shanzeek wrote:I don't think Quoth was trying to shift the blame from the abuser. (were you, Quoth?)
Sorry for the delay. No of course I wasn’t.
Frankly reading through the responses I have to wonder who or what most are responding to. I certainly wasn’t placing all the blame on the victim and I didn’t even mention narcissistic abuse, so god knows how that came up. I thought we were talking generally about toxic relationships. I suspect that you have to have want me to have said those things to think I did.
I’ll do one big post to clarify my position in regards to the points raised.
Vulnerability not strength is the primary risk factor for the presence of abuse.
I say this because the last 40 years of psychotraumatology tells me so, see the works of Judith Herman and James Chu who are to the best of my knowledge the current authorities on intrarelationship trauma.
I know that most people who get into long term relationships with people with PDs and are on the receiving end of abuse often have psychiatric issues of their own, which often includes personality disorders, that plays into the toxic dynamic. see the work of Professor Mark Allen who specialises in relationships involving BPD and NPD.
In fact any charitable organisation which deals with either the protection of children, disabled people or the victims of domestic violence, will all say the same thing, that vulnerability is proportional abuse.
The lack of boundaries and the tendency to accept another persons perception of reality over ones own is related to a lack of self esteem and low ego integrity. It also doesn’t equate to cooperation. In the more extreme cases where regression and dependence are seen it is related to traits of BPD and DPD.
Next for codependency. It derives from the experiences of AA councillors dealing with the enabling behaviours in the partners of substance abusers. Attempts have been made since at least the early 80s to have it acknowledged as an axis II disorder. All formulations of codependency centre around the concept of an individual who becomes reliant upon the approval of another in order to regulate their own self esteem and sense of identity. It is associated with “a high level of neuroticism and low level of openness and agreeableness” and a greater vulnerability to stress(Panaghi, 2016) and childhood emotional abuse, negative problem orientation and increased conflict avoidance (Bell, 2015). As became to be applied other relationship problems, the original formulations were avoided due to the shame they inflicted on the patient, and codependency was explained in terms of insecure attachment.
In terms of toxic relationships co-dependency has an alter ego in the form of counter dependency. Counter dependency is an avoidant attachment style driven by lack of trust in others rather than a lack of trust in self. Counterdependency is characterised by having “having emotional suppression, idealization of relationships, strong work ethic, a caregiver role-identity, and self-reliance.” (Gregory, 1999) there are also more pop-psych definitions which differ.
Example:https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/theory-knowledge/201404/signs-counter-dependency
The important points being that both often exist during toxic relationships, people can often switch roles and both are built around similar neurosis. Arguably a toxic relationship with someone with a cluster B disorder can push you into a form of dependency but I personally don’t think counter/co dependency could be used as descriptors of those with a PD themselves. For example BPD isn’t just insecure attachment it’s primary driver is the need for a surrogate caregiver with which they attempt to psychically merge to compensate for the lack of affection shown in childhood. Counter and co-dependency are fundamentally unstable, non-pervasive and , if people recognise them as a problem, fixable. Where as it is the tendency of PDs to construct everything in accordance with its emotional compensations which makes them stable, pervasive and mostly incapable of the self-perception required for change through traditional psychotherapy.
Not to mention we know why pwNPD do what they do. Their ego failed to form properly so to compensate for it’s lack of integrity they denied reality and developed a fragile and grandiose false self which requires external validation to sustain. Their exploitation of others is simple a combination of motivation, lack of deterrent and opportunity.
As an aside I had to seek therapeutic help for dependency issues I had in relation to my mother when I was in my mid 20s. My mother was born with a serious physical disability and as the result of some fairly nasty abuse also developed psychiatric problems similar to BPD. As a child I was her primary carer so it’s fairly obvious how such a situation could lead to dependency. I certainly thought of myself as self sacrificing and noble, however each time I went away and came back home I found that I would revert to a ‘child-like’ subservient state as if all the personal growth that had happened in between had been undone. It was a university psychologist who pointed out to me that my mothers abusive behaviour was playing into my own low self esteem and that I was compensating by trying to attain her approval which in turn made me vulnerable to more abuse and creating a vicious cycle. It was a bitter pill to swallow but insight based change usually is. Being able to break the cycle changed our relationship from toxic to merely complicated. There isn’t ever going to be when I don’t view her antics such as throwing boiling water, threatening me with bleach and actually using pesticide, as anyone’s fault but her own. However by understanding and accepting the unpalatable nature of my role in our relationship and in taking back control it has provided the distance to understand her behaviour and perhaps to be able to see the times she was a good mother alongside those times she wasn’t.
Clearly it didn’t change the compulsive need to fix situations/people, as evidence by the collection of what my friends refer to as ‘waifs and strays’, which make up my romantic history. It did mean I got throw a 2 year relationship with a volatile girl with BPD relatively unscathed because it’s difficult to play games with someone who refuses to assume the expected role. That it ended was a result of the realisation that she, like the rest of cluster B, lacked what I wanted from a relationship.
I’ll explain what I meant by agency and not validating delusions using a paraphrase of an example found in Herman’s trauma and recovery: A rape victim goes out and has sex with random strangers as a form of acting out to alleviate the effects of PTSD. She says that what the rapist did to her makes her do this, which is self-delusion that makes her feel better. But the delusion plays into the behaviour which in turn increases the guilt and self hatred which provides emotional impetus to sustain the delusion. The other example Herman uses is the traumatised soldier who emotionally deregulates and beats his wife. As with EE’s ‘he’s pulling me in’ business. Clearly he wasn’t but she externalised the emotional reaction as part of his agency rather than hers.
It is necessary to recognise that where the abusers agency ends and yours begins. None of us can choose the hand were dealt but we can choose how we play it. Personally I would not regard, ‘support’ which plays into those cycles, emotionally satisfying though it may be, as particularly useful.
As for abuse, it is fundamentally about control. In my experience dealing with PTSD, if you allow the other person to distort reality in any way you just end up giving them more control. Best case scenario you become invested in the idealised view of self and devaluation of them, but as with the narcs themselves a false self is incapable of insight and thus can neither heal nor grow, just become more elaborate.
Blame doesn’t really enter into it, my own support group’s phrase is ‘owning your situation’, the greater capacity for which an individual has, the better they usually do. An alternative phrasing could be ‘engagement with your situation as it exists not as you want it to exist’. Tbh this probably true of every health problem in existence but the nature of trauma disorders make it particularly relevant. There isn’t anything you can do about people and the unpleasant things they do, but the choice will always be one of failing because of it, or succeeding in spite of it. That isn’t victim blaming
I’m not saying it’s easy, I know from experience that it isn’t, but it is simple
Shanzeek if codependency is the legacy of your past just as ptsd is mine, my suggestion would be to own it rather than idealise it and maybe by doing so be able to do something to correct/manage it. Seek help for it, get the substance abuse under control if it isn’t already and focus on positively moving forward. That which you take responsibility for, you control and until you do it’s always something that was done to you controlling that aspect of your life.
My personal take is that idealising self and devaluing others is a good recipe for becoming bitter and twisted, rather than getting on and dealing with the problems you have. I tried getting pissed off about what had happened to me, it doesn’t work. I can muster up a general crabbiness but if nothing else I’d rather spend my energies in a more useful.
I’m not about to take one persons account as the gospel truth because experience tells me that in relationship problems it is not always the victim which cries abuse, and that sometimes it’s abuser against abuser or victim against victim. I don’t fancy the idea of giving advice which could potentially damage a vulnerable person.
I don’t believe in narcissistic abuse because I see no reason to believe that the effects of emotional abuse differs radically with the mental pathology of the abuser. That is not to say that people with NPD are not abusive, just that NPD does not predetermine abuse and that the effects of that abuse,when it does exist, doesn’t differ radically from those of someone with say BPD.
Oh and I used ‘find that argument unsatisfying’ as a polite way of saying i my view it was 90% fiction. The remark about trauma disorders was because the phrase ‘thank you captain obvious’ was a little too cliche. And until such time that psychforums tells me that it is policy to only allow those opinions consistent with the personal truth of its staffers, I’ll consider myself free to differ.
I think that’s clarified everything that possibly could have been and I don’t think there is anything there which is inherently offensive.
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