Therapy too expensive? Wait 'til you have a Midlife Crisis!

(I've no idea where this image was originally published. It's been sitting in my Clip Art file just waiting to be reposted and voila, today is the day.)

If you think therapy is too expensive when you’re younger, wait till you see what you do at midlife! Now THAT'S expensive. Untreated narcissism will cost you everything you worked for, saved for, and dreamed about because narcissism turns life upside-down at midlife. You will find yourself doing things you never could have imagined. Hurting people you may never forgive yourself for hurting. Tearing down walls that took years to build and hawking your principles and values for a blissful trip to LaLaLaNd. You will take thirty years of labor and spend it on a temporary escape from reality. Such a shame. Such a waste. Such a terrible legacy to leave your kids. Such a cruel thing to do to partners’ trust, not to mention demeaning their support through years of financial deprivation, believing retirement would be a sacred time to get to know one another as partners, not as two oxen yoked to the responsibility of providing for a family.

The misery and pain of ending a relationship that might have been salvaged with therapy, is devastating to everyone---including the person who resisted therapy because their hubris told them they could resolve their problems themselves. If there’s anything I’ve learned from 12-step, it’s this: Your head is a dangerous neighborhood to visit by yourself. You cannot fix the problems your head ‘thought’ you into creating in the first place.

It reminds me of an old joke about the truck driver who lost a ton of money after a year of making shipments and deliveries. He thought to himself, “Something has to change since one truck has proven to be unprofitable. Next year I’ll get two trucks.”

This is how it is with a narcissist who tries to fix his problems by meditating even more. Or reading self-help books incessantly. Or sitting alone, next to a stream and contemplating life, granting authority to his or her thoughts as the discerning filter to truth. If your thoughts are ‘distorted’ by paranoia, anxiety, distrust, fear and even self-loathing, the answers you’ll come up with will reflect your imbalanced perceptions of reality. And you won’t know it. Because your answers will appear to be the truth, undisputed as they remain by your unwillingness to consider viable refutation, or other people’s contradictory perceptions.

Even the very people, those who have proven trustworthy in the narcissist’s life, become adversaries when measurable facts contradict the narcissist’s 'truth'.

The first time my own mental health pushed me into therapy was back in 1989 when the Loma Prieta earthquake shook the ground of my being. Terrifying it was, as though my security in the world had been a preposterous illusion. I found myself acting in ways that were ego-dystonic (to use a psyche term meaning: my actions did not align with my values; I was uncomfortable with my behavior). When I woke up thinking about how much I hated my husband and my father and even my mom and subsequently taking my anger out on them and my children, I grabbed the telephone and called my HMO. I needed help and I knew it. Not that I wanted to admit my head was a bad neighborhood or anything of the sort because who appreciates knowing they can’t trust the way they’re thinking? Out of love for other people, out of concern for my impact on other people, out of admission that I was projecting blame on other people when “I” was the one having contemptible thoughts, I took advantage of the Loma Prieta earthquake to find out what was going on inside myself to cause such a ruckus in my life.

When you are hurting the people you love, feeling terrible about yourself, consider it a window of opportunity to understand your self and align feelings, thoughts, and behaviors with the person you believe yourself to be. If you’re not okay with busting other people’s chops because YOUR feet are shaking in your boots, consider yourself ‘normal’. It’s the people who are comfortable with contempt, disdain and aggression that will likely not see a problem blaming other people for making them ‘feel’ the way they do. The people who justify anti-social behavior by blaming other people are the ones who really need therapy but you see, they won’t take responsibility for themselves so they don’t go. It’s everyone else who’s the problem, not themselves. Psychologists call that being ego-syntonic. They are comfortable being assholes.

Now whether we put a co-dependent label on the importance I place on family and community, let’s just say my advice to ‘anonymous’ came from personal experience. The impetus to seeking therapy was not to serve myself (though in the end, that IS what happened); it was concern for my impact on people I loved---the people who did not deserve to be mistreated simply because my anxiety needed a reason to exist (or a place to go). My anxiety was my problem and whether my kids and my husband were acting like children or not, my anxiety about their behavior was my problem. So I took my problem to an objective psychologist to help me cope with it, digging all the way to China to find the root of my anxiety. And as expected, my parents sucked wind. Which was a huge wake-up call because I’m a mother and sucking wind is ego-dystonic. Once again, concern for my impact on my children kept me in therapy for a couple of years. See how it works? I did it for others but ended up benefiting myself.


When my son was having behavioral problems in France (show me an eight-year-old who wouldn’t), I took him to French psychologists while we lived overseas. To this day, he loves Madame Argeles for her knowledge, compassion and interest in helping him cope in a school that did not speak english. When my daughter was depressed as a teenager, I took her to a psychologist, too. Not that she kept going because in our household, any mama who paid attention to a kid in trouble, was an overly-concerned mama. A mama who, hummm…what was the pejorative label? O yes. An Overly Protective Mother. Back in the day, that was akin to being called "Unfit".

As long as Mom and Dad split on the efficacy of therapeutic intervention, a kid in trouble will take the easy way out and dismiss therapy as necessary because therapy hurts. It’s not like going to Lalaland. It's not fun. My daughter rues the day she left therapy to figure things out on her own and has since spent years recovering from the damage she did to her life in the pretense of not needing therapy. Pleasing her father by ignoring Mom’s advice, you see.

So when I write to someone like Anonymous, my perspective has a long-view, a reason to HOPE therapy can intervene before even ‘one’ untreated narcissist destroys people’s lives. Can narcissists be cured? Who knows? And besides, who knows if someone displaying narcissistic traits is actually NPD? Not even your local therapist knows for sure.

In my family, predisposition towards narcissistic behavior is common enough and treating narcissistic behavior has proven to have valuable results. If narcissism is nipped in the bud, that is. If it isn’t, if narcissistic traits flourish unabated, they rigidify over time, making it potentially impossible to change a narcissistic personality at midlife. Because our society has almost normalized narcissistic behavior, I am concerned people will dismiss the potential of narcissism to destroy their lives when they age. Unhealthy narcissism must be confronted, struggled with, challenged, viewed as destructive to not only the self, but others, too.

The Midlife Crisis may be the reification of unchallenged narcissism that could have been treated had it been taken seriously, not rationalized or dismissed as self-conceit or arrogance. Narcissistic traits are warning signs of that which is yet to manifest: complete and total isolation from other people. Who knows if treatment will cure narcissistic traits or prevent traits from becoming a narcissistic pathology at midlife? Does it matter? Maybe not to the person with the capacity to escape reality when life gets tough; but it certainly matters to those who are unwilling to accompany them to LaLaLaNd.

If you have narcissistic traits causing relational problems at home, at work, in your neighborhood, or your significant relationship, remember this: You cannot think your way out of problems your head got you into in the first place. Asking for help is an exercise in humility…a surrender of hubris. Asking for help drives a wedge in the concretization of destructive narcissism.

Even if you can’t solve the N-problem, manage it. Today. Like Now. Like don’t wait a moment longer.

Hugs,

CZ

Resources

Elsa Ronningstam, author of Understanding the Narcissistic Personality tells us there are two signs narcissism may not be ameliorated, even with treatment:
1) The inability to sustain long-term commitments; 2) The inability to tolerate criticism or disagreement