Narcissism and other Pop Diagnoses

My Sweet Somatic Narcissist – it’s free

I wrote the above story this week, and duly punted it for a couple of days.  The first four copies were poorly edited, so if anyone got one of these, my apologies.

Having spent the last week or so investigating the matter, I have come to the conclusion that you can easily get sucked into a vortex of extremely complex self-evaluation as a result of investigating this topic.  I would just like to reassure any potential readers of the above free story, that it is not particularly heinous or ‘victim’ orientated.  In fact, Kate responds reasonably well to her 18 months or so.  I did leave out some stuff, but it was more about poor self-management than drama.

So, today the mild panic was over whether I am an Inverted Narcissist  – someone who seeks relationships with narcissists because they know what to expect and seek validation from tolerance of narcissistic behaviour.  Given that I am drawn to complicated relationships, and that I have had a few narcissistic people in my life, I wondered whether this was a possibility.

Whilst I certainly don’t seek to cure people of whatever their problem is, I have probably shown too much flexibility in terms of tolerance in the past, and should be valuing my emotional and physical safety more highly.  I am also highly practiced at managing the feeding of narcissists, evidently, which is why I have managed fairly long term relationships with some very difficult people.  I do also suffer from flash rages, which are, I think more evidence that I was brought up in a large house where I could easily go and chuck a tantrum and avoid dealing with problems face to face, rather than evidence of CPTSD.  I could go down the other road, and investigate whether I am suffering from dependency issues etc, but I think it is healthier to develop a harder core and go ahead and do what I am capable of.

Therefore, I would like this blog post to be a warning to other people like me, who discover that the answer to some unanswerable questions is that you are dealing with people suffering from a variety of personality disorders.  Your trauma is yours, and you do not necessarily require intervention or company.  As I have said to many people in the past, feeding the sharks is not necessarily a good idea.  Sometimes it is a good idea to starve your particular shark and go and do something else.  It is not so much a question of avoidance, as a willingness to say OK, I think I will close that chapter and move onto something else.

In the more distant past, I moved on successfully from being an angry teenager to being a highly productive twenty something, and a stupidly caring thirty and forty something.  I got some answers this week, as to why I was so angry to start with, and why I am taking the very odd path that I am currently taking.  I do not think that this is justification to question or alter that path, as I think it is a positive development.  In many ways the Wolfe project is continuously positive.  I have rarely been so happy to avoid hating someone on the grounds of it being obvious to do so.

This does not mean that I will not be carefully considering the new information that I have, yes, I have been ‘mobbed’ by my family for several years, yes, I have made a lot of mistakes with people, and yes, I have developed some symptoms of trauma.  However, the knowledge of this does not change the validity of what I am currently doing or plan to do, especially as it does not involve harming anybody and might help a great number of people if I can pull it off.    Even a few years ago this would have thrown me a bit off-balance, as I would have sought to ‘fix’ the problem.  Now, I think ‘meh.’

Feel the fear, and do it anyway.  Additional information is a good thing, using it as an excuse to stop moving forward is not.