Read Healing Your Emotional Self Online
Authors: Beverly Engel
Healing Your Emotional Self (25 page)
If you can’t find someone you trust to talk to, write down your feel- ings. Describe what you are feeling in detail, including your physical reactions. Trace these reactions back to other times and incidents when you felt similar feelings. If you find a connecting situation, write about it in detail. Then spend some time reminding yourself of your good qualities and accomplishments.
Countering Messages from Perfectionistic Parents
There is a reason I include ways to overcome the damage caused by per- fectionistic parents in this chapter on overcoming the damage caused by overly critical, shaming parents. It is that perfectionism can be extremely shaming. In addition, some people fight against shame by striving for perfection as a way to compensate for an underlying sense of defective- ness. The reasoning goes like this: “If I can become perfect, I am no longer vulnerable to being shamed.” Unfortunately, the quest for perfec- tion is doomed to fail, and the realization of this failure reawakens the already present sense of shame the person was trying to run from in the first place. Because he already feels that he is inherently not good enough as a person, nothing he does is ever seen as good enough.
If you expect perfection from yourself, you will be constantly dis- appointed in yourself and constantly damaging your self-esteem. If you expect perfection from others, you will end up being demanding and critical. If you do this with your children, you will be emotionally abusing them.
How to Deal with Your Internalized Inner Critic
If one or both of your parents was perfectionistic, you will tend to be perfectionistic as well. You’ll expect yourself to do things right the first time, and when you make a mistake you will not be forgiving of your- self. Instead, you’ll berate yourself with comments like “What’s wrong with you?” and “Stupid, you can’t do anything right.” You may expect perfection from others, but mostly you will expect it from yourself, and your self-chastisement can sometimes be brutal, causing you to become depressed or despondent when you make a mistake. While others seem to be able to move on after making a mistake, you tend to dwell on it, and this continually damages your self-esteem.
If this describes you, the first thing you need to do is identify your inner critic—that harsh, judgmental voice that insists on perfection. Begin to notice how often you berate yourself. Like my client Pamela, you may find it is constant: “I am so hard on myself! Whenever I make a mistake I hear a voice inside my head telling me what an idiot I am—how I can’t do anything right—that I am an incompetent fool. I just don’t ever let myself off the hook.”
Earlier in the book I presented several exercises and processes to help you begin to deal constructively with your internalized inner critic and to begin to form a more positive self-image. This also involves beginning to develop a nurturing inner mother to replace a critical, shaming one, and a safe, powerful internal father to replace one who was judgmental and rigid. Review those portions of the book and continue to provide yourself the nurturing and limits that will help you overcome your shaming experiences.
If You Had a Self-Absorbed or Narcissistic Parent
Healing the “I Don’t Matter” Mirror
W
HEN I WAS GROWING UP
I knew my mother hated me. I knew that she wanted to destroy me. I would sometimes catch her looking at me with disdain and malice in her eyes. I suffered from chronic bronchi- tis and would cough throughout the night and sometimes have fevers. One night my mother came to my bedside to put a cold washcloth on my head to bring down my temperature. In my fevered state I was certain that she was trying to strangle me; I screamed and pushed her away. You could say I was delusional because of my fever, and this was certainly possible. But I also believed my mother would have liked to strangle me.
Many narcissistic parents want to destroy their children. They do not want them to exist. In order to take care of a child, parents fre- quently must put their own needs aside. Narcissistic parents resent having to do this, because they tend to be selfish and self-absorbed— only their needs count. At the same time, narcissistic parents want their children to be at their beck and call and to take care of
their
needs. While many narcissistic parents resent having to take care of their chil- dren, they grow to expect that their children will take care of them.
As a child of a narcissist, your biggest challenge will be to free yourself from the grip of your parent’s stranglehold on you.Narcissistic parents do not want their children to have a separate self. They want
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Creating a Separate Self
In
Trapped in the Mirror
, Elan Golumb compares children of narcis- sists with bonsai plants: “We are like bonsai plants with prior years of confinements, suppression and reshaping. What is our natural shape? It takes years to uncover as we revert by degrees to growing.”
Because most children of narcissists do not really know who they are and because we are so disconnected from our true selves, it is dif- ficult to create a separate self. This is partly due to the judgments our parents placed on us that, in turn, colored our perceptions of our- selves. You most likely learned self-hatred without even knowing who your self really is. You absorbed your parents’ negative opinions about you and now believe them to be true. You may have taken on your par- ents’ values but do not really know what you yourself believe in.
Much of the information and exercises in chapter 6 will help you begin to discover who you are separate from your narcissistic parent. In this chapter I will offer you still more suggestions.
Separate Yourself from Your Parents and Your Parents’ Opinions of You
Narcissistic parents insist that they know their children better than anyone else. While parents do tend to know their children the best, this is not the case with narcissistic parents, because they project their own self-hatred onto their children and therefore have such distorted perceptions of them.
Unfortunately, children of narcissistic parents, like all children, tend to believe what their parents tell them about themselves. There- fore, one of your most difficult tasks will be to learn to carefully con- sider the information you received from your parents and to discard the things that are not true. If you remain confused, it will help to get feedback from your closest friends about how they perceive you.
Don’t Be Afraid to Look Inside
Children of narcissists are fearful of looking inside, of really getting to know their true selves, often because what they tend to find is a deep anger or rage toward their oppressive parent.
Karen knew that she had a narcissistic mother who despised her and verbally and physically attacked her almost daily. But Karen was afraid to explore the anger she felt toward her mother. She vividly remembered an incident when she experienced an overwhelming desire to murder her mother. She was only six years old, but her mother already had her working in the kitchen, cutting up vegetables. She wasn’t doing it to her mother’s satisfaction and so her mother was yelling at her, telling her what a stupid child she was, how she could never do anything right. “My hand starting shaking as I listened to her put me down one more time. I put my finger on the sharp tip of the knife and then I imagined taking the knife and stabbing my mother in the heart. The more I thought about it, the more my hand shook. But my legs felt like cement. I couldn’t move off the place where I was standing. Thank God, because if I had been able to move I think I would have stabbed her.”
It took a lot of encouraging from me for Karen to begin to own and express the rage she still felt toward her mother. She was afraid her rage would burst out of her and cause her to lose control. “I never want to feel that kind of murderous rage again,” she would tell me. Eventually, through journaling and anger letters Karen was able to put her feelings down on paper. “I do have a lot of rage and it is murder- ous,” she shared with me, “but now I know my rage is justified and I know how to contain it.”
Others are afraid their narcissistic parent will sense their anger and that this might cause a further attack. Stills others disown their anger, because being angry makes them too much like the parent they abhor. This is what my client William told me when I suggested he needed to express his pent-up anger toward his father. “I refuse to be like my father. He was angry all the time and he was constantly hurting people with his comments. That’s why I decided I’d just bury my anger and never dig it up.”
The truth is, you cannot have been raised by a narcissistic parent without experiencing tremendous rage toward him or her. You must
accept that anger is a part of life and part of yourself. Refer back to chapter 5 for suggestions on how you can express your anger in safe and healthy ways and find a way that works for you. It can help to ask your body how it would like to release the anger (hitting, throwing, smashing, tearing). You intuitively know just what you need to do. If you have had a history of losing control of your anger, chose an anger- release technique that does not involve physical activity, such as jour- naling or anger letters.
Mourn the Loss of a Healthy Childhood
In order to free yourself from your narcissistic parent, you must mourn the possibility that you will ever have a happy childhood with loving, accepting parents. Mourn the loss of the fantasy that your par- ent will love you today in the ways that you need. Continuing to fan- tasize about your narcissistic parent one day changing and treating you the way you’ve always hoped for will keep you stuck in the past and unable to create a separate life from him or her.
Separate Yourself from Your Parents’ Values, False Beliefs, and Negative Habits
It is also important for you to stop being invisible to your parents out of your need to please or appease them. Dare to have your own ideas and goals. Your parents won’t like this and may increase their attempts to squash you, but remind yourself that you are an adult and that they do not have power over you today.
Narcissistic parents cannot allow their children to be independent beings. After all, what if they do something of which they disapprove? What if it is something they cannot do themselves? Out of their need to bind their children to them, narcissistic parents will convince their children that they cannot make it without their parent, that they are incompetent or inadequate, or that no one will ever want them. Don’t continue to believe these things about yourself. Dare to experiment with new people and new ways of thinking. Refer back to chapter 4 for more information on how to do this.
Allow Yourself to Experience Life
Sometimes experience is necessary in order to find out what we are lacking. Experience confronts what we are taught to believe. For example, travel teaches us how people can live in non-narcissistic ways. And being physically far away from your parents can make you feel that you are beyond your parents’ reach, so far that you can try out different ways of being.
I am at my best when I travel. I feel excited and open and inde- pendent. My personality takes on a subtle but profound change. I’m more friendly than I am at home. I am more open to meeting and talk- ing to strangers. I feel more energy and I take greater risks.
Children of narcissistic parents benefit from stepping into the unknown of any type, be it people, reading, experimenting, or playing musical instruments. My experience with learning how to swim is an excellent example of how stepping out can help us to individuate. I realized that the reason swimming was so powerful for me (and caused my inner saboteur to rear his ugly head) was that it was com- pletely separate from any association with my mother. I never swam with her. It was my own territory, and learning how to swim was noth- ing my mother would have ever done. Swimming was all mine. It was not polluted by her criticism, expectations, or fears. In the warm, sen- suous water I am on my own, unencumbered by my mother’s inces- sant voice. I am connected to my body in a sensuous way, something that was forbidden by my mother. I am free, I am me, and I am in my body. What a wonderful experience!
Explore Your Creativity
The same joy can be true of creating, whether it is music, art, or writ- ing. If you are not connected to your creativity, you can become increasingly dependent on your narcissistic parents to give you what needs to come from within. Creativity is an incredibly effective way of “stepping out and away” from your parents and becoming a separate self. The act of creating is itself an act of individuation.
As Elan Golumb so eloquently stated, “Creativity takes the destructive threads of life and puts them together with something from within that changes it all into what can sustain a faltering self. Our creative mind bypasses hackneyed limited thought and shows us who we really are. . . . To one who thinks herself worthless, seeing her creativity is a shock. Where did this outpouring come from? Is there a worthwhile self?”
Work on discovering what interests you, what creates passion within you. Take back your self. Because it was no doubt difficult for you to take on any project without parental invasion, you may have rejected interests, hobbies, and even talents in an effort to separate from your parents. Now it is time to take back these interests and hobbies.
Join a Group
Whether it is group therapy, a 12-step group, or a spirituality circle, in order to develop a healthier self you need places where you can dis- cover who you really are and are encouraged to express how you really feel. You need feedback from others that supports your developing sense of self. This will include feedback that will correct your dis- torted, unacceptable self-image. Most important, because adult chil- dren of narcissists tend to be self-destructive, isolated, and disconnected from life and from others, you need connection with others. And you desperately need the experience of being recognized and accepted by others.
