Narcissism in a parent is a way of sucking a child away from self regulation, since there is no self to regulate.
And I will comment that I have been pondering in recent days the status of dissociation as a psychological symptom. It is rarely discussed. There is Dissociative Identity Disorder, aka Split or Multiple Personality Disorder, but simply being poorly connected with ones feelings, with ones own desires, is really not something they have a good term for.
It might be termed Impinged Living Disorder. Or Grey Foggy World Disorder.
Obviously, it can manifest as depression, but that is not the core problem. People with what I suppose I must call mild dissociation (when compared with having multiple “alters”) are simply not thriving, not flourishing. They are not enjoying their lives, and given that life almost always also presents lot of negatives, it can be tiring getting the bad without the good.
This, in my view, is really what kills people like Chris Cornell and Anthony Bourdain. They’ve got what everyone thinks they should want, but it isn’t what they want. And they can’t fucking figure out what they want, because their illness is not a presence but an absence, a lack, a something that is nearly impossible to see, which psychologists don’t name often because it isn’t in their little book.
They feel–odd, different–but can’t quite put their finger on it. So it seems to me, projecting my own introspective insights (or guesses) on them.
And this problem is closely tied to the question: what and who should I trust? This is a very hard question to answer nowadays. I don’t know if it was much easier in the past, but I do think extended families and clans were physically and emotionally closer for most, and certainly they did not have the flood of information we do, and with it keen awareness of the many possible disasters awaiting all of us.
Affective Dysregulation, which I might insert as a more sciencey sounding term for this, worsens over time. This is known. Brainwave patterns established in early childhood do not generally correct themselves. For much of this, Neurofeedback is the only good solution, with the likely exception of psychedelics like Ayuahasca, LSD, Peyote and the like, when dosed properly, in the right place, at the right time, with the right people.
Talk therapy arguably makes things worse. The thing is that trauma seems to reside in the right hemisphere (for right handed people at least), and by definition that is not the talking part. I would argue that much art is really the effort of the right hemisphere to “talk”. I found myself spontaneously reciting poetry a few nights ago, which I was making up on the spot. It was poetry of the quality (poor) which I post on here, but it had metaphors, and meant something to me. I normally vocalize nonsense, so this was something qualitatively different and I think better.
But the thing with talk therapy is you create over time “a story”. And that story, if it has to do with Developmental Trauma–describes something that is STILL HAPPENING in your right hemisphere. It is not in the past, but if anything talking about it without feeling it distances you from true healing.
And it can be good being a victim. People feel sorry for you or tell you how brave you are. That story can become a sort of business card, to tell people who “you are”.
It is so hard looking into the unknown. It is very, very hard. I feel confused and afraid every day.