I love your list. I look at it at least once a week and it has helped me enormously. I've restarted my research and thank you for your commentary about Vaknin. Unfortunately he's so visible his was the first stuff I came across in my quest to find out why I keep getting involved with NPDs. I've also started a subliminal program for self esteem and have found it makes me feel belligerent. It might sound strange but that is really making a difference in how I am seeing myself change my point of view. Then the advice to stay out of their heads and ignore content. Very useful in making me pay attention to the suck. Watching Glenn Gary Glenn Ross was interesting after that. All suck, no content sales is what that movie is about. I never appreciated that before. Gee.
I've also found a good Alanon meeting for support in my work on myself. That's been wonderful and I find myself waiting all week to go!
Unfortunately I didn't protect my assets and after having paid off my exes grad school student loans for her ivy league degree, and paying off her new car, she, a psychotherapist, left me for a client half her age. Unethical, illegal and yet she has so much charm that her colleagues still befriend her after that and refuse to see her as a narcissist. I guess they didn't hear her screaming at me every time she didn't get something she wanted, or even of course was a little nervous she wouldn't get from me. Anyway, I am unemployed now, like so many, and okay with my funds but it sure could be better. She and I agreed that we would buy a house after her loans were paid off. So much for trust.
All my intimate relationships in sobriety have been with narcissists. I really know the meaning of the phrase anaclitic object selection. "Partner" after partner has scalded me for as much as they could crawl away with, leaving me feeling like I am soooo stupid and ugly and unwanted.
My parents were both narcissistic; my mother being a violent codependent and my father the kind of alcoholic who let everything in his life go, including his college education, so that he could work a factory job and spend his money, all his money on alcohol for himself and his friends. I was a prodigy in music, art and literature and never saw any attention from them. I was also heavily physically abused, as well as emotionally, and went to school with a lot of evidence of having been beaten. Instead of confronting my parents the school separated me from the rest of the students and had me see psychologists. By fifth grade I was sent to a small room on the 3rd floor to stay by myself during school hours. If that were done today people would be in jail but back then in the sixties it was all they thought of.
Then I started drinking and like my dad, couldn't stop. I finally did at 29, and strangely, had better relationships before I stopped than after, so this is me at 56, still trying to become a human being.
I have had a lot of therapy for PTSD, even the inpatient program at Northwestern Institute, and have plodded on, but the attraction to destructive scum is a tough one to break. I'm working on it though, and I appreciate your help. I think you may underestimate the good your website is doing. The information you're providing is so much more informative than anything therapists have given me. I'd say actually, therapy has mostly been about changing my behavior without giving me much in the way of reasons for doing so.
A friend of mine who got her PhD in Moscow said that when she was in school she'd heard that the Americans only used cognitive behavioral therapy and thought that was just anti-American propaganda.
The tools you're providing are really valuable to those of us with either no insurance to pay therapists or with therapists that are clueless or NPD themselves, and believe me, there are more than a few of those. Thanks for your work. You are doing a lot of good in my life and from the comments I'd say you've accomplished a lot with others who've used your guidelines and information.
Take care, and be well!
Tuesday, August 31, 2010
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
