No, I’m not rick-rolling…
It might surprise, and perhaps disturb, you to learn that before Rick Astley became the figurehead of an internet meme and prank (that is now a bit old school as far as online practices and trends go)… he was just a pop star singing a song that was rather popular with a certain generation…
a generation who wasn’t as cool as yours…
who thought of computers as something rather large and cumbersome with green writing on a black screen that didn’t always make sense if you weren’t really into this modern thing which probably wouldn’t catch on and become a part of daily life.
I recall my first lesson in computers… mainly because it involved my math teacher of the time who doubled as a computer teacher, and that particular math teacher was an a-hole who hated me and… that feeling was mutual.
I once almost passed out during a maths test because I had a fever… he sent me to the headmistress to get punished – she was furious with me for coming to school when I was obviously ill and should have been in bed at home or at the doctors. She was also furious with my parents for letting me out when I should have been kept in (about that… they were a bit busy being up their own asses… like my maths teacher). She asked me wtf I was doing coming to school when I was so sick (and possibly infecting everyone else with my virus)… if I’d been more compos mentis rather than composte mentis then and more aware of business practices to come, I ‘d have told her that I was doing what the modern age expects of its people and that is to keep working our ass off until we die on the job… ’cause that’s what life and Rick Astley’s song is about!
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(oh dear look at his teeth… those would not work these days… in a world which says it wants ‘authenticity’, starts ‘authenticity’ movements that call for ‘mindfulness’, but is afraid of things which are actually authentic and demands that such things are ‘fixed’ so that the mindful aren’t made uncomfortable by what their mind notices)
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I’m one of those people for whom the 80’s wasn’t just a present day flashback into a past fashion faux-pas laugh-a-thon – look at that generation and the shit they thought was cool!
Just in case you missed such an excellent (and hilarious) decade it let’s make a bunch of films and TV shows all about it… we like those but damn that generation was all kinds of vintage mess! WTF was wrong with them!? Haha…
It’s easy to laugh at others… not so easy to laugh when those others are us… unless we pretend that somehow we weren’t us… or that ‘us’ was all someone else’s fault, delusion, problem… whatev’s… yeah…
Just you wait, present day generation, until the next generations look back at you and your idea of cool (or whatever word you use instead of ‘cool’ because ‘cool’ was a word that some other generation thought was cool), your lifestyle will be under the examination of a critical eye which somehow thinks it’s disconnected from the past, isn’t a ‘product’ of it, and isn’t laughing at itself when it laughs at you…
we all have to experience this kind of retro-ridicule…
it seems to be a rite of passage.
None of us like crossing this threshold (even less these days when ‘old’ is a scary clown who will eat you with its painted on smile) and yet it has benefits – while we have to put up with others doing to us what we did to other others, we also finally get to do to others what other other others did to us.
Pass the parcel along and hope you don’t have to be the one who holds it when the music stops because then you’ll be the odd one out and… unless being the odd one out is cool when you’re ‘it’, you’ll end up being the uncoolest uncool in the social circle.
And yet being the odd one out gives you a ‘special’ status – everyone else needs you to be ‘out’ so they can be ‘in’, without you they’d all just be neither in or out, stuck in some neutral limbo, and that scares them (more than the fake-smiley clown with perfect teeth – bought from a cosmetic dentist who was cashing in while fake smiles were the in thing to get because real teeth made you stand out as an out – who is planning on eating them).
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(Pennywise loves to eat the pussy generation* (*pussy generation trademarked by Clint Eastwood & son)… OMG, did I really say that!?!)
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Big hair for women was big in the 80’s… I did big hair in those days, frizzed and fried it with perms, crimped and curled it with machines, tried to break its straightness… didn’t really succeed but… it did suffer trauma at my hands while I tried to force it to be what it wasn’t because those were my dreams and it was going to be what I wished it to be.
We’re told to live our dreams and live them no matter what the cost or consequences of it is because those are our dreams, ffs!!!…
the power of positive thinking trumps everything even nature and the natural, and forcing that ‘positive’ thinking on ourselves (and others who surround us) is imperative, a show of strength, personal ‘power’, and if that thinking doesn’t take then… we’re negative (or those around us are ‘toxic’ and it’s their fault so get rid of them – getting rid of ‘toxic’ people is not a negative act at all if it’s for the sake of ‘positive’ stuff for you… um… right!?) and that kind of negativity needs to be wiped out!
I wanted to control the natural and turn it into what was unnatural. I refused to accept it as it was…
…straight hair only became cool later on in the 90’s, but the kind of straight hair which was ‘in’ then was far more straight than natural straight hair is – so once again those selling us ‘fashion’, what is ‘cool’, ‘in’, and such are just like those who tell us to accept ourselves as we are, but… they don’t really want us to accept ourselves as we actually are because… there’s no money in it for them, no profit, no gain, no power for them over us… due to us not being in pain… and they need our pain to sell us their version of painless… our pain makes us need them, they need us to need them to tell us what we need for us to be ourselves…
or something like that…
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I dressed like Madonna in her early videos when she was desperate to make us seek her (I guess some things never change… oops, I used the word ‘never’… this is apparently ‘mad’ of me according to one person who commented on my blog – I’ll explain that later on)
I wore jackets with shoulder pads… those bits of foam were as annoying then as they are now but for different reasons. They moved if you moved and you ended up looking like the hunchback rather than a quarterback of Notre Dame. I already had prominent shoulders thanks to swimming and perhaps genetics, the extra shoulder stuffing just made me look like I was a bodybuilder…
…which was something to laugh at at the time… body-building wasn’t quite as ‘in’ or ‘cool’ or ‘normal’ as it is now… especially for females.
Females were only just beginning to get ‘physical’…
being ‘ripped’ was still a male thing, an ‘Arnie’ thing (and even he did two episodes of The Streets of San Francisco long before he was the Terminator who’d be back again and again until you kinda wish he’d stop due to being a bit too old for it… where his character killed people for laughing at his bodybuilding ways – baby oil was a trigger for violence or at least people laughing at his shiny was).
Women did aerobics not weight-lifting. Yoga but not yoga because yoga wasn’t yoga then….
They did ‘Flashdance’ = wear skimpy outfits that showed off their sexy probably bra-less (because the feminism of a previous generation had burned all the bras) curves… but did it for themselves, to liberate their anima from the oppression of animus, and not for the men who might be watching…
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(the ‘big issue’ of scenes like this at the time was that the actress had a stand-in who did the scene for her…)
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So having a form that was considered ‘mannish’ was then still not that fashionable a look for women or girls…
(in the 80’s I was still a ‘girl’ who was aiming to be a woman, who was still testing out what that meant for me, trying to be more ‘grown up’ than I actually was…)
There was always Grace Jones… love her and her androgynous look but I was too young trying to be too old to appreciate her statement of I am what I am and I’m going to make what I am super cool…
…hence why maybe people of both genders kept assuming that I was a Lesbian (and maybe why that old woman in a haberdashery store thought it was okay to touch my tits without my asking or inviting her to do so – that random gesture was more surprising than disturbing, it only disturbed on afterthought because at the time I was so surprised I really didn’t know what to think).
…or why it seemed as though my sexuality was up for grabs… literally rather than just figuratively…
(when I was about 10 or 11 some guy walking down the up escalator in a department shop decided to rub my crotch with his hand – again it was more surprising than disturbing, it certainly wasn’t sexual – for me anyway, until afterthought kicked in in the form of the opinion of others. When I told other people about this strange event those people who were supposed to be ‘adults’ weighed in on it by letting me know that… perhaps the clothes I was wearing at the time (which were the fashion of the time for those my age) had encouraged an adult to behave this way with a child. So an adult’s behaviour was the fault of a child… let me see, where have I heard that explanation before… oh, yes, my parents and their friends excusing themselves by blaming me for their behaviour…
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What happens if I change my behaviour… but this results in others still doing what they’re doing, including blaming me for it?
If I dressed differently would that have changed anything…
maybe if I was wearing poisonous tipped spikes on the areas of my body that the old woman and man felt obliged because of my unofficial invite to touch they’d have still touched me up but would have died shortly and painfully afterwards and… I would probably have ended up incarcerated for murder (at least that would have actually been legitimately my fault… and I might have gotten away with it because they got away with it when they commited a crime so… you never know… oops, used ‘never’ again).
Luckily I didn’t listen to adults by then… not in the way that they expected to be heard while pontificating because they’d already messed me up enough and I was too full of their nonsense already to let that gem of bullshit in – your inventory is full – but I do remember it…
For the same reason that a comment like the one I received recently on – Forgive and Forget and Fucks Yourself Over… – made me take notice of it rather than shrug it off.
The commentor said:
“It’s mad how you use the word NEVER for everyone like NOBODY can change.
Anyone can change its just a matter of who actually wants to find their own damn problems and fix them without being called the N word..
And this whole thing about “forgive but don’t forget” is not forgiving..it’s just another way to hold resentment without trying to look bitter about it no?”
They have a valid point…
People can and do change… life tends to require that we learn and adapt from the experiences it puts us through.
And we all make mistakes… and sometimes those mistakes make a big difference to us.
We all deserve the respite of a forgive and forget… sometimes… depends on circumstances, context, and other factors, like… how many times have we done whatever it is that these ‘bitter and hanging on to resentment’ others find difficult to ‘forgive and forget’? You know, trivialities like that… sorry, I cheated again, I lied again, I did what I promised fifteen times before I’d never (did I say never… how clumsy of me) do again because I love you and would never (oops…) want to hurt you… the other times I hurt you were a mistake, misunderstanding, you’re just getting things all wrong, you’re confused about what happened, it’s you and not me…
I apologised… again… what more do you want or need… OMG! You’re so intransigent!
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A random thought for those who are hell bent on others ‘forgetting’ stuff they did to those others…i f people want us to ‘forget’ the ‘bad’ things they do to us… and do so in a wiping the slate clean manner that forgives because it forgets, they run the risk of us also forgetting the ‘good’ that they do. Apparently we’re supposed to erase some things and not others… but what if the ‘bad’ is intrinsically linked to the ‘good’?
Their point gets a bit lost in the ‘hidden’ aspects of the comment…the personal story which prompted them to speak up and out against what they thought was being said in my post…
a post written in 2013 influenced by events I was experiencing at the time… perhaps things have changed for me since I wrote that post…
but for them that aspect of the matter is irrelevant – it’s not about me as a person, I’m not really a person to them, at least not one who fits their criteria of being allowed to find their problem and fix it, of being able to change, I’m static, forever stuck in 2013 when I wrote this, it’s about me as words on a page which annoy them but it’s not about me at all… it’s about them and their relationship with someone else who has a problem with them as they are or were.
But they’ve changed why can’t others see that… and appreciate it, accept it!?
…perhaps because others have changed too due to what transpired…
are others allowed to change or is change something only one person can do while others stay the same?
We understand what we understand and… will have to wait until we can understand what is waiting for us to understand it.
Our lives are permanently shifting… sometimes we shift in time with it, sometimes it’s a game of catch-up, and sometimes it’s a case of halt and catch fire…
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Some things, events… and people… are beyond our control…
maybe it’s better that way…
these days people can control what we experience of the 80’s…
it’s now become a quirky place full of people with bad hair, bad fashion sense, bad teeth, and bad ideas about politics… but for all their bad stuff they make us laugh as we know we survived them and their bad stuff and made things good…
except we’re not certain about the good we have now because it’s feeling a bit like things changed but didn’t change at all…
we may all look better, our hair is perfect, our fashion is ‘hip’, our teeth are cosmetically fixed into a perfect smile, and if we want to we can freeze our face the way we want it to be rather than how the wind decided to do it in an awkward moment, we can be ageless, timeless, expressionless, while our mouth says the words ‘authentic and mindful’ over a cup of organic tea grown in a country we’d rather not know uses slave labour after a yoga session with a guru who screams at their family behind closed soundproof doors….
but are we any better than those we mock?
Does it matter… after all, we’ve changed…
An Upturned Soul 
Hey, at least the 80’s were great fun! I think we have the right to forgive and forget as we please, and if we don’t, it doesn’t necessarily mean we haven’t moved on. Personally, I maintain a small amount of anger towards the N, will never forgive him, but hey, why would I? I forgive myself, and to me that is all that matters. Like you say, the journey is a moving feast, we learn what we need to as we go.
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This brings backs some memories for me, Rick Astley just happened to be my biggest teenage crush, 😍 His voice was magnificent
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The 80’s were fun, there was so much going on and it was totally weird and wild. It was a pretty awesome rite of passage! 🙂
I agree, each individual has the right to choose how to apportion their resources and attention. Forgive and forget is a choice – how we choose to do it is up to us individually, and often requires an assessment of circumstances, context and history.
Others have the right to ask us to forgive and forget, they can even demand it, but demanding that we give it doesn’t mean that we have to give it.
If you’ve dealt with a narcissist you learn the hard way that forgive and forget = them doing to you again what they swore they never did to you in the first place, you were imagining it, you’re wrong according to them and so you are guilted, shamed and pressured with blackmail into turning that wrong into a right by letting them do it again and again while being told that they’re not doing to you what you think wrongly that they’re doing.
Not forgiving and forgetting when dealing with an N is a way to return sanity and simplicity to life, but of course they’re not happy about us not allowing them to walk all over us, and those who haven’t dealt with a real N think we’re the ones who are the problem.
Sometimes you just have to do what is right for you and let all those who tell you that your right is wrong say what they have to say while you let their opinion wash over you because it’s just a rainstorm from a passing cloud and that passing cloud just doesn’t get you and doesn’t want to get you as it’s caught up in its own story.
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Does anyone have an answer to a dilemma I am facing, is it a good thing, or a bad thing, to try to view narcissism with a sense of humour, when they have been on the receiving end of abuse.
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I am going to reply to this in a post. : ) It’s to long for here. I would also like to talk to you sometimes if that is alright with you. It would be nice to have someone who understands what I am living with.
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One of my favourite quotes is:
“Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,
there is a field. I’ll meet you there.
When the soul lies down in that grass,
the world is too full to talk about.
Ideas, language, even the phrase each other
doesn’t make any sense.”
– Rumi
Something being ‘good’ or ‘bad’ is an opinion which depends on the person looking at that thing. Some people think that narcissism, especially narcissistic abuse, must always be taken seriously because that’s how they see the subject based on their own experience, their story, on themselves. Others prefer to add humour because humour helps them to process their experience and understand their story.
For instance I use humour to deal with pain, I also use it to deal with fear – it diminishes that which is looming over me and sometimes paralysing me, so that I can move and perhaps move beyond that point in time. It helps me to clarify confusion for myself and deal with what I need to deal with.
However some people think that using humour to deal with pain and fear diminishes the seriousness of the matter and makes a mockery of pain and fear, abuse and personal experience.
It very much depends on how you’re using the humour, what you’re using it for. It should ideally be used to help heal yourself and not to hurt yourself further – don’t use humour to deny, diminish or dismiss the narcissistic abuse which you have experienced. Don’t use it to excuse the narcissist in your life.
Humour can be used while still taking the issue seriously – it can provide ‘comic’ relief while dealing with heavy issues.
If you do it privately to make yourself laugh or smile then only you get a say in whether it is ‘good’ or ‘bad’, however if you share it with others then their opinion of the ‘good’ or ‘bad’ of it will be relevant. So you may need to be sensitive when using humour around others who have also experienced narcissistic abuse and whose methods of dealing and healing differ from yours.
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Such a happy feel good song x
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Absolutely 😀
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I might catch hell for this but here goes anyway.
I think this was wonderful put.
Now the part that may make someone mad lol
People should understand a blog is a personal sacred space. The right to comment here is not a right it is a privilege. I like to comment and share stories with people. It’s not acceptable for others to come to a blog and attack someone verbally in their own space just because they do not agree. If they dont like it they should move on without incident to a blog that has view they agree with. I personally love being able to read stories about people’s real lives. I have lived in secrecy my whole life. Even as a child family buisness was family buisness nothing more Ever. I find it prudent in our society today that people have a safe comfortable place to share their thoughts and feelings. Sometimes always and never are the only words to discribe something. I also happen to firmly believe people do not change. That goes back to a timeless argument that one side says we grow as a person. We learn new things. Learn and unlearn habbits. Some call this change. I do not. The reason I do not call the things change is because we never really forget. We may supress. We may push memories to the far reaches of our subconscious. We may bury them or hide them away. We do not forget. Just because we choose or may have the inability to access those memories does not mean they are not there and are not inherently a part of us. Every experience we have builds on what was there before. This is called growth, not change. That’s just my opinions though. I like the way you write and am interested in the things you have to say. I think you should just be you reguardless of what anyone says. If we don’t how else will we ever find real people without the mask if we don’t challenge others to live without it. I have lived with a mask my whole life because that is what society and my family expected. That’s what abusers do. Want you to keep quiet. Without our silence they are powerless. Just as that person was trying to control what you said by having a tantrum. It’s a power play to see if you will change to meet their needs. That’s how they test the boundaries to see if they can get over on you. Looking forward to the next post. : )
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I’m very clear when it comes to online space: My blogs and social media are not democracies.
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Thank you for sharing 🙂
I don’t see why you would catch hell for that, it actually makes a lot of sense and is very well thought out and expressed. I’m glad you shared.
Of course this is the internet and the social media side of it so pretty much anything we say can cause someone somewhere to take offense and stay up all night trying to prove us wrong. They have the right to do that and we have the right to do our own thing too. Funnily enough an astrology blog I enjoy going to posted something along those lines last night – they had received an influx of non-astrology related comments which kept criticising their use of certain words and they got fed up and said so. People online can be very pedantic about words… I think its a distraction tactic, distracting them from issues in their own life which are overwhelming them and they release the pressure of it by picking on little things to avoid the big things.
I came across a quote shortly after posting this post – “People demand freedom of speech as a compensation for the freedom of thought which they seldom use.” – Soren Kierkegaard – it’s a bit harsh but worth contemplating and considering when on the receiving end of someone’s ‘freedom to speak’.
I love the idea of ‘growth’ instead of ‘change’. If I was a more verbally precise person I would probably ‘never’ use ‘change’ again and use ‘growth’ instead because it suits the concept better, however I’m a lazy old sod and won’t be ‘changing’ my ways any time soon or ever 😉 but I will ‘grow’ from my experiences, sometimes in a twisted old olive tree or grape vine kind of manner.
I too experienced a ‘code of silence’ which applied to me more than it applied to anyone else in my immediate family. I reached a point in my life when I was afraid to say anything because my voice and words seemed to be a weapon which invariably upset, offended, hurt someone else… and although they were not concerned if their voice and words hurt me, I was made to be concerned and did indeed feel concerned. I was ‘mute’ in many ways for a long time and almost forgot how to talk. Then something ‘changed’ – I would say that in this case change occurred which lead to growth. It was a case of grow or wither because change has happened.
I do see my blog as a ‘sacred space’ of sorts – within that space I welcome differences of opinion (within reason – reason being whatever I decide that it is in the moment 😉 ) partly because I’ve been in places which didn’t welcome my difference of opinion and that’s a stagnant environment for all, or at least that’s how I experienced it. Some of the biggest spurts of ‘growth’ which I’ve had have come from people telling me that I’m wrong, an ass, and need to completely rethink my point of view – they were right but not always the way they thought they were right.
I don’t like to silence others – because I don’t like being silenced. And if someone tests me – they’d better like being tested in return because when people test me I get testy. Power plays have consequences which aren’t always the ones intended by the person playing with power… and that flows in all directions.
One of the things we can learn from those who try to silence us or who test their power by having power over us is… that often what they’re doing to us is a reaction on their part to what someone did to them, they’re the abused becoming the abuser – this cycle doesn’t have to be one we get on, but if we happen to find ourselves on it we can fall off of it and break the momentum.
Sometimes we encounter in life those who remind us of our story and the challenges presented by it – they give us an opportunity to see how far we’ve come, how much we’ve grown and to change how we do things and deal with the same thing in a different mask 🙂
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The quote really did make me laugh out loud.
It has been happening more and more people pick fights and troll online to just start things.
It’s even harder to speak up when people in your own life like to pick fights just for fun them blame you for it.
I am not talking about you. I’m talking about me. I was going to delete it and rewrite it but I decided to leave it. It shows I have a serious problem admitting my problems are my own. It’s easier to speak in hypothesize. The old I have this friend who has this problem kinda thing. If I can’t admit to it how can I learn from it? I ramble. It’s why I don’t write books. 🙂 I think the hardest problem is being able to tell the difference between someone who was abused and who is an abuser. More often the abuser plays the victim better than the abused. My problem is being able to have empathy for even the abuser. This makes it more difficult for me to tell who needs help and who I need to be away from. So now I’m actually afraid to talk or be around people. I really like your comments and post. It’s comforting and empowering to talk to like minded people. People who don’t have a reason to keep me silent. Writing here is not like speaking out. It’s more like screaming silently from the inside. It took my whole life for me to have the strength to do even that. Thank you for the time and effort you put into your writings. You do make a difference. 🙂
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Thank you 🙂
I know what you describe well – it’s hard to look at ourselves and ask ourselves certain questions, so many fears and trepidation about the answers. It’s sometimes easier to make it all about someone else rather than see how our ‘all about someone else’ is actually about us.
But it’s also liberating. That moment when we own something… we get the power which is hidden with in it. That kind of power means you get to choose your next move, step, etc. You get to decide… all those things you thought someone else always got to decide for you. Power is perplexing because it comes with things we didn’t know it had when we saw ourselves as powerless.
Who is the abused and who is the abuser – they’re sometimes one and the same.
One of the most insightful and heartbreaking reads I’ve come across with regards to that question is this one – http://www.drirene.com/victim_is_abuser.htm – now this is a personal share which definitely makes a difference. Whoever shared this was one hell of a brave soul in search of growth.
Follow your story, see where it takes you, don’t worry if it detours and deviates from the path you thought it would take… you’re not written in stone, you’re a natural work in progress who goes where your life takes you and isn’t stuck there… keep going, keep being you and finding out what being you means for you. Your strength is within finding its way out – and many of the experiences you have are the fuel which make the fire within burn bright 🙂
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Huggggsssss and Thank you.
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Rick Astley – made me chuckle. So many memories come with that name. I can’t believe we are so “ancient”.
I’m so much with you on “die-ing on the job”, it’s hard to weed out sometimes. Legacy of being an unhealthy people pleaser, more of a nuisance than benefit to anyone, myself included.
You brought up a really great issue; it’s just horrible how people shift blame to suit their own “peace of mind”. To blame a child for a sexual assault is unbelievable. A kid is already in a state of turmoil of what the heck had happened but hey, why not just finish your child off and rip his or her dignity, self-esteem and trust in adults (who supposed to protect no matter what), let’s just blame it all on the kid and the clothes (the funny thing – those clothes were bought by the said parents)… Happens all the time, rather more often than not.
I can say from my own experience that when I was 14, I was groped in the middle of the grocery store with plenty of people around and my mother (who happens to be a narcissist) was looking the other way, I asked her for help, she just looked me in the eye and said that I just imagined that and made it up, that it simply “never happened”. I even showed her the guy, he was watching and following me like a hawk, it was really creepy. Yet, “you are an attention seeker” and “it never happened” – mind you, things like that are “brought up” at every occasion and gathering for a good laugh. Completely eradicates trust in your parent, taught me to never ask for help and find the way to deal with the issues by my own means.
The other thing, even if their “formula” with provoking with inappropriate clothing works, I don’t really know how it works here (yet, it does). When I was 19, I was on a “path for searching for peace” (so I thought), I believed that I would be able to become a better person, worth of living, if I joined the convent and became a nun. So I got a job at the convent and well, my life was pretty much in accordance with the certain rules and beliefs. In my everyday life I was wearing a plain grey dress below the knee length, plain stockings, plain closed shoes and a white scarf over my head. One day I was waiting for a bus at the bus stop with other people (about 10 people or so). There was a guy coming from across the street and he came straight up to me, spat me in the face and walked away. I was glad he didn’t hit me. I wiped it off and just continued to wait for the bus, like it never happened. The people around started looking angry at me like they wanted me to go away, – “That’s your fault! That’s ‘cause of what you are wearing!” – somebody shouted. Go figure. It’s kind of funny, made me think what the heck just happened and how did I become a bad guy in a blink of an eye. Of course, it was over 20 years ago and there were no Middle Eastern or Indian ladies walking around in their traditional clothing, so I was standing out like a sore thumb with my midi dress and head scarf, but still. While I understand that the guy might have had his own issues, I don’t think that it gives anyone the right to “act” on them wherever they see appropriate and justify it by blaming the other person for provoking their behaviour by wearing something that triggers their personal hate or sexual urges or whatever they seem fit and getting instant immunity from the society for that.
I think that blaming everything on a victim actually solves the problem for the society in general. There is no need to do anything about ANYTHING at all. No need to address the issues and to deal with a bad guy that causes them in the process. Because truly BAD guys have neither moral obligations nor the rules to follow and if somebody challenges that then bad guys would simply turn on them like on a fresh meat and that would present a much bigger problem for them. On the other hand – bully the victim (weak person) and you have your made up “bad guy” chastised and problem solved, nobody can say that you did nothing.
With “forgive and forget” – it’s a nice concept but it is so fragile. It kind of hit me really bad the second time around. Out of peace seeking I wiped out the memories of the bad past and started afresh. It didn’t work out. Like many things in life, I find that nothing is written in stone, everything is fluid and relative. Discarding old experience by forgetting it, whether it was good or bad is not a very smart idea. People can change, true, but that only applies when the certain rules, boundaries and morals are observed, however there is a niche where there are no rules, never were and never will be by definition, that’s where “forgiving and forgetting” becomes your self-destructing enemy and a breeding ground for exploitation and manipulation. It only works if you let it, of course, so cutting it off and becoming a bad guy that never forgets is sometimes vital in my personal opinion. Primal survival, bite back or be eaten alive (may be I went a little too far, sorry about that).
Thank you so much, Ursula, for your awesome posts, they are amazing. Very thoughtful and deep.
I really appreciate you giving me a chance to comment, sorry if I write too much (I try to cut it short but it rarely works, heh).
I value your opinion and support!
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Please don’t worry about ‘writing too much in your comments. Say what you would like to say, share as you would like to share 🙂
I’ve had many questions (and quite a bit of anger) about how the adults in my life handled my ‘childish’ problems when I asked them for help, advice or when I expected them to ‘protect’ me because I was in their care and under their supervision.
As I get older and therefore get a whole load more experience of the vicissitudes of living I realise that those adults were often overwhelmed, confused, in pain, helpless, and all the other things we ourselves suffer from now… they suffered from those then.
Children expect adults to know what’s going on and how to deal with what’s going on – adults, now that I’m an adult, often don’t have a clue about what’s going on and therefore don’t know how to handle it. Burying head in sand is sometimes the way to go… and so they did that with us and we felt abandoned and left to our own devices in a scary world.
Narcissists are sort of stuck in childhood – their actual age is probably about 5 years old permanently regardless of physical age. So if you’re a child of narcissists your parents are children (twisted and damaged ones) trying to raise a child – you as their child become older than them the moment you pass the age of 5. At least that’s how I experienced my parents. Once I was 6 and older… I was the real adult in the family and they sometimes confirmed that, my mother started to call me ‘mama’ when I was very young, treated me as though I was her mother (also told me that I might be her mother reincarnated – as my grandmother had died when my mother was a child), although they weren’t too keen on me having the ‘authority’ over them part of it.
Narcissists love to have ‘authority’ they just don’t want the responsibility and consequences which go with it, at least not the ‘unpleasant’ ones. They want the crown and the sceptre, to sit on the throne and rule… just don’t ask them how to handle a problem in the kingdom which doesn’t end up with them being the king or queen whom all subjects love and adore.
I read an article the other day about possible reasons for victim-blaming – https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/ulterior-motives/201609/why-some-people-blame-the-victims-crime – one idea was that it depends upon how a story is told as to how people perceive who is to blame when they are not personally involved in the story.
Just before I read that I had been contemplating someone I know who is very talented at getting others to help them but who doesn’t actually do very much for others. They’re a ‘user’ and yet the people they ‘use’ seem to enjoy being ‘used’ and always say good things about this person (whether they think those good things is another matter).
Another psychology article I read (can’t find the link atm) said that people like to be asked to do favours for you. This makes them feel ‘useful’… being ‘used’ is a close cousin to feeling ‘useful’.
Narcissists are great at telling stories, and in those stories they sometimes make the audience feel like they’re ‘participating’ in the outcome – do you want a happy ending or an unhappy one?
While ‘victims of narcissists’, especially children of narcissists, tend to suck at telling stories involving their narcissist and the abuse their narcissist has put them through – unless the ‘victim of narcissists’ is also a narcissist themselves. Why is that?
‘Real’ stories tend to be too brutal with their truth and life is brutal with everyone so people often don’t want more brutality… they want an escape from it, one which offers them some kind of redemption, or at least hope for a happy ending, a hero… maybe allowing them to be a hero who gives someone else a happy ending.
Forgive and forget is a story with a happy ending with a heroic element… the truth of the behind the scenes of forgive and forget is brutal and the heroic element is overcome by villainy… survival sometimes needs for us to go with the veneer rather than what is beneath it. If we considered how each piece of paper we use required for us to cut down a forest and pollute the environment… or that every meal we eat required death (even if we’re vegan)… or that the walls, floors, roof which we see as part of our home have blood, sweat and tears of generations poured into them… that our own DNA is made up of what our ancestors went through since humans first became a reality… it’d be too much, so we go with what our mind can handle.
Narcissists in some ways show us the weak link of being human and how that weak link tries to become strong because it hates being weak… and so the truth becomes twisted to make it palatable… which makes the real become something we avoid over time in favour of what doesn’t scare us so much and yet… that eventually becomes scary in a different manner.
Everyone is trying to figure things out… and that process is a mess for all of us. We need to embrace the chaos at some point or be consumed by it and it embraces us.
Or something like that 🙂
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Don’t worry. When Millennials have kids, those kids are going to laugh uproariously at the drag-queen eyebrows and cartoon contouring their mothers drew on their faces to take pictures for Instagram and the dopey-looking Rasputinesque beards and greasy pompadour hairdos coupled with plaid shirts on men who tried to look like lumberjacks without having so much as a single callus on their manicured hands. Some things never change (oops–I said “never”) and that is that every generation thinks the one before it and after it had no fashion sense.
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Frankly I like the Millennials, they’re nicer, kinder, more thoughtful, smarter… and under far more daily non-stop pressure in the internet city which never sleeps and never shuts up picking and pounding on people with its opinions that are usually nasty rather than nice, than I ever was when my generation was the one being all here and now.
And I love men with beards. I like hairy women too. It’s time to let our messy hairy human selves just stop shaving until we bleed to look prepubescent as adults.
I don’t think ‘Millennials’ are the problem, they’ve just been nominated as the problem by everyone else. Kind of like our generation was the ‘problem’ then (we’re definitely part of the problem now if we weren’t then). I read a news article about a recent Twitter hashtag – How to confuse a Millennial – and I have to say that the ‘other’ generations showed their grumpy old colours and came out far worse than the Millennials who responded to the attacks aimed their way. This hashtag was something that didn’t need to be ‘negative’. Perhaps a way to confuse Millennials is by not shitting on them but actually appreciating that they’re us… if we’re alive at this time we’re ‘Millennials’ too. But people who were not ‘Millennials’ decided to vent their frustrations and blame the generation which came after them… the generation who isn’t responsible for people that are running things at the moment… for everything that’s wrong with the world today (how things never change and yet think they’ve changed).
A few of our ancestors did warn us that we were destined to keep repeating things… we never listen, but we do love to talk and complain about people not listening 😉
I do find the resurgence of leggings funny because not so long ago people laughed at them and now they’re in again and being laughed at again.
We’re a funny bunch of weirdos – earthlings!
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Maybe I missed your point then, because it seemed to me you were talking about Millennials poking fun at Gen-X (kids of the 80s), so my point was that the generation after Millennials will poke fun at Millennials. Every generation pokes fun at and takes issue with the ones before and after it. That will never change. (There’s “never” again.) How much of an issue one chooses to make it is up to oneself as an individual, but there is always going to be some kind of generation gap. It’s human nature, or we wouldn’t have terms like “old fart” and “kids these days.”
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I wasn’t targeting Millennials, I was just looking back (sideways and forwards) at my ‘generation’… of which I never really felt a part at the time – which is a common experience, it’s like we’re not a part of it until we suddenly are many years later.
How many Millennials really feel that they’re part of the Millennial generation and how many feel that the generation doesn’t represent them and doesn’t include them?
Going by stories on the internet… it’s not just previous generations who feel left out of or left behind by, or are perplexed and confused by the present one. It’s almost as though no one is part of the present generation, it’s an unpopulated one during a time of increased population.
But ultimately aren’t we all a part of what’s happening now?
I’ve been watching Halt and Catch Fire and at the same time watching Mr. Robot – different generations but so many crossovers. Perhaps we need ot see the connections rather than the differences. Perhaps we need to choose whether we’re here or not.
Mostly in my posts I’m just talking to some part of myself 🙂
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