Feral Children of Narcissists??

[Sealynx]

I was watching a program last night on Ferrel children. They were talking about research related to them and how after a certain point the children could not be taught to speak. They could learn words but did not understand how to put them into sentences. I watched as they showed the children, all of whom related better to animals than people and in several cases had been raised among dogs and acted like them. I kept waiting for them to talk about what was missing in their relating process but they didn't go there. The language comparison gave me something to think about.

So many of us describe the same issues with not being able to attract friends though we seem to be socially appropriate at work and can conduct ourselves well in most social situations. The thing that is missing is almost intangible. We have the behaviors, we have the feelings, we are missing......???? It is likely that our mothers failed to read our emotions and normal signs of need when we were babies. Their care of us must have seemed random and beyond our control so we likely gave up using what babies are supposed to use and develop to call out and to bond with others. Perhaps it is a kind of expectation that is read as attractive energy by others???? An expectation we lack????

[Portia]

An expectation that is read as attractive energy by others - sounds possible/probable Sealynx.

And?

[Meh]

My friends who have large social circles don't doubt that other people will like and accept them they take it for granted.
It's confidence. Along the lines of charisma.

[Sealynx]

It may be that our chances of developing this intangible thing are zero...no matter how much therapy we get. They were completely unsuccessful in teaching the language skills and they at least knew exactly what they were trying to teach.

I remember in Dr. McBride's book on Daughters of N mom's she pretty much accepted that one path for a daughter was to remain alone. She was talking specifically about partnering here but did not really address the friendship issue which has perhaps less to keep it together socially. I think more could be written on this but no one seems to have scratched the surface. When you search the info on "loner" adults you are either shuttled off to anti-social or schizoid personality disorder or Aspergers syndrome in the Autism spectrum. There is no real class for people who were given a kind of "ferrel" emotional upbringing.

I know that unlike me, my sister had lots of friends as a child. I was left alone with my mother in a distant state while my father was at sea. I had no one to engage in correct stimulus /response behaviors with. Even though I might have lacked the "spark", that drew people to me, I could still respond normally to my sister and who was four years younger. In early Christmas videos of me at about 7 or 8, I am shown caring for her. For instance she got one of those spring rocking horses one Christmas and I am shown struggling to help her onto the horse. I was able to respond to her signals of need which would have allowed her brain to develop those engagement patterns.

It would make sense that we would have soulmates of a sort in other daughters, but then NPD in women is actually rather rare with males predominating, so we are few and far between. Perhaps this is why we have such a hard time getting our stories heard by others. There is also the problem of some of these daughters having N traits themselves and not being available for relationships of any kind.

[Gaining Strength]

Sealynx - I think you made a brilliant deduction.  That fascinates me and explains so much.
Just me - I would not go so far as believing that we cannot learn.  I am convinced by modern science that the brain is continueally capable of rewriting over past learned behaviors and patterns.  It is not quite so easy perhaps but possible nonetheless.  That is my belief and my hope.

[Logy]

Sealynx,
Good food for thought.  I think you raise some interesting points. 

Gaining Strength,
I agree that we can learn.  My social skills have always been below my peers.  But through reading and learning I learned to function in a social setting, engage in conversation, restrain my antisocial comments.  But the learning has not made me feel better about myself.  I anticipate that I will not fit in, that others will prefer the company of someone other than me.  Deep down I feel I am a misfit in society.  I am never relaxed, even with those I have known for decades.  Outwardly, I am normal.  Inside, I wait for the rejection.  I expect to always be alone.

Regarding friends that I had as a child and adolescent, NM either criticized the friend or criticized the way I interacted with them.  According to NM, I never made a good choice.  And if I confided something I said to them, it was always wrong.  As an adult I see now that NM made the same mistakes she accused me of.  And has no long term friends. 

One thing I do remember is always wanting to move to a different place.  To start over.  Where nobody knows me and I can try again.

The intangible.  That intangible that is just out of my reach.  Could be that attractive energy.  So am I a born introvert?  Or was I made a loner?  Seems to me a born introvert would feel good about themselves.  A loner feels bad about themselves.

[Sealynx]

Since I wrote this I've done a personal social inventory of sorts and given some thought to things I've read about attachment theory.

What I've read...Children whose mothers don't come when they cry or ask to be held often turn their attention to objects in the environment. After a while they may not try to engage adults.

Question...Is this behavior carried over to relationships with other children???

My earliest memories of being around other children...  I was brought to a nursery school and immediately sought out a toy to play with. I only became aware of the other children when a little boy came over and took my toy. I didn't protest or try to interact. I just accepted that the toy was gone and turned my attention to another. I did not occur to me find an adult or cry. I never remember actively playing with another child or the name of anyone in that class.

Next memory. Nursery school. I tried to break up a fight between two boys and was made to stand in the corner. I don't remember having any relationship to either boy before or after. I just knew it was wrong to fight. I know from pictures I was in a carnival ball with another child named Linda and that we went to her home once or twice (mother and I). I remember being nice to her but cannot remember ever playing with her or having fun.

Even at that early age I was already alone and watching the world as if from a glass jar. I had emotions, compassion for others and from a very early age could understand their intentions, though not always why they engaged in things like selfishness-which is interesting. What I already lacked was expectations of joy related to other children. I was good to them but I didn't expect them to provide me with any kind of emotional satisfaction. I didn't look forward to visiting a friend or not.  

When I look at the above I think it totally mirrors my early parent response from my mother. I didn't understand selfishness because I was already a giving machine, trained to operate, not internally from my own core needs, but externally by adjusting to a chaotic environment where I might suddenly be hugged tightly in front of guests or thrown up in the air by a returning father I barely knew. My brain could not create a PLEASURE response to human interaction...because it WASN'T PLEASURABLE....so it created the necessary hormonal relationship to DEAL with uncertainty.


So what does a PLEASURE RESPONSE consist of....CHEMICALS!

As it stands I would guess that we would be amazed at what other people feel at the thought of spending time with others or even a simple touch. Their brain responds by pumping out endorphins which are opiates that give a feeling of well-being (just like they were trained to do by mom in infancy). If they had a warm responsive environment when young, other people are a drug. They get an anticipatory high just thinking about any kind of pleasant interaction. We are probably more likely to pump adrenalin or other corticosteroids related to pain and inflammation or just feel neutral.  In this way people may even be bad for some of us because each negative association strengthens our childhood programming.

So if we look at a fun social setting...we must come across as a little flat initially. Everyone is already high when we get there, alcohol or not!.

When I look at my closest relationships today, they are not based on pleasure in the emotional sense. They are based on shared interests of an intellectual nature. I would say that my social skills are excellent and I can function sexually but there is a pleasure gap between the two and other people can sense its not there.

[Sealynx]

Hi CB,
I don't think we are damaged in the same way as the Ferrel kids, but I do think that brain development might be affected, not so much in capacity as in what it later "rewards". I think our EQ and our IQ are largely inherited and barring any severe damage, we will tend toward a certain personal expression. Some of the twins separated at birth studies seem to suggest this.

There is no lack of emotional understanding in me, nor does there seem to be in any of the daughters on any board I've ever been on. What does seem different is that reward factor. What does the brain reward with pleasurable feeling? I think this is very along the lines of Pavlov's dog . I think our physiological responses can be trained without altering our basic emotional outlook or capacity. If that were not so, we would not have a much needed fear response to things like fire. But the brain doesn't always decide to pump adrenalin at the right time. How I handled my mother not coming when I cried and how my brain/body interpreted that in terms of its perception of the relationship between people and pleasure is in the realm of conditioned response. The difference between feeling that going to an event won't make a difference in my life and the feeling that it will be at least nice (like last time and the time before) is huge.

This in no way diminishes my innate capacity to care and feel for others, in fact I am valued (too much in my opinion!) as a counselor by people who know me. So as you say we do make deeper associations and I think understand others very well. The problem in my opinion is that I was not conditioned as a child to associate and feel pleasure when relating to others and that pattern seems to have played out through childhood and lingered on into middle and high school. BTW, I was about 5 and not 2 when the little boy took my truck. When I was 2 I was still alone with my mother in California while my father was on a Navy ship somewhere.

Oddly enough, when you ask me where I got my nurturing ability...the only kindness I remember in childhood was from my pets. I always had one!! So not everyone raised by a dog turns out badly...LOL. My mother worked and even the people she hired to care for us were cold distant "rule oriented" people. As far back as I remembered I nurtured things, even though no one nurtured me.

[Portia]

Sealynx
interesting and I can understand what you're talking about here. I can relate to not having a 100% pleasure response to (anticipating/or) being with people.

I'm not sure if it's important to me though. I don't get to an event and see everyone else high: I see individuals, many many of whom are obviously stressed at the situation. I see far more differences in people in social situations. And as for people who eat up social interaction as though they're dependent on it, without paying any attention to others, individually ... there's a lot of it about.

[Sealynx]

I agree Portia, but I think a theory can be useful without fulfilling the scientific requirement that it be universally applicable at all times and to everyone. What I have seen on many boards is a generalized pattern of discomfort in the area of friend formation. What I know from watching people around me is that most seem to have an emotional response to being with familiar people that is self generated. If you look at some of the personality disorders that involve traits of feelings of social isolation (such as Avoidant or Schizotypal), you will find that each mentions "having an emotionally detached or mentally ill parent"among the possible causation factors. Personality disorders are by definition extremes of behavior, they don't encompass those who show a tendency toward one or two traits, but that doesn't mean that the same forces aren't at work when milder forms present. Each also suggest that positive experiences in childhood are needed to reverse the disorder and little can be done in adulthood to reverse the trend. This suggest to me that the parts of the brain involved in relatedness are "set" in a similar way to what happens with speech.

When I got up this morning, something else about the Feral children program hit me. Many people who are essentially loners still take joy in relating to animals. Is that because at the point where their brain was looking for a social response it found it in small furry creatures and attached a healthy dose of endorphins to even the thought of them? I sat for a moment and compared my feelings about friends I had over this weekend with what I was feeling for my pet house rabbits.

I enjoyed getting up and fixing breakfast for the guys as I tend to enjoy nurturing people and one of the guys doesn't have any family at all. It was mother's day and I was glad he could be with us. I enjoyed playing games with them the night before. However, in terms of FEELING, in terms of the way my mood lifted, thinking about seeing my pets gave me a much more physical, tangible pleasure. It made me high even though they had much less to offer me in terms of interaction (other than a dirty pen to clean!!). I felt like we were part of each other. My body reacted to thoughts of them with a feeling of well-being. I wondered...is that what most people feel when they contemplate a night out with friends??

I also contemplated the reverse, people who were frightened by a large dog in childhood and continued to have issues with dogs all of their lives. They only had to see a dog to be frightened and the dogs seemed to know it! I had a friend recently who was attacked by a dog on a road frequented by runners and walkers. Why did the dog pick her? Probably because she is scared of dogs. Supposedly we can still "smell fear and friendliness" though we don't identify it as a smell, it may be responsible for that uneasy feeling in our stomachs around certain people.

Last night I wrote to a neurologist and asked if any research had been done on the relationship between social extroversion/introversion and related endorphin levels. She is also a psychiatrist with a radio program. If she writes back and seems open to a little more dialog I'm going to ask her about what she knows about NPD moms and related attachment disorders. Perhaps she can steer me to some good reading to share here.

[Ami]

This is interesting.
I have been doing a little "Get Well "program of my own. I found a program on disassociation. It says you MUST force yourself to be real and present.
 I began to force myself to share things I really felt --NOT what I though I should/looked good.
 I was afraid--in a sense--but in another sense--I felt at peace.
This is ME. No one can shame me cuz I am not hiding.
 So--I have found people who are not screwed up the way I am .
 They all say I am normal LOL
 It is strange to think that maybe I AM buried treasure who was always OK---just a regular person with all that entails.
 I am thinking that is the case.
 I called my M --yesterday. She cried that she missed me. I cried but I got off fast LOL
 Can't take a good thing too far with an N 
 No--Siree.
 My relationship with my guy is different. I try to take my hands off it .
 I can be real and that is beautiful.
 It is a winner relationship if you and he can be real.
 You can't hold on to anything --really. Death is gonna take us all away--anyway
         


                                                                                                                                                               Ami

[Meh]

I had normal routines with my childhood pet cat. I would feed her when she meowed, I would let her in or out when she mewed. She would follow me around outside in grassy fields. I would get catnip mouses for her. I remember my cat making eye contact with me.
I don't remember my mother making eye contact with me as a kid. I would guess that she did but I have no recollection of that as a child.
If my mother and my cat had photos in my highschool year book, I would look back at my cat and think "that was my friend", I would look back at my mother and think "I never knew that person very well, only passed in the hallways".

I think Narcissistic people are constantly threatened by their own children. Any child emotion, any child individuality.

[Sealynx]

Helen,
 I would bet that children who always had a pet did learn nurturing, eye contact, empathy, intuition and a host of other relational skills from the pet. This did not stop the brain from labeling social interaction with people as a cause for either no endorphins or added adrenal secretions because it was unrelated. So the skill set is there to relate to people, but the reward isn't.

[Meh]

S: This is fascinating topic. I have never considered the Nar-issue from quite this angle before-in terms of endorphins vs adrenalin.

[Gaining Strength]

Gaining Strength,
I agree that we can learn.  My social skills have always been below my peers.  But through reading and learning I learned to function in a social setting, engage in conversation, restrain my antisocial comments.  But the learning has not made me feel better about myself.  I anticipate that I will not fit in, that others will prefer the company of someone other than me.  Deep down I feel I am a misfit in society.  I am never relaxed, even with those I have known for decades.  Outwardly, I am normal.  Inside, I wait for the rejection.  I expect to always be alone.

Logy - have you tried any techniques to challenge those thoughts?  Paricularly the thoughts right here, " I anticipate that I will not fit in, that others will prefer the company of someone other than me.  Deep down I feel I am a misfit in society.  I am never relaxed, even with those I have known for decades."  I have found and continue to find that identifying such thoughts and processing them is a very powerful agent of change for me.  I have used Jeffrey Schwartz' 4 Steps, Ruiz' Four Agreements, EFT and now Byron Katie's The Work to help me shift these beliefs that are obstacles to the life I believe should be mine.  Each of us respond to different concepts, perhaps there are others that would work for you.  But the first question would be would you like to let go of these thoughts and then do you believe you can.  If you answer "yes" to both then I encourage you to start your journey by looking for a process that feels great and conforms to your belief system.  

Sending great encouragement and hope to you.

Just read more and want to add.

Regarding friends that I had as a child and adolescent, NM either criticized the friend or criticized the way I interacted with them.  According to NM, I never made a good choice.  And if I confided something I said to them, it was always wrong.  As an adult I see now that NM made the same mistakes she accused me of.  And has no long term friends. 

One thing I do remember is always wanting to move to a different place.  To start over.  Where nobody knows me and I can try again.

The intangible.  That intangible that is just out of my reach.  Could be that attractive energy.  So am I a born introvert?  Or was I made a loner?  Seems to me a born introvert would feel good about themselves.  A loner feels bad about themselves.]
If you are at all like me, then it would be possible to assume that you are "stuck" in the emotional reaction that you experienced when your mother criticized your friend or your interaction.  That it happened repeatedly over time suggests that your reaction probably was repeated as well and became a kind of cement that stuck you so that when the thought of making a friend came to you it also called up the anticipation of the negative emotional reaction to your mother's harsh and painful criticism. That would be enough to cause that entire natural longing to make friends come to a grinding halt.  (I, of course am speaking out of me own experience.  Apply it if it fits and throw away if not.)

I also see as an adult that my mother constantly projected onto me her own mistakes and fears and shorcomings.  But I am also seeing, that even though I have lived into these things for years that I do not have to continue to repeat these patterns.  My freedom has not come by wishing or hoping but be finding a way to bring up these painful experiences and processing that pain and eventually releasing it.