous paragraph, I said change is hard to notice when they are gradual. However, when seen externally, change is noticed earlier than internally.

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