Sovereign et al.
Let me make it clear that I have absolutely zero formal psychological education. Everything I have learned has been through my own reading and my own analysis. Therefore, view what i have to say a model of reality as I see it. I suspect that much of what i have to say is valid and perhaps the psychologists can fine tune the theory.
There are three basic models of emotional determinism. First there is the Genetic model that says your grandparents did it to you. Next there is the Psychic model that says your parents did it to you. And finally there is the Environmental model that says your social network did it to you. All of these models say that someone else did it to you. These models developed from the study of animals. The existence of animals is almost entirely determined by these factors. The great leap of faith was to assume that the same apples to humans.
In fact, this leap of faith is not entirely incorrect. Yes, how you were raised will affect your emotions, and what happens in your own corner of the world will also. In other words, every stimulus will go through a black box and out will come your response (emotion). This is only true for people who are passive in their emotional responses. If we do not have a well developed sense of our self awareness we can go through life always being the victim of our environment.
However, we humans are different. We are aware and therefore we can determine how things affect us. In the case of a child of a narcissistic parent, if you allow your emotions to be determined by your automatic response, then the answer is that yes you are determined by what your parents did to you. This is how I have been operating my entire life. And it gets even worse. I have used the same model when interacting with my peers. I assume that the same motives and methods of operation are similar. So now, not only do I have a distorted view of reality from my parents perspective but I also get the same effect from dealing with others.
But NO MORE!
You see, the key is to realize that you have allowed this to happen. Think about it. You have CHOSEN to let this happen. If you choose to do otherwise, then we have a whole new model of emotions. In other words, I can determine how things make me feel I used to hear these words before and I would sluff them off because I have tried it before and it never worked. I would try to say to myself, forget him, he is not important, just control how you feel when you interact. But ultimately, I would fail and then I would assume that I failed because this positive mental attitude stuff is crap.
But now I realize why I failed was because of an inner incongruence. Though I was trying to think positively, I was internally allowing my fathers mental map to dictate my emotions. Result was guilt and shame. Here I was trying to make myself feel better but inside my own objective function (value function, call it what you may) I was hurting. My own objective function was saying
make dad feel well,
make dad feel well,
make dad feel well.
So when I was ignoring his signals by filtering them to make me feel good, I was just making myself feel like crap because my values were saying I need to make dad feel well.
So there was a HUGE error of logic on my part. My mistake was to use the superficial positive attitude stuff when in fact I just needed to look deeper inside my core. That is when I realize that everything I was doing in life was to make others feel better. All my decisions flowed through this warped model as to how I should feel.
The KEY is to change that. From now on, I worry ONLY about how things make me feel good. Yes, you read that correctly. This is not a selfish statement. And this is a very important principle to understand. See my next post where I will expand on this point.
Steve
