Moab is my Washpot.

Moab was a large tract of land, a country with its own king just outside Canaan., in which his Fantasticness would deposit his…leavings.

Yahweh dump him shi’ on Moab..

Yeees… a bombardment of shadow.

Moab, in ancient times, had

”become so utterly contemptible as to be likened to a washpot or basin in which men wash their feet. More than this, however, may have been intended—nay, we feel sure was intended by the expression.”

Thankyou, Phil of the Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit who, I’m afraid, has no time to answer any questions about the geneology of his family, so that queue will have to disperse.

Moab was the kid in the playground that got dumped on, that Yahweh deposited his imperfections and various bits of nail and hair and mank into.

These days we call it projective identification. It describes the process by which unconscious material can be effectively disowned by one party and claimed by another as if it were their own.

The dominant model that we have of the psyche, which we inherited from Freud, finds this phenomena a little embarrassing and hard to account for because the theories of that paradigm are intrapsychic, you fucked yourself up, rather than interpersonal, whereby one person might well pass on their ‘stuff ‘ to another.

Did you pack this suitcase, Sir? Has it been with anyone else since the time it was packed? Could some low down sonofabitch slip their shi’ in your stuff and make out like it was, you know, your shi’? make you carry it for them…so they can swan through, or by, or over, or around, and let you take da muddafuggin rap?

When Freud, as a young turk, tried to suggest, before the collective might of the Viennesse Psychiatric Society, in his ‘Aetiology of Hysteria’, (1896) that the cause of mental disturbance lay in the way people were treated as children, he was entirely shut down…

Wot do you call a bunch of psychiatrists?

Is this a joke? not now for chrissake,

No, but its interesting.. would it be a ‘dourness’, or maybe a ‘bowtie’, or a

be fucking serious will you

Perfectly serious, serious business, I mean it must have been like the inquisition for poor Sigmund..

Except that he recanted and went back to his, ‘you only imagined it’, theory..

And were his friends, friends with him again?

Yes.

And did he get his stuff back?

Yes.

And the badges, and the twizzly bits?

Yes, even the twizzly bits.

Bonza

So, the notion that projective identification even exists is a social faux pas in certain cirles, marking you out as a believer in the myth that parents burden kids and hits straight on the nerve of how people go crazy.

Projective identification works like this; You depend on me for your life. Don’t forget that. But I don’t have what you need. Do forget that. We’ll have an arrangement, a covenant. Instead of what you need, which you now can’t remember, you will be special, instead.

Good here, innit?

And for this grand prize… of specialness, which is really top notch, you will fufil certain… conditions, expectations, a subclause of which, in tweeeeeeenzy print will be, ‘and carry my shit while I suck out your heart through a straw.’

It doesn’t matter. You just sign it. The ‘Dependence for life’ proviso at the top of the contract renders the rest of it all academic. You sign.

Anyhoo, yes, the grand prize, and our little arrangement…

One of the things that earmarks a narcissistic encounter is the use of projective identification. You get to feel as though someone just crapped inside you. Or made you feel that you deserve no more.

Their avid fortifying and walling off of some prefered, though highly defended self image, is hard work. Its easier to get some other poor bastard to take charge of all the incongruous stuff in life. The hidden painting in an attic solution tends not to work too well. Neither does walling it up. No, give it a host. Someone who’ll just walk away with your shi’ , now gnawing on their innards rather than your own.

Sounds like a plan.

One person passes another a piece of themselves, or a gritty solution of all their…dirt, under the table, without anyone noticing. And if you are unlucky it will be yours forever unless you can palm it off on someone else.

You’re it!

They get to be grateful, need you, miss you. You can be their special little guy. And their whore.

Moab was Yahweh’s bitch.

And so God washes off his pollution onto….people, just across the river, and we, like dutiful lambs, having learned by divine example, have each other.  Oh frabjous day!

And so, oh great and mighty spoon of my heart, whilst you maintain all that fine PR with regular sousing of the people with your leavings your use of Moab as a washpot is so much less evolved than acceptance and dying and renewal. You get that lovely, fluffy bunny, freshly laundered smell that says, ‘mummy loves you’, rather than… ‘washpot’ which is so…frikkin…washpot.

ITS DONE OF YOUR DAMNBUSIBESSMJHGKVRYEDJDYKULYBLIUK

Well, actually, it is, oh great mountain of corpulence, because who is Moab other than me and mine?

THEN YOU WILL BE MY WASHPOL<YRFVHHGGYIFGUYGFUGY

We already are oh jewelled heap of my bowels, and its starting to piss me off.

 

 

 

The Cathars of Bordeaux

So, can we talk about the Cathars.

DONT SPEAK HER NAME.

No, no, sorry, not Her name, just the Cathars and, you know, what happened to them.

They were Her people!

They were both your people.

You cannot serve god and Mammon…

but it wasn’t Mammon, it was your wife..

DONT SPEAK HER NAME.

No, no, we’ll stick to the Cathars and not mention anything about the …unpleasantness. They were church going, yes,…. bit mystical, they believed in there being two gods.

THEYSTRAYEDFROMTHEPATHRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR.

Oh, great God, it was just that they could not understand your wild mood swings, I mean, err, your colourful and glorious outpourings, oh lord, and so posited a dark god besides your brilliant magnificence and, you know, She who must not be wossnamed.

I WILL KILL THEM ALL.

Er, of course, umm, so, the Cathars.

I WILL KILL THEM ALL.

Yes, and er, you did, oh mighty one. Every last one. 25,000 people.

I WILL KILL THEM ALL.

Burned, actually. 14th Century

I WILL KILL THEM ALL.

….great fire pits were dug and fed with massive trees… The people were made to walk the plank, the planks, great columns of people, bound, marching in rows, into the flames, ’till every last one were dead.

THEY WERE CRIMINALS!

Actually, they just couldn’t understand you oh, Serendipitous Light of Creation, They could not comprehend in their limited human limitationy thingy, how it was possible that a good and loving god such as yourself, my liege of hosts and all that, could possibly be the angry, crazy, rotwieler, rampaging god who…

I WILL KILL THEM ALL.

….and so they felt that they had to assume that there were two gods, your  eminenticle tremendousness. One good and kind and and wise and beautiful, oh sweet lord, a vision of fantabulous you know perfumed bowers and that, and another, wicked and cruel. Full of hate and….

I WILL KILL THEM ALL.

And so in your infinite kindness and mercy oh lord you…killed them, oh God.

I WILL KILL THEM ALL.

even the babies…

I WILL KILL THEM ALL.

 

On Smiting.

The earnest conversation about whether God exists or not seems to ride roughshod over the more cogent point that he is a certifiable psycho with serious bonding issues.

Do wot?

er, just wondering…  about the smiting of your bride, the Chosen People. You don’t seem to be happy with your new choice…

Chosen People doesn’t do it for me. I tried. Really. I been patient. Cannot fault me there.

You’re disappointed and angry.

Ja man.

How long were you separated from  …..

DON’T MENTION HER NAME.

from your…er..ex before you got together with your new bride, Chosen People?

Not long.

Three quarters of a page in Revelations actually.

I don’t know. I said, not long.

Do you think er,… perhaps you should have taken an epoch or two to you know, find yourself again, work through some issues, learn from the experience?

Learn? I know all..

Of course, oh Mighty One.. it’s just that maybe your disappointment is in the hastiness of your re-marriage after, the er… thing that never happened with you know who… ahem.

Speak plainly or be smote!

Yes, its exactly this smiting thing I’d like to ask about, oh Great One, who is so…. great. You’re clearly, well, upset. Perhaps regretting your decision. It stands to reason oh munificent and resplendent lord of hosts, that if you beat your wife then she’s not the one for you and that rather than your wife being unfaithful it is your own secretly harboured wish to be in the arms of another, the loss of whose embrace actually constitutes such a torture as to unleash…

KILL THEM ALL……..

Exactly, the smiting. Now you have been a bit over the top haven’t you?

KILL THEM ALL .

The thresher’s at Edom didn’t really deserve to have their house burned down for using iron threshing rods did they?

KILL THEM ALL.

The iron rods were somehow… offensive to you?

KILL THEM ALL.

And Lot’s wife, who doesn’t even get a name…

Well it was just the one.  I let the others go. Am I not infinite in my mercy? Usually I take them all, sheep goats the lot.

You killed someone…?

Yeh, Lot’s wife.

But, how…why?

Well , she disobeyed me, mon..

By…

by looking at her burning home with all her stuff in flames, mon.

You burned her home..

Yeah, bitch. I burned it. Burned it right down, mudderfukka. Down to the ground, mon. They went down in that town. Know what I’m sayin’?

But why?

Mixing it up with other gods, mon.

Let me understand, you burned down her house as a way of appealing to her devotion and then killed her with an ironic twist for displaying the least of all human gestures conveying loss of something dear to her heart?

I turned her to salt, mon..Bamm!

er, okaaay,,, why the salt. I mean what’s that about?

Are you mixing it up with me, mon? Boooyakasha! Walk on before I’m beat you.

No,.. er, sorry,, I just wondered, just interested in your divine inventiveness and curious about what might motivate, I mean inform, no, er…. what you are trying to teach your faithless children, oh lord, by your great and mystical symbolism, you know, of the salt.

Its just salt, innit? you want me to explain when I already show?

But this is the problem, oh Great and Mighty One.

Wot?

Its not simply that your Chosen People feel unheard and, well frankly treated very badly, but we’re all a bit concerned that you don’t seem to be thinking through your own great wisdom either.. Oh Great One, which is maybe why things went so pear shaped with your first wife, Hokmah, back in the day….

DON’T SPEAK HER NAME.

And then you did that most human rebound thing, got all cranky very quickly, you know… nudge nudge, new woman not quite what the old one used to do for you and boom, centuries of smiting.

They strayed from the path..

No, oh lord, we were never on the path, could never live up to …Her, no matter how she cheesed you off…and giving people the freedom to choose and then smiting them if they don’t choose you, is not really a choice is it?

Don’fugwidme mudderfukka.

But I’m worried and seriously anxious, oh Great One. You’ve lost Relatedness in more ways than one.

DON’T SPEAK HER NAME.

Sorry, its just that the whole salt thing is still bothering me. I mean, was there a choice in the matter? Could it have been stone? Or even different types of stone. You carry quite a range, you know. Or maybe, you could have turned her into a tree, you know, a bit of creativity, poetic justice and all that. After all, in punishment for her loving your mother whose groves were sacred..

DON’T SPEAK HER NAME. I warn you, I will smite you.

And when you are done, oh Great One, who will you play with then?

 

On being more equal.

Narcissus is blind to the well maiden’s essential being, he depersonalises her with his rejection, declines relatedness, which is why she curses him with his own preoccupation, a dose of poetic justice  the gods are so good at.

Gilgamesh does the same in his story when he is propositioned by the goddess Ishtar. He spurns her. He refuses the kind of awareness that might challenge his assumption that the psyche is what he knows of it, and thereby misses the opportunity to grow, to be fertilised/inspired by the Unconscious. The carnal invitation is one of initiation, a cross-pollination of energies that might give rise to something new..

I was once talking to a lovely guy who travelled the world giving talks about interesting stuff to packed venues. So, this woman comes up to us and asks if we’d like her to fascilitate our conversation. Like, we couldn’t possibly talk to one another under our own steam or were clearly failing to  get friendship right. We needed her help. Like an angel of…. something, she descended to grant us the boon of knowing our own minds.

She was blind to our essential being, didn’t want the unpredictable, lively dance of our conversation. It took something away from her. So she’d step in and ‘fascilitate’ .

The divine spark couldn’t be shared, and so everything must be unintelligible. You must be talking crap, even if you aren’t.

Who gets to have the spark is a big deal. And many a relationship is fucked up simply because we don’t know how to be on the same level playingfield.

There’s no divine template for sharing space.

And so we can’t see what is in front of us. No matter what you are staying or sharing it has no ultimate validity without my stamp of approval.

What is it with Yahweh stamping people? Everyone seems to get stamped in the Old Testament. Stamped with his mark or stamped with his foot. He even stamps his own wife, before tossing her into the briny foam.

You stamp property.

And that’s what we do with one another if only one person can have the stage at a time. We reduce the other’s stature to that of stock, and then of course cannot possibly condescend to converse let alone congress, concealing meantime that ragged hole passing for a centre.

Like dutiful children who follow by example rather than fine verses we start our own  bit of stamping, labelling, owning, exploiting, any thing to avoid being in a situation where who has the spark becomes a matter of debate.

To follow example is in our DNA. It comes under the ‘how to survive’ icon on our hard drive.

So its not really right to talk about narcissists. Our culture is narcissistic. The dominant religion is narcissistic. It would be better to talk about the narcissistic encounter, something that happens between.

I saw a lovely narcissus-free encounter on the bus. Mother with shopping and two small kids, the larger thumping the smaller protesting child. Mum says, ‘Billy, is Carl as big and strong as you?

No ways!

Remember that next time you thump him…

An honest measured thump… rather than what I did in the absence of such containing forbearance, convincing my younger brother that mother was dead and that he’d been sent away to Mars which just happened by chance to look like where we lived, forcing him to carry the dark wound of my own black mamma’s loss and being sent away so that it could be his experience and not mine.

I could magically have a different and better experience….

…..and join in the joke that Andy only speaks Swahili.

Hilarious.

 

The Whore of Babylon and the Erudite Scholars.

In the process of watching a video on ancient civilisations, I noticed in the ‘related topics’ tool bar, a video announcing itself with the title, ‘Is religion unfair to Women?’, and a still frame of several erudite people sitting about in earnest discussion.

Its amazing. In all seriousness and with the implication that it could go either way (and that the violent, draconian rejection of the divine feminine over the last 3 millenia might just be swept under the carpet for the duration) we’ll sit about and earnestly discuss.

So I clicked on the learned scholars and …yep, there they are, discussing in an even tempered kind of way.

The endless polite masturbation is excruciating…

Hello! Is there anybody in there?

Can I just recap a moment, and please, correct me if I’m mistaken, but the first thing our recently and acrimoniously divorced God does once he has spent a week refurbishing a new bachelor pad is to take All his divine matrimonial angst out on Eve who he curses Forever, rejects eternally and is to blame for EVERYTHING.

Now, is religion unfair to women! Humm, let’s see….is the camera running? Humm, so your filming me now? Hum, is this my best side?

Our God, so needing to have the stage to himself that he’d rather hook up with humanity, and through no illbehaviour on Her part, divorces his wife Hokmah/Sophia/Wisdom circa 3,500 BC., banishes her to Babylon, slags her off as a whore, burns every city where she is openly worshipped, decrees through his kings that her groves be cut down and scorched bone fragment ground into the hilltops where she is worshipped to defile and pollute them. Her priests are killed, holy books destroyed, followers cast out.

In summary, Women’s evil is responsible for all human suffering and shall have no divine representation WHATSOEVER.

Now, where were we, ah yes, Dr  Upyerbum, so, do you think the judeo/christian religion is unfair to women?

We get the same erudite pondering in the next ‘related topic’ about the book of revelation… related mostly by the same ponderous tones, pompous observations, and the deeply held conviction that it must be about them… and their enemies…

Why would people ponder so much of that which is supposed to be so revealing?

Any hoo… marvellous innit, a holy book that’s guarenteed to be about you aaaaand your great victory over your enemy! And every century, those that lived in went, ‘ hey, they’re talking about us!’

And the Beast must be whoever I hate and they’re going down, dude.

The fact that this vision circa 170AD coincides perfectly with the last gasp of the historical epoch in which the aforementioned Whore of Babylon, with her name clearly stamped like frickin’ ID on her forehead, was indeed cast down, broken up and thrown into the sea followed by a large millstone just by way of punctuating Her demise.

We are so absorbed in our own little worlds hey?  Little worlds that have, with profound irony, become so by the restricted vision that 3,000 years of ‘be good or I’ll smite you!’ does to kids. You can have your name stamped on your forehead and we still don’t know who you are because you are not real and do not exist and therefor cannot be called by name despite the stamp. Sorry. Next.

 

 

 

The Archetypal Narcissist.

There’s a detail in an ancient story I find intriguing. The story, the ‘Epic of Gilgamesh’, is fascinating in and of itself. It is, after all, the first and oldest story ever written down, penned (or is that ‘stylused’? ) in ancient Sumerian nearly 5 thousand years ago.

The Epic predates much of the Old Testament by several millenia. It is also the only written record from a time where goddess worship would not get you hung drawn and quatered. But most of all, this first story is one about the first man, the first king, who got it into his head to build a massive wall around where he lived and give it a name, Uruk.

The story of Gilgamesh is a salutory tale about what happens when you wall yourself off from Nature.

The king builds his wall, feels chuffed with himself, feels safe from the things-out-there that never seemed to bother him before…. now his wall is built the sounds of the creatures are all…alien, and worse, there is a wild man out there terrorising the land.

Of course, the wild man is his own split off natural self, Enkidu, whom he defeats and charges with the task of joining him on the quest to defeat the ‘Humbaba’, a monster, and destroy the sacred grove of Cedars she lives in. Trawl the archives and you find that Humbaba, is also Kumbaba, AKA Cybele, Mother Goddess of the Ancient world.

Oops.

She is defeated. Her sacred grove, the symbolic tree of life is cut down. Gilgamesh commands  Enkidu to help him carve the wood into a set of  great gates which they then float down the Euphrates back to Uruk.

What an odd tale! If you watch the u tube videos about Gilgamesh there is much chuckling up the sleeve at those citizens of Uruk at this stage of the story who were clearly just cobbling stuff together as a way of making sense of the world.

Innit?

The fact that senior scribes and priests dedicated their all to a cryptic tale containing, like the shard of the hologram, their entire cultural experience, seems lost on the commentators satisfied in their superiority……and narcissistic presumption.

5,000 years ago,  on the fertile plains of Mesopotamia, ego consciousness was manifested by the creation of a walled city. The difference between me and not me emphasised by the novelty of the sudden schism between the world in here and the world out there.

Gilgamesh, previously an entity complete but without self awareness, becomes self conscious but only at the price of an inner split between an idealised self and a dark, shadowy, horned self represented by Enkidu. These ‘brothers’, can only hold together so long as the idealised self defeats the shadow self, setting it the task of raiding the sacred grove and killing off the principle of Relatedness. In so far as the trees represent the earthly manifestation of the Goddess, the gates are made from the defeated and dismembered body of the Great Mother.

Gilgamesh is compelled to split himself in two and shore up the defences of his fragile ego with the bones of the Great Mother. Divided from her he can no longer ‘cathect’ what he needs. So he can’t really grow up. He can only reinforce his defences against the aliveness of the feminine principle with her own dead body which will soon  lead  to the death/loss of Enkidu, only to be ameliorated by growing awareness of his own mortality.

Sound familiar?

When we split ourselves off from our own dark nature in the absence of a containing mother whose divine counterpart is degraded and cut down leading to hubris and loss of relatedness, then narcissism ensues.

Does this mean that narcissism is endemic in our culture from the beginning? Does it mean that the primary causes have to do with splitting off the shadow and devaluing the feminine? Is the way through by virtue of grief and sorrow?

What will the first story tell us about what can be done? Will Gilgamesh find a way out of his situation?

What needs to be done in our own time with the groves being destroyed at record speed and the dark brother being slaughtered beyond every city wall?

 

Attachment and Separation

I’m walking along a level suburban street. The intersecting roads all run up a steep hill. As I approach a cross roads there comes a young mom flying down the slope on her bike with her 2/3 year old in the basket up front.

The kid’s making the best of it but her tight knuckles give the game away. Her shrill voice belays the underlying anxiety. ‘Mom, if we crash, all I’ll do is…’ and then they were gone.

The kid has reached the outer limits of play. It’s stopped being fun. The child’s status has shifted from Mom-joining-daughter’s world  to Daughter-having-to-join-Mom in her world. She loses both mother’s containment and the resource of mother processing her fear for her in the process.

So she compensates with a grandiose fantasy that if mummy should suddenly become dysfunctional, or break, or run into the back of a taxi she could still mange very well by… swooping around the lampost… or flying up into the sky… or something else equally heroic.

She has to attribute super hero status if not godlikeness to herself in order to manage fear the management of which is normally Mother’s department.

Bit by bit, if we’re lucky, ego consolidates itself slowly out of the primordial identification with mother/world but only if its safe enough. If life itself is a white knuckle ride then we are  bound to remain in part fusion with  the Self in order to magically handle our situation. Many an obsessive ritual has its roots in the  numinous  word or gesture that somehow has the power to shore up selfhood.

I have to find a way to remain in this exalted state of extreme self belief because no-one is going to catch me when I surely fall.

I have to identify with the most enduring structures in the psyche to remain safe.

If that means depersonalising you in the process, well, you too can use the magic shield of Captain America or the Silver Surfer’s board to help yourself.

A lack of reliable resources has the child tunneling in to its own archetypal grain store and unconsciously feeding itself with stuff that it would normaly take many years to access and digest. The narcissistic are often precocious as a result.

I should know, I was reading Tolkein at 9.

Separation from our parents is one of the great thresholds of life. But how do you do that if you’re so insufficiently attached in the first place that you’ve had to grow wings or x-ray vision or ESP to compensate the fact? And what would it take for those amulets to be traded in for.. ordinariness and vulnerablity? Who would do such a dumb thing?

 

mending mummy

I spent years in a relationship with someone overwhelmed with NPD. Maybe it was more of a cage fight.

It was only supposed to be a brief fling….

yeah, right.

I didn’t know what I was getting into…

Uhuh..

Suddenly life was all mortgage and diapers and screaming….

You felt it happened to you…

Damn right. but i quickly realised i was in trouble…

So slow, so very slow.

Nothing was ever right for her. She’d switch the Aga off in November and back on in June. She’d hide my stuff or just throw it away. Someone once rang when i was in the bath and said they’d call back in half an hour and she said , ‘no, in 32 minutes’.

So, you have a thing for control freaks….

She’d go in my room and remake my bed!

..for control freaks who are also very intrusive…

She’d want sex in the middle of an arguement..!

and pervy…

But I didn’t choose that situation..!

No, it chose you and you allowed it because in amongst all that shit was some little veign of gold, something wanting expression, some shard of selfhood..

I dreamt I was riding her like a broomstick..

You’re doing something witchy with her…

Then I dreamt I was remonstrating with her about something, punching my fist into my hand to emphasis a point. Then the perspective panned back and I was Robin from Batman…

…unconsciously identified with the caped crusader….

I’m on a crusade.

She is the crusade. Who do you imagine yourself to be that you might storm such battlements? And for what purpose?

I’m in adolescent avenger mode…

and getting her to carry all the chaotic childhood stuff so you don’t have to..

Oops.

Meantime you can educate her like some post modern Eliza Doolittle, and panel beat her into some semblance of functioning so that the chaotic child can be looked after by her if not by you.

Double ooops..

               The catastrophic expectation is a memory’. Donald Winnicott.

Sooo, i got a bit paranoid after this little chat…. paranoia that seemed unrelated to stuff you might actually get paranoid about, like coppers parked outside your house and threats of imprisonment. No, it was more like… being taken away for ever and ever and ever because… you have green eyes… or fair hair… or nice shoes.

Then it condensed into a fantasy of two women banging on the door, determined to..take me away. I was …five. Then I remembered, two women, come to take me away from my black mother, whose language I spoke, whose smell I knew, whose heart loved me… but who would now be gone. Forever.

perhaps I could reconstruct her. If I squeezed my eyes hard enough and explain well enough how you have to be… if I spoke slower..maybe.. or found better words..

We have poor relationships for a reason. Despite the misery something makes it worthwhile. And despite your intention that something is pushing for the light. Like the ring, it wants to be discovered. So you have to work hard at your misery. Really help them. Try harder. Explain it again. And be patient.

Your friends commiserate with how much shit you seem to take. Someone tells you that you must have the patience of a saint. That’s it, you’re just too good a person.

Bollocks.

I was only free of my NPD nightmare when I realised the part I was playing, how I’d foisted a chaotic inner child on someone only too ready to receive the projection whom I could then remonstrate with from a distance  whilst getting her to double up as my DIY Mom.

Treble oops.

The only way out without having to repeat the whole thing (as badly) was to suffer the reality of my own early losses and feel my paranoia in its proper context.

I lost my mother.

They gave me another one but she was broken.

 

The Great King.

When I was about 8 my father took me to the grave site of our ancestor, a great king. The king was not my mother’s ancestor so she was not present.  He showed me the grave with a flourish. It seemed to be made of nettles. We stood about. He seemed to be praying. I looked around. This was no kings burial! Who did he think I was to suck up such bullshit? I could even read the marker, Jo Bloggs blah blah

The significance of the story is that the next few years are a blur. The narcissistic parent isn’t just preoccupied and vain. He doesn’t just dump his shit in you and hold your worth in proportion to your fufilment of that holy task.  Nor even depersonalise you by reducing your being to a mere extension of his fantasy world.

Just as importantly at stake is the attribution of your worth to themselves. Flush, and giddy with all the personhood in the room, or overgrown churchyard, he can say what he pleases without reflection. Everyone else really will be toooo stupid to notice the grandiose babble for what it is.

I always felt worthless in my father’s company. Not just because my significance failed to go beyond being a repository for all his inferiority  but because he sucked me dry.

Leaving the church yard, I felt, not only that he had crapped in my chest, nor even that I was a marginalised bit player in a game whose rules I would never know, but that all the life and vitality in my Being had just been poured out of me.

Narcissists will steal your thunder, attribute your values to themselves, and behave as though all your accomplishments are really down to them.  In the language of the trade, the self of the other is cathected in order to ensure the going-on-being of incomplete ego structures. So every success is not really yours whilst every disaster is. All your attributes and qualities are just on loan and all your inner treasures something to give back at the end of playtime.

The narcissistic parent rootles around in  the child’s inner world and has it away with their treasures. He doesn’t just preen. He doesn’t just dump. He wants your inner world.

The hubris of assuming leverage over someone else’s inner world, compensates for and shores up the yawning gap in the other’s life that they so need you to make better and raided you for in the first place.

Now for the ugly bit. Its infectious. You too can have kings for ancestors and thereby wear the mantle yourself, one day, when you’ve proved your worth.

The Great King is real. The archetypes of the Deep Unconscious do indeed have their own life. But its not an experience we can have whilst polishing our own tinsel crown or tottering about being descended from royalty.

If we are encounter the Great King in any meaningful way we will need to address our own inner narcissist, the point where we got infected ourselves. A good place to start is to recognise that the inferior self we might so urgently wish to hide beneath a grander mantle is itself a construct. It doesn’t need compensation. It needs dismantling.

The halls of our inner worlds are deeper and more complicated than we could ever imagine. We just need to allow them to be other. The otherness of others is not the Narcissist’s main problem, its the otherness of himself.

The Great King is real. Our task is not to mistake ourselves for him or stake some claim over him. The innoculation to the infection is a propitious attitude and if not a journey into the dark then at least respect for it.

My forthcoming book, ‘Abundant Delicious’ is about a king who found a way to put down a crown that wasn’t really his to wear and the spiritual journey that then followed.

Doing unto Others

I very nearly lost my son. He was taken away from me by the authorities who decided that a man could not possibly be a primary carer. He was sent away. I almost let him go.

Some horrible, semi-human construct inside me, barely audible, began to canvas for his demise, my own child, a demise that would have had all the hallmarks of , ‘I told you so’, beginning with his academic collapse, progressive dishevilment, through self harm and cutting to…  what?

I nearly let him go.

Why should he have you? Who did you have? Does he deserve better? What about your needs? Its not fair! You are a victim of the State!

The inner 12 year old in me that had been sent away, rejected and violated, came screaming to the rim of consciousness, demanding congruence, demanding my son suffer at least his fate if not worse… and for just a brief moment, I capitulated. I hung my head and gave up.

A friend of mine once told me that stuff doesn’t change in life until you hear ‘the Voice of Noyt’. Noyt was a slang term at Uni for ‘no’. Only, its a capitalised,’No.’  and emphasised,’NO!’ and then screamed from the gut like a banshee..

On the way home from the court, having been given two days to comply with the judge’s ruling or be arrested for contempt, I heard the Voice of Noyt, made the Sound of Noyt, had to pull the car over, choking, and wrestle like a bitch with whatever it was inside me offering me an easy way out.

Compulsive repetition. Do unto others, particularly those you love. Again and again. One of the reasons that abuse is so pernicious is that the child is compelled to idetify with the abuser, paradoxically so as not to feel the pain of his wound. He steps into the shoes of his assailant so as not to have to experience what that other is doing. And then does that horrible.. thing, to some other poor bastard.

My default position, my automatic pilot, my deferential yes-man, so wanted my child to be sent away. What happened to me could then be ligitimised, I could forgive my father for sending me away and compulsively repeating what had happened to him, and, in the fullness of time, my boy would betray his child and forgive me for abandoning him..

Simples.

To defy the judge meant much more than the prospect of 3 months in jail (and how would you look after him from prison, smartypants?) It meant, after years of analysis and being trained as a psychotherapist myself, that we would now find out what I was actually made of and whether I could bear the rapidly condensing memories, the abuse, the abandonment, the terrible under-resourced desolation of being sent away myself that was bound to claw for the surface if I refused the path of least resistance.

When Dracula tells his Igor to stop torturing the poor beast left in his charge, he turns and says, ‘Its what I do, master. I do unto others as they do unto ME.’

Not to ‘do unto others’, means stripping what the others have done… of their legitimacy. Suddenly an inner court is in session, and all kinds of unpleasant shit offered up for exhibit.

So, the enemy was not the judge, who I politely wrote to declining his kind suggestion, nor the coppers who came round and dragged my boy away, nor his mother who drove him half crazy with her bullshit, nor the corrupt CAFCASS officers grinding their double headed axes, nor the collusive court officials who lied and cheated, nor the expert witness whose report made me look like jack the ripper, but my own quiet… ‘do unto others.’

When I decided to forgo the luxury of being the state’s victim and risk detention at her Majesty’s Pleasure I found that I now had two kids to look after, my boy, whom the Universe quickly restored,( the Voice of Noyt carrying far in the halls of the psyche) and the neglected 12 year old in myself who was actually battered way beyond what I had remembered.

Eleanor Roosevelt said, ‘There’s what happens to us and there’s what we do with what happens to us.’

What happens to us is difficult enough, but most things can be survived and actually used as impetous to create and acheive, if only we will refrain from identifying with the aggressor or at least bear in mind that we are, strangely, liable to collude with the ills done to us and pass them on wholesale to others as a trade off with destiny not to have to feel any of it. The hot potato doesn’t burn if you are quick enough….

I see a lot of people questioning how to deal with narcissists. The trick, having protectively scooped up the child you once were, is to disable the narcissist in yourself.