When people find out I'm a therapist, they usually assume I chose my profession because I want to help others. While I derive a deep sense of satisfaction from doing just that, I mostly chose to become a therapist because it was the only line of work I could envision that would support me and a family, while at the same time holding my interest for a lifetime. Human beings are deeply intriguing to me, at least once (if) you get past the veneer, and I can't imagine a more fascinating job. During my last vacation, I thought more deeply about the work I do and the ways it satisfies me. I came to some new insights about myself and how I feel about my clients which didn't entirely surprise me, but that shed some new light on the way the practice of psychotherapy "feeds" me. I believe many therapists feel the same way.

For the most part, I find social conversation and even many friendships to be a less-than-satisfying experience. If you've read my post on narcissistic behavior, you already know how I feel: most people regard parties and the making of a new acquaintance as another opportunity for self-display, to talk about their own amazing experiences, success stories, etc., to elicit admiration from other people and make themselves feel good. Because I'm deeply curious about other people, I'm often eager to hear those stories; but when the narcissistic self-absorption feels too intense, I get tired. It also feels very lonely when the other person shows absolutely no interest in getting to know anything about me.

The Narcissistic Mother

Joseph Burgoin

Relationship Issues

Shame/Narcissism

March 20, 2012July 28, 2015

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Before I decided to stop writing my 'Movies and Mental Health' blog, I had intended to do a video about the narcissistic mother as portrayed in two different films, Black Swan and The Fighter; in this post, I'll be referring to those films but I won't include video clips. If you haven't seen them, I recommend both movies for their psychological insight into family dynamics and, in particular, the role of the narcissistic mother.

There's a degree of narcissism inherent in the relationship between most parents and their children: we take pride in their achievements and feel they somehow reflect well upon us when they do succeed. I'm very proud of my kids and take pleasure in recounting their latest achievements to my friends, and those friends in return (the ones who have kids of their own) appear to feel the same way about their offspring. "My son the doctor" ... you know what I mean. On some level, I suppose we view our children as a type of achievement of our own: we've spent so many years raising and caring for them that we feel pride in ourselves, as well as in them, when they turn out well.

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Performance Anxiety and Shame

Joseph Burgoin

Anxiety

Shame/Narcissism

February 23, 2012February 27, 2012

Over the years, I've worked with a number of artists/performers and dealt with the issue of performance anxiety. I've also had to cope with my own anxieties, both as a public speaker and as a beginning pianist, playing for my family and friends. For most of my career, I've thought about performance anxiety as fall-out from the perfectionistic superego, how the hostile demand for perfection gets projected into the audience. I discussed these issues in an earlier post about self-consciousness.

I've also thought about performance anxiety in terms of fraudulence: for those of us who struggle with issues of precocity, who grew up quickly on the outside to escape unbearable feelings of needy smallness, we often believe our accomplishments are a sham, disguising the true state of affairs inside. One of my clients neatly summed it up with the first dream she brought to treatment: there was a scientist with big round glasses (like Mr. Peabody of the Way-Back machine) and a mortar board on his head, wearing diapers underneath his lab coat. Performance anxiety sometimes embodies the fear of being exposed as a fraud, of revealing that we're really only "babies" underneath that facade of competence.

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Anxiety Basic shame narcissism Shame

Attachment Theory and the Tenacity of Defense Mechanisms

As you can see from the comments to my last post about attachment theory and the origins of shame, many people are struggling with the idea of lasting neurological damage as the result of failures in early attachment. This is a difficult truth to accept, but we're talking about scientifically verifiable changes in the brain that result from different experiences during the first two years of life. I have no problem with people hoping that science will eventually figure out how to repair that damage; I can't argue with religious faith when people believe that their God will do the same. But while we are waiting, full of hope and faith, we must try to make the best use of what we know. Contrary to what one of the comments suggested, facing the truth does not lead to a sense of hopelessness and despair about changing. Rather, it allows us to be realistic in our expectations and to work for attainable change, rather than hoping for salvation from science or God. I would suggest it is the hope for a "complete cure" (instead of facing the truth) than undermines the hard work of psychotherapy.

In an earlier post about the tenacity of defenses, I discussed how our defense mechanisms are mental habits of coping etched in our neural pathways. I'm not a neurologist and my ability to describe the science is limited, but based upon the work of Allan Schore and others, I think we can now expand on this idea. When there are early failures of attachment and the infant doesn't learn to manage its own emotional experience, it instead makes use of psychological defenses to ward it off; such defenses are built into the structure of the brain as it develops. When an adult comes into my office -- a person who relies heavily on denial, his neuro-anatomy has developed in a way -- an abnormal way -- that reflects the use of that defense. If someone else resorts to splitting and projection, her neuro-anatomy will have developed differently. These defensive strategies are inherent in the very structure of the brain as it developed.

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