Because the damage to the narcissist occurs in early years, it is my feeling that it profoundly affects the ability to be close and attuned but minimally affects intelligence. By the time narcissists are at the stage of intellectual development where their brain allows them to abstract, they are in school, learning and probably getting plenty of opportunities to grow. It is emotional learning that seems missing, not intellectual learning. This makes narcissists all the more confusing: they can think so clearly, piece together such seemingly attractive personnas, but the feeling connection is underdeveloped. In a relationship, this means that a narcissist can observe you, sometimes very perceptively, but does not tune into your inner world.
Will My Narcissistic Parent Ever Change?
It is not likely that narcissistic parents will change. Narcissists rarely get help as they cannot step away from themselves and see themselves through another person’s eyes. Besides, they feel that they are fine; it is the rest of the world who is out of step. And if they do get help, it will have to be the “best” help possible and will likely be short lived. They remain true to the Greek myth about Narcissus, who fell in love with his own reflection and for whom this disorder was named.
Integrating the “Good” and “Bad” Parent
There is a moment in all children’s lives when it dawns on them that their parent isn’t perfect, a time when the disparity between the wished for, idealized parent of the innocent child mind needs to be integrated into a more realistic picture of who the parent really is—someone with personal limitations, foibles, and faults. Someone who is not perfect. Someone who can be loved in spite of imperfections. Melanie Klein, a psychoanalyst who was famous for work with and about children, refers to this moment in the child’s life as “the depressive position” because even in the best of cases it is a loss of innocence and a profound shift in expectations—a disappointment. No longer can the child call on the magical, protective presence of the parent to make everything okay, to hold monsters at bay, to meet all needs, and to make pain and angst disappear.
Jean was a beautiful, bright, and privileged girl who had a special closeness with her alcoholic mother, who called her Jeannie. On the one hand, Jean was so welcome in her mother’s inner sanctum that she came to terms with many of her mother’s weaknesses earlier than her other siblings. She saw clearly her mother’s self-absorption, but the little girl in her was still and forever enchanted with the magical feeling of being her mother’s confidante. She was as much a mother to her mother as her mother was a mother to her. If that sentence is confusing, imagine how confusing the actual experience was. Jeannie hovered somewhere between knowing her mother’s faults with amazing clarity and clinging to her idealized imaged of her mother. She had trouble integrating the beautiful woman who looked so elegant in Chanel suits and Ferragamo shoes, who knew how to entertain and make guests feel so at home at dinner parties, with the woman who could not walk a straight line down the bedroom hallway, who fell over on the dance floor, who was drunk and slurred her words at the family holiday party, and who quietly went to bed, took the phone off the hook, and pulled down the shades. And so Jean never did. Instead, she married a man who drank too much himself, telling herself all the same emotional lies that she learned as a child: He is so good with people. He thinks I am so special. He will fit so naturally into my life, my family, my dreams. Our dreams.
All children are faced with the task of integrating conflicting sides of the parents they love. For the child of addiction, this inner picture looks more like Picasso in his Cubist period than a Renoir. CoAs and ACoAs are faced with incorporating a drunken, out-of-control, and perhaps abusive parent into their internalized working model. If they have idealized their addicted parent in an attempt to ward off the despair and depression of seeing their parent’s dark side, they also may feel that they are giving up an ideal parent or an ideal childhood along with it. Facing up to the very significant deficits of an alcoholic parent, or for that matter the enabling or narcissistic parent, can leave CoAs or ACoAs with a sense of loneliness and disappointment. It can feel like too great a task to undertake. But they need to integrate the good and bad parent so they don’t project their shadow onto their spouses and children.
Children of fairly regulated parents have the job of facing up to their parents’ faults, perhaps their tempers, or their shyness, weaknesses, or lack of success in the world. These children have to somehow incorporate these deficits into the image of the parents they have internalized throughout their childhood . . . the parents who seemed to have enchanted powers in a good-night kiss, who made the best-tasting food in the entire world, who lifted them into the air and into a heaven of two filled with blue sky, love, and warm, caressing breezes. Children need to make peace with their childhood wishes and their need to see their parents as all-powerful and perfect, and move into a more mature psychological state in which they can love their parents as they are, warts and all. There is a profound freedom in realizing that a parent isn’t perfect, because we simultaneously incorporate the knowledge that we, too, can lead a relatively happy life, even without being perfect ourselves.
Part III:
Faces and Voices of the ACoA Trauma Syndrome
We have not even to risk the adventure alone, for the heroes
of all time have gone before us. The labyrinth is thoroughly known. We have only to follow the thread of the hero path,
and where we had thought to find an abomination, we shall
find a god. And where we had thought to slay another, we
shall slay ourselves. Where we had thought to travel outward,
we will come to the center of our own existence. And where
we had thought to be alone, we will be with all the world.
—Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth
TEN
Self-Medication: Misguided Attempts at Mood Management
There is no greater agony than bearing
an untold story inside you.
—Maya Angelou
Many addicts, whether they self-medicate with drugs, alcohol, food, sex, or spending, are ACoAs. Just as someone with a physical injury can become addicted to the medications that bring them relief from their chronic physical pain, an ACoA can become addicted to the “pain meds” (alcohol, drugs, food, sex, money) that bring them relief from their chronic emotional pain. When ACoAs cannot cope with the pain they are in, they often reach for some sort of mood-altering substance or behavior to do that for them.
The habit of self-medication can start very early. One of the misconceptions about addiction is that when the substance is removed, the addict’s troubles are over. But we don’t learn what our pain is trying to teach when we silence its voice. Addictions to mood-altering substances such as alcohol and/or drugs are called substance addictions. Addictions to mood-altering behaviors or activities, such as sex, eating, spending, and/or gambling, among others, are called process addictions.
Making Recovery Real: Sandy’s Story
“I know I look together on the outside,” Sandy says, “but on the inside, I feel like I’m falling apart.” I observe this elegant young man as he dialogues with an empty chair and struggles to find the words to describe what has been festering inside of him, unarticulated and unspoken, for so long.
“Who are you?” Sandy asks the empty chair as he begins his role play. He is talking to that little boy who lives inside of him, the one he still wants to shove down. “I can’t even find you. No, that’s not really true. I don’t want to find you. I’m ashamed of you. I don’t want to look at you.” He lifts a flat hand of rejection toward the chair that is representing the part of himself that he buried in a bucket of ice cream, then later in six packs of beer, and eventually in drugs. His inner child . . . adolescent . . . teenager.
“I just look at you and . . .” At this point he drops his head into his hands, and tears begin to
flow down his cheeks. “I know how lonely you are, how different you feel, and I want to say I’m sorry. God, I’m so sorry that I stomped you down for so long, that I fed you drugs instead of food, that I dragged you to all those dark places. I’m sorry that I ignored and hurt you and made fun of you just the way they did to me. I’m sorry I hated you. I look in the mirror and I see you staring out at me.”
As I watch his drama unfold, I am stunned. I am a therapist. I deal with this every day and still, these moments of self-disclosure take my breath away. What is it that makes us so vulnerable when we are small? How can it be that we don’t forget about all of this: the old complexes about being left out of family conversation at the dinner table, humiliated or criticized by a father, or ignored by a mother whose love we want so desperately? How can this stay with us all our lives? Why do we want to hide from our needy sides that yearn for love, connection, and attention—indeed, from our basic humanness?
Sandy is well-groomed, well-educated, and from a well-heeled, liberal Boston Brahmin family. He first came to see me when he was thirty-seven, a year or so after a serious breakup with the woman he planned to marry. When his engagement ended, he felt as alone as he’d ever felt; vulnerable and in need of a way out. With his very social friends, that “out” was easily found; there was always a house to go to and a place to party well into the night after all the other parties had broken up. Those who felt so inclined could sniff and smoke and drink their way into oblivion—in style and comfort. Drugs and alcohol provided Sandy with not only immediate relief from emotional pain but also a ready group of loyal comrades to keep him company—until, of course, he got sober. Then all the music and laughter stopped, and he felt alone with just the relentless pounding of his own heart to fill the void in which he found himself.
The Trigger Event Relationship
“I thought we would always be together,” said Sandy about his fiancée. “I really loved her and I let myself trust her, but I pushed her away.”
Thinking back on when Sandy first started working with me, I recall that his breakup had clearly plunged him into overwhelming and confusing pain. It also turned what was previously social, diversionary drinking and occasional pot-smoking into full-blown addiction. Sandy’s problems with full-blown addiction were short-lived; his pattern of self-medication, so common among ACoAs, had deeper roots. Unknowingly, Sandy had been trying to drown the pain not only of his breakup, but the deeper, earlier losses that were now getting triggered and mixed up with his present pain.
More backstory . . . let’s look back at when I began seeing Sandy; his intake went something like this:
“Do you drink much, Sandy, or do other drugs?” I asked.
“No, not really,” said Sandy, raising his hand to his chin in reflection and leaning back in his chair. “I party with my friends on weekends but I don’t get out of control. We all indulge.” He rolled his eyes slightly, which I wasn’t sure how to interpret.
“Would you say that you drink when you’re feeling depressed?”
“No, mostly socially, when I go out.”
“Do you ever drink or drug alone?” I asked.
“No, always with my friends, only when I’m out,” said Sandy. “But I can always stop. I don’t think alcohol or drugs are my problem. I think it’s this other stuff—that stuff from when I was a little kid that I can’t seem to get at.”
It was hard to tell how much Sandy had been using drugs and alcohol to numb the pain of losing his fiancée and their plans for a future together. One indication that this might be the case was that he couldn’t move through the anguish from his breakup, but I believed him when he said that his main issues were related to CoA trauma. Sandy came to group but found connecting difficult, and it became evident after a few groups that he would need to abstain from drugs and alcohol in order to process feelings. Yet he was not ready to admit this to himself.
When Sandy missed a group, no one was too surprised. “I got a call from London,” he said. “I think I may have missed a group. I’ve met a girl. I really have to give this a chance. I haven’t felt this way in a long time. I won’t be there this next week either.”
The next week I got another call: “Missing another group, so sorry, things taking a little longer than expected . . . work possibility I need to check out, hope you can understand, apologize to everyone, see you next week. . . .”
His next communication was by e-mail: “Please forgive my unexcused absence. I know I committed to a year in group. I’m just not sure this process is, well, working for me at the moment. I’m feeling a lot better. I think the work is so important, but I just don’t think I’m ready for it, just not right now. Sometime, though. I know I need to do it.” He was doing the whole thing all over again, re-creating his painful history of loving and losing in a matter of weeks. He was falling in love, breaking up, drinking and drugging to get over it. It was the same script, just accelerated. But unlike so many who start and stop recovery, Sandy wasn’t blaming the group or me for why he was leaving. He made it clear that he felt he needed to do this work but that he wasn’t ready. That was actually very sane—maybe ambivalent and fraught with anxiety, but sane. And also kind and well-related: he did not wish to hurt or alienate anyone. He needed to get to know himself, but he already knew a lot.
Six months later I heard from him again. “I’m sober. I’ve been sober for six months. I know I need this work. Will you let me back in group?” I asked him if he was going to AA.
“No, I tried a couple of meetings, but I don’t know, they’re just not for me.” Even though this was a phone call, I could almost see him wincing. “The God stuff—I just can’t get into it. And I don’t need it to stay sober.”
“If you come back to group, you will need to go to AA.”
“I’ll give another meeting a try. I can’t promise anything; I want to be honest.”
“Sorry, if you come back to group you need to be in AA and seeing a therapist one-on-one. You need safe places to process all the feeling that will inevitably come up as we examine what’s underneath your self-medicating, why you wanted to drink and drug in the first place.”
“I thought once I got sober I’d feel so much better, but I feel worse.”
“You’re feeling the pain that used to make you want to pick up and use.”
“I don’t like it.”
“I know, no one really does.”
“I feel like I got my appendix out and the medication is wearing off and it hurts like hell.”
“You were medicating your emotional pain with drugs and alcohol. Now you’re sober. You’re feeling it.”
“I thought when I got sober it wouldn’t hurt anymore.”
“I know.”
“So can I come back to the group?”
“I need to check it out with everyone, to make sure they are willing to reinvest in your recovery, Sandy. You disappeared, remember? Groups don’t like that much. Can you give me a few days?”
“I’ll think about it.”
“You think about it.”
Six weeks later I got another call. Sandy was going to two to three meetings a week and willing to go to more if his emotions got rocky. He’d find a therapist. Did I have any recommendations?
“I just know I need this work. It’s the only thing that feels hopeful to me. I’m not worried about relapsing. Sobriety is okay, but I’m emotionally relapsing, if that makes any sense. I’m all over the place.”
“Welcome back, Sandy. I’ll see you on Monday.”
The Bottom of the Iceberg
As he was growing up, Sandy spent the bulk of his time with a young Irish nanny named Deirdre whom he grew to adore. His memories of her plunge him into a mixture of feelings both divine and downhearted. “I just remember being this happy little kid with her. I’m sure I wanted to be with my mother, but honestly, I was
completely bonded to Deirdre. Sometimes I wonder if I thought she was my mother. She was just this warm, loving, wonderful woman.” In his mind, Deirdre was his first love. His own mother had returned to a high-powered business job so quickly after Sandy’s birth that he hardly knew her. As a newborn, Sandy had enough bonding chemicals coursing through his little brain and body to ensure an attachment powerful enough to hold him to his birth mother until maturity. But the woman he primarily bonded with was Deirdre. Still, this was okay. He was getting what he needed to develop a sound little emotional infrastructure, to feel loved and valued. He adored his surrogate mommy, and the feelings were mutual. He belonged somewhere and to someone. He felt happy and whole.
The real trouble for Sandy began when his mother “suddenly” realized that her now-four-year-old son was much more attached to Deirdre than he was to her. “My mother just came home and fired Deirdre one day. She took six months off and poof, Deirdre was gone, no more, like she’d died or something.” This traumatic rupture forced Sandy to attempt to re-bond, however anxiously, to his own mother. “I was getting the person I’d probably wanted in the first place, but I was always so anxious she’d leave, I guess, so I literally clung to her. Maybe I missed Dierdre, too, I must have. If my mom had stayed, it would probably all have been fine; I loved her.”
The ACOA Trauma Syndrome Page 10