I have been thinking about our "places" on the board. We come here, most of us, needing help. For months, at least, a new member, especially one who has just discovered NPD in a close person and doesn't know anything about the disorder, will want to take in everything he/she can and will want to hear about others who are in the same spot. I think this is an information-gathering time. After this stage, the person should want to move on to the What Do I Do To Feel Better stage. At this point, you will start to understand about negative tapes, reactions to things that are actually reactions to the N in your life but displaced, and ways we have hurt ourselves. Now is the time for growth. Once a person has had much growth, he or she would stay on the board to provide help to others and share what he/she has learned. Or the person leaves the board pretty much altogether.
Of course, even those who have had a lot of growth need to go back to stage one sometimes and ask for help.
What do you all think about this... the stages and the growth????
Love, Beth
I am coming in very late here, and thought long and hard about posting at all.
I agree completely, beth, with everything. But I'd add one thing. There are some things you just can't do in this setting. Deep process work is one of them. A year ago, I thought it might be possible, but now I know it's not. That kind of work requires a dedicated therapy group... and that's what I'm headed for now.
I hate how this sounds, but I can't find a better way to put it: I want to be in a place where everyone is there to get garbage out of their own heads too, not just to commiserate about "those awful people out there".
We have a fable here, a very powerful myth that seems almost impossible to challenge: we are all just dandy, and it's only the Ns who are vile. Not so. It is simply impossible for us to live through what we have lived through and emerge intact, undamaged, unscathed. As long as we have to pretend that's so, as long as we're unable to part with the images of ourselves as perfect, we are doomed to continue through life hurting ourselves and others.
I've seen plenty of vile behavior here, and only *some* instances of it have been mine. But this, We Do Not Talk About. We don't take our own inventories. We rare back and glare at any who even raise the thought that We the Innocent Victims might hurt and abuse others because we learned to do it on a deep, instinctive level, from those who hurt and abused us. And then we make sure to give the renegade an extra helping of abuse just to larn them not to think such things of us. Many of us would rather die naked and flogged, than ever admit that we have wronged someone here and - god forbid - apologize to them. It would tarnish the image unbearably, and the image is the thing that matters.
This makes me want to shake people until their teeth rattle, and that is not good for me or them. Not to mention innocent bystanders.
I've been helped hugely here. I don't want to sound like I'm unaware of that. But I think, in my case, that the help has come because I had my therapist with me every step of the way. I was working with him when I signed up here the first time, and this time. He's seen the site and knows my screen name, and I've talked with him on many occasions about what has gone on here - my sins of omission and commission, and the omissions and comissions I've experienced, both onboard and in PMs. He knows what I think about pretty much everything and everyone - at least where I have an opinion. Sometimes he agrees, sometimes he disagrees, usually he asks me why I think as I do. And he always gets the story 'afterward'. He doesn't tell me what to think or do.
Without that sounding board, I'd have stalled very early, because I couldn't 'get into' anything deeply at all otherwise. I found, and find, that when I try, it either frightens people, angers them, or both. I've reached the point where I'm seeing a lot of interpersonal dynamics here that I can't talk about [I've been called an N and worse when I try], especially as they affect me and I affect them in turn. At this point, I need not one therapist, but a roomful of therapist-peers. A therapy group. If I can find one. Because, for me, as long as I have to dissemble in a therapeutic environment, it can never be completely therapeutic.
I would LOVE to talk constructively and openly here about my own flaws and imperfections and distortions and unrealistic expectations, and get honest non-defensive agenda-free feedback about them. No can do. This is not a therapy group; it's a support group. One of a kind, incredible, but still, a support group. Trying to use it as a therapy group is not going to work; it's not designed to be one. Lesson learned, and accepted.
Lest this be dismissed as Another of Stormchild's Recent Rants, let me leave you with a thought, and a challenge. I believe that the people who have made the most progress here - in the psychological sense, not the temporal or financial sense - are people who have 'kissed their monsters on the nose' [from Friel and Friel, I think] - people who face and own their labels, and in so doing, break the spell.
Write, who is bipolar and unashamed. Moon, who is also bipolar and unashamed. Yourself, an AA member and unashamed. And others...
Because there IS no shame in these things! There is only courage and freedom to be found in facing them.
