Running your life like a business

Sklyar, in response to your post that began “Wow, Star, that’s a great story”, you remember when I wrote “the enemy is us”?

The narcissistic wound sociopaths reflect back to us is ours. Read your second paragraph. You tell a story about the situation with your parents. You describe a result on your behavior. You say something about your beliefs about yourself.

The unasked question is why? What is it about you that makes you unworthy to ask for what you want or a favor? And which certainly would make you ineligible to make demands on other people.

I went to a weekend training for non-violent communication. This particular weekend was focused on self-compassion. We did an exercise in which we were required to come up with the worst piece of negative self-talk we had. Mine was: “there is something wrong with me.” And then, when we had to come up with some of its subsets, mine were “Everyone can see it,” “It ruins everything in my life,” and “I don’t know how to fix it.”

It took me back to two existential questions that I’d worked on in therapy. One was the question of whether I felt welcome in the world as a child. The other was whether I deserved anything at all. To be loved, to be cared for or appreciated at all.

What the sociopath in my life did was play on those wounds. He made me feel bigger and more confident. And he made me feel smaller and totally inadequate. He did all this because of his own narcissistic wounds, but why he did it is beside the point. The fact that those wounds existed in me was why he could do it at all.

A huge percentage of the people here on Love Fraud come from abusive backgrounds growing up. And when we talk about being damaged, that’s not just a saying. Our identities did not develop properly. We didn’t grow up with a sense of healthy entitlement, the idea that we were intrinsically valuable and deserving of compassion and support.

This sociopathic side of us is the part that was suppressed. (People on the NSP side of the spectrum have another part of their natural character suppressed.) We give up directly wanting and asking for what we want, in favor of trusting that if we’re good enough, it would be noticed and everything would work out okay for us. Unlike more direct people who go after what they want directly, we became focused on making our relationships so perfect that other people would make the decision to give us what we need. If we ask, it’s inserting ourselves into the other person’s process, not allowing them to do this naturally, because they realize how wonderful we are. It’s almost against our religion to ask. (Especially since we were well-trained as kids that our best chance to get our needs met was to make other people happy, or keep them from getting mad.)

It is not sociopathic to ask for what we want, to go after it and make it more important than what other people want, and to eliminate obstacles from our path. It is efficient. Much more efficient than being wonderful and waiting around hoping that someone else notices and rewards us.

However it is what the sociopaths can do, and we can’t. At least when we get involved with them. And that may not be true of all of us at the beginning. Some of us are somewhat assertive when we meet them. But in the polarization of roles that typically occurs when a feeling person deals with an NSP, we become more and more feeling, because we become more and more confused, hurt and inefficient in dealing with someone who has no social rules at all. And by the end, most of us have polarized out to something that looks an awful lot like borderline personality disorder — obsessed with one person who we assign all power to make us whole, capable of doing just about anything (or a lot more than our previous value system would allow) to make them supply our needs, unstable, unable to deal very well with ordinary reality, etc. And it’s not a coincidence that BPD is out at the end of the dependent spectrum of personality disorders. The sociopaths light a fire under nice, functional, garden-variety codependents and make them a thousand times worse.

And they do that, largely, by showing us their narcissistic wounds. Their neediness, their paradoxical grandiosity, their ruthlessness (which looks like strength to us), their shallow sentimentality (which looks like sensitivity to us), and their hunger for a new source (which looks like strong feelings for us). But mostly it’s their need we relate to. We get involved, one way or another, with an agreement to help them. Because we’re so good at that. It’s the way we create our sources of approval, appreciation and love. All that indirect method of getting what we need.

So the good news is this. In driving us into the most extreme expression of our wounds — please love me, please appreciate me, please recognize that I exist at all — they show us how faulty our strategies for living are. Why can they be so direct, when we can’t? As I’ve written here before, with mine, I became conscious of him winning and me losing at every decision, every crossroads of our relationship. I never even thought about winning and losing before I met him. I was always looking for a grade. How am I doing? I am loving you enough that you love me back. Am I giving you enough that you’ll give me back what I need? With him, thinking like that gradually went out the window.

But I didn’t know what to replace it with, until I worked a while on recovering. I couldn’t be like him. He was brutal, uncaring, really vicious. I didn’t want to be him. But I ultimately realized that he really did have something that I didn’t, even if I didn’t want to be just like him. He took care of himself. And I didn’t.

As I said, I had to do some therapy, and later kept working on the ideas through other studies. Learning how to take care of myself was a gradual process. When I first started trying to do it, I was both extremely defensive and still carrying some old ideas about “making” other people give me what I needed by manipulating them emotionally. It was the best skill I had. It took a while to learn how to be frank about how I felt and what I needed or wanted, and to discover that kind of honesty actually worked better. It was very scary at first to be that exposed.

Another thing that happen at the NVC weekend was that I learned that my “something wrong with me” self-talk was really about something else. It was about a lack of trust in myself. That when I looked at myself, I saw lfaults in my character and capabilities. I had no faith in my ability to carry anything through. And I think that this, too, was part of that narcissistic wound. I was discouraged from focusing on my own ideas and plans, in favor of focusing on other people’s wishes and intentions. I was essentially told that whatever I wanted and was willing to work for was no good. It didn’t fit into the objectives of the big people who had power over my life. And that idea was enforced with the kind of emotional and physical punishment that makes a big impression on a child.

So, I came to realize that my fears about becoming a sociopath were, to a great degree, the learning of that era. That if I thought my ideas were more important that I would be bad, that no one would love me, that I would be punished as a selfish girl.

Narcissistic wounds like this literally block our development as whole human beings. Whole human beings are not embarrassed about wanting things, asking for them, working for them openly, walking away from situations that don’t meet their needs, and judging those situations (and people) as bad for them. It doesn’t mean they’re not capable of loving or caring about how things come out for other people. But for them, it’s a choice. They don’t spread altruism in all directions, no matter what they get back. They’re enlightened altruists, not casting their pearls before swine.

After the sociopath, my recovery involved developing those traits that I didn’t have. Getting them out of my shadow self and into the light. Self-interest. The ability to get angry. The capacity to judge without apologies. And the entitlement to make my life what I wanted it to be. I refer to all this in a kind of fondly joking way as my inner sociopath, but it was really me all along. I just had it all twisted up inside of me, because of fear of not being loved or accepted.

If you can manage it, don’t worry about other people’s feelings of inadequacy. We all have them occasionally, and we do we tend to act them out in some way. We may think we’re hiding them, but if we’re feeling them, we’re probably acting them out. It’s just being human. Which is what they’re being. Our responsibility is to recognize these feelings in ourselves, find their sources and heal them.

That what my sociopath did for me. He made me recognize these feelings in myself and see how I was acting them out. He did it my triggering them more powerfully than anyone had ever done before, and make me act out of them more dramatically than I ever had before. Until I just had to look at myself, and say “What’s going on here?”

Namaste.

Kathy