Phoenixxx said:
Nomad
you bring up some good points. I have thought about it for the last 3 years, I've talked about it ad nauseum in therapy. I've read, questioned myself endlessly and the only answers I come up with are that I expected my exN/S to be like any other normal person, and while I loved, I had hope. It took a long time for that hope to die.
That is a problem of our education system which is part of the pathological system that perpetuates pathology. We are born into a system that is glorifies democracy and somehow, pathologicals have twisted democracy to use it as their ideological weapon. Democracy now means that "all men are created equal" in the sense that everyone is born the same and that is just not true. Indeed, everyone should have the same rights to "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" under the law, but everyone is NOT born the same! There are individuals who are born pathological and they have used this idea to set things up so that they can pathologize other people. It is encoded in our religion: everyone has a soul and can be "saved." Everyone is born equal, but the "sin of Adam and Eve" is a blemish and people must be saved either by being sanctified by the covenant of Judaism (and following the laws it prescribes) or by believing in Jesus, which is the new law prescribed in the New Covenant.
Phoenixxx said:
I suspect that last line resonates with other survivors.
I came into this world completely naive about narcissists and psychopaths except for those serial murderers I watched on TV. The garden path variety, the kind that use and abuse their lovers was never a part of my world that I could recognize.
Of course we can't recognize something that we are not allowed to recognize because we have been inducted into the pathological system and have been pathologized to believe some things are normal which are NOT normal.
Phoenixxx said:
In that way, websites like this one are useful, its too bad this kind of knowledge is not made part of highschool sex ed classes, or sociology courses for teens.
Its the kind of knowledge one only gets through experience.
But, like you said, it SHOULD be a part of our educational plan for children, to teach them about pathology in human society. But that is not what the pathological system wants...
We are also conditioned out of calling a spade a spade by paramoralistic cliches like "If you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all." "Least said, soonest mended." "The truth stands up for itself." "If your friends believe lies about you, they weren't your friends to begin with." ... not to mention a whole culture that suggests that saying anything about anybody else at all is "gossip" and gossip, as we all know, is evil and a tendency of evil women, like Eve...
Well, let me tell you: sharing information about our relationships, about human beings, about our experiences, and even some speculation about same is NOT gossip! It is an immunological precaution! People are so scared to say stuff because it does not seem democratic to label - it suggests that we are judging or censuring. Part of the problem is that "gossip," i.e. saying things that are NOT true about someone else in secret IS exactly what pathologicals do to destroy their targets. That is, the injunctions to NOT talk about others only works on people with conscience who have taken these precepts to heart (even if they are wrong when one considers truth!) It's like being sworn to tell the truth in court: the oath works on a person of conscience, it means nothing to the person with no conscience.
So, as a consequence of this paramoralistic training we receive, we don't talk about the most important things in our lives because we are afraid to talk!!!
But there is more to this than just our conditioning to not talk to each other as France's premier Victimology Expert, Marie-France Hirigoyen writes:
Perverse abusiveness fascinates, seduces, and terrifies. We sometimes envy abusive individuals because we imagine them to be endowed with a superior strength that will always make them winners. They do, in fact, know how to naturally manipulate, and this appears to give them the upper hand, whether in business or in politics. Fear makes us instinctively gravitate toward them rather than away from them: survival of the fittest.
The most admired individuals are those who enjoy themselves the most and suffer the least. In any case, we don't take their victims, who seem weak and dense, seriously, and under the guise of respecting another's freedom, we become blind to destructive situations.
In fact, this "tolerance" prevents us from interfering in the actions and opinions of others, even when these actions and opinions are out of line or morally reprehensible.
We also weirdly indulge the lies and "spin" of those in power. The end justifies the means.
To what degree is this acceptable? Don't we, out of indifference, risk becoming accomplices in this process by losing our principles and sense of limits? Real tolerance means examining and weighing values.
This type of aggression, however, lays traps in the psychic domain of another person and is allowed to develop because of tolerance within our current socio-cultural context. Our era refuses to establish absolute standards of behavior. We automatically set limits on abusive behaviors when we LABEL them as such; but in our society, labeling is likened to intent to censure. We have abandoned the moral constraints that once constituted a code of civility which allowed us to say "That just isn't done!" We only become indignant when facts are made public, worked over and magnified by the media. [...]
Even psychiatrists hesitate to use the term "abuse"'; when they do, it's to express either their powerlessness to intervene or their fascination with the abuser's methods. [...]
[Psychopathy] arises from dispassionate rationality combined with an incapacity to respect others as human beings. Some [psychopaths] commit crimes for which they are judged, but most use charm and their adaptive powers to clear themselves a path in society, leaving behind a trail of wounded souls and devastated lives. ... We have all been fooled by abusive human beings who passed themselves off as victims. They fulfilled our expectations in order the better to seduce us. ...
We subsequently feel betrayed and humiliated when, in their search for power, they show their true colors. This explains the reluctance of some psychiatrists to expose them. Psychiatrists say to each other, "Watch out, he's a [psychopath]", the implication being "This could be dangerous," and also, "There's nothing that can be done." We then give up on helping the victim.
Designating [psychopathy] is certainly a serious matter... whether the subject is serial killing or perverse abusiveness, the matter remains one of predatory behavior: an act consisting in the appropriation of another person's life.
The word "perverse" shocks and unsettles. It corresponds to a value judgment, and psychoanalysts refuse to pronounce value judgments. Is that sufficient reason to accept what goes on? A more serious omission lies in not labeling abuse, because the victim then remains defenseless...
Victims are often not heard when they seek help. Instead, analysts advise them to assess their conscious or unconscious responsibility for the attack upon them. ... Emotional abusers directly endanger their victims; indirectly, they lead those around them to lose sight of their moral guideposts and to believe that freewheeling behaviors at the expense of others are the norm. [Dr. Marie-France Hirigoyen, Stalking the Soul]
Phoenixxx said:
I had parents who stayed together till death did them part, and I witnessed daily arguments that were respectful and almost always rooted in my mother demanding her equality in a marriage to a man who wanted things to be traditional and like the "old country". That is the ONLY thing I can think of that set me up to stay with someone who treated me badly. My dad loved my mother till the end, and I suspect respected her because she refused to be "lesser than". It provided her with a quality of life she needed before Womens Lib took a foothold.
That was my primary female role model. It worked for them.
Did you ever watch the movie "One True Thing" with Meryl Streep about the woman who dies from cancer? The end of the movie really drove me up the wall because, at the end, after learning what a narcissist her father was (and we may even rightly assume that the mother died of cancer because of his narcissistic draining and treatment of her) the daughter makes the decision to go on supporting the narcissism.
Psychologist Andrew Lobaczewski once told me that he could quite easily figure out how a victim had been pathologized in childhood by what kinds of abusive relationships they had as adults.
Now, here I want to be very clear: this is not "blaming the victim" because, very often, the pathologizing consists mainly of creating and maintaining a state of ignorance about pathology - about what is or is not pathological! It can also consist in making behavior that is not normal appear to be normal and acceptable. So, how is it that seemingly normal, loving families produce children who are so ignorant, aside from the influences of culture? Stephanie and Robert Pressman write in "The Narcissistic Family":
Links between the experiences of childhood and their sometimes permanent effect on adult behavior have long fascinated observers of human behavior. Of particular interest has been the impact of one's family of origin on personal development. In the last decade, the concept of the "adult child of alcoholism" (ACOA) has helped us to understnd the nearly predictable effects of being raised in an alcoholic, family system.
As therapists, many of us have worked for years with individuals suffering from what appeared to be immutable low self-esteem, inability to sustain intimacy, and/or blocked paths to self-understanding. The concept of the ACOA opened a new door to the understanding of such problems. Therapist/authors such as Woititz, Black, Gil, and Bradshaw (among others) have drawn vivid images of how children's personalities are molded in a special way by alcoholic families.1 The literature produced on this topic has cleared a much wider path of recovery for children of alcoholic parents. It has also increased the sensitivity of therapists to the impact of alcoholic rearing on personality development. At one time, therapists seldom asked directly about the drinking patterns of the patient's parents; now such questions are routinely explored in initial assessment interviews.
Of late, a new body of literature has been created: books written by abuse survivors both to focus attention on the devastation caused by physical and sexual abuse and to give validation and guidance to other survivors, whether male or female. {...}
Common Links
In our work at the Rhode Island Psychological Center, along with the benefits of working with the ACOA and abuse models came a puzzle. What about individuals who had the traits of an ACOA but whose parents did not drink, or rape, or beat?
True, there was dysfunction in their families, but the common thread was elusive. Among adult children of dysfunctional (but nonalcoholic and nonabusive) families, we found a body of personality traits previously identified with the ACOA model. These included chronic depression, indecisiveness, and lack of self-confidence.
Within this population we found common behavioral traits as well: a chronic need to please; an inability to identify feelings, wants, and needs; and a need for constant validation.
This group of patients felt that the bad things that happened to them were well deserved, while the good things that happened were probably mistakes or accidents. They had difficulty being assertive, privately feeling a pervasive sense of rage that they feared might surface. They felt like paper tigers-often very angry, but easily beaten down. Their interpersonal relationships were characterized by distrust and suspicion (bordering on paranoia), interspersed with often disastrous episodes of total and injudicious trusting and self-disclosure. They were chronically dissatisfied, but were fearful of being perceived as whiners or complainers if they expressed their true feelings. Many could hold their anger in for extremely long periods of time, then become explosive over relatively insignificant matters. They had a sense of emptiness and dissatisfaction with their achievements; this was found even among individuals who externally may have been viewed as very successful. The list of people included professionals who were obsessively involved in their enterprises, but were unable to achieve at a level at which they found satisfactign. In relationships, these individuals frequently found themselves in repeated dead-end situations.
Because these symptoms were so well defined in the popular literature about adult children of alcoholism, we asked some individuals from nonalcoholic dysfunctional families to read such books as Adult Children of Alcoholics by Janet Woititz and Outgrowing the Pain by Eliana Gil.3 The clients returned, identifying somewhat with the syndrome, but not at all with the examples of drunk or brutal parents. Some things about the model rang true-denial of feelings, a sense of emptiness, recurrent ineffective patterns of personal inter¬action-but not enough to be very helpful.
We did two things to deal with the discrepancies between the examples of "causes" of ACOA-abuse personality traits and the actual experiences. of our clients. First, when reading the self-help literature, we asked clients of nonalcoholic/ nonabusive families to substitute the word dysfunctional for alcoholic or abusive. Second, we assured those clients whose childhood memories were still vague that the books we recommended would be helpful, even if their personal experiences did not seem fully to fit the descriptions given. {...}
The same question, however, kept returning: what really goes on in these families that causes those common psychological problems we used to label as ACOA traits? The principle clue was that in the absence of alcohol abuse, other forms of dysfunctional parenting (such as incest, physical abuse, emotional neglect and physical absence) seemed to produce the same symptoms.
As we began to track common traits shared by the parent systems of the survivors, we identified a pattern of interaction that we labeled the narcissistic family. Regardless of the presence or absence of identifiable abuse, we found one pervasive trait present in all of these families: the needs of the parent system took precedence over the needs of the children.
We have found that in the narcissistic family, the needs of the chil¬dren are not only secondary to those of the parent(s), but are often seriously problematic for the latter. If one is to track the narcissistic family on any of the well-known developmental scales (such as Maslow's or Erikson's), one sees that the most fundamental needs of the child, those of trust and safety, are not met.4 Furthermore, the responsibility of needs fulfillment shifts from the parent to the child.
In this family situation, the child must be reactive to the needs of the parent, rather than the converse. In fact, the narcissistic family is con¬sumed with dealing with the emotional needs of the parent system.
In the narcissistic family, children are recruited in the process of satisfying the parents' needs. {...} The spouse of the troubled parent ,,puts energy into sustaining the status quo and mollifying his or her partner, to the detriment of the children. {...}
Over time, these children learn that their feelings are of little or negative value. They begin to detach from their feelings, to lose touch with them. Often this denial of feelings is functional to the child, as to express them only adds fuel to the fire. Instead of under¬standing, recognizing, and validating their own needs, these children develop an exaggerated sense of their impact on the needs of their parent(s). Indeed, they become the reflection of their parents' emotional need-s. The needs of the parent become a moving target on which they struggle to focus. Because they feel responsible for correcting the situation without having the requisite power and control to do so, the children develop a sense of failure. Moreover, they fail to learn how to validate their own feelings and meet their own needs. In time, the children undergo a semipermanent numbing of feelings. As adults, these individuals may not know what they feel, except for varying degrees of despair, frustration, and dissatisfaction.
This is the kind of person that often becomes a primary target for a pathological. They have developed a high need to please others, they seek out relationships with individuals that remind them of the dynamic of their childhood. Perhaps in some unconscious place, they feel that if they can get the parent to meet their needs as he/she did not when they were children, it will mean, finally, that they are validated and accepted. So, they seek out relationships with someone like the parent feeling that if they can "fix" that person, get that person to love them, then they can "fix" mommy or daddy or fix what was wrong in their relationship with mommy or daddy.
Phoenixxx said:
Theres no working that with a narcissist/sociopath/psychopath because winning his respect was never possible. But I DIDNT KNOW THAT until all hope was gone.
Exactly so. You didn't know that. And that is what needs to be examined long and carefully.
Phoenixxx said:
I was waiting for my pride, assertiveness and fortitude to reap the same benefits for me, as they had for my mother.
Instead what I got was a slow spiritual death.
So, you were trying to fix the guy the way your mother "fixed" your father, right? Did she? I do think you might like to read "The Narcissistic Family". It's not about narcissists, it's about a family
dynamic that occurs in most normal families...
Phoenixxx said:
I agreed to it, I agreed to stay despite feeling there was something terribly wrong, especially when I realized finally that he was profoundly lacking in empathy. So really, in the end, the staying part I have no one to blame but myself...because of my ignorance...and my hope.
Again, there's that ignorance factor. And while it is helpful to learn about pathological individuals, it is even more helpful to learn about ourselves and what makes us ignorant and keeps us ignorant...
We are not only NOT taught about pathological behavior, we are induced to believe that pathological behavior is normal when we witness it taking place in our families.
