You Have the Power

As a child I was not allowed to say “no” to an adult. Any adult. My child’s mind extrapolated that to authority figures in general so by the time I became an adult myself, authority figures were people to be feared, to obey, or to find ways to get around, to do what I wanted without getting caught.

This is a dangerous thing to teach a child, that s/he cannot say “no” and must accept whatever is handed off to them by adults. I was not allowed to have my own taste in clothes, to choose my own hairstyle or shoes. When I said I disliked someone or something, I was corrected: “Of course you like your cousin Sherry,” or “You know you like buttermilk…” Because I was fortunate enough to spend a year with my father and his wife, who were considerably more permissive when it came to such things as personal tastes and likes and dislikes, by age 16 I had developed a sense of style and taste of my own (which was, in hindsight, considerably more mature and sophisticated than my mother’s). At my father’s house I began the transition from child to adult, got into the individuation stage of development, then went back to my mother’s where it was abruptly halted. Oh, she didn’t regress me back to little-girl dresses and hairy legs, but further individuation was halted on the spot.

Emotionally, I remained the child who expected to get approval or permission for everything, even to take a shower (because the bathroom would be inaccessible to others while I was in there). I could not eat a snack without permission, could not take a phone call without consent, leave the property without approval. If I had opinions that differed from hers, I had to keep them to myself and not even let them show in my expression: no eye rolling or pursed lips or heavy sighs. These were offenses against her dignity that warranted a smart slap across the face in retaliation.

And so my self-image remained that of a child, a repressed and stultified child who was not permitted to have an independent thought or belief or opinion. If my mother said I was bad, I was bad, regardless of my intent or my feelings or my logic. If my mother said I was lazy, I saw myself as lazy and either tried to change her opinion by frenziedly doing things to repudiate the lazy label or despondently live down to it. If I talked, I talked too much; if I didn’t talk, I was hiding something: there was no happy medium in anything. Ever.

By the time I was out on my own this was entrenched in me. I was what other people believed me to be. If a man found me sexy, I felt sexy. If a man found me repulsive, I felt repulsive. If my co-workers thought I was bossy, then I felt guilty for being bossy and backed off, only to be told by the boss I wasn’t carrying my weight, for which I felt more guilt as well. I was a mirror of what other people saw or believed or thought about me. The only thing I had that was truly mine was my sense of style and taste, developed during that one precious year with my father and step-mother. Add to that the fact that I grew up in the 50s and early 60s when girls could not take auto shop, get into Ivy League schools like Yale or Harvard…or even West Point…women could not get credit on their own and college scholarships for girls were so rare as to be unheard of, I became an adult woman who was a chameleon…whoever or whatever the authority figures around me thought I should be.

This included the adults in my family. Even though I was out of the house and living on my own, I was still viewed as the black sheep, the trouble maker, the incorrigible. At first I complied and behaved as expected, going from bad to worse to downright unresurrectable. Drugs, alcohol, men, jail, bikers, druggies, marginal living—even homelessness, crashing on friends’ couches or family rooms, sleeping on floors…wherever I could find a place out of the open to sleep.

Eventually I opened my eyes and realized that I didn’t have to be what they created me to be. I woke up one morning and decided I wouldn’t be that any more. I refused to accept the labels they put on me. I had long ago acknowledged my victimhood but I had never done anything about it. I was angry…enraged, actually…but I had never used that rage to fuel a revival of my Self, to create the impetus needed to overcome not only their ugly labels but the damage I had done to myself over a decade of being who they said I was.

It was not an easy transition and I had many relapses along the way. I married a man who, on the surface, was patient, loving and kind, only to find out shortly after the wedding he was my abusive, narcissistic mother with a penis. But I, still in the throes of the values and internalized messages of my childhood, believed the issues in the marriage were my fault…I was taught that anything wrong was my fault…and that it was therefore up to me to change things—including him—to make it work. It took more than a decade, but I crashed and burned. He got worse…so did I…until the day I was ready to use the Smith & Wesson revolver I had secretly purchased and had hidden under my bed. On myself. I had failed suicide attempts but the third time was going to be the charm that liberated me from the hole of despair that filled my entire being.

One of those last minute epiphanies saved me and I went into therapy. This time the changes I made were accompanied with insights, insights that changed what I believed, how I thought, what I saw when I looked in the mirror. My therapist just pointed out to me things I had not seen before, refused to let me sink back into denial, held my hand while I climbed out of the pit of despondency in which I had lived most of my life.

But I was the one who made the changes, who discovered that the power to make those changes had been within me all along. I had fallen for the blandishments of my abusers who convinced me that I didn’t have it, that the power over my life belonged to them and any power I felt was wrong and had to be subordinated to theirs. They lied: it was their job to help me learn to harness that power and use it to make a successful and happy life. Instead they usurped it and used it to make me feel powerless and themselves powerful and superior.

You have that power within you as well. We all do. We can piss it away in rebellious behaviour, we can drown it in substance abuse and self-pity, we can shun it through learned helplessness, but it is still there, waiting for us to lay both hands on it and put it to good use, making ourselves strong and independent, making ourselves successful human beings.

But nobody can do it for you. It is your journey and only you can walk it. If you depend on others to make you feel loved, to feel accepted, to feel “good enough,” you have given them your power. You have to take it back and from some people you will have to wrest it away from them because the only power they feel is the power they have over you. To take it away will make them feel powerless, adrift: only by wielding your power over you, by turning you into a puppet whose feelings and emotions they control, can they feel powerful. There is nothing in the rules of life that says you must sacrifice your power and your life so that someone else can have two…hers and yours. Look within yourself for rescue because the face of your greatest champion is the face that looks back at you from the mirror.

Nobody will love you or take care of you better than you love and take care of yourself. You are your own hero.

Cleaning up someone else’s mess: waiting to be rescued

Life is not fair.

There, I said it…Life is not fair. And if you expect it to be, you are guaranteed to be disappointed.

People and entities created by people, like governments and societies, corporations and churches, families and social organizations, have the ability to be fair. They can choose to treat people fairly or unfairly but outside of those things that humans create, fair simply does not exist.

It is the fundamental unfairness of life that explains the occurrence of such things as birth defects, genetic anomalies, weather phenomenon, illness, infertility, avalanches, and a host of other things that “just happen.” Life is not fair and we are not entitled to fairness, either.

But there are things in life in which we do have a legitimate expectations of such as our treatment at the hands of others. In such things as school and work and the law, in how we are treated by other people and the constructs of those people like corporations and governments, we have a legitimate expectation of being treated justly…we are entitled to a “fair shake.” This has repeatedly been upheld in the courts in the form of cash awards to people who can prove they were treated unfairly. Unfortunately, however, the popular perception of these awards is for people to somehow transform this legal entitlement into a belief that they are just as entitled to fairness and justice in all facets of their lives. And nothing could be further from the truth.

Even if it was the truth, from whom are you going to seek redress when you find yourself infertile, when a loved one gets cancer, when a meteorite crashes through your roof and sets your house afire? Life is not fair and until we internalize that fact, we are going to be continuously and constantly dissatisfied and resentful about our lives.

In no place is this more evident than when a person has been victimized by another. In particular, there are many of us who grew up in grossly unfair households in which we were the fall guy, the scapegoat, for everything that went wrong. To protect ourselves we developed numerous coping mechanisms that served us in childhood but which, as adults, may hinder us. I cannot count the numbers of people I have come across who continue to live unhappy, dysfunctional lives, lives that are suspended while they wait for their dysfunctional family members to acknowledge their perfidy and apologize so that they can get on with their lives. If you are one of these people, I am sorry to tell you, it ain’t gonna happen.

You may think that your abusers have an obligation to acknowledge their wrongdoing and your healing cannot take place until that happens, but you would be wrong. They may have a social or moral obligation to acknowledge their wrong doing, but that doesn’t mean they will honour it. And you have no obligation…nor any reason…to hold your healing in abeyance while you wait for them to wake up and accept responsibility for the pain they caused you.

You see, you have an obligation to yourself and that obligation comes before anyone else’s obligations to you. You can acknowledge the inherent unfairness of the universe, you can acknowledge the specific unfairness of your dysfunctional family, but neither of them hold back your healing. Only you do that.

It’s not fair that your parents treated you badly and you are unhappy, you are in emotional pain, you are dysfunctional yourself, as a result. And it is not fair that you have to do all of the hard work to repair the damage they did to you so that you can have a happy, satisfying life. But much of the work of living is unfair: does everybody in your house do his own cooking and laundry? Does everybody in your house clean and take out the trash and shop for necessities, all without being told or reminded? Does everybody do exactly his fair share and not expect services from the others?

Sometimes what is fair for one person is unfair for another: how fair is it that you want sex and your partner denies you? Or vice versa? If you go through life weighing everything and deciding that your participation in your own life must be put on hold until everybody in it treats you fairly, you will get nowhere.

How do you define fair, after all? It is subjective and if you don’t believe me, ask a narcissist to describe fair to you. I once accused my narcissistic ex husband of being unwilling to compromise and he was outraged…he was absolutely adamant that he compromised all of the time. When I asked him to define “compromise,” he said “I get what I want and you get everything left.” And he was dead serious. What your narcissistic mother thinks is fair is most assuredly light years away from what you think is fair. Not only that, all of the flying monkeys are going to put their own twist on the definition of “fair,” as well. So how are you and all—or any—of the Ns in your life ever going to come to a middle ground in which they take responsibility for their behaviour and thereby open the door to healing for you?

Furthermore, why should you hold your own healing hostage to the behaviour of a narcissist or other abuser? Because it isn’t fair that she caused you all this pain and you should have to fix it? Have you even given consideration to what she could do that would actually remove your pain, your dysfunctional responses, your memories of being hurt and betrayed over and over again? Even if your narcissist got down on her knees and apologized and begged your forgiveness, would you be healed and whole when she stood up again? Of course not.

Life isn’t fair. Sometimes you get stuck cleaning up messes you had no part if making and that is just the way life is. You didn’t ask for Superstorm Sandy or 48 inches of snow in one day…you didn’t do anything wrong to deserve them, either. But they came and they negatively impacted the lives of people who had done nothing to deserve the devastation, and guess who had to do the clean up? The innocent, undeserving victims, of course.

And so it is with us and the mess our narcissists created in our psyches. It isn’t fair that they can make such a hash of our lives and we have to clean it up, but there you have it…you are the one with the broken bits and you are the only one who can fix them. Oh, you can get help and guidance from a therapist, books, groups, loving husbands and empathetic friends, but in the final analysis, the clean up, the repairs, the refurbishing…it’s all on you. And the sooner you stop waiting for the impossible to happen—your Ns grow a conscience, apologize, and you are magically healed—the sooner your ordeal will be over.

It’s your life, your happiness, your sense of self that it on the line, and the job of fixing it is all yours.

Hero Syndrome

An abstract from an article published in the Sept-Oct 2013 issue of the medical journal Drug TestAnalysis: “A nurse administered the neuromuscular blocking agent succinylcholine (SUX) to at least one patient and gave first aid in the therapy of unexpected respiratory depression. SUX is regarded as an undetectable and thus perfect poison due to its short half-life and degradation to the endogenous compounds choline and succinic acid. However, SUX and especially its metabolite succinylmonocholine (SMC) were found in plasma and urine a few hours after administration by means of high performance liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry (HPLC-MS/MS). Compared to clinical studies, the window of detection was sufficient to gain definite proof; in other cases no samples were collected. The nurse enjoyed high reputation with the doctors. According to the court she wanted to present herself spectacularly as the first and decisive rescuer to demonstrate her special abilities and capacities, perhaps to receive a better job in the hospital. Considering the actual case, the hero syndrome is not limited to fire-fighters.” (Emphasis mine.)

I am sure we have all heard of the heroic fire fighter who rushes into a burning building to save those imperilled, only to later be discovered as the person who set the fire so that he had an opportunity to be that hero. The above-cited article is an example of a medical professional, a registered nurse, intentionally endangering the life of a patient so that she can rush to the rescue and receive the accolades of a hero. What you may not realize is that there is a very good chance that these people are narcissists, and this behaviour…this “hero syndrome” mindset…is not limited to fire-fighters or medical personnel, either.

Wikipedia says “The hero syndrome is a phenomenon affecting people who seek heroism or recognition, usually by creating a desperate situation which they can resolve. This can include unlawful acts, such as arson. The phenomenon has been noted to affect civil servants, such as firefighters, nurses, police officers, programmers, and security guards. Acts linked with the hero syndrome should not be confused with acts of malicious intent, such as revenge on the part of a suspended firefighter or an insatiable level of excitement, as was found in a federal study of more than 75 firefighter arsonists. However, acts of the hero syndrome have been linked to previously failed heroism. The hero syndrome may also be a more general yearning for self-worth.”

There are more subtle forms of “hero syndrome,” forms that do not overtly endanger the lives of others but still allow for the creation of situations in which the “hero” can be the rescuer. These forms involve the creation of a desperate situation…real or contrived…that can only be resolved by the very same person who covertly created the situation. A perfect example is a woman I worked for, the head of the legal department of a large company, who regularly created situations that, upon resolution, made her look like a hero…so much so that the unsuspecting Board even made her a member of its august self.

She was a lawyer, educated at an Ivy League university, who had a staff of eight to ten lawyers and law specialists and four secretaries. Her legal staff was highly credentialed, with degrees from prestigious universities and experience in prominent law firms. And yet, at the end of my two-year tenure as her executive assistant, only two of the original lawyers remained and she had had a staff turnover rate of 144%, meaning that among those positions that became open due to resignations, some of them had been filled more than once: the new lawyers took her measure and left the company, usually within four to six months of starting.

Why? Because their boss had a “management style” in which she would give them a task and then prevent them from completing it. She was an extreme control freak, so she would set them to work at something, like preparing new contracts for leasing some of our technology, but tell them that she had to review their work at a particular juncture and they were not to proceed beyond that point without her approval. And then she would make herself “too busy” to meet with them. This, of course, was sabotaging her own staff, but what could they do about it? If they proceeded without her approval, they were being insubordinate; if they waited for a meeting with her in which to receive that approval, she was never available to meet with them. Eventually, the situation would become dire: the contract due date would be looming and the contract wasn’t done. She would then swing into action, taking over the project and working heroically into the night (or requiring the staff to stay late and then stay and micromanage them), presenting the completed contract in the eleventh hour, along with the tale of how her staff stuffed it up but she managed to pull it off. This not only earned her sympathy from the senior staff, Nsupply for having to put up with the incompetents around her, but polished her halo for being able to force success out of the sluggards. It earned her the executive staff’s admiration.

People who are afflicted with “hero syndrome” are people who seek praise and admiration…or even more concrete rewards…from others and have little or no limits as to what they will do to set themselves up to appear to earn that recognition. And while some will endanger lives and others will limit themselves to endangering the careers and/or emotional well-being of others, they all have one thing in common: other people are merely objects to them, pawns to be used in the game of getting what they want. And they have no compunctions about hurting another person in the pursuit of their goals.

In order to make a “hero syndrome” scenario work, three things are needed: 1) danger; 2) a victim; and 3) a rescuer. It is a foregone conclusion that the N casts herself in the rescuer role, but, but the N must choose a victim (or victims) and then find a way to either put the victim in danger or make it appear that the victim is in danger. The danger can be as real as a fire or as ephemeral as another person identified to be a danger through slander and gossip. All that matters to the Hero is that someone has to appear to be in danger from someone or something else and she, the Hero, saves them.

In the case of my former boss, the danger was the possibility that we would lose out on a lucrative business deal, the victim was the company we worked for, and the hero, of course, was my boss who would wrest victory from the jaws of defeat by working long hours and cracking the whip over those idlers who put the contract in jeopardy. She set up the situation, then swooped in and saved the day…instant Hero!

It is my own personal opinion that the more subtle Hero is the more common: as long as you are not doing things that endanger the life and limb of others, it is unlikely that your game will be recognized…and even if it is recognized, in the absence of any law breaking, the consequences are much less severe. And while it is reprehensible to set up your staff to look like a bunch of inept bunglers so that you can look like a hero, there’s nothing illegal about it. Narcissists, as we all know, will go as far as they can, as long as they believe they can avoid being exposed. This is why the more dangerous, life-threatening forms of Hero Syndrome tend to be found in professional rescuers like police, fire-fighters and medical personnel, and the critical situation is created within the bounds of their expertise: they are confident that they know what they are doing and that they can effect the planned rescue without getting caught. My boss, who was a lawyer, would never dream of setting a fire and then herding everyone out in a show of heroism…she didn’t know anything about fires, how they acted, what to do to make a rescue that pointed her out as a hero…she might even get hurt herself. But she knew law and she knew how Boards of Directors work and think and she had her staff sufficiently intimidated (and the Board sufficiently hoodwinked into thinking that she was stuck with a staff of lazy incompetents) that nobody was going to say anything against her that the Board would take seriously.

These more subtle hero-types exist everywhere and the dire situations they create to give them opportunities to swoop in to the rescue are legion. It took me years to realize that my mother was one of these “rescuers,” and it didn’t happen until I was able to see three similar situations she created, years apart—only then did her pattern emerge and I could see it.

When I was in the first grade, we moved in next door to the McKenzies. I have never yet figured out what it was my mother had against Mrs. McKenzie, but shortly after we moved into the house next door, my mother began spreading ugly rumours about her. Up to that point, the neighbourhood had been sympathetic to the woman, who was a war widow and worked nights as a nurse to support her two daughters, who were just a few years older than I was. Before long, my mother had the whole neighbourhood believing that Mrs. McKenzie beat and starved her daughters, kept an unsanitary house, and was a drug addict who stole drugs from the hospital and also worked as a prostitute on her nights off from the hospital in order to feed her habit.

The way the houses were built in our neighbourhood, Mrs. McKenzie’s garage was between her living quarters and the house to the east of her; we were to the west and our living quarters and hers were separated only by a six-foot wide strip of dirt that was divided by a flimsy wooden fence. In a time before residential air conditioning and in a place where a good part of the year was hot and humid, windows were often left open for months at a time, affording a snoop like my mother ample opportunity to hang over the fence and eavesdrop on the McKenzie household.

By the time Mrs. McKenzie unwittingly gave my mother a reason to bring the authorities into it, my mother had successfully convinced our neighbours that Mrs. McKenzie and her skinny daughters were a danger to the neighbourhood. And because she lived right next door and could hear them through our open windows, my mother was in possession of information about the family that the rest of the neighbourhood could not possibly know…at least that was how she presented it. Nobody was in a position to tell the real truth from the manipulations and embellishments and outright lies except the person who was telling them…my mother. Then, one evening, Mrs. McKenzie had cause to punish one of her girls and, like most parents of the time (including my own mother), she spanked the child. The kid put up an awful howl and my mother was on the phone to the cops before you could blink an eye. The upshot of the situation was that Mrs. McKenzie was arrested and her daughters taken to the Children’s Shelter. A few days later the girls were back home with their mother and a “For Sale” sign appeared in their front yard. Within weeks the house was sold and the neighbourhood villains, Mrs. McKenzie and her scrawny daughters were gone.

My mother called everyone she knew to crow about their departure…she had “saved” the neighbourhood from the nefarious influence of the drug-addled nurse and her starvelings. The truth was, she had successfully created a situation by casting aspersions on a completely innocent neighbour, accused the woman of beating and starving her daughters to the police (the girls were just naturally thin like their mother—unbeknownst to my own mother I had been in their house numerous times and there was always plenty to eat and the girls had complete access to the food, unlike my house where every apple was counted and a missing one would bring doom to the child who took it without permission), and then went on to “rescue” us and our neighbours by running the woman out of the neighbourhood. And, time would reveal that Mrs. McKenzie took the smartest route by moving away because my mother’s next two victims were not so fortunate: they lost custody of their children due to her Hero Syndrome.

I cannot imagine that people who employ Hero Syndrome tactics of creating a crisis that only they can resolve are anything but narcissists. Just as my boss cared nothing about the feelings or professional reputations of the staff members she cast in the role of obstructive malingerers, my mother cared nothing for Mrs. McKenzie’s feelings or reputation, or the terrible consequences that might befall a nurse accused wrongly of stealing drugs from her job. She had no empathy for the woman’s situation, a widow with two daughters to raise, and no empathy for those girls whose father had died and who had only their mother, just as my boss had no empathy for the people she maligned on her way to Hero status. No, my mother, like my boss, saw them all as merely pawns who could be used to achieve their own objectives: looking like a hero, feeling like a hero, and reaping the rewards of appreciation, gratitude, and admiration. That it was gained at the result of a contrived situation made no difference: the prize was just as sweet to them as if it had been honestly earned.

This Hero Syndrome can be enacted inside a family. The Hero selects one or more people in the family to be the “problem” and then goes about blackening the reputation of that person to the rest of the family. Normal mistakes are spun to be intentional wrong-doing, acts of defiance or rebellion. Someone else in the family is identified as being at risk because of the “problem” person…it could be a sibling, the children of the “problem,” or even the entire family. Once the “problem person” is sufficiently maligned to the family that she is viewed by the majority as a troublemaker, the Hero can take action, whatever that action might be. I have been the victim of this, inside my family, several times. Mostly my mother was behind it all, but on one occasion it was my daughter. And they came out Heroes whereas I came out the bad guy, yet again.

As scapegoats, we are all vulnerable to this kind of subtle attack. Too often we not only cannot see what is happening, when we finally do see, we have no idea what is going on, why we are being targeted in this manner, or what the perpetrator gets out of it.

The answer is simple: she gets to be the Hero…and you get to be the vanquished dragon.