Disrespect and rudeness--really?

What is does it mean, to be rude? The Google search function turns up “…offensively impolite or bad-mannered…” but that is rather subjective—who determines when impoliteness or bad manners becomes offensive? Obviously the person who is perceived as being rude doesn’t think he’s being rude at all, while others—whose minds he cannot read—perceive differently. The Cambridge Dictionary¹ defines rude as “…not polite; offensive or embarrassing…” Again, subjective: that which I find offensive you might find hilarious.

Years ago there was a standard of behaviour to which the majority of people agreed constituted basic manners. Things like saying “please,” “thank you,” and “you’re welcome.” Saying you are sorry for causing someone else inconvenience or hurt. Children asking to be excused from the table. Not interrupting others while they are speaking. Waiting your turn for something. Calling before going to someone’s home. Respecting the privacy of others. Respecting other people’s wishes with respect to their own persons and property. Being a “good sport” when losing and gracious when winning. These and many other small courtesies were handed down to each succeeding generation as the lubricant that oiled the wheels of society. Without small, simple courtesies practiced by the majority of us, regardless of class, society broke down into a chaos of ruthless competition. The definition of rude was not subjective or ruled by the perception of either the recipient or perpetrator, the definition of rude was codified—it was anything that violated the basic code of manners that permeated the society.

Narcissists understand the codes and narcissistic parents use them to their advantage. In a society that largely ignores the traditional courtesies, narcissistic parents are in their element: they can teach their children the kinds of behaviours and responses they want, call them “manners” or “courtesy” and shape their children the way they see fit.

When I was growing up we were taught basic manners first in the family and next in primary (elementary) school: teachers would require us to say “please” and “thank you,” wait in a queue or raise our hands for our turn at something, to share with others. Girls got a more expanded version of it in the higher grades during compulsory Home Economics courses. We had books and newspaper columns by well-known etiquette mavens, books that might show up in a young adolescent girl’s birthday or holiday swag. And we learned from TV shows like Leave it to Beaver in which the young Beav and his adolescent brother Wally were counselled on manners by their mother, who was backed by their father. But we also understood that there were different rules for adults, rules that forbade us to do things until we were “old enough,” among them smoking, drinking, driving cars and—my eagerly anticipated favourite—moving away from home.

It was this “rules are different for grownups” that gave people like my mother their power. They could demand adherence to the rules of etiquette from children without reciprocating because their rules were different from ours—“Do as I say, not as I do” was a common refrain around our house. Of course, I knew adults who were courteous, even to kids, but I understood this was not required of adults, that courtesy was a one-way street where children and adults intersected.

Another thing my mother inculcated into me—and which was largely supported by society in general—was the notion that children owed respect to adults…all adults…no matter what. So an adult could berate you loudly and rudely in public and you couldn’t say anything “disrespectful” in return without risking getting into trouble over it. So if some grouchy old neighbour threw handfuls of garden manure at you as you walked by their garden, bellowing at you not to trample their flowers, you were allowed to say “I didn’t walk through your flower beds,” but if Grouchy insisted it was you, you were disrespectful to “talk back” and insist on your innocence—because at this point you were supposed to take it to your parents and let them handle it. If you had clones of Ward and June Cleaver for parents, this worked. But if you had the narcissistic Wicked Witch of the West or Captain Bligh for parents, this didn’t go so well. Instead of being able to go to your parent for support and defence, you had to keep quiet…and you learned that people older than you could get away with shit you couldn’t.

Most people grow up understanding they are supposed to respect their elders and give them deference. Unfortunately, if your parent was narcissistic, there was an added dimension to this. At the age of individuation, at the age where normal families begin loosening the reins of control over their kids, helping them to learn to handle independence and to start thinking of themselves as adults, narcissistic parents tighten the screws. Even if they ostensibly give you the freedom to come and go like your friends do, sign for your driving license, etc., they do not stop thinking of you as a child. They believe they are doing you a favour by allowing you to participate with your peers—and they see no value in helping you to become emotionally independent.

When these children become adults, their lives and choices are often ruled by those narcissistic parents. The parents have taken up residence in their heads and those parents remain in control. I had a friend who, in her 30s, was lamenting her single state. I offered to introduce her to a couple of guys I knew, engineers who made a good living and would, in my opinion, make good husbands and providers. She declined because her parents wouldn’t approve of these guys because they were ethnically different from her. She, personally, didn’t care but she couldn’t go against her parents’ biases. Another woman I used to work with had a hard core controlling mother who demanded that my co-worker pay her rent and utilities. This left my co-worker, who was a clerical worker like me and a single mother, scrabbling for pennies at the end of every month. When I asked her why she did this she said “Because she’s my mother.” I knew nothing of narcissists in those days but I suggested that she tell her mother she needs to pay her own way and my co-worker blanched. The very thought of standing up to her mother literally made her feel faint. She was in her early 40s.

We get taught that inside the family circle, our parents not only hold the power, they hold it until they die—sometimes even after they die, depending on their will. We are not supposed to contradict those parents or even think differently from them. As children that is naughty and we court punishment; as adults were are deemed disrespectful, insubordinate and rude. Due to the conditioning of our childhood, we fear being found wanting by our parents. Even when we know we are too old to be spanked or grounded, the visceral fear is still there. Depending on the kind of parent we had, that fear may be mixed with guilt and shame. But any way you slice it, doing—even thinking—anything that our parents would disapprove of brings us anxiety and even fear.

So what happens when we grow up and put enough distance between us and our Ns that we begin to have contrary thoughts? What happens when you develop the nerve to disagree with your mother face-to-face and not back down, or find the courage to tell her she’s wrong or to call her on her bullshit? Well, depending on the type of NM you have, you can get tears, push-back, or outrage—but in every case your NM is going to perceive you as both rude and disrespectful. Narcissists rewrite definitions of words and phrases to be more self-serving. My NexH, for example, when accused of never compromising, indignantly informed me that he compromised all the time. When asked for a definition of compromise he came up with this: he gets what he wants and I get everything that is left. Narcissists not only rewrite history, they rewrite the damned dictionary.

As children we don’t know any better and we accept those definitions. So when you are actually individuating and becoming independent, your NParent redefines it as rebellion. When you tell you NM that she can’t give your child cookies twenty minutes before dinner, she calls you disrespectful. When she invades your private space and you ask her to leave, she sees this as you being rude. And so do you! Even if you have reached the point where your intellect recognizes that you are not being rude or disrespectful, you can still feel like you are!

Believe it or not, there is no rule in the books of etiquette and tomes of manners that says it is rude or disrespectful to disagree with your parents. There is no prohibition against upsetting your mother or disagreeing with your father. There are rules against such things as browbeating others with your point of view, showing up at a person’s place of work or residence uninvited, and demeaning others both publicly and privately. There are even polite ways to deal with people who persist in these behaviours and, simply stated, it is to ignore their presence as if they are not there. It is called “The Cut” and old fashioned guides to etiquette delved deeply into the various kinds of cuts and when and how to employ them. It is an old, tried-and-true, absolutely correct method of dealing with people who persist in imposing their bad manners on you: you simply do not engage them in any fashion, up to and including shutting the door in their faces if they appear at your door uninvited and having them escorted away by security or the police if they refuse to take the hint and decamp.

Narcissists instil that sense of being rude or disrespectful in us as children for a reason: it allows them to control us. When we are little, we are shamed and even punished for a behaviour our parent identifies as rude or disrespectful. We learn from them what it means and we believe them. We internalize it and it becomes part of our core beliefs. Once we have it internalized, they no longer need to threaten or imply punishment because we do it ourselves: we shrink away from assertive and autonomous behaviours because we now believe such behaviour is rude or disrespectful. We also believe it is a one-way street, that they can be rude and disrespectful to us, it is within their purview as our parents, but we cannot reciprocate because that is unacceptable.

We will remain their emotional zombies for as long as we permit ourselves to buy into those self-serving definitions that underpin our inappropriate feelings of guilt and shame and wrongness. As long as we feel like we are being rude (which we react to by feeling shame) when we are doing no more than asserting our autonomy, we are still being controlled by the Ns who conditioned us to accede to their wishes in all things.

But the truth is, they are the ones who are being rude and disrespectful, not you! But until you use those feelings of shame, that fear of retribution, that anxiety that comes over you whenever you think independently, until you use those clues to lead you to the reality, to the real definitions of your behaviour, you will continue being controlled by them remotely. You have to stop in the middle of that attack of shame, and think. Yes, it is difficult. Yes, you may not realize you have to stop and think until you are in the middle of the attack, it doesn’t matter. Once you realize you are reacting, make yourself stop! Put your mind to work. Acknowledge you feel like you are being rude but are you really? Is asserting yourself rude? No, it is not. Is having an opinion or belief that differs from your parents rude? No. Is failing to or refusing to live up to their expectations rude or disrespectful? No. Is disappointing them bad? No again. None of those things that they taught you are true. They lied.

They LIED to you. They redefined all of those things to condition you so they could control you. And as long as you continue to react as programmed, they are in control, not you, no matter how far away you live, no matter how long you have been NC.

What you may not yet realize is that you are the one who has all of the power in the relationship. That’s right—you have all of the power! They have managed to con you into not seeing that and allowing them to continue controlling you as they did from childhood. But you can stop that at any time—at any time you choose.

The thing is, it is not going to be easy. You are going to have to fight yourself, your own feelings, even what you perceive to be your instincts. They aren’t your instincts, they are programmed responses that are actually overriding your instincts. It is going to take work and effort on our part. It is going to take recognizing and stopping automatic responses and substituting the appropriate responses until they become habituated. It is going to take recognizing that it is your Ns who are being rude and disrespectful to you, not the other way around, and then putting a stop to it. It is not easy…but it is well worth every iota of effort you put into it.

1 https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/rude

Do you know how to feel loved?

As the scapegoat children of narcissists, we know how it feels to feel unloved. We know what it feels like to want to be loved and to feel its absence from our earliest memories.

Many of us spend our lives seeking the love withheld from us by our selfish, narcissistic parent(s) using a variety of largely unsuccessful techniques…I say they are largely unsuccessful because few people who actually feel loved find themselves reading a blog like this one.

The problem with growing up feeling unloved is that when we go out seeking to be loved, we don’t know what it is we are looking for. Having felt only its absence, how will we know when we have found what we are looking for?

What does it feel like, to feel loved? Would you know it when you felt it? Or would you, like I did, mistake something that felt comfortably familiar for it? Do you have a list in your head of what it would feel like to be loved? Do you use that list to guide not only how to recognize if someone else loves you, but as a way to show love to others?

One of the problems we face is that of subjectivity. What feels like love to one person does not feel loving to another. That not only means that what feels like love to one ACoN does not feel like love to another ACoN, it also means that what feels like love to me may not feel like love to you…or to my husband or to my kids or to anyone else on the planet. And while this may well be true of “normies” as well, I suspect that they probably have a clearer, more accurate sense of what it feels like to be loved than we do.

I grew up with the sense that love hurt. Unless my heart was wrung with anxiety and even a bit of fear, whatever I was feeling was not, I believed, love. My comfort zone included a dynamic in which I had to earn the love of my partner through excellence: being the best cook, lover, housekeeper (that one was really tough for me because I hate housework), most obedient and even anticipating the desires/needs of my partner and spoiling him. It means keeping my kids quiet and out of the way unless they were on their best behaviour, and demanding nothing in return…fidelity and love would be my reward if I was good enough.

Of course, this failed. And my failure generated a lot of fights because I perceived this as my partner’s expectations, and that they were unreasonable (then I married a malignant narcissist and those actually were his expectations and they were still unreasonable.) We would fight because I was stressed by the unreasonable expectations and my partner’s failure to live up to his end of my one-way unspoken bargain: to be faithful and to love me in a way I could feel loved. Because throughout all of this, despite having set up a paradigm in which I was supposed to be able to finally earn my partner’s love and then actually feel loved, it never happened. And no wonder, since I was going about it all wrong…

It took a long time and a lot of therapy to realize that, until I loved me…flaws and all…that I could not feel love from another person. And that was key…it didn’t matter if another person loved me or not because I was in a situation in which I could not feel loved, and what I identified as what I needed in order to feel loved was way off base. I was working against myself…no matter what I tried, I did not ever make the effort to love myself as I was because it actually never occurred to me. I thought that would come when someone else loved me and I felt loved…I needed outside validation—the love of another person—before I could allow myself to love me.

One of my biggest epiphanies came when I realized that without respect there is no love. A person who does not respect you and your very humanness does not love you. Oh, s/he may be obsessed with you, but without respect, there is no love. We mistake many things for love: obsession, passion, need, even fear…but the single most important component of love is respect for it is from respect that compassion and empathy grow, and without those, love is simply not possible.

We know what it feels like to feel unloved and some of us, simplistically, believe that whatever makes us feel unloved, the opposite will make us feel loved. For the most part, this is incorrect. This is like thinking that if we do the opposite of what our narcissistic parents did, we will be good parents and loved by our children: nope…extremes don’t work whether it is the extreme of non-nurturing narcissistic parenting or its opposite number of smothering and indulging a child’s every whim. And it doesn’t work for love, either, especially when you consider that, growing up conditioned to feel “normal” in being disrespected and unloved, the opposite might feel cloying and even mocking. Why? Because, simply, we don’t know how to handle it and we aren’t very experienced at accepting true expressions of love. We may even be suspicious of someone who treats us with the respect and kindness every human being deserves because we did nothing to earn it.

We may also find simple, honest love to be “boring.” How many times do you hear men lament that they are stuck in the “friend zone” because the women they meet are attracted to the “bad boy” type, the players, the men who will inevitably break their hearts? This is a manifestation of love being perceived as a competition, something to win: a woman who wins and weds a “bad boy” perceives herself as better than the women who failed to do so, never mind that people don’t change for other people and the marriage will likely be fraught with tension as she must keep up the competition indefinitely…just because he is married doesn’t mean he is necessarily tamed. Does she feel loved? Probably not…she feels victorious but the competition never really ends…as long as there are other women out there, the competition continues.

So what is it you think you need from someone else to feel loved? Can you analyse it honestly and determine whether or not you would actually feel like you were loved if you had it? I know that in my case, it didn’t matter what another person felt about me, until I could perceive myself as being worthy of love…which meant loving myself including my flaws…nothing another person could do would make me feel loved. I would have been uncomfortable with lavish displays of affection, embarrassed, even. I would have been very suspicious, thinking I was being led along until the big reveal, in which I would be humiliated and abandoned. Because I didn’t feel I was lovable, I not only didn’t love me, I couldn’t believe anyone else could truly love me, which meant those who declared they did were just leading me on, manipulating me, or otherwise trying to take advantage of me. This went for family members as well as romantic partners. Out of desperation I had allowed myself to be fooled a few times when I was young, and the bitter lessons stuck tight.

I didn’t come to love myself during therapy, but I was able to see that loving myself first was the key to feeling loved and internally accepting it. I had mellowed a great deal, no longer perceiving insults where they did not exist, and able to shrug off those that were real. Over the next years I came to view myself realistically…I began to see and embrace truth…and to recognize that having flaws is simply part of the human condition and not a barrier to love or being loved. I let go of the idea that I had to be perfect by some other person’s definition in order to be worthy of love and I also gave up the notion that I could remodel an unsatisfactory man into the man I wanted to love. It eventually manifested into an understanding of acceptance…that I must accept a person as he is and he must accept me as I am…as a key component of love.

I found, eventually, that what I needed to feel loved was to feel respected and accepted just as I was…by me. It didn’t mean I couldn’t recognize and work on character flaws…it simply meant those flaws did not render me unworthy of love, respect and acceptance, including my own. All of the things I thought I needed…beauty, wit, accomplishment, being “the best”…none of them truly mattered because I had achieved them all, in one way or another, and they had not changed anything about my feelings about myself.

What I eventually discovered is that my mother always found me wanting and I had adopted that mindset. A report card of 4 As and 2Bs should have been all As…and when the straight A report cards came, then I was found wanting because I had not been producing them all along. My hair was too straight, my posture unacceptable, my feet flat, my shapely legs marred with eczema. If I spoke like my peers, I was exhibiting lazy speech; if I spoke correctly I was being pretentious. To not have my chores done perfectly was to be defiant and lazy; to have them done perfectly was to be angling to get something from her. I came away from my childhood feeling fat, ugly, stupid, manipulative, unworthy, and of the opinion that if I was to get anything even resembling love, I couldn’t pass up any opportunity, and to get what I wanted from another person, I was going to have to fight for it.

And yet I went into relationships expecting to be loved and respected just as I was. Of course, by picking the wrong kinds of people—often immature and/or narcissistic men like my NM—I guaranteed that I would not get what I expected and wanted, and then I would have to either fight for it or go outside of the relationship for it…and sometimes both. Years of this type of interaction ultimately wore me down until I was suicidal and leapt into therapy with both feet, a lifeline at a time I was rapidly losing the battle.

What did I need to feel loved? What did it mean to me? For me, I ultimately discovered that feeling loved by someone else was secondary: I could not accept love from another without being suspicious of it until I was able to love myself, accept myself, accept that my flaws were simply part of my human condition and not barriers to respect, love and acceptance. Eventually I found that by being able to love and accept myself as having value and worth, despite my flawed condition, I was able to believe that others could love me as well. I learned to expect respect and acceptance from others before I would believe their declarations of love—how many times had I believed a man loved me when, in fact, he merely wanted something from me or wanted to remake me into the perfect woman according to his definition. Ultimately, I discovered that when a person tries to change me, he is not respecting me or accepting me and, once you truly accept and respect yourself, you really aren’t willing to accept anything less from others.

So what is it that you need to feel like you are loved. Do you have fantasies of when you are pretty enough or accomplished enough or smart enough, then someone will love you? Or have you learned that first you must love yourself, warts and all, before you can actually feel the love of another?

It is, I have discovered, a key part of healing and feeling whole.

The Elusive "Normal" - Third of 3 parts

13. Provides Clear Boundaries

We aren’t each other’s friends. A parent is a parent no matter how friendly they may be. Our children are not extensions of ourselves, they are individuals. Do not ‘friend’ them on Facebook unless you talk about it first and they say it’s OK and they mean it.

It’s more than providing clear boundaries, it is about enforcing them and enforcing them consistently and justly.

In functional households, there are clear boundaries, boundaries that to not capriciously fluctuate from day to day, whim to whim. Boundaries may change and evolve with time and the maturity of the children…like curfew…or they may be immutable—like treating your parents and others with respect, but they remain clear and they have consequences for violation that are proportionate to the breach.

And boundaries work both ways…children need to be able to set boundaries—within reason, of course—so that they can have a sense of control of their lives. You cannot allow them to set any boundary they like, however, because they do not have the wisdom yet to do so responsibly. That comes with time and trust…and you must allow them to be trusted until they show themselves to be untrustworthy. You can help a young child set a boundary with respect to body touching, with respect to the kind of treatment s/he will accept from others (no hitting, for example) and teach your child that boundaries apply to others as well as to himself: if he expect other people not to hit him when they are frustrated, then he must not hit others, either.

But with kids, boundaries must have limitations. Years ago a diamond ring set was stolen from my home after our teen baby sitter and her boyfriend had been there. I reported it to the police and gave a sketch of the unique setting. A year later a police officer showed up at my place of work and said “I think I have something that belongs to you,” and handed me my ring. Then he told me what happened: a teen-aged girl (not our baby sitter) came home wearing a ring her mother recognized as being much too expensive for her daughter to have legitimately received from her teen-aged boyfriend (our former baby sitter’s now ex-boyfriend). She took the ring and called the police. The girl, under pressure from her mother, told her where she got the ring and, using the ring as evidence to get a search warrant, went to the boy’s house. There they not only found my other missing ring, they found tens of thousands of dollars of stolen goods stacked up in his closed, stowed under his bed, and even hooked up and being used in his room.

When the police asked his mother how he could have all of this stolen merchandise in his room and she knew nothing about it, she indignantly told the officer that her son had a right to privacy and she respected it. She was fortunate that she was not also charged as an accessory for allowing a massive amount of stolen goods to be stored in her house.

There was a news story some years ago about a disabled low-income woman who was evicted from her apartment in a government-sponsored housing project because her teenaged son was storing drugs in the apartment and dealing from the premises without her knowledge. It violated the lease and when he was arrested, her ignorance was no excuse. She lost her home because she respected a privacy boundary her child had no right to erect and she had every right to deny him to have.

So, it is a fine line we must walk when allowing our children to set boundaries, but they must be able to erect some…and to erect more as they grow older…but not to the point that you can be held liable for a criminal act that occurred because you were more focussed on respect than guidance and monitoring. Functional families find balance and sometimes that balance involves violating someone’s “rights” for the well-being of the whole household. And as the parent, the decision to put family welfare over one child’s self-imposed boundaries is yours to make, not the child’s, just as in the larger society, your right to freedom of movement can be overridden by the authorities if something you are doing with that right somehow jeopardizes the rest of the community. Respect for boundaries is a good thing in general…but it can, of necessity be conditional—but the children are not the people to decide when such a condition exists.

14. Has Each Others’ Backs

Part of resilience – being supportive to each other no matter what, will allow your kid to call you when he thinks he’s in trouble, like needing a ride home from a party that’s gotten too wild.

This one is a true tightrope walk because, on the one hand you want your kid to call you to come get him in a circumstance like the one above…on the other hand, you don’t want your kid to take this as tacit consent to go out and get tanked every weekend and you’ll pick up and there will be no consequences.

We have to be supportive of the person, but not necessarily of the behaviour—and that can sometimes be a tough one to negotiate. My solution was to make sure the kids could get home safely, then supply some onerous chore in the morning (and I did not let them sleep in on the following morning…up at 7!) that made the effects of the hangover even worse…like weeding the garden or cleaning up dog poop or some such job that gets the blood pumping (and throbbing in the hangovered brain).

My daughter was searched by a male member of the faculty in front of 150 other students on the grounds that he thought she had marijuana on her. I came to the school, over her objections, and had a row with the Vice Principal over it. He at first defended the search, saying “If we found drugs on her, you would feel differently!” to which I replied “No, I would not. There was no reason for that man to physically search her body and to do it in front of 150 of her peers. You have a Girl’s Vice Principal, a female school nurse, and this happened in front of the Girl’s Gym, where she could have been taken and privately searched by a gym teacher.” It was not until I threatened legal action and going to the school board that he capitulated.

Later in the year she was searched again but, the VP was quick to inform me that is was done by the school nurse with the Girl’s VP as a witness. And they found a couple of roaches in her purse. She was punished both by the school and by me. Her right to the dignity of her body was supported by me and all but forced on the school, but when she was found to be guilty of wrong doing, she was disciplined for it. I had her back when they searched her in such an inappropriate and humiliating manner, and whether they found drugs or not, I was not going to allow that kind of indignity to be perpetrated upon her: if they had found drugs, she would have been disciplined for it but I would still have pursued changing the policy that allowed fully grown adult men to run their hands over the bodies of nubile teen girls under the thin guise of looking for drugs. I supported her as a person being treated without respect but I did not support the stupidity of bringing drugs to school.

In a functional household (which mine was definitely not, but we had our moments of functionality) parents and siblings support the people without necessarily supporting a behaviour. You can understand that your child is angry or fearful without going along with his expressions of those feelings. Part of being a parent is recognizing when your child is not taking the appropriate steps to deal with a situation and helping…giving them options they did not have before. Hormones are high in teens and they may be thinking revenge scenarios, and their prefrontal cortex is not as well developed as yours and mine, so long-term consequences may not act as a restraining consideration. You have the obligation to notice when your teen is becoming emotionally unwound and to open the dialog and offer acceptable ways he might handle his issues. If you suspect something dangerous might be in the offing, you have the obligation to protect the rest of your family as well as the community so seeking counselling for your child or even involving the authorities are choices you might make. Functional families are concerned for the well-being of their members over their public image so they take those kinds of steps. Imagine that boy who had my ring and a bedroom stuffed full of stolen electronics that his mother knew nothing about…just imagine if those had been firearms?

15. Get Each Other’s Sense of Humor

Functional families laugh a lot. They have ‘inside’ jokes and favorite stories, anecdotes of memories shared that delight and re-enforces a healthy bond.

I have to take exception to this one because you can’t always “get” someone else’s sense of humour. My NM used to tell me I needed to get a sense of humour because I didn’t think laughing at the expense of someone else was funny. I didn’t “get” pratfall humour because my first thought went to whether or not the victim was hurt and I didn’t get cruel teasing for the same reason. My own sense of humour was much drier and more dependent on wit than on banana peels, and she didn’t get that, either.

I think a sense of humour is rather individual and can also depend on the age of the person as well. There is a time when scatological humour is hilarious, but most of us outgrow that by puberty…are Bevis and Butthead really funny after you are old enough to buy booze legally? If it is, maybe the legal age is too low…

All that said, I do agree that shared family stories—with the caveat that the humour is not at the expense of the feelings of one of the family members—are a good thing and re-enforces a healthy bond. But when those stories humiliate a family member, too often those who find it funny feel obliged to further victimize that family member by telling him or her to “get a sense of humour,” rather than acknowledging that they are hurting that person yet again and ceasing their behaviour.

16. Eat Meals Together

So hard to do in today’s society but research does show that communication within a family is enhanced if we take more meals together, even if it’s in front of the TV.

This is another one of those agree/disagree issues. It is not hard to schedule family meal time nor is it hard to enforce it. In a functional family, people care about their fellow family members and they respect them, and that includes respecting the efforts of the family member who had taken time to prepare a meal for them all. It may be the only time in a day that the whole family has the opportunity to be together.

Children in a household are not miniature adults who can decide what to do with their time. They can have blocks of free time granted to them by their parents, but it is up to the parents to see to it that a schedule, however informal, is established so that kids have rules…kids need rules for security. One of those rules can be dinner time. You set a time and everyone is expected to be there. There are consequences for not being there; there are consequences for being late; there are consequences for filling up with junk food at a friend’s house and having no appetite for dinner. And the first consequence is the shortening of the free time period so that if dinner is served at 7, the offending child must be home by 6, or something like that. You are the adult, you set the rules. No eating dinner at a friend’s house without prior permission, no making plans that occur during dinner time without prior permission, and no eating in front of the TV except on very rare occasions (and if you have a way to record it, not even then).

Dinner time is family time and it should be sacrosanct. Families bond during this time, it is your opportunity to observe your family and see how they are doing. Does your teen daughter seem depressed? Is your preteen son preoccupied with something? Is your toddler whiney? Does your husband seem distant and detached? Observe…discuss in private…and make the kids help with clean up so that they understand that a family meal is, in all ways, a family event.

17. Follow The Golden Rule

It’s golden for a reason. “Treat each other as we wish to be treated in turn.” It was true way back when and it’s still true now.

mmmm…not necessarily. In a fully functional family, yes. In a family with dysfunctional people at the head…not so much.

They way we, the children of Narcissists, want to be treated is not necessarily healthy. If we grew up in a household that caused us to be hypervigilant and hypersensitive, then what we want is to not have the hypervigilance and hypersensitivity triggered…which others may perceive as having to walk on eggshells. And, if we give that same treatment to our kids, we may tiptoe tentatively around issues and situations when, if fact, such issues need to addressed head on.

The bottom line is, they are not you. The way you wish to be treated may not be at all they way they need or wish to be treated. You and your feelings and your desires are not the benchmark for your significant other, your kids, or anyone else on the planet: they are yours and yours alone. You are not a universal standard from which to measure the emotional needs of those around you. No matter what level of recovery you have achieved, you were still damaged in your early years and some of your emotional needs come from that damage. Your needs cannot even be used as a standard for measuring the needs of other damaged people, as we are all unique and respond to our tribulations and traumas in our own unique ways.

Better, I think is to adopt a policy of treating everyone with respect and expect that in return…and if you don’t get it, remember that is not a reflection on you, it is a reflection on the person who treats you disrespectfully. If that person is your child, then you have some work to do, some teaching and guidance. If that person is not your child, then you might want to reconsider keeping that person in your life.

But to treat everyone the way you want to be treated seems to be a little narcissistically centred, as if everybody on the planet wants to be treated the same way you do…and there are just too many of us for that to be true.

And I will add my own:

18. Trust and trustworthiness

It is important to be able to trust those in your family and for them to be able to trust you.

You create trust by following through on your promises, but being consistent and even predictable. That may sound awful, but if you have children, they need to be able to predict you to feel secure. If you are all smiles and praise over a “B” on a math paper this week, but thunderously displeased over a “B” paper next week, you are going to confuse your child and he is not going to know what to do to please you. Children feel secure if they feel their parents are happy with them.

Be very wary of making promises and when you make them, let nothing short of sudden death make you break them. I learned long ago to tell my children something less committal: “I’ll see what I can do,” “I will try,” “It’s not in the budget for this month but let me see what I can work out down the line”… They knew this could end up becoming a “yes” or a “no,” but they didn’t get their hearts set on something that would ultimately be a disappointment.

I rarely made promises then, and I rarely make promises now. But when I do make them, you can take them to the bank. People who know me know that if I promise something, it will happen…they can trust.

Was I always so trustworthy? Of course not. I didn’t understand the value of it. I didn’t trust anybody anyway…promises seemed just empty words to me. But time has brought me to the realization that if I am going to expect others to be worthy of my trust, I have to be worthy of theirs as well. I am always forgiving of unforeseeable circumstances, but many others are not, so I promise very infrequently and only when I know that I can deliver. Everything else gets either turned down or with a commitment to see what I can do, but no promises of the outcome.

People in functional families can trust each other because they come through for each other. Sophistry such as I employ…promising only when I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that I can deliver and “I’ll see what I can do” for everything else is not really necessary because functional people in functional families understand and forgive those unforeseeable circumstances. People in functional families are not blindsided by the unexpected. To those of us raised with high drama and low blows, functional families may actually feel boring because they are pretty predictable. Your parents will still love you if you are unmarried and pregnant, gay or transgender, get an abortion, marry a person of a different faith or colour, commit a crime. They may not approve of the actions you undertake, but you know in the depths of your heart, that they will not stop loving you, no matter what acts you have committed. You trust that love…and they trust yours.

And that is what we, the adult children of narcissist parents, were most deprived of…the ability to trust. Because when you cannot trust your parents, when your entire life you live in fear of a rejection even deeper than that you endure as a scapegoat, trust simply does not exist. And that is the furthest from “normal” that you can get.