“How can I deal with a person who tells the same story over and over about someone who hurt her 20 years ago? Also she gossips about me even though I have asked her many times to stop.”
Verbal restraint is a virtue
Your friend’s problem is that she cannot contain her feelings and thoughts when it is appropriate to do so. She cannot resist her impulse to express whatever will get the attention she is desperately seeking. She does not try to restrain herself from venting her feelings of victimhood and from gossiping about other people’s lives despite the toxicity of such behavior.
The bottom line is that she is seeking attention in unhealthy ways and the solution for you is to stop enabling her.
Broken record—victim story
Individuals who continuously vent and complain about a past incident are psychologically stuck and seek relief by venting. Like having a cigarette, the relief from their anxiety is only temporary, and the long-term effects are harmful.
If you can, it is worth telling her in a compassionate way that telling the same story continuously will not help the situation, and in fact will keep her from dealing with the underlying issue and moving on. She is defining herself as a victim, and thereby limiting her own life. Perhaps suggest that some counseling would help her.
You might also gently tell her that she is causing others to see her as unempowered. If she could try to contain her resentment by focusing on improving her life, she would open up new possibilities in her life—talking about interesting ideas, for example, and hearing about other people’s pursuits and passions. As a result, she might feel less need of getting attention for being a victim.
It takes guts to say things like this, but it can be extremely helpful if you do so with compassion.
However, she may not have a strong enough sense of self to take such poignant input, in which case, she will be hurt and angry and you may have to limit your exposure to her. You can emphasize that you are not trying to be judgmental, but that you just want the best for her and therefore wanted to make a helpful observation.
An easier, alternative response is to say something like, “ I have heard this before,” each time she tries to bring up the same old story, and then change the subject to something more inspiring. This may not stop her from venting to others, but over time she might become aware of her tendency to repeat herself.
The simple act of denying her a sympathetic ear may be the best solution because in this case, listening sympathetically without challenging her is harmful enabling behavior. So you may ultimately have to distance yourself from her and the relationship.
How to stop gossip about you
Since your friend is disclosing too much about your life even though you have asked her not to, you need to keep your personal life private! Everyone makes the occasional mistake saying something they should not have. However, you cannot trust someone who continues to talk about you and your private life in spite of your specific requests not to do so. It’s fine to keep her as a casual friend, but do not disclose to her anything personal that you wouldn’t want circulated.
You may want to consider distancing yourself from her. Make other friends, and don’t disclose private details about your life until you really know, trust and are intimate with them.
George MacDonald’s saying is so true: “Few delights can equal the mere presence of one we utterly trust.”
When a person who has cheated someone is ashamed, the wronged person becomes a perpetual and painful reminder of that shameful behavior. Consequently, perpetrators often become annoyed and angry with their victims.
To reconcile their bad behavior with their self-image, perpetrators will distort facts about the victim in order to rationalize and excuse their own actions. As Rudyard Kipling wrote, “Of all the liars in the world, sometimes the worst are our own fears.” Thus, the fear of self-loathing that would result from honest self-assessment may drive a wrongdoer to fabrication.
If you are being blamed for something you didn’t do, defend yourself without sounding defensive. Avoid viewing yourself as a victim, but also consider how your own demeanor and actions may have contributed in allowing someone to cheat you.
We often dwell on specific, painful and negative events from our childhood.
“My mom passed out from drinking every night.”
“My dad hit me if I didn’t get straight As.”
“I hoard stuff because I grew up poor.”
Our childhood circumstances do affect us in many powerful ways. We should not glibly gloss over the past and thereby try to repress our anger, pain, or our heartfelt desires.
Yet we often create a story around our upbringing that actually constrains our lives by turning us into a lifelong victim.
Living in the past
Our interpretation of what happened and why we ended up the way we are is partly a work of fiction. More importantly, when we repeat the same stories to ourselves and others, we trap ourselves into being victims of our past.
Why do people reiterate the same simplistic, deterministic stories that interfere with their free will and personal responsibility, boring themselves and others? Because it is easy and comforting to do so. It gets us off the hook for taking responsibility for our lives. It is difficult and challenging to use fresh thinking instead of making excuses for our current situation by living in the past.
Personal responsibility
Of course you had bad luck in having an abusive parent, and no child is responsible for the bad behavior of their parent. Nonetheless we do grow up and develop strength and capabilities that allow us to make choices that determine a new path for our future.
Yes, some people had a tougher childhood than others. Yet the best way for all people to free themselves from the shackles of the past is by freeing themselves from their victim story. This means taking personal responsibility for the choices we make in life.
Healing fiction
Once we grow up, we have the choice to let go of the histories we cling to. Rather than thinking of yourself as a victim of your family dysfunction, you could think of yourself as someone who has learned important lessons during childhood, finding inner courage and resilience as a result. You could view your experience of pain and hardship as the way in which you developed your inner strength and your dreams.
You can use your creative intelligence and wisdom to look at your life through a new prism. When you transform the story about your past, you create an opportunity to direct your future. By becoming one who has successfully overcome past challenges, you invite inner strength and vitality into your life. Continued Evolution
We should continue to beware of clinging to our new story, however, even if it is one of redemption, recovery, or triumph over wrong-doing. Any story reiterated automatically becomes stale and thus prevents evolution, innovation, and inspiration in our lives.
Say you have overcome a miserable childhood by developing tremendous optimism. In general this will be a productive and positive way to improve your life. However, if tackling everything with optimism becomes the new story with which you identify, it may prevent you from becoming angry, having boundaries, making a complaint, or making an important change. Your story of optimism only allows you to conquer any difficult circumstances with a positive attitude. But even such a positive outlook can lead to naiveté, possible harm, and lack of growth when it is the only tool in your tool box. Always keep a place for standing up for yourself.
Therefore, it is wise not to allow one particular story to become the rigid definition of who you are, no matter how positive that story may appear to be.
You have been diagnosed withDependent 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.
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.
