There are days the sky moves just so. It is beautiful to watch the clouds glide past the horizon of my balcony window. Something is coming alive in me, little by little. It's a small seed. The cracking of the shell is hurting. I thought you only go through growing pains once in your life.
Thirty six years of grief are enough. How does it stop? The happiest I have been in my life is when I was as far away from my parents as possible. And when I was doing art as a regular practice, in community.
Never make the mistake of taking a narcissist on. You will be attacked for your very being and end up feeling small, incapable and impotent in your life. The narcissistic parent will take this opportunity to offer help using it as a way to infantize, manipulate and guilt you. You will end up enraged, confused and feeling crazy in your own reality.
I think Communism made my parents narcissistic. They grew up there until their 30s. It wasn't communism by itself, but the particular flavor that played out in Bulgaria. The humiliation, degradation and shaming, I think for most people, created a split personality to survive it. The humiliated and downtrodden diminished self and the aggrandizement of the self in an attempt to compensate for the degradation. We can see this in Hung Moo's biography. In modern psychology we call this split personality bipolar disorder and narcissism is a particular type. It doesn't mean you cannot function in the "real world". In fact most narcissist function extremely well because they attach their sense of self to achievement and power as a way to compensate for what they lack in self-esteem.
What does all this terminology do for you and for me, where does it leave us? Without parents....but also with validation.
No comments:
Post a Comment