*Random Thoughts*: Sobriety, Therapy, Narcissism, Evolution

Things Pouring Through my Mind

Photo by Brandon Morgan on Unsplash

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I posted a 54-minute audio speaking post (monologue) about tribalism, politics, culture, yesterday. Took a day or two of notes, riffed randomly, read notes and selections from Emerson, Orwell, Trilling, etc. Too much [literal] throat-clearing, but I generally came from a kind, intelligent, thoughtful perspective. Of course I’m nervous, even though I turned “comments” OFF. I doubt many people will actually listen to the full 54 minutes, but who knows. Hoping for more. I have to admit I enjoyed doing it. I recorded it as a voiceover on Substack.

We had therapy yesterday, our 5^th or 6^th session, something round there. We both like her (our therapist) a lot. She’s good, and even has a similar former background to us, drinking/drugs etc. Last night she helped me realize something about myself: My need for control stems from feeling out of control with my mom as a kid. Mom felt angry and emotionally tumultuous and narcissistic, and Dad was an emotional blank slate. So I never felt seen and heard and that “Little Boy Michael” is still inside of me and he screams and pouts and wants things his way. Ultimately what she helped me grasp is that in the deepest sense what I’m afraid of is being “left” by Britney.

Similarly—and ironically—B is also afraid in a similar way. Her parents never saw/see her and they deny her feelings and experience. Denial. Our therapist referred to it as gaslighting and narcissism, and referred to B’s mom as a “narcissist abuser.” That feels a little too harsh to me, but then again, I’d describe my mother in these terms (along with positive glowing traits/terms), and my mom and her folks seem similar in some ways. Both lack the emotional sophistication to SEE their own flaws and faults, and to listen with love and compassion to what their kids are needing. And they always have, which is why we’re the way we are to a fairly large degree.

And of course we love our parents with great, wild dollops of warmth. They are totally and profoundly good people genuinely doing the very best they can. I know I owe my mom a lot, on many levels. And we’re very close. Especially after my father’s recent death. B and I are adults, no longer allowed the excuse that “Mom and Dad” didn’t fill-in-the-blank. I am not self-victimizing or casting blame on our parents. Rather, I am acknowledging the simple fact that we come, psychologically, from emotional chaos, and this drove us to drink and drug, and incentivized us to shift towards specific cognitive and emotional centers where, when push comes to shove, we sometimes still go.

Our parents are no longer at fault. We make our own choices. We can sit in stagnancy, or we can change. At a certain point you have to let go of Who Did What and just decide to be who you want to be NOW. Yet who we are now is largely dependent on who we’ve been and what we come from. This leaves us with doing the emotional and therapeutic work necessary to breaking through barriers and seeing oneself with more clarity than once thought possible.

We’re running around seeking love and validation and not getting it and so we turn to control as a result. B’s parents’ refusal to face reality or to actually SEE B means that B grew up feeling totally unseen, unheard, unacknowledged, essentially dismissed. That’s why she gets so angry sometimes and throws shit at me: She needs me to SEE and HEAR her. Because her folks can’t and don’t. B has said often that she “feels like a Joke.”

She blames this on a particular friend, and she plays a part, for sure, but the deeper thing is her parents. Mom and Step-dad, and Dad too. Her mom gets very uncomfortable when serious subjects come up, anything sexual or non-superficial. She changes the subject. She’s emotionally anorexic. She’s codependent with her step-dad, and has always, according to B, relied more on her step-dad and been more concerned with her step-dad than her own daughter. That is very, very sad.

And my mom has always been unable to look at her own narcissism, her own emotional rejections of me, the things that make her uncomfortable. Protecting herself has always been more important to my mom than protecting me. Sadly. I wish desperately that this wasn’t the case but it is. And my father always put protecting himself from conflict and from tough emotional choices before protecting me. So in the end no one was looking out for me emotionally, and in many cases even physically.

It’s no surprise, then, that I turned to alcohol. Something had to give. I couldn’t survive on blankness, on the confusion of survivors, people who were obsessed with protecting themselves because they’d grown up with their own sordid childhoods wherein they weren’t protected or seen/heard. Generational trauma: The sick, sad cycle.

And then B and I get caught up—like flies in a nasty web—in our own emotional dysfunction, because look at what we learned all our lives: We learned that protecting our parents and making sure the outside looked good came above all other needs, including our own emotional needs. We learned to wear social masks and stuff deep down inside our own sense of self. The result of that is self-hatred, self-mockery, thinking you’re a “joke.” And we find the appropriate “friends” who assure us of that. The friends don’t know they fulfil this role; they are simply being themselves and we lack the boundaries or the self-honesty to change things.

I was listening to a recorded Al-Anon meeting the other day and the woman speaker talked about how she always knew how to show the world the external stuff while she was simultaneously dying on the inside. Most of us are experts in this regard. Isn’t that the pathetic game of being alive in society? To show the world a well-gilded mask while underneath praying for depth, meaning, love, acceptance, forgiveness?

What is the path forward to love and letting go? How do we detach from the people who harm us, especially if they’re family?

I realized the other day: None of it matters. Our loved ones’ opinions of us mean nothing. People have views, opinions, judgments. We all do. It’s normal. Natural. Human. We often fool ourselves into thinking we know what’s best for other people. Age tricks us into believing we have greater “wisdom” to share, and often time we in fact do. And yet: There’s that inner knowing, that intuition that [Ralph Waldo] Emerson talks about, and [Carl] Jung talks about, that deep inner transcendent awareness that goes farther within us than anything else. Most of the time we truly know what to do, what needs to be done; it’s just a simple matter of taking the courageous action.

Action = courage. Action = terrifying. Action = change. Change is scary. Change is the one constant in life. Change is guaranteed to happen. We’re born; we live; we die. We do not know when our lives end. They just do. We know that part. Death and taxes, they say. Knowing we die gives life some sort of intrinsic meaning. It has an end point. As Kierkegaard says: The purpose of life cannot be simply to continue working and making money so as to simply continue…living. (From his two-volume book, Either/Or.) No: There must be something beyond simply working to survive, working to live. Creativity; movement; travel; action; love; change. We live in order to SEE things and DO things in the clearest, most glowing light. To understand ourselves and others in a unique and stark manner. To grasp firmly and finally Who We Are.

Sartre and Camus proclaimed that there Is No Self. No “you,” no egotistic “I.” Perhaps. The Buddhists have been saying this for over 2,500 years. The self, they say, is an illusion; there is no “controller” in the [psychological] driver’s seat in your brain which is the Wizard of Oz, the man behind the curtain. There is no “there” there. Instead, all there truly is when you break it all down is a physiological reality based on the five senses and then consciousness, which stems from a brain and a body which themselves come from Nature, from evolution. There’s conscious awareness, yes, but no inherent “I.” That is a manmade social and psychological construction. Identity, I think, is the root of so many of our problems.

Stripped of our identity and ideology and egos—of our incessant need to be “right”—we’re left with a human bag of bones and flesh. And that, my friend, is beautiful. Ernest Becker’s The Denial of Death shows clearly the path forward: Acceptance of the ephemerality of life. Life is brief, hot, blindingly confusing, like a bolt of energy or thunder suddenly smacking you across the eyes. Ba BOOM: And then it’s already gone. Nabokov’s brief crack of light.

Where is the mind but within the brain which is within the skull which is connected to the entire body which is made up of a slow 13 billion-year process moving from A Grand Clash of Elements to single-cell organisms to fishes to land mammals to apes to Homo Habilus to Homo Erectus and finally, 250,000 years ago, the version of US we know now (more or less). And 10,000 measly years ago we have the development of early agricultural societies; thus begins the Fertile Crescent. Long before: The Diaspora out of Africa. Man: The dumb, wise, intelligent, foolish beast we know as The King.

None of this means anything except to say: We must listen to our own inner knowing. Forget others’ judgments, what others think, the supposed superiority or inferiority of “Them.” We all suffer and change and grow. This is the nature of things. Right now it’s like this, my SF meditation teacher used to say. Some people will like you and some won’t. Especially if you have guts: People will agree and disagree, scream and nod; it makes no difference. Everything in existence comes back down to your own choices.

Choose wisely, because if you choose badly the world is always there, ready to push you down.