Very long post!! (prize for those who reach the end...!).
I've been wanting to share about this, its what Ive come to understand... the thread by NLS, and the coversations arising made me feel able to start it. I want to try to share what I see and make it understandable, even useful, so responses, feedback, all apprecaited.
Continuing from what Hops said, .............
To me tho, its not about women, its about a principle, and I see this principle resurrected in any culture or social/ ethnic/ gender group. It happens that as sexuality becomes a commodity, woment become a commodity too. Using people as disposable commodities is basically an N principle. I was brought up with 'guilt' for my mum. Only late into my adulthood I realised that what she wanted from me was nothing to do with
me. I was disposable if I was in the way of something she wanted better. Yet she wasnt a
BAD N like some people have survived here.
It was the hidden agenda about which I was inconsolable and that had got inside me. And I think I split that part off to protect the rest of me. I tried to explode it out of me via my sexuality, and tried to fix or cure it by wanting to resolve the damage inside my 'other', my compulsive love addiciton to an N., feeling for, and could see his inner damage, and thought we could heal together, but I ommitted to check this out with him, (minor oversite!).
That split off part of me that ~ in fantasy~ went along with all the worst of it, expressed the most absurd extremes of behaviour in fantasy, whilst in reality I had an ethical, deeply humanistic ethos. A split, a split off part of me, that I believe was an attempt to keep my soul safe from the N principles that had got inside me.
Throughout my adult life I iether acted out or searched for understanding and healing. I believe that my acting out with compulsive, destruciver relationships was not a 'defence' as some psychology would have it, but an attempt to exorcise what shouldn't have got inside me in the first place.
Finally, when I read first Vaknin, then Masterson, I had the full understanding.
There was so much denial about my mother's Nism, she was what Masterson calls a 'closet' N. Its all about her, but she's more victim than grandiose, and so everyone is bent out of shape with guilt, and particulary me. Shame became a central issue for me, and I struggle with that today.
When I was teenage and the need to separate and be my own person hit, it hit with fierce disgust towards my mother, and I went into exile, lived in a dreamworld, and that then was my schizoid position, at a distance and unable to properly connect with reality. Ran away from school, into exile, aloneness and confusion. And when I fell in love it was impossible, my self esteem was so low.
Eventually falling in love with an N that was the other half of the schizoid split, the slave/master relationship and brought me to my first rock bottome and into recovery.
For me the ourtrageous N was somenow a big attraction, the naughty boy N who challenged the status quo, anything, that, in my unconscous felt like it would challenge my mothers draining deadening grip, and something outrageous, dysfunctional and
VISIBLE unlike my mother's which was hidden.
So that is how, when I read about the disorders of the self, because this had been with me persistently thro my life, and I'd searched high and low to cure myself, so I discovered thats
IT! I've got a personitly disorder. Yes, I could see how much the N mother was at the root of it, however, I considered it mine now, to cure. (And oh boy, seeking the cure was another thing altogether, so few professionals understand) But in the process, I read and read, and came to see the the whole DYNAMIC in that it wasnt just about Ns and their victims, but there was a triad that kept the whole thing circulating, between the Ns the Borderlines and the Schizoids. (Which I call Ns Bs and Xs to get away from the pathologising scientificising of it).......
For example, my father she blamed for everything, projected all her unhappyness onto him as the cause, and alientaed us against him, he was in the exile part of the split. Then one sister was the Borderline, she never broke away from my mother, was devoted to her, she was seen as the one that needed protecting and looking after, (reward/ relationship on the basis of regression, victim/ dramas), for example my mother took over for her and wrote out her university work for her, (where ~ I would rather have died than that happen) And my othe sister was primed to hold the self esteem of the whole famliy, the first born, and indeed, grew up to be charming, and clever, a high achiever, and organises the world around her, by her own admission, is like mother, doesnt mind who she steps on to get her way, yes, she became the n. Yet my family are basically decent, not extreme by normal standards, yet I see these patterns continue, mosty out of sight, so it seemed that
I was the extreme one, used to feel totally alienated in family gatherings, in exile, now handle it better - usually.
And I see these patterns everywhere I go. I see the dynamics everywhere.. Everywhere that humans comply with the prevailing ethos in a group, fail to think for themselves, giving up the search for honesty and truth, instead they feel mostly comfortable because they havent really had to separate, they belong.
I spend so much time alone with the way I see things, and have for long wanted to try to share some of it.
I dont know where this post will lead, but here goes....
prize to follow if you got here....
