Innocence doesn’t exist

The point here is that the psyche, in its search for the right scenery, adjusts reality to what it needs. There are many ways to do this, from simply demonizing a partner to unconsciously provoking narcissistic behavior. This is a very complex topic. To think about it is to refuse the salutary shifting of responsibility to another person. The word “salutary” here is not ironic, but an inner reality: to accept that I bear some of the responsibility for what is happening to me is to return to the childhood experience of “if it’s happening to me, there must be something wrong with me.” To experience the shame you’ve been so diligently avoiding, and to discover that you’re not so innocent after all. Given that it is innocence that the psyche seeks, adequate and grounded then, when we were children, avoiding responsibility is life-saving. It takes many, many resources and support to stop blaming everything on the partner (as a traumatizing parent figure) and lean on our own adulthood to really get over old experiences.

Our adult task is not to get our childhood desperate needs met, but to learn to live with the fact that they have not been and will not be met.

This is a huge, irreversible grief. Can we be blamed for trying our best to avoid it?

Thank the author: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/FragilePeople/

So the victim’s strategies are infantile and the ways they adapt to relationships and take care of themselves are infantile too. The most common victim strategy in a narcissistic relationship is to run away from the one who is seen as the abuser. This is not just a childish strategy. This strategy is all too similar to what the victim accuses her partner of doing.

Jana talks about her husband, at length, all through the first few meetings, practically not letting me get a word in edgewise. I understand that it is important for her to speak out, important for her to feel heard and understood. It’s not hard for me to understand her: she talks about how her husband doesn’t pay attention to her, infatuated with what’s going on with him, and I feel the same way around her. She talks about his coldness and indifference, that he is not interested in her, and I feel the same way. She complains about the categorical nature of his judgments, the way he grades her, calling him a “pronounced narcissist” and a “man without feelings.” Next to her complaints about being devalued, it’s hard for me to feel valued: without letting me do anything for her, after a few meetings Jana starts talking about how therapy is going wrong. And when I draw attention to the fact that here she has a space for all her experiences, that in this way they find a place and express themselves — she says that she already shares it with her friends all the time and expected something more serious from the psychologist.

For Yulia, fear is important: she lives in constant tension because her partner constantly compares her to her ex-girlfriend, and this comparison she loses. Speaking about this, she utters the phrase: “My past man carried me in his arms, with him I understood what love is”.

Thank the author: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/FragilePeople/

Andrew is married to a narcissistic girl who blames him for any difficulties they have in raising their daughter. “You’re a bad father”, ‘if only you spent more time at home’, ‘you spoil her’, ‘you don’t help me with her upbringing’, ‘it’s all a never-ending holiday for you’ — all these reproaches come down on Andrei all the time. He feels that if his wife would cope with her maternal duties, there would be no problems for his daughter. In this family there is an undeclared war for who is the best parent: open on one side and secret — on the other. At the same time, both are genuinely happy when the other makes a mistake or fails. Everyone lives in constant tension and stress: war is war. The daughter does not sleep well at night, throws tantrums and can not learn to use the potty.

The relationship in which the victim of a narcissist is in is narcissistic on both sides. The partners in this relationship share the same trauma. They both seek a merger that will finally heal the old pain, and they both choose partners who can recreate the right scenery. Both seek unequivocal recognition and acceptance of themselves, suffering through their partner’s dissatisfaction or demands. Both possess a set of specific adaptation patterns that make one vulnerable to criticism and cause one to expend all of one’s energies on the one who criticizes.

Thank the author: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/FragilePeople/

The victim rejects his partner as often as they reject him. He doesn’t like the way she talks — she rejects his need to have a worthy partner at important events. He devalues her hobbies — she overlooks his efforts at work to provide for his family. He torments her with demands for order and cleanliness — she thinks he is a maniac, complying with his requests with anger and fear, unable to listen to what he really wants.

The relationship between Lana and Egor looks, at first glance, like that of a rapist and a victim: cleanliness is important to Egor, and Lana has to spend most of her time cleaning, because a drop of water on the bathroom mirror can lead to a lecture at best, a scandal at worst. Lana agonizes in these attempts to keep clean and not get aggressive with her partner, and her martyrdom is obvious to everyone, including Egor. He is indeed narcissistic, and disobedience makes him frighteningly angry with Lana, it’s true, but he’s not just angry because she didn’t take out the trash can or make the bed. Despite her haggard face and her refusal to spend time together because she’s tired (which is passive revenge), she still doesn’t do what he asks her to do. The trash is still not taken out, the bed is still not made. Above all, Egor is pissed off because Lana, by and large, doesn’t care about his needs: she does mechanical work to wear herself out and have the right to resent him and refuse him, without discerning what is really important to him. This is the kind of passive rejection in which narcissistic character traits grow by leaps and bounds.

Thank the author: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/FragilePeople/

Lana provokes Egor’s narcissism — if he doesn’t look like a maniac, she won’t look like an innocent victim either. So she ignores Egor’s demands (he asks that the house be clean and orderly, but she makes an operating room out of the apartment, in which order never appears because she is tired). Egor torments her directly. Lana is passive-aggressive.

The relationship the narcissist victim is in is masochistic on both sides. Both partners have difficulty expressing their feelings directly, both do not know how to take full care of themselves, and both tend to assert themselves at the expense of the other because the opportunity for fulfillment is lost. Masochism and narcissism always go hand in hand: they are two sick forms of adaptation, two stereotypes that stem from the impossibility in early childhood to be who we are. To put it very crudely, in a narcissistic relationship, the narcissist is the one who benefits more from narcissistic stereotypes — grandiosity, social admiration, publicity — and the victim is the one who has more masochistic patterns: to tolerate, suffer, and make his or her life worse so that others feel bad. Usually these patterns vary, though there are favorites. In the story above, Lana is a masochist who narcissistically thinks she is absolutely right, and Egor is a narcissist who masochistically endures his role as domestic tyrant even though he takes no pleasure in it.

These stereotypical behaviors are not indicative of anything unusual. Actually, they are the ones that make up the bulk of modern relationships.

Thank the author: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/FragilePeople/