Tag Archives: abuse

Codependence by GUEST AUTHOR SAM VAKNIN, PhD:
Issues and Goals in the Treatment of Dependent Personality Disorder

Posted on by
1

"Mayan Haab Calendar" by Mimi Stuart ©

“Mayan Haab Calendar” by Mimi Stuart ©

Guest Author SAM VAKNIN, PhD:

You have been diagnosed with Dependent Personality Disorder (Codependence, or Codependency) and you have decided to attend therapy. Here is a brief guide to the personal issues that you should tackle and the goals that you and your therapist should aspire to.

ISSUE 1

The codependent patient has alloplastic defenses and an external locus of control: though she believes that she is in full control of her life, her behavior is mostly reactive and she is buffeted by circumstances and decisions made by other people – hence her tendency to blame the outside world for every misfortune, mishap, and defeat she endures. She rarely takes responsibility for her choices and actions and is frequently surprised and resentful when faced with the consequences of her misconduct.

The patient is convinced that she is worthless and bad, a loser and no-good. She is masochistically self-destructive and self-defeating in her romantic relationships. These propensities are compounded by a predilection to decompensate and act out, sometimes violently, when her defences fail her.

GOAL 1

To develop autoplastic defences and an internal locus of control: to learn to assume responsibility for her actions and refrain from self-destructive and self-defeating behaviors.

ISSUE 2

Having been deprived of it in her childhood, the patient is on a perpetual quest for ideal love: motherly, protective, engulfing, omnipresent, and responsive. Her mate should be handsome, sexy, and should draw attention from and elicit envy. He should be fun to be with and intelligent, although passive, malleable, compliant, and subservient.

Yet, the typical codependent has been exposed only to transactional and conditional love from her parents: love was granted in return for meeting their unrealistic and, therefore, inevitably frustrating expectations.

Such patients resort to fantasy and develop a deficient reality test when it comes to their romantic liaisons. The patient lacks self-awareness and sets conflicting goals for her intimate partners: they are supposed to provide sex, intimacy, companionship and friendship – but also agree to be objectified and to self-deny in order to fulfill their roles in the codependent’s “film”.

GOAL 2

To develop realistic expectations regarding love, romance, and relationships as well as relationship skills.

ISSUE 3

The narcissistic codependent idealizes her intimate romantic partners and then devalues them. She seeks to “mold” and “sculpt” them to conform to her vision of the relationship. She deprives them of their self-autonomy and makes all decisions for them. In other words: she treats them as objects, she objectifies them. Such a patient is also a verbal and, at times, physical abuser. This impoverishes her relationships and hinders the development of real intimacy and love: there is no real sharing, no discourse, common interests, or joint personal growth.

Owing to the patient’s insecure attachment style and abandonment/separation anxiety, she tends to cling to her partner, monopolize his time, smother him, and secure his presence and affection with material gifts (she is a compulsive giver.) As she holds himself worthless and a loser, she finds it hard to believe that any man would attach to her voluntarily, without being bribed or coerced to do so. She tends to suspect her partner’s motives and is somewhat paranoid. She is possessive and romantically jealous, though not exceedingly so. This environment tends to foster aversions in her romantic partners.

GOAL 3

To develop a productive and healthy attachment style and learn relationship skills.

ISSUE 4

The codependent’s proclaimed desire for stability, safety, predictability, and reliability conflicts with her lifestyle which is itinerant, labile, chaotic, and involves addictive and reckless behaviors. Her need for drama, excitement, and thrill (adrenaline junkie) extends to her romantic relationships. Owing to her low threshold for boredom and multiple depressive, dysphoric, anhedonic, and anergic episodes, she seeks distractions and the partner to provide them. She, therefore, shows a marked preference for men with mental health issues who are likely to lead disorganized lives and to react to her abuse dramatically and theatrically.

GOAL 4

Learn how to choose partners who would bring stability and safety into the relationship and how to interact with them constructively. Learn anger management skills.

ISSUE 5

The narcissistic codependent has strong narcissistic defenses, especially when it comes to maintaining her grandiosity with the aid of narcissistic supply. She needs to feel chosen and desired (a flip coin of and antidote to her fear of rejection); be the centre of attention (vicariously, via her intimate partner); and to conform to expectations, values, of judgments or her peer group, relatives, and other role models and reference figures. See: Inverted Narcissist.

GOAL 5

To develop a more realistic assessment of herself and her romantic partners and, thus, reduce her dependence on narcissistic defences and narcissistic supply.

by SAM VAKNIN, PhD, Author of “Malignant Self-love: Narcissism Revisited” — a comprehensive analysis of narcissistic personality disorder and correlated abuse.

Read “I Can’t Live Without Him/Her” by Sam Vaknin, PhD.

Read “I am Terrified that S/he will Abandon Me! I will Do Anything to Avoid It!” by Sam Vaknin, PhD.

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

When Your Abuser Becomes Codependent

Posted on by
1

“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.

Guest Author Sam Vaknin, PhD
“I can’t seem to be able to protect my child from the other parent’s narcissistic bad influence.”

Posted on by
Reply

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

Your child is likely to come across all kinds of people in his future. Some of them will be abusive, narcissistic, or even antisocial (psychopaths.) In a way, early exposure to a dysfunctional “bad” parent will render your child better prepared to cope with them, more alert to their existence and chicanery and more desensitized to their abuse.

For this you should be grateful.

There is nothing much you can do, otherwise. Stop wasting your money, time, energy and emotional resources on this intractable “problem” of how to insulate your son from the other parent’s influence. It is a lost war, though a just cause. Instead, make yourself available to your son.

The only thing you can do to prevent your son from emulating the other parent is to present to him another role model of a functioning NON-narcissist, NON-abuser, NON-psychopath – YOU. Hopefully, when he grows up, he will prefer your role model to the other parent’s. But there is only that much that you can do. You cannot control the developmental path of your child. Exerting unlimited control over your progeny is what narcissism is all about – and is exactly what you should avoid at all costs, however worried you might be.

Parental narcissism, abuse, and psychopathy do tend to breed narcissism, abusive conduct, and antisocial traits and behaviors – but not inevitably.

Consider the narcissistic parent, for instance:

Not all the off-spring of a narcissist inexorably become narcissists.

The true, narcissistic parent does tend to produce another narcissist in his or her child. But this outcome can be effectively countered by loving, empathic, predictable, just, and positive upbringing, which encourages a sense of autonomy and responsibility. Provide your child with an alternative to his other parent’s venomous and exploitative existence. Trust your son to choose life over death, love over narcissism, human relations over narcissistic supply.


by Sam Vaknin, PhD, the author of “Malignant Self-love: Narcissism Revisited” — a far-reaching book about Narcissistic Personality Disorder and abusive behavior — and other books about personality disorders.

Read “Triangulation: ‘My ex can’t stop complaining about me to my child. I feel like doing the same right back.’”

“I’m his biggest fan and he treats me like a slave.”

Posted on by
2

"Opus 76 by Haydn" by Mimi Stuart ©
Live the Life you Desire

Isn’t it curious that some people tend to become more critical, cold, and cruel with the very people who champion them the most? Why would someone treat their admirers worse than their critics?

People who devalue their biggest supporters — often their partner — resent the fact that they feel so dependent on that support. In fact, they may be addicted to their dependency, and for that reason, they simultaneously feel bitter about it.

They don’t like feeling helpless. They don’t like needing support and praise. They don’t like counting on you for their self-esteem.

Yet, they don’t have the fortitude to stop relying on you for services, accolades, and admiration. They belittle you so as not to appear needy. They despise their own weakness and you become the physical manifestation of that weakness.

By devaluing the sources of said supply (his spouse, his employer, his colleague, his friend) he ameliorates the dissonance.

~Sam Vaknin, PhD

Understanding why someone might treat you like a slave does not mean you should continue to act like one, or to accept the treatment. So the real question is why would you continue to be a fan of his if he treats you or anyone like a slave?

Anaïs Nin wisely pointed out that “We don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are.” It may be time for you to step back from your role as an admiring slave and to view people as they are in their entirety, to admire those who are more worthy of admiration, and to create your own life-opus.

by Alison Poulsen, PhD

Read Guest Author Sam Vaknin, PhD “’Should I Stay Or Should I Leave?’ The Tremendous Costs of Staying with an Abusive Person with Narcissistic Personality Disorder.”

Read “Overfunctioning and underfunctioning:’If I don’t take care of things, nothing will ever get done.’”

Read “Respect each other: ‘He’s always talking down to me.’”

Guest Author Sam Vaknin, PhD:
“I feel bad even though the abuse has stopped.”

Posted on by
1

"Purple Heart" by Mimi Stuart ©
Live the Life you Desire

So, you have mustered courage and left the abusive relationship. Why do you still feel so bad, so down, and so sick at heart? Repeated abuse has long lasting pernicious and traumatic effects such as panic attacks, hypervigilance, sleep disturbances, flashbacks (intrusive memories), and suicidal ideation.

Victims and survivors experience psychosomatic and “real” bodily symptoms, some of them induced by the secretion of stress hormones such as cortisol: increased blood pressure, racing pulse, headaches, excessive sweating and myriad self-imputed diseases. The victims endures shame, depression, anxiety, embarrassment, guilt, humiliation, abandonment, and an enhanced sense of vulnerability.

Surprisingly, verbal, psychological, and emotional abuse have the same effects as the physical variety [Psychology Today, September/October 2000 issue, p.24]. Abuse of all kinds also interferes with the victim’s ability to work. Still, it is hard to generalise. Victims are not a uniform lot. In some cultures, abuse is commonplace and accepted as a legitimate mode of communication, a sign of love and caring, and a boost to the abuser’s self-image. In such circumstances, the victim is likely to adopt the norms of society and avoid serious trauma.

Deliberate, cold-blooded, and premeditated torture has worse and longer-lasting effects than abuse meted out by the abuser in rage and loss of self-control. The existence of a loving and accepting social support network is another mitigating factor. Finally, the ability to express negative emotions safely and to cope with them constructively is crucial to healing.

Typically, by the time the abuse reaches critical and all-pervasive proportions, the abuser had already, spider-like, isolated his victim from family, friends, and colleagues. She is catapulted into a nether land, where reality itself dissolves into a continuing nightmare.

When she emerges on the other end of this wormhole, the abused woman (or, more rarely, man) feels helpless, self-doubting, worthless, stupid, and a guilty failure for having botched her relationship and “abandoned” her “family”. In an effort to regain perspective and avoid embarrassment, the victim denies the abuse or minimizes it.

No wonder that survivors of abuse tend to be clinically depressed, neglect their health and personal appearance, and succumb to boredom, rage, and impatience. Many end up abusing prescription drugs or drinking or otherwise behaving recklessly.

Dr. Judith Herman of Harvard University has proposed a new mental health diagnosis to account for the impact of extended periods of trauma and abuse: C-PTSD (Complex PTSD).

The first phase of PTSD involves incapacitating and overwhelming fear. The victim feels like she has been thrust into a nightmare or a horror movie. She is rendered helpless by her own terror. She keeps re-living the experience through recurrent and intrusive visual and auditory hallucinations (“flashbacks”) or dreams. In some flashbacks, the victim completely lapses into a dissociative state and physically re-enacts the event while being thoroughly oblivious to her whereabouts.

In an attempt to suppress this constant playback and the attendant exaggerated startle response (jumpiness), the victim tries to avoid all stimuli associated, however indirectly, with the traumatic event. Many develop full-scale phobias (agoraphobia, claustrophobia, fear of heights, aversion to specific animals, objects, modes of transportation, neighbourhoods, buildings, occupations, weather, and so on).

Most PTSD victims are especially vulnerable on the anniversaries of their abuse. They try to avoid thoughts, feelings, conversations, activities, situations, or people who remind them of the traumatic occurrence (“triggers”).

This constant hypervigilance and arousal, sleep disorders (mainly insomnia), the irritability (“short fuse”), and the inability to concentrate and complete even relatively simple tasks erode the victim’s resilience. Utterly fatigued, most patients manifest protracted periods of numbness, automatism, and, in radical cases, near-catatonic posture. Response times to verbal cues increase dramatically. Awareness of the environment decreases, sometimes dangerously so. The victims are described by their nearest and dearest as “zombies”, “machines”, or “automata”.

The victims appear to be sleepwalking, depressed, dysphoric, anhedonic (not interested in anything and find pleasure in nothing). They report feeling detached, emotionally absent, estranged, and alienated. Many victims say that their “life is over” and expect to have no career, family, or otherwise meaningful future.

The victim’s family and friends complain that she is no longer capable of showing intimacy, tenderness, compassion, empathy, and of having sex (due to her post-traumatic “frigidity”). Many victims become paranoid, impulsive, reckless, and self-destructive. Others somatize their mental problems and complain of numerous physical ailments. They all feel guilty, shameful, humiliated, desperate, hopeless, and hostile.

PTSD need not appear immediately after the harrowing experience. It can – and often is – delayed by days or even months. It lasts more than one month (usually much longer). Sufferers of PTSD report subjective distress (the manifestations of PTSD are ego-dystonic). Their functioning in various settings – job performance, grades at school, sociability – deteriorates markedly.

What can you do about it?

The short and long of it is: seek professional help. You cannot cope with the aftermath of harrowing abuse all by yourself. The prognosis in case of treatment – even brief treatment – is good: PTSD can be alleviated and eliminated.

Second: re-connect with friends and family. Make amends where necessary. Re-establish your network of emotional support and share, share, share. The more you share, the easier the burden.


by Sam Vaknin, PhD, the author of “Malignant Self-love: Narcissism Revisited” – an excellent, comprehensive book about Narcissistic Personality Disorder and abusive behavior – and other books about personality disorders.

Read “Traumas as Social Interactions” by Dr. Sam Vaknin.

Read “I Attract Abusers Like a Magnet” by Dr. Sam Vaknin.

Watch “Self-Respect: How to Avoid becoming a Doormat” by Alison Poulsen, PhD.