Legacy of a Narcissistic Parent

From the title of a recent post on GOOP.com. After telling of some of the difficulties that children of narcissistic parents face and how that affects their development and the behaviors and patterns that those children carry with them into adulthood, the article shares some advice on how to counteract some of those effects now:

First, you have to grieve the loss of the parent you never had. Really grieve the fact that you didn’t get the parent you needed, the one who put you and your needs first. Part of that requires releasing the fantasy that your narcissistic parent can change and eventually give you what you need. They can evolve and grow, but they may never evolve enough to meet your deepest needs. Therefore, managing expectations is key, particularly when you see glimpses of the healthy parent you wish you had had, but in fact those glimpses are often not sustainable. Accept that your parent was limited—and could not give you unconditional love or even deep empathy because she could not get past herself to truly see you. Allow yourself to feel your feelings, the anger and the sadness. Emotion has the word motion in it; allow your emotions to move through you. You might not have lost your parent to death, but you lost what could have been—you lost an opportunity to be truly mothered—and that is really a profound loss. Accepting this, rather than denying it, is the first step in opening your heart to healing.

You are going to need to discover boundaries—where you begin and your parents end—to free your authentic self. When you choose who you want to be, rather than who your parents wanted you to be, you break free from their narcissistic grip. Tolerate their discomfort, even if they make a lot of noise. 

You are not misbehaving, rebelling, or rejecting them. You are being you, the real you—maybe for the first time. This is the first part of breaking the cycle. Next, you don’t want to repeat/generalize the relationship that you had with your narcissistic parent to your coworkers, partner, or friends. Realize where you are meeting the needs of other narcissists in your life, real or imagined. Sometimes children of narcissists assume that every person they’re close to will need the same kind of hyper-attention and appeasement that their parent did—and unconsciously begin doing mental backbends to please others. At times you may be tapping into the expectations of a narcissistic boss or partner, and reflexively playing that familiar role. At other times you may be making erroneous assumptions about what someone important to you really needs—perhaps they don’t want you to mirror their opinions or they don’t need you to sugarcoat your real feelings or soften constructive criticism. Breathe, pause, give yourself some psychic space and then test it. Try just being frank, try not to rush in and take care of their feelings. If being different from your loved one feels uncomfortable—or if you feel you’re risking love with that stance—just notice it. Watch how much stronger your bond is than what you secretly imagined it to be. This is the gift of evolving past the scene of the original crime—your own childhood. Surviving childhood meant taking care of the narcissist and swallowing your feelings. But now as an adult you can begin to surround yourself with people that you feel safe and at home with—like soul mate girlfriends—who know and love the real you, and this can be deeply transformative.

Children of narcissistic parents often wonder if they are really loveable. You are! Start loving and caring for yourself in ways that you wished your mom or dad had loved and cared for you. Start paying attention to what really matters to you; what makes you feel alive and moments when you feel authentically you. Maybe you will need help mothering yourself. Maybe that means getting re-parented by a therapist, or maybe the healing comes from an emotionally reparative romantic partnership. Maybe you have a friend’s mother who is nurturing to you, or a mentor who celebrates the real you. All of these people can become part of your collective parent. No one person is ever capable of meeting all of your needs so start building your collective parenting community. And once you have learned to mother yourself, you will be able to mother your child.

Sociopathy & Addiction

Sociopathy & Addiction

There have been numerous studies made to understand the link between sociopathy and substance abuse addiction.

One of the problems researchers face when trying to study this problem is that often addicts with no previous history of sociopathic behavior do begin to show signs of it when something happens to make the addictive substance difficult to obtain.  This tendency could lead researchers to record "false positives" when declaring that an individual addict is also a sociopath.

What is known is that it would be wrong to think of all addicts as sociopaths, or that all sociopaths are addicts.  But there is strong evidence to suggest that substance abuse is more common among people who can be diagnosed with Antisocial Personality Disorder (ASPD), more widely known as sociopathy.

Emotional control, denial, and excuses

Many people mistakenly believe that because one of the supposed signs of ASPD is that the individual has a high level of emotional control, they would be unlikely to use substances that would lead to a loss of control.  For example, by using drugs or alcohol, it is expected that the sociopath may "slip up" and reveal his or her true nature.

In fact the opposite is true.  Some sociopaths may actually crave that loss of control.  But more importantly, it must be remembered that sociopaths tend to be exceptionally self-confident, and it is unlikely that they will believe they will experience a loss of control when they first get on the path to substance abuse.

Even once they do become addicted, they may assert that they are in control of their addiction, or "could give it up if they wanted to".  For some sociopaths, being under the influence of drugs or alcohol also provides a handy excuse for their antisocial behaviors.
Addiction is always a serious problem, but it can be even more serious for sociopaths

A key difference between true sociopaths and other addicts is that whereas most normal addicts come to realize the negative effect of their addiction on others and eventually seek help, the sociopath may be left untreated until the situation has become so dire that there is absolutely no other choice but to get treated.

Sadly it is often the case that may cause serious harm to themselves or others as a result of their addictions, and sometimes they will even die or end up in prison.

Why sociopaths are so susceptible to substance abuse

What may seem like normal life to many people can be incredibly boring to a sociopath.  Sometimes they are willing to do almost anything to escape that boredom.  Sociopaths tend to be thrill-seekers by nature, and they are more likely to indulge in risky behaviors, including drug and alcohol abuse.

Something can be done

While many professionals view sociopathy as "untreatable", the sociopathic thrill-seeking tendency does not necessarily have to be destructive.  It just may never occur to the sociopath that the stimulation they crave could be obtained in more constructive ways.  Sports and physical activities, for example, could be viable alternatives. Florida Beach Rehab is just one of many facilities around the country that’s fully capable of dealing with sociopathy and other types of addiction problems.
Seeking treatment as early as possible is vital

Everyone suffering from addiction should receive treatment for it.  The tendency of sociopaths to avoid treatment places them especially at risk of serious consequences.  Without treatment the addiction will continue to get worse, and so could the destructive behavior patterns that accompany it.

New assessment tool for incarceration

The more that I studied music, the more faith I had in its timeless beauty and infinite variation and admiration for its greatest practitioners. The more I studied law, the more I realized that most of it was built on entirely unfounded assumptions. And there is an odd, awkward, and often misguided interaction between the social science findings and the legal reactions to them. This sort of blind leading the blind feature of the law is troubling, to say the least, which is why I love the empirical movement in law (and continuing expansion in social science).

That's why I was so interested to read that the Kentucky in the United States has established a new risk assessment tool to determine when a potential parolee is likely to be a reoffender based on (wait for it) -- actual verifiable and replicable data! If this surprises you that this was not the status quo or if you don't quite believe me, these quotes from the article:

"We have had a risk-assessment tool since 1976, the Vera scale. Over time, modifications were being made to factors used to determine risk that were reactionary. The indicators for determining risk were not research-based," says Klute.
***
"Good, reliable data drive good bond decisions," says Kentucky Circuit Court Judge David Tapp. "It's definitely changed the way I decide. When I was a young judge, I relied on intuition and community expectations. Now I know with verified information what is statistically likely" if the defendant is released. 
***
"It enables us to make better arguments for our clients," says Scott West, general counsel of the Kentucky Department of Public Advocacy. "It allows a factual argument to rebut gut instinct." 

Not everyone is a fan, including U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder:

On the PBS NewsHour with Gwen Ifill on July 31, 2014, Holder questioned the use of big data on the front end to determine detention. States are already "using that as a predictor, though, of how likely this person is going to be a recidivist. Using group data to make an individualized determination, I think, can result in fundamental unfairness."

No doubt big data can often lead to stereotypes and covert racism, but statisticians have gotten increasingly more sophisticated about trying to filter out those tendencies (I believe), and if there is no evidence that this is what actually is happening (again from real, reliable data), then I'm not sure how non research-based risk assessment tools are any more fundamentally fair than research-based ones?

For anyone who has been worried that being tagged a sociopath would lead to their permanent incarceration should they ever be caught up in the system...

Severus Snape

The previous post reminded me of this video, showing Harry Potter's Severus Snape's scenes in chronological order (spoilers!):




The best part are the comments, particularly those on this site. If you've ever thought that moralizing was a simple matter of doing right things at right times, you may be surprised to hear that is not enough in the black and white moral worlds of many others in which there are only good people and bad people and good people must have done bad things for a good reason and bad people were probably doing good things for selfish reasons (like romantic love?) or didn't really mean them (even though they sacrificed their life for it?) or shouldn't ever be trusted anyway because once a bad guy, always a bad guy. 

It could happen to you

I spoke with a friend who was recently ousted from a job based on fabricated charges. She told me that she finally understood -- for the first time -- a little bit about what it was like to be me. She told me that before this happened to her, she had always just assumed that if anyone left her previous places of employment or were fired, it must have been because there was something bad about the firee that she simply didn't know about that justified the firing. 

It's a commonly held belief (and absolutely self-serving), that if something bad happens to someone, that person must be guilty. It's so common that when an even worse thing happened to a mutual friend of ours, during what became a minor media scandal the precipitated the ouster, her co-workers were quoted as saying things like, "you think you know a person, but I guess everyone is capable of darkness." When this mutual friend was eventually exonerated by her place of employment, the employer gave her a sort of a shrug of his shoulders -- yes she was innocent, but there was no way that they could re-hire her given the salacious nature of the scandal and the delicate nature of the job. Now she has no career.

Even before my own very personal experiences with the media, one of my extended family members was an integral part of a national scandal. Although she was largely kept out of the limelight for being a minor, I was able to see how dodgy even very respectable journalistic outposts were about accurately reporting the facts. There's actually a surprising amount of inferences dot connecting reported as absolute that goes on (probably true of any area of life), and there's an odd sort of hubris and self-assurance that some journalists have that their inferences have to be right, just because that is how the journalist happens to see it. 

So Jon Ronson has his book about public shaming out. I haven't read but excerpts (see here for adapted excerpt re Justine Sacco), but obviously I am a fan of the topic, given its coverage on this blog. I've never been a fan of the empath's capacity and eagerness to form lynch mobs. And I can imagine that Ronson's book may be the least loved and most controversial of his books because there is a significant portion of the population that loves lynch mobs so much that they will defend almost every aspect of them, including the capacity and authority to judge others to the point of deciding who gets to live a normal life or not. 

For instance, in his piece that reads (at least to me) largely as a defense of his own part in the Jonah Lehrer shaming, Slates's Daniel Engber quotes the observation of a theatre professor regarding the reaction that some had in learning that Lehrer was to speak at a Midwestern university: “As soon as it became clear to certain people on the East Coast that Jonah was here, I started to get phone calls from people who had no other wish than to ruin his life.” Can you imagine hating a stranger so much that years later you are still harassing him in anyway you can?

Engber gives some obeisance to the idea that he was less knight in shining armor and more misguided Crusader: 

It seemed to me that Payne might have had a point. Am I part of this East Coast mob of angry journalists, out for nothing less than Lehrer’s blood? Ronson’s book suggests as much. In the coda to his chapters on the scandal, he cites a post of mine in Slate, in which I found signs of plagiarism (among other problems) in Lehrer’s newest book proposal. Could I be, as Ronson hints, a self-appointed fury, cruelly bent on someone else’s destruction? 

He concludes, no. Why? Because even though he has done only a bit of anecdotal fact-finding (sound familiar?), he believes that Lehrer has still not owned up to what Engber imagines is scores of misdeeds. What does he base this belief on? Not much more than the fact that Lehrer's publishers never released their reports on his other books, which naturally indicates that they have something to hide: "Houghton Mifflin never published the results of its investigation, so there’s been no full accounting of the problems in Lehrer’s work. But it’s safe to say the Dylan quotes were just the tipoff for something much worse." Is that really safe to say? In what sense of the word "safe"? Safe to say in the sense that it is convenient to assume without verifying and makes Engber's piece seemingly stronger and more compelling (again, what he accuses Lehrer of having done in making "'mistakes'" that "tend to make his stories more exciting".)

Other misdeeds are that the following sentence appears in Lehrer's work and also appears in another book: "The coaches were confident that the young quarterback wouldn’t make a mistake," along with similar descriptions of what happened during a Super Bowl (probably all descriptions of the Super Bowl would be similar because they're all based on the same underlying facts of what actually happened?).  

So basically we have a menace to society on our hands in the form of Jonah Lehrer. And Engber concludes, unsurprisingly from a pitchfork wielding member of the original mob, that Jonah Lehrer should never get back into society's good graces perhaps until he acknowledges all of the mistakes that Engber thinks are mistakes, or perhaps never because how could we ever trust him again. As Engber notes himself, "there are rules to telling stories," and when we tell ourselves stories of self-justification to excuse the blood that we may have spilt in enacting justice, best to stick to the original script of -- if something bad happened to a person, they must have had it coming somehow. 

Otherwise we'd have to admit, as my friends have unfortunately had to recently, that this sort of life ruining and shaming can truly happen to anyone.