Narcissistic Rage: Not always a firestorm

If you have a narcissistic parent, you’ve experienced narcissistic rage. But because narcissists are as individual as anyone else, you may have experienced it without recognizing it for what is really is.

When someone says “rage” we tend to think of someone screaming and yelling and waving their arms and being loud and angry. We are probably also familiar with the quiet rage…the seething but controlled anger that manifests as clenched fists and jaws, giving the fear that the person could burst into some kind of physical fury at any moment.

But with narcissists there can be yet another kind of rage…the silent, subterranean rage that simmers, often for years, before being released…and the release can be in a long-planned and carefully executed manner.

What provokes a narcissist to rage? On the surface it may look like a lot of different things provoke a narcissist, but the fact is, only one thing does it: narcissistic injury.

Freud defined narcissistic injury as occurring when “…a narcissistic individual is confronted with a situation that counter-argues their firmly held beliefs about themselves.” Narcissist injury leads to narcissistic rage:  “This wound or blow that threatens their firmly held set of beliefs is likely to elicit a violent outburst of anger, known as narcissistic rage. The rage has a variety of forms and can be very mild or severely extreme.”

So what constitutes narcissistic injury? The short answer is “virtually anything.” This is the reason that living with a narcissist feels like walking on eggshells…you just never know when something you innocently do or say will set the narcissist off. That is because what is innocent and innocuous to you the narcissist may perceive as challenging or defiant or even intentionally attacking. Why that perception? Because whatever it was you did or said the narcissist finds it threatening to the delicately balanced house of grandiose cards she has built as her perception of herself.

You can know that certain things are guaranteed to set off your narcissist…you will have gained experience over time that certain behaviours or opinions or words will light the fuse. But there is always, always something else…something you don’t know about that will start things. You may think that always agreeing with the narcissist will guarantee peace but not only will this make you feel like a fraud, at some point the narcissist is liable to tip to it and say “Wait a minute…are you just humouring me, like I was some kind of senile old goat?” and then the rage game is on.

The narcissist will tell you that you have no one but yourself to blame for her rages because you provoke them with your contrariness, your defiance, your insensitivity, your cruelty. And for a long time, we may believe this because the fact is, you did do something the narcissist found provoking. But analysed from a greater distance, you have to acknowledge that the narcissist has no right to hold you, your feelings, your actions hostage to her perceptions, she has no right to deny you your autonomy by using rage and hurt feelings as a weapon to beat you into submission and back into control. You may have provoked the outburst, but you were no more in the wrong that the concentration camp inmate who, attempting to escape, provokes a guard into shooting at him.

Narcissistic rage, then is both a reaction on the part of the narcissist, and a tool used to control and manipulate others. I can remember saying to my brother “Don’t do that…it will make Mommy mad.” Mommy’s anger was a palpable, fearsome thing to be avoided at all costs and it was a weapon she consciously used “Are you trying to make me mad?” she would ask. Her rage was unpredictable in terms of what she would do with it, but predictable in its being a response to anyone doing anything that she did not like…and I mean anyone and anything.

Interestingly, her rage was often expressed differently, depending on who was the target. The more power a person had, the less overt and explosive her rage, and the more manipulative, subtle and vindictive…as if, by denying her a temper outburst, you earned a deeper, more lasting expression of her rage. When I was a child she would scream at me until her voice was raw, and hit me with anything handy until her rage was purged. This often left me sobbing and curled into a defensive little ball which, curiously, could act as yet another narcissistic injury: the reality that a beaten child will cry and cower away from her abuser was not acceptable to her and her response to my perfectly normal reaction would be to tell me to shut up or she would give me a real reason to cry. And any time I cringed or flinched in her presence was enough to set her off as she did not want other people to see it as it would give them the “wrong impression” of her.

She would not, however, use such overt means to rage at people who had more power than a child. She was capable of long-term planning and incredible spite. And, like so many other narcissists, she was glib and charming enough on the surface to convince others that her treachery was actually a good thing.

She would never rage at her mother or father…but she behaved in such a way, from her teens onward, as to cause a scandal in their tiny rural town such that the reputation of the entire family was damaged. Then, when it was clear that nobody found her cute or amusing anymore, just so shameful they didn’t want to soil their skirts by even walking past her on the streets, she packed up her children and moved 1000 miles away.

She had visions of an upper middle class lifestyle and convinced herself that the little Eichler-style house she nagged my father into buying was the first step on that ladder. So secure was her vision that she couldn’t see the impact of the dirt road, cesspool that backed up into the bathtub with high tides at the nearby bay, chronic cockroach infestation, lack of sidewalks or even trash collection tarnished the vision. No, the thing that brought down her property values and was the scourge of the neighbourhood was the next door neighbour who, as a war widow, had no husband to maintain the house and, as a nurse working night shift, kept “suspicious” hours. When NM’s demands that the woman spruce up her house and front yard fell on deaf ears, she took on a narcissistic rage that consumed her. In the end, NM convinced the neighbours that the woman’s job as a nurse was a convenient cover, that she was really a prostitute using the hours of her nursing job (where NM claims she stole drugs and was an addict) as a cover, that she beat and starved her children and kept a filthy, unsanitary house. The woman almost lost her job and custody of her children over NM’s accusations and ultimately sold her house and moved away. NM got what she wanted: a quiet English couple with a penchant for gardening bought the house and fixed it up. Throughout this campaign, NM’s family heard the towering rages about the woman next door, the woman who dared defy my NM and refuse to give her what she wanted. Superficially it was only a small thing…most lower middle class neighbourhoods have a shabby house or two, but NM took it as a personal affront that she lived next door to one (even though it was in that condition when NM bought our house) and the owner would not succumb to her demands to clean it up. Living next door to the shabby house damaged NM’s grandiose vision of herself living a genteel suburban lifestyle, which was her narcissistic injury, and she quite determinedly retaliated against the woman. Rather than go to the house and have a screaming fit in the woman’s face…which would make her the “bad guy” instead of the offending homeowner, NM undertook a campaign of undermining and sullying the woman’s reputation and creating an environment so hostile that the woman had to move away or lose her job and her children. That was one form of narcissistic rage at work.

“Symptoms of rage may be mild and non-violent, such as displaying visible irritation, vocal disagreement with the situation or head-shaking. More severe symptoms of narcissistic rage include outburst of physical violence, directed at both objects and people, and vocal outrage. In general, a person that frequently displays narcissistic rage symptoms is often labeled as selfish, spoiled and a sore loser by their peers. Unlike regular anger, narcissistic rage is unwarranted and is caused by neutral events that will not provoke reactions in non-narcissists. Persistent episodes of narcissistic rage may result in the perpetuation of rage cycles: patterns of rage behavior that frequently repeat day after day.”

The key to identifying a narcissistic rage is ascertaining if a non-narcissistic person would be outraged by the same thing that triggered the narcissist. If you tell your mother you are going on a two week vacation to Greece and she flips out, you are dealing with a narcissistic rage. A non-narcissist might ask a few practical questions like “do you have travel insurance?” and “has the political situation calmed down there?” whereas the narcissist could do anything from scream at you about wasting your money or traumatizing your dog by putting him in a kennel to inviting herself along to actively sabotaging your trip by falling “ill” or even causing something costly to happen to your house or your car so that you can’t afford to go. Narcissistic rage is not confined to temper outbursts and overt expressions of rage…narcissists are perfectly capable of the “slow burn” kind of rage that manifests in an extended period of retaliation, and that retaliation can be small and childish, like calling and hanging up the phone to big and devastating, like blackening your name among family, friends, and neighbours and making herself look like your victim.

It all starts with that narcissistic insult, that little injury that most people would not even perceive as an injury or insult. You have a choice of living your life walking on eggshells in an attempt to avoid causing that injury or you can decide that if you N gets his/her nose out of joint by something you do or say, that’s not your problem. If you decide you won’t be controlled by a narcissist’s tantrums or your own misplaced guilt, then you are prepared to set and enforce boundaries with your Ns, including getting restraining orders against them if nothing else works. You cannot control them but you can control yourself and what influences you allow in your life.

I read a line the other day that said when it comes to narcissists, you must weigh their influence on your life: if they bring you more joy than difficulty, then find ways to live with them but if they bring you more pain than joy, then you must let them go. It didn’t make exceptions for elderly narcissistic relatives or mothers or even narcissistic adult children: it simply said that if they bring you more pain than joy, then you must let them go.

Sounds like good advice to me.

The “Identified Patient”

Over and over again I see it written: the scapegoat is troubled, the problem child, the troublemaker, even the household rebel. Psychologists and other writers, from the well-known like John Bradshaw to the most obscure blogger, publish works that make it look like the scapegoat, because of his or her behaviour, might actually deserve both the role and the disdain forced upon him.

My own experience does not bear this out. M. Scott Peck, in his book “People of the Lie,” references the “identified patient.” According to Wikipedia, “Identified patient, or ‘IP,’ is a term used in a clinical setting to describe the person in a dysfunctional family who has been subconsciously selected to act out the family’s inner conflicts as a diversion; who is the split-off carrier of the (perhaps transgenerational) family disturbance. The term emerged from the work of the Bateson Project on family homeostasis, as a way of identifying a largely unconscious pattern of behavior whereby an excess of painful feelings in a family lead to one member being identified as the cause of all the difficulties - a scapegoating of the IP.

“The identified patient - also called the ‘symptom-bearer’ or ‘presenting problem’ - may display unexplainable emotional or physical symptoms, and is often the first person to seek help, perhaps at the request of the family. However, while family members will typically express concern over the IP’s problems, they may instinctively react to any improvement on the identified patient’s part by attempting to reinstate the status quo.”

That last paragraph strikes a responsive chord in me. I was not only the first person to seek help in my family, I was the only one. NM’s one foray into psychology for me during my childhood—part of a custody battle with my father in which she wanted a psychologist to testify on her behalf—was abruptly cancelled when the therapist was more interested in talking about her than about me. I don’t remember this at all (part of that blank period in my childhood for which I have virtually no memories), but I clearly remember NM citing this as an example of the uselessness of psychology/psychiatry: she took me to a therapist because I was obviously disturbed (I wanted to live with my father, not her) and the therapist was focussing on her instead of me. NM, who had an agenda that had nothing to do with my emotional well-being, took me to that psychologist as the “identified patient” (a person who is taken to therapy by his or her family, as being a problem or having problems), but the therapist saw right through her. We never went back for a second session.

Peck says this child, the identified patient, is the family member who is identified as the source of the family difficulties. And while some of these children are, in fact, acting out, it is usually a problem in family dynamics that is the true source of problem, and if the child is acting out, it is in response to those dynamics. In other words, the child doesn’t really have to be a problem to be designated the scapegoat, although some children become a problem as a result of their being cast into the scapegoat role. Then, they are blamed not only for their acting out behaviours, but for the problems of the entire family system as well.

I read “People of the Lie” long before I had any notion of narcissism and personality disorders. But I was struck with the similarity between the “identified patients” and my self-identification as a scapegoat. I had come across the term in my reading and it immediately resonated within me: my brother, who was always in trouble at school, at home, even in the neighbourhood, was seldom punished for his misdeeds and his lies…often mind-bogglingly transparent…were always accepted as truth. For me, I was blamed and punished for not only my mistakes (which were interpreted as deliberate defiance) but for his misdeeds—his misbehaviour was my fault because I “allowed” him, I didn’t stop him, I was the oldest and he was my responsibility. This is classic scapegoating and, since I was already being blamed for ruining NM’s life by my very existence, it wasn’t much of a leap to lay everything wrong the family at my feet.

In “People of the Lie” Peck describes the parents of a little boy so deeply depressed he was hospitalized. That year for Christmas they had given the boy a .22 rifle, the exact same rifle his older brother had used to commit suicide. When confronted by Peck and the message their “gift” conveyed…that they wanted him to commit suicide, too…the parents became immediately defensive, dug their heels into denial, and refused to entertain the thought. They became angry at Peck, insisting their son was the sick person, not they. Peck defines evil as “militant ignorance” and the behaviour of these people, angrily defensive and unwilling to accept the truth of their actions and the message those actions conveyed to their grieving younger son, exemplify not only their ignorance but their militant defence of it. To remain blameless, to be able to see themselves as good people and good parents, they sacrificed their son, making him the sick one, the identified patient, the one with the problems, and completely absolved themselves of any responsibility for his depression. No, he was the sick one and the doctor needed to focus on him, not on them. They reacted to Peck’s rejection of their son as the “identified patient” in much the same way my NM reacted to that psychologist rejecting me as the same.

This is not to say that the identified patient is not suffering, does not need some kind of therapeutic intervention. Most likely s/he does. But critical is the understanding that the reasons the IP needs help is not because s/he is the centre of the family dysfunction. Often the child singled out as the scapegoat is the most emotionally healthy, most cognitively aware, most fundamentally balanced member of the household. The child may act out to draw attention to the family in a subconscious hope of getting help…or the child may be so successfully subdued that s/he simply goes along, not making waves, either biding her time until she can escape or becoming so imbued with the family mythology that she buys into it and accepts that she is at fault, even though she cannot figure out how. The identified patient has been damaged by the dysfunctional family system, but she is not the only damaged person and she is not the cause of the dysfunction.

Is it possible to have a dysfunctional person inside a functional family? I believe it is, using my NM and her FOO as an example, but I think it is rare. Perfectly normal families can have a family member who is substantially different from the rest of them. We are not blank slates upon which our parents write: if we were, all of us ACoNs would be the same and we are not. We each bring a unique personality and set of traits with us when we come into the world and it may well be that there is something in our particular make up that strikes a negative note in our NMs and causes them to single us out as the scapegoat.

Identified patient is a psychological term that, in my mind, equates to scapegoat. “A dysfunctional family needs someone to focus on, someoneto blame things on, someone to point to when things go wrong… It means that in a sick family system, the group has subconsciously elected one person to act out all the family sickness in a very overt way while the rest of the family acts it out in a covert way. Even if the IP tries to act “not sick,” the family will send messages to “get back where you belong” and set the IP up for failure.” How much does this sound like the family dynamics surrounding the scapegoat?

“It’s not that the identified patient is any sicker than the rest of the family, in fact they probably aren’t, but they are the one through whom the family channels all of its “stuff.” The family dynamic is to keep things status quo, to keep its eyes trained on the IP.” Have you tried going NC—or even LC—only to find members of your family going out of their way to suck you back into the drama? That isn’t because they love you and miss you (as they may well say) but because they need you to be there to take the blame, to be the negative focus, to be the disappointing one against whom they can all compare themselves and come away superior.

Some of us disappear from the family scene and we don’t get hoovered. This is the function of the “ignoring types,” the family dynamic that treats you like you are invisible until something is needed from you. In such situations “…the identified patient, or IP, is viewed as a troubled individual or, in extreme cases, as someone with whom the family would be better offwithout.”You are still the IP or scapegoat, but in this case, the family had decided that your absence makes them whole as they can continue to find ways to blame you even at a distance.

“Usually the one who gets help first in the family is the IP. They get out of the family and find out what is wrong because they are tired of being blamed for everything and everyone. Usually their acting out is a normal response to an abnormal situation and they want help.” Some of us seek therapy, others of us seek self-help through books, websites, on-line groups, journaling. Some of us don’t seek help at all and just escape the FOO but continue to replicate our dysfunctional emotional relationships with others, seeking to “get it right” this time…the next time. And some of us just get out and withdraw, licking our wounds and living in a cocoon of hurt.

But we all want that hurting to stop. “…part of recovery is identifying who you were in the family and how you have carried that role into adulthood. See how your role in the family plays itself out in your current relationship and ask yourself if it’s time for a change.

“Being the IP or the one that doesn’t belong can be a [hidden] blessing. If you’ve never belonged, it’s easy to take a step in another direction. Take refuge in exile. It can be a good thing.

“If you’ve been the IP, realize you’re never going to win their approval, so stop trying. You have a role to fill and they’re not going to be happy if you’re not filling it. If you’ve brought it into your relationships, chances are you will not be validated and acknowledged in those adult relationships either.

“Stop seeking approval from people who don’t have it to give. Throw off those old messages…get rid of the negative messages from the family…get rid of “get back where you belong” everytime you try to save yourself.”

Yes, you might fail. You might even fail repeatedly in your efforts to get away, to resist being sucked back into the drama by empty promises and your own broken heart. But if you don’t keep resisting you will get absorbed back into the drama and become nothing more than a broken gear in their dysfunctional machine. They aren’t going to change –there is too much in it for them to keep you in your assigned role—and nobody is going to rescue you. To escape and have your own life, a life of fulfilment and devoid of their drama, you have to shrug off the role they have imposed on you. You have to do it yourself. 

You have to be your own hero.

Attention-seeking: a tale of two psyches

All children need attention. In addition to their bodily needs such as food and shelter, they have emotional needs for nurturing and love. Babies are hard-wired to get that attention—they cry when they need food, warmth, or other kinds of attention and they are mightily persistent. In a nurturing environment, these babies get their needs for attention met and as they develop, their needs diminish with time. But children whose needs are not adequately met still need the attention that is denied them and as they grow older their needs do not diminish even though they may appear to as the child’s demands may lessen with time. This may occur because either the child learns through repeated disappointment that certain people cannot be approached for nurturance, or the child is punished for such an approach and learns that to need anything is to be bad…or both.

Narcissists have no inclination to nurture: a narcissistic mother can fake it as long as she gets lots of attention and praise for her pretty baby and the cute clothes she dresses the child in, and some are even diligent about such things as bathing and changing and feeding, but there is no emotional attachment behind it. A family member of mine whose pregnancy was a surprise—and not an especially welcome one—once told me that after her son was born, she kept waiting for that “rush of mother love” she had heard about to come over her and it just didn’t happen. She looked at him and just felt nothing. She took adequate physical care of the child, but was completely disengaged from him emotionally.

Mothers like this tend to ignore their children to the greatest degree they believe they can get away with, as long as it doesn’t affect their own acquisition of admiration. Children can be lavished with gifts and toys as a means of neglecting them emotionally (giving them stuff instead of attention) or they can be deprived of everything except those most basic essentials…and a few may be criminally neglected to death. If the child wants or needs anything more than the mother has deemed necessary—and this is critical because the child’s actual needs are subordinate to what the narcissistic parent decides what the child needs, which may be poles apart—she perceives the child as demanding more than his due. Some mothers, like mine, completely ignore a child except in the most basic ways, giving only perfunctory attention to fundamental needs and being punitive when faced with a need—which she perceived as an unwarranted demand—for more.

It should be a no brainer to recognize that a child who actively demands attention is doing so because s/he is not receiving enough…or at least not enough of the right kind. Unfortunately, this is not always the case as there are children who demand an excessive amount of attention not because they have been abused or neglected, but because they have been conditioned to believe that they are entitled to monopolize the attentions of others. Since narcissistic parents often single out one or more children as “Golden Children” who are invariably spoilt and given privileges, goods, and attention denied to the Scapegoat children, it is quite likely in a multi-child household with at least one narcissistic parent that there will be more than one child clamouring for attention, assuming the Scapegoat, or neglected, child has not yet learned to stop trying.

Narcissistic parents are so self-oriented that often they cannot be bothered to investigate a child’s—particularly a Scapegoat child’s—complaints and dismiss them out of hand as “attention-getting devices.” In addition to the problem of the child being deprived of necessary attention by this, she is also deprived of any care her complaint would have elicited from a normal parent. From too-small shoes to toothaches to poor vision to medical conditions warranting a doctor’s attention, children who are dismissed as attention-seekers without having their complaints investigated can be neglected and ultimately end up neglecting themselves because if their parents didn’t think their toothaches or shaggy hair warranted attention, why should they? It is a self-esteem issue, a matter of a sense of self-worth, that was internalized from the value placed on them by their parents when they were children, dependent on their parents’ wisdom, good will, and love.

All children believe, at least when they are small, that their parents are omnipotent. From a completely dependent infancy where our parents’ judgments and activity literally meant life or death for us, we grow up believing and accepting that our parents gave us the care we needed—so if they denied us something, we believed we didn’t need it. Cognitively, however, we may recognize that we do need something, like bigger shoes or a trip to the dentist and if our parents withhold it, particularly if they withhold it from us while giving it to someone else in the family, we begin to learn that for reasons unknown to us, we are apparently unworthy and undeserving, while another child in the family is entitled. If we clamour for the attention we need, we are admonished, shamed, discounted, invalidated, and we come to learn that our own assessments of our needs are inaccurate (even when they, in truth, are accurate) Actions—behaviours—do speak louder than words, so by being neglected by our parents, we learn that we are not deserving of the same treatment as others in the household, that we are incompetent to assess our own needs, and that we are bad and selfish to try to draw attention to our needs or to try to put our need for a trip to the dentist ahead of our GC sibling’s new bicycle.

If, through independent means, we are found to actually need that which we have been clamouring for, it becomes our fault. I had my first fillings at age 13 or 14 as the result of a toothache that drove me to the school nurse. She packed some oil of cloves into the cavity, then called my NM to tell her that I needed dental work. At first NM denied it and said I was employing yet “another attention-getting device” and “refused to be conned” by me into “wasting money on a useless trip to the dentist.” When the nurse insisted, saying she would involve Child Services and have me taken to the County Hospital for the work, NM capitulated. But not without a price: looking in my mouth, I had four visible cavities in my molars. It was pre-fluoride days and I was 14 and had never been to a dentist before! But the cavities were not a result of her neglect of my oral health—oh no, they were my fault for not brushing my teeth often enough. (I had not had a new toothbrush since I was six, so it’s pretty obvious what a priority my teeth were to her.)

Unfortunately, the dentist was a ham-handed brute, the cavities were large, and by the time the teeth were filled, I had developed a life-long fear of dentists to go along with my belief that I did not deserve dental care except in the circumstance of extreme pain. It did not bode well for my dental future. Neglect on the part of parents, whether obvious like the denial of medical attention or more subtle, like the withholding of love and support, can have life-long and devastating negative effects on children.

Naturally, my NM did not neglect her own care. She saw her dentist regularly, including for teeth cleaning, and when she needed a doctor, she did not hesitate to go. I suffered greatly from allergies, particularly from fur and feathers, but not only did she keep a big hairy Persian cat, she wouldn’t take me to the doctor for allergy medications (no OTC meds for allergies back then, either). It was not until my constant sneezing and sniffling was an annoyance to her that I got allergy meds…but let her have the first sniffle, and it was off to an ENT to have her sinuses irrigated.

Appearances were everything to my NM. I have what is called a “natural turnout” and if she’d been interested in my taking ballet classes, she would quickly have learned that this is considered a rare and desirable advantage. Unfortunately, she was more interested in making me a singing and/or movie star so my “natural turnout” got termed “duck footed” due to “fallen arches” and for years I had to endure rigid arch supports that blistered my feet, ugly saddle oxford shoes that did nothing for my social standing, grace or comfort, and regular visits to a podiatrist for new supports as my feet grew. It never did cure me of the “duck walk” that my NM found offensive, but it did set me up for years of feet and knee problems in adulthood because I had to learn to pronate my knees and walk on the outsides of soles of my feet.

My GCBro was a robustly healthy child, a bit on the fat side, and until the age of 8 or 10, he wet the bed at night. While I got punished for not pointing my toes straight ahead when I walked (and was intentionally tripped by her to “make me aware” of how I was walking), GCBro was taken to specialists, including a chiropractor, to “cure” his bedwetting. She didn’t want to hear that he would eventually outgrow it, she wanted it fixed and right now. The contrast, of course, being that GCBro was never blamed for his wet bed nor told it was his fault, whereas my “duck feet” were my fault for being lazy and not paying attention to how I walked. (Note: I am not saying GCBro should have been blamed for his wet bed or be faulted for it, only noting that he did not endure the criticism and disdain I did for things equally beyond my control.)

I have always found it curious that NM was so fixated on my feet yet neglected legitimate medical complaints like my allergies, my teeth, my vision (getting my first pair of glasses was almost a verbatim repeat of getting my first fillings, complete with the school nurse threatening her with Child Services and me getting harangued non-stop for the week it took to get my eye appointment). People couldn’t see inside my mouth or through my eyes so it couldn’t reflect on her, and her response to my allergies was to tell me “Stop that goddamned sniffling and sneezing!” as if I was doing it on purpose, thereby reinforcing her schtick of being martyr mama to the Most Defiant Child in the Civilized World.

These children inevitably grow up to be adults and develop into two basic categories: the attention-starved and the attention whore. Sometimes they look confusingly alike on the surface, as both may use similar techniques to draw attention to themselves. But while they may look superficially similar, their motivations are light years apart: the attention whore feels entitled to attention, to people fawning over her, giving her what she wants, to taking what she wants…the attention-starved is just that—starved and desperate for any kind of attention that might validate her existence.

Both might demonstrate the same kind of outward appearance, say blatantly sexual in dress and behaviour, and they may get similar results—lots of male attention. But whereas one is doing it from a sense of entitlement, feeling she deserves the adulation, the other is grasping at crumbs of anything that she might be able to convince herself has a resemblance to affection. Both might engage in affairs with married men, the GC because she believes she is entitled to anything she wants and has no respect for others, including the betrayed wife, whereas the SG believes she must take what she can get when it is available, her own need so deep that it overrides her sense of right and wrong. The GC will feel entitled and will be unlikely to suffer remorse or shame; the SG will likely feel guilty but excuse herself with “But I love him…I can’t help it!” even when faced with incontrovertible facts proving she is nothing more than a temporary play toy. Their behaviours may look the same but the reasons behind them are light years apart.

The attention-starved may come off looking like an attention whore at first because she may display some of the same behaviours. Attention-starved women may also come across as shy or withdrawn or quiet, rather than as party girls. They may have learned that attention is a dangerous thing, that to draw attention to themselves too often can result in negative, hurtful attention. But regardless of whether she comes across extroverted or introverted, there is an element of desperation about her that reeks of deprivation, of having a hole in her soul, of her being a bottomless pit of need. It is to these women that narcissists and abusers gravitate because their very desperation sets them up to tolerate behaviour that well-balanced women—and even their GC sisters—would not stand for.

GC women tend to attract enablers, men who feed their overblown egos. Narcissistic men may be drawn to them due to their flashy, attention-seeking ways but such pairings are bound for conflict when they each expect to be the centre of attention. “Normal” men may be flattered to be the object of an attention-seeking GC, only to find out later that they were being used. Or, they may adopt enabling ways to keep the GC interested.

However they end up, you can be assured that children who are raised in such a way that they did not receive adequate, balanced, positive nurturing and attention will grow up into adults who will engage in unhealthy relationships as adults. They will gravitate towards people who are their opposite number, people who will support their self-image whether that image is one of entitlement or privation. Very rarely does a DoNM, whether a GC or SG, luck into a healthy relationship with a healthy partner simply because healthy partners do not fulfil their inner needs: they find them dull and boring or “too good to be true” and reject them in favour of less balanced partners who can be their yin to their yang. And absent awareness and therapy, they are doomed to repeat their unsuccessful or unsatisfactory relationships, relationships they have been groomed for since the cradle, for life.

Next: No Contact

A Summary: 10 Commandments of Dysfunctional Families

From The 10 Commandments of Dysfunctional Families
by Thomas F. Fischer, M.Div., M.S.A.

The Ten Commandments of Dysfunctional Families: A Summary

The First And Great Commandment Is This:
“Be a ‘good’ person: Be blind, be quiet, be numb, be careful, keep secrets, avoid reality, avoid relationships, don’t cry, don’t trust, don’t feel, be serious, don’t talk, don’t love and above all, make everyone think you’re perfect...even if it makes you feel guilty.”

In other words, cease to exist as a separate, autonomous entity and exist as a cog in the wheel of the machine that is the dysfunctional family. Each child has one or more roles in the family, some of them assigned, others taken on by the child. These roles are rigid and, unless the child is an only, unlikely to change during the Nparent’s lifetime. The family is delicately balanced, its cohesiveness and continuation dependent upon each member playing his or her role. To attempt to change your role is to disrupt that balance and threaten the existence of the family itself.

And so you must don your role in the family like a burqa and play the role as if it were really you. And the real you must be stuffed down, silenced, and denied until she doesn’t consciously exist anymore and you become the creation of the dysfunctional parents, playing the role they need to enable their drama to continue. Your feelings are immaterial: ideally, you have none, but you must make a credible show of the feelings they allow or need you to display at any given moment.

You may not be yourself—you may not even have a “yourself.” You must selflessly be who and what they want you to be, what they need you to be, on demand…and like a good little marionette, be unobtrusive and out of sight, call no attention to yourself, make no demands, have no needs, just be ready for the next performance.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The Second Is Like Unto It:
“Since you're worthless and nobody loves you anyway (including yourself), don't try to change yourself. You're not worth the effort and you couldn't do it if you tried anyway. God won’t help you either. So get back where you belong. There’s nothing wrong anyway so what’s your problem! See, I told you that you were stupid.”

If you change yourself, you change how you work in the family dynamic, and in a dysfunctional family, that can destroy the delicate balance the parents have worked so hard to create. It is mutiny—insubordination—chaos—if you change yourself and thereby remove yourself from the role you were assigned...you destroy the family.

The rulers of a dysfunctional organization do not like change they did not create. Any change must be created by them so that it will benefit them…changes they do not initiate, like you removing yourself from your assigned or accustomed role, are threatening and frightening and potentially destructive. And so once you are performing your assigned role, you must be convinced that you have no options outside this role, that you are enslaved to it and cannot ever be released because it is who you are.

And so they convince you to stay as you have always been. That change would be futile even if you were able to change—but you can’t, a leopard can’t change its spots and you will never be more or better than you are today…or were yesterday…or that long string of yesterdays leading back so far you cannot remember.

You are not a person to them, you are a thing, immutable and unchanging, without feelings or needs, occasionally balking as machines are wont to do, but always there, always accepting and discharging your role so that their lives can continue as they created them to be. And if you try, you will fail because you cannot be anything other than what you are: just another cog in their machine.

You cannot even escape if you go No Contact because your absence from them doesn’t stop them from blaming you—they do it in absentia, behind your back, without your knowledge. But at least you don’t have to listen to them anymore.

These are the rules of the Dysfunctional Family and if you wish to be a part of it, you must play by those rules, play your role, don't try to improvise or improve your place. Just do as the directors say and you can stay...and they always assume you want to stay, that you are desperate to stay...

Next: "I Can't!"

No boundaries: 10 Commandments of Dysfunctional Families Pt 7(1)

From The 10 Commandments of Dysfunctional Families 
by Thomas F. Fischer, M.Div., M.S.A

7. Thou shalt allow your boundaries to be violated, especially by those who “love” you.
Sample Situation: A child trying to accomplish a task continues to persist and work on it, hoping to gain a sense of accomplishment and approval. “Don't be so stubborn!” mommy says. “Just give up. There’s more important things than that to be done! Now put that stuff away and clean the house so that mommy knows you love her.”

Lesson Learned: Anything you want is not worth protecting. Only those you love can tell you what is important and what’s not. Quit thinking for yourself and just do what makes everyone else happy.

Motto: Because others are more valuable than you, you don’t have the right to maintain your own boundaries or to make decisions.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Some of us aren’t clear on what boundaries are. According to Wikipedia, “Personal boundaries are guidelines, rules or limits that a person creates to identify for him- or herself what are reasonable, safe and permissible ways for other people to behave around him or her and how he or she will respond when someone steps outside those limits. They are built out of a mix of beliefs, opinions, attitudes, past experiences and social learning.

“Personal boundaries define you as an individual, outlining your likes and dislikes, and setting the distances you allow others to approach. They include physical, mental, psychological and spiritual boundaries, involving beliefs, emotions, intuitions and self-esteem.”

If you are the child of a Narcissist and/or grew up in a dysfunctional family, you have been raised to have no boundaries. Nothing you own is yours, not even your body, certainly not your thoughts and beliefs. If you have any boundaries at all, they are in your head and you keep them to yourself because letting your NParent know about them guarantees they will be immediately disregarded, trampled, forbidden. You are not an individual, separate person to your NParent, you are an extension of him, her, or them. Unfortunately, that doesn’t change when you grow up.

“Having clear boundaries is essential to a healthy, balanced lifestyle. A boundary is a personal property line that marks those things for which we are responsible. In other words, boundaries define who we are and who we are not. Boundaries impact all areas of our lives: Physical boundaries help us determine who may touch us and under what circumstances— Mental boundaries give us the freedom to have our own thoughts and opinions— Emotional boundaries help us to deal with our own emotions and disengage from the harmful, manipulative emotions of others—”

“…boundaries are a healthy, normal, and necessary part of life. Boundaries are a way to manage one’s life and one’s interpersonal relationships—a way to set limits.”

I spent most of my childhood waiting to be 18. I really didn’t have any plans for my life after that, I was simply focussed on turning 18 because, I believed, once I was 18 I could move out of my mother’s house and she would not be able to hurt me any more. Somehow I expected that when I turned 18, not only would I have boundaries, but NM would be obligated to respect them.

I was wrong.

I had never thought of myself as being an extension of my mother until I learned about boundaries: the better your boundaries, the more autonomous you are…and I was not allowed to be autonomous, nor was I allowed to have boundaries. To even hint at having them was to invite a retaliatory rage; to give away the slightest feeling of dismay or displeasure at having my boundaries violated risked indignance, aroused suspicions, and punishment. Not only did I have to tolerate the constant and unrelenting violation of my boundaries, I had to pretend that it was ok with me, that it was no big deal, that I had no rights and that was fine with me.

Just what are we talking about here? Well, when I was a kid, NM would come into my room and “clean out” my closet, my dresser, my room…usually when I was not home. At the end of one her forays, I would be missing clothes, books, toys, cards from my grandmothers and drawings I did (“worthless trash” in NM’s estimation), and even pets. I had no voice in the matter, things just disappeared when I was not there. And I was expected not to object.

I was not allowed to have physical boundaries: if she wanted me to sit on the lap of a smelly old man who happened to be the producer of a movie she wanted me to have a part in, I was expected to do so (and I faced severe punishment when I refused). When punishing me, she would make me lay across a bed with my bare buttocks and thighs exposed. She had a thin leather strap, once a dog leash but with the metal clip removed, with which she would “spank” me. These were no spankings, they were whippings in the truest sense of the word, because The Strap left the same thin, raised red welts across my tender flesh that a whip would leave. I was not allowed to move during the whipping—if I so much as rolled to one side in my agony, I was given more lashes for attempting to get away—“defiance,” she called it. She could hit, slap, pinch, whip, push, trip, beat me and even pull my hair, but I was not allowed to even look like I wanted to protest. When I had boils (which I did during childhood—lots of them), I was not allowed to object or protest or even cry out in pain when she sat on me (to hold me still, she said) and squeezed them. I had no dominion over my own body whatsoever—any physical boundaries I might try to set were trampled with hob-nailed boots.

When I was an adolescent, she ransacked my dresser and my closet, searched my school books, coat pockets, handbag, even turned my bed out, looking for stuff. Nothing of mine was sacred, anything could—and did—disappear if she either disapproved of it or fancied it for herself. I cannot begin to count the sweaters, skirts, and tops she “borrowed” without asking and subsequently stained, stretched out of shape, or simply never returned. She snooped in everything, demanded explanations for doodles in my school notebooks, even beat the stuffing out of me one afternoon when she found some money in something of mine—I wasn’t allowed to have money until I got a job in high school, and then, only as much as she allowed me to have for bus fare and school lunches. Nothing was private, nothing was sacrosanct, and if I wanted something that she didn’t find necessary in her life (like a can of hair spray), I had to submit a justification for buying it. I could not wait to get out of there and have some privacy and autonomy!

I actually did rebel and set a boundary when I was about 16… We lived about a block from the beach and every afternoon I went down there with a towel, my books, and the dog, and did my homework while working on my tan. I came home one afternoon to find my two-piece bathing suits missing (they were bikinis by the standard of the day, but covered a great deal more than modern bikinis). Outraged—I knew exactly where they were and who took them—I went to NM’s room and searched her drawers and closet as she must have done mine to find my swimsuits. I found them, hidden under some of her lingerie, retrieved them, put one on and went down to the beach. When I got back, she was home and she was livid. How dare I go into her room without permission and go through her things? She had a yardstick in her hand and she smacked me on the bare thigh with it and I—very unexpectedly—went ballistic.

It was like I had split in two, one person standing on the sidelines watching, horrified, as the other put herself in deep, deep trouble. The other, seized by rage and indignation, snatched the yardstick out of NM’s hand and broke it in half, then put her hands on NM’s chest and pushed her, with short, sharp shoves, right out of the bedroom and slammed the door in her face. All the while this was going on, she was screaming her outrage, “Stay out of my room! Stay out of my things! And I’m too old for spanking—don’t you ever hit me again where the marks will show in my gym shorts!”

How pathetic is that? So brainwashed, so lacking in real boundaries or sense of personal power, that I couldn’t tell her not to ever hit me again, just to limit her beatings where I would not be humiliated in front of my peers with the evidence of her brutality. Not only did I not want to reveal to my peers that she still treated my like a little kid, I had come to recognize that those bruises were not badges of my mother’s brutality, they confirmed my culpability…I had gone unbelieved for so long, I no longer expected people to believe me, I just wanted to stop showing them marks on my skin that proclaimed me at fault for my mother’s volatility.

I was careful to keep my thoughts to myself, my opinions and my beliefs. Since my beliefs and values and convictions were pretty much always different from those she expressed, and knowing that she took disagreement as a challenge that she had to win at all costs, I forestalled confrontation with her by simply not informing her of what went on in my head. If she knew what my private thoughts were, she would have done her level best to change or eradicate them.

Before I reached that magical 18th birthday, I got pregnant and married and out of her house. And I expected that would be the end of her predations. She had told me that when times got tough, not to run to her for help—a boundary she set down and I never attempted to cross. And I fully expected her to respect my boundaries after I was on my own. But it didn’t work out that way. As much as she was an ignoring NM, there were times that she decided to visit me—always unannounced—for reasons known only to her. “I was in the neighbourhood” was as false an excuse as one could make, considering that she lived down by the beach and I lived a good 20 miles inland. During those visits she made it clear that even as an adult living on my own, I was not allowed to make decisions for myself without hearing her opinions on where I was wrong. I was supposed to live my life according to her dictates, even though I was on my own and a mother in my own right.

One of the problems with a dysfunctional family and boundaries is that we aren’t allowed to set our own. Someone else sets them for us and they tend to be pretty one-way: they get to set boundaries that keep you out of their business but you are not allowed to do the same. Your boundaries exist only insofar as you are admonished to keep silent about the goings-on inside the family. The problem with growing up this way is that when you reach adulthood, you don’t change: you don’t really know how to set and enforce boundaries and anybody who presumes him/herself your superior will set up the same kind of dynamic with you: your boundaries may be violated at will while you must respect the boundaries of those who have assumed a position of authority over you, be it a boss, a boyfriend, or even another family member like your sister or daughter.

Growing up in a dysfunctional family that tramples all over your boundaries sets you up for two distinct problems in adulthood: 1) an inability to set and enforce boundaries in adulthood and 2) guilt about boundary setting, viewing it as “rejection.”

Learning to set boundaries and enforce boundaries can be tough. We don’t know what is too strict a boundary, what is too lax; we are conditioned to permit any kind of intrusion into our privacy, any kind of control, and sometimes it is difficult for us to even recognize these incursions. After a 13 year marriage to a paranoid malignant narcissist I took a two year hiatus from men and just worked on healing and becoming a healthier person so I would attract healthier men. When I resumed dating I went out with a guy I’ll call Bill who, on the surface, seemed nice enough but I couldn’t quite pin down my unease. One day Bill and I were in a video rental shop and I asked to open an account. The clerk was asking questions and writing down the answers…the problem was, Bill wasn’t letting me answer, he was just taking it over. Finally I interrupted him and said “Bill, who is opening this account, you or me?” He looked puzzled and said “Well, you, of course,” to which I replied “Then kindly allow me to answer the questions, since they are about me, after all.” He sulked all the way back to my place. On another occasion, Bill and I took a car trip down to LA (we lived in Silicon Valley). On the way back, I got food poisoning at lunch and by the time we came into this quaint and romantic little inn he had booked us for the night, I was desperately ill. He was very unhappy with me that I wouldn’t “set it aside” and be romantic and sexual with him…he even complained about how much he paid for the suite and how much trouble he went to in booking just the right room…I was sick and was up and down to the bathroom all night while he sulked. My expectation that he would respect my feeling ill was stomped all over—he moaned and complained all night and in the morning assumed I was well and ready to be frisky when, in fact, I felt like death warmed over. We parted shortly after that trip, for I had seen that nothing, not even my being sick with food poisoning, put a dent in his sense of entitlement.

My brief relationship with Bill taught me a lot about boundaries—setting and maintaining them—and reinforced my resolve to kick to the kerb any man who could not or would not respect them. The next couple of boyfriends didn’t even last as long as Bill because not only was I noticing their boundary violations, I wasn’t sticking around long enough to let them stomp on my sensibilities. Eventually I found a lovely man who understood and respected boundaries and I married him.

We often find boundaries difficult to deal with because we equate them with rejection and we are conditioned to put the feelings of others before our own…and we therefore fear that setting a boundary with someone will be perceived as a rejection. “Dysfunctional families are often dysfunctional in large part because they don't set healthy boundaries. As a result, during their crucial years of development, the children of…dysfunctional parents very frequently are rejected by their loved ones. Children from dysfunctional families commonly develop a hypersensitivity to rejection as a result.” Because setting boundaries is alien to us and because we, unlike our dysfunctional parents, retain our compassion and empathy, setting a boundary may feel like a rejection to us. We feel like we are rejecting the person (or people) who would be most affected by our boundary and we feel guilty for it despite the fact that boundary setting is actually healthy for us and for the people we expect to respect it.

Even though we intellectually recognize the difference between reinforcing boundaries and rejection it does not mean that our emotional perceptions follow suit. This make it difficult to set boundaries for dates such that we end up being promiscuous not because we are lusty, sexual women but because we cannot say “No.” We have been conditioned since the cradle to let someone else be our boss and we know the sting of rejection…and we also know the crush of guilt. We say “yes” to spare the guy what we perceive as rejection and ourselves the guilt that comes from saying “No.”

This carries over into our marriages and our mothering. We agree, we permit, when we don’t want to in order to spare our husband or child the feeling of rejection that we would have felt—and to spare ourselves the guilt that comes along to haunt us when we hurt someone. It is neither good for our marital relationship, as it breeds resentment that our husbands can’t read our minds and just know we wouldn’t like something nor is it good for our children when we cannot set limits for them because we don’t want to bear the irrational guilt our psyches will visit upon us when we violate one of the old boundaries set down by our dysfunctional parents when we were helpless children.

So, for a myriad of reasons, it is important for us to close the door on people violating our boundaries and to learn to set and enforce boundaries in our own lives. It is the only way we can ever gain respect and maintain respect from those around us and teach it to our children.

Next: Ten Commandments of Dysfunctional Families:
7 (2). Thou shalt be hyper-vigilant (there are actually two #7s in the original document!)