April 17, 2004

• NPD
  
  AND
  
  MEN
  

  A two-blog day, fancy that.  It’s not that I’m trying to make up
  for all the days I’ve missed.  No can do:  time gone is gone
  and ideas for stories are perishable goods.  This morning’s blog
  started out as just some quiz stuff, then after I got here it grew a
  paragraph of reaction to an absurd comment on my previous blog.  I
  posted that hurriedly and zipped out to the Willow Post Office (no
  goose today) to pick up Greyfox’s latest shipment of knives before they
  closed at noon.  I’ll deliver the knives to the Old Fart in
  Wasilla tomorrow when I go in for step work with my sponsee and the
  Double Trouble meeting.  That meeting for people in addiction
  recovery who also are under (or have been under) psychiatric treatment
  or taking (or have taken) psychtropic drugs for mental illness, has
  become my favorite meeting.  There’s lots less bullshit there,
  none of the rampant hypocrisy about drugs I see in AA and NA, and so
  much “cross talk” (as opposed to the series of monologues in ordinary
  meetings) that it’s almost as good as group therapy.

  When I first read that comment, the context, etc., suggested it was
  written by a woman.  When I “reached out” (as I drove into Willow)
  to get a feel for the mind that created that drivel, I wasn’t sure that
  it wasn’t a man who wrote it.  I’m still not sure, and having been
  clued in that it comes from a bogus site where they leave absurd
  comments “for shits and giggles,” I don’t care.  What it did for
  me was stimulate some thought about sexism and about the men in my
  life.  A lot of that thought centered around Charley, my fifth
  ex-husband, who was my best friend for a long time during our years
  together and after our divorce.  I don’t see him now unless I go
  to visit him, so I suppose that at least part of what used to bring him
  around here fairly often was the weed.  That’s okay.  We
  still sit and talk as always when I go over there.  He shares with
  me his unique perspective, which I would never find anywhere
  else.  I’ll save most of what I’ve been recalling and realizing
  about Charley and me for the next memoir blog.  He’s where I
  bogged down before.

  He’s a strange sort of sexist, a chivalrous chauvinist who loves women
  and defers to us quite sweetly sometimes.  Despite never having
  won an argument with me in over thirty years, and having heard, “I told
  you so,” from me countless times about his fuck-ups, he still maintains
  that men are superior.  It’s his childhood programming and I’m
  fairly certain he’s too old to change it now.  Not that he’d want
  to change, since I’m sure he gets some emotional payoff from having
  someone to feel superior to.  Charley is also codependent, always
  needing to fix the people he cares about or fix things for them. 
  I’d already started healing my codependency when I met him, and that
  created friction until it wore away the cohabitation bond between
  us.  Charley, I know, is incorrigible, unrepentantly stuck at the
  developmental phase he was in around age nineteen.  With no teeth
  and very little hair, his boyishness is not charming, but I love him
  anyway.

  Which brings me to the general topic of men, as stated in my
  title.  I grew up in the 1950s when there was a bunch of buzz
  about the Battle of the Sexes.  Women in the USA had taken off
  their aprons and put on welders’ masks for the war effort (that’s WWII,
  for you too young to remember and not paying attention in history
  class).  After the war, few of them wanted to go back to being
  accessories.  Men, in their last-ditch efforts to regain the upper
  hand, were resorting to everything from scripture to superior physical
  strength to assert their dominance.  For the first time statistics
  began to show significant numbers of women murdering their husbands and
  boyfriends by means other than poison.

  In the 1960s, the gender war escalated and the Women’s Liberation
  Movement gained momentum.  That was the time period during which I
  gained my political awareness.  For a while back then I was an
  insufferable Libber.  I’d flip the bird at any man who had the
  nerve to open a door for me (now I thank them).  If a guy whistled
  at me on the street and stuck around to give me a chance, I gave him
  holy verbal hell, the PIG!.  The time I spent in prison just
  compounded and crystallized that bad attitude toward men.  Our
  favorite pastime in there was to sit around telling stories about the
  men whose choices and actions landed us there.  There was the one
  who shot her drunken abusive husband in an alcoholic blackout… the
  one caught driving the getaway car for her boyfriend’s bank robbery…
  the one who tried to cover up her daughter’s murder after her husband
  killed the kid… you get the picture.

  After I began to gain some self-awareness through group therapy, I
  became aware of the internal contradictions between my attitude toward
  men and the fact that I always had at least one of them intimately
  involved in my life.  I came to terms with my codependency and
  started transcending it.  I realized that I and all those other
  women had made the choice to follow our men into hell, trouble, or
  whatever.  I began to look at men as my equals, for real, whether
  they saw it that way or not.  I ditched that bullshit of letting
  the pendulum swing from one extreme to the other, trading in male
  chauvinism for the myth of female superiority.  Now I will take
  on, in debate, anyone who cares to assert that either gender is better
  than the other.  Men need to accept that they and their
  forefathers earned the distrust and disrespect of women through their
  oppression.  Women need to accept the responsibility for their own
  choices and realize that their grandmothers (and even they, themselves)
  have been co-conspirators in their own oppression.

  I don’t romanticize man-woman relations.  Aside from the
  physical/sexual part of it, which is a very big and wonderful subject,
  one of the things I appreciate most about men is that other perspective
  I gain on things when one of them will bother to express himself openly
  to me.  It is quite OTHER, indeed. The Urantia Book says that we
  are like two alien species inhabiting the same planet.  The
  differences in the way we think are hardwired, part of the
  electrochemistry of our brains.  That there are women who think
  like men and men who think like women does not refute that contention,
  not when you take a look at their biochemistry and
  neurophysiology.  When I refer to Greyfox as my “soulmate”, I
  don’t mean some romantic ideal of someone I can’t live without. 
  Nor do I mean anything even remotely close to a “twin-soul” whose
  thoughts and feelings run in the same ways mine do.  Soulmate, in
  my lexicon, is strict reincarnationist jargon for someone with whom
  I’ve shared a series of past lives and with whom I have strong karmic
  connections.  He’s not my only soulmate, as anyone knows who has read my
  memoirs and/or the exchanges of comments here between Sarah and me.

  But Greyfox is apparently the one with whom I had the most to resolve
  in this life, karma from as long ago as ancient feudal Asia and bands
  of wandering warrior monks, through the Roman Legions, up to each of
  our most recent lives before this one.  I like to imagine that
  some of my mentors, people like E.J. Gold, Edgar Cayce, and Dick
  Sutphen, might be aware of this and understand from it that they taught
  me well and that I’m taking care of business.  This shit won’t
  happen again, fellas.  Which brings me to the other half of that
  title up there….

  This has been hanging fire for a few weeks.  I made a flip remark
  here about how NPD “sufferers” don’t suffer, they make the rest of us
  suffer.  It has been on my mind off and on ever since.  It’s
  not totally true although there is a kernel of truth in it.  In
  fact, when I wrote that I was quoting Greyfox.  He has said it
  several times in meetings.  It brings laughs, which is, I suppose,
  why he keeps repeating it.  But I have to set the record straight
  here so I can stop thinking about this.  When I realize I’ve made
  a misstatement, I tend to obsess over it until I correct it.

  There are so many ways in which people with narcissistic personality
  disorder suffer that I can’t enumerate them all.  Few of them ever
  find contentment in life because real life does not readily support the
  false persona on which they depend.  Their expectations are seldom
  met.  People don’t tend to give them the deference and attention
  they feel they need and deserve.  The negative feedback,
  resentment and rejection they receive as a result of their grandiosity
  and selfishness hurts their feelings, damages their self-esteem, and
  usually drives them even deeper into the false persona and delusions of
  grandeur for refuge.  …and that’s just the perceptual, emotional
  toll the disorder takes.

  NPD also affects their health and general well-being.  They are
  inherently impractical and don’t generally trust the good advice of
  those who care for them.  They injure themselves with drugs, poor
  nutrition, and the like because they have that attitude that they know
  better than all the experts.  It affects their material security
  through bad investments, and other impulsive acts such as Greyfox’s
  early retirement and move to Alaska… I could go on and on but maybe
  you get the picture.  At the very least I’ve gotten this off my
  chest and can get on to obsessing over something else.
  

  • 7:24 pm
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