This is a big topic, and I fully intend to flesh it out in future posts. But allow me, here, to consider this question from the perspective of the work I do with couples. It is often surprisingly easy, from a couples therapy perspective, to weed out the narcissists from the non-narcissists; and more importantly, the salvageable from the unsalvageable narcissists.
Narcissists, as we know, will struggle to see things from their partners’ perspective. But let’s be clear: it is the reasons they struggle with this, not that they struggle with it, that signals their narcissism.
At the risk of oversimplifying, narcissists struggle to appreciate their partners’ perspective fundamentally because they are deeply self-centered; and their self-centeredness does not arise from a neuro-developmental disorder.
But why do narcissists struggle to see things from their partners’ perspective? Mainly, because to do so, in their experience, would concede the primacy—the overwhelming significance and importance—of their wants and needs.
For narcissistic personalities, the mere notion of others questioning the primacy of their experience is felt variously as insulting, outrageous, unacceptable, threatening and punishable.
In contrast, less narcissistic personalities are less threatened to consider their partners’ perspective, because they have a more equitable view of whose perspective matters. To be clear, for less narcissistic individuals, their perspective matters a lot, but their partners’ perspective also matters a lot.
But I want to be very clear: it’s not that less narcissistic personalities don’t take their own perspectives seriously, maybe even more seriously than their partners’; it’s just that they’re not inflexibly wedded to the idea that their experience—how they feel, how they think, what they want, what they need—is always, by definition, more important and valid than their partners’!
Believe it or not, this is a virtual litmus test for problem levels of narcissism. When I work with couples, I am interested to encourage, and then see, something very important. I’m interested to encourage, first of all, the idea that “validating” your partner’s experience is not the same as endorsing it, agreeing with it, or even, necessarily, fully understanding it.
And “validating” your partner’s experience certainly doesn’t obligate you to abandon your own, possibly very different perception of the situation.
And so I often discuss this model of validation with couples in some depth—especially, the idea that you can recognize your partner’s experience; be willing, interested and curious to appreciate, and better understand, your partner’s experience, from her perspective; and recognize the sanity and sense of your partner’s experience, again from her perspective, without any of this effort and interest requiring you to concede your own, and perhaps very different, experience of the situation.
As you can see, validating, in this model, is the process of recognizing your partner’s experience from her perspective. It is not a process, as noted, of necessarily agreeing with, or even fully understanding your partner; and most certainly—and I can’t stress this enough— it is not a contest of whose perceptions of any given situation are more accurate and right, versus less accurate and more wrong.
Many find this a liberating concept, as it can allow for a relaxation of a common and unhelpful defense: I can’t validate what you’re saying or feeling, because to do so would effectively invalidate my experience.
In other words, from the perspective I’m describing, it’s possible—indeed, with motivation and practice, surpisingly easy—to validate another’s experience without in the least invalidating your own. In fact, this is a model of validation that’s relatively easy to practice because it respects the integrity of one’s own perceptions and experiences.
Once the need for the above defense is removed—and I work hard with couples to remove it—the couple’s capacity to appreciate each others’ experiences of each other often improves significantly.
Partners discover that, because the integrity of their personal experience is preservable, they can actually listen to each others’ experiences with more interest, curiosity and less defensiveness.
In marriages in which some goodwill remains, partners who buy into the model of validation I’m describing often find themselves striving for even more—that is, more than merely endeavoring to listen to each other more effectively, they often find themselves striving to make their partner’s experiences less frustrating and more satisfying.
Conversely, where no goodwill remains in the relationship, everything I’m discussing becomes pretty much moot. Narcissist or not, the marriage, with no goodwill left, is almost certainly dead. It’s just awfully difficult to recover goodwill in a relationship when the “goodwill tank” begins in the therapist’s office with the arrow on empty.
In any case, what happens in my office is often very interesting. The highly narcissistic and, in extreme cases, sociopathic client, cannot do what I’m discussing. Specifically, he is unable, with sincerity and effectiveness, to apply the model of validation I’ve described.
I suggested above the reason for this: he is simply too deeply, inflexibly invested in the significance, if not superiority, of his experience to make enough room for genuine interest in his partners’ experience, even after he’s been introduced to, and given ample time to digest, the proposed model of validation.
That is, this model of validation still falls well short of his demands. Sure, it’s nice that his partner is making efforts to recognize and appreciate his experience from his perspective. He’ll certainly take that, but he wants more than that.
Not surprisingly, what’s necessary—that is, what he still insists on and continues to demand—is his partner’s total capitulation to his way of seeing things.
This is the essence of his narcissism or, if you prefer, his deep, immutable self-centeredness.
Will these individuals show their cards immediately? More often than not, yes. More often than not, whether in my office or outside it (between therapy sessions), they’ll demonstrate, sooner than later, their inability to apply the kind of mutual validation under discussion.
But what about the smooth manipulator? It’s true that a smooth operator, a sociopath, for instance, can fake this process for some time, if he perceives it’s in his selfish interest to do so. (By “fake it,” I mean that he may seem to grasp it, apply it, and be invested in it.)
Yet, in my experience, even the manipulative individual masquerading as sensivitely invested in this form of validating communication, will almost always, sooner than later, reveal chinks in his mask; almost always, sooner than later, he’ll lapse into the highly self-centered attitudes and behaviors of the classic narcissist—attitudes and behaviors characterized by high, rationalized levels of under-accountability and non-transparency.
And so, while the slick manipulator may “get over” for a while, it’s usually not for long. That is, while he may present, initially, as reasonable, flexible and motivated, sooner than later his disguise will fray, revealing his true agenda in the forms of his usual presumptions and entitlement to ongoing gratification.
And so who is the salvageable partner? Narcissist or not, I’d venture to suggest he’s the partner capable of understanding, and appreciating, the concept of validation I propose.
He will be highly motivated to apply it, which is to say, willing to work hard, consistently and sustainedly at applying it; and, of course, he must be capable of applying it.
But the nice thing is, if he’s willing to work hard at it, he’ll definitely succeed.
In which case he won’t be a narcissist or, at the very least, his narcissism will prove to have been less extreme, and less emotionally crippling, than we might have feared.
(This article, the first of several impending articles on this subject, is copyrighted © 2010 by Steve Becker, LCSW. My use of male gender pronouns in this article was purely for convenience’s sake. Females are also capable of the attitudes and behaviors discussed.)
Psyche, I apologize for the delayed response to your wonderful response. I so relate to everything you say.
And I don’t know if this will sound horribly inappropriate but when I read this, the following paragraph, I laughed out loud:
“I apologise for being so ME ME ME ME ME, I’m struggling, on a crazy emotional trip hanging on by the nails..the need for revenge is giving way to the need to express anger”so can I start by saying, I am really really angry”.really really incredibly angry, so angry I get all hot in the head and face”my face has set into a sour grapes expression, battleaxe like and bitter, I have tension in my shoulders and neck”I woke up in the middle of the night not knowing where I was”and every time I come to”I have to remember the P and what happened all over again.”
I know it’s not funny to have to go through this. But it’s really excellent that you’re moving into this state. I can’t tell you how long it took me to get angry, and largely because I was afraid of what it would make me. I had visions of myself as a perpetually bitter, sarcastic, sour-faced old hag until the day I died, if I allowed myself to get mad.
That good old childhood training about how no one would love me if I wasn’t Mary Sunshine all the time. And I loved it when you talked about being true to yourself, even if other people get pissed off.
You know they will. And it’s really, really okay. You know this. Real people have disagreements, and sometimes live with them forever without it affecting their love for each other. Beyond that, a person who is even mildly self-interested can be a real problem in a thoroughly codependent group, like a lot of families are. (You’ve probably read about how the exit from the drama triangle is to become “the perpetrator.” Once you start looking out for your own interests and telling the truth about what you see and how you feel, once you start refusing to be either a victim or a rescuer, then you become a very “bad” person.)
You wrote about the people who can trust their gut reactions and the people whose gut reactions are a little vague or trigger a lot of self-questioning. I’d suggest to you that we all have perfectly accurate gut reactions. The problem is that they’re being blocked by two things. One is social training designed to keep us compliant with things that are NOT in our best interest. The other is the neurotically twisted emotional states that evolve from stuffing our healthy reactions and not taking care of ourselves.
So it’s there inside you. Your challenges is to clear the path between your healthy reactions and your conscious mind. And that’s really a way of defining recovery.
Which bring us back to anger. I would guess that virtually everyone who gets involved long-term with a sociopath has a problem with admitting and expressing anger. And that means that we have a backlog of resentment, frustration and flat-out outrage that goes even further back than this relationship. So when you finally take the lid off it, it can be pretty overwhelming. My therapist said that it’s common for people to fear that their anger will destroy the world. And then when they finally start to experience it, it’s like they’re on fire with it.
I called it my flamethrower phase. I was seeing betrayals, insensitivity, and all kinds of bad behavior everywhere I looked. I tore up virtually all my existing relationships with friends and family, accusing them of all kinds of things. (I later repaired the ones I wanted to keep, which were all the people who were perceptive enough to recognize what was going on with me and mature enough to realize — after they’d processed through their own hurt feelings — that it really wasn’t about them at all.)
If you’re feeling like that, I promise you it won’t last too long. You will be kind of startled for a longer period about how much of a role anger comes to play in your life. But that’s just because you are just getting used to having a normal emotional spectrum. Healthy people say “no,” and they say easily and without a lot rancor. Just no. And if things escalate, healthy people say, “Piss off” and walk away. And if the problem won’t get out of your face, healthy people use their anger as a tool, to give them the narrow focus and emotional/physical energy to fix the problem.
And yes, it’s a very self-centered emotion, because it’s about taking care of a threat. You’re not being perceptive and compassionate. You’re handling a problem. You can return to a more expansive state later, when you’re world is in order again.
So finally, I suggest that as you get to understand and accept your anger, you’ll also become a lot more connected with your gut and it’s reactions. There are other energy centers in your body that are about the various forms of “yes.” But your gut is generally about “no.”
Just because you have a gut reaction doesn’t mean you have to act on it. We sentient creatures have a kind of hierarchy of processing. The gut reaction is toward the bottom. Given that we have this wonderful nervous and intellectual system, where we can process gut reactions up through our more complex emotions and then into our reasoning intellect, it makes sense to give ourselves time to let the reaction move up to the higher levels of processing. If we can. If our lives are not at stake. Or we’re facing something else that requires immediate handling. (Like facing the rest of dinner with an unbearably boring or obnoxious first date, when we could just as easily plead a headache and get out of there.)
I hope all this makes sense. I’m trying to give you a framework of viewing what’s going on with you. You doing very well, right on the path, moving in the right direction.
I recognize something else of myself in you. You know intellectually more than you’ve grokked at the lower levels. When I was actively healing, I wrote constantly, and sometimes I’d get really frustrated because I realized that I was “smarter” in talking about things than I was in understanding my feelings or reacting to what happened in my life.
I have a theory that we’re all existing at a lot of levels. And at some level, we’re perfect, totally without confusion, free of bad training, in touch with our feelings and with our spiritual core. We already know everything we’re learning. But what we’re doing in healing is untangling and clearing out the beliefs and twisted emotions and habits that keep us from being so clear and being okay with our experience — joy, suffering, triumphs, mistakes, learning, failing, the whole gorgeous business of life.
That housekeeping is what you’re doing, and it’s just the best adventure in the world. Or so I think. I’ve finally gotten down to reading “The Pathwork of Self-Transformation” by Eva Pierrakos. I’ve had it on the shelf for a decade or two, nibbled at it occasionally when I was trying to conceptualize my healing path, but I’m finally ready to read it now. There is some amazing stuff in there about the difference in social attitudes between a dependent child and a competent adult. You might find it useful.
Okay, I’m out of here again. Still buried in work. But I truly wish you the best and applaud your progress. You’re doing great.
Kathy
Kathy
every word accurate, full of heart, it’s like you read my head perfectly and I can feel myself relax. I appreciate your response so much I would rate it as my first therapy session without being face to face with someone in a room. I will keep this post with me because it’s like a lamplight full of hope….. was worth it to be expressive because look what I got, a genuine resonse the equivalent of Gold. I will comment further tomorrow. But for now, I’m so satisfied with the help that just keeps coming from the most extraordinary women of all time here on lovefraud.
not forgetting Hens…an extraordinary male!!!
Bullet 🙂 I came back. But I find have nothing else to say:) I think Kathy said a lot there.. to anyone.:) xxx It’s really good:)x
Dear Bullet – What a nice thing to say, thank you…
(Hmm apart from the use of the word grokked )
Thank You Steve,
There is much to be learned here. I know many wonder about couple’s counseling and if it would have made a difference.
If the person is a true narcissist I would say no.
I attended 9 months of marriage counseling and watched the counselor become frustrated week after week. The counseling always came back to how he was slighted or how he was wronged. He could never accept blame for any of his actions
and could never see anything wrong in his actions.
The counselor had tried everything in a way to hold no blame to either but to assign each of us a form of homework we could do at home. This lasted until we were out of the office then right back to the same behavior and anything that happened wrong was my responsiblity.
One day the counselor asked him point blank if he could even try to consider placing himself in my shoes? He kept telling her he could not understand the question. Then she tried to reword it to say: What if your wife said this to you or you found this when you arrived home?” He stated he could still not understand the question and she could not understand how wronged he was. He became aggitated and went on and on how bad of a wife I was and how he was doing nothing wrong.
At this point I tried to enter into the conversation. This is when he grabbed my face to face his. He began reciting his version, his views and how things really were in his eyes.
At this point the counselor told him why did you just do that?
He asked her “What?” The counselore stated “You just grabbed her face.” He denied it. The counselor stated “I just saw you grab her face.” He again denied it. She stated again I saw the action and there is no reason for me to lie.
He stated this was to get my attention. That he did not hurt me but needed to get my attention. She stated “How would you feel if your wife did this to you?” He said he did not understand the question. The counselor stated “Can’t you just for one minute try to place yourself in your wife’s shoes?” He again said he did not understand the question. That she was not making any sense. He went on that she could not understand all he had been through and was not helping.
This is when the counselor stated that he was unable to feel empathy. A sad look crossed her face as she looked at me and I knew we were in dire trouble. After this she told him he should have never married, as a relationship does require at least mininum empathy to be able to relate to one another.
bulletproof, thanks for your kind comments. I just went back to read your comments on this thread.
I was initially a little put off by the psychobabble comment. Though I’ve had my own irritations with all the quickness to categorize people, because it seems to remove all complexity of memory or subtlety of analysis. But settling on these names can be a necessary simplification, so we can stop obsessing about what they are, and get on with our healing.
Anyway, reading on through your posts, I saw what you’re going through. As you said, this unleashing of anger. And all the prickliness and outspokenness and demands for acknowledgement that goes with it.
One of the things about anger is that it’s really a social emotion. It not just reactive, but we want to interact. Whether it’s to have an argument or to have someone witness our verbalizing and acting out and to reassure us that we have reason. It’s not something we want to do alone, because there’s no release and it can feel like it’s eating us up.
When I wasn’t blowing off anyone foolhardy enough to get close to me in my flamethrower stage, I wrote through it. Mostly to my ex (unsent letters). One of the wonderful things about anger is that it really clarifies the mind. We get over all that second-guessing about ourselves and get clear about our offense at what was done to us. The external trigger to our anger becomes better defined, and there’s a powerful feeling of … well, personal power in just standing up and staying, “This was wrong. I refuse to accept or support it anymore, even in memory.”
And that naturally evolves into a new stage of thinking about how to take better care of ourselves. First, improving our boundaries and defensive skills. Then moving on to getting more focused on what we want, and releasing the need to get anyone else permission to want it or pursue it.
You mentioned finding some talk therapy, or maybe some Gestalt work in punching pillows or talking to empty chairs. When I read that piece of your post, I wondered if you’ve considered taking a self-defense course for women. I took one with a black belt who taught me to fight off two men blindfolded, as well as to sharpen my awareness of my environment. It really changed a lot for for me in terms of reducing my anxiety, which I think is a big part of anger. It also helped me work off some of that angry energy in a way that was educational and productive.
When I was healing, I felt like I’d lost connection with my spiritual center. Actually I lost it in the relationship with that terrible man, as I became more and more depressed and self-hating. Because I kept loving him and hoping it could turn out okay, while he systematically looted or destroyed virtually everything important in my life.
But in retrospect, I think that there was huge spiritual component in the healing process, and it really kicked in when I got angry. Because if there’s one consistent piece in the dialog between my conscious self and my spiritual it’s the question: “What do you want to do with this situation, Kathy?” I felt that question filtered through whatever emotional state I was in. And in the angry phase, I rose up out of the depressive slump and decided I wanted to take back control of my life.
In retrospect, I think I made one big mistake in my healing process, despite the fact that it generated some really great thinking and writing. I wasn’t nearly active enough. I didn’t use my body to let off steam. When I did, or when I even made the effort to get away from myself and just revisit the world, I found that it speeded up my production of insights and it also seemed to help my endorphin level. I felt better, less victimized by my own huge feelings.
So I don’t know if any of this helps, but it’s offered with compassion and optimism. It will get better for you, and soon. You won’t stay in this big anger. It may come back when you’ve got another bit to process, but each time you know more about the process, and your own feelings are less intimidating. And eventually you become cool with it.
I had a blow-up this week with a client who kept me waiting six weeks for a check, and then started bypassing me to talk to my contacts. First internally. I felt so angry I thought the top of my head was going to come off. But I knew what it was, and even the probable timing of when I’d have it pretty well intellectualized. So, I chose to act when I was still mad. As a result, the check will be here by Federal Express tomorrow. But I made a conscious choice of how I used that energy, and that’s what different for me now than when anger used to be something I was afraid of.
Your anger is righteous. You have it for a good reason. If you go ahead and feel it now, you’ll get to know it and become friends with it. Your on the right path.
Kathy
Clearly, blueskies, you have not yet surrendered to the fact that there is no elegant synonym for “grok.”
It’s unfortunate that the word sounds like a hobbit’s toe jam, but it is the only word that means what it means.
That lovely, soft sinking of a ten-ton puzzle piece into the primordial swamp when a hard-won insight finally percolates down to the brainstem, and we don’t have to remember the words anymore because it becomes part of us.
Like when I grokked, after living through one lesson after another, the simple fact that I didn’t have to care what other people though of me. It wasn’t that simple when it started percolating down. There were lots of stories attached, lots of evidence and arguments, and finally a decision that was something like “screw it.” But that worked its way down through all the various levels of emotional concerns and addictions related to the issue. And when when it finally got released to drop to the bottom of the ladder, it was something like giving up and something like freedom. As far as the brainstem was concerned, it was just a chance to turn down the anxiety and have more chest space to breath. And with that, the big shake-out was completed and I don’t even think about it anymore, unless I see someone stressing over what people think of him or her.
I think therapists would call it integration. I like grokking better.
Oops, did I overreact? Oh well, it’s been a long day. Thank you, dear blueskies for your nice words about my post. And I honor our differences about grokking.
Kathy
Sierra2008
It’s so weird….what a chilling account of therapy with a P!! I’m shocked yet I went through similar sessions with the P….he was’nt remotely nervous beforehand, he lied to the therapist, he yeah yeah’d in the right places and pretended to go with the flow…the therapist looked baffled…I was so nervous and embarrassed I just wanted to get out of there…but It never even crossed my mind he was a psychopath…I didnt know it at the time what that was…I just felt my skin crawl as he dodged every direct question and slithered around the truth with an even gaze….and he said a very strange thing when the counselor asked him what he would do if I cheated on him…he said well that would make her more interesting!!!!!!!aaaaaaaargh and the therapist laughed!!! what kind of therapy was that!!! it’s only in hindsight I get it, but I get shocked all over again when I remember my puzzlement…I was bewildered, bamboozled, bedazzled and temporarily insane walking around with shots of adrenalin going off every hour on the hour as it began to drop…the love of my life is a psychopath…not a sociopath, not a narcissist, not a cluster of bees but a great big stonking psychopath.