Are we all narcissists? I don't think so

This post resulted from comments I made on YouTube videos about the subject, which somehow evolved into longer chains of thought that I felt might have some value on this blog. It's easy to come up with examples - hundreds of them - of how the narcissist in the family manipulated, damaged and vampirized both friends and enemies, ate their young, and attempted the kind of dominance usually only equalled by totalitarian political leaders.

My sister the narcissist (13 years older than me) did something so inexplicably awful that I still have trouble wrapping my brain around it. She wrote my mother's obituary, imposing her own agenda on it, for my mother was on her deathbed. 

I was not in my mother's obituary. I had been stricken off the record and, according to that document, had never been born at all. 

As cruel and indifferent as my mother could be, I do not think it was her idea. It was my sister's ultimate act of malignant jealousy and hatred of me, an attempt to literally "unmake" me. Of course I was devastated at first, but then I had this thought: no matter what my kids did, even if they were murderers, even if they murdered ME, in no way, shape or form would I ever even think of striking them from the record, because they are MINE, my beloveds, I birthed and raised them, so this malignant hatred was NOT transferred to me. 

It did not happen by itself, as you can imagine, but through years, and years, and years of therapy, falling into addiction, mental illness, suicide attempts, etc. - BUT, somehow, always coming out the other side. I showed the obituary to my adult daughter, who snorted and said, "That says everything about HER, and nothing about YOU." She also said, and I liked this, "Don't give it another thought." In other words, don't let this nasty lie rent any more space in your head! Garbage is garbage and should be thrown out. I couldn't have said it better myself. 

As a P. S.: a high school friend phoned me and said, "I am sorry to read about your mother, but why aren't you in her obituary? Was it some sort of oversight?" I said, "no, it was quite deliberate," and my friend was so horrified she couldn't speak for a while. And people squabble and complain when they are left out of the will! But that attempt to erase my very existence turned out to be pretty laughable, after all. I managed to have two wonderful kids who also turned out to be wonderful parents. That doesn't happen to someone who never existed, does it? I don't think so.

Narcissism has lately been exposed in the popular culture as never before, but suddenly it has become too prevalent and is being rendered meaningless. If everyone is a narcissist, then no one is a narcissist. It's like saying "we're all geniuses" and other absurd generalizations. Human beings are far more complicated than that. Nor is it inevitable for narcissism to beget narcissism down the generations. It CAN be stopped and rooted out, but only if it is recognized and no longer tolerated. 

I know a lot of wonderful, even selfless people, and I married one, even while being exposed to hateful narcissism in my childhood. We gravitate towards who we are ourselves, or perhaps (in my case) who we would like to be. I know people who grumble "there are no good marriages," but inevitably their own relationships are chaotic. People I know with stable marriages are puzzled by this and always say most of their close friends have good marriages.

But the problem now is how easy it is for a narcissist to exert influence over others on a mass scale. A narcissist can very quickly attain world prominence on social media and become an "influencer" (incubus/succubus) and thus wield enormous economic and even political power (Kanye West for President??) on a global level. And you do not even have to spend a cent to do it. Twitter is the great equalizer.

Meghan Markle is a chilling example - she is now called "the most talked-about woman on the planet", and I agree, there are mainstream news items about her every day now, in which she is usually shown in a totally benevolent, humanitarian light. She has cultivated "friends" who are so well-placed (Oprah, Gayle, Ellen, Elton, George and Amal, etc.) that she almost cannot fail. If she rises to political prominence as she seems to want to, God help us all, we will have another Trump on our hands.

When I watch true crime shows like Dateline, it shocks me how often the victims of horrendous violence will say "I forgave him". I do not like the current emphasis on what I call the "forgiveness agenda". Supposedly, you "MUST" forgive the people who have wronged you, even if they have murdered your children, or else you will be filled with anger and rage and bitterness for the rest of your life. 

People who say they have done this are treated like living saints, and it creates pressure on others because it becomes a "should". I disagree. To survive and ultimately thrive, you've got to get away from malignant narcissists, escape with your life, and concentrate on reclaiming yourself. My therapist said about forgiveness: "Don't make an issue out of it" - in other words, you do not HAVE TO do anything! No other person has the right to dictate how you heal yourself, because it is an absolutely sacred process known only to yourself and whatever the healing agents are in your life.

What actually happened over many years and even decades of struggle is that I went from total disgust and contempt for my abusers to a kind of measured pity. I DO feel sorry for these people, because they are truly pathetic human beings. I cannot imagine anything worse than being that sort of person, even if they are not the ones who suffer most. Nor are there any of those kinds of people in my current circle, nor will there ever be. 

But this hard-won pity is NOT the same as coerced forgiveness, which is NOT necessary to avoid a lifetime of bitter rage. Don't let anyone pressure you into something that feels wrong to you! The "forgiveness agenda" may well be yet another attempt to silence you, because people are profoundly uncomfortable with your pain and anger and don't want to hear about it. Their motives are entirely selfish. People have largely lost the ability to bear witness without judgement, which is what all wounded people/all people need. "You must forgive" can just be another way of saying "don't talk about that any more." It's cowardly, selfish and not what is called for. I am not impressed by it. But pressure to forgive is sanctified and bulwarked by basic Christian principles, which makes it even more potentially powerful and even deadly. 

In my own former so-called-liberal Christian church, we struggled and wrestled with the concept of forgiveness as a "must" in Christian faith. If you can't forgive, the myth went, then you are not a true Christian. You must at least "try", struggle and strain, and reproach yourself continually if you can't do it. It was very important not to feel "comfortable" in our faith. It was work, and I now see it as thankless work and a waste of energy and time. We were even told "God will only forgive you if you forgive everyone else," which is an abomination and the most coercive idea I have ever encountered. It's one of the more insidious forms of religious abuse, and I somehow tolerated it for fifteen years for the sake of "belonging".

If God does not play dice with the Universe, as Einstein claimed, then God doesn't force people into uncomfortable and unhealthy patterns through coercion or "guilt trips". The Christian God no longer makes sense to me, and I feel if there is any benevolence at all in the Universe, it must come from us and travel from heart to heart. God's grace, if you want to call it that, is lived out through those difficult acts of compassion which force us to stretch beyond our own little universe of closed thoughts and wrongheaded ideas.

We cannot wait around for Big Daddy to fix things, or even fix us. Jesus at least tried to get this across, but no one seems to have heard him. The hardest thing in the world is to bear witness to another's pain silently and non-judgementally. Don't say anything, for once! Don't even think anything. Don`t try to fix it. Just sit. It is what 12-step groups attempt to do, usually imperfectly, but they at least try. To bear witness often means to just not bolt out of the room, or make all sorts of frantic attempts to get the person to shut up and follow THEIR hidden agenda. How rare it is, and I believe it is the only key for human beings to truly help each other in a world full of anxiety, stress and daily predictions of doom.