Transcription
I want to talk about the parallels in experience between leaving or extracting oneself from a narcissistic space, relational space, and extracting oneself from a cult, and how we find connections in those two. Yeah, that's a good question.
And in order to address it, I want to talk for a minute about what a narcissistic psychological structure is. People have a naive idea that narcissism is just about being grandiose and boastful, but narcissism is really a narrative that is spun, that is self-serving. It helps the person answer some of life's great questions: What is the meaning of my life? What is the purpose? How do I direct my energy? Life is a challenge. That's first. You have to put effort into meeting it, and there are some shortcuts or easy ways out. One of the easy ways out is a narcissistic structure. Somebody who has all the answers. It could be a patriarchal family. It could be a cult where they say, "Trust me, this is the way life is. This is the path toward having a meaningful life. This is the path toward goodness." And on the individual level, what we see in our patients, the narcissistic structure is, "I am X, Y, and Z," which are all good, but it doesn't quite correspond to the facts, which are not so simple and straightforward. But anyway, narcissism at these levels, cult, family, individual structures, the person, it gives them something to hold on to. It answers questions they don't know how to answer.
So when a person leaves that family, leaves the cult, or in the course of therapy begins to take a distance from their internal narrative, there's a really difficult phase of distress that can be extreme and sometimes even lead to thoughts of suicide. Why is that? When you have been subscribing to a system that tells you what is, you're kind of relaxed. When you take a distance from that, all of a sudden, you're much more on your own. How do I deal with this situation? How do I deal with that impulse within myself? How do I deal with that emotion that the cult leader told me to direct toward this awful other group I'm supposed to hate? So we have to empathize with the difficulty moving into a more individual frame of mind.
"Okay, I understand what you believe now doesn't do it for you anymore, and you don't know what the next set of beliefs is. You don't know what's right, what's wrong. In many instances, you haven't figured things out." I understand that's as disturbing as can be. But if we work together, I can offer you a pretty good assurance that by figuring things out on your own, rather than taking a pre-fabricated set of answers from some external source, you'll be able to put together a self that is more satisfying and adapts better and integrates better into the world around you. But it takes time.
This friend mentioned to me that he had grown up being told by one of his parents, "Waiting on lines is for suckers." And so he believed this, right? And thus, everybody waiting on that line that he would pass are suckers. He's a little better than because he ain't doing that. And that he also really missed out on things because of that belief. You know, he just wouldn't go to things because there were lines, and that was for suckers.
I'm curious about a specific example of the dismantling of a belief system that was passed down to you and you held because it just was true until it wasn't. Yeah, I'm thinking about somebody from a narcissistic family, a patient. Let's see if this gets to what you're asking about. She was pretty successful in her work, but not close to anybody in life. Why? Because what was imbued in her was the idea, she grew up in a family where they were the arbiters of right and wrong, and in order to have any self-respect, you couldn't acknowledge any problems. So in the course of therapy, she began to get pretty condescending about me. It turned out that I wasn't up to her standards, and I can accept that. The key here was in exploring a kind of subtle devaluing and denigration of me. She began to realize that her MO in relating to others was to sometimes consciously, but if not consciously, always unconsciously, look down on them and have a superior air about her, which is why she couldn't get close to people. Because that's kind of offensive when you're trying to get involved in a friendship or an intimate relationship.
When she began to see that her devaluing of others wasn't fully justified by an inbred and innate moral superiority that she had, she got really distressed and said, "Well, how do I deal with people then?" And what she learned is that you can relate to others without having to be perfect. She said something like, "My effort to be perfect with others just kept me at a distance from others. I was trying to do all the right things. I was always just focusing on doing the right thing, and by doing the right thing or having to do the right thing all the time, I was not doing what's human." And I learned, she said, that to be human includes all of this uncertainty. That's distressing initially, but as I began to manifest uncertainty and fallibility with others, they didn't do what I expected. I thought they'd reject me, devalue me, disparage me. That's when I began to see you can empathize with somebody. You don't get close around being perfect, you get close around being human, which includes being flawed.
And just one other question. In that sort of interim period where someone is reaching to try to sort of uncover, I almost would say, like who they are because it's they are trying to uncover who they are because they've been living a fiction. Yes, they've been living that "I am right all the time. I know what's right. I know better than anybody else." That's not really who the person is. That's what they're saying to themselves, but they're saying that because that's what they were told by this sort of other person.
Yeah, I mean, I wouldn't attribute it all to the parental figures. I mean, it's a ques, it's a, it's an interaction, let's just put it that way. So what happens, um, in that interim period, sort of therapeutically, how do they begin to access, you know, their true thoughts? Yeah, when I say it's not just that they've been inculcated with this, usually it has to do with insecurity of attachment. The family communicates, you know, "If we're going to care about you, you have to be perfect all the time. You can never be flawed. You can never make a mistake." So what we end up with in a person like that is the inability to trust another. You can't feel like the other will accept you as you are, and thus you have to live out the ideal fiction.
Let me go back to the initial moments of trying to help this person see that she was devaluing and denigrating of me. She didn't buy that at all. I mean, I didn't say, "Hey, by the way, do you see how devaluing and denigrating of me you are?" We try to look at the nonverbal communication, the way feelings get communicated almost subliminally. So I would say, "You know, it's kind of interesting that often when I say something, you kind of roll your eyes or wrinkle your nose, like it's kind of really stupid what I've said or something like that. Just wondering about that." She said, "I don't do that. You're the one here who's actually devaluing. You might not realize it, but you can be quite devaluing of what I say." We accept that. That's what we call working in the projection. All right. I don't think that's true, although I have to examine and see if that's partly true. But I say, "Okay, she can't see that in herself. She sees it in me. Let's get to know it." And then I kind of modeled for her the ability to see oneself as flawed without breaking down and deciding one's a total disaster and failure. That then eventually can be carried back to the patient, who can begin to see, "Oh, well, maybe I'm not so perfect. But if I'm not, what am I?" And that's when you have to be your most supportive as a therapist and say, "This is a new world for you. It's like unknown territory. When you had this system of 'you're the moral compass of the world and everybody else is flawed,' you knew the score. Now you're trying to read signals. Now you're trying to figure out which end is up. Let me be with you during all that confusion. Bring the confusion here." And that's when we try to invoke trust in the process and say, "I know how uneasy this is making you feel, how distressing this is, but this is a part of our work. If we didn't go through this no-man's-land of distress, we could never get to a fuller, more full-bodied and rich sense of who you are and how you relate to others."
I mean, it sounds like what you're describing is something on some level. Do people, does everyone have to go through that? I'm just curious. I don't know. I really don't have an answer. I'm just wondering. I think everyone would benefit from going through that, but I don't think everyone does. The world would be a better place if people evolved in larger numbers to realizing there isn't anyone in the world who's perfect. We have to accept everybody as a mixed bag.
I don't know if this example would fit, but let's take the priest scandal in the Catholic Church. You know, a lot of Catholics were brought up, "The priest, you trust fully. You can always go to the priest and so on and so forth." And finding a large number of very immoral priests who were abusive in a very hard-to-forgive way. There were different reactions in the Catholic community. Some would say, "Well, these are just terrible bad eggs, and they don't have anything to do with the church, and I still have 100% faith in the church." Other people would say, "Oh, this is proof that this church is totally corrupt. I'm going to leave the church." I think either one of those is extreme. I think a better example would be maybe we should see that as an earthly institution. The Catholic Church is flawed. They really need to do a lot better policing themselves. But I'm not going to either deny what's wrong in the church and just pretend it's perfect, or I'm not going to throw the whole thing out and pretend it's all bad. So that's an example of what I would call more mature thinking versus more primitive thinking. And I would agree with you that everybody has to go through a phase where they realize that. I say everybody has to. People don't have to. I think the world would benefit if everyone went through a phase where they came to question what they idealized and moved beyond the idealization. It's not our borderline patients who have a monopoly on black and white thinking, and black and white thinking always leads to conflict.