The Therapy is Dandy Guidebook to having a Narcissist for a Parent. Chapter 5.

Posted on May 14, 2012 by Therapyisdandy

An ongoing survival guide.

Chapter 5:  Love is a Battlefield

I tend to use way too many warfare metaphors in the therapy session, FYI, I admit that right now for clarity’s sake. This is a survival guide, for goodness sake.

The imminently quotable Sun Tzu said that, “All warfare is based on deception.”

My addendum to that is: The Narcissist is a master of deceptive psychological warfare—they don’t want you to even know there is a battle going on. The battle is between their needs and your emotions.

There has been very revealing research that argues that emotionally invalidating environments are more damaging to children than physically abusive environments. Let me put that more plainly: evidence shows that beating a child unconscious is not as damaging long term as not allowing that child to develop their own emotional understanding of themselves and their world.

Henry, that sounds crazy, you might be thinking.

Let me explain.

If a child has an intense emotional experience, no matter how big or small, and the adult in charge of them continually denies/minimizes/conflates those emotional experiences, blaming the child for some wrongdoing, or provides only peripheral and lackluster feedback to those emotional experiences, the child may develop a poor ability (if any) to trust what is happening to them. To understand if what he or she is experiencing is right or wrong, helpful or hurtful, deserved or criminal.

That’s more harmful than getting beaten. And worthy of a post all by itself. Some other time.

So what are these needs that the narcissist parent is trying to fulfill at the sake of other people’s (their children’s) emotions?

Narcissists are bad with empathy. They view children as extensions of themselves, as useful vessels for their own ego demands. Of course, this is a parental behavior (and some would argue a parental right). But the narcissists take it to the dark side. So, a narcissist in a public park with a crying child who just dropped an ice cream cone, doesn’t see a situation that requires them to be patient and caring and emotionally soothing. The narcissist parent potentially is experiencing frustration and embarrassment at their child acting like a child, and therefore punishes the child for humiliating them.

The child is emotionally confused and invalidated by these kinds of experiences. That child can become an adult who doesn’t believe their emotional experiences are important or meaningful. That they don’t have a right to feel something. Anything.

At the very least it can lead to bottling up anger (or other emotions) that can then lead to depression, or drug use, or eating disorders, and, in general, the danger of becoming a door mat in personal relationships (or having no personal relationships).

It is not just narcissists who can behave this way. Of course. But this is the environment that children of narcissistic parents find themselves in. Before they even can comprehend what is really going on. And because it happens when a child is young and malleable, they come to believe they somehow are responsible for it. Chances are that the child of a narcissistic parent has issues regarding the denial of their own feelings. A fair question to ask yourself is, do you know what your feelings are? Do you know who you are in relation to others? As opposed to the role that the narcissistic parent wanted you to have.

Breaking free from the emotional control and dishonesty of a narcissistic parent can be incredibly eye opening, liberating but still painful. It cannot but fundamentally change your own relationship not just to yourself but to all the relationships you have in your life.

And that’s what Pat Benatar dancing her abusive pimp into submission at the end of the video represents—an end to his emotional (as well as physical) warfare and her decision to live honestly and free from his shenanigans.

I think.

Ms. Benatar is not returning my calls.

Next time: Narcissism begets Capitalism, or Capitalism begets Narcissism.

Requests? Have you been reading the guidebook and have a specific request regarding this topic?  Send me an email with your requests through my homepage.

Posted in Adult Children of Narcissists, Mental health therapy, Therapy | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

The Therapist is Dandy Guidebook to having a Narcissist for a Parent. Chapter 4.

Posted on May 8, 2012 by Therapyisdandy

An ongoing survival guide.

Chapter 4: Darth Vader is your father (or your mother).

Before we get to the always exciting Star Wars analogy, let’s speak of bullies.

Narcissists are like bullies in that they covet territory in order to prove themselves. For a schoolyard bully, that territory could be the playground, the cafeteria or locker room. But for narcissists, the territory they really covet, the territory they lord over, is quite simply you.

Their child.  Their greatest, best offering to the world (other than themselves). Their own opportunity for their very own Mini-Me.

Chances are the narcissist has an enabling spouse on their side, or a spouse that is helpless and/or clueless, or the narcissist is alone and mostly single (and bitter). Better that way since all their energies can be turned toward you and any siblings.

On the surface, you may have been a perfect example of what the parent wants others to see and believe, but underneath that surface, the reality is much, much darker.

When you disappoint a narcissistic parent as a child, the punishment can be cruel and unexpected. The bully shows themselves by projecting all the things they fear about themselves onto your head. The projections may be unconscious or conscious, but they are all their fears, not yours. Over time, a child can easily become confused as to what is their own fault and fears and opposed to what is their parent’s. We call emotional confusion like that a state of enmeshment—the child doesn’t know where their feelings stop or start and where the feelings of their narcissistic parent take over.

This enmeshment is a real problem. People can often let it generalize into other relationships, and other facets of their life. Others can be Jedi Masters at enmeshment in personal relationships, but be devoid of enmeshment in other areas, such as workplace or professional relationships. This is a really interesting piece to take note of. As a child, we are shaped by our parents and the environment, but take the narcissist out of the environment, and the child may naturally develop healthier relationships with appropriate boundaries that don’t cause so much suffering and guilt

Why? It’s a good question. Maybe it has to do with an individual’s attempt to break free from the wounds of childhood and get away from the swamp that is emotional enmeshment.

Which brings us back to Darth Vader.  When we first meet Luke Skywalker, he is desperate for information about his father. He has been told lies, and lives in a perpetually disconnected, unauthentic state where his emotional needs are not being met. Vader’s physical absence during Luke’s childhood can be symbolic of the authentic emotional absence children experience from narcissistic parents.  Basically, Luke is emotionally stunted, and more than a bit whiney.

Luke was striving for the connection we all want from our family: to understand where we come from, to put our own identity in perspective with what has come before us. For all his innocent, earnest strivings, Luke is told lies. And then when he first confronts Darth Vader, he is told the truth—that Vader is his father—and everything changes. Rather than having a spice freighter navigator for a father, his father is now the biggest war criminal in the galaxy.  When Luke denies Vader, as any child within reason tries to deny the manipulation of a narcissistic parent, Vader seriously wounds Luke. The message here is clear: you must obey the parent. Or else.

Still with me?

Despite the many criticisms one can lay at the feet of George Lucas, the psychological need Luke has for a real connection to his father and his subsequent actions to try to save Vader are actually quite genuine and real.

It’s not easy though. The guy needs a new hand to start with. And most of us are not lucky enough to have a Yoda to guide us through our angry late teens/early twenties period.

Confrontations with narcissists don’t work out well.  This has been covered, and Luke losing his hand is your reminder of this. Many adult children of narcissist’s end up moving away, maybe across the country, across the world, or maybe just across the county to get enough distance from their domineering narcissistic parent. You can avoid the problem that way, sure, but not the wound. Luke couldn’t runaway from Vader after discovering he was his father. The need for the connection to our parent is that strong. Some adult children of narcissists will look for a shield to protect themselves from the narcissist. A spouse, an addiction, a job that requires lots of travel, all of these things can act as shields. They provide a physical boundary from the emotional enmeshment one experiences with the narcissistic parent.

After Luke finally learns the truth about Darth Vader, and only after sitting with his emotions and his pain, is Luke moved to try to help him, to try to turn him from the dark side. Luke is moved by his ability to love and to feel empathy for Vader who seriously wounded him in his own effort to make Luke more like himself (the narcissist’s pathological need for perfect mirroring). Why did Luke do this? It’s a plan that both Yoda and Obi Wan Kenobi thought would fail. Because Luke never had a real father. And if your parent is a narcissist, chances are you didn’t have one either.

Continue reading →

Posted in Adult Children of Narcissists, Mental health therapy, narcissism, Therapy | Tagged , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

The Therapy is Dandy Guidebook to having a Narcissist for a Parent. Chapter 3.

Posted on April 25, 2012 by Therapyisdandy

An ongoing survival guide.

Chapter 3-Pyrrhic Victories.

If there is one underlying emotional truth for what an adult child of a narcissistic parent feels in relation to that parent it is this:

A shallow surface level, one-sided, difficult relationship exists rather than a deep, personal and fulfilling, mutually advantageous relationship for both individuals.

This is the ongoing dilemma that prompts many children of narcissists to seek counseling to begin with. The relationship we have with our parents is so fundamentally important in not just how it shapes our own personality and life experience, but how it can positively or negatively affect our ability to form lasting relationships with others.

So, it’s a BIG DEAL.

If you are the child of this parent, untold years of distance, detachment and growing concern can take place where the child can internalize that they are somehow responsible for this poor relationship.  Adult children of narcissists are brought up in an environment where they can unfortunately become very effective human sponges for guilt and other displaced emotions. The parent isn’t explaining things or taking responsibility for the relationship, the alienation, the weird shallow emotional context, so the child soaks it all up—they must be responsible some how. And if they do all this dirty work, maybe the parent will show them appropriate love and boundaries. And that’s a damn shame. And it needs to stop.

But that’s the only kind of relationship narcissists have. It’s the only kind they understand.  Queue the violin music, but resist the urge to feel too much pity for them. You deserve better. And so do they. If they are able to see other options.

When you finally build up the courage (or resentment) and ask for a deeper, more fulfilling relationship from a narcissist—gently and calmly—you may be surprised to be labeled with any number of unfortunate epithets: trouble maker, greedy and selfish, immature, overemotional, disrespectful, the spawn of some satanic creature, etc.

This happens because the narcissist can’t take criticism. They have too thin of skin. Remember, they are only surface level people themselves. Asking them for depth is like expecting a painting of a flower vase to be able to hold water.

I know what you may be thinking. It’s an old cliché to blame your parents for your problems in therapy. It’s one of the reasons therapy sounds like a joke to many different groups of people. And I agree therapy shouldn’t be about pointing fingers.

Except when it comes to narcissists.

Parents who are narcissists set their children up in a rigged game that takes decades for them to understand the basic rules and premise. It causes pain and misunderstanding, and relationships that should be solid and strong are weak and mostly painful. And it’s never the narcissist’s fault. Or so they would like you to believe.

That’s why I am labeling this chapter a Pyrrhic victory. What is certainly possible in working with a therapist around your relationship with your narcissistic parent is for you to free yourself of the guilt and the misunderstanding and the ineffective ways of communicating, and the expectations of your parent being something that they are not. There is no guarantee however that the relationship with the narcissistic parent will be anything less than what it always has been: shallow, unfulfilling, painful and completely on the surface. Therapy can also help circumvent and course correct your own behavior and attitudes toward all the other relationships in your life and help you focus on what is working and what is not working. Just because your parent is a narcissist, doesn’t mean you are condemned to live out a life of shallow, unfulfilling relationships.

Next time:

Chapter 4: No one likes a bully.

Posted in Adult Children of Narcissists, Mental health therapy, narcissism, Therapy | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

The Therapy is Dandy guidebook to having a narcissist for a parent. Chapter 2.

Posted on April 10, 2012 by Therapyisdandy

An ongoing survival guide.

Chapter 2.

Tactics.

If you already suspect one of your parents to be a narcissist, you may have tried to talk to them about your concerns.

And it probably didn’t go very well.

Narcissists are extremely thin-skinned when it comes to criticism. They literally disavow any wrongdoing on their part. It is always someone else with the problem. If the narcissist in your life is a parent, this someone is often you, or a sibling, or the other parent. If your narcissist is really grandiose, the bad guy who gets all the blame might be: the government, the world at large, feminism, Bob at the office, etc.

The bad news: you will rarely, if ever, get a narcissistic parent to admit they did something wrong in relation to you. From the perspective of the narcissist, they are the victims who have to put up with so much crap, including whatever you are trying to pin on them.

So don’t even try.

At least not out of blue, cold turkey style.

If you really want to talk to your local narcissist about your hurt feelings and experiences, you are better off getting some quality care from a therapist.

In talking with a counselor, you can circle around the cause of so much of your own discomfort that has been caused by the narcissist. With the counselor, you have someone who actually cares and wants you to start feeling better.

You will not get such an invitation from the narcissist near you.

So don’t even try.

What can you do?

Lots, actually. But if you think the equivalent of a full frontal attack is going to accomplish anything, you are thinking of the wrong personality disorder, my friend.

To catch a narcissist requires that you understand something about their way of thinking and feeling.   Feel free to check back to chapter 1 here. The distinction to make here is focusing on the message rather than the messenger (the narcissist).

A narcissist’s worldview is hardly logical. It can appear so at first glance, but it is one convoluted, emotional rollercoaster of denial and entitlement. You can use that. You can point out the inconsistencies that the narcissist uses to prop up their own deluded world view. You can point out an inconsistency but still do it in a supportive, nonjudgmental way.

Why? Why am I suggesting this? Because the one thing a narcissist lacks is appropriate self-awareness. If you can get them to actually think about their own process, to think about what they say is “the truth,” you might be able to knock down some of their defenses.

It’s not going to be easy. And be aware of what you want out of this, as opposed to what the narcissist needs in order to stop being so much of a narcissist.

Next time:

Chapter 3. Pyrrhic Victories.

Posted in Adult Children of Narcissists, Mental health therapy, narcissism, Therapy | Tagged , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

The Therapy is Dandy guidebook to having a narcissist for a parent.

Posted on March 27, 2012 by Therapyisdandy

An ongoing survival guide.

Chapter 1.

Know your enemy.

Taken from the Greek myth of the boy (Narcissus) who fell in love with his own image in a pond and died of starvation rather than get up and go live his life. All narcissists have a false sense of themselves. In a word that false sense is considered grandiose.  The take away from the myth is that Narcissus was fooling himself: he wasn’t all that.

For Narcissus, he lost the capacity to engage with anything other than what was staring back at him. So he lost his life—not to mention all the important relationships he had or would ever have—because he abandoned everything for that gratifying, if illusory, image of himself.

Outside of Greek myths, today you will know narcissists by those who also believe in a grandiose sense of themselves, an identity only they see, an identity that ultimately has no time to spend on anything or anyone outside of their own needs, or a means to those ends. The modern day equivalent of Narcissus’s pond might be someone who believes they deserve their own reality television show and not be speaking with any sense of irony about the subject.

Narcissists rarely can find fault with themselves or their actions. As a result, you rarely find them going to therapy. Everything with them is fine; it’s other people who are causing all the problems in their life. Narcissists are kings and queens at the defensive strategy known as projecting.

In normal conversation however, narcissism is often confused with anyone who has a large sense of entitlement. There is a difference. We all have streaks of narcissistic traits. Some larger than others. Politicians, rock stars, real estate moguls, artists of all stripes, can all act like entitled jackasses if they want to, but that doesn’t necessarily qualify them for a genuine mental disorder. A little bit of narcissism is actually healthy, but in healthy doses it could be better described as a positive sense of one’s own life, ambition and agency. At one end of this spectrum you have what the DSM IV calls Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD). Now, the diagnoses in the DSM get voted in ands out, and the rumor for the DSM V is that NPD is no longer going to be a valid diagnosis. Consider that bold, if completely political, move when I tell you that there has been the argument (for quite some time) that as a culture we are all becoming more and more narcissistic. Now we are so narcissistic, a mental illness diagnosis doesn’t sound “appropriate” to the gatekeepers.

Excuse me while I vomit.

Unchecked, narcissism causes tremendous pain and anguish not just to the one’s who suffer a relationship to the narcissist, but ultimately to the narcissist themselves.

Which brings us to the idea of parents who are narcissists.

Other than the traits already listed above, here is a list of what you can expect from a parent who is closer to the NPD diagnosis than, say, Heathcliff Huxtable was:

  • Narcissistic parents can often deny the emotional reality of their children’s lives (for the sake of their false persona).
  • Narcissistic parents can often see their children as mere extensions of themselves and their own ego.
  • Narcissistic parents can often hold their children captive with their own emotional needs. Otherwise known as the role reversal: the child becomes the emotional caretaker for the parent.
  • Narcissistic parents often can deny their children genuine affection, physical  emotional or otherwise.
  • Narcissistic parents can display atrocious lack of insight when it comes to appropriate boundaries with their children.
  • Narcissistic parents do not have to be colorful, larger than life characters to be considered narcissists. Otherwise known as the well-camouflaged narcissist.
  • Narcissistic parents do not accept criticism for their behavior by their adult children. It is never their fault, nor is it their concern how you feel about them or your childhood grievances.
  • Narcissistic parents however will take credit for all of your successes in life.
  • A narcissistic parent is often matched with an enabler of a spouse: someone, anyone who either thinks the narcissist indeed walks on water, or is so emotionally checked out, they can’t even notice the damage being done to the family unit.
  • Narcissistic parents may also come from a narcissistic parent or family of origin of their own.
  • Narcissistic parents may honestly believe that their behavior is in the best interest of their child.
  • Narcissistic parents may also have coexisting conditions including, but not limited to, substance abuse, mood disorders, and other related difficulties.

Reading list:

Alice Miller, a psychologist who pioneered work in this area, has written a number of very good books on the plight of adult (and younger aged) children of narcissistic parents. To begin, take a look at Drama of the Gifted Child, or Thou Shall Not Be Aware.

For Chapter 2 in this survival guide, expect an inventory and assessment of strengths and weakness that an adult child of a narcissistic parent needs to consider before confronting the narcissist in their life.

Posted in Adult Children of Narcissists, Mental health therapy, narcissism, Therapy | Tagged , , , , , , , | 4 Comments

You talking to me?

Posted on March 16, 2012 by Therapyisdandy

The scene and the reference are obvious to anyone who has been drawing breath for the last 35 years.

Given how many times I have seen Taxi Driver, I watch that scene and I consider the dialogue as symptomatic of Travis Bickle and his own self -destructiveness. He is in a sense taunting himself, threatening himself—as Travis Bickle is his own worst enemy.

And so is everyone else. You. Me. Your partner. The barista who made your latte today.

That isn’t so much the news as how one can go about changing the dynamic in each of us.

People who are struggling with the most common of mental health concerns—depression and anxiety—often over identify with their symptoms. Rather than depression or anxiety being a separate thing, in those cases, a definable illness, the ones who struggle with depression or anxiety (and possibly other illnesses) see themselves as the illness itself: depressed or anxious.

“I have always been this way.” They might say. “I’m prone to depression. Or I have always been an anxious person.”

And this kind of identification goes on all the time. If you have ever known someone who received inpatient treatment, it is not surprising to hear that former patient saying more extreme things like, “Yeah, I am Bipolar 1 and Schizoaffective.” Or something very similar.

So what’s the big deal?

It’s going to be much harder to fight against an illness, be it depression, anxiety, substance abuse or whatever, if in the way you define it, the illness is part of you rather than an external threat.

If you conceptualize depression as a thing, a heavy burden sitting on your chest that prevents you from being happier and healthier, then by god, you can conceptualize pushing that burden off you. If anxiety is seen as an external threat instead of how you process information, then you can fight back and win.

Identifying with a mental health disorder is only effective if you are trying to get your health insurance to pay for treatment.

For your own treatment, it is going to be much harder to know how to feel better or do better when from the very beginning you identify yourself as the problem. How do you fight yourself in that scenario? Look how well things turned out for Travis Bickle.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Posted in Anxiety, Depression, Mental health therapy, Therapy | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

So what are these damn emotions for anyway?

Posted on March 1, 2012 by Therapyisdandy

It’s a legitimate question: “If all these emotions ever do are cause me to get hurt or angry, then why the hell do we have them anyway?”

It is more than just a little telling that our pop culture has been fascinated with “unemotional” characters.” Star Trek fans know what I am talking about, and more than ever before there is a patina of contempt when a conversation is had regarding emotions. Emotions are almost second class citizens to many otherwise intelligent, savvy human beings—best ignored, and not fed from the dinner table sort of unfortunate necessities. The most common mass marketed form of therapy, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, routinely gets criticized even by its own practitioners for not paying enough attention to human emotion.

So what’s the deal?

Emotions, by their very nature, resist rigid, scientific classification. No one is very willing to say how much of an emotion is good and how much is bad.

Sort of.

There exists something called the Global Assessment of Functioning, or GAF. It is a numeric, 1to100 scale that mental health professionals often use to rate a person’s current functioning. The higher the number, the better the prospects: 90 or above and the observed person has very little to be concerned about; with a score of 20 or below, professionals or facilities would be requesting a mental health hold for safety reasons (suicide or homicide).

But the GAF is not exactly assessing emotions, it is accessing total over all functioning. It would be a very strange day indeed to have your counselor say to tell you that your happiness level is hovering at 75 while your sadness is rising to 47. It sounds like a description out of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. It should be worrying. It is scientific reductionism at work. It is unhealthy to think of emotions as “things that get in the way of other more important aspects of life.” But that’s exactly what happens for a lot of people. And pharmaceutical companies are loving it.

Last time, I brought up jealousy as an example of the confusion that protecting emotions can cause. There is no such thing as good emotions or bad emotions—just what we decide to do about those feelings.

Emotions are our version of radar/sonar/global positioning system. They warn of us of something coming into our range that is potentially good or bad. That’s it. From this early detection system, then we can decide (cognitively) how best to approach this new found potential suitor/threat/food source/opportunity/pitfall/experience.

Unfortunately because of a lot of different factors, including family of origin issues, emotions can be treated like delicate treasures, things to be rarely used, and more often than not protected, and poorly understood. People begin to act in ways to avoid feelings. To avoid having any kind of emotional reaction toward their life, and loved ones.

And that doesn’t end well for either party. Emotions are dandy (obviously). So maybe it is time to start treating them and yourself as such.

Posted in Mental health therapy | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

Jealousy: that green eyed insecurity.

Posted on February 16, 2012 by Therapyisdandy

This past week was Lupercalia, or Valentine’s Day for those of us who didn’t study Roman history. So it seems obvious to me that we should take a closer look at that troublesome emotional state we all call jealousy.

I will make it very simple: the more jealous you feel = the more insecure you are.

Specifically in romantic entanglements, in dating, in whatever constellation that you go and do whatever you like to do with whomever you like-eventually getting naked and somewhat sleepy.

It’s easy to be jealous when you are young. You don’t know any better. And the emotional feelings involved in dating and courtship are oh so tender. You feel everything is intense and delirious and happening just for you. But that’s youth.

As we get older, jealousy is a hangup, and a bad one. First of all, jealousy provides no benefit to the afflicted. Not one. It doesn’t make you a better lover. It doesn’t get you more sex or more security. It doesn’t make anyone love you more—usually quite the opposite happens. Getting angry or sulking at every individual who happens to smile at your partner, or being bitchy to the chatty waitress or bartender does nothing for your social life. Jealousy of a spouse is even more absurd. How often do you want to have that same fight after all? It’s tedious. It’s shallow. It’s a shame. Remember, people actually get killed because of out of control jealousy. And it’s all your fragile ego’s fault.

The diagnostic problem here is that the insecure ego wants to be protected from whatever intense feeling is going on. That intense feeling is often just desire of our partner—which obviously is a very good thing. But the insecure ego messes up the whole experience. It gets between us and our feelings. It get’s this crazy notion that it has to protect us from these intense feelings. Being in love, being in lust, all of these states are emotionally laden, intense and somewhat spooky. The payoff is obvious. But for the insecure ego, it deflects those intense feelings and makes them the enemy, and it tries to fight them off, rather than submitting to love, to lust, to that last call at 2:30AM on a Saturday night, which is how it should go.

In some instances, insecure egos also want to control everything around them, because it doesn’t have any strength of its own. It wants to control others, to dominate them, to at least feel some semblance of power and authority. This is exactly why no one should have sex with people like Rick Santorum.

So what do you tell a jealous partner? Get thee to a counselor’s office. Next, ask them if being jealous has actually improved their lives. Then get them to talk about what they are trying to protect.

All that energy, all that mojo, because you are afraid? Because your world would end if you found out what about your partner? That is giving a lot of power over your own life to another person.

And if you keep it up, there isn’t going to be anybody left to buy you that box of chocolates. Let alone the jacuzzi suite at the Hotel Vintage Plaza.

Posted in Mental health therapy, Therapy | Tagged , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

Lying to avoid Death (and Seinfeld).

Posted on January 31, 2012 by Therapyisdandy

So if little white lies are what polite society is based on, and fear keeps us from being brutally honest in relationships, what keeps us lying to ourselves?

The answer, in this third of a three part discussion on lying, may very well be death itself.

We tell ourselves we will get to that stack of dishes, that annoying home repair, or complicated personal addiction tomorrow because we have enough time for that later.

But lying to ourselves about how much time we have is like lying to a friend when they ask us if those pants make them look fat.

The truth of the matter is, considering both Western existential philosophies and Eastern based mindfulness practices, today is all that we really have. Death is waiting.

So, big deal-death is depressing, okay. Fine. But our culture’s inability to talk about death and the practicality of how to live meaningfully and be well informed about grief and loss is a problem that few come to terms with. Why do you think people are so keen on believing in an afterlife, in the power of the free market, in the second coming, in their own narcissism, in (fill in the blank)? Fear of death is one of the easiest emotions to exploit, and from Hollwood, Madison Avenue, the Vatican and even main street USA, we are constantly bombarded with messages that are intentionally and subconsciously freaking us out.

Literature and mythology are full of self-actualized characters who, after being transformed, have risen above the fear of death and, not surprisingly, talk about being more open and honest about everything. The Buddha, Jesus, and one of my personal favorites, Larry Darrell from the novel The Razor’s Edge. The tragedy of those stories is how adamantly the rest of the world–us normal people–refuse to accept the message. These stories really are trying to tell us something important about fear and our amazing ability to delude ourselves with nonsense. Contemporarily speaking, the onslaught of books and media about vampires exploits this fear even further. In them, death really isn’t the end. Death means you get to be sexier, stronger than ever dreamed of when one was alive—and be a superhero. Hello? Fantasy against death, calling on line one. Pick up, somebody. Pick up. We don’t get flawless, glowing skin and telepathy when we die. We get a pine box.

That brings us back to Seinfeld and Cosmo Kramer, hipster doofus or enlightened shaman?

Kramer didn’t get social lying. He rarely lied to himself either. He really believed he was quite, quite groovy (vanity is a potential future topic on the nature of lying-another time though). Kramer is the Shaman figure in the Seinfeld universe—he lives in his own bizarre apartment and comes to Jerry’s to interact with normal people: to bring his message to the other villagers. He has no means of employment or money, yet never worries about either, and always has a weird scheme on how to make more money and/or fame. And he is oddly successful with women. He is without much argument, the happiest of the 4 main characters in the show. He walks his own strange path and is pleased to be who he is. You rarely see that in television sitcoms, let alone out in the real world. That is why he is interesting. Atypical. A shaman is there, just outside the system, to give aid and instruction to those who seek enlightenment and illumination. And to loudly, and whenever needed, call bullshit on our tendency to lie to ourselves.

That’s a pretty good model for what effective therapy can be like. And that’s no lie.

 

Posted in Mental health therapy | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Relationships and the Truth (Bomb).

Posted on January 17, 2012 by Therapyisdandy

Can you have both or is it an either/or sort of proposition?

I know I suggested lying to oneself as the next segment, but in peeling back the layers of this subject, relationships came up before the actual self—the self comes last, it seems.

In this recent news article there was an air of surprise that less Americans were getting married than a generation before.

Everyone seems to agree that marriage is hard work.

And that’s the problem.

Due to technological innovations very few of us are used to anything remotely close to hard work. Unless you are one of the 99% who must work manual labor jobs to support your family, our hard work is just not as hard as it used to be.

So without really signing off an any of it, what is considered hard work changed.

I am speaking the truth when I say spending a month overseas with my elderly parents was hard work. But is it comparable to working an eight hour shift underground in a coal mine?

Of course not. It would be crazy to make that suggestion.

But just by using the term “hard work” in this manner, our brains are changing, slowly, where the delineation between hard work and not hard work is. We don’t even have to be aware of this. Our brains do this on their own.

What does this have to do with relationship and honesty?

Our brains have evolved to do the least amount of work possible in a given situation. Much of what we once believed to be rational, logical thought processes, is purely emotionally driven guess work.

The problems any of us have in relationships can all be backward engineered to our own insecurities and issues—issues that may be buried or unrecognized by us. So if we are deceiving ourselves, sometimes unknowingly, how can we not lie to our partners?

Look at these statistics and consider how much truth is being told around dinner tables in America.

We are programmed almost from the beginning with other people’s ideas of what a relationship is or is not. We are shown ideals that we model our behavior and character after, both male and female, and then we try on the mask and many of us realize is it decidedly not one size fits all.

Albert Einstein of all people once said that the most beautiful thing one can experience is the mysterious. I agree, and I propose one of the most beautiful things one can do in a relationship is to try to be honest when fear tells you that you should not.

And that’s our boogeyman, ladies and gentlemen. Fear. It keeps us away from knowing ourselves fully and from expressing the truth.

 

Next time:  The lying witch and the neurotic wardrobe.

Posted in Mental health therapy, Therapy | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments