The right scenery
Back to relationships. Old traumas are always seeking closure. The psyche seeks to work off the painful material. In order for wounds to heal, we need the opportunity to react differently to the old situation. We seek to experience new feelings about an old problem and so unconsciously seek out and choose people around whom our trauma will resurface and we can finally experience it differently. And who better than a person with narcissism to recreate for us the trauma of narcissistic rejection, to lift the narcissistic experience from the bottom of the psyche?
Ira’s mom is a psychopath who chose one of her three children to love and rejected the others. Ira didn’t make it into the favorites and had heard enough about how she wasn’t pretty, that she could eat less, that she was growing up too fast and generally embarrassing her mother. Now Ira is married to a man from a different social circle, who perceives Ira as an unfortunate Christmas toy that hangs in the most prominent place. She needs to go with him to receptions and business lunches, she needs to dress nicely, she needs to behave with a dignity that will complement her husband’s image. She doesn’t succeed, of course, so he tells her. Her taste is bad, her figure is ugly, her manners are provincial, and in general she interrupts him all the time and embarrasses him in front of people.
And Lena has a rejecting father who has been living on two families for many years. He seems to love his daughter, but he never finds time for her — at least not as much time as she would like. As a child, she thinks it’s all about her and tries to attract and keep him, sobbing bitterly when she fails. By her teenage years, she decides it’s all her father’s fault and stops talking to him, believing her feelings for him to be faded and irrelevant. She doesn’t have a permanent relationship, but the relationships she has had are with a business traveler, a shift worker, a workaholic, and a single father. All her partners also always don’t have enough time for her, she hates them too and cuts them out of her life, like her father.
Thank the author: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/FragilePeople/
At Denis everything is not so obvious: the family is good, the parents love each other and the children, there are a lot of resources. Dad is a surgeon who adores his work, a professional with a well-known name. Denis, by the way, is also a surgeon, and a good one (but not as good as his father, of course, he says). Denis is in a relationship with a bright, interesting girl, a poet and writer, successful and passionate about her work. Denis feels that he is not suitable for her, that he is not up to her level. Insecurity is his constant background in the relationship, which in other senses could be quite good. As it is, he torments his beloved with bouts of insecurity. Denis suspects her of cheating, acutely reacts to any of her missteps, it is difficult to tolerate her successes. She tries to share less with him to hurt him less, and then he accuses her of secrecy and that she does not trust him. Exhausted, she leaves, leaving Denis convinced that he was unworthy of her and ruined everything himself.
Such relationships are the perfect backdrops for old traumas. That is why they become super-valuable, super-important: the psyche throws all resources at the possibility of becoming healthy again. On the surface it looks like great love, strong attachment, love addiction. In the depths, this one is always trying — over and over again to prove to the rejecting person that I am still worthy of love, that there is nothing wrong with me, and you are wrong. This is why the idea that the partner is a hopelessly sick person and nothing will work out with him simply because he is not capable of it, so easily resonates with narcissistic victims.
This is one way of resolving the psychic trauma: to decide that it has nothing to do with me and that it’s all about the other person who is incapable of love.
With a parent, this is most often true.
With an adult partner, not necessarily.
Thank the author: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/FragilePeople/
