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walkitoutMy regular readers know the drill: “A Few Thoughts” often equals pages and pages and pages. You’ve been warned! If you have important things to do, put this off . . . Forever.
ETA: Also, if you are reading this, and you think you know who inspired this post, there’s a chance you do! It’s based on reflections on a couple dozen people I’ve known personally to one degree or another (yes! Including exes! And the exes of an ex). It’s also based on decades of reading etiquette books, advice columns, and years of reading books and articles written by clinical psychologists. The possibility of overlap between my universe of experience and your universe of experience is, for sure, non-zero.
Anyway.
I think of Personality Disorders as a class (which is where the diagnostic community is slowly moving) and my definition of Personality Disorder is distinctly different from how the pros think of it. My definition is: “A Characteristic Way of Not Solving One’s Problems”. So, for example, narcissists deal with problems by reassuring themselves that they are better / smarter than everyone else. Histrionic would be by reassuring themselves they are way hotter than everyone else and they could get anyone at all. Antisocial would be by hurting someone. Borderline would be by panicking about and demanding reassurance that their current primary relationship other will not abandon them. Got a problem? Turn it into something you _know_ how to deal with, basically, but in a particularly juvenile and cartoonish way.
And that’s my entry point for a new (for me) observation. People who are in relationships that start great and deteriorate thereafter often describe a pattern that is labeled “narcissist”: the person is super charming, and does all kinds of wonderful things early on, then, as things proceed, the narcissist progressively isolates them from the things / people / activities they love by making fun of them and cruelly mocking them, and finally, the narcissist directly attacks the person. Narcissists are described as manipulative and because this program tends to repeat in relationship after relationship, outsiders — naturally! — assume intentionality and the whole thing rapidly shades into a character or morality frame. Bad person! Yes, indeed, bad person. No question.
I have two children and I love to cook, but they basically made cooking and eating virtually impossible for me until A. finally aged out of whatever the fuck that was. I _assumed_ this was sensory related, and especially for A., it definitely was. But even while it was in progress, I remember reading other books and stories by women who described their babies and toddlers actively preventing them from engaging in the things they loved the most, found the most engaging in life, etc., and it made the difficulties of raising small children that much more exquisitely painful. Of course, as children mature, they are more capable of getting their needs met in other ways than Get And Keep Caregiver’s Exclusive Attention All the Time.
I think at this point, you have a pretty good idea where I’m going with this. Imagine a person who isn’t hitting all the subtle developmental milestones. Specifically, they’re terrible at negotiation, and probably pretty bad at figuring out how to do anything new, and the Patience Fairy skipped them entirely, etc. They don’t know how to tolerate a lack for any length of time, and they don’t know how to work collaboratively with other people, and they just are not good at solving problems. Now, this person, like any person, would like to have someone to be intimate with, and this person, _more than most people_, would really like to have a stable intimate partner, because it’s hard for them to do stuff and it would be great if someone would do a lot of stuff for them.
Honestly, this is a spectrum. We all have days where we’d like someone to do a lot of stuff for us.
Anyway. So this person is bad at negotiation, but _has_ figured out how to be cute, and has honed Being Cute until it is Charm or Charisma and it is basically weaponized. There are books and classes and so forth that you can take if you are really struggling with this, but basically, They Did Learn This Part. And so they go do that part. They clean up good. They devote their limited interpersonal skills to a pretty transactional invitation to a party and then they troll for someone who likes the way they look and is responsive to their patter. The most degenerate form of this is the person who literally walks from one person to the next in a social context trying the same pickup line over and over and over again. That’s actually NOT who I am talking about here ; they _haven’t_ figured out the charm piece yet. Altho they are displaying persistence, they’re probably on a different spectrum, where persistence is also known as perseverance and is diagnostic in its own way. But never mind that now! Back to the charmers.
That will continue as long as they are pretty sure they may get what they want (you to go home with them, move in with them, marry them, have their babies, etc.) AND they have the capacity to put on the Charm Act. That second part is important — anything that reduces their capacity means it can break down. If they’re sick, injured, exhausted, hungry, drunk, or otherwise limited in capacity in some way, it’ll break down even if they are doing their absolute best to continue to be Charming.
Also, if it looks like they will NOT get what they want, they may flip into a tantrum, and while with kids, that is obnoxious, with an adult, it can be very hazardous.
When people are struggling, one of the (healthy) things that people do is to reduce their commitments. Working 80 hours and struggling to find time to sleep, interact with non-co-workers, exercise, etc.? Reduce work hours. Healthy! Good choices. However, people who are managing their closest, day-to-day relationship by Being Charming are not necessarily progressing through the normal, closest, day-to-day relationship path of integrating two (or more) lives and collaboratively problem solving. They’re not. Remember: this frame asserts that they don’t Solve Problems, they have a different, characteristic thing they do instead of solving problems. It is quite possible there are married couples out there that are made up of one or even two people whose primary strategy in life is to Be Charming. If they have enough money, and enough other people around them to deal with whatever crops up in their lives, they might even be pretty happy together (altho I question whether this could possibly extend to having children, and it being a good experience for the kids, but who knows, corps of nannies, could work!). But that’s not most of us. Most of us have to actually do for ourselves, to one degree or another, and if we’re overwhelmed, we cut back. For a Narcissist, cutting back means two things: Being Less Charming, and Being More Demanding of Their Intimate Partner(s). They are cutting back on energy expended (being less charming) and they are trying to get more resources for themselves (being more demanding).
This is usually the point at which the narcissist’s partner’s friends and extended family start saying, hey, that guy’s an asshole, why are you with him, and so forth. And the partner is like, you don’t understand, he makes me happy, he’s so nice to me, etc. The isolation phase.
But if the isolation is successful, the partner is no longer getting their needs met by all those friends and extended family who have given up and are quietly waiting on the sidelines (we hope) until there is a good opportunity to swoop in and rescue the victim. The partner is now going to focus more on getting those needs met by the narcissist. And if you ask someone to do the impossible, gears grind and everything breaks down. This is where open abuse of the partner shows up, and the partner starts looking into therapy.
Therapy is a tricky thing. There are all kinds of funny ways of expressing the basic conundrum, which is that someone is looking for help. Either they want help for themselves, when the problem is really mostly with other people, or they want help changing other people, when the problem is really mostly with themselves. Ideally, in the scenario I am laying out (person who missed a bunch of development, figured out how to be charming, and then life stresses have caused their charm-founded relationship to, er, founder), a good couple’s counselor is found to improve the way the partners interact, and good individual counselors are found for both (all) parties to help them with whatever missed personal development it would be helpful to work on next. However, therapists (alas!) are humans, and when someone in distress shows up (partner of person often labeled narcissist), it’s pretty easy to go, DTMFA, or at least start nudging in that direction. And honestly, there are cases where DTMFA is a _really_ _good_ _call_, lives could be saved, children could grow up in a much less toxic / dangerous environment, etc.
In any event, _going into therapy_ (whether that is with a pro, in a pastoral context, with a peer counselor / friend / trusted family member / self-help / etc.) in the sense of gaining insight into aspects of one’s self and one’s relationships that are causing distress and finding other ways to go through the world that are less distressing is the right choice (and there’s a lot of variety available within that choice, see earlier parenthetical remark).
Also, if you are looking for an intimate partner, I think this argues pretty solidly in favor of presenting yourself in-line with what you can maintain easily, vs. Bringing Your A Game. And it argues _very_ solidly in favor of being extremely wary of someone who is clearly Bringing Their A Game. You will not be living your A Game. They will not be living their A Game. So if you are doing this for other than Temporary Good Times, get as clear a sense as you possibly can of what they’re like day in and day out. This, of course, you have also heard many, many, many times.
There are additional components to this (A Few Thoughts!). During the Great Recession / Financial Crisis, there were articles describing an uptick in divorces in couples where he was working on Wall Street and either lost his job or the bonus money stopped flowing and they got divorced. That’s pretty transactional!!! So even if you manage to make it work as / with a narcissist, that reduction in capacity can be an exogenous event. I would also point to lockdowns / pandemic related restrictions making everything harder as a reduction in capacity that probably pushed all of us down on whatever spectrum we are on. My husband has some choice words on the topic of my control freaky behavior (he says I’m such a control freak, that one of my primary areas where I exert control is to prevent people from noticing how much of a control freak I am, and he’s not wrong), and the interior of my fridge increasingly terrifies even me. I mean, it is a marvel of organization and while we weren’t wasting that much food before, I now joke that we’re running a No Calorie Left Behind operation. But while that might be an aspiration for a healthy person, it’s a terrible sign for me.
Anyway. If you are struggling, or you know someone else who is struggling, assess for Safety first, and if Safety requirements are not currently being violated, sit a bit with the idea that there could be some major missing development in that adult you are or who you love. Even major things can be broken down into bite size chunks — task breakdown is all big projects are accomplished, so don’t despair. But it’s _really_ easy to slip into denial, and I guess right here, I’m arguing as hard as I know how: Look. See. If you are looking at a _literal_ toddler in a _literal_ fifty year old (or whatever), don’t be thinking, aw, that can’t be right. That could be right. From that point, you can then explore Well How Much Change Do I Need for This Relationship to Work and, probably more importantly, Is This Person Still On the Way Up Or Are They On the Way Down. If you can really understand yourself or the person you love (ideally, both! At the same time! Asking a lot here, I know!), you can engage in a problem solving process, which is exactly what a Personality Disordered Person characteristically does not do.
ETA: Also, if you are reading this, and you think you know who inspired this post, there’s a chance you do! It’s based on reflections on a couple dozen people I’ve known personally to one degree or another (yes! Including exes! And the exes of an ex). It’s also based on decades of reading etiquette books, advice columns, and years of reading books and articles written by clinical psychologists. The possibility of overlap between my universe of experience and your universe of experience is, for sure, non-zero.
Anyway.
I think of Personality Disorders as a class (which is where the diagnostic community is slowly moving) and my definition of Personality Disorder is distinctly different from how the pros think of it. My definition is: “A Characteristic Way of Not Solving One’s Problems”. So, for example, narcissists deal with problems by reassuring themselves that they are better / smarter than everyone else. Histrionic would be by reassuring themselves they are way hotter than everyone else and they could get anyone at all. Antisocial would be by hurting someone. Borderline would be by panicking about and demanding reassurance that their current primary relationship other will not abandon them. Got a problem? Turn it into something you _know_ how to deal with, basically, but in a particularly juvenile and cartoonish way.
And that’s my entry point for a new (for me) observation. People who are in relationships that start great and deteriorate thereafter often describe a pattern that is labeled “narcissist”: the person is super charming, and does all kinds of wonderful things early on, then, as things proceed, the narcissist progressively isolates them from the things / people / activities they love by making fun of them and cruelly mocking them, and finally, the narcissist directly attacks the person. Narcissists are described as manipulative and because this program tends to repeat in relationship after relationship, outsiders — naturally! — assume intentionality and the whole thing rapidly shades into a character or morality frame. Bad person! Yes, indeed, bad person. No question.
I have two children and I love to cook, but they basically made cooking and eating virtually impossible for me until A. finally aged out of whatever the fuck that was. I _assumed_ this was sensory related, and especially for A., it definitely was. But even while it was in progress, I remember reading other books and stories by women who described their babies and toddlers actively preventing them from engaging in the things they loved the most, found the most engaging in life, etc., and it made the difficulties of raising small children that much more exquisitely painful. Of course, as children mature, they are more capable of getting their needs met in other ways than Get And Keep Caregiver’s Exclusive Attention All the Time.
I think at this point, you have a pretty good idea where I’m going with this. Imagine a person who isn’t hitting all the subtle developmental milestones. Specifically, they’re terrible at negotiation, and probably pretty bad at figuring out how to do anything new, and the Patience Fairy skipped them entirely, etc. They don’t know how to tolerate a lack for any length of time, and they don’t know how to work collaboratively with other people, and they just are not good at solving problems. Now, this person, like any person, would like to have someone to be intimate with, and this person, _more than most people_, would really like to have a stable intimate partner, because it’s hard for them to do stuff and it would be great if someone would do a lot of stuff for them.
Honestly, this is a spectrum. We all have days where we’d like someone to do a lot of stuff for us.
Anyway. So this person is bad at negotiation, but _has_ figured out how to be cute, and has honed Being Cute until it is Charm or Charisma and it is basically weaponized. There are books and classes and so forth that you can take if you are really struggling with this, but basically, They Did Learn This Part. And so they go do that part. They clean up good. They devote their limited interpersonal skills to a pretty transactional invitation to a party and then they troll for someone who likes the way they look and is responsive to their patter. The most degenerate form of this is the person who literally walks from one person to the next in a social context trying the same pickup line over and over and over again. That’s actually NOT who I am talking about here ; they _haven’t_ figured out the charm piece yet. Altho they are displaying persistence, they’re probably on a different spectrum, where persistence is also known as perseverance and is diagnostic in its own way. But never mind that now! Back to the charmers.
That will continue as long as they are pretty sure they may get what they want (you to go home with them, move in with them, marry them, have their babies, etc.) AND they have the capacity to put on the Charm Act. That second part is important — anything that reduces their capacity means it can break down. If they’re sick, injured, exhausted, hungry, drunk, or otherwise limited in capacity in some way, it’ll break down even if they are doing their absolute best to continue to be Charming.
Also, if it looks like they will NOT get what they want, they may flip into a tantrum, and while with kids, that is obnoxious, with an adult, it can be very hazardous.
When people are struggling, one of the (healthy) things that people do is to reduce their commitments. Working 80 hours and struggling to find time to sleep, interact with non-co-workers, exercise, etc.? Reduce work hours. Healthy! Good choices. However, people who are managing their closest, day-to-day relationship by Being Charming are not necessarily progressing through the normal, closest, day-to-day relationship path of integrating two (or more) lives and collaboratively problem solving. They’re not. Remember: this frame asserts that they don’t Solve Problems, they have a different, characteristic thing they do instead of solving problems. It is quite possible there are married couples out there that are made up of one or even two people whose primary strategy in life is to Be Charming. If they have enough money, and enough other people around them to deal with whatever crops up in their lives, they might even be pretty happy together (altho I question whether this could possibly extend to having children, and it being a good experience for the kids, but who knows, corps of nannies, could work!). But that’s not most of us. Most of us have to actually do for ourselves, to one degree or another, and if we’re overwhelmed, we cut back. For a Narcissist, cutting back means two things: Being Less Charming, and Being More Demanding of Their Intimate Partner(s). They are cutting back on energy expended (being less charming) and they are trying to get more resources for themselves (being more demanding).
This is usually the point at which the narcissist’s partner’s friends and extended family start saying, hey, that guy’s an asshole, why are you with him, and so forth. And the partner is like, you don’t understand, he makes me happy, he’s so nice to me, etc. The isolation phase.
But if the isolation is successful, the partner is no longer getting their needs met by all those friends and extended family who have given up and are quietly waiting on the sidelines (we hope) until there is a good opportunity to swoop in and rescue the victim. The partner is now going to focus more on getting those needs met by the narcissist. And if you ask someone to do the impossible, gears grind and everything breaks down. This is where open abuse of the partner shows up, and the partner starts looking into therapy.
Therapy is a tricky thing. There are all kinds of funny ways of expressing the basic conundrum, which is that someone is looking for help. Either they want help for themselves, when the problem is really mostly with other people, or they want help changing other people, when the problem is really mostly with themselves. Ideally, in the scenario I am laying out (person who missed a bunch of development, figured out how to be charming, and then life stresses have caused their charm-founded relationship to, er, founder), a good couple’s counselor is found to improve the way the partners interact, and good individual counselors are found for both (all) parties to help them with whatever missed personal development it would be helpful to work on next. However, therapists (alas!) are humans, and when someone in distress shows up (partner of person often labeled narcissist), it’s pretty easy to go, DTMFA, or at least start nudging in that direction. And honestly, there are cases where DTMFA is a _really_ _good_ _call_, lives could be saved, children could grow up in a much less toxic / dangerous environment, etc.
In any event, _going into therapy_ (whether that is with a pro, in a pastoral context, with a peer counselor / friend / trusted family member / self-help / etc.) in the sense of gaining insight into aspects of one’s self and one’s relationships that are causing distress and finding other ways to go through the world that are less distressing is the right choice (and there’s a lot of variety available within that choice, see earlier parenthetical remark).
Also, if you are looking for an intimate partner, I think this argues pretty solidly in favor of presenting yourself in-line with what you can maintain easily, vs. Bringing Your A Game. And it argues _very_ solidly in favor of being extremely wary of someone who is clearly Bringing Their A Game. You will not be living your A Game. They will not be living their A Game. So if you are doing this for other than Temporary Good Times, get as clear a sense as you possibly can of what they’re like day in and day out. This, of course, you have also heard many, many, many times.
There are additional components to this (A Few Thoughts!). During the Great Recession / Financial Crisis, there were articles describing an uptick in divorces in couples where he was working on Wall Street and either lost his job or the bonus money stopped flowing and they got divorced. That’s pretty transactional!!! So even if you manage to make it work as / with a narcissist, that reduction in capacity can be an exogenous event. I would also point to lockdowns / pandemic related restrictions making everything harder as a reduction in capacity that probably pushed all of us down on whatever spectrum we are on. My husband has some choice words on the topic of my control freaky behavior (he says I’m such a control freak, that one of my primary areas where I exert control is to prevent people from noticing how much of a control freak I am, and he’s not wrong), and the interior of my fridge increasingly terrifies even me. I mean, it is a marvel of organization and while we weren’t wasting that much food before, I now joke that we’re running a No Calorie Left Behind operation. But while that might be an aspiration for a healthy person, it’s a terrible sign for me.
Anyway. If you are struggling, or you know someone else who is struggling, assess for Safety first, and if Safety requirements are not currently being violated, sit a bit with the idea that there could be some major missing development in that adult you are or who you love. Even major things can be broken down into bite size chunks — task breakdown is all big projects are accomplished, so don’t despair. But it’s _really_ easy to slip into denial, and I guess right here, I’m arguing as hard as I know how: Look. See. If you are looking at a _literal_ toddler in a _literal_ fifty year old (or whatever), don’t be thinking, aw, that can’t be right. That could be right. From that point, you can then explore Well How Much Change Do I Need for This Relationship to Work and, probably more importantly, Is This Person Still On the Way Up Or Are They On the Way Down. If you can really understand yourself or the person you love (ideally, both! At the same time! Asking a lot here, I know!), you can engage in a problem solving process, which is exactly what a Personality Disordered Person characteristically does not do.