Category Archives: Conflict

The Introvert and the Extrovert:
“You always stay home!”

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“Pop” Mayan Collection by Mimi Stuart ©
Live the Life you Desire

The Introvert and the Extrovert

The terms introversion and extroversion were first coined by psychologist Carl Jung. Jung defines introversion is an inward-turning of libido away from others. The introvert relies principally on subjectivity — captivated by how and what he or she feels, senses or thinks.

In contrast, an extrovert’s inner life is subordinated to the external environment. The extrovert thrives on interacting with the outer world — different people and varied activities.

Excessive Introversion

Despite being in tune with nuanced inner perceptions, extreme introverts neglect to notice how those around them may feel and think. Even when introverts are attuned to the environment, their focus is primarily on their own internalized reactions to it.

When too little attention is paid to others, it may lead to an inability to empathize with others. Without putting oneself in other people’s shoes, it is difficult to intuit what is appropriate in a given situation. Ironically, despite the focus on internalized reactions, extreme introverts do not have a clear sense of self and awareness of their effect on others.

Extreme introversion can also lead to co-dependence in intimate relations because the introvert often becomes excessively dependent on the other person to act as an intermediary to the outside world.

Excessive Extroversion

Extroverts are generally perceived as normal in our American culture because they are comparatively adept at fitting into society, finding a job and making friends unless they become too pushy, nosy, talkative, or superficial.

Extreme extroverts exaggerate their rapport with others, adjust quickly to different people with the intention of making themselves interesting to those around them. They often lose their individuality to external enticements and demands. Sometimes this effusiveness will be compensated for by the onset of physical ailments, depression, or a feeling of emptiness within.

The tendency to be outward directed is often a symptom of a lack of introspection and awareness of the extrovert’s own subjective condition — e.g., fatigue, hunger, sadness, etc. Extroverts may unwittingly sacrifice their own physical, emotional, and psychological well-being to outward demands or distractions, as seen in workaholism, consumerism and extreme sports.

Jung points out that the extrovert’s tendency to take in more and more of the external world — excessive parties, work, food, or alcohol — can increase a feeling of inner poverty. Suppressing subjective awareness may also result in apathy or being scattered by too many interests. In extreme cases, all conscious action can become paralyzed, as for instance, by a nervous breakdown or depression.

Balance for the Introvert

Intraverts need to balance their inwardness with objectivity by increasing their awareness of and concern for the wants and desires of other people. They need to gradually engage in the world around them, rather than focus solely on their own inner responses. They may want to develop more acquaintances and friends, and engage in more communal activities.

They don’t need to become extroverts. But some ability to be engaged meaningfully in the world around them will actually deepen their inner world.

Balance for the Extrovert

Extroverts need to counterbalance extreme responsiveness to other people and external activities with inner depth. By spending some time alone and focusing inwardly, they can balance their outgoing nature with an awareness of their own inner needs, perceptions, and ideas.

Such inward reflection and solitude will add gravitas, depth and meaning to their relationships with others and their experience in the world.

Gradual Integration

While neither the introvert nor the extrovert should flip to the opposite, a gradual integration of some opposite qualities will bring wholeness to both the individual and his or her relationships. It is more effective to work on developing balance within ourselves than to force change in our partners.

Encouragement not Criticism

However, we can stop enabling the crippling effects of extreme introversion and extroversion in our partners. For instance, we can lovingly avoid acting as an intermediary for the introvert to the outside world by no longer always being the one to deal with people and make phone calls. We can show love for the extrovert without feeding the external frenzy, that is, without encouraging extreme behaviors involved in workaholism, over-consumption, and pursuing endless distractions.

We can also point out how our partner might benefit from bringing more balance to their lives. This, however, must be done with compassion, subtlety and discretion.

For instance, the introvert might compassionately say to the extrovert:

“How are you feeling? I’m worried that you are over-working and will get sick. It would make me happy if you would take care of yourself the way you take care of others.”

The extrovert might say to the introvert:

“I’m worried that you are spending too much time alone. Engaging in some activities with other people might bring you some balance. Why don’t you come with me to town tonight.”

Once we have spoken, it’s important not to control or manipulate the other person. It is self-empowering to recognize what part we play in the patterns of our relationships. Yet, this also lays on us the responsibility to stop demanding of our partners what we have to do for ourselves – gain more balance within ourselves.

by Alison Poulsen, PhD

Read “Opposites attract: ‘Can’t you ever stop and just sit down with me!’”

Read “I’ve fallen out of love with her.”

Read “Enantiadromia: ‘It drives my partner crazy that I’m ‘too’ polite. I think he is too blunt.’”

Opposites attract:
“Can’t you ever stop and just sit down with me!”

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“Muwan” Mayan Collection by Mimi Stuart ©
Live the Life you Desire

Long-term intimate relationships bring out a person’s strengths and weaknesses and therefore can offer tremendous opportunities for growth.

Development of personality traits

People tend to develop certain personality traits and habits as a way to thrive in their childhood environment. People become introverts or extroverts, serious or fun-loving, accommodating or contrarian in response to a confluence of factors. The culture we are raised in, family structure and dynamics, critical events, and genetic disposition all contribute significantly to the way we behave. For example, we may navigate through life by blending in and not making waves, by withdrawing into books and our own imagination, or by being active and engaging the people around us.

Undeveloped traits

Our primary personality traits feel as though they are who we are. “I am quiet.” “I am outgoing.” But they are only part of who we are—the part of us that is the most highly developed, the most practiced, and the most ingrained in our neuro-network.

As a result of developing certain qualities, we generally tend to neglect opposing qualities. For example, an introvert feels comfortable alone but awkward at social events. An extrovert feels comfortable with people, but feels bored and empty when there’s no outside stimulation.

Usually, we feel satisfied with our personality traits until life somehow reminds us of how limited we are. Trauma, tragedy, life struggles, and falling in or out of love are the most common events that challenge us to become more whole and balanced human beings. These are often the turning points in our lives.

Polarization

It so happens that we often fall in love with someone who holds some of the qualities we have neglected or pushed aside. After the initial stage of falling in love, people often polarize, that is, they step back into the personality traits they feel comfortable with and accentuate those qualities in response to their partners’ opposing qualities.

For example, the introvert complains, “Can’t you ever stop having a good time and just sit down with me?” While the extrovert retorts “Why don’t you ever talk to new people?”
When your primary personality traits are attacked, you become entrenched in the defensive. Each drives the other into more extreme positions, causing a downward spiral in the relationship. Questioning turns into attacking. “You never go out!” says the extrovert. “You can’t sit still!” says the introvert.

Finding Balance

Given sufficient necessity or desire to evolve, people have an opportunity to mitigate their extreme natures, to avert the frustration and disappointment that so often follows the fire of a romantic or intriguing beginning triggered by the attraction of those opposites. Here are three keys to developing balance in oneself and in the relationship.

1. Develop the other side.

We have to consciously work on ourselves to become more balanced if that is desired. Without swinging to the opposite extreme, we should consciously develop the other side. Someone who is sweet and accommodating should start making the difficult phone calls rather than asking his or her partner to do so, e.g., dealing with the lawyers and accountants, or making the call to someone who has charged too much. Someone who is tough and direct can try to show some compassion.

2. Honor the other person’s differences.

We must appreciate, and not belittle, our partner’s opposing personality trait. Contempt simply puts the other person on the defensive. People are more likely to risk change when they feel support and love.

3. Lovingly encourage the other person’s attempts to develop new trait.

We can encourage, but not force or manipulate, our partner to develop the new trait. Encouragement works best when it is light-hearted and lacks emotional heat or pressure. It is also important not to criticize or make fun of our partner when he or she is attempting new skills.

by Alison Poulsen, PhD

Read “The Introvert and the Extrovert: ‘You always stay home!’”

Read “Enantiadromia: ‘It drives my partner crazy that I’m ‘too’ polite. I think he is too blunt.’”

Read “He tells me to stop being so emotional. Does he want me to be cold and unfeeling like him?”

Guest Author Sam Vaknin, PhD:
“Please Don’t Leave me!”

When Your Abuser Becomes Codependent

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“Yax” Mayan Collection by Mimi Stuart ©
Live the Life you Desire

Sometimes, the breakup is initiated by the long-suffering spouse or intimate partner of the narcissist or psychopath. As she develops and matures, gaining in self-confidence and a modicum of self-esteem (ironically, at the narcissist’s behest in his capacity as her “guru” and “father figure”), she acquires more personal autonomy and refuses to cater to the energy-draining neediness of her narcissist: she no longer provides him with all-important secondary narcissistic supply (ostentatious respect, awe, adulation, undivided attention admiration, and the rehashed memories of past successes and triumphs.)

Typically, the roles are then reversed and the narcissist displays codependent behaviors, such as clinging, in a desperate attempt to hang-on to his “creation”, his hitherto veteran and reliable source of quality supply. These are further exacerbated by the ageing; narcissist’s increasing social isolation, psychological disintegration (decompensation), and recurrent failures and defeats.

But the question who did what to whom (and even why) is irrelevant. What is relevant is to stop mourning oneself, start smiling again and love in a less subservient, hopeless, and pain-inflicting manner.

On the face of it, there is no (emotional) partner or mate, who typically “binds” with a narcissist. They come in all shapes and sizes. The initial phases of attraction, infatuation and falling in love are pretty normal. The narcissist puts on his best face – the other party is blinded by budding love. A natural selection process occurs only much later, as the relationship develops and is put to the test.

Living with a narcissist can be exhilarating, is always onerous, often harrowing. Surviving a relationship with a narcissist indicates, therefore, the parameters of the personality of the survivor. She (or, more rarely, he) is moulded by the relationship into The Typical Narcissistic Mate/Partner/Spouse.

First and foremost, the narcissist’s partner must have a deficient or a distorted grasp of her self and of reality. Otherwise, she (or he) is bound to abandon the narcissist’s ship early on. The cognitive distortion is likely to consist of belittling and demeaning herself – while aggrandising and adoring the narcissist.

The partner is, thus, placing herself in the position of the eternal victim: undeserving, punishable, a scapegoat. Sometimes, it is very important to the partner to appear moral, sacrificial and victimised. At other times, she is not even aware of this predicament. The narcissist is perceived by the partner to be a person in the position to demand these sacrifices from her because he is superior in many ways (intellectually, emotionally, morally, professionally, or financially).

The status of professional victim sits well with the partner’s tendency to punish herself, namely: with her masochistic streak. The tormented life with the narcissist is just what she deserves.

In this respect, the partner is the mirror image of the narcissist. By maintaining a symbiotic relationship with him, by being totally dependent upon her source of masochistic supply (which the narcissist most reliably constitutes and most amply provides) the partner enhances certain traits and encourages certain behaviours, which are at the very core of narcissism.

The narcissist is never whole without an adoring, submissive, available, self-denigrating partner. His very sense of superiority, indeed his False Self, depends on it. His sadistic Superego switches its attentions from the narcissist (in whom it often provokes suicidal ideation) to the partner, thus finally obtaining an alternative source of sadistic satisfaction.

It is through self-denial that the partner survives. She denies her wishes, hopes, dreams, aspirations, sexual, psychological and material needs, choices, preferences, values, and much else besides. She perceives her needs as threatening because they might engender the wrath of the narcissist’s God-like supreme figure.

The narcissist is rendered in her eyes even more superior through and because of this self-denial. Self-denial undertaken to facilitate and ease the life of a “great man” is more palatable. The “greater” the man (=the narcissist), the easier it is for the partner to ignore her own self, to dwindle, to degenerate, to turn into an appendix of the narcissist and, finally, to become nothing but an extension, to merge with the narcissist to the point of oblivion and of merely dim memories of herself.

The two collaborate in this macabre dance. The narcissist is formed by his partner inasmuch as he forms her. Submission breeds superiority and masochism breeds sadism. The relationships are characterised by emergentism: roles are allocated almost from the start and any deviation meets with an aggressive, even violent reaction.

The predominant state of the partner’s mind is utter confusion. Even the most basic relationships – with husband, children, or parents – remain bafflingly obscured by the giant shadow cast by the intensive interaction with the narcissist. A suspension of judgement is part and parcel of a suspension of individuality, which is both a prerequisite to and the result of living with a narcissist. The partner no longer knows what is true and right and what is wrong and forbidden.

The narcissist recreates for the partner the sort of emotional ambiance that led to his own formation in the first place: capriciousness, fickleness, arbitrariness, emotional (and physical or sexual) abandonment. The world becomes hostile, and ominous and the partner has only one thing left to cling to: the narcissist.

And cling she does. If there is anything which can safely be said about those who emotionally team up with narcissists, it is that they are overtly and overly dependent.

The partner doesn’t know what to do – and this is only too natural in the mayhem that is the relationship with the narcissist. But the typical partner also does not know what she wants and, to a large extent, who she is and what she wishes to become.

These unanswered questions hamper the partner’s ability to gauge reality. Her primordial sin is that she fell in love with an image, not with a real person. It is the voiding of the image that is mourned when the relationship ends.

The break-up of a relationship with a narcissist is, therefore, very emotionally charged. It is the culmination of a long chain of humiliations and of subjugation. It is the rebellion of the functioning and healthy parts of the partner’s personality against the tyranny of the narcissist.

The partner is likely to have totally misread and misinterpreted the whole interaction (I hesitate to call it a relationship). This lack of proper interface with reality might be (erroneously) labelled “pathological”.

Why is it that the partner seeks to prolong her pain? What is the source and purpose of this masochistic streak? Upon the break-up of the relationship, the partner (but not the narcissist, who usually refuses to provide closure) engages in a tortuous and drawn out post mortem.

By Sam Vaknin, PhD, Author of “Malignant Self-love: Narcissism Revisited,” a comprehensive analysis of narcissism and abusive relationships.

Dreams and Nightmares:
“I had vivid dreams of my teeth falling out while the world was coming to an end.”

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"Roar" by Mimi Stuart ©
Live the Life you Desire

Dreams and nightmares often convey messages from the unconscious through images that have both archetypal and personal meaning to the dreamer. The more emotionally powerful or repetitive your dreams become, the more urgent is the message from the unconscious. As the degree of fear experienced in your dreams intensifies, it becomes increasingly critical to figure out what your unconscious is trying to tell you. What is it that is not working in your conscious life? What are you disowning or neglecting?

Dreams are often triggered by specific events occurring the day before the dream—events that may have gone unnoticed. It’s therefore helpful to ask oneself what happened the day before the nightmare. Did I stop myself from speaking up? Why did I lose my temper at the slightest provocation?

Look at the nuances in your dream, such as the specific people in it, the location of the dream, and sequence of events. The story of the dream can be viewed as a metaphor for what is going on in your psyche, with the different characters often representing different disowned aspects of yourself.

Dreams about teeth falling out:

Dreams about one’s teeth falling out are unpleasant and distressing. It’s a great relief to wake up from such a dream and find your teeth intact. Generally such dreams have to do with not being tough enough with others, not standing your ground, not being able to grit your teeth and say “no.” Baring one’s teeth is a symbol of aggression. Using your teeth to bite into food is key to taking in the nourishment you need. Even a bold smile requires the showing of teeth that are firmly in place. When your teeth fall out, there’s a loss of the strength needed for self-preservation. You have no bite, metaphorically speaking.

If this were my dream, I would ask myself how I might be experiencing loss, frustration, and impotence, or a lack of nourishment and sustenance. Am I unwilling to stand up for myself to obtain my needs, such as needed rest, respect, or support? I would consider how I could become more self-empowered.

Much of the meaning of a dream is found in the details. So it’s important to look at the setting of the dream. Other people or familiar locations may represent disowned parts of your personality. For instance, did your teeth start falling out right after you visited a house like the one your father used to live in? This could indicate that you lose your ability to stand up for yourself with people who may play a father figure in your current relationships or with people who might intimidate you.

Nightmares of the world ending:

Dreams of a natural catastrophe or the world ending should not be ignored. They often indicate that dramatic changes are occurring and that transformation of your psyche is necessary. When our way of being in the world is no longer working, our unconscious feels as though the world is ending. The dream uses images to symbolize the demise of the primary psychological structure. The old psychological framework isn’t working and is about to fall apart.

The more fear or terror you experience during the dream, the less control and peace of mind you have over the changes coming. When changes are thrust into our lives without our mindful awareness of what is going on, they can create illness, mayhem, or breakdown.

Yet, when we take notice of powerful dreams and listen to what our psyche needs, transitions in our lives will occur with less painful upheaval. Where there is an ending, there is also an opportunity to generate a new “world” by creating a more effective way of being in the world.

If this were my dream, I would ask myself how I could develop a more desirable way of relating to myself and others that would be more fulfilling to my soul. By figuring out what fundamental changes you need to make, you can foster positive growth with less turbulence and struggle. By taking the difficult steps of changing your patterned behavior, you can encourage the metamorphosis to occur with less pain and suffering.

Your dreams are telling you something. By paying attention to them you can turn peril into possibility.

by Alison Poulsen, PhD

Read “Inner Struggle: ‘I’m tired of giving in.’”

Read “Re-Visioning Psychology: ‘With all my psychological baggage, I feel like damaged goods.’”

Swearing and Yelling:
“STOP SWEARING and YELLING AT ME for #%&%’s SAKE!”

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"Come-backer" by Mimi Stuart ©
Live the Life you Desire

So what I really meant was…

“I’d like to help but I can’t do so if you swear at me or continue to raise your voice.”

In difficult situations staying calm will create an atmosphere that is least likely to escalate tempers. Issuing commands, yelling, or swearing back generally stokes the flames of anger and the argument will spiral out of control.

Yet, ignoring the swearing or yelling by continuing to help someone who is treating you inappropriately is not the answer. Never accept demeaning language or behavior as this will encourage more of it in the future.

If the other person grabs you by the arm, don’t lose your calm. Face him or her squarely and repeat your request, “Look, nothing is accomplished by shouting. Let’s sit down and discuss this in a civilized manner.”

If the angry person continues, you can repeat yourself one more time: “As I’ve said before, I do want to help, but I cannot do so if you raise your voice and swear at me. And if you continue, I will walk away.” Be prepared to do so.

If the behavior continues, quietly walk away.

by Alison Pouslen, PhD

Read “Defensiveness: ‘What do you mean by that? You’re always attacking me!’”

Read “Dealing with Angry People.”