Just who is looking out for YOU?

Have you ever wondered why you and your feelings always seem to be the lowest priority, why you are always the one who has to give in or give over in order to spare the feelings of someone else? Why others don’t seem to be expected to spare your feelings, but you are expected to spare theirs? I have never seen this addressed before, in any of the articles I have read, in any of the conversations I have had, in any of my many exhausting therapy sessions.

In passing, I have heard people ask “Why am I always the one who has to give way?” but it always comes across as rhetorical, not a real question begging for a real answer. But for those of us who grew up under the thumb of a personality-disordered parent, the question is very real, the dynamic anything but balanced and just.

I once was asked by a therapist, in reference to my narcissistic then-husband, “If you are looking out for him and he is looking out for him…who is looking out for you?” As a person raised and trained by a narcissistic mother, I was groomed to put myself last on anybody’s list or priorities, virtually guaranteeing that my needs would never be addressed…and, not knowing any better for many, many years, this is exactly how I lived. I believed I had to justify every purchase, every need. I didn’t seek medical attention unless I was debilitated by the problem, I didn’t buy new clothes or shoes from quality retailers, but bought from the cheapest stores and even then, felt I had to justify my purchases. Every once in a while I would splash out on something costly…like my sports car…but then I felt like I had to justify my expense by driving it for fifteen years (and thereby saving the cost of buying another car). For the most part, I set myself at the end of the priority list and actually felt grateful for the crumbs that fell from the banquet from which everyone around me was partaking.

A reader made a comment some weeks ago and in it she asked why she was always the one who had to give way to the narcissist or the Golden Child. It struck a chord with me, as I instantly related to the question. And I have a strong sense that this reader and I not are the only people who deal with this…in fact, I have a sense that it is pretty much universal for those of us who have to deal with narcissists.

What is peculiar, however, is not that it is the narcissist who demands this from us, but the other people around us. Well-meaning family members who would never consciously wish to harm or humiliate us, expect us to give in to the narcissist for the sake of family peace, to end a rift, to mollify the indignant and bristling N in their midst. And I have to wonder…why did my grandmother expect me to set aside my animosity after my mother stole my children, told them a pack of hurtful lies about me, and then left me twisting in the wind for eight years, wondering where they were, if they were dead or alive, if they were ok or not? Why didn’t my grandmother seek to restore family harmony by asking my mother to apologize to me and tell the truth to my children? Why was I the one who had to give up a toy to my destructive little brother? Why were my howls of outrage met with a beating and his were met with the demand that I give up whatever it was I was withholding from him, even if the item belonged to me?

But it wasn’t just my NM or my NexH who had this expectation of me. Other people, both inside and outside the family, seemed to have this expectation as well. I kept waiting for it to be my turn to hear, “…don’t be so selfish, it will hurt Violet’s feelings…” but the words never came. Violet’s feelings, it seemed, didn’t need to be spared. Growing up, I knew that I was the one who had to give way…and so did everyone else in the family. I can remember my cousin, a girl my age who I saw only during the summers, threatening me with “I’ll tell Nana,” if I didn’t give her what she wanted. If I told our grandmother about her threat, that would be “tattling,” something my NM had beaten into me as being unacceptable. So there I was, stuck with only three choices: 1) tell Nana and be branded a tattler, 2) refuse to give my cousin what she wanted, in which case she would tell Nana, branding me as selfish (also forbidden), or 3) giving in. I was always, always giving in because that, it seems, was the role assigned to me.

When I was in my early teens my mother arranged a “date” between me and the son of her best friend. They thought it was cute, me dressed in my Sunday best in the backseat with my GC brother and my “date” as the two mothers sat in the front and drove us home from a matinee. The problem was, I already knew this boy and I considered him to be gross. He was at that gangly stage, grown nearly to the size of a man, but not yet able to coordinate those big, ungainly limbs. He was rather crude and didn’t even approach my standards of attractive. For one thing, he had big rubbery lips that always looked wet which I most definitely perceived as gag-worthy. He engulfed my hand in his huge paw, and when I snatched it back, he ignored my wishes and grabbed my hand again. As the mothers tittered in the front seat, he suddenly kissed me, his wet rubbery mouth engulfing my lips and applying considerable suction, which absolutely repelled me. I tried to push him away (I couldn’t make a sound with his mouth covering mine) and instead of letting me go, he then stuck his tongue in my mouth! I found this positively revolting and, when he would not let me pull away and break the kiss, I bit his tongue. Hard. He stopped…and he howled.

Do you think either mother scolded Greg for the intrusion into my sovereign space? Nope…I got nailed for biting him! For being “ungracious”! For upsetting Greg’s mother and hurting Greg’ feelings. What did I think was going to happen, I was asked…I was surrounded by people…his mother, my mother, my kid brother…he wasn’t going to rape me (I didn’t even know what rape was at that time). Apparently I was supposed to acquiesce to his crude, fumbling attempts at wooing, under the watchful eye of our mothers and my brother, and be grateful for his attentions. Nobody…nobody…cared one iota about how I felt.

I look back on my life and it is full this. After my mother told the family a heap of horrible lies about me, lies so bad that they turned their back on me when she stole my children and gave them up to another family member for adoption, when the truth came out and, after eight years I got my kids back, the family still expected me to hold out the olive branch. Did anyone say to her “Georgia, you did a terrible thing to Violet—the least you owe her is an apology”? No…but my grandmother, who was the one who finally broke the silence and told me where my children were…asked me to “bury the hatchet” with my mother for “the sake of family harmony.”

Why is it the victim is always pressed to “forgive” but nobody seems to be pressing the perpetrator to make amends and stop behaving like a predator? Is there some perceived ennobling of a person who has been victimized, making her one who is expected to take the high road and “make nice” with the very people who victimized her? It rather reminds me of the rape culture that has been making the news lately: girls are being taught how to not get raped, but who is taking the boys aside and saying “don’t rape…we’ll punish you severely for it!”? Nobody is telling male freshman college students at orientation to refrain from sexually predatory behaviour and, when they get caught doing it, too often it is brushed off as “boys will be boys” behaviour and a vocal victim, if she’s lucky, just shunted aside. Unlucky ones get further traumatized by being censured for attempting to ruin the future of a "promising young man"…who is castigating the campus rapists for ruining the future of a promising young woman?

I am at a loss to explain a social structure…either in microcosm, like that of a family, or in macrocosm, like the greater society…that demands a victim be careful of the reputation and feelings of her abuser. Whether the expectation is that the victim keep silent about a raping fellow student or an abusing parent, it is wrong. Abusers of every ilk fear the truth and only by speaking that truth do the abused have any chance of ending the abuse, not only for themselves but for others who are current or potential victims.

When someone is being abused, sometimes that person has safety issues…even life-threatening issues…that keeps her silent. But once that person feels safe enough to speak out and name the abuse and name the abuser, why do so many of us feel compelled to shut her up? I once had a letter from a reader who said that her father admonished her to “not provoke” her mother…why did he not tell her mother to stop abusing their child? My step-father, for all that he was a child-molesting sleaze, at least would stop my mother in mid-tirade when she was on a tear with me. Of course he did it for selfish reasons—her screaming at me was drowning out his TV in our tiny one bedroom apartment—but he wasn’t afraid to tell her to “shut up and leave the kid alone.” And he never had the audacity to suggest that I debase myself to her and seek a less fraught relationship. But he did step in, which is more than a lot of people seem to be willing to do.

The perception that the onus is on the victim to “make nice” with her abuser is just senseless. Not only does it fail to support a person who has already been wronged, it sends a message to the abuser that he will not be held accountable…and an abuser who knows no one will hold him to account for his misdeeds is a person with no incentive to stop abusing (if he had the conscience and ethics to stop without an external threat of punishment, he wouldn’t have abused in the first place). Expecting a victim to tread lightly in the face of her abuser is simply adding to the abuse: it passively supports the abuser by not calling the abuser to account.

I never understood people who asked me “what did you do to provoke her?” after my mother beat me black and blue. What transgression can a small child commit that warrants a violent beating? (I am no longer going to minimize what she did and call them “spankings”…I don’t think I was ever spanked in my life because what I got were beatings.) And I further didn’t understand why I was last in line for everything…from new shoes to eye glasses to dental care…I got them only when the situation was urgent, and even then I got verbally abused for needing them, as if I had intentionally contrived to need them. My mother had her own agenda when she stole my children: she had an adored younger brother who was childless and who had not passed the home study for adoption—and she took my children from me and gave them to him with no more thought for my feelings than taking a kitten from its mother and giving it away. And yet, years later and with no apology or acknowledgement of wrong doing from her, I was expected to “bury the hatchet” with her for the sake of “family peace.”

Why didn’t someone ask her to make amends with me for the sake of family peace? Why was I always the one who had to make the sacrifices for the “greater good”? Who was looking out for me and for my feelings? Why did my mother’s feelings matter more than mine…or even those of my children? And why is it, when there is a narcissist in the family, the sensibilities of that narcissist come before anything else? How many times have you heard someone who has absolutely dreadful parents say they feel “guilty” about their lack of contact (or even contemplating going low or no contact)? How many times have you heard these same people recoil at the suggestion that they keeps their kids away, saying something like “Oh, I couldn’t deprive them of their grandchildren…” Or, “that might hurt her feelings” when responding to a suggestion to stop the abuse. Why is it that we are expected to submit to the abuse and they are not expected to stop abusing?

My therapist was really on to something. Who was looking out for me when both my NexH and I were looking out for him? Nobody, that’s who. He neglected and abused me…and so did I. Carefully groomed by a narcissistic mother to put myself last, I was the perfect foil for a narcissistic husband. And when I put myself so far last that I felt almost invisible, I became suicidally depressed…and even that was ok with him, as long as he had clean laundry, food purchased and prepared, and I was available for sex. As long as his needs were met, nothing else mattered.  

Nobody was looking out for me, including me. And I set a poor example for my kids, giving them not only a narcissistic stepfather as a role model, but providing them with a perfect example, in the form of on-going tableaux, of how the other person in a relationship with a narcissist should behave. We demonstrated the crushing of my occasional rebellions, we demonstrated the power of towering rage, and we demonstrated the proper driven-by-fear scrambling to make everything perfect for the narcissist, the anticipation of his every need, the excusing of his selfishness and redoubled efforts to please in order to keep the peace.

And there is the answer…if your goal is peace within the family, then you can’t approach a narcissist for it. The narcissist, the abuser, the perpetrator, is not open to making admissions of guilt and requests for absolution. Rigidly and inflexibly self-serving, the narcissist is not interested in family peace, only in advantaging himself. Approaching a narcissist to attempt to solicit a behaviour that will create peace with one of the narcissist’s victims is a guaranteed way to spark a negative reaction because it implies the narcissist was wrong…and we all know that no narcissist will ever acknowledge that, let alone make a heartfelt apology. No, the person to approach is the victim…appeal to her better instincts, tell her she must be a better person and “take the high road,” to let “bygones be bygones.” And, if the victim has empathy for others, once she is made aware that the well-being of the family hangs in the balance, she will be the one to capitulate, to let go of (or suppress) her feelings of anger and hurt, not only with respect to the initial injury, but with respect to the expectation that she be the one to make nice.

The problem with this is that it encourages the narcissist. It confirms to him that his behaviour and attitude were right all along…and so it encourages even more of it. The victim is put in the position of allowing an internecine conflict to continue or to throw herself into the breach, sacrificing her own emotional well-being in order to preserve “peace” in a dysfunctional family. That she is expected to do so by more than just the narcissist is telling…it demonstrates just how toxic the entire FOO is when it demands sacrifices of the victims rather than banding together to protect the victim from the abusing narcissist.

So what do you do? As always, it depends on the situation: the news is full of stories of dead people—particularly women—who stood up to their abusers and who died at the abuser’s hands. For most of us, though, the situation is not that dire…but it requires us to choose between ourselves…taking care of ourselves…and the people who abuse us and their supporters. And that, after being raised and groomed by narcissistic parent, can be surprisingly difficult to do.

The Scapegoat’s children: the Narcissist’s grandchildren

On 25 October 2013 I published “The Scapegoat’s Daughter,” a guest post written by a young woman named Eve who very eloquently told us about the pain narcissistic grandparents cause for the child who must watch her mother’s pain. It helped us to realize that, even if our children seem unaffected by their exposure to narcissistic grandparents, they may well be suffering just as much—if not more—than we are.

There is another facet to this, however, because not all children of scapegoats are empathetic, compassionate individuals like Eve. Some of them may be innocently influenced by their narcissistic grandparents and some of them may even be narcissists themselves. And that creates a whole new dynamic.

There is a lot that is unknown about narcissism, such as when is the onset of narcissism as a personality disorder. This is because a certain degree of narcissism is natural…even necessary…in infants and young children—it is part of the survival mechanism. How much compassion for her sleepless mother does a 3 month old infant have? Absolutely none: the infant wants something and it cries, regardless of what else is going on. This behavior, however, is supposed to diminish with age and maturity. Toddlers are pretty much without empathy for other creatures, even other people. Susie wants the toy Mary has, Mary won’t give it up, Susie bites her or hits her over the head with another toy: perfectly normal behaviour for that age—Susie has found a way of getting what she wants and she employs it ruthlessly and to her best advantage. So, at what age does narcissism cease being a natural behaviour and enter the realm of a pathological disorder? Nobody knows for sure and there are professionals who believe that narcissism in teens is still natural behaviour that has yet to be outgrown, but there are others who believe that narcissism should be resolved by the onset of puberty. There is, as far as I have been able to determine, no consensus on this.

This is actually important for parents because if even the experts can’t tell us when narcissism enters the realm of disorder, how are we to know how to deal with children who show narcissistic traits? How are we to know if those traits are developmentally normal, fleas acquired from narcissistic family members and friends, or pathological in nature? The short answer is, we can’t. All we can do it try to teach our children to make choices that take into account the feelings and rights of others because you can neither generate nor appeal to compassion or empathy in a person who does not have them. And, sadly, some of us have children who lack those qualities.

In seeing narcissistic behaviours and attitudes in our children, we ACoNs may react in certain ways. Two of my children turned out to be narcissists: my reaction to one of them was to be puzzled by his behaviour and beliefs…my reaction to the other one was denial. My one child did things I simply could not understand…like making choices that made him look like a victim when he had other, better choices available to him (I know now that looking like a victim allowed him to elicit Nsupply from others with a minimum of effort on his part but back then I could not fathom why he would deliberately disadvantage himself…and, of course, he got no Nsupply from me because I knew the whole truth, not the edited version he told people he was trying to get sympathy—and handouts—from). My other child repeatedly made selfish choices, told egregious lies to get what she wanted, and seemed to have absolutely no regard for how she was hurting other people, both inside the family and out. I repeatedly excused her behaviour, writing it off to immaturity and/or to being the result of my mother having stolen her, filled her with a stack of lies, and giving her away to my childless aunt and uncle, people who had failed the home study as adoptive parents not once, but three times!

But as she got older, her behaviour became increasingly self-centred and, when called on it, she blamed other people…frequently me. It was not until I started learning about narcissism that the light began to go on in my head…a light I quickly extinguished with denial. But as time went on she became less and less subtle in her manipulations and exploitations of others and there came a day when her behaviour intersected with my growing awareness of narcissism and I was no longer capable of switching off that light in my head. I had to face the truth, and the truth was, my daughter was a narcissist who had no more conscience, compassion, or empathy than my own mother had.

That was hard to swallow. I came to the realization slowly…I simply was not prepared to accept that my own child had no more ethics or morals than my amoral narcissistic mother, but I finally reached a point that I could deny it no more. I came to the realization and admission reluctantly, looking everywhere for valid reasons to explain her apparent callousness and self-serving behaviour, but simply could not find anything that I could accept. My daughter was a narcissist and she had thrown to the wolves everybody who did not serve her in some way, me included.

I can see that she continues to manipulate her brothers with the money she inherited from my mother…and I can see that she insinuated herself into her grandmother’s good graces after years of estrangement: grandmother had inherited a packet from her own mother and was ripe for plucking. All my daughter had to do was to swallow Grannie’s kool aid…to side with Grannie in her animosity towards me. Suddenly, I no longer existed—my daughter usurped my place in the family order and I (and all of the other grandchildren) were disinherited in her favour. Grannie’s bundle of cash and goods was divided two ways: between my brother, the GC, and my daughter.

My daughter’s narcissistic behaviours were blatant and obvious to anyone who knew the signs and was prepared to believe them. I can plead ignorance for her teen years…nobody knew much about narcissism back then and I, like most people, wrote it off to teenage rebellion. But going to my best friend and her husband and begging them to let her live with them because I was abusing her was not “teenage rebellion.” It was a lie that drove a wedge between me and my friend (a friendship that never recovered) as my friend, unable to fathom a child telling lies like this about her own mother, believed her.

I learned that, at age 13 and 14, while living with my aunt and uncle, my daughter used to sneak out of the house at night by climbing out a second story window. She would go to parties and clubs where she got drunk, did drugs, and “hooked up” with much older guys, sneaking back into the house in the wee hours of the morning before my aunt and uncle got up. She was unable to pull this off at my house, so she sought adult guardians she figured she could bamboozle…my friend Pris and her husband Tim. When this came to light, my daughter changed her tactics and ran away…and got involved with a pimp and his live-in girlfriend. My daughter swears that the did nothing but babysit their five kids, but she came back from Los Angeles (brought back through the work of a private detective I hired) with a severe case of PID…she was 15.

The behaviours became more refined and subtle as she grew older, but no less manipulative and self-serving. By the time she was in her middle 40s she and her husband had accumulated a nice little estate: big house, nice cars, good furniture, pension plans—and then her husband suffered an industrial accident and became addicted to the pain meds. Instead of helping him, however, she divorced him and he ended up living in a tent in a park in the middle of a Colorado winter while she lived in their McMansion with multiple empty bedrooms and three cars in the garage.

It was through this that I finally discovered the information that turned off my denial for good. My son-in-law contacted me to tell me they were divorced…she didn't tell me because she had stopped speaking to me about five years earlier and, when I asked why, simply said “I have nothing to say to you.” I had no idea why and she stonewalled my every effort to find out. But now that he no longer had to obey her dictates to keep his place in life, my son-in-law came clean: she was mad at me for my blog.

Now you have to understand, this was before this particular blog was on line. Previously I had a private—password protected—blog that contained the first 46 entries of this blog. I had written it as a catharsis and gave out the password to only a few, carefully selected people. Obviously, my daughter got the password from someone, read the blog and took exception. She told her husband that is was nothing but lies…but almost all of those entries were about events that happened before she was born, and since NM was long dead, she had no way of actually knowing if my stories were true or not, but she decided they weren't. She then cut off all contact with me. But she went one step further, which ultimately explained why some of my family members inexplicably backed away from me: she told them about the blog and scared them into thinking I was telling lies about the whole family. Essentially, she cut me out of the family so thoroughly that when my beloved father died, my daughter and her family were listed as next-of-kin, but I was omitted from the obituary altogether!

Where did I go wrong? Well, hindsight being much more accurate than foresight, I think I know: I made the mistake of allowing my narcissistic mother to have contact with my children. So desperate was I for her love and attention, I used my children as lures…she might not come to see me, but she would come to see them! But it was years until I realized that had she ignored them, along with me, until we became useful to her: her beloved younger brother could not have children of his own and was rejected as an adoptive parent. My mother had tried to force me to abort my daughter when I was 17, unmarried, and pregnant and when that didn’t work, she refused me permission to get married…I had to get a court order to get a marriage license and be married before my baby was born. I don’t think she ever forgave me that: for my entire life my mother made a point of separating me from everyone and everything I loved, from dolls and toys to pets to family members…it was much too late when I realized that her sudden appearance in our lives was not because she had awakened and realized she had a daughter and grandchildren to love, it was because she finally had a use for us: I was the producer of the two children she was going to give to her brother to adopt…and how it hurt me or those children was never even considered.

So I went wrong by not realizing just how deeply predatory my mother was, and by wanting the tokens of maternal affection so much that I was willing to expose my children to a grandmother who had mercilessly beaten and demeaned me, their mother. I went wrong by allowing her to have an influence on my children…would my daughter have outgrown her innate narcissism if she had never had the narcissistic role models of my mother and the adopting aunt? Certainly my mother had no boundaries and in reviewing my daughter’s behaviours over the years, I am seeing that she has had very few…what she wants dictates her behaviour and she plays her game several steps ahead, like chess.

Would the lack of narcissistic role models have changed things? My youngest child had a malignant narcissist stepfather who raised him from toddlerhood. The man actually told my son that he didn’t have to listen to me…how is that for teaching disrespect? Would this boy have reached his majority with the ambition to go out and set the world on fire with his intellect (which is prodigious)…or would he have still decided, at 18, that he was going to live his life as a mooch and I was somehow responsible to take care of him for the rest of his days?

There is no way to know, but in my case, it is obvious that allowing my children intimate contact with narcissistic authority figures was a bad, bad move on my part. That I had no idea what narcissism was in those days doesn’t excuse me: I knew how brutal my mother could be but I chose to believe that she wouldn’t behave badly with her grandchildren and I was now too old for her to beat. That I had no idea what narcissism was does not excuse giving my sons a role model for whom exploitation of others and a pervasive sense of entitlement was the core of his personality…I knew he had “bad” ideas about other people but I set him up as a role model, a parental figure, for my children. Is it any wonder they have no respect or love for me? Who did they ever see, during their formative years, who loved and respected their mother? How much of it did they learn and how much of it was in their psyches when they were born?

There is really no way to know…and what I should have done, what is the prudent thing to do in situations like that, would be to keep them away from my FOO. Yes, there were many benign people, but those people were the very ones who asked me to “bury the hatchet” with my narcissistic mother…advice that I took and came to bitterly regret. Just because you are a scapegoat child of a narcissist does not mean you cannot bring forth narcissistic children, but you can limit the influence of your family narcissists, enablers, deniers, and apologists. If I had been looking at the situation with clear eyes and a whole heart, I would have kept those children as far away from my family as I could…and thereby limited their influence on children who didn’t need to have narcissism, enabling, and denial demonstrated to them by the extended family.

I didn’t know…but I should have known that these people were not good role models for my children. Somewhere deep inside I knew better…I just did not act on it. And now, whether or not they were born to be narcissists or it was something learned, is effectively moot.

When you don’t—or can’t—take credit…

Why are some people so gratuitously cruel? It’s more than “because they can”…in my opinion, it is because they get something out of it…a feeling of superiority, perhaps.

My grandmother once told me that if you look hard enough, you can always find something to compliment another person on. I decided to test that out and, sure enough, she was right. Even in the case of a co-worker who dressed like Ugly Betty and wasn’t much more attractive…she was a very nice person who had a wonderful, infectious laugh. The day I said to her “I just love your laugh!” she lit up like she had been plugged in…and seeing her so delighted made me feel good, too.

Years ago, after years of wanting one, my husband gave me a pretty little Yorkie puppy for Valentine’s Day. I was over the moon…she was so cute, and such a little sweetheart. We took her with us everywhere, bought her jerseys and cute outfits and a pretty pink collar with her name spelled out in rhinestones and my husband even sent to America to get her a dog stroller (pram) because walking on a leash in crowds was a terrifying exercise for her (as an adult she weighs less than 7 lbs…as a puppy she wasn’t even 2 lbs!). We went to “slow food” and farmer’s markets and craft fairs and other outings with our little doggie girl securely leashed into her pram and she was such a delight. She is very outgoing and loves attention, so when people would stop to greet her, she would wag her tail and raise up to be petted and even give out kisses if her admirer was so inclined. Every weekend there were at least two or three people who would whip out their camera phones and take snaps of the cute little Yorkie wearing a frilly dress, her hair done up with a bow, and sitting sweetly in her pram.

And then one Saturday morning at the farmer’s market held at the nearby ostrich ranch, we ran into someone who didn’t admire the little dog but who couldn’t be bothered, like most people who didn’t find her overwhelmingly cute, to just walk on by, saying nothing. She stopped and bent over the pram and Puddin’ began wagging her tail and raising up into a “sit up” position to get petted. The woman ignored her and turned to me and asked “What kind of dog is this?” “A Yorkshire Terrier,” I told her, whereupon she proceeded to tell me, in indignant tones, that my dog was not a "real" Yorkshire Terrier, she was a poor example of the breed and should never have been allowed to live! She went on to point out every fault she perceived the dog had, ending with a reiteration that my precious baby was such a poor example of the breed that she should have been put down rather than sold to someone gullible like me. And then she stomped off in a huff. Not only was I shocked and stunned, so was the dog: accustomed to being adored and petted…and being highly intelligent…she knew that for some reason she did not meet with that woman’s approval and she sat in the pram, ears down and tail tucked, as if she had done something worthy of a scolding.

Now, I have bred dogs in the past and I am well aware of breed standards. I already knew that Puddin’ would never make it as a show dog, but I didn’t want to show her, I just wanted a sweet little dog to cuddle and play with and she fit that role admirably. Spunky and with a cheerful, loving temperament, she was everything I had expected and more. And after that dreadful woman’s diatribe, my poor puppy sat in her pram with what can only be described as a “hangdog” look, and her only sin had been to attempt to greet the woman and bestow a little Yorkie love on her.

I cannot fathom why that person would take such issue with my dog…she’s not a show dog, but she is healthy and personable and well-mannered…what’s not to like? The only thing that I could think of was the possibility that this woman had a show-quality Yorkie of her own and it made her feel superior…and to reinforce (or milk) that feeling of superiority, she had to belittle my dog (and probably any other dog that did not meet show standard). It was not about my dog at all, but all about her.

I am uncomfortable with praise and have been all my life. A curt “this is good,” is all I can take without feeling squirmy, but I don’t feel that way about others. You can wax eloquent about how brilliant my husband is, how cute my kids are, how endearing my dogs, and my sense of pride just blossoms. Go on like that about me or my attributes or my achievements and anything beyond “ya done good,” makes me feel uncomfortable. And I don’t know exactly why.

When all of those people admired my little Yorkie, I felt proud and, seeing how she loved the praise and attention, felt good for her—I liked seeing her happy and obviously enjoying the admiration. And when that awful woman scorned my little puppy in such harsh terms and sharp tones, I felt bad for the dog as much as for myself because it was obvious that the little sweetie knew she was being maligned and the set of her ears and tail showed she felt bad about it.

I get comments and letters all the time from people who have read posts on this blog and took away information that helped them change their lives for the better. I received one such letter over the weekend and, while reading it, began to have an awareness of my own feelings on the subject. On the one hand, I am always very pleased to hear that people have been motivated by what I write and as a result, begin looking critically at their lives and taking responsibility for making changes. On the other hand, as soon as someone writes something greater than “Thank you, Violet,” when they get into more lavish praise or fulsome commentary, I start to feel uncomfortable. Just what the hell is that all about??

It’s odd, but I notice that when someone says something nice about me to another person, I am gratified but when they say it to me directly, I feel uncomfortable. I have tried to better define that “uncomfortable” feeling I get and the closest I can pin it down to is that I somehow feel vaguely threatened. That, of course, is absurd—how can anyone feel threatened by being praised? And yet, there it is—I do not know how to appropriately respond, on an emotional level, to being praised and appreciated. Intellectually I get it, intellectually I am pleased and gratified…but emotionally, I shy away from feeling pleased and gratified and feel somehow threatened by it.

I just checked the thesaurus for synonyms for “threatened” and was rather surprised by what I found: endangered, vulnerable, susceptible, exposed, helpless, defenceless, disappearing, in danger. And it begins to make a little better sense…if you use my little dog as an example, she had come to have an emotional investment in the positive interactions she had with people: their praise and admiration made her feel happy. And that correlation between the praise of others and her feeling of happiness left her vulnerable, exposed, and defenceless to the killjoys of this world, like that woman who thought my dog should be perfect or it should be dead. Puddin’ approached this woman, all doggie smiles and innocence, expecting a pat on the head and some positive-sounding noises and instead, she got what sounded to her like a scolding. She had no idea why she was being scolded, what she might have done to deserve it, but she knew she was being found wanting and that woman was hostile about it.

Now, this was a puppy…imagine if it was a child? This little dog had faith in the world and in strangers…up to that moment, her every interaction with people outside the family had been positive, and her little spirit bloomed. She was a happy dog and she projected that and people responded to it by giving her positive attention, which made her an even happier dog. And then that woman happened by and stuck a pin in her balloon.

But she is a dog and she recovered…her detractors were few and her sunny disposition drew positive attention. Even today, at 5.5 years of age, she is still a happy dog, eager to meet new people and exchange greetings with them.

But what about little Violet? What happened that the child grew into a woman who feels vulnerable, exposed, endangered by being directly praised? What occurred that, instead of feeling proud and pleased when the recipient of praise, my first instinct is to feel powerless and imperilled? I also notice that I often give others credit for ideas that were, in fact, my own and that I am pleased when they receive the praise instead of me.

This is undoubtedly linked to my childhood and my narcissistic mother but I can’t, for the life of me, remember a time in which I received negative attention specifically for accepting praise from another. I do know, however, that NM was always give centre stage and that any accomplishments I made were, one way or another, attributed to her. If I got an A on my report card, it was because she “wouldn’t accept anything less and the kids know it.” If I won a prize at a talent contest, it was because of her sacrifices in paying for lessons and the amount of time she “selflessly” devoted to making my costumes, putting on my make up, and fixing my hair. Whatever I achieved, she usurped. Perhaps I divined that objecting to her taking my limelight was a dangerous thing to do, and that the safest course of action was to simply step back and deflect onto her all praise and credit for whatever it was I was being lauded for.

It makes sense but, quite frankly, I have no recollections of anything like this. But, ordinarily, I am not a shy, retiring kind of personality but rather a gregarious sort, known for my ability to tell funny stories…it doesn’t seem to fit with the woman who easily gives credit to others and deflects praise as being uncomfortable. It tells me that there was something in my childhood…probably very early in my childhood…that makes me shy away from positive attention directed at me by others. Something that gave me sense of foreboding from praise, a feeling of being threatened as the recipient of positive attention…as if I were stealing the thunder from a great and powerful giant.

How deeply buried this must be that it is only now surfacing, more than 60 years later…and I still have no clear sense of what it is. But rather like finding a black hole, I can only infer an event…or series of events…from what evidence is available to me: an outgoing personality known for entertaining conversation who systematically deflects praise and avoids taking credit for successes and good ideas. Something is definitely wrong here…even my dog revels in praise and positive attention…why am I afraid of it?