Everybody on this site should read Karyl McBride's 'Will I Ever Be Good Enough? Healing the Daughters of Narcissistic'. It's poorly written, and the website is worse, but she's onto something. The patterns that she talks about are a dead-ringer for my own mother. Not that the word 'narcissism' would ever come to mind when interacting with her - overtly, she's amazingly obsequious and generous; but she's lonely judgmental, fearful and repressed inside.
The other thing that it covers is the cause. In my family, there's a history of maternal selfishness and insecurity going back three or four generations, depending on which side you look at.
Finally, it's a step toward making the problem go away. It's amazing what you can do with good old-fashioned self-care once you decide that you deserve it.
I see a fair amount of discussion on this forum that runs along the lines of 'What was wrong with you as a kid?' Where's the control group? The first few pages of Claude Bernard's Introduction to Experimental Medicine will argue that you need to know the physiology before you can define the pathology. Kids do all sorts of things. They pull hair; they bite nipples; they act out; they vary in how long it takes to potty-train. If mothers judged infants, we'd be extinct.
I've often baby-sat friends' kids; none have been younger than two or three, but that's often when the 'trouble' starts. I didn't have the problems that my mother had, even though I'm a guy and the kid that I spent by-far the most time with was actually a lot like I was at his age. It's not that there weren't problems, but that nobody involved got upset about them. We loved the kids. You either want them or you don't, and it's not a baby's job to edify adults.
One thing that we noticed twas that he would mirror our emotions; if we were in a rotten mood, he'd be crabby to. If he didn't get what he needed, he'd act out, but it's hard for me to blame a kid who depend on adults for food and waste disposal for asserting himself.
Empathy isn't projecting your emotions onto others; that's narcissism, and my mother would have never tolerated my doing that to her. That's the double-standard. Really, empathy is allowing someone else's emotions to be superimposed over your own. That makes sense for a mother (or other primary caregiver) raising an infant - the infant can't act in its own interest - and for a spouse whose partner is also unable due to care of their kid.
My mother would also reject support from my father to assert her independence, which meant that she was often on the verge of breakdown behind her projection of rationalism. There's a difference between emotional suspension and suppression. If you can't do the former, you either blow or become jaded. My father then felt unappreciated and unrespected, so there were two emotionally-needy people who couldn't offer any support. It makes you grow up fast, intellectually at least, but it hurts your ability to understand your emotions.
What stands out about my mother is that she's smart and educated. She's a good enough sophist to make quite a few things seem reasonable. She was always perfect on the outside, and made us try to seem so too, but home life was horrible. (I grew up in a garbage house, despite how well-off they were.) That's exactly what this book is about. It also talks about the fathers who enable them, and they deserve at least as much criticism.
Also, read the Scientific American article titled 'The Expert Mind'. It's a perfect description of the parallel, systematic thinking style of savants. I sometimes wonder whether it's an adaptation to dealing with neglect; you need to predict what's going to happen in order to look out for yourself. Especially when the person causing trouble is a smart manipulator, a linear approach doesn't work. They change their behavior until they get what they're unable to get in a healthy way.
Finally, read 'Stop! You're driving me crazy!' There's a line between healthy nonverbal communication and passive aggression. Nonverbal cues are plausibly deniable, so manipulators love them.
And for a general devil's advocate, read H. L. Mencken. Regardless of whether you agree with him on any given issue, he's strikingly well-read (he's translated a number of German works, and refers to interesting things that I'd never been told about) and will at least tease your brain.
Last edited by NobodyKnows on 30 Jul 2011, 12:23 pm, edited 3 times in total.
30 Jul 2011, 10:59 am
