Amazing and insightful post written by a diagnosed NPD (non-malignant) who has been working hard to stop the generational transfer of NPD and raise an emotionally healthy and empathic son, while she works on herself. They are learning together, and she may have prevented her child from developing a personality disorder by using the techniques discussed in this post.
I sure wish my mother had become self aware enough to do this with me.
An older post that I’d forgotten I wrote, but I think people will be able to relate to the traumatic experience I describe here.
I think I made a kind of breakthrough in my therapy session tonight. For years one of my problems has been this overwhelming fear that something bad will happen to one of my kids. (I don’t like to even say the D word because I irrationally believe if I say it, I’ll somehow make it happen, by putting it out into the universe or something).
Of course all parents worry about their adult kids, especially when they know they’re out there somewhere in cars, which we all know are dangerous hunks of metal capable of the most ghastly and gory deaths you can imagine and operated by countless idiots and drunks on the road who can’t drive. I think my apprehension about something bad happening to my adult children edges into OCD-type territory though, because of how overpowering and pervasive these thoughts are, intruding where and when they are not…
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Something a bit more light hearted! Please comment under the original post.
Hieroglyphics were ancient Egypt’s way of communicating. Emoji is how we do it on cell phones today. They both seem to be very similar ways of sharing information in symbolic form. I found this on Facebook and thought it to be thought provoking and profound.
This article from one of my favorite bloggers is about how religious fundamentalism, like politics, has also moved so far to the “right” since the 1960s that these churches now resemble dangerous cults more than churches, and they seem preoccupied with control, a doctrine of hate and punishment, and make excuses for the abuse of women and children.
We became fundamentalists in 1958 when I was 7, and I ate it up! We joined a Freewill Baptist Church and I was with those churches until 1970. However, I did not absorb fundamentalism only from FWB churches; my strongest influences were from the Independent Fundamentalist Baptist (IFB) movement which was even more fundamentalist than the FWB churches.
We subscribed to John R. Rice’s influential paper The Sword of the Lord, which I read devotedly. I also read many of John Rice’s booklets, including Bobbed Hair, Bossy Wives, and Women Preachers. In addition, I read articles and books by other IFB leaders such as Bob Jones, Jack Hyles, and Oliver Greene. I listened to Lester Roloff on the radio. Other fundamentalist influences were Carl McIntire and the Moody radio station. I was pretty much saturated with fundamentalism.
Characteristics of Fundamentalism in the 1960s
Like evangelicals, fundamentalists subscribed to…
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Lenora Thompson writes about narcissism for PsychCentral. This article about her narcissistic third-grade teacher stood out to me, not only because it is an entertaining (and of course, heartbreaking) read, but also because not much has been written about narcissistic teachers. This is strange to me because teachers probably have the most impact on young children, after their parents.
I had one such teacher (also my third-grade teacher), Mrs. Morse, who decided to make me her scapegoat. You can read about that here, in an older post I wrote about my childhood, called Crybaby.
By Lenora Thompson, for PsychCentral
The class of thirty 9-year-old third-graders looked like something out of a 1950s photograph. They sat perfectly still. Their reading books were held in identical grips in their chubby hands. Every student held their books at exactly the same angle. No one slouched. It looked like a model classroom.
What no one knew was that, just the day before, their narcissistic teacher had taped a student’s mouth shut, tied him to his desk and struck him.
They were not model students. They were quite simply terrified.
Finding out who your new teacher will be at the start of each school year is always very exciting. In my über-religious Protestant school, there were two third grade teachers. There was the beloved nice one who, unbeknownst to us, was slowly dying of cancer.
Then there was the other one. A newlywed. Very young. Very pretty. Very mean.
As luck would have it, I got the mean teacher. But I adored her. Back then, I adored all my teachers and often was the teacher’s pet.
Who doesn’t have a dire tale to tell of getting sick at school. On this particular morning, I felt fine when I boarded the schoolbus. I felt fine when I arrived at school and handed in my completed project.
Then it struck me, the waves of nausea. That salty flavor in the mouth that precedes losing ones cookies. “Please teacher,” I begged. “I think I’m sick. Can I go call my mommy?”
“No,” she snapped. “You’re just pretending to be sick because you haven’t finished your homework.”
It wasn’t true, but she was scary. So I shut up.
Then I threw up…all over the floor. Served her right.
*****
Read the rest of Lenora’s article here.
I wanted to give this article I wrote on May 1 last year a second chance, so I’ve bumped it. I hope it inspires you to write honestly about what you really feel, trolls and critics be darned.
I don’t write to people-please. I did enough people-pleasing as a scared, awkward child and a codependent wife to a sociopath. Those days, for me, are numbered. I blog to be honest about myself and the way I see the world. Being completely honest isn’t always easy, and there have been many times I haven’t posted something I really wanted to because I was afraid of how people might react. But my track record is pretty good, and usually my desire to post an opinion or viewpoint that may not be “popular” overrides my fear of angering or upsetting someone. Even if I hesitate before posting an unpopular or controversial opinion, more often than not, I’ll eventually post it anyway and worry about the fallout (if any) later.
Most of the time, I’ve been pleasantly surprised. I’ve had people actually thank me for posting a controversial or unpopular opinion, because…
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Another inspirational story from one of my partners, The Purple Almond! Please leave comments under the original post.
I’ve long noticed that middle, working class and lower middle class families seem to care more about each other and show more empathy and generosity to each other than upper middle class and wealthy families, who often seem cold and unsupportive, even to their own. Many upper middle class families, including my own, seem to take the “sink or swim” attitude even to their own children. They refuse to offer either emotional or financial support when you fall on hard times. Their attitude is, each man or woman is an island and no one is responsible for you but yourself. They don’t seem to believe in lending a helping hand when one of their members falls down or is having difficulty. In fact, too many seem likely to kick that person when they’re down and blame the victim for their troubles. “Well, if she had only done this or that,” or “she never listened and this is what she gets,” or “well, she always made such poor choices.” If you’re not doing well, they seem embarrassed or ashamed of you and may even exclude or shun you.
In middle to lower-class families, there just seems to be more empathy and understanding and emotional support shown to other family members who are having difficulties. They seem more likely to listen without judging or shaming, and will even try to help financially when they can, even though they might not be able to afford to.
Of course, this isn’t an ironclad rule. There are many well to do families who are very emotionally supportive and empathic to one another, and may also give generously to charity. There are also many dysfunctional lower class families who treat other family members horribly. But the class differences in empathy is a pattern I’ve noticed, especially as someone who came from one of these cold as ice upper middle class families. I think narcissism runs rampant in the upper middle class even more than the truly wealthy, who are more secure in their status. In my own family (we were far from rich, but I suppose we were solidly upper middle class), I might as well have been an orphan, for all the “love and support” I got from them over the years. Now I’m a source of shame for most of them. Oh well, too bad. I feel like I’m a better person than they are because I don’t judge people based on their physical appearance, financial status, or job title. I look at what’s inside, or at least I try to.
I thought it was just me, but apparently there is empirical evidence that supports the idea that rich people are less empathic and care more about themselves while the less wealthy feel more like “we’re all in this together.” This article from NYMag.com explains the research behind this finding.
By Drake Baer, for NYmag.com
http://nymag.com/scienceofus/2017/02/how-rich-people-see-the-world-differently.html
The way you view the world depends on the culture you come from — in a granular, second-by-second sense. If you present a Westerner and an East Asian with the same visual scene, for instance, the former is more likely to focus on individual objects, and the latter will likely take in more of the scene as a whole. East Asians are more holistic in their thinking, the research indicates; Westerners are more analytic.
The same thing is happening with people who are from the same country, but belong to different social classes. With America’s top one percent of earners earning 81 times the average of the bottom 50 percent, the research shows how the wealthy and the working classes really do live in different cultures, and thus see the world in different ways.
One of the most powerful examples come from Michael Varnum, a neuroscientist at Arizona State University. In a 2015 paper on empathy, he and his colleagues recruited 58 participants for a brain-imaging study: First, the participants filled out a self-report on their social class (level of parents’ education, family income, and the like) before sitting down for an EEG session. In the brain-imaging task, participants were shown neutral and pained faces while they were told to look for something else (the faces were a “distractor,” in the psych argot, so hopefully the participants wouldn’t know they were being tested for empathy).
*****
Read the rest of this article here.
I’m sure my friend Nyssa from the Hobbit Hole won’t mind me reblogging this post she wrote today. I think politics is dominating many of our minds these days, especially for those of us who are survivors of abusive families or marriages and are triggered to the point of hypervigilance and paranoia by the constitutional chaos and hatred that seems to have suddenly taken over ever since Trump came into office. It’s as if the world has gone mad.
Every day since this president took office is more WTF than the last. Staying glued to the legitimate media (oh wait, I mean ‘fake news’) is almost an unconscious reflex that has its roots in our C-PTSD. But our morbid fascination and vigilance doesn’t have to be in vain. It can and should be a call to take action and (peacefully) protest and expose the truth, instead of listening to the shitstorm of hatred, lies (oops, I mean alternative facts), and national-level gaslighting and projection this Hitlerian president and his army of brainwashed ‘deplorables’ is engaging in, while they gleefully gut democracy in their attempts to turn us into a banana republic with a cruel and dictatorial ruler who wants to silence the free press, dismantle all regulations, build walls, shut down the EPA, and run our nation as if it’s a religious cult.
All I know is this: If I have to die under this new regime (and many probably will, either through acts of internal terrorism and violence, natural disasters due to unregulated plundering of our natural resources, disease caused by “mythical” global warming, or because they lost their health insurance, Medicare, Medicaid, or social security – those are all next on the table to be axed under this administration), I don’t want to die as a victim. I almost did already and I’m never going there again. I’d rather die fighting for truth and justice, whatever that might mean. I’m not going to succumb and die as one of the scared sheep who did nothing.
So, here is Nyssa’s article.
So much is going on that I can barely keep up. My friend Lucky Otter calls it hypervigilance, says that the abuse is now happening on a national scale…. We have the flying monkeys in large numbers….
I’m starting to burn out on news from the White House. It’s nonstop crapstorm every day. I spend hours just checking news feeds on Twitter. But I keep hearing that we should all be vigilant so we can protest through various channels and keep our voices heard. But I do have other things to do….
Then I watch movies of the White Rose Society, and hear how Germans didn’t do enough to stop the Nazis, for various reasons. We can keep the same thing from happening here, and it looks like we just might do so–but not if we stop watching. But what about the other things I need to do?
I’m following not just American newspapers, but German and British ones as well, to get more global perspectives. Der Spiegel is about to publish the English version of a scathing series on Trump. That’s the magazine which also put a controversial picture on the front cover, of Trump beheading the Statue of Liberty.
It’s all maddening. Those of us who have experienced narc abuse and other kinds of abuse, we can recognize what’s going on, but the flying monkeys call us “libtards” and laugh at us.
*****
Read the rest of Nyssa’s article here.
Food for thought during these dark times.
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Lucky Otters Haven 