Twice this week somebody, who wanted something from me, has rung up and asked, ‘How are you?’ Then, when I was telling them, they didn’t seem to be listening. Eventually they attacked me. ‘You didn’t ask how I was.’ They hadn’t given me a chance. One said she felt ‘crap’ but refused to discuss it. In both cases I felt attacked. I also had a call from a friend whose partner is going through a rough time. Her complaint – he keeps attacking and blaming her.
So what happens?
This is narcissistic rage: the rage of a baby. An adult would say what they wanted, why they are calling. A baby can’t articulate. If they can’t ask for what you want or create it as an appropriate response to their crying, they rage. It may not be safe for the baby to express this rage, so they turn it inwards and feel attacked by their own feelings. These become paranoid fantasies because a child lives in a world of fantasy. When you grow up, you carry this unexpressed rage with you. You feel attacked and you attack.
Narcissistic behaviour lacks empathy and therefore compassion. So asking someone how they are doesn’t mean you can empathise, or that you really want to know. All you want is relief from your own pain and frustration. And if you don’t get this, you attack. You blame the other person. If your cries were not heard and responded to appropriately, when you were a baby, then you were not contained. It is hard now for you to contain your own emotions because you still feel like that baby. You have not grown up and learned to manage pain and frustration. You have not learned to respect time, to wait. For a baby, time is endless and they cannot wait. As an adult you know that change comes slowly, over time. Nothing lasts for ever. You learn this from experience, if you are patient.
Friday, May 15, 2009
Thursday, May 7, 2009
Challenges and Control
If only you could plan your days, life, wake up in the morning and it would go just that way. If only. You live with the illusion that you can control your life. You can’t. There are too many external influences, and also unconscious internal influences, for you to be able to control them all.
However, you can take control of your life, as it presents itself to you. You can accept life’s challenges, accept every day and everything that comes to you, as a challenge and respond to it. Or you can react against it.
If you respond, you will learn and grow. Your potential will be stretched. This is constructive. If you react, rage against what you cannot control or change, you regress, become a helpless victim. You do not learn or grow. This is destructive, especially to yourself.
You have a choice to accept life’s challenges, on a daily basis, and work with them. You have a choice to use your resources and stretch yourself. This also means talking risks, feeling the fear and not always getting it right.
However, you can take control of your life, as it presents itself to you. You can accept life’s challenges, accept every day and everything that comes to you, as a challenge and respond to it. Or you can react against it.
If you respond, you will learn and grow. Your potential will be stretched. This is constructive. If you react, rage against what you cannot control or change, you regress, become a helpless victim. You do not learn or grow. This is destructive, especially to yourself.
You have a choice to accept life’s challenges, on a daily basis, and work with them. You have a choice to use your resources and stretch yourself. This also means talking risks, feeling the fear and not always getting it right.
Rejection
This is a painful one. Probably the most painful experience I know. That’s why you avoid it and deny it. You set up all sorts of defences to pretend it hasn’t happened.
Behaviour can be rejected as undesirable, inappropriate. When this happens to you as a child, and depending how it happens, when you have offered that behaviour with love, you feel like all of you is being rejected. Because we are all born to love, it’s hard to separate that love from your ‘self’. It’s who you are. If you don’t know why your love isn’t received, or your behaviour isn’t appropriate, if you’re not told, you lose your sense of that self. After all, children can be awkward, naive. So you blame yourself. You believe you are intrinsically flawed. We are all born to love, albeit in different ways.
The love of a child is so delicate; it needs to be handled with care. Children are easily hurt and rejected – by the insensitive. If you don’t know how much you were hurt as a child, how much you felt rejected, you will go on to hurt others in relationships. You may damage young and vulnerable lives, still in the process of developing, as you were damaged. The same applies to relationships. These also need to develop and grow in a healthy way.
Rejection, including shaming, causes deep pain that is hard to face and therefore hard to heal. Children who have been rejected clamour for love as adults, often from rejecting people and especially in codependent relationships. (Don’t forget that withdrawing, counter-dependency, is also a form of codependency. If you are proud and aloof, you are likely to have been rejected too. You reject other people by not being emotionally available now). Children who have been rejected grow up learning to reject themselves, and to reject others, not letting them in. They then feel lost and empty and turn to codependency and other addictions as adults to fill themselves up. This doesn’t heal the pain or fill the emptiness.
Behaviour can be rejected as undesirable, inappropriate. When this happens to you as a child, and depending how it happens, when you have offered that behaviour with love, you feel like all of you is being rejected. Because we are all born to love, it’s hard to separate that love from your ‘self’. It’s who you are. If you don’t know why your love isn’t received, or your behaviour isn’t appropriate, if you’re not told, you lose your sense of that self. After all, children can be awkward, naive. So you blame yourself. You believe you are intrinsically flawed. We are all born to love, albeit in different ways.
The love of a child is so delicate; it needs to be handled with care. Children are easily hurt and rejected – by the insensitive. If you don’t know how much you were hurt as a child, how much you felt rejected, you will go on to hurt others in relationships. You may damage young and vulnerable lives, still in the process of developing, as you were damaged. The same applies to relationships. These also need to develop and grow in a healthy way.
Rejection, including shaming, causes deep pain that is hard to face and therefore hard to heal. Children who have been rejected clamour for love as adults, often from rejecting people and especially in codependent relationships. (Don’t forget that withdrawing, counter-dependency, is also a form of codependency. If you are proud and aloof, you are likely to have been rejected too. You reject other people by not being emotionally available now). Children who have been rejected grow up learning to reject themselves, and to reject others, not letting them in. They then feel lost and empty and turn to codependency and other addictions as adults to fill themselves up. This doesn’t heal the pain or fill the emptiness.
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