"Just when we had girded ourselves against the sociopath next door, Burgo alerts us to the narcissist across the street. What a neighborhood!" - The New York Times Book Review
Several readers responding to my recent post about a client who felt invisible have asked me to discuss the opposite experience -- the person who fears being seen and desperately wants to remain invisible. It's a very different issue, with roots in profound shame.
Early in the summer of 2011, not long after we arrived in Colorado, I received an email from our good friends in Los Angeles who also own a cabin down the road from us. They had offered the use of their cabin for one week to the rector of their church, All Saint's in Pasadena, who would be using it as a retreat while he worked on his book; they wondered if we could "keep an eye out" for him in case he needed anything during his visit, and asked if they could give him our telephone number. I'd do anything for these friends, to begin with, and the fact that this visitor was a writer made me all the more willing to help.
According to my friends, the Rev. Ed Bacon had appeared on The Oprah Show, as well as on her radio program, and apparently she suggested on air that he write a book. This aroused the interest of literary agents and led to a bidding war for his book proposal, along with a "significant" advance. Even before I met Ed Bacon, I felt envious. I've been writing since I was 12 and for most of my life have wanted nothing more than to be in his position. I had launched my website seven months earlier and was struggling to find my way as a blogger; I'd also begun a non-fiction book in the self-help genre and would soon be attempting to interest a publisher in acquiring it. I knew that the prospect of a "significant" advance for a relative unknown like me was highly unlikely.
I've always struggled with the term attachment, used in my profession to denote the relationship that is supposed to develop between mother and infant during the earliest months of life. I may be too concrete, but it makes me think of those poor monkeys in Harlow's experiment, clinging to that cloth-covered metal skeleton; it seems to imply a kind of physical connection when in fact, it's all about the emotional relationship. In his video on attachment theory, Allan Schore brings that relationship to life when he speaks about the complex interactions between mother and baby -- the role of eye contact, physical interaction and facial expresions in creating secure "attachment" -- but it still seems to me to be the wrong word.
I've had a similar problem with Kohut's word, mirroring, because to my concrete mind, it suggests that what the mother does is behave like a physical object (a mirror), though lately, I've been feeling better about it. In my work with several different clients, I've been struck anew with the role of our parents' attention in creating our sense of self, how important it is that we feel that we are seen. In a fundamental way, we come to know who we are by witnessing our parents' responses to us; in particular, the joy and love we see in our mother's face convey to us that we are beautiful and important. Allan Schore has shown how the infant comes with a set of inbuilt expectations and behaviors geared to elicit those parental responses; when the reality of an engaged and loving mother meets those expectations, the result is a secure "attachment" (ugh).
In recent weeks, both within my practice and through emails from site visitors (all women), I've heard about several men who have tried to destroy the reputation of their ex-wives with a ruthless and quite thorough assault on their public characters. These men have told lies to friends and family members, attempted to blackmail their former spouses by threatening to spread vicious lies about them, stolen money from them, tried to turn children against their mothers, become explosively angry, even physically violent when challenged, and have uniformly laid blame for the failure of the marriage at the feet of the ex-wife. I've also heard from a couple of men confronting vengeful and narcissistic women in their lives, but with nowhere near the level of vindictiveness displayed by these narcissistic ex-husbands.
A few weeks ago, just before I took a week's vacation, I did a radio interview with Jo Anne White of "Power Your Life" concerning the limits of psychological growth. We actually ended up talking quite a lot about the subject matter of my new book, so if this of interest to any of you, here's a link.