I've had over twenty years of one on one therapy, group therapy, treatment center for three months, just about every twelve step program for 15 years, and no where did the subject of narcissism come up. Ever!
And yet both my mother and the man who caused so much pain in my life obviously are narcissits and I have all of the characteristics of ACON.
I just don't understand how nobody even mentioned it to me. Do you have any ideas about that, since your discovery was your own as well?
Hi Sally - I wanted to answer your question but we got sidetracked a bit!!
And I thought it was worth a separate thread as others might have some ideas and thoughts, too.
I was wondering how to answer your question but the answer arrived this morning in the guise of a little book by Alice Miller called 'Banished Knowledge'.
She was taken by surprise by discovering HER abuse too - so much so that she resigned from the International Psychoanalytical Association, revised her previous books and went on a crusade to make the world stop taking abuse for granted.
Her thesis is (my paraphrasing) that we talk ourselves into believing our parents love us 'because' they abuse us or in spite of the fact they abuse us - and this is perpetuated down the generations and reinforced by our culture. So everybody is basically taking it for granted that our parents (who we are expected to respect) do what's good for us.
And that means all the helping services (cos it consists of people with the same drive) take it for granted, too.The responsibility is put on us to be good and not speak ill. Even when we intellectually grasp it, it usually doesn't go far enough and we still end up in denial.
Nina Brown in her book 'Children of the Self-Absorbed' makes it clear that we need to check out whether we're being 'childish' in making a judgement of our parents or whether they are really Ns - but you're unlikely to get much help from the establishment in doing so, so it's difficult to judge which side of the bridge you should be on.
Here's the point where you have to take responsibility for what happened/what happens to you (which is part of growing up and maturing out of our own narcissism) and there's the point where you can 'name' the 'wrong' behaviour of the parent and start healing the damage (which is different to blaming them).
Like you, I've spent a great deal of time in therapy and personal development, some of which was actively harmful - I was ready to come out of my cocoon of 'unknowing' 20 years ago and I was consistently thrown back into it by people I trusted to get me out of it!! What a tragic waste, eh!! I took responsibility for myself like a good girl, like a 'good' patient or client or group participant. And never once blamed my mother. I didn't even have a vocabulary for what she did - and so everyone else could do it to me, too!!!!!!!!!!!!!
From now on I shall wear my ACON badge with pride! It's a badge of honour as it proves I've lived a life of self-sacrifice, braved painful self-knowledge and learned a whole new language - and that's the least of it! I'll just go and give it a little polish!!
BTW Sally, in answer to your other question, I learned about narcissism less than a year ago. Since then, I have spent an absolute fortune on Amazon and it was the best investment I ever made - and it wasn't an investment in books, it was an investment in MY SELF!!!
R
