I was never so tall as on my father's shoulders
Was taken out to dinner by a dear writer-friend for her birthday. She is looking so much healthier, which is good to report. She reminisced about being carried by his father on his shoulders until she got too big, "I was never so tall as on my father's shoulders".
I had a minor revelation while we were conversing. The birthday girl was talking and I did what I normally do, and dislike doing, which is my eyes went to people coming in the restaurant (that is, any movement). I realised I do it out of a deep wariness. Having great respect for her perceptiveness about people--legal aid solicitor who writes very successful crime novels, funny that--I explained my realisation. I started off with "I had an abusive upbringing" and then semi-apologised for putting it like that (it being such a modern cliche). She was very firm in telling me that, yes, I was an abused child and that I was hyper-vigilant as a result, needing to assess any movement by people around me for possible threat.
It was a relatively mild form of abuse--being completely starved of any physical affection or praise--but abuse it was. A seriously unbalanced upbringing starved of a basic requirement for healthy emotional and psychological growth.
A comment by an author of an excellent book (a book the birthdaygirl had lent me) on adolescents who kill their parents is relevant:
Abuse and neglect are not always obvious to their victims. When abuse and neglect are discussed in university classes, some students become aware for the first time that they were abused or neglected as children (p.54).
In my case it was reading a post by a psychblogger which led to the realisation. If something is your normality, you can lack any place to stand from which to judge it.
An older and wiser friend once commented that I have a pattern of putting up with what no one else would put up with and then exploding. It comes from the "split ego" that the psychblogger talks about in the post linked to above. Part of you--the part that "managed" the interaction with my parents--puts on the agreeable surface, while part of you--the inner you--is hiding away the pain. When the latter gets too intense, some sort of eruption occurs: all the worse since it was so long repressed. Learning to not be "merely agreeable", but asserting myself as appropriate, has become increasingly easier since I became aware of these issues.
But it meant that, when I was still very unaware of such matters, I was very vulnerable to a deceptive manipulator-- mememegirl--and a pretty narcissicist-- prettymeboy. All the worst when they acted as a tag team. When mememegirl was doing her "you are my Newest and Bestest Friend" thing with me, I ended up opening up with her far more than I had with anyone else. I discussed things with her that I have never talked about with anyone else since in any real depth. That I was opening up all my vulnerabilities for her to use and manipulate never occurred to me. Particularly as I supported her relationship with prettymeboy. But turning me into a "problem" that she could be so sympathetic to prettymeboy about, and which gave her a way of strengthening her hold on him, was the strategy she chose--and I had told her which buttons to push and how.
Which makes the fact that mememegirl has once again become active in a certain society a matter of deep frustration for me. It is not merely that all the issues which led to my emotional breakdown and the destruction of my previous career resurface; it is that I have to suppress any expression of my deep hurt and rage. So it is easier simply not to play anymore, which does mean that she has taken something else from me--not helpful.
It seems appropriate to invoke Poe's famous poem, but hopefully knowledgeable rage is not quite the same as descending into madness. Rage is certainly preferable to the depression (aka anger-without-enthusiasm) which was the operating alternative.
A friend once commented that "I like [prettymeboy] but not when he's with [mememegirl]". I expected prettymeboy to act decently, mememegirl encouraged his worst instincts; which made her much more convenient than me at lots of levels, and a narcissist can always be expected to go with what is convenient. Indeed, their key characteristic is that their own convenience is their reality principle. I suspect that encouraging prettymeboy's narcissism probably bit mememegirl in the end, but that is little consolation. (Prettymeboy has a record of hurting everyone who gets close to him: which adds almost nothing to the statement that he is a narcissist.)
Somewhat more consolation is that I did acquire an understanding of narcissism: when I post on it, people comment (both on the posts and privately) how helpful and revelatory they find what I write. It is knowledge bought at great personal cost, but that is hardly unusual in dealing with a narcissist.
The birthday girl is close to her mother and misses her father, who died a couple of years ago. She puts down her "disgusting self-confidence" to the absolute confidence in being loved her upbringing gave her.
I don't miss either of my parents. Sad at lots of levels: not least because they were good people. Even sadder, that merely suggesting that my upbringing had problems was enough to alienate me from Mum's two sisters (one of whom was my Godmother), who had been my favourite aunts. Not from my brother, who has been nothing but supportive. But he was there too: his first comment on a memoir I circulated privately was "I agree with every word". But is a very common feature of children of abuse that adults do not believe them: if it can happen to a man in his 40s, how much more can an adolescent or child be discounted?
Possibly the right sort of relationship would be helpful: not relationship-as-therapy (always a bad idea), but relationship-as-emotional oasis. A place of comfort and replenishment where my psyche could find emotional sustenance. But I trust neither my judgement in such matters, nor expressions of intimacy beyond friendship. For me, "yes" involves far more trauma than "no"; which destroys any incentive to even consider the possibility.
Not that I had much confidence in the possibilities of intimacy, given my upbringing. But to have expression and language of intimacy poisoned by being associated with trauma and deception; that is, if anything, more toxic. Even working towards a comfortable emotional self-sufficiency is hard when one feels possibilities have been ripped from you in trauma and pain.
That the narcissist in question "explained" why it was all really my fault (again, a normal narcissistic pattern) does not help. Talk about adding insult to injury. (Why aren't more narcissists murdered? I ask this question seriously.)
As a coping mechanism, I prefer friends to therapy. They have a serious connection to you, have a better chance of seeing things in context, and the emotional benefit of friendship has firm empirical evidence. Unlike talk-therapy, on which the evidence is bad--for example, trauma debriefing's strongest statistical tendency is to make things worse. (One reason why the Catholic Church got into such trouble over paedophile priests is that, rather than following the old-fashioned response of locking erring priests up in monasteries, the bishops bought into the delusions of "therapy", which relentlessly failed while reporting success.)
That prettymeboy said counselling had helped him--while continuing to display exactly the same patterns of narcissism, just with extra glibness--was not reassuring. Nor that he had previously suggested I should get counselling--which was perfect: it absolved him of all responsibility and firmly established me as the problem. (I suspect mememegirl put him up to it: she was clever enough to work out how I would react--there are few things more infuriating than the person whose complete untrustworthiness has hurt you greatly suggesting that you get counselling--and that it would give a new round of her commiserating with prettymeboy about how unreasonable I was being: she was the person who bought me stuff I did not want to "cheer me up" and then added the cost to my share of common expenses.)
It is not that one expects such behaviour to be general, it is that the whole language and expression of intimacy is poisoned; that it becomes associated with such trauma, without compensating positive experiences to draw upon. So, lots of stuff to continue to work through: and there are some good books that are helpful.
I had a minor revelation while we were conversing. The birthday girl was talking and I did what I normally do, and dislike doing, which is my eyes went to people coming in the restaurant (that is, any movement). I realised I do it out of a deep wariness. Having great respect for her perceptiveness about people--legal aid solicitor who writes very successful crime novels, funny that--I explained my realisation. I started off with "I had an abusive upbringing" and then semi-apologised for putting it like that (it being such a modern cliche). She was very firm in telling me that, yes, I was an abused child and that I was hyper-vigilant as a result, needing to assess any movement by people around me for possible threat.
It was a relatively mild form of abuse--being completely starved of any physical affection or praise--but abuse it was. A seriously unbalanced upbringing starved of a basic requirement for healthy emotional and psychological growth.
A comment by an author of an excellent book (a book the birthdaygirl had lent me) on adolescents who kill their parents is relevant:
Abuse and neglect are not always obvious to their victims. When abuse and neglect are discussed in university classes, some students become aware for the first time that they were abused or neglected as children (p.54).
In my case it was reading a post by a psychblogger which led to the realisation. If something is your normality, you can lack any place to stand from which to judge it.
An older and wiser friend once commented that I have a pattern of putting up with what no one else would put up with and then exploding. It comes from the "split ego" that the psychblogger talks about in the post linked to above. Part of you--the part that "managed" the interaction with my parents--puts on the agreeable surface, while part of you--the inner you--is hiding away the pain. When the latter gets too intense, some sort of eruption occurs: all the worse since it was so long repressed. Learning to not be "merely agreeable", but asserting myself as appropriate, has become increasingly easier since I became aware of these issues.
But it meant that, when I was still very unaware of such matters, I was very vulnerable to a deceptive manipulator-- mememegirl--and a pretty narcissicist-- prettymeboy. All the worst when they acted as a tag team. When mememegirl was doing her "you are my Newest and Bestest Friend" thing with me, I ended up opening up with her far more than I had with anyone else. I discussed things with her that I have never talked about with anyone else since in any real depth. That I was opening up all my vulnerabilities for her to use and manipulate never occurred to me. Particularly as I supported her relationship with prettymeboy. But turning me into a "problem" that she could be so sympathetic to prettymeboy about, and which gave her a way of strengthening her hold on him, was the strategy she chose--and I had told her which buttons to push and how.
Which makes the fact that mememegirl has once again become active in a certain society a matter of deep frustration for me. It is not merely that all the issues which led to my emotional breakdown and the destruction of my previous career resurface; it is that I have to suppress any expression of my deep hurt and rage. So it is easier simply not to play anymore, which does mean that she has taken something else from me--not helpful.
It seems appropriate to invoke Poe's famous poem, but hopefully knowledgeable rage is not quite the same as descending into madness. Rage is certainly preferable to the depression (aka anger-without-enthusiasm) which was the operating alternative.
A friend once commented that "I like [prettymeboy] but not when he's with [mememegirl]". I expected prettymeboy to act decently, mememegirl encouraged his worst instincts; which made her much more convenient than me at lots of levels, and a narcissist can always be expected to go with what is convenient. Indeed, their key characteristic is that their own convenience is their reality principle. I suspect that encouraging prettymeboy's narcissism probably bit mememegirl in the end, but that is little consolation. (Prettymeboy has a record of hurting everyone who gets close to him: which adds almost nothing to the statement that he is a narcissist.)
Somewhat more consolation is that I did acquire an understanding of narcissism: when I post on it, people comment (both on the posts and privately) how helpful and revelatory they find what I write. It is knowledge bought at great personal cost, but that is hardly unusual in dealing with a narcissist.
The birthday girl is close to her mother and misses her father, who died a couple of years ago. She puts down her "disgusting self-confidence" to the absolute confidence in being loved her upbringing gave her.
I don't miss either of my parents. Sad at lots of levels: not least because they were good people. Even sadder, that merely suggesting that my upbringing had problems was enough to alienate me from Mum's two sisters (one of whom was my Godmother), who had been my favourite aunts. Not from my brother, who has been nothing but supportive. But he was there too: his first comment on a memoir I circulated privately was "I agree with every word". But is a very common feature of children of abuse that adults do not believe them: if it can happen to a man in his 40s, how much more can an adolescent or child be discounted?
Possibly the right sort of relationship would be helpful: not relationship-as-therapy (always a bad idea), but relationship-as-emotional oasis. A place of comfort and replenishment where my psyche could find emotional sustenance. But I trust neither my judgement in such matters, nor expressions of intimacy beyond friendship. For me, "yes" involves far more trauma than "no"; which destroys any incentive to even consider the possibility.
Not that I had much confidence in the possibilities of intimacy, given my upbringing. But to have expression and language of intimacy poisoned by being associated with trauma and deception; that is, if anything, more toxic. Even working towards a comfortable emotional self-sufficiency is hard when one feels possibilities have been ripped from you in trauma and pain.
That the narcissist in question "explained" why it was all really my fault (again, a normal narcissistic pattern) does not help. Talk about adding insult to injury. (Why aren't more narcissists murdered? I ask this question seriously.)
As a coping mechanism, I prefer friends to therapy. They have a serious connection to you, have a better chance of seeing things in context, and the emotional benefit of friendship has firm empirical evidence. Unlike talk-therapy, on which the evidence is bad--for example, trauma debriefing's strongest statistical tendency is to make things worse. (One reason why the Catholic Church got into such trouble over paedophile priests is that, rather than following the old-fashioned response of locking erring priests up in monasteries, the bishops bought into the delusions of "therapy", which relentlessly failed while reporting success.)
That prettymeboy said counselling had helped him--while continuing to display exactly the same patterns of narcissism, just with extra glibness--was not reassuring. Nor that he had previously suggested I should get counselling--which was perfect: it absolved him of all responsibility and firmly established me as the problem. (I suspect mememegirl put him up to it: she was clever enough to work out how I would react--there are few things more infuriating than the person whose complete untrustworthiness has hurt you greatly suggesting that you get counselling--and that it would give a new round of her commiserating with prettymeboy about how unreasonable I was being: she was the person who bought me stuff I did not want to "cheer me up" and then added the cost to my share of common expenses.)
It is not that one expects such behaviour to be general, it is that the whole language and expression of intimacy is poisoned; that it becomes associated with such trauma, without compensating positive experiences to draw upon. So, lots of stuff to continue to work through: and there are some good books that are helpful.