Voicelessness and Emotional Survival > Voicelessness and Emotional Survival Message Board
grrrrr
cj:
Very good point rosencratz Re: differentiating between Feelings/ and thoughts! (I don't think I even was aware of not differentiating between the two, or even taking into account feelings! Funny that eh? :wink:
Yep Clj. Whenever something is bothering me, and I happen to tell my mother (maybe i subconsciously feel I 'have to' so always end up doing so), she is fond of saying 'I knew something was wrong, I could tell!'
cj:
Thanks for that jacmac.
Sally:
cj: Your story was great about your grandfather and needing to use the phone...could just see it! And I know everyone too in my family would have expected that i would run out in the rain to help anyone do anything.
Things are different now, I don't speak to my mother anymore (we live about 30 minutes from each other), and my father passed away over twenty years ago. My sister and I have had a very rocky relationship, but are getting along now. Not seeing my mother has been easy and a great blessing for me. Hasn't bothered me a bit. She will never get help to change and thinks she is perfect anyway.
You asked if there was a guide describing characteristics of ACON and in Trapped in the Mirror, there is a discussion about that. Below are some excerpts from the book:
1. "Children of narcissists fear to know themselves, particularly when what they find within is anger. When things go wrong they retreat and do not know that much of what they fear from others is a projection of their inner lives. Feellings of their own that are attributed to others make the world a frightening place".
2. "They are oversensitive, which means that we overreact to what other people say and do, are hurt and confused by the belief that someone intends the worst. We perceive neutral behavior in a negative light. Being hypersensitive is like having skin so badly burned you cannot lie beneath a sheet."
3. "A common problem for children of narcissists is that we do not know when to stop being mistreated. We do not even know when we are actually being mistreated since we accept suffering as a means to winning favor. "
4. "Sometimes we feel wounded and do not notice the wound as we are pulled into the need system of the person harming us....it is our lot in life to be mistreated and to ingnore it....In the opposite direction, after being so long mistreated, we can find mistreatment when none is there.
5. "On the other hand, hypersensitivity to how one is treated or to what one fears can have the paradoxical outcome of making us undersensitive toward others. To safeguard our skin we ferret out and over-react to anticipated mistreatment. We run from it and accuse the person of intending to mistreat us. Our charges are hostile but we call the other person aggressive and charge him or her with having sinister motivation. Our tone is one of trial and punishment. We retaliate in the present for wrongs we have suffered in the past, the suffering of our narcissistic home."
6. "Addiction is another common response to being the child of a narcissist. It is easy to fall into a self-destructive lifestyle after being treated as expendable and worthless. Destroyed by our parents' narcissistic blindness and without someone to observe and comfort us, we now destroy ourselves."
7. "Procrastination is a common shortcoming of one whose performance has been attacked. Low in self-esteem, many of us think we should put off action unti we feel sufficiently confident. It is an error to believe that we must love ourselves before undertaking a difficult project or relationship. We postpone what we think is beyond our grasp, giving ourselves no opportunity to learn from error. Raised to magnify our limitations, inferiority feelings keep us from the world. We fail at school, job marriage, work, child rearing, and so on. We fulfill our predicted destiny."
8. "In addition to being hurt we have learned many of our parents' narcissistic habits since they taught us that narcissism is the better way. We do not recognize that we have narcissistic defenses and patterns of perception that make us behave insensitively and feel morally correct. If others complain about us, we cannot understand."
9. "Another common narcissistic habit is to criticize. The child of a narcissist who emulates his parent is always trying to improve the other person. That is what his parents did to him and to everyone else. As an act of identification with his parents, he responds to people's errors with the kind of rage his parents showered on him."
10. "Ofen children of narcissists don't know how to read their bodies because their parents did not give the child's emotional and bodily sensations an appropriate label, did not call a spade a spade. The parents were not in tune with the child's emotions and labeled the child's feelings according to their own moods and needs. ...If we said we were lonely they tried to make us think that people were unimportant. They made us eat when they thought that we were hungry, feeding us portions that they felt suited our needs."
Whew!! that was a lot to digest! I am so new to understanding the very concept of narcissism that I don't yet want to start focusing on things I may do due to my narcissistic upbringing. That stage is yet to come, although I certainly see some of those charactestics in me.
Well, cj hoped that helped. Hugs. Sally
clj_writes:
Dear Sally,
Thank you so much for the list you provided (I was the one who asked..my initials are also cj....sort of confusing). Numbers 1, 6, and 10 are big ones on my list. Some other ones *used* to be major issues but aren't as much so now. I do have an N book en route as I see there's much more for me to learn. I always wondered why ACOA stuff always resonated with me when neither of my parents drank!
Regarding addiction (#6), I recently read that binging is *always* an attempt at self-help and I believe this is true and probably applies to other addictions as well. We did not develop healthy internal caretakers and are "helping" ourselves through something that inadvertently adds to our pain. In my case, I'm mostly avoiding overwhelming feelings--either positive or negative.
Thanks again for your post!
cj:
--- Quote from: clj_writes --- I wonder what other "obvious" things I've been missing!!!! .
--- End quote ---
Man, tell me about it. So many things have never occured to me in my life, so many questions I never thought to ask myself, thoughts and feelings, all that come with being a 'person'. I feel like I haven't been a complete person, or half complete even. I always wondered why I was never quite 'with it' in so many capacities.
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