Tag: narcissism

Fielding narcissism.

Saying there’s no such thing as a narcissist is only true when you’re feeling generous. The rest of the time, they’re real enough and its denial to say otherwise. You can feel trapped, especially if its family or work, and it can be tough keeping alive that you’re not destined to be a victim of the situation.

That other really might be depersonalising you, loading you down with shadow material, unrealistic expectations and enviously tugging at you’re essence.

What do you do?

here are some options;

1) play masochistically into the game without let or hindrance.

2) play masochistically into the game whilst wondering what you are about.

3)  spend seven years in anaysis and then back away.

4) back away.

Wondering what you are about is good for a couple of things. Its good for seeing if you are balanced. If you aren’t they topple you over. Its like a pillow fight on a greased pole but you have no pillow.

And its good for practising compassion.

Don’t get caught in the story. Don’t stop at being so damn clever about the game they’re playing.

Go deeper.

See past the nonsense to the vacant, unmothered child behind the glass, where I can no longer talk to me.

Then, deeper still, to the flower that’s still alive beneath the boot.

This has the effect of changing the dynamics. The practice of kindness is powerful stuff and it doesn’t cost you your point of veiw. You are modelling tolerance of difference and embodying the other’s potential to do likewise.

Change begins that no amount of making-the-other-see will ever achieve.

An aspect of Relatedness that we lost with the Goddess is that generosity of spirit which is willing to walk a mile in another’s shoes and is actually the kind of mirroring containment the other really needs and is asking for in the first place.

Oh, and, don’t sign anything.

 

Narcissistic Collusion

What makes us collude with Narcissism? It’s like allowing yourself to be bullied by a two year old! Why would you do that? For love? Well you might say so, I certainly have, but I no longer buy it.

Love wants us to grow and narcissistic collusion keeps us all small.

I once new a woman who tolerated an extremely narcissistic husband for 30 years because he once made her a cup of tea…. and on the strength of that alone commited herself to his tyranny. Was she a woman who loved too much? Too much something, but it wasn’t love.

The actual service with which he provided her, as a recepticle for all her inferiority  whom she could then safely sneer at from across the room, was enough glue to hold the marriage together… forever.

In order to keep her eye off the ball she needed a whole gamut of back-up reasons for being with him, pseudo explanations for his behaviour and saintly giving him ‘the benefit of the doubt’, only made serviceable by living in eternal doubt herself and  underming the entire structure of her own natural intelligence.

She believed in him all that time, not because he gave her any hope but because her unacknowledged need compelled her to find… anything, a lousy single gesture, to justify what she had done and cover up her deeper motives. She searched his every word and bent his every deed into some fresh shape that might then justify her own stagnant, loveless existence.

To do this she could turn black into white and rain into sun.

We humans are good at that.

Look at how we respond to God’s bad behaviour. We constantly let him off the hook out of our own urgent need to…what?

We  hear over and again about how we were given free will but actually it doesnt say that anywhere, not at all… We need to believe it that’s all. In order to fulfil our own urgent need to.. what?

Jah man! Everyone know God give us free will…

Bollocks, its a delusion or at least the reducto ad absurdam of ‘we have free will therefore God must have given it to us’. The story of the apple suggests we’re capable of all kinds of stuff He didn’t intend. We collude with the idea that we were given free will so as to explain  any subsequent smiting having failed to exercise it appropriatly.

Dat’s sin, mon.

No, we’re explaining away petulant behaviour we wouldn’t accept in a toddler because something in us needs to.

We alla’ us got free will, mon.

Yeh, but only as a result of dissobeying god. How can God ask us to exercise that which Eve stole when his punishment of her wanting to be conscious is to be cursed for eternity? His entire beef with people is Eve’s sin and yet now we are being asked to exercise it in order not to… sin.

Yeah, an’ it gets missed a lot that God frew them out the garden because they disobeyed…

..when actually what he says is, ‘lest they become one of Us’.(Gen 3:22)

He had someone with him?

Unless he was talking to Himself…

Hum, at the very least, he doesn’t want us to be conscious.

That’s not very nice, but… he did give us free will.

No, he never. Look, I’m a bright chap and the internet can give you every quote that’s even vaguely related and I’m telling you I trawled the lot. We just want to believe in this great gift which we have to honour on pain of eternal damnaation because we want to.

What you actually find is that free will is stolen, stolen and punished. Why would we dare exercise that which, just by the having of it, gets you cursed forever?

Why? Because we don’t have to be responsible. Yahweh is easy, you don’t have to search your heart. You don’t have to try too hard. Paul sells  his whole spiel to the Thessalonians on the basis that the lords yoke is light and that ALL you have to do is abstain…

an’ praise..  got an easy ride mon, don’ complain…

I don’t want a fucking easy ride. I want to grow and growing is hard. I want something other than your feather bed. Did you ever wonder why our culture is so hungry alla time, desperate for that instant gratification fix..?

er..

…because, there’s no frikkin challenge within the fold that’s really worth  the candle, so we may as well stay at home and stuff our faces. We believe in the lie that free will is something we’ve been given so we don’t have to face the fact that God wants us small and compliant..

And why…

..because we want to be …small and compliant.

 

The Fate of Gilgamesh.

I’m struck by the fact that writing should be invented in precisely the best place to document the collapse of an age and from the point of veiw of the loser. Usually its the victors that write history.

What they did, in symbolic form, was to hold up a mirror to the tide that was about to engulf them. All over the known world the goddess was being over thrown or killed by semi divine sons. Attis and Cybele, Marduk and Tiamat, Yahweh and Hokmah.

DONT SPEAK HER NAME…

I have a rare gift and I’m about to be driven into the ground by hordes of really fast chariots driven by determined looking blokes with mean pointy beards. What shall I do? How shall I respond?

Let’s tell them a story…

So- proud Gilgamesh! He has defeated The Great Mother! He has destroyed Her sacred grove! He has hewn great gates from her limbs and floated them down the Euphrates in triumph. Gates made of the Mother Herself! No-one can get him now.

He has magically made a piece of mother, protection against Her, and with that a piece of himself set against the whole man.

Ishtar sees what’s going on and tries to intervene in a seductive way but is spurned, she then sends the bull of heaven to intervene.  Enkidu and Gilgamesh chop it up and fling bits at the Gods.

Oh, dear, this is going to end badly.

Innit, you can’t do that. It ain’t right.

Fuck you, we don’t care. Gilga’s part god anyway and i’ve got serious horns…

But the Gods close ranks. They decide one of them has to die and its Enkidu. The inflated desecration of Ishtar’s bull widens the split between the idealised, narcissistic self and the shadowy horned self even further, so that having them be represented as brothers no longer works. One of the brothers must die and fall into the Unconscious.

The gods are a pranksterish lot. They like punishments to be amusing as well as instructive. If a punishment can’t be witty what’s the point?

So the say, ‘ok mr cool guy with your one-god bling, think you can live without the natural, the wild, then live without that part of yourself! Enkidu dies and you can be king of the world without stain…. alone.. with not even yourself to talk to.

And see how you fucking like it.

So you see, Assyrians, we had a king that was just like you, all pumped up on the life blood of others. Let us tell you of his fate so that you might be informed…..

Gilgamesh, him all upset now..

Yes, but only because his personal mighty bubble threatens to burst, and so he has to make a great heroic quest, not for the pearl of great price or some fair damsel, there’s no girl in the picture, he’s doing it to bolster himself up even more. he wants the elixir of immortality so that he can live for ever and be even MORE godlike. The towering walls are not enough. And even his tears at Enkidu’s death are for himself and the dawning realisation of his own mortality.

‘Im no care abou’ him frien’.

He’s learned nothing…

Him want him not his own fate…

and makes NPD like like a breeze in the park…

Boldly he sets off across the land of night, the sea of death, past scary monsters until eventually they come to the house of The Ancient One who might just be able to help him….maybe.

Last chance for Gilgamesh to wake himself up!

In fact, his task is to stay awake but he can’t or, is too cool to pay attention to the old guy.

Charcoal burners do it by using one legged stools to rest on. If they drop off, they drop off.

Gilgamesh! Even in the measly selfishness of your cheap wish, for an elixir of something, you screwed up. Because you’re so frickin arrogant that you think you don’t have to pay attention to anything around you which is why you can’t have a relationship and why your going to die like a bitch.

No! No! Give him one more chance! He’s had a hard life! I beg you.

And so the Ancient One’s Wife, Mrs Ancient One, pleads on Gilgamesh’s behalf and shows him where to find the magical plant he’s looking for.

There you go Sonny Jim, take care, mind….

There is no end to the ladies trying to help this boy, mon.

Despite his crap attitude….

….and the chopping and the flinging….

So he gets his plant.

Him score big time!

… but while he’s daydreaming about how cool he is and all the stuff you can amass over an eternity he takes his eye off the plant..

..snake com’ along and gobble it up.

The goddess takes it back.

And so ends the tragic story of Gilgamesh. Oh. no, not quite. He goes home and praises his walls. Himself.

What for Gilgamesh take him eye off the treasure? Mrs Ancient One tell him plain…

Because he’s lost the streetwise quality of Enkidu’s instinctiveness. He’s not whole and so the elixir is not for him. The she-snake takes it back into her safe keeping.

He’s left by himself, I no longer able to talk to me. He can make love too, but no longer with…

So, its got saucy bits after all!

Its a frickin epic you great arse, a cosmogonic encapsulation of the zietgiest, a collective dream spun forth from the psyche of ancient Sumer, poised on the cusp of a new age, peering forward into the..

Ziet wot?

 

 

 

 

We’re Sending You Away…

When I was first sent to boarding school I was so excited. Soooo excited. Excited. Excited. Excited. After all it would be a full thirty years before some kind soul laid their hand on my shoulder and reminded me that the closest comparisons in the literature were the Nazi’s concentration camps with which I would become fascinated without quite knowing why….

We’re sending you away…

I was being honoured. Honoured, it was a great priviledge. One that would make me a man. ‘Its the best school in the country,’ my father told me proudly, the specks of spittle dancing in the corners of his mouth. Oh, my God, how fantastic. My manhood! A noble and proud and superior manhood was now my sure inheritance.

In my final year of incarceration one of my few friends in that place asked me, ‘Andy, do you  remember the first thing you ever said to me?’                                                                  ‘No.’                                                                                                                                                  ‘Fuck off’.

Start as you mean to go on. How else does the entirely unprotected field the daily maelstrom of feral teenage boys, entirely deprived of feminine contact, fed on inflated visions of their moral ascendency over the entire world whilst desperatly hiving off the underlying shame, humiliation and rejection of being sent away by torturing one another on a more or less continuous basis.

We’re sending you away…..

to play a game, one where you get to be the lords of the universe who will know themselves by being treated as scum and treating one another as scum, where kudos and pride are measured in caprice and malice and you get to know just how much we love you by having nothing to do with your growing up.

By the time I was fourteen I had been beaten with sticks, whips, cricket bats; sexually molested, felt up, and forced to publically have sex with my own bundled bedding. Is that rape? Yes it is.

But then something really weird happened.

I was in afternoon prep. I got called out by the housemaster and motioned to follow him to his house down the hall. I went. He invited me in and closed the door. We went through to the dinning room. He motioned me to sit. I sat. He went away, then came back with a slice of cake on a plate and a glass of coke. ‘It’s your birthday,’ he said, giving me this information as you might assert that Mogadishu is the capital of Yemen.

He put the things down and went away. I ate the cake in silence. Then I drank the coke. Then I waited. Then I got up and left.

I couldn’t think straight for days and that cake repeated on me endlessly until I realised that the reason I was choking so much on my gift was that  it meant  the very best I could hope for in this marvellous world of priviledge was a moment to be envied by everyone else in a room so empty I could hear the echo of my own heartbeat.

Why is this important?

Because the best people going to the best schools of the best religion generally turned out rather badly. And then they run the country.

I just heard ————  ——–  killed himself.

”Last seen in his car…..”

I trawled through his face book page trying to make sense of it. But it already made perfect sense. A narcissistic bully, fed all his life on the myth of his unbounded superiority, entirely invested in power to compensate the desperate and terrible insecurities engendered in being sent away, the worthlessness, the shame, the horror of a world where rape was normal, suddenly got to the point where his denial and compensations ran out of their batteries and as ever with the narcissist if he could not have his quota of being better than, tough at 50, then what else was there but to blow his brains out?

His brother was a terrible bastard. He would walk up and down the line of us little fags in his study, stripped to the waist, up and down, up and down, eventually lashing out violently at …  who knows, someone, maybe you, maybe..no-one. Up and down. Whose turn today? If not in the morning then maybe in the evening. I wound up in the sanatorium, not with bruises but, as I discovered much later, hysterical blindness bought about by acute, ongoing terror.

We’re sending you away….

This blog is a forum to explore the reality of the grown up children who, one way or another, were sent away, rejected or violated. It is also about how we are taught to send away, reject and violate –  the underbelly of  Western Civilisation.

My book,’Going Mad to Stay Sane’, about to have its third edition published, explores the legacy of parents who either invade or abandon their children and what those children can do to re-member themselves.

See the post of the same title below to preorder.

Coming out for the first time later in the summer is ‘Abundant Delicious, the secret and the mystery’, which shows how we can use our woundedness to discover who we are and celebrates the capacity and responsibility of the human spirit to triumph in the face of  the greatest adversity, the split reality of a divided world.