Memento (movie)

Theres no definition in either your post nor Vaknins article.

Akuma wrote:There's no definition in either your post nor Vaknins article.

I'm sorry. I don't know how to explain it better, or more definitively.

EDIT: It was also discussed in the thread "Inner noise?". I think it's hard to explain to someone who doesn't have it (or hasn't recognized it yet?).

Truth too late wrote:

Akuma wrote:There's no definition in either your post nor Vaknins article.

I'm sorry. I don't know how to explain it better, or more definitively.

EDIT: It was also discussed in the thread "Inner noise?". I think it's hard to explain to someone who doesn't have it (or hasn't recognized it yet?).

Ah. I see now. This comes to a peculiarly fitting time, as I am just reading about the Kleinian perspective of that claustrophobic aspect of this "narrative".
Ah well. Memento remastered has magically manifested itself, I'll check it out later ^^

Akuma wrote:Ah. I see now. This comes to a peculiarly fitting time, as I am just reading about the Kleinian perspective of that claustrophobic aspect of this "narrative".
Ah well. Memento remastered has magically manifested itself, I'll check it out later ^^

Vaknin calls it a narrative or "inner dialogue." When I first read about it (after a year of accepting something was deeply wrong with me, assessing myself for a year) I knew exactly what it was. I always thought it was normal. Just what people do to get by. Filtering reality to be more flattering. I always hear people say "you can't love someone until you can love yourself." That's what I'm doing!

I don't know how to describe it. And, it may have been extraordinarily obvious to me due to the manner in which I faced myself (as described in the making connections thread I linked to above). There was no mistaking the seriousness of that specific incident. The clarity of it, and seeing how I've done it my whole life. For a year I struggled with understanding why. So, I chewed on it a lot, making it extremely part of my mission in life to understand. When I stumbled onto NPD it made a lot of sense. When I read Sam's descriptions of the narrative it didn't take long to see that part of me (as I understood all the parts).

Sam's essay talked about identifying the individual components (false self, true self, the parts of the narrative. He called it voices of the narrative. But, it's not voices.). That helped identify it too. That's when I had the weird feeling that I found myself in an empty room. Just my awareness, nothing else. It was frightening. I thought I lost it for a few moments. I think that was my first exposure to my true self. There wasn't much there. (I think I'm more like my true self now. For example, the departure of the feelings. That's more like the empty room. What I thought was normal feelings weren't part of my true self, and part of what I freaked out about when I isolated the true self the first time.).

I had that understanding of it. That the narrative is like an argument in the background of my consciousness. It exists right at the edge of unconscious. I know it's there, but I can't hit it directly like a fully-formed conscious thought or emotion. It's in another room. I don't hear a voice. But, it's something. It's like a mood that isn't mine. Like hearing a muffled tv in another room. Not making out actual words, but you can tell from the theme, tempo and tone what's going on. Somehow my mind (maybe giving rise to the false self, or the false self is acting upon it) turns it into my prevailing view. It's compulsive. How I view my place in the world. It gets between me and reality. I deal with people based upon this mood/vibe/tension/argument/noise/presence. I'm not entirely in the present, part of me is living in that thing. Or, I deal with people as if they're part of that thing.

It's temporal or ephemeral. It has a persistence which helps minimize reality over the long term. A longer-term rationalization. More of a "who/why I am" quality. Not the immediate "what I am" being applied real time.

I use the word "narrative" to describe both parts. The noise/vibe/mood/argument/presence seems to be what I often thought was ADD, hyper-vigilance. It's a reality-warping presence that affects real time existence. It's the filter between me and reality. Just a slight color which I thought everyone had. They do. But theirs isn't impervious to reality.

I would use Sam's word "confabulation" to describe the larger scope. The more persistent, historical filter. The selective elimination and amplification of history. Somehow this plays into the real-time existence.

I use "narrative" for both those things (I don't know what to call them). I originally intended "narrative" to refer to the interaction between the two. I gave up on making distinctions because it all seems to be the same thing. It's a presence of some kind. An embodiment of memories so that form something more than a memory. They can't be remembered. And they can't be forgotten. It's not a personality. But, it seems to have a realtime and historic effect (a memory of its own). It seems to exist in the false self -- but doesn't derive from it.

That's the reason I've said if BPD is named "borderline" because it is on the border with psychosis, then NPD seems to be on the border with schizophrenia. The narrative (as a process and influence) is at that border. It's like a low level of schizophrenia, not breaks. So low level you can live a productive life, etc. Not a full life.

That's my definition tonight. It's how I define the part of me that lets me reinterpret reality in realtime for a lifetime without seeing it. But, my situation may be different because, as I said at the top, my problem was focused clearly for me and I had a year to explore myself before everything made sense. That might be different than how people normally do it? (Therapy? Working on improved practices first?). I cracked first instead of a controlled discovery?

I saw another thread where I talked about it. You would have found it if you followed some links in the thread I linked to above. So, you might have already seen it.

That's the reason I've said if BPD is named "borderline" because it is on the border with psychosis, then NPD seems to be on the border with schizophrenia. The narrative (as a process and influence) is at that border. It's like a low level of schizophrenia, not breaks. So low level you can live a productive life, etc. Not a full life.

I agree. I watched my mother flirt with the edges of schizophrenia, let her delusion take her into totally crazy territory at times. But she never lost the lucid ability to hide her craziness from the outside world. She always put on a supremely "together" show in public. At one point she created for herself the same kind of cataclysmic event that you describe, Truth. She used the silent treatment on my dad for 2 years to force him to leave her so she could then play the role of "abandoned wife and mother." When he did actually leave her, it was the biggest shock of her entire life. But instead of slowly becoming self-aware, she nearly drove herself into full-blown schizophrenia, magnifying her delusions of grandeur, drowning in paranoia, becoming vicious to everyone around her. My sister had always been the golden child, but my mother even turned on her at this time. She came to a crossroads of her own making, and strongly chose to embrace her NPD so much that she nearly went over an edge. But she didn't have the physiological brain of a schizophrenic, so she could make her narrative real, no matter how hard she tried. She intensified the narrative. She whipped it up to fever pitch and imposed it on us 24/7 using every tool in her arsenal to force us to say her grandiose delusions were true. But she herself still knew they weren't true, and that was something she couldn't stand. She got her kids to believe it and to constantly tell her it was true, but she couldn't make herself believe it. I could see that in her eyes, and since I believed her, I could never understand why she didn't believe herself.

But when her cataclysm came, she couldn't find the courage to grab onto the little bit of honesty that would have shifted her into self-awareness and sanity, and the stress drove her to the edges of schizophrenia for sure.

I had my own experience with the BPD side of psychosis in response to this. My mother began beating on me every possible way, both emotionally and physically. For 9 months, kept me locked in her house and wouldn't even let me go out in the yard. She had my younger sister, the golden child, help her tell me what a monster I was over and over. I was not allowed to say a word, during all the time, for 9 months, unless she asked me a specific question that I had to give a one-word "right" answer to. She was punishing me the way she wanted to punish my dad. It was like something out of a horror movie. I'm a very naturally outgoing, people person, and I was forced to be closed up inside myself, hating myself, believing I was the terrible monster my mother had always taught me I was. I started fantasizing that I wasn't a monster, that I was actually someone special and good. The fantasy was so alluring that I couldn't resist it. I started living in that fantasy world in order to completely escape my mother. But BPDs/doormats/victims have this "brutal honesty" thing that we can't escape. So I put a test in my fantasy. If I were really this special person, then someone else would have to tell me it was true without me manipulating anything. When I finally got out of the house and got access to another human, I tried my test, and it failed miserably. I knew that my fantasy was fake, and I knew I had to never go into it again. I had to maintain my "brutal honesty." I realized that I had been on the edge of a psychotic break, that I had recognized what it was, and couldn't let myself go there.

It was a HUGE turning point for me. My mother was trying to make me mentally ill, to make me "worse" than her, to make herself feel normal and sane compared to me. In that moment I knew that I could not let my mother succeed, I had the power to stop myself from going down that path, and I chose to stop it. I think I never fully developed BPD because somehow I had the power inside myself to stop the craziness at a certain point. But it was one of the hardest things I've ever done, to pull myself back from that edge.

Truth too late wrote:... In order to forget one thing (which we couldn't deal with as a child), we spent our lives solving an unsolvable puzzle. We tried to remember everything to forget one thing.
...
That really describes the root of narcissism, the narrative, the delusion, the subtle choice we make repeatedly to continue because it's easier than facing that sense there's something wrong with us. ...

This is the kind of stuff that makes it feel like a song playing backwards.

I was reading a pretty good internet page about narcissism and saw the following:

Narcissists are too busy proving their worth--or, more properly, denying their worthlessness to feel the love, appreciation and joy of human connectedness which their good works could potentially stimulate in themselves and others.

That's another example of the ironies that affect me. Like, trying to forget one thing by remembering everything (compulsiveness, even if it's just hypervigilance). Affecting the one person I shouldn't have (because of their unique ability to reach me) -- but the only person who could reach me. Wishing it hadn't happened -- but glad it did.

The quoted text above isn't astonishing. But, it made me think about the unusual number of "ironies" which stand out because they signify loss of control, I suppose. It seems eerie. @Akuma mentioned claustrophobia. It could feel like that now that he mentioned it. These things make me feel like a buffer's gone (the coping mechanisms, source of supply.). I can see how that could be claustrophobic.

Those ironies used to cause an emotional sensation (shame, regret, longing, panic). Since my emotions subsided 3-4 weeks ago, it's more of a numb sense. Vulnerability without the fear.

I only mentioned it because reading that quote reminded me what I posted last night, and gave me that earthquake'ish irony feeling. It makes me a little disoriented.

Truth too late wrote:I only mentioned it because reading that quote reminded me what I posted last night, and gave me that earthquake'ish irony feeling. It makes me a little disoriented.

Here's another one. If amnesia is a loss of identity, then becoming self-aware could be called reverse amnesia. It's losing a large part of your actual identity. But, recovery -- not affliction.

That's the kind of irony I seem to notice a lot of. It's not ha-ha funny irony. It's like evil Zen. By going backwards you go forwards?

That stuff stands out to me for some reason.

So that was Memento. Ok movie, kinda predictable.
Dont see much NPD in it though, more like an absurd caricature of dissociative coping strategies.

On a sidenote, if you like non-linear movies you should check out Lost Highway.

Akuma wrote:On a sidenote, if you like non-linear movies you should check out Lost Highway.

Thanks, it sounds interesting. Now that you mention it, Two Days In The Valley and Mullhuland Drive sound like similar irony-producing plots and metaphoric meanings.

Akuma wrote:an absurd caricature of dissociative coping strategies.

One man's absurd is another man's metaphor of reality.

Akuma wrote:On a sidenote, if you like non-linear movies you should check out Lost Highway.

I just watched it. That's 4th dimension stuff. Don't get me going on that again. (Too late. You already did. If I choose to stop talking about it, a copy will continue in another universe. Thanks a lot.).

I'll never look at table corners the same way. And, I believe I have finally seen Michael Jackson's biological father. (Robert Blake was perfect for that role.).

The only thing which reminded me of my traits was when he said he didn't own a video camera, he "likes to remember things my own way." That sounded like my inner dialog. The delusion.