Once, before I really understood Nism, I found myself caught up in a news story of what seemed Nparent abuse. A young top tier grad student was found in the trunk of her car, she killed herself with several bottles of sleeping pills. She was a super academic super high achiever. Her father was absolutely sure that she was murdered, he pressed the media and even went so far to blame authorities for botching the investigation of her death in order to point the finger of blame away from himself.
I got caught up in the story, my anger and rage at the father was my own displaced anger and rage at my N parents. He was so N, it was so obvious that he had ignored his daughters emotional needs, pressed her, pressured her to be someone, to excel, to achieve. He kept talking about her academic achievements, even creating a memorial web-page that listed nothing of who she really was as a person but rather all of what she had accomplished academically. It was sad...I could see the young girls low self esteem in the photos, that vacant stare of a cry in her eyes for someone to free her, for someone to help her.
The week before she killed herself she called her father and asked him for some time to talk, apparently he denied her and told her that she needed to finish her studies that week before he would help her with whatever it was she was asking for. She was found dead that weekend. I think that he has denied her one to many times in life, and, yet, all he could and would do, when pressed about her suicide, was point the finger at what he was absolutely sure was someone else's fault.
I felt for his grief and tried to empathize with how any parent would feel with the death of a child, to be fair and compassionate to him. But he was so busy caring about what the world thought and how his image through her suicide would be forever tainted that he seemed to forget that his daughter was even gone. He seemed completely caught up in damage control of image.
It enraged me. I could not figure out why I was so caught up until about a year later when all of my rage at my N parents started surfacing, until I could see that my mom was an N. Eventually I learned that I was emotionally denied and treated just like an object, like this young women was treated by her father, an object that he could brag about, that he could feel as if his needs for affirmation were being met through her achievements. It seemed to me that her suicide was an act of revenge towards him. I could relate.
After having worked through so much of my displaced anger, when I see news reports like the balloon one, I just feel sad.
