Wednesday, January 28, 2009

The Trap

Imagine this....

You've been invited to a party, but you realize on the day you're pretty sure the party is happening that you're not sure what kind of party it is or what time you should arrive. Well, you're smart and you'll give it your best shot. So you dress in a kind of neutral casual-dressy style and show up at seven.

*

As you come up the walk, you can hear the sounds of a party: music, laughter and you think, "This is going to be a great party." When you come up the stairs you can smell aromas coming from the house and again you say to yourself, "This is going to be a great party."

*

You ring the bell and your host emerges wearing a bemused, enigmatic smile... and a tuxedo

*

"You're late," he says. "I'm sorry. You didn't tell me what time the party was." "I thought you would figure it out" he says. "Well I am here now," you say . Your host looks you up and down. "That may be true, but you are not dressed properly." You look down at your elegant, if casual, clothing and then at his black-tie formal wear. "Yes, that's true. But I'm not that far from home. I can just go and change quickly and be right back."

*

You desperately think about what's in your closet that would fit with formal wear and how long it will take to press it. You add up the travel time, wonder what you'll have to do to your hair to look right, how to change your make-up.... after all this still seems like it'll be a great party......Your host shakes his head. "But then you'll be really late." Dinner will be over and I was COUNTING on you to sit right beside me at the head table."

*

Your heart sinks. Your one chance and you blew it! Inside your head, you say several unflattering things about yourself, your abilities, your intelligence, and your potential, but out loud you declare, "Honest, I'll be back in 45 minutes. I'll be perfect. Can't you wait? You cannot imagine how you'll be back, but you want so badly to be the guest of honor.

*

Your host shakes his head. "Well, I don't know. But what are you planning to bring to contribute to the dinner? I've told you how much I like those special, individual nineteen-layer cakes you bake. I thought you'd know to bring one for every guest."

*

Behind him you can still hear the laughter and the music; you can still smell the exotic foods, and you can still see the champagne in his glass. And you still think it's the greatest party ever and you still want to be the guest of honor.

*

That is what an emotionally unavailable relationship feels like. You're just never quite good enough to get admitted to the party. You get seduced by the clear, often indirect and unspoken, message that something is just a little wrong. If you can fix that, the implied promise goes, you'll be the guest of honor and win the door prize: love...

*

But when you "fix" what was "wrong" the first time, something else is a little "wrong." And when you fix that, something else will appear.

*

Your host has no intention of making you or anyone the guest of honor. Your host also has no ability to make you the guest of honor - or even to open the door to let you in. Your host is suffering from emotional unavailability. This is the inability of a person to reach out and make a heart connection with another person.

*

What is so unsettling and painful is that you end up with the clear belief that this somehow your fault and that it's your responsibility to fix it by being perfect. If it isn't fixed, you're not perfect enough.

*

You did not break it, you don't have to fix it.

*

You say to yourself that you would never get caught in a situation like that, it seems obvious... until - you are in the middle of it..... it doesn't start out with unreasonable demands of perfection. If it did, you'd walk away after the first five minutes. We all get sucked into emotionally unavailable situations because the process is subtle and progressive.The demands move a little at a time, inching you away from your power base, shifting control of the situation to the emotionally unavailable person. This person doesn't want love as much as he or she wants CONTROL. Emotions are unsafe; control gives the illusion of safety.


It is perfectly reasonable to expect an emotional connection with someone with whom you are in a relationship. We expect police officers to enforce the laws, teachers to teach, etc.. These expectations put us into a particular mind-set when we're around those people.


Over time you expect a relationship to grow and deepen. When your partner turns out not to be making an emotional connection, it causes trauma; that is why these relationships are so painful. The trauma then does further damage as it undermines your expectations about yourself and YOUR abilities to make connections. As illogical as that may seem, it's human nature to look for the flaws in ourselves when things don't go as we expect.


We end up being traumatized twice in these relationships; once by the loss and abandonment and again by the loss of our own confidence in ourselves. That is why the end of these relationships can be so much more painful than the end of a fully realized relationship.. We ruminate about what we could have done differently to make it work...."

This is the way disorientation works. And the gradual erosion of all we understand and know by messing with our normal expectations and reality, by subtly shifting the goalposts. Why, in the end, we can no longer trust ourselves. Our psyches were gradually shaped to respond in a certain hostage-like manner, and our cell kept getting smaller and smaller. ~Invicta

Excerpted from "EMOTIONAL UNAVAILABILITY" by Bryn C. Collins

Thanks to Kim of the Passive Agressive Site for her labour.


16 comments:

Anonymous said...

Thank you very much for this very clear picture. I'm in a starting relationship. Many things feel right but there is this intuitive feeling that something also is not. Slowly loosing myself which I will not let happen. This was a great help to keep things in perspective!

Anonymous said...

Thank you for this. Very insightful.

Anonymous said...

Very insightful...I wish I would have known more about this five years ago. Don't want to lose myself again to this person or anyone like him.

OnceSmitten said...

It is interesting how the traps work. I was with a partner who would act as if I were some functionary with no abilities outside of cleaning and making her look good. I am a former musician, and a good one, an artist, and a really good one, a writer, and have been encouraged by successful writers and educators in higher education to publish my work, and she was the single most awful karaoke performer alive. Seriously. I feel like whatever people like to do for fun is fine but she acted like she was freakin' Elvis. Once she commented to me that people like me with a skill (CAD design in my case) would always be employable, or in her words, would always "get by". Something about that statement was so toxic. I felt like some poison gas has just been tooted in my direction. I swear it was tangible. Another time when I was passing by her closely in the kitchen I felt, literally felt her enmity just coming out of her like a cloud. I've worked with people who have that ability to sort of psychically bombard you with hatred, real grim black energy, while they are chatting up everyone else in the room. I wonder if anyone else has had this kind of experience. I have come to understand that I am a bit more sensitive in these areas than most. Probably a result of having N parents that were always changing the rules to create some reason for punishment, basically sadism since there was no crime, but when you're a kid you have to be so aware of the changes in the atmosphere with those kind of people. I think that's why they are often called evil. I think they really are sort of steeped in some deep rageful destructive hate and have learned how to wield it.

Anonymous said...

oncesmitten sept 3 2010 - this reminds me of my narcissistic neighbour, who at the time was my friend. i often heard her leave her house and would look up to see her walk down the path past my kitchen window. And I would feel this absolute blast of resentment, anger and hatred which always made me feel this overwhelming feeling of guilt. It used to unsettle me for ages even though I tried to rationalise with myself that I had nothing to feel guilty about. I have never in all my life ever come across anyone else who was able to project such a physical force through their mood, and have such an effect.

merchantofcool said...

sorry if it offends, the entire site represents the truth, as I have experienced. It doesnt help when others hold me responsible and the n. slips through unnoticed and even enabled to be. One would have to be Jesus Christ himself not to have changed due to the extremeties of the injustice. I have survived it, I realise nothing I was or perfection itself could not change it. I am not responsible and unfortunately modified myself to accommodate it so much so that I lost myself in the process of loyalty. There is a condition called éxcuse abuse' amongst all of the behaviours it is the n's way of redeeming himself. I looked for many a reason in myself that would cause such sadism and realise, I am not the cause, just convenient. I won't apologise for the truth, however I will apologise for searching deep within the n's roots for some kind of reason as to why a human being can be so ruthless and readily dispose of humans that have served him well, like as easy as putting out the trash, because the black and white with no in between is the way for him. No compromise, No remorse, No real accountability, No empathy, Empty words, not backed by genuine actions, unless it serves his purpose, subject to change at any given moment and massive confusion and all of it's consequences. How Sad, surely the pain cannot be that externalised that others have to live it, incarnated. What's really sad, is that intimacy has no value, nor any vow, or any amount of love invested into a void that even the much sought after lottery win could'nt fill. It lays behind closed doors, it kills love, it preens itself in its conquests....regardless of any woman, any relationship, it is a disease, like a match lit, a fire out of control and the ashes that are left of the extinguished fragile remains of the 'broken dove that dared to love'.

Anonymous said...

I found myself in a relationship with a woman who is diagnosed borderline yet also has many of the narcissistic characteristics as well. She is now divorced twice, and sadly has moved on to another city. Lets just say that is her history. Move in, shake it up, leave behind shaken and fallen people and then start over again somewhere else. Her logic is to start over with a 'clean slate'. But as they say, wherever you are, there you are. It is sad that this type of behavior has become so prevalent in our society. What could have been a wonderful relationship (I was alternately described as 'wonderful' and 'nice'), was just scuttled. Rather than nurture a relationship it was instead poisoned to whither and die. Fortunately for boards like this and a number of other resources, we who have been smitten, and then emotionally and financially gutted can recover. The sadness is that someone to whom we represented healthy love, cast us under the speeding locomotive.

starboard said...

Invicta,

You have an enormous capacity to make clear what the classic NPD person is like and in reflecting on the challenges along the often long and complicated path to healing after life with one.

Thank you so much for your work here.

Anonymous said...

My god have just realised I spent 15 years of my life with a person with this condition .Am out now but still having to deal with the aftermass of such a destructive relationship. Do you ever get over it completely ?I have a child with this man ,how can you stop them from being affected?At the moment he is doing the charm offensive on him ( very little actual parenting).grateful to this website as I don't feel the confusion of his behaviour any more but just wish I was away from him completely .

MMH said...

What is so toxic about this kind of relationship, are the mixed messages. It always begins with sweet words, to suck the positive attention out of you. Then the next minute it are those very subtle but evil remarks that they very subtly plant in your brain. It are those dangerous remarks that leave you wondering if you maybe said or did something wrong to deserve this. Most of the time this strikes you when this person is already gone back home, only leaving you with the void of this unanswered question where you have made a mistake. That's how you end up in a vicious circle, for that void can only be filled by that person being with you again and starting with sweet words and making you feel like there was nothing you did wrong.

I am not stupid, nor needy, and I never expected there would be someone gaining so much control over me. I made me doubt my selfworth, and it changed my reality. Thank you for creating this blog. It really helps to heal, find my old self again, and see there are more people dealing with this.

geometaphysicalmusings said...
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geometaphysicalmusings said...
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geometaphysicalmusings said...

The thing that I am struggling with is that in the beginning it was all the sweetness and I was the apple of his eye, which brings out my inner healer, so full of love and compassion, but then the subtle put downs begin, always as a joke, and then in anger, then the punishing, then the nothing quite good enough arrogant behavior...which all brings out my inner bitch, and then I am mirroring the dysfunction to get even, to teach a lesson, who knows.... leading to goalposts that hold only me accountable for the transgression in the relationship...until I flee with my esteem in the toilet, wondering if I am just a masochist at heart. One of the many putdowns to which I gave rise. It takes two. Thank you for this site so I can recognize the red flags immediately in the future, pluck the splint out of my own eye, and heal myself instead of thinking I can be a caretaker in a passive aggressive relationship with a narcissist.

alligators shoes said...

Perspective of others are very useful. thanks for sharing.

VEvil said...

I joined this site after reading your analogy. It is wonderful, and describes these people/monsters so accurately. My mother was an "N," I married an "N," and my first boyfriend after my divorce was an "N," I thought I'd read every self-help book, and had prepared myself so well that it would never happen again! This one was so different, so sweet, kind and caring....until he had me hooked. I prayed, and then I could see. I got away from this one, and no contact is working for me and I am so grateful and happy to be free. They cause so much pain, disorder, and ruin in your life. This is what I am dealing with today. The ruin comes from the first "N," and from the meddling of my mother and brother during and after the divorce. I have lost everything, my home, my job, and even the life of one my dogs. People can not relate to you if you try to talk about it, so I don't. Many believe that what is being said simply can't be true, and that is because it is so hellish.

Anonymous said...

When people realize that they did not break it and do not have to fix it, there is such relief in knowing and accepting that. You literally feel lighter once you unburden yourself from the responsibility of fixing and repairing them. It is their responsibility to fix themselves and if they choose not to, their lives will continue to suffer becasue of the lack of emotional connection to others.