article about N parents

[Ales2]

So very true... an article about N parents and the problems they cause.

http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-me-in-we/201203/when-narcissist-heads-the-household

Best wishes to everybody here on the board, and you too, Dr. G.

[JustKathy]

This is an excellent article. Thanks for sharing.

[Dr. Richard Grossman]

Hi Ales2,

Thanks for the article! 

Elisabeth Young-Bruehl certainly sounded like a kindred spirit--the themes she writes about are familiar to all here.

Best,

Richard

[sKePTiKal]

I can so relate to the paragraph, where she describes how a child in those situations becomes "nobody".

But, some kids do survive and turn out OK - through some combination of external influence and internal resiliance. I don't think those are the only two outcomes, though. People are way more complicated than that. In my case, I was "ok" on a lot of life-scale ratings... but there were some huge, only half-known and unexplainable items on that kind of list that I didn't realize were also important. Those were the things that tripped me up and grew to crisis level just outside my own internal field of awareness. And that's just one variation of not fitting into the "two kinds of survivors" category... there are a lot more - just as many as there are people.

Maybe it helps to simplify things down to those two kinds of people, to help public awareness of how deeply children in those kinds of families can be injured. I would really like to see some research and studies on what it is that helps people survive that kind of start in life and how they feel "ok" despite it.

[sunblue]

Alex:

Thanks so much for sharing this article!  It described perfectly my narcissistic household and my own struggle.  All of it is just so true.  What especially resonated with me when the author described the psychoanalytic method of trying to discover the real child, including asking whether the patient had dreams.  So very sad and true because when children of Ns are not allowed to be children, they have no dreams, either as children or adults.  They don't know who they really are.  I can't help but wonder if these types of children (of whom I am one) can ever really discover that.  How can you know who you are if "you" never existed? 

But a really great article.  Thanks again for sharing.

[sKePTiKal]

Sun - you discover that child and self by starting where you are right now, with what you know about yourself (not what you've been told about yourself - "question authority" in this case)... the big disappointments, the attractions you feel for things, people and activities... that you may have felt unworthy or incapable of engaging in all your life.

The simple question: What do I WANT? can lead to hours and hours of introspection, writing, or drawing... trying to get past the layers of what we feel society tells us we should want, or what the nasty old FOO thought was important, or what our own reactions to the impossible FOO pressure to be what THEY wanted & told us we had to be - instead of our own selves - to survive without going insane.

That was one of my first challenges in therapy - answering that question. I couldn't. Oh yeah, I had a short of list of things: live near the water, quit smoking, and be happier. But even those things were just things - over the course of years, I realized that these were kinda "smokescreens" to the REAL answer(s). Digging through my own mental clutter the answers are kinda different. I want to be really HEARD, I want to feel connected to people - like I belong, and I want to feel that it's safe for me to exercise my own god-given personal power -- that I won't be the cause of some unexpected, unforeseen catastrophe because of it. I guess that boils down to I want to trust myself and my judgement. (the source of that distrust was the litany of things I experienced at the hands of my mom - who can ya trust, if ya can't trust mom???)

Where to start? Right where you are right now with what you know about you. Did you love horses as a kid? Treat yourself to a couple hours riding or some lessons. Softball? Look around - there are a lot of pickup leagues. Did you like reading? Become a "fixture" of the local library... and explore what they offer for free to nurture that (and it's also a good way to be heard - talking about books). My first attempt started with an ad in the paper: a local natural history museum was opening for a whole day (for free) to artists who wanted to work from their collection. I worked all day on a snowy owl, chatting with people who were also working around me. And oh.... I felt like a steel door that had been rusted shut for too many years to ever be opened again, without a plasma torch! I hadn't realized how much I'd missed; how important cameraderie with my fellow art students was to my experience of making art. It the being in a GROUP and belonging... not the ability to draw what I see, accurately - making good art - that was important to me; that I was longing for.

Intuitively, I realized this. Took a couple years for it to process, and bubble up as a real conscious thought in my assessment of myself. I really didn't want to admit that I was that emotionally needy (still am). But it was the REAL ME and that was how I found out who I really was. Trying this, doing that, pushing my own "No, sorry, I can't do that" reflex to hide myself all the time. Allowing myself to feel: OK, if everyone else is allowed to feel or do X, why can't I? It's MY TURN.

Each experience had really positive - and some negative - "take aways"; lessons that I learned about myself. But each lesson was totally valuable as it accumulates to show me what my real limits are (or mostly aren't), what my real characteristics are, and I can feel waaaaay more confident now that people aren't going to cringe away from me in horror as I reveal to them "what I'm really like".

It really is OK now to be me -- even with my FOO (most of the time) -- because I trust myself to protect myself, I've stopped playing their silly games, and if they don't like me this way -- well, tough toenails! After 40 years, you'd think they'd realize the reason I was never home, left home at 18 and never went back and am having even less & less to do with them*... is because I don't need that abuse to feel I belong somewhere. In 40 years time, I found out I could pretty much fit in and belong -- almost EVERYWHERE else. That's a way better anti-anxiety med than any Rx I can think of!

* That's not entirely true of my brother. Since his heart attack, we have had some interesting conversations and I'm not hearing the old paranoia or hostility from him  - about me - as much. I'm still cautious, but I'm not shutting the door in his face either.

[gratitude28]

They can tell the details of their parent's painful past with such keen awareness that they "never miss a crumb of information that will explain the wounds their parents have sustained."

The reason kids can do this is that we are told the same stories over and over. The only interesting stories are those about the N parent and her life, so these are retold ad naseum. Anything else is boring and ignored.

Good article - thanks!

Beth