Even before my husband, Greyfox, diagnosed his own NPD (narcissistic personality disorder), when I first began looking up web resources on it, some intriguing and puzzling facts came up.  NPD is often viewed as mostly a male phenomenon. Only one out of five of those diagnosed with NPD are female.  I might have ascribed that to some testosterone-related factor and left it at that if I had not experienced so many examples of women who exhibit traits of the pathological narcissist.

I knew that in my own youth I had the typical grandiosity of NPD, and I tended to drop relationships and move on to new friends when I did not get the support and approval I was seeking.  I had eventually outgrown these and other diagnostic markers for NPD, and I now know that virtually every normal adolescent goes through a phase when his or her behavior is highly narcissistic.  My own observations suggest that many women, about as many as the men I know, did not outgrow those narcissistic traits.

It took a while for me to find information about the other NPD, the more feminine covert or hypersensitive narcissism.  Four to five years ago, when I was doing most of my web research on NPD, one person dominated the internet in that field.  At that time, the first page of results in a Google search on NPD would return only urls for pages directly created by him or extensively quoting him.  He is a pathological narcissist himself (his preferred term for the condition is, "malignant self-love"), not a psychologist, but a financial consultant convicted of banking irregularities.

A decade or so ago, when he was released from prison, he began a program to inform, support and help the victims of other narcissists.  Apparently, the psychiatric and psychological communities decided they needed a greater presence on the internet.  Today, there is a proliferation of professional articles on the web, and my recent searches for "hypersensitive narcissism" and "covert narcissism" went through three pages of results before that man's name turned up.  Sites such as about.com, which used to quote him exclusively, now are citing other sources.

It is not that the man's data is incorrect.  It is incomplete and idiosyncratic.  As can be expected of a pathological narcissist (for brevity, N) his work is self-aggrandizing even as it appears to be self-deprecating.  NPD is all about control, a desperate need to control the N's perceived reality.  All Ns need "narcissistic supply" in the form of attention, approval, acceptance, and support for the beliefs that make up their personal fantasy worlds.  "Classic" Ns, mostly male, target people they judge as "superior," having wealth, beauty, intelligence, status, fame, or some other characteristic admirable to the N.  Greyfox says that it was, "the mystique of psychism," that got him attached to me.

They ingratiate themselves with their targets and are sweet and agreeable until the other person gives "narcissistic injury" by saying or doing something that challenges the N's self-image or threatens his fantasy.  Then, depending on the N's personality and the value he places on the other person, he may react with increased ingratiation, redoubling efforts to convert the other to believe in his fantasy or trying to convince the other that their difference was really just a misunderstanding.

If it is a more casual and unimportant relationship to the N, or the N feels that the reservoir of narcissistic supply is drying up, he is more likely to react to a narcissistic injury with narcissistic rage.  The friend or lover who had been placed on a pedestal is now denigrated and abused.  If he or she doesn't respond with ingratiation and more supply for the N, then the relationship often will end.  An inverted narcissist, who is attracted to Ns and masochistically thrives on emotional abuse, may work hard at keeping such a relationship going even after the N has relegated her to second or third place and found newer, more abundant sources of supply.

From the victim's perspective, the N's behavior may seem deliberately and aggressively cruel.  The N, however, feels he is the victim.  His rage is an unconscious defense mechanism guarding a grandiose self-image and unrealistic fantasy life that the N needs, at all costs, to maintain.  As miserable as the N may make life for those around him, he is just as unhappy.  An N may view himself as laid back and easygoing, but he is always on guard against narcissistic injury.  His attention and energy are focused on preserving a fantasy against continual assaults from conflicting reality.

It is much the same for the covert or hypersensitive narcissist, but the overt rage is absent, relatively infrequent, or displaced onto secondary objects.  Instead of striking out physically or verbally at the person giving the narcissistic injury, the N may dissolve in tears and play the victim or go off alone, tear at her own hair and clothes, trash a room, or commit anonymous vandalism. Where the classic N reacts to narcissistic injury with scorn and abuse, the covert N may cry, wheedle, bargain, or beg for affection, attention, or "love."  Both types of N are controlling, but the covert type uses subtler forms of manipulation.  The martyr act and guilt trip are common ploys.

I have been heedlessly writing along here just as if the words I'm using actually mean something.  The trouble with this is that many of the words I have used don't mean the same thing to you as they do to me.  "Narcissist," in psych jargon, is shorthand for a person with narcissistic personality disorder.  It doesn't mean someone who is in love with himself or herself.  The self-love is illusory, part of the fantasy that enables the emotional survival of the ego-damaged N.

Ego is another word that is tossed around a lot in connection with Ns.  Some people's religious beliefs declare that ego is inherently bad or wrong and must be suppressed or transcended.  Psychologists learn that everyone has an ego, and that suppression, wounding, or perverting it results in psychopathology.  This is less a matter of conflicting beliefs than of semantic differences.  The ego to which I refer is one's sense of self, an essential part of the personality.

Ns may appear to have mighty and monstrous egos, but strong, healthy egos do not puff themselves up that way.  Ns have fragile egos in constant need of reassurance.  They react to accusations of egotism with understandable denial, for they know how much effort they must put into maintaining an appearance of self-worth.  Richard Grossman, PhD, says, "All energy is devoted to inflating the self, like a persistent child trying to blow up a balloon with a hole."

In the support forums for victims of classic Ns, it is often said that those who suffer from the disorder don't suffer, they make others do the suffering.  That's about half true.  Ns strike out and try to hurt those who have hurt them through assaults on their fantasies.  Sometimes the N's retaliation for narcissistic injury is a physical attack.  NPD is not uncommon among those on death row.  But most Ns are adept at verbal and emotional abuse.  If those they attack have fragile egos, it hurts their feelings and can do psychological damage.

The damage done by the unhappy, perpetually unfulfilled covert, hypersensitive narcissist is subtler.  Her suffering can be distressful to those who care about her.  Living with and trying to fulfill her excessive emotional demands can be crazy-making.  Getting away from her can also be difficult, for she is clingy, ingratiating, and skilled at providing ego gratification.  You stroke her ego and she'll stroke yours.  No child growing up with such a parent is going to have a healthy psyche without some therapeutic intervention.

Conventional psychotherapists take a dim view of NPD.  Of all the Cluster B personality disorders, it has the most pessimistic prognosis.  Ns are not motivated to seek therapy because therapy threatens their fantasy life.  If they make it into therapy somehow, they are likely to walk out on it in early stages because facing reality is threatening and painful.  Classic Ns tend to burn out therapists, or threaten or attack them.  The therapists then withdraw from the case in frustration or fear.

That all makes it sound, I know, as if therapy for NPD is pointless, a losing proposition.  I don't see it that way.  I know that transcending NPD requires courage.  I have seen Greyfox's courage in action.  It also takes vigilance, but the N's vigilance is not enough.  Greyfox has said that the times when he has taken the most extreme, irrational narcissistic injury have been the times when he was least aware of his own insane reactions.  That is when my vigilance and my courage, as his therapist, have been vital to the process.

I have to confront his rage at its worst.  Here at home, in the family, we joke that it's a dirty job but somebody has to do it.  That's a joke, as I said.  Nobody had to do it.  I could have allowed Greyfox to go on in his fragile and frequently shattered grandiose fantasy, self-medicating in his crises until the toxins killed him.  I'm glad I didn't, and he's glad, too.  But in my experience, in my educated opinion, classic NPD is easier to confront (at least for me, by the methods I have been taught) than is covert hypersensitive narcissism.

I have tried confronting a few people I know well and love, and have tried to gently inform a few others whom I don't know so well but have observed, about their covert narcissistic behavior.  They are slippery.  They run away, withdraw, go incommunicado, and seek out support and reinforcement from false or misguided friends who are willing to puff up their egos, shore up their fantasies, and enable their pathological behavior.  Thus they remain unhappy, unfulfilled, emotionally needy, guarding a wounded ego.

I don't know how to help them.  Do you?

Okay, don't hit me!!  I know I go way too far overboard while the race is on, and I know that it has been over for a couple of months, but this is something that several people asked me about previously, and I did not have an answer until recently.

You may recall that Lance Mackey is this year's champion, coming right out of his third consecutive Yukon Quest championship to win his first Iditarod.  You may also recall, now that I'm mentioning it, that he had to drop his beloved lead dog Zoro in the last days of the race because Zoro developed pneumonia.

(I had thought that the dog's name was spelled Zorro, but I learned a couple of days ago that Lance only uses one "r" in there.  I spelled the name the way I saw it in the Anchorage Daily News.  I also reported, after ADN, that one of the two leaders into Nome was named, "Lippy."  I later learned that the dog's name is Libby, presumably after Libby Riddles, first woman to win the Iditarod.) 

After Lance and his team arrived in Nome, several Xangans asked me how Zoro was doing, and there hadn't been a bit of news on his condition for me to report.  At the time, I had used the email link on Lance's Comeback Kennels website to inquire about Zoro's condition.  I suppose Lance had been busy with other matters for a while and just got around to answering his email.

This is the text of the email I received this week:

I, of course, was thrilled to get mail from one of my heroes, with good news about another hero.

Last week, I far exceeded my usual level of activity as I moved boxes around in the storage cabin, sorted, cleaned, priced and packed things for the big weekend yard sale that never happened.  The weather was rainy all weekend, which took the pressure off me to go into town and set up my junk to sell.  I ended up appreciating that because I had worn myself out getting ready for it.

I don't know what comes next. I'm brain-fogged and fumble-fingered today, but not sorry that I pushed the envelope and did all that stuff to get me in this condition.  If I ever stop "forgetting" my limitations, I might as well stop everything.  But don't quote me on that, and don't be surprised if I reverse myself.  I reserve the right to be inconsistent and unpredictable.  The reality I live in is inconsistent and unpredictable.  I fit right in.

I'm still trying to keep some frogspawn alive.  One tadpole ranch had an overnight die-off when the water turned an opaque inky black.  I cleaned out the container and divided the population of the remaining one to relieve population stress.  So far, that is working.  The little polliwogs are growing and developing.  Maybe if the sun comes out I'll get some new pics to show you.

Everything is "maybe" and "if... then."  I am very glad that I am not forced into an invariable schedule, glad that I have no unbreakable commitments other than the ones I can handle. 

I had a scary, uneasy moment when I woke today and the front door was standing open.  The unease eased up a bit when I saw Koji curled up at the foot of my bed.  If he took advantage of the temporary freedom to roam, he made it back before I awoke.

That door won't lock or latch because several successive avalanches off the roof of the little cabin just outside there have destroyed the part of the door frame where the lock mechanism used to be.  Sometimes it saves my having to get up and let a cat in or out, because some of them will just open the door for themselves.  Usually, since the trailer leans that way due to settling of the blocks under it, the door swings shut on its own.

When I saw it standing open today, my first thought was that the ground had thawed under the blocks and the place had settled in the other direction.  I was trying to think of a doable fix for the door, and wondering if I had run out of easy solutions, but my anxiety was unfounded.  The problem was only that Koji's leash, on its hook behind the door, had swung out and gotten into the crack by the hinges, keeping the door from shutting.  I fixed that.  If only the leaky roof were that easy to fix....

I thought for a while today that I'd lost the scrap of paper with my to-blog list on it.  When I finally found it and added the new idea to the list, and scratched off a few things I have already blogged about, I was sorta wishing that the thing really would disappear.  Isn't that silly?  Yes, it is foolish, I know, to make a list to help me remember things, and then wish I could just forget some of those things.  I'll get over it... or not.  Either way, don't worry.  Worrying about me won't help me; it will only hurt you.

This morning I started to suspect that my state of irrationality might have something to do with the upcoming full moon, a true blue moon in my hemisphere, being the second full moon this month.  Imagine my delight when I found that Robert Wilkinson calls this period the Grand Irrationality.

Ahhh... my specialty:  flying by the seat of my pants.  And I never expect things to make sense, because they seldom do and I'm sharp enough to have noticed that.

Preview of blog in progress:

To be continued, unless the weirdness passes.

I love my country, but I'm not a patriot, not a fan of the government.  I love the planet more than I love this little artificially bordered portion of it.  For about forty years, I have been thinking of myself as a citizen of the world.  This doesn't mean I can't participate in remembering the casualties of war.  I have been a casualty of war.  My warrior karma has been a persistent theme in this lifetime, hard to transcend and even harder to live with .

France, Poland, Canada, Russia, Greece, Australia, Japan, and I don't know how many other countries have shrines dedicated to "unknown soldiers," entombing unidentified remains presumed to have belonged to warriors fighting on their side in one war or another.  The first one we know about was in Denmark, in 1858.

In the United States of America today, what with the government having decided that all those images of flag-draped coffins were not good for its public image and our morale, celebrating the fallen might be construed as a mild form of civil disobedience.

I think it is important on this day to remember that those who die in battle are not the least fortunate of all casualties of war.  Those who return home maimed and scarred, mentally as well as physically, and those who live out their lives in grief over the fallen, suffer more.

While you are remembering the fallen today, don't forget the walking wounded, the survivors, widows and orphans.  Hug a fatherless child, kiss an old soldier, piss on the flag, picket the Pentagon... oh, hell, forget I said that last part--I got carried away a bit there.

Sexual activity is very important to all humans with normal healthy biochemistry.  The fact that the biological imperative to reproduce is stronger than the instinct for self-preservation is demonstrated every time someone risks life itself to satisfy the mating drive.  Sexual activity is only peripheral to my topic.  The "sex" about which I am asking is that denoted by gender-specific words and those little boxes on various forms marked with an "M" or an "F".  How important is the distinction, the question of which box one checks?

...and why don't those forms offer us other choices, at the very least, "undisclosed," or, "none of the above?"  Depending on which

definition of intersexism one uses, at least one in every 1,500 to 2,000 births
has anomalous sex or gender, and one or two babies out of every thousand births have surgery to "normalize genital appearance" (sex reassignment surgery, SRS). (Source:
 American
Journal of Human Biology)  That statistic applies to infants, but of course older children and adults also have SRS, and sometimes that is done to "correct" an earlier surgery that assigned the "wrong" sex. 

Many people believe that one must be one thing or the other, that it is wrong to be both.  It is certainly dangerous, in our culture, to be both, or to be different.  The psychiatric profession in the USA considers the desire to change one's sex to be a rare mental illness called Gender Identity Disorder, and DSM-IV claims an incidence of about, "1 per 30,000 adult males and 1 per 100,000 adult females [who]
seek sex-reassignment surgery."   Each year more than that many people in this country have SRS.  Shrinks have their own reasons for preferring to view it as mental illness, and for presenting it as rarer than it is.  Transsexual and transgender researchers have found, "that the prevalence
of (MTF: male-to-female) SRS is at least on the order of 1:2500, and may be twice that
value."

I have written previously about the complications our culture creates in the lives of transgender and intersexual people, in male or female or not.  For another view, read "There are more of us than you think," by Joanne Herman.  Intersex Society of North America is an information and advocacy organization.

By the way, as far as I know (not having had any gene-testing) I am female, except for some of my attitudes and personality attributes.

This weeks photo challenge is hosted by CFairy

Her subject is Signs

The sign of a sloppy snowplow operator.  Lots of the signs in our neighborhood lean over even more than this one.

outhouse sign

When I was a kid, some of my relatives lived on farms and had outhouses.  I don't recall any of them having signs of any sort inside.  Many of the outhouses around here have signs that were hung with facetious intent.  One that comes to mind was a standard hazard warning sign saying, "poisonous gas."  The outhouse at our old place used to have a "no swimming" sign, in French: "defense de baigner."  One of my neighbor hung a couple of framed cartoons featuring outhouses in his.  After a big party, people started saving outhouse cartoons for him, and he papered the whole inside of his privy with them.

I think the reason for the proliferation of funny signs in our outhouses is related to the fact that most of us came here from more civilized places, having grown up with indoor plumbing.  To people who have always had outdoor toilets, they are not inherently funny as they seem to be to many modern civilized people.

Fireweed is getting taller, but still no buds, so it is still officially breakup here.

Tiny buds (this is much magnified) have emerged on the evergreen lowbush cranberry plants.

Unless you count pussywillows and other tree catkins, these are the first wildflowers open here.  If anyone can identify them, please let me know.  Leaves are shown below.

Recent rainfall brought up numerous seedlings of chamomile (above) and chickweed (below)...

...and weighed down the blossoms on the pigsqueak.

wildlife

I found this Salon article when I stumbled upon Information Clearinghouse this morning.

It's the awful truth.

I let myself off the hook, and what a relief it is.  I had made tentative plans to go to Wasilla today for an NA meeting.  After a little mishap yesterday in the storage cabin, I decided the prudent thing to do was to stay home.  It is so satisfying to make a wise choice, abandon a pointless or imprudent plan.

Mother Nature took some pressure off, too.  A weak low pressure system moved in and it rained most of the day yesterday and much of the night.  It was a gentle, soaking rain.  Already things are greening up out there.  I took a little walk in the evening rain and noticed a haze of green across the muskeg where new swamp grass is poking up through the brown stuff left from last year.

I'm not sure what I'll be doing with my time today, other than resting.  One of my most important recent discoveries has been that I can get much more done by taking frequent breaks, even very brief ones.  My tendency before had been to push myself to finish something before stopping to rest.  That meant, more often than not, I'd end up flattening myself up against the fatigue wall.

Now, when I feel like sitting down, I start looking for a place to sit.  Yesterday, in the little storage cabin, I had a situation where I literally couldn't sit.  I was working on sorting, cleaning, pricing and packing up a lot of the stuff Greyfox has salvaged from the dumpster, to take it back down to Felony Flats for a yard sale this weekend.  I reached over a stack of boxes, knocked them off balance, toppled another stack on top of me, and by the time I'd crawled out from under the mess, I was ready to toddle back in the house and lie down.

The rain, if it continues, may give me a reprieve from the yard sale.  Whatever happens, I'll just keep working on organizing and packing until I have a carload of junk and a sunny weekend, then I'll go down there and make a bunch of people happy with unbelievable bargains on goodies we got out of the garbage.

Three members of my family have birthdays today.  It is the seventh anniversary of my dog Koji's birth.  He had six brothers and a sister, and the young couple from whom we bought firewood were going to kill all the males because they were getting ready to move and the only pup they'd found a home for was the female.

Out of a box of seven puppies obviously only about three to four weeks old, too young to be taken from their mother, Doug and I chose the one who moved around the most and cried the least.  The couple said they were part husky and part collie, but as he grew we saw the bone structure of a doberman and the markings of an Alsatian.

Koji didn't even know how to eat when we got him.  He'd do face plants in his gruel.  But he finally got the hang of it, and adjusted to the idea that he is the omega animal in a multi-species pack.  He sticks pretty close to the alpha, sleeps on my bed and will go wherever I go if I let him.  Unfortunately, his mom didn't have time to teach him what to eat.  His dietary indiscretion has given us all a few laughs and some worries, and has torn up his guts on one occasion, but he has mostly recovered from that. 

He has not, and may never entirely, recover from the post-traumatic stress of being stomped by a moose.  That altered his personality.  The cats used to fish chunks of his big kibble (large breed style) out of his dish, bat them around the floor until they were good and dead, then eat them and he would just lie there and watch.  Now he guards his dish until he's ready to eat and will not share.  Until each new kitten learns that Koji's food is taboo, there are sudden charges and mad scrambles accompanied by the scritching of claws.

He is a perfect dog.

The other two birthdays have nothing to do with being born, but rather with a sort of rebirth.  Four years ago this was the day that ended my soulmate Greyfox's last drug binge.  Nobody will ever know all that occurred during the days leading up to that, because he was in an alcoholic blackout, and had just moved into his little cabin at Felony Flats.  After some initial resistance, I acceded to Spirit's urging and went down there to rescue him.  Fortunately for us both, I had never been to Al-Anon and didn't know that I wasn't supposed to intervene.

By using orthomolecular supplements similar to the ones I had used to kick my sugar addiction, Greyfox got off booze, pills, weed and cigarettes all on that same day.   Perhaps even more importantly for his mental health and our relationship, he took an online personality test, diagnosed his own narcissistic and histrionic personality disorders, and agreed to let me act as therapist in helping him to transcend them.  He also appointed me as his AA/NA sponsor after the first sponsor he picked didn't return his calls, then got drunk and disappeared.

Both those things:  a spouse or family member acting as therapist, and a member of the opposite sex being a 12-step sponsor, are unorthodox.  We say, as the kahunas do, "Effectiveness is the measure of truth."  Whatever works, works.  Greyfox's amino acid, vitamin and mineral supplements worked to get him through a painless, easy withdrawal from multiple addictions, and my determined confrontation of his pathological behavior has helped him make great progress in transcending some personality disorders for which conventional therapy gives a very pessimistic prognosis.

The two of us celebrate the same 12-step birthday, even though we found our recovery outside the usual AA/NA/DTR dogmas.  We attend meetings occasionally, do twelfth step service work in NA, and I, for one, enjoy the fellowship of dope fiends and crazy people, especially in Double Trouble.  I had kicked IV meth and downers thirty-some years previously, and it was my research into orthomolecular psychiatry and its success at getting me out of a lifelong addiction to sugar, that led to Greyfox's poly-drug recovery. 

What his recovery four years ago did for me was free me from the need to grow weed so that he wouldn't need to spend money on it, and from any desire to use it.  The stuff gave me the munchies and made my abstinence from sugar more difficult, so it was with a sense of liberation that I finally got "clean" of the last of those substances that NA considers "drugs".  Ironically, though, the coffee in those meetings, and the tradition of "birthday" cakes, revived my old addictions to caffeine and sugar, both of which I had kicked before I started going to 12-step meetings.  Once an addict, always an addict, even in abstinence and recovery. 

Happy birthday, Greyfox.  You are totally kewl, dood.  So what if I went through twelve and a half years of hell with you.  These last four years have been the happiest of my life.