Does Codependency Therapy Help or Hurt?

It seems to me that the adult children of narcissists who learn of NPD and then go through the natural process of dealing with this stunning revelation fare better than those who get involved in codependency therapy.

You are at first enormously relieved, because your instincts were right and the brainwashing was wrong: it wasn't your fault, and you weren't the defective one. But then come the memories and the pain and all the emotions they generate. You go through them. You gain much understanding.

Result? SELF-ESTEEM!

Yes, you do learn who loves ya and that you must look out for yourself first in life. But you just lost your naivete, that's all. You (correctly) view your abuse as the narcissist exploiting your love and goodwill, which are virtues - not as him or her exploiting what the preachers of codependency regard as a FLAW in you - your vulnerability. (Which is exactly the view the narcissist takes. Hmm.)

If that parent is still alive and plaguing your life, you stop enabling by making changes to distance yourself as much as possible.

Then, six months, a year, or two later, you're beyond it. Because those emotions are spent, and you have put that parent too far away from you to hurt you anymore.

The people who handle it naturally like this have no problem talking about it, either. They will give you frank, straight answers about that parent.

But just listen and compare their voices to the adult children of narcissists in support groups that preach codependency therapy. The latter still seem enslaved to the idea that there is something wrong with them, that they need much improvement and have been struggling at it, some for many years.

They go against nature on everything, as though what a person is naturally inclined to do is always dangerous or something.

So, for example, instead of feeling their feelings, they repress them. Because in that religion, being made to feel bad or angry is a sin: you're supposed to have one emotion = happy, happy, happy. No matter what is done to you - happy, like good people are. (Which is again the view the narcissist takes.)

Years later they are still fighting to conquer those repressed feelings, which they consider a character flaw in themselves. Any little thing that happens calls those painful feelings to consciousness, so that they must be stifled and repressed again.

Again, for example, instead of contemplating their memories in the light of what they now know, and having a good cry, they eschew thinking or talking about it. They think it's a sin to think or talk about what happened to them, so they repress memory too, because just talking about the childhood abuse or that parent is "failing to take responsibility" for your life in that religion.

You must take responsibility for the hurt done to you. Narcissistic abuse hurt you only because you are weak and let it hurt you. You must pump up your self-esteem (which is telling the victim to do exactly what a narcissist does) and just "blow off" abuse and all other unhappy things so that you stop being guilty of ever feeling any negative emotion about anything.

In other words, you must act like it didn't happen. Which is exactly what the narcissist tries to make you do.

Consequently, the adult children of narcissists under codepency therapy act like war veterans who come home and never talk about the harrowing experience. But, unlike war veterans, they won't even talk about it with other war veterans.

And these people constantly have to puff up their self-esteem because every little thing still deflates it. Which is no wonder, because they believe they are flawed for having their feelings.

How is this "casting off victimhood"? It looks to me more like re-vicimization. Is this codependecy therapy not picking up right where the narcissistic parent left off?

Add it up. It sounds like therapists took this therapy for the VICTIM right from mouths of the NARCISSISTS on their couch! For, this is exactly the line the narcissist hands a therapist about his or her victims...to blame them.

And notice the wholly negative nature of this "positive" therapy: Rule 1: Don't feel what you feel. Rule 2: Don't remember your past. Bossy, bossy, bossy.

Where is the proof that this therapy is effective? Nowhere. Why? If it really works, why don't the practitioners show us the proof? They offer nothing but the kind of unreliable testimonials you can find posted on a website that sells tablecloths or some other merchandise.

Since codependency therapy is so involved with 12-step programs, here is a well-kept secret about 12-step programs: A scientific review of comparative studies of various 12-step programs show that they are no more effective than any other kind of treatment for alcoholism.

But here's the kicker: no studies have been done to establish whether most of these other treatments are effective at all. That's indefensible. Why are there no such studies? Are the AA and APA afraid of what the results would be?

The existing SCIENTIFIC research allows us to say nothing more than Dr. Edward V. Nunes, a professor of clinical psychiatry at Columbia notes - that certain elements of A.A. are known to be effective:

Some of the wisdom embodied in A.A., such as the notion of persons, places and things that trigger drinking, are very much a part of cognitive-behavioral therapy, which is a scientifically driven, empirically validated treatment.

Therefore, the other treatment methods and the rest of the 12-step program may be ineffective for all we know. We do know that at least 1 in 5 alcoholics achieves long-term sobriety on their own, with no treatment at all. Do any of these treatments beat that benchmark?

The NYT tries to downplay the facts by suggesting credibility in the whining that this reveiw refused to accept the pseudoscience usually put forth as "proof" of the 12-step program's validity. In other words, they whine that no junk science "data" was allowed in this scientific review. Specifically, they complained that this scientific reveiew cited only randomized, carefully controlled studies = real science.

Get it? Very funny. Can't the NYT tell a joke when they quote it?

The people who let that stinker have NO CREDIBILITY whatsoever, and the NYT shouldn't lend them the semblance of any. You do nothing but misinform by "balancing" the known truth with a known lie. The NYT is irresponsible for even quoting that crap. The defenders of the 12-step program should have been warned that if they couldn't come up with something credible and legitimate to say, they wouldn't be quoted at all.

Otherwise, from now on the NYT must quote a flat-earther every time to "balance" any source quoted as implying that the earth is a sphere.

And I'm not being facetious. I'd be surprised if there were no legitimate criticism one could make of this scientific review. So, its opponents don't have to try to legitimize the illegitimate...unless that's exactly what their goal is.

They're just trying to discredit real science and pass off their pseudoscience as superior - with nothing but fast-talk to people who don't know enough about science to see how absurd they're being.

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"Responsibility" Wrap: Narcissist Hurts You to Make YOU Guilty of the Sin of Feeling the Pain

Remember when you were a child and you used to say that "Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me"?

Even little children instinctively know enough to hide their pain when someone has hurt their feelings. This instinct is good, even when the enemy isn't really an enemy - just a friendly opponent in a tennis match. Don't let the emotional effect on you of bad things show. It encourages the adversary.

But keeping them to yourself doesn't get rid of those feelings, does it?

Children, however, live in very different minds than normal adults do. Like Alice and Peter Pan, they don't distinguish between fantasy and realty, preferring fantasy, where they learn the (delusory) power of magical thinking. In some cases this pretending goes so far as to imagine into existence an imaginary friend, expecting Mom to set a place for her at the dinner table.

So, children have no problem getting rid of unwanted feelings. They just pretend them away. They just pretend their feelings aren't hurt.

They aren't really altering those feelings though. They're just repressing awareness of them to the subconscious and pretending to have other, good, feelings instead.

You can tell, because their behavior is such as proceeds from bad feelings, the repressed ones, not the feelings they pretend to have. In other words, those repressed feelings are still there and having their normal motivational effect on the thinking that controls conduct.

Unfortunately, however, the child is unaware of those buried feelings and therefore unaware of why she's doing what she's doing.

When feelings are repressed, it takes a good deal of of introspection to get in touch with those feelings again, so that you know why you're doing whatever you're doing.

I'll never forget this little exchange between Sister Mary Peter and a budding sixth-grade narcissist who had done something vicious that was totally inexplicable and whose mother was there and totally snookered by the conning brat. Seeing that the mother was willfully obtuse, Sister Peter got blunt...

Sister Mary Peter: Why did you do it?

Narc: I don't know.

Sister Mary Peter: Do you know what we do with people who don't know why they do things?

Yes, people who don't know why they do things are seriously mentally ill. And when you bury your natural feelings, that is what you are doing to yourself. You will soon NOT know why you are doing things.

But narcissists aren't the only people who refuse to grow up and quit clinging to the cherished myth that they can make unhappy feelings go away and make them into happy ones instead. Many people cling to this belief that "Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me" because I am strong and I have high self-esteem, when really all I have is a habit of lying to myself.

One thing I remember about the Bible is how virtually anything can be "uncircumcised." Like your heart. Your eyes. Your ears.

In fact, according to the Bible, things that are circumcised can suddenly get uncircumcised. Kinda calloused-over with some crusty shield.

So, I had a hard time figuring out exactly what this figure of speech means. But, like a dog with a bone, I kept at it till I got it.

Nothing uncircumcises a head faster than stating the simple, self-evident truth that we cannot control our feelings, that feelings are not conduct and therefore cannot be right or wrong.

Just state that plain truth to many people and you can almost see it happening: that person's forehead suddenly gets thick as a brick. Reason bounces off it like missiles bounce off an Abrams tank


Uncircumcised Head
They act like they didn't even hear what you said. They just come back with, "But" and a reply that assumes you can control your feelings and that certain ones are sins.

How's that for being blockheaded? They can't even give you an answer - just nothing but this complete dodge all the time.

Which is absurd. Feelings are sensations, emotional sensations. You cannot alter sensations (except with hallucinatory drugs and hypnosis). If you get burnt, you should feel burned. If you don't, something is wrong with you. If the narcissist punches you in the face, he is responsible for your pain, not you. If he forces you to your knees and shoves your face into garbage he threw all over the floor, he is the one responsible for your anger, not you.

To think otherwise is incredibly stupid. The cause of a sensation is the stimulus that produces it, not the mind of the person who experiences it.

The worst thing about repressing unwanted feelings is that burying them locks them inside. They never go away then! Just as normal physical pain motivates action and then passes, normal feelings motivate action and then pass whether action has been taken or not.

But denied pain paralyzes and then just festers in the subconscious, motivating negative behavior (usually passive-aggressive behavior) like an unseen puppet master. And not just against the abuser - but rather against any available target, people who had nothing to do with the person who abused you. Hence we see many people subconsciously getting even with a parent by mistreating their spouse decades later.

That's crazy.

So, the very premise that codependency therapy rests on is invalid. Manifestly invalid. Of course people swear by it, though. But that doesn't mean that codependence "therapy" works. It just means that they think they have made their bad feelings go away. But they have merely brainwashed themselves and were conned into doing so. Sooner or later the price for doing that will have to be paid.

The pain of narcissistic abuse is sheer torture. I have no doubt that it drives many mentally healthy people all the way to suicide. And often without the narcissist even laying a hand on the victim. It's THAT bad when you're bludgeoned with it day after day after day.

But in my own experience, I found relief when I stopped trying to fight those feelings off. When I asked myself why I was angry, sad, outraged about this or that. When I accepted my feelings as having a valid cause and owning them. I could see that my feelings were a natural human reaction to what had been done to me. I no longer felt like a pressure cooker about to explode. I could bear it. And it got better - just a little better - every single day.

Feelings are nothing to fear. Felt feelings motivate behavior, but they don't rule it. And felt feelings never killed anyone.

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Nonsense Check on Codependence

The preachers of codependence say that you are to blame for how the narcissist's abuse makes you feel. They say that no one can make you feel anything. That if you feel bad about abuse, it's your fault. Specifically, you lack self-esteem. Shame on you. That makes you a victim. And it's bad to be a victim.

If that isn't blaming the victim, I don't know what is.

I ran across this example on the web: It starts off in the title saying that no one can make you feel anything, though the writer admits it's hard to achieve this mental armor.

Lets say someone comes up to you and says you are a liar. Inside you know you always tell the truth, you are confident in that and don't feel threatened by the accusations of this other person because you know youself, you know how you treat people and you don't care what others believe about you, you let your actions speak for you. The idea is if your self esteem is HIGH enough, and you are not dependant on the opinions of others, then you would be able to blow this off and feel secure in the knowledge that you are not a liar. The power then, that this other person seems to have over you is lost because you know the truth and you have faith in yourself/ your higher power.

It's hard to know where to begin disentangling this mess.

Presumably, the third sentence contradicts the second because the writer got the cart ahead of the horse and meant to say that 'only if your self-esteem is high will you be able to know that you are not a liar, etc.' Which is absurd. Your self-esteem can be in the pits, and you'll still know that you're not a liar.

This literary spaghetti confuses mere insecurity with being brain-dead, so brain-dead that if someone tells you that you are 3 feet tall, you believe them.

And what follows doesn't follow: "You know you always tell the truth, so you are confident and don't feel threatened by the accusation, and you don't care what others believe about you." There are two – count 'em, two – absurdities in that sentence.

First, being honest makes you feel unthreatened by the accusation that you are a liar? That's absurd. Being honest does not make you immune to damage by being called a liar. If you are a liar, THEN you suffer no real damage by being called a liar, because then you are just getting the reputation you deserve. That's justice. No foul. But when you're honest, that false accusation can make your whole past life go up in smoke. That's damage. The threat is real, and if you don't feel it, you are off ga-ga land.

Second, because you know you're honest, you don't care what others believe about you? That's a non sequitur. And anyone who says they don't care what others think about them is either deluded or lying.

Now for the self-esteem thing. First, self-esteem itself is but a feeling. It's your emotional response to how you treat yourself. People who force you to knuckle under to abuse beat it down, because they have made you stoop.

So, this guy is saying that if you pump up one feeling enough (your self-esteem) you won't ever be made to feel other (bad) feelings? That's another non sequitur.

That's two gigantic leaps of illogic.

Your self-esteem, among other things, will figure into your emotional response to this false accusation or any other kind of abuse. But the main factors will be whether the accusation is true and who the accuser is.

For example, have you ever incurred the wrath of a tempestuous little child? She stamps her foot at what you're saying and yells, "You're a liar!" You are not going to be bothered by that, are you? In fact, you'll be amused and have to try to hide your amusement so as not to rub it in. Why? Because you don't feel threatened by the accusation of a child.

But if your boss calls you a liar, that's a whole different thing. You are threatened by that, just by virtue of who he or she is. And you can't make his power over you go away by just pumping up your self-esteem.

So, the circumstances and the accuser have much more to do with your feelings than your self-esteem does. If you need fear that this accusation is going to be spread all over town, you are off in ga-ga land if it doesn't evoke a very strong negative emotion in you.

And any sensible, thinking person knows all this, so where is this half-baked doctrine coming from?

What's more, if it is a FALSE accusation, you will be all the more angry. Correction, you will be outraged, because your sense of shame and your sense of justice are being outraged. Yes, your sense of shame, because (contrary to this sloppy thinking) shame isn't guilt: shame is something others put on you. It wounds the innocent far more deeply than the guilty. Indeed, the most damaged are the most innocent.

Note that this preacher of codependcy even says that you don't counter the false accusation. You just let your actions do the talking. In other words, you act like the offense didn't happen.

If that isn't aspiring to victimhood, I don't know what is.

I'm a firm believer in the victim rising from the dust as soon as possible and thundering with both fists in the air.

What's so horrible about admitting that other people's treatment of you can make you experience negative feelings as well as positive ones? Is that too scary, or what? Isn't it narcissistic to be in denial of that fact? Why do people need to feel in control of their feelings? And notice how it all comes down to power in the end. Why do people feel the need to be more powerful than their abuser? That too is exactly how the scared-of-his-own-shadow narcissist thinks.

He NEEDS to control others because he is terrified of a world in which he isn't more powerful. He NEEDS to feel in control of his feelings because he is a big baby who can't take them. He too regards feelings as weakness, so he represses them. Deludes himself about them. He too pumps up his self-esteem. Or, he thinks he does. He just pretends he has high self-esteem and represses awareness of his low self-esteem.

I don't think the cure for narcissistic abuse is to become like the narcissist who abused you.

Some feelings are pleasant, and some are unpleasant. Some, like anger and sorrow are emotional pain. Of course we don't like feeling them. At least if we are normal we don't. But does that mean they are intolerable? That they should be feared?

I know that fear is the first thing to go when you "descend into Hell and rise again."

Owned and acknowledged, feelings are not harmful, just painful. And they pass if you don't keep them buried in your subsconscious. In fact, those unpleasant emotions are good for you in a way. They MOTIVATE you to do something about the theft or abuse. Without those feelings we'd all be pathetic wimps.

Numb ones betraying ourselves by going around and acting as though it didn't happen.

For how far codependence theory has run amok, see:
Codependence and Is It Wrong to Be a Victim?

UPDATE: Note that those who "believe in codependency" always talk as though a person's feelings automate his or her conduct. But this obviously isn't true. At a very early age, we learn to stop being impulsive. That's a character trait of childhood that normal people leave behind. We learn to keep the rational mind in control of our behavior, even when angry. So, what is wrong with these people? Have they failed to learn this? Are they still so childish that their own behavior is driven by their emotions? Listen to them. They talk as though they have no idea that a human being has any self-control. They equate feeling angry with losing your temper and acting out to do something bad.

Their unnatural solution is to numb their natural feelings instead of to just grow up and practice self-control of their words and deeds.

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"Understanding" the Evildoer

Anna Valerious at Narcissists Suck in Angry with a Narcissist? Read On..."

You don't have read much of Sam Vaknin's fanciful ideas of what creates a narcissist to see how he relieves himself of responsibility for what he is by his explanations. Mother, society, genetics, abuse, neglect. Never is Sam Vaknin ultimately to blame for choosing to be a parasitic life form. Because he feels he can explain how he, the narcissist, came to be...he doesn't have to believe he is evil. To explain the etiology of evil will, inevitably, explain it away. Who exactly is helped by explaining away evil? Do we actually make evil go away by saying it doesn't exist? Do we change evil doers by not calling them evil? No, we only succeed in making it easier for evil doers to continue their life of crime.

Yes, the narcissist wants us to "understand" him. And those who take off on excursions into "understanding" evil (e.g., even with blatantly psychotic acts of mass murdering people for being the wrong kind, through Islamist jihad) inevitably end up excusing it, sympathising with it, and blaming the victim. Valerious says this is the underlying (and inappropriate) purpose of trying to "understand" this mystery of how people become evil. The next thing you know, they find the evildoing "understandable." (Just words, words, words. What's the difference if you mix them up a little?) That lessens it. Makes it less spooky.

The psychology establishment is a prime example of how explanations for evil have been used to do away with the entire concept that evil even exists. Pretending they have the ability to find a root cause for the problems of people's souls, they have been willing to rationalize even the most base behaviors of humanity into simple, even justifiable, reactions to their circumstances. They must paste the corruption somewhere -- so they lay it on society at large in order to give a pass to the individual in the mis-guided belief that the individual's sense of shame somehow explains why he acts out. This helps no one but the evil doer. Society then has to suffer the predation of evil individuals even while bearing the blame for the evil deeds perpetrated upon it. Society is you and me. Are you really willing to bear this kind of responsibility for the acts of another over which you have no power to stop or persuade from his evil course? I'm not.

Nor I. This crap that society is the evil one is more of the typical banality of sounding smart. They just completely reverse the obvious truth to end up with the the attacker (the narcissist) as the "victim" and his prey (us) as to blame for whatever he does to us.

Master that trick and you can pass yourself off as an intellectual at any cocktail party in San Francisco or Manhattan.

Don't fall for what passes for "truth" by the prescribers of false righteousness. They want peace at all costs. They are willing to overlook the crimes of abusers in order to keep things looking good on the surface. They want you to screw yourself by pretending someone didn't injure you, steal from you, slander you, etc. They demand you submit to bad treatment so they don't have to deal with anything as messy as your hurt or angry feelings at having been crapped on and screwed yet again. See what I'm saying? These people who condemn your negative feelings are demanding you put up with being raped. They are demanding your silence. In fact, in a real sense, they are piling on with the narcissist. They don't want to be inconvenienced by your justifiable reactions to evil deeds done to you or yours. Do not give moral weight to the opinions of someone who is only studying their own convenience and therefore willing to subvert justice in the name of a false peace or truce with evil.

Give up your quest to find peace at the cost of honesty. Be honest with yourself about what you feel. Attempts to lessen the guilt of the guilty is an illegitimate way to cope with your negative reactions to them. Accept the truth that a decent person should be angry and outraged at perverted and evil behaviors.

Read the rest.

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Healing and Forgiveness

I have a question for anyone out there who can answer it. I would like to know why therapists - yes, therapists, not just preachers - think that a victimized person must forgive in order to heal.

To keep things from getting all fogged up, we must be clear on what we mean by forgiveness.

The word has a definite meaning: it is forgiving a portion of the debt incurred by the offender as your ante in a mutual act of reconciliation.

But the word is suffering a terrible bout of bastardization these days, having the guts torn out of it by being used as vague codeword for somehow managing to "stop hungering and thirsting for justice," for somehow "erasing your anger."

Woops, I forgot. Justice sounds too good in this context, I must call it revenge instead.

But, anyway, please be sure to identify which kind of forgiveness you mean if you explain why therapists instruct their patients to forgive.

A couple related questions, just to make sure we all heal good.

Let's say that a malignant narcissist tells me today that she is going to ruin my life tomorrow. Must I forgive her today? Or may I at least wait until tomorrow?

Now, hopefully, we can presume that the therapist would cut me a little slack and say that it would be understandable if I wait awhile, simply because it would be very hard to forgive the offense in advance. But I would sure like to know what the preacher's answer is.

Because you know what I'm going to ask next then, right? If I am morally obligated to forgive, I'm as morally obligated to forgive today as tomorrow.

Which could be problematic.

Like what about a crime in progress? I'm morally obligated to forgive it, right?

What does that mean? Like, I am under assault by someone committing assault-and-battery against me, and I must sign off on the debt he will owe me when he finishes damaging me? I must "give away my anger"? I must therefore put down that baseball bat and stop defending myself, right?

Well, let's say the malignant narcissist has already ruined my life. She destroyed a $50,000 professional career (the cost of a college education), calumniating me so badly that I can't get a job anywhere but at the checkout in a convenience store.

She did it 10 years ago. Which means that the malignant narcissist has by now racked up a debt of $500,000 ($50,000 a year). Plus interest. Plus punitive damages.

But I'm a bad person who fails to "heal" if I haven't forgiven her by now, right?

But let's say I do forgive her now. Am I not forgiving a crime in progress? The ruining of my life? Yes, the crime is in progress until she restores my good name, and she never will. So, am I not forgiving the $50,000 she will be stealing from me next year, and the next, and the next, until I die?

Am I not then forgiving her in advance? And I'm a bad person if I don't do so? We must forgive without restitution of stolen property?

I think I'm beginning to get it. This "forgiveness" business is just "letting her get away with it."

Now, it's one thing to be unable to do anything about it, and quite another thing to be required to do nothing about it.

I feel like Huck Finn. I say, "All right, I'll go to Hell." I am going to be a bad person and keep biding my time, hungering and thirsting for justice, reminding myself like Hamlet did that there is justice to be done, a wrong to set right, waiting for an opportunity to get my money and put her behind bars. It's bad enough to be unable to do so, but don't try to tell me that I have no right to want to do so.

And I just noticed that "healing" rhymes with "feeling," so it's easy to see why fogheads get the two confused. Healing is just not feeling that hunger and thirst and anger anymore, right?

Because the therapist says that my feelings are what's hurting me, my feelings are what make me feel bad - not the punches or the poverty.

Aye, laddies, THERE's the pathology! It's those pathological feelings of mine! I must numb them.

So, I get it now: forgiveness is like a drug, a pain-killer.

A mental one. It amounts to "acting like it didn't happen."

Yes, let's play Pretend.

All gone. I feel fine now.

That's all you have to do to make a $500,000 crime go away. Just make nothing of it.

Ruining my life was nothing.

But what if she has just taken a sledge-hammer to my car instead? Would the therapist and the preacher say doing that was nothing, too?

I don't think so. I think they'd say I should get an estimate of the damages for her to pay. Because a car is a thing of value. So, destroying it is not nothing.

You know what I am going to ask them now, don't you? I'm going to ask them why they are dehumanizing me, devaluing me all the way to absolute zero, by saying that destroying my car is destroying a thing of value but destroying me is nothing.

Though I must forgive her, she need not ask for my forgiveness. She need not give me back my good name or pay even a portion of the damages. She need not even say she's sorry. She need not even admit that it was wrong for her to do that. She need not even admit that she did it!

How come I am the only one who incurs a debt through her deed? I owe her forgiveness, and she owes me nothing.

Indeed, she need not even promise never to do it again.

Like that guy committing assault and battery against me. He does that about once a week. But I must forgive him 70 times 70 times without him ever even promising to stop doing it?

Well then, let's add this up. If it was nothing when she or he did it yesterday, it would be nothing if she or he does it tomorrow too. No penalty = no damages. Or, as we say in sports "No harm/no foul" = carte blanche = I am letting them do that to me.

YES I AM!

The reason I yelled that is because someone with total contempt for logic, who thinks you negate a truth by simply flatly denying it, is sure to say that I am not letting them do that, as if that is a valid argument in answer. Which is exactly as valid as thinking that you prove the sky is purple simply by saying that it is.

(Psst, if your genetic instincts for survival are so anesthetized that they haven't informed you yet, I have news: some folks are amoral, like precisely the folks who attack you for no reason, so hitting back is the only way to make them stop attacking you. Yes, I'm afraid 'tis so. Sorry, their amorality doesn't take away my right to protect myself from them: it gives me the right to whack them.)

By serially forgiving the serial offender I am letting them offend me, because I am doing nothing to put a stop to it. I am doing nothing to discourage them from doing it more or again. I am not protecting myself. I am not defending myself. This conduct flies in the face of the instinct for self-preservation and therefore violates the Laws of Nature as a perversion of human nature.

That's of all things "healing"? I'd say it sounds more like self-masochism.

Yeah for forgiveness! A great idea invented and loved by all the bad guys in Hell.

By forgiving every offense – for no reason other than that it was committed and hurts me - I am letting them hurt me! Pardon my incredulity at such craziness. That allows me no more rights than his punching bag has. I mean, to be a good girl, I must thus serve myself up on a platter (the literal meaning of be-tray) and deliver myself up to continued victimization = I must bend over it.

Yes, that will make me like myself a lot. I'm being sarcastic, of course. I see that I must thus make me hate myself instead of my abuser. Because I will for sure hate myself for being such an abject worm who just lays down like a doormat to be trampled like that.

And any HUMAN being, any therapist or preacher with one drop of empathy/humanity in them, knows that. How callous of these "caring" people to tell us we're bad if we don't prostrate ourselves to abuse this way - something that makes any man, woman, or child feel so self-degraded that they hate themselves ever after.

How faithful of me to me. But what happens to your relationship with anyone who betrays you to harm or abuse? Then what happens to your relationship with yourself when you betray yourself?

I'd like to know how any therapist thinks that would be good for a person.

Now for some sanity.

The problem with feelings, like hunger and thirst for justice, anger, and sorrow is NOT that they hurt. They are emotional pain. If you repress them to the subconscious, they drive your behavior from there, without your awareness of what's driving your behavior. You have done nothing but slam the lid down tight on a pressure cooker.

That's when they can explode so you that do do something wrong.

If you accept, own, go through your feelings, like any pain they pass.

In fact, THAT'S the problem as Hamlet discovered. As time passes, so does the pain. THAT'S healing.

And when the pain of the emotion of anger passes, so does the motivation to right that wrong. So, like Hamlet, you must give yourself a pep talk every now and then to remind yourself that there is justice to be done, a better life to reclaim, and that you should never give up, never surrender, never resign yourself to defeat. Never, never, never. That you must never quit waiting for an opportunity to set the world right-side-up again.

Anyone who thinks that's bad should try thinking right-side-up.

Because forgiveness is for the repentant. To hand it out to the unrepentant is like going up to your neighbor on trash-collection day and saying, "Here, I'll trade you this 12-carrot diamond ring for that little baggie of doggie-do."

It makes a mockery of something sacred and precious.

Update: A related link

Individual and Civic Notions of Forgiveness by Sharon Lamb, Ed.D. author of The Trouble with Blame: Victims, Perpetrators and Responsibility

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How to Feel Happier

The other day I saw an ad on the Web offering advice on "how to feel happier."

"How to feel happier."

I should have snapped a screen shot, but I didn't. Still, ads and stuff like that are common enough that everyone has probably seen it or one like it.

I won't make you pay for the answer though. To make yourself feel happier, take Prozac or two dry martinis.

Shall we get serious now?

But I WAS serious. That's how you alter feelings - with drugs or self-imposed delusions. That isn't honest. And since when is it mentally healthy to be dishonest with yourself?

This idea that we control our feelings and that they should be disconnected from stimuli that cause them is doing great damage in Western society. It is absurd and ridiculous.

It is self-evident that external stimuli cause our feelings. We can only lie to ourselves about our feelings: we can't change them.

This is as true of psychological feelings as it is of physical feelings. Those feelings are processed to produce emotions. Emotions motivate behavior, but they do not control it - not unless the rational mind cedes that function.

Emotions are not bad. Often, without strong emotion, we would not have the motivation to act, even though our rational mind sees that we should act. Hamlet, for example, was greatly tempted over time to just allow the murder of his father to pass. It was his strong emotions that kept him on task, though he never gave in to their fury, which tempted him to just murder Caludius and be done with it.

So, emotions are necessary. Without them we are paralyzed. Reason and emotion must work together (even fight with each other now and then) in the mind of a properly functioning human being.

What's more, the entire gambit of human emotions includes both negative and positive ones. If you take away the negative ones, what have you got? Is there any such thing as "happy" if you don't know what it is to be sad? Can you even FEEL happy unless you also know the feeling of being sad?

I'll tell you what the result of this idiocy is = total numbness.

This rot doesn't even pass a basic nonsense check.

It's fear-based, the product of a mentality that wants to insulate itself from the world so that nothing can make it feel bad, so that nothing bad can happen. It's an attempt to control your "little world" just like a narcissist tries to control hers - through authoring a work of fiction.

Plus, it's just another way to blame the victim for their feelings. They talk as though people just feel things out of the blue. They never breate a hint of blame for a feeling like unhappiness on hardship, abuse, abandonment, unfair play, war, illness, troubles in the home, or anything else. They always blame it on some imaginary inadequacy in the person feeling unhappy.

Maybe THEIR feelings are always phony put-ons like a narcissist's mask, but not everyone's are.

The people promulgating this junk are treating your unhappy feelings as the problem - not the real problem = whatever is causing those unhappy feelings. That's stupid. That approach precludes any solution to the real problem.

They treat your unhappy feelings as a weakness, a character flaw in you. Does that make sense?

According to them, you should correct this flaw. What does that mean? It means that the FLAW isn't in anyone causing your unhappiness. The FLAW is anyone made unhappy by their actions.

Right, the sin is in being unhappy, not in making others unhappy.

These scrambled-eggheads must have to keep half their brains shut down at all times to avoid a crash that takes the whole system down.

Look what they're saying. According to them, you are "responsible" for your feelings, so, in the middle of a war zone, you are to blame for being unhappy and you should therefore be a good boy or girl (so as not to rain on our day) by being "happy" instead.

And when professionals cash in on these memes, that really sucks.

They don't all do that though. When looking for a good one, look for one with a rational and sensible approach to feelings. One who never encourages you to repress them. One who will tell you that are times when you should get angry. One who helps you DEAL with them and GET THROUGH the pain.

Until you do that, you never will heal. Ironic, eh? By denying your real feelings, you never do heal so that you CAN be happy again. You just turn yourself into a numb zombie who acts "happy-happy-happy" all the time while feeling miserable deep down inside.

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Every Little Thing Is Not a Sin

I think victims fear to defend themselves because society has an unwholesome obsession with passing judgement on every single thing a person says or does. It's like there is some moral obligation to call every word or deed "right" or "wrong." This nonsense has gone so far now as to extend to FEELINGS.

You can't say or do anything without someone feeling it incumbent on them to tell you whether it was holy or a sin, though secular people use different jargon than that.

When I was teaching, I relieved myself of this burden. Sometimes I'd sit back at my desk in Biology lab and just watch the kids interact with each other. Every minute or so, someone would grab an instrument and tell his or her partner, "No! That's not how you do it, Dufus! This is how you do it!" Then over here, there's a kid snarling at his partner for "kidding" him in a way he didn't like. Over there, a girl is sitting back in disgust, tossing the instrument on the table saying, "There, you do it if you can do it better!" because her partner was criticizing every move she made. I could list no end of little human interactions like this going on.

When I was new to teaching, my indoctrination went off and I thought I had to race like a firefighter to the scene and correct this behavior. I must swoop down on every spat or quarrel, bawling the parties out for getting mad and judging who was to blame.

Then one day I had a brilliant thought. "Why?"

Why did I have to do that? So, I sat back and just watched. Guess what? Every little issue resolved itself almost instantly. A minute later, those partners were getting along fine again.

It was easy to see that one party stepped on the other's toes or was succumbing to mediocrity that would affect his or partner's grade and...YEOW - just like tiger cubs at play. Every so often, one of them gets ticked off and snarls. But then it's over.

The snarl actually works. It's nothing so long as the God of that world (me - TEACHER) doesn't descend on them and make a big deal out of it.

Once that happens, THEN their feelings don't blow away in under 30 seconds, because now they've been SHAMED by the teacher judging them as having sinned.

So, I learned to mind my own business. I'd just watch to make sure something I didn't understand wasn't about to escalate into something I would have to put a stop to. Guess what? I never had to. Those kids got along with each other and me beautifully.

Sometimes during one of these little spats one of them would look up and see me watching them - looking like "Oh-oh! She sees us and we're gonna get bawled out for arguing with each other!"

Why? Because that's what their other teachers would have done.

They'd keep looking back at me, more and more puzzled at why I wasn't coming at them and was just sitting there listening and occasionally laughing at something one of them said. I'd see the humor in it, you see. Then I'd make some joke to show them the humor in it, too.

In short, I just made light of it, made nothing good or evil of it, and just let them settle it.

Suddenly the brainwashing fell from my eyes and I could see that every time a person says a sharp word it is not a sin. It is nothing. It is part of normal human interaction.

Every time you yell, it is not a sin. Every time you get angry it is not a sin. Every time you slam a cupboard door it is not a sin. And if it's in self defense, even every time you hit it is not a sin. Neither is every time you fart.

I was a cradle Catholic and the nuns weren't HALF as bad as secular society is today in loading a guilt trip on you for every single thing you say or do.

Let's be honest. The reason people judge everything you say or do is because judging others is THE act of playing God and makes them feel morally superior to those they are saying sinned. In other words, it's nothing but self-righteousness.

And the punch line is that those same holier-than-thous doing this are committing the Sin Sodom (by denying you the right to do anything but bend over for abuse) while bawling you out for "raising your voice."

Don't be puppet-mastered by these moral idiots, whether they be the secular ones or the religious ones. Don't fear that you mustn't ever do anything that someone will call a sin. They can call ANYTHING a sin.

Knuckling under to their moral control tactics disables you and establishes a gross double-standard, in which the narcissist is free to rage, hit, abuse, be irrational, act crazy, lie his head off, smear, and steal to get whatever he wants, but you dare not even "raise your voice" or FEEL your anger.

Of course you don't want to degrade yourself by how you react and protect yourself. But don't be obsessed with fear of doing anything some holier-than-thou would say is wrong. If you do, you will soon find that you are nailed to a cross for target practice.

Every little thing you say or do simply doesn't rise to the level of being right or wrong. It needs no judgement. And being obsessed with such trivia is just a distraction from the big things, the things your moral judgment should be focused on.

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A little more on feelings

Something I learned from tennis.

It is probably best to keep your feelings to yourself out there. The greatest players usually do. Pete Sampras, Chris Evert, Bjorn Borg.

They weren't phonies, acting as though their feelings were different than they really were. These players simply kept their feelings to themselves. Bjorn Borg, for example, would afterwards say that he was so nervous he could hardly hold the racket. But you couldn't tell that by watching him.

I have a friend who says he never believes anything his mind tells him during a tennis match. Which is the best advice I've ever heard.

But let's say that you have listened to your stupid mind and that it is getting to you. Maybe you do need to blow off a little steam, as a result. So long as you control your behavior to keep it within acceptable norms, it won't hurt anything.

Though it migh boost your opponent's morale. And that's certainly no good. Which is why it's usually best done with a touch of humor.

This might help with your narcissist, since narcissists compete with the other party in every interaction.

It may be best to keep your feelings to yourself. But that doesn't mean that you must be a phony. It doesn't mean that you must repress your feelings and delude yourself about what they really are. For, doing that is bad for you.

But does your N need to see an expression of those feelings? What's the point when an N just reacts perversely to them?

He or she will see through any phony facade you try to put on and smell blood. But if you just give NO reaction, that's different. That is not what an N wants.

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About Your Feelings

I was just trying to Google for a psychiatrist whose site talks sense about the harm in repressing your feelings. He even points out that we have a moral obligation to become angry over cruelty and injustice and abuse. Indeed, St. Paul rightly identifies the failure to do so as the indifference of the damned, who look the other way in consenting to the wrongdoing. Not the kind of thing good people do - just hypocrites who won't lift a finger to help those in need of protection.

But all I found is garbage about how angry people must "take responsibility" for their anger.

Do these parrots ever run a logic on anything before they start repeating it?

Then you must take responsibility for feeling cold. Or hot. Or in pain. Or happy. Or burnt. Or lonely. Or sad. For, according to these parrots, it's all in your head.

You aren't cold because it's cold. You aren't hot because it's hot. You aren't in pain because you are injured. You aren't happy because something good happened. You aren't lonely because you are alone. Or sad because something sad happened.

No! Your feelings are YOUR fault.

I am sorry, but they are being incredibly stupid. Obviously, they can't distinguish between a FEELING and an ACT. Yikes.

Maybe that's because all their "feelings" are just put-on acts. Do you suppose? I guess that if you are a phony, you get confused about the nature of true feelings.

But I say, if you get burnt, you should feel burnt. If you don't there's something wrong with you. If someone punches you, he is responsible for your pain, not you. Anger is emotional pain. So, if someone abuses you, he is responsible for your anger, not you.

That's just common sense.

You are responsible for your CONDUCT. Not your feelings.

And as for narcissistic ragers and their so-called "feelings," I have given numerous examples of how they are acting jobs, not genuine. (See Conceptual Clarity.) At least not until their huffing and puffing has whipped them up into a self-inflicted fury. So, when they throw one of their temper tantrums, nobody else is to blame for it - just them.

But real people have real feelings that are caused by outside sources. And blaming people for their feelings is just a sneaky way to blame the victim.

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Do Narcissists Have Emotions?

It is often said that narcissists and psychopaths don't experience the full depth and range of human emotions. I have known some narcissists very well for a very long time, and I am sure there is something different about their emotions.

Sam Vaknin discusses the matter here, starting off clearly by saying that narcissists repress their emotions. Which makes sense. After that he gets into fuzzy abstractions that don't seem to add a lot.

But I wonder if there isn't more to it.

Maybe a large part of the difference is simply due to their idenitification with their image instead of themselves. I've read that they view their bodies as a machine or tool, not really an integral part of themselves. And I believe it, because the narcissists I have known were amazingly out of touch with their bodily sensations. One had a heart so enlarged it was thumping against her sternum 24/7 for about a year, and when the doctor asked her how long she had been feeling it do that, it was news to her! The other never seemed to know when he was sick. His wife had to tell him. When he got old, life was such an out-of-the-body experience for him that he couldn't even tell where, or if, anything hurt! Welcome to The Twilight Zone.

If you're that out-of-touch with even your physical sensations, you certainly aren't in touch with your emotional ones either.

And it stands to reason, because they identify with something external and immaterial, their image. They relate to it as themselves. So, they aren't connected properly to their real selves.

What's more, their emotions are pretended. They don't get mad because something really made them mad. They pretend to get mad when they throw a fit to bully you. But that isn't genuine anger. It's an act. Otherwise they couldn't turn it on and off like a light switch.

Sure, they work themselves up into a lather as they summon anger to put on a temper tantrum, but that isn't the natural emotion of anger.

Narcissists have about two emotional acts: their happy act and their mad act. These are just acting jobs in their game of Pretend. The emotions are shallow because the narcissist conjures them up and then pumps them up. So, they're artificial, not the real thing.

As for feelings, they regard feeling as weakness, vulnerability. So they repress them.

You Are Not Guilty of Your Feelings

If you point out that people cannot control their feelings and that they therefore cannot change them and that feelings therefore cannot be a sin or a character flaw of any sort, you always get some holier-than-thou coming back with "Yesbut...feeling angry (or whatever) is a sin."

What can one do to get through a three-foot-thick forehead? It is impervious to reason. Reason just bounces off it like that, because such people have no respect for it.

Never feel guilty about your feelings!

Woops, an oxymoron. You don't feel guilty about your feelings; you feel ashamed of them. That is because shame has nothing to do with guilt. Shame is something others put on you. Whether you deserve it or not.

So, never be ashamed of your feelings! There is no guilt in them. Anyone who judges you for your feelings is the one doing something to be ashamed of.

I say this also to naricissists. Narcissists, you have abnormal feelings, but they are not your fault. They are an effect of the disease. Victims, you have normal feelings, and they are not your fault. They are an effect of the abuse.

Aside to those who think what I say conflicts with religion: Think again. Look it up. Abraham finds that God judges by CONDUCT. Conduct is words and deeds. Feelings are not conduct. And the word "faith" in that book means what it used to mean = what we now mean by "good faith" = simple honesty, sincerity, fidelity to truth and one's word = something even an atheist can have. Only within the last few hundred years has abuse and misuse of the word faith warped it into meaning a "list of religious beliefs." Indeed, when you compare various versions of scripture to see how many way a given passage may be translated, you start to see how misleading current translations can be.

Emotions are just psychological feelings. Like physical feelings they are triggered by stimuli. We have no control over this process. If you touch a hot stove, you feel burnt. If you get put down, you feel insulted. The stimulus is the cause. So, it makes no more sense to blame you for how a narcissist's abuse makes you feel than it does to blame you for smarting when he or she punches you in the nose.

I just don't see what's so hard to understand about that.

This doesn't give the victims a carte blanche to go off and react to abuse in any way they want. Indeed, the narcissist's abnormal feelings are no excuse for his conduct, either.

We must all make sure our emotions don't control our conduct. We must temper it with good judgement and moderation.

When there would be no witnesses, narcissists don't. That's where they incur guilt.

True, injured feelings are more easily hurt. Just as a wound is more sensitive than uninjured skin. So, the victims of narcissists must realize this. Get away from the source of constant re-injury, and you won't find that your feelings get easily hurt anymore. And your anger (emotional pain) will eventually pass.

See On Your Feelings.

Dealing with Anger

If you are still smarting from narcissistic abuse, try something the next time your anger rises.

Go somewhere apart, where you can be alone. Then just sit down and admit to yourself, "Boy! am I angry!" Let yourself feel it.

I guarantee that you will feel great relief. Even comfort. Yes, you deserve your own sympathy even more than you deserve the sympathy of anybody else.

Why do you feel this immediate relief and comfort? Because you just took the lid off a pressure cooker. You stopped trying to repress your anger. You stopped trying to deny it. You stopped trying to unfeel it = distance yourself from it.

You stopped viewing it as a flaw. You know it's justified. And you know that you must temper its influence on your conduct.

It hurts. It's psychological pain. A very unpleasant state of mind, perhaps the most unpleasant this side of fright.

And, like any pain, it WILL pass. But you can't wish it away. All you can do is delude yourself by repressing it. That's not dealing with it. Anger is like grief: you can deal with it now, or you can deal with it later, but sooner or later you're going to have to deal with it.

This is why "venting" sometimes helps the victims of narcissists. In venting to others they are owning their feelings. I don't think that's as helpful though as just going off by yourself and venting to yourself alone. Why? Because you're more honest when not performing for others. You'll own your vulnerability and do more weeping than fuming.

Venting to others is like releasing the valve on a pressure cooker, whereas venting to yourself is like taking the whole lid off.

We don't blame those sick in the flesh for their pain, so we shouldn't blame those sick at heart for it, either. They are responsible only for their conduct, not their feelings. If somebody hits you with a club, whether physical or psychological, THEY are the one responsible for your pain.

The pain, in all its manifestations -- not just of anger, but of grief, sorrow, and shame as well -- is a huge burden, and it is unfair for you to have to bear it, because the narcissist is the one responsible for it. You are carrying his cross, paying for his sins.

That's not forgiveness of his debt: that's extortion.

Now, think what it means then for everybody else to dump also the BLAME for your painful feelings on you. That heaps insult upon injury to outrage. That's the unbearable part. That's what cannot be tolerated.

Our conflicted feelings

I think we all feel guilty at times about our feelings -- or rather our lack of feeling -- toward the narcissist. Something inside just dies when we confront the spirit in which a narcissist does what he or she does.

That is a confrontation with the pure will to evil. You know -- the big chill. You stand on the edge of the abyss and look down into their soul and see there is no bottom. It's natural, it's human, to back off as if repelled by antigravity and abhor it. In fact, it's immoral not to.

But especially the parents and siblings of a narcissist often feel conflicted, because they sympathize deeply with the hurt little child inside the narcissist. They remember him or her. They witnessed the abuse. Just remembering it creates such a vivid experience that it enrages them all over again, 20, 30, 40 years later.

And they have occassionally caught heartbreaking glimpses of this ghost, this murdered little child inside the narcissist.

Dealing with these conflicted feelings is simply a matter of understanding them. They are natural. It's the situation that is unnatural, bizarre. That's because this hatred of the monster is directed at seemingly the same object as the love and grief for the innocent child inside.

That's just the way it is, and there's nothing we can do about it except keep clear about it and try not to confuse those feelings. The narcissist, by misidentifying, by identifying with his or her false image, has created this bizarre situation with their false and abhorrant persona.