The Rawness

When I was doing Part 4 to this series, I did a lot of research on the internet and in the book The Game to try to make a psychological profile. One thing I found interesting though was how little of Neil Strauss’s background, particularly his childhood and upbringing, was discussed, as opposed to Mystery’s, which was described in excruciating detail.

I tried a bunch of Google searches and looked at his Wikipedia and it was incredibly vague about his childhood, so I had to end up doing the piece without that info and worked around it.

However I found some updated information that confirms a lot of my theories about Neil Strauss and his issues, so I am going to revise Part 4 with an update. Read the rest of this entry »

INTRO

This is part 4 in a series. Here are the links to Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3. You need to read all three parts before proceeding, because I am going to repeatedly refer to concepts from those first three parts. If you don’t read them beforehand you’ll end up lost.

One of the things Bill asked me about in his original set of emails was about whether the world of pickup artists like Neil Strauss and Mystery were a solution to his problems.

Here are the relevant portions of his emails:

On a total side-note, I would also like to ask your opinion of the PUA community as discussed in the book The Game by Neil Strauss. And made famous by the peacocking Mystery…

I also meant to ask about the validity of NLP neuro linguistic programming. And it’s uses by the PUA community. In specific I’d like more information about the ‘forbidden patterns’ I have done some reading about the October Man Sequence, and have also read it. I do believe it could work, my real concern is the possible effects these tools could have on someone.

This installment took me way longer than I originally planned because the more research I did to answer this aspect of Bill’s question, the more interesting meaty stuff I found to analyze. I just kept finding more and more information on the web and on Youtube and I got fascinated by how deep the dynamics going on were. Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve been exceptionally busy the past two weeks, but I will do parts 4 and 5 of the current series of posts this Sunday.

Thanks for the patience.

This is the third part of a response to a letter from reader Bill asking for advice. Part 1 can be found here. Part 2 can be found here. You should read both parts before reading this one.

This installment is about chemistry, and what it means.

In Bill’s original letter he stated:

I started dating her awhile back, and the relationship burned hot and fast. Part of the reason it burned so fast was that I was caught up in my emotions and allowing them to rule my actions. I became a very jealous boyfriend, not to mention protective.

We worship romantic chemistry. Our novels, our movies, are plays, our great epics all diefy it. So when it occurs in our lives, we assume it must be a good thing. But just because it feels good, does that mean it’s a good thing? I mean, heroin must feel good given how many people get strung out over it, but few rational people would mistake it for a good thing, would they?

Here is what I think chemistry is. Some people think we get attracted to partners who represent our opposite-sex parent. Women supposedly marry their fathers and men supposedly marry their mothers. This is not necessarily true. In relationships, we feel intense chemistry with partners who remind us of aspects of our parents we have the most unresolved, open issues with. And in relationships, we become those aspects of our parents we most identified with.

Someone with codependent caretaker values, they have unresolved issues with hard to please parents and never getting their emotional needs met from them. Therefore when they have a lot of chemistry with someone, it tends to be with someone who has the same issues as their parents as far as being hard to please and being inconsiderate of the codependent’s emotional needs. That intense chemistry they feel, that familiarity, it comes from unconsciously recognizing the most influential dynamic of their lives: the dynamic they had with their parents.

In  Bill’s case, both of his parents had problems meeting his emotional needs, and he had to focus more on meeting their needs than the other way around. This is called parentification, and it’s what made him develop caregiver values. As this article about parentification explains:

“[C]ompulsive caregiving” among the ‘over-conscientious and guilt ridden as well as anxiously attached‘ [is] a result of ‘a parent, usually mother, exerting pressure on them to act as an attachment figure for her, thus inverting the normal relationship’^[8] - requiring the child to act as the care-giving parent while she took on the child-role.

Notice the term “anxiously attached.” Attachment theory is a school of psychology created by John Bowlby, and you can find a summary of it on this page, but let’s  focus on the definition of anxious attachment, since it’s the attachment style of those with the caregiver values:

People who formed an anxious or preoccupied attachment as an infant, by comparison, are more likely to be preoccupied with their relationships as an adult. Anxious or preoccupied adults are constantly worried and anxious about their love life – they crave and desperately need intimacy – but, they never stop questioning their partner’s love (“do you really love me?”). Anxious individuals are concerned that their partners will leave them. These adults are obsessed with their relationships and everything that happens in them. They rarely feel completely loved and they experience extreme emotional highs and lows. One minute their romantic partner can make their day by showing them the smallest level of interest and the next minute they are worried that their partner doesn’t care about them. Overall, anxiously attached individuals are hard to satisfy; you can’t love them enough, or be close enough to them, and they constantly monitor their relationships for problems. Ironically, their need for love, makes it easy for anxious individuals to be taken advantage of when it comes to love and romance, which in the long run can create even more suspicion and doubt.

If you remember Bill’s original letter where he mentioned his inability to get his jealousy under control? That was his anxious attachment at work.

The fact that people with anxious attachment can be easy to take advantage of in relationships makes emotional vampires, who are very manipulative by nature and love to play games with people, gravitate toward them. And these caregivers with anxious attachment often feel great chemistry with these people because they push the same buttons in them that caused their core issues.

This article describes the relationship between Cluster B vampires and the types of men who attach to them. The whole article is worth reading, but here are the key parts for our purposes:

Certain aspects or common denominators are present in males who attach to [Borderline Personalit Disorder] Waifs. Generally, these are People Pleaser types, who have rescuing or fixing compulsions, self-esteem difficulties from childhood, intimacy issues, engulfment concerns, poor self-image, dysthymia (chronic/long-standing mild to moderate depression), etc. Foundational problems of this kind leave men vulnerable to being seduced and manipulated by these women. You may be extremely accomplished and successful–but the Borderline will methodically learn what’s underneath the props, and use your most intimate secrets and self-doubts against you. Men drawn to waifs are addicted to helping others, and usually need to be in the one-up position in their relationships…

When the Waif shared tales about former boyfriends or lovers who assaulted her, you were outraged. These accounts inspired your fierce need to protect her–while assuring yourself, it’ll be different with you; why not–you’re one of the “good guys!” During these storytellings, you were made to feel heroic, exceptional and uniquely unlike all the others. But no matter how convincing this woman is, you must resist the temptation to believe what she tells you…

The Waif seduces you with her fragility. If your childhood experiences turned you into a mediator, fixer or rescuer, this woman or man presents you with plenty of opportunities to feel powerful, in charge and in-control. You thrive on these, for they (temporarily) appease your need to be needed, which has formed the basis of your self-worth–but have you ever felt valued and loved for simply being, instead of doing?…

The man-child of a Waif Mother is anxiously attached to females he dates, and consistently chooses partners he thinks will never leave him–or that he won’t miss when they do. The needy/clingy Waif or emotionally vapid Siren perfectly fits this profile–until she deserts him for another. This is when his fragile ego takes a nose-dive, and core abandonment shame is triggered. He may know he doesn’t really want her–but desperately needs to be wanted, to ease the hideously painful shame he feels from her rejection.

This issue alone, can send him into perilous pain and longing for any woman who has pried the lid off his Pandora’s Box of self-esteem wounds. Thus, his misguided, frantic pursuit to win her back, begins in earnest.

Now some people out there with caretaker codependency issues who have been involved with vampires may be confused, and thinking something along the lines of the following: “Wait a minute–the emotional vampire in my life started out like a dream. They built me up, they fawned over me, they flattered me, they came on strong, they played to my ego, they made me feel like a million bucks. They idealized me. They only turned on me later, once I was hooked. Later on they became Mr. Hyde, but at first they were pure Dr. Jekyll. They didn’t start withholding approval and emotional validation from me like my parents did until later on, so how can you say that the chemistry came from “recognizing” aspects of a parent or both parents in this vampire partner? The parent I have issues with was never as fawning or approving as my vampire was in the beginning of the relationship. The person my vampire was in the beginning was the opposite of my troublesome parent. The similarities only came along later.”

Narcissist and borderline vampires almost always follow an idealization and a devaluation phase. They are a dream come true in the beginning and a nightmare later on. But to anyone reading this article who feels they are codependent and that they have a tendency to attract emotional vampires and have a certain vampire parent they feel they can link this “unfinished business” core issue to and a codependent parent they feel they may be subconsciously imitating, I suggest the following test for you. The next time you talk to your codependent parent, ask him or her what your narcissistic parent was like in the beginning, in the courtship phase. I bet what you will hear will eerily mirror the courtship phases of your relationships with the vampires in your life: lots of fawning, sweeping off of feet, lots of chemistry,  and an eagerness to make a good impression.  The point is, your vampire even during the idealization stage was more like your hard to please parent than you may have realized consciously, but your subconscious picked up on it quite well, which is where the chemistry came from.

People focus on the wrong questions when it comes to chemistry. It’s not about whether chemistry is not inherently good or bad. It’s about your relationship with your primary inferiorities, your core issues. If you haven’t done the inner work on your core issues, if you haven’t made peace with or aren’t even aware of your primary inferiorities, then for you chemistry is bad. You can’t trust chemistry until you have done the hard work on yourself needed to heal your primary inferiorities. 

When someone with a healthy emotional core feels chemistry, it’s often a good sign. When someone with profoundly damaged core damage feels chemistry, it’s usually a danger sign. Only when you fix your own emotional core will you be able to experience chemistry with healthy people, because that’s when you’ll feel that at your core you have something in common with them. Right now at your core you can only relate to damaged people, because subconsciously that’s what you feel comfortable with. In addition, if someone is too healthy, you unconsciously feel they won’t want anything to do with you if they got past your false self and saw the real you. Groucho Marx had a famous saying, “I don’t care to belong to any club that would have me as a member.” That’s the state you’re in now. That’s why you look for “bargains,” people who are “fixer-uppers.”

These tendencies are why people with caregiver codependency issues are encouraged not to enter serious, long-term relationships until they do the serious  inner work they need to fix their core issues.

There is a great book called Emotional Vampires by Albert Bernstein that I recommend, and it has a section on chemistry, although it refers to it as “hypnosis.” The book describes danger signs that I think are worth discussing and quoting, but if you when caretaker values these danger signs are even bigger red flags:

• Deviating from standard procedure.
  

  If you ever find yourself veering sharply from your usual way of doing things, especially in response to a person you don’t know very well,stop right then and ask yourself why. Listen very closely to your answer.

• Thinking in Superlatives. If you are thinking words like “best,” “most promising,” “perfect” or “most charisma” in relation to a person you barely know, take a step back. This is often happening not because of the person is those things but precisely because the person isn’t those things and is overcompensating in order to be seen as the very things she isn’t. (And as I describe later, narcissists and borderlines are expert overcompensators.)
  

  Distorted perceptions usually involve superlatives. If you find yourself thinking that someone is radically different from other people, quickly ask yourself why. Remember, worst and most annoying are superlatives also.

• Instant Rapport.
  

  Getting to know and appreciate another person usually involves time and effort. Be careful when rapport seems to be developing too quickly, no matter how good the process feels. Instant understanding is usually the result of someone recognizing how you would really like to be seen and pretending to see you that way.

• Seeing the Person or Situation as Special. This means you view the person as “special” and deserving of special treatment you normally wouldn’t give other people as a result. A good indicator this is happening is when you hear yourself say “so different,” “the one,” or “once in a lifetime.” For example sometimes you may see someone who is a stone cold player with girls he is not interested in, but he turns into a sucker and people pleaser when he falls for a girl he has chemistry with. Chances are, she activates a childhood dynamic he had with a certain parent and he’s now seeing her as “special” or “the one,” causing him to turn silly.
  

  Defining an interaction as a special case that doesn’t follow the normal rules is a clear sign that an Emotional Vampire is turning on the predatory charm…[R]emember that vampires excel at getting you to notice them, not what they’re doing. Pay attention!

• Lack of Concern with Objective Information.
  

  Your two most important sources of objective information about another person are the details of that person’s history and the opinions of other people. If for some reason you find yourself avoiding those sources, or thinking that they don’t apply, watch out.

• Confusion.
  

  Hazy understanding of the reasons for your own reactions, coupled with unusual certainty, is a pretty clear sign tha somebody has been messing with your mind.

In addition, someone like Bill is only 18, so he’s too young to be in serious relationships anyway. He has too much growing to do, too much to see. He needs to enjoy his youth and sow his oats, not look for serious girlfriends. My rule of thumb for young guys is to not even consider a serious relationship until at least 25.

What caregiver codependent types and narcissist and borderline emotional vampire types have in common that  helps fuel their intense chemistry is that they both suffer from very low, shaky self-esteem, often to the point of self-loathing. Don’t let anyone convince you otherwise, narcissists and borderlines do not have high self-esteem. In fact, I think narcissists and borderlines, underneath their haughty exteriors, actually have lower self-esteem than codependents. Another thing codependents and emotional vampires have in common is they both got such low self-esteem from similar emotional wounds and attachment traumas.

The reason they seem so different on the surface comes from their respective  coping strategies. The codependent  primarily chooses the faulty coping strategy of surrender to deal with his low-self-esteem while the narcissist/borderline chooses overcompensation through grandiosity to deal with his low self-esteem. It’s a case of two different external reactions, giving in versus rebelling, to the same internal issue, low self-worth.

Here is the good news if you are a codependent caregiver though. You are curable. For you there is hope. The narcissist/borderline is not curable. Even those who feel the narcissist/borderline can be cured (and they are an extreme minority among mental health professionals) admit that it is very rare and requires an extreme amount of self work, at a level most narcissists simply aren’t equipped to do.

See, the major key to fixing oneself is awareness. One must own all one’s problems and deficiencies along with all of one’s strengths and talents in a brutally, unflinchingly honest manner, and without shame or self-judgment. Most if not all major schools of thought regarding personal growth at some point preach this. You must own all your faults and weaknesses and all your virtues and  strengths.  But you must especially own the faults and weaknesses, because you can’t truly fix something until you know exactly what’s wrong.

Because the codependent caregiver’s main faulty coping strategy is surrender, he is much more in touch with his faults and weaknesses. In his case, it’s not hard to get him to own his main problem, which is low self-esteem. He’s likely already very aware of it. His low self-esteem is much closer to the surface. The narcissist/borderline on the other hand has chosen the primary coping strategy of overcompensation. This overcompensation is maintained by defense mechanisms like projection, denial, intellectualization, splitting, repression, dissociation and others, all of which are aimed at maintaining obnoxious grandiosity and keeping the narcissist/borderline from discovering the truth about himself: that he or she is racked with self-loathing. They have erected so many psychic defenses against accessing their feelings of self-loathing that they can never develop the awareness needed to own their weaknesses and faults.

They feel on a subconscious level that without their grandiosity they would fall apart and cease to exist, much like a shark will die if it stops swimming. That’s why they hang onto that grandiosity no matter how miserable it makes their lives. That’s why they refuse to even let themselves realize how much the grandiosity ruins their lives. It’s because they believe their only other choice besides grandiosity fueled by self-loathing is total ego annhilation and psychic nonexistence, a figurative death if you will.

So for those reasons, be happy that if you had to have a problem caused by low self-esteem, you had the problem of caregiving codependency rather than being an emotional vampire. Because at least you have the capacity for empathy. At least you have the capacity for self-awareness when it comes to your faults. And through that self-awareness, you have the capacity for amazing spiritual growth and amazing inner strength. If you are willing to face some painful truths about yourself and do the hard personal work to move past them, you can and will be healthy and filled with true self-worth.

I will go into what it takes to fix these problems more in-depth later, but for now I’ll say this: you need self-awareness without self-judgment. You need to be aware of all the details of your primary inferiority, your core issues, the depth of your self-loathing, the childhood roots of it all, the faulty coping strategy you’ve developed to deal with this primary inferiority, the final fictional goal you’ve created for your adult life that you feel will redeem this primary inferiority, the idealized, false self you’ve aspired to become in order to carry out this final fictional goal, and then you need to make peace with all of it. You need to say “Yes, this was me, and it may be me for a while longer, but it doesn’t have to be this way, and with hard work and continued self-honesty, it won’t be that way.”

The key is to stop trying to fix your primary inferiorities and core wounds through new forms of external validation and final, fictional goals and instead realize this: you can’t “redeem” those childhood needs and wounds through adult gratification and adult goals. Those childhood needs can only be met as a child. The time for getting that unconditional love and approval of our true selves we needed from our parents is in childhood. Trying to find that unconditional love and approval and validation that a child needs from external sources in the adult world like money, career, sex, and relationships is a fool’s game.  Look at how tortuous Michael Jackson’s adult life was because he never learned that lesson.

What you have to do is make peace with and mourn the external validation and emotional nurturance you didn’t get as a child. Grieve it, then move past it. Don’t keep trying to make up for what you missed in your childhood as an adult. And now that you’re becoming aware of what you missed in your childhood, don’t wallow in it and make it into your identity now either. It’s just something that happened to you, not something you are.

Just remember: If you never work on your core issues, I guarantee you your core issues will continue to keep working on you beneath the surface.

And to Bill: don’t let these realizations about yourself cause you increased shame and self-judgment. The caregiver values you developed, the catering to others emotional needs, the pleasing, etc., these were emotional survival strategies that got you through childhood. You needed them. They were absolutely necessary. They helped you come out of childhood whole, and you should be proud of yourself for coming out as good as you did.

The problem is, as an adult you no longer need these faulty survival strategies. You’re only holding on to them out of habit, and now as an adult the same strategies that served you so well in childhood are not only no longer needed, but they’re now backfiring. You need to become aware of those bad emotional habits, unlearn them, and learn new, more functional ones. And an important habit to start with is enforcing your emotional boundaries.

Next  is part 4, the answer to the last part of Bill’s email: Is the world of pickup as described by Neil Strauss in the book The Game the answer to his problems? My answer is no, and I’ll explain why in more detail in part 4, but the gist of it is I think that most people who get drawn to pickup artistry are codependent caretakers who have surrender to their low self-esteem, and pickup, rather than addressing their core issues and primary inferiorities instead teaches them to switch their faulty coping strategies from one of surrender to one of overcompensation, which leaves their core issues and low self-esteem intact and turns them into narcissists. And as I mentioned earlier in this article, narcissists don’t really have any less self-loathing than codependents, they’re just better at blocking their own access to their inferiority feelings and self-loathing through a grandiosity propped up by layers upon layers of defense mechanisms.

After that I’m going to do a post elaborating on strategies of how to fix core issues and primary inferiorities, along with a good reading list. I haven’t decided if I’m going to call that part 5 of this series or make it a separate post.

Recommended Reading:

Follow up with this book and these links, which cover even more ground than this post did:

The book Emotional Vampires is a great resource. The edition I quoted above can be found here.. There is also a revised and expanded 2nd edition coming out as seen here, but I don’t know when that’s getting released.

This installment of 31 Days of Game.

Read everything on the Shari Schreiber’s website, starting with this one, then this one, then this one, then this one and then this one. Eventually try to read as many as you can that apply to your situation.

Go through the posts on the blog Shrink4men (new site and old site), starting with this piece and this one.

“What is Codependence?” article.

The Narcissistic Family: Diagnosis and Treatment, Part 1 and Part 2.

The Narcissistic Family Portrait.

I’m going to do an occasional recurring feature here where I recommend a movie that I think does a good job illustrating the human nature topics of this blog. This is the first installment.

Tonight  Turner Classic Movies at 1 Am Eastern time is airing a movie called “Darling” starring Julie Christie. Try to watch it or DVR it if you’ve been enjoying the last two years of posts on this blog.

“Darling” is a great depiction of a Cluster B personality disorder, a true emotional vampire. It’s about a beautiful woman who likely suffers from Malignant Narcissism,  Histrionic Personality Disorder and Borderline Personality Disorder. She idealizes, uses, and then devalues and discards men as she climbs to the top. She is utterly devoid of empathy and damaged in a very realistic way.

Many of the concepts I’ve discussed on this blog are well illustrated in this movie. If you miss the movie tonight, you can always watch it on Netflix instant here or buy it here on Amazon.

If you do manage to see it, share your thoughts in the comments, good or bad.

The trailer:

In response to my last post, I discussed among other things the three faulty ways of coping with core problems: surrender, overcompensation and avoidance. Commenter YOHAMI wrote the following:

So what to do? how do I heal this stuff. Im always in pain. Sometimes its great for making music. I meditate or do stuff I love (ehrr. avoidance?) and it goes away. Then something triggers again.

I think I got the picture. I´d like to know if you have a method to get rid or solve or transmute or whatever has to happen.

I think he raised a good question. Is meditation a type of avoidance of core problems?

There is a Vipassana meditation book called Mindfulness in Plain English by Bhante Henepola Gunaratana that tackles this subject and says the following:

[Meditation is not running away from reality.] Meditation is running straight into reality. It does not insulate you from the pain of life but rather allows you to delve so deeply into life and all its aspects that you pierce the pain barrier and go beyond suffering. Vipassana is a practice done with the specific intention of facing reality, to fully experience life just as it is and to cope with exactly what you find. It allows you to blow aside the illusions and free yourself from all the polite little lies you tell yourself all the time. What is there is there. You are who you are, and lying to yourself about your own weaknesses and motivations only binds you tighter to them. Vipassana meditation is not an attempt to forget yourself or to cover up your troubles. It is learning to look at yourself exactly as you are to see what is there and accept it fully. Only then can you change it.

Mentally running away from reality is not meditation, but rather dissociation. It’s a defense mechanism we often use to mentally escape the discomforts of real life. Dissociation can range from daydreaming to taking drugs to get high to getting absorbed and zoning out while watching TV to  situations as extreme as developing multiple personalities.

This article goes further:

Think of a more common captivity situation, like child abuse or domestic violence. Victims of abuse are in a captive state psychologically. They dissociate to cope with being abused. Dissociation during sexual abuse is a classic example. Many people who have been sexually abused as children report leaving their bodies and watching the abuse from above themselves. This is a more extreme form of dissociation than simple daydreaming. This is the mind’s ability to cope with horror at its best. Instead of having to be emotionally experiencing sexual abuse, the mind helps your soul escape. Your experience of being is not in your body, but on the ceiling somewhere witnessing abuse that is happening to you.

There are varying levels of dissociation:

• Everyday Dissociation we all experience that is healthy in general
  day dreaming
  • spacing out
  • fantasy
• Traumatic Dissociation that comes from trauma and is not integrated in the psyche
  • numbness
  • deadened emotions
  • leaving one’s body
• Severe Traumatic Dissociation comes from major trauma that is not integrated in the psyche
  • derealization – constant experience of dissociation
  • depersonalization – not feeling the sense of “Me” or feeling your body as belonging to yourself
  • forming separate identities or self-states
    • fully formed identities
    • partially formed identities with specific roles
    • emotion states that are fragments

In its most extreme form, dissociation can actually cause a sense of fragmentation or various self-identities within one person. This happens to children who endure horrifying torture and extreme forms of abuse. Instead of leaving one’s body, an entire separate identity is created to handle the abuse the child has to endure. It isn’t uncommon for children who develop different self-states to form several personalities to take on various roles. The more personality states created, the more abuse has occurred. This form of dissociation only happens in childhood, when children are most vulnerable, and endures through adulthood unless therapy is sought out. Therapy can help people with multiple identities to either learn to manage the fractured pieces of themselves more effectively and improve their overall quality of life, or to integrate the fractures into one sense of Self.

For dissociation that interferes in your quality of life, therapy can be extremely helpful. Traumatic dissociation happens when you are overwhelmed by a traumatic event or a series of traumatic events. It is self-protective. The problem is that in order to put the past to rest, the painful feelings of the past trauma have to be re-integrated into your sense of self, and a new sense of the integrated trauma needs to be internalized.

Many people feel that even if their childhoods were emotionally dysfunctional, so long as they didn’t consist of extreme abuse such as lots of beatings, sexual molestation, etc, they don’t really have any trauma to complain about, but that’s not true. Dysfunctional families that don’t provide emotional nurturance, even the ones that don’t have physical, verbal, or sexual abuse , are usually very traumatic to a child.

Some people tend to dissociate easier than others, and kids who grew up dysfunctionally and used dissociation to cope often become adults who chronically dissociate all the time. This is one of the reason alcoholism and drugs are so so appealing to people with bad childhoods; they create an easy way to induce dissociation through use of chemicals. It’s a type of repetition compulsion; by bringing about dissociation via chemicals, they’re re-experiencing one of their preferred coping mechanisms of youth.

For those who tend to dissociate easily, mentally moving away from reality, meditation can be very difficult because it is the polar opposite, mentally moving toward reality. Some people think they’re meditating when really they’re just dissociating and calling it meditation. Some people go into meditation chasing a high or a trance that feels similar to what one enters when taking drugs, which again is just more dissociation. This is why some think it’s so important to have the guidance of a good teacher before seriously undertaking meditation.

I took a class in Vipassana (Insight) meditation myself recently and it helped a lot as far as telling the difference. I was fortunate to have a good teacher who explained the difference between meditation and dissociation very clearly. She then recommended a few books, including the two I’m giving links to below, that helped even more.

Also, in regards to your other question, yes I do have some suggestions about how to go about correcting a lot of these issues. It’s a process I still struggle with myself, but I’ve come across techniques that have done wonders for me. I will discuss them later in the Reader Letter series this month.

Recommended Reading:

• Mindfulness in Plain English by Bhante Henepola Gunaratana. This book is the more essential of the two, as it discusses the how of meditation.

• Insight Meditation: The Practice of Freedom by Joseph Goldstein. This book is a good (but not essential in my opinion) supplement to the previous book that discusses the why of meditation.

[This is a long post, so to make it easier to read you may want to hit the "Print This Post" link above the post title.]

Before starting, I want to make it clear that I am in no shape or form a mental health professional and have zero credentials in such that area. If lack of credentialed authority is a dealbreaker for you, I highly suggest you stop reading now. I just want to be clear about this, and no advice given in this post is expected to be a substitute for diagnosis from a qualified, talented and empathetic therapist. With that disclaimer out of the way, let’s proceed:

Last week I discussed Bill’s letter asking for advice. You can read the original letter and the first part of my response at this link.

Now I want to talk about how Bill developed his codependent behavior patterns. Different mental health experts have many names for the tendency some people have to attract and accommodate narcissists and other types of emotional vampires. In addition to codependency, this condition is often called enabling, caretaker values, white knight syndrome, rescuer complex, hero complex, etc. (I provide you all these names in case you want to do further research on your own about this dynamic via Google. The more terms you have, the better range of information you can find.)

Before we get started, I’m going to bring you up to speed on some key psychological concepts from a variety of sources that will come into play in discussing your codependency: primary inferiority; secondary inferiority; faulty coping strategies; surrender; overcompensation; avoidance; final fictional goals; false, idealized self; narcissistic injury; repetition compulsion.

To start, let’s discuss Alfred Adler’s concepts of primary inferiority and secondary inferiority.

Primary inferiority is the type of inferiority feeling that defined your childhood. You can also refer to it as your core issues. Everyone as a child unavoidably has some feeling of inferiority, because all children are weak, helpless and dependent. However some children develop a more exaggerated feeling of inferiority growing up than others, sometimes due to perhaps neglectful, abusive or over-pampering parents, sometimes due to comparisons to siblings and other children, or sometimes due to other trauma like physical defects, harsh environments, mental limitations or socioeconomic limitations.

Most people learn deal with this primary inferiority feeling by using one or more of the following three faulty coping strategies as defined by Jeffrey Young, developer of Schema Therapy: surrender (freeze), overcompensation (fight), or avoidance (flight). For example, say my parents intentionally or accidentally, through neglect, bullying or pampering, made me feel growing up that my job is to self-sacrifice and be responsible for their emotions. I may surrender to this feeling and decide to accept these self-sacrificing values, and become a caretaker who seeks out dysfunctional people to fix, and I always emotionally and physically give without ever asking for much in return, hoping one day it will be my turn to receive. This is the codependent’s solution. Or I may overcompensate by rebelling against the idea that I should self-sacrifice, instead choosing to give as little as possible while taking as much as I can. This is the emotional vampire’s solution, particularly Cluster Bs. Or I may choose avoidance (flight) of all situations that involve giving or taking altogether. This is the solution of the paranoid and the recluse.

People often create adult goals when they get older that are based on their primary inferiority feelings and the particular faulty coping strategies they’ve chosen to follow. Adler called these goals that guide our adult quests our final fictional goals. People believe on some level that these final fictional goals will fix whatever primary inferiorities they developed as kids. The codependent wants to erase his feelings of worthlessness by finding someone to please, impress or fix in the way he could never please, impress or fix his parent. The narcissist wants to erase his feelings of worthlessness by always appearing perfect, being a superachiever, demanding things from others and making others serve his emotional needs. And the paranoid or recluse wants to avoid people and the feelings of worthlessness they bring about in him because as a child avoiding his parents wasn’t an option.

Other examples of final fictional goals can include a certain high-status career, sleeping with a certain amount of women, finding a rich man to fulfill one’s Cinderella fantasy, having a certain type of family, living in a certain type of house in a certain neighborhood, having a lot of political power, being a famous celebrity, living a high-profile jetset life, being a celebrated author, or being a spiritual leader. The options are endless.

Whoever you feel you have to become in order to fulfill your final fictional goals is your false, idealized self. This is the mythical person, the symbol of perfection, that you imagine you have to be in order to be found worthy and to overcome the childhood traumas created by your primary inferiorities and eradicate your self-loathing. Many psychologists like Karen Horney and D.W. Winnicott discuss false, idealized selves. Freud also touched on the idea, but called it the “ego ideal.” Dealing with the false self plays a big role in Buddhism as well.

Another important concept is narcissistic injury. This is a very complex concept but for the purpose of this article I’ve going to oversimplify it a lot and say that narcissistic injury is anything that bruises our ego and has the potential to expose our false, idealized self as a fraud either to ourselves or to others. Don’t be fooled by the name, you don’t have to be a full-blown clinical narcissist to suffer a narcissistic injury. We all have an ego or idealized, false self to some degree, and therefore are all capable of suffering narcissistic injury as a result, although the bigger your ego or idealized, false self is, the worse the damage you suffer when the narcissistic injury happens to you.

Secondary inferiority is the pain we feel whenever we suffer narcissistic injury from failing at these adult goals we created for ourselves and feel unable to live up to our false selves. Not only do we end up feeling the current failure, the second inferiority, but we end up having our childhood buttons pressed as well, and all the childhood pain from the narcissistic injuries associated our primary inferiority gets reactivated and comes rushing back into awareness as well. We end up reliving our primary inferiority feelings and childhood feelings of self-loathing that we forgot about. This is especially true the more the dynamics of your secondary inferiority mirror the specific dynamics of your primary inferiority.

For example, say your current girlfriend rejects and abandons you. This creates a secondary inferiority. You end up not only feeling that current pain, but suddenly you feel that primary inferiority from your past that lies at your very core and that you worked so hard to repress: the same crushing feeling of worthlessness that your parents used to create in you when they used to emotionally reject and abandon you by offering conditional acceptance.

Repetition compulsion is an idea introduced by psychoanalysis and expanded upon by many mental health professionals that can be summed up by the folk saying “what you don’t complete, you will repeat.” This means that the situations and dynamics we had growing up, whether functional or dysfunctional, are what are the most comfortable to us, and we will feel compelled throughout our lives to seek out and repeat similar situations and dynamics in our adult relationships, often even when we believe we’re setting out to find the exact opposite of our childhood experiences.

Repetition compulsions are especially pervasive when you’ve built up a lot of defense mechanisms over your life to avoid dealing with your core issues head-on. It can be one of the most pervasive and counterintuitive self-sabotaging strategies we have to deal with in our lives.

So Bill, back to you and your problem:

What you showed in your original email to me was a tendency to get sucked into relationships with vampires and your jealousy problems in those relationships, but these were your secondary inferiorities. They are symptoms, not causes. But they gave me clues as to what your possible primary inferiorities were, and I felt it was more important to address those. That’s why I asked you the questions I asked, and you answered the way I thought you would.

Here I repeat some key paragraphs from you (emphasis added by me):

My parents are divorced, they have been for almost six years now. They got divorced when I was 12. My mother has custody. I’m not sure if that information will help or not, but there it is. My mother alternates between being hard to please, and seeming to almost not care. Whereas my father, he is grudging with approval, that is the best way I can think of putting it. He is a very ‘manly’ kind of man. He is a police officer, outdoorsy type guy. He is also very distant most of the time. I never really know if I have his approval or not. I have known from an early age that my father would be most proud of me in a masculine type of profession such as military or policing. Mom on the other hand, she is uncomfortable with the very idea of me having a dangerous job and would be happier if I had some kind of desk job. Something that made a lot of money.

This is how you developed much of your codependence/enabler issues. You felt you couldn’t consistently please your mother, which created one aspect of your primary inferiority: I am not pleasing to the people who matter to me. At other times your mother seemed almost not to care, which created another aspect of your primary inferiority: I am not inherently worthy of being cared about just for being me. Your dad is grudging with his approval, and you’ve never really sure if you have your dad’s approval or not. This creates yet another aspect of your primary inferiority: I am not naturally worthy of approval from the people who matter to me just for being me. The people who matter to me approve me only grudgingly if at all. There are certain jobs and income levels that you know would make your parents particularly proud of you. This creates another aspect of your primary inferiority: I can only instill pride in people I love if I play certain roles and accumulate the right things. My worth isn’t intrinsic and internally generated but instead is tied to external markers of success and adopting a limited choice of roles. 

So now we understand your primary inferiorities. But what are the coping strategies you developed for dealing with these problems?

Before understanding that it’s important to explain the concept of the narcissistic family, which is what I think you have. Remember how I said a person doesn’t have to be a full-blown clinical narcissist in order to suffer narcissistic injury? Similarly, people in a family can have some narcissistic traits and issues, yet no one in the family is extreme enough to qualify as a full-fledged clinical narcissist.

I want you to understand that I’m not saying anyone in your family has full-blown clinical Narcissist Personality Disorder. I don’t have enough information on your family to wager such a guess, and I think it’s something for a mental health professional to diagnose. I do feel comfortable saying that your family does have enough traits that the general dynamics of a narcissistic family apply though.

In narcissistic families, the needs and emotions of the parents take precedence over the emotional needs of the kids. In healthy families, the children’s emotional needs are put first. From this article (emphasis and additional comments added by me):

So to explain, a basic goal for most families is to raise healthy children who will one day become independent adults. In a healthy family, parents work to accomplish this task by assuming responsibility for their children’s emotional and physical needs. Over time, parents gradually teach their children to be independent by allowing them to assume responsibility for meeting their own needs in a developmentally appropriate manner. Thus, the primary work of children is to learn to become independent adults. Along the way, they learn to identify and act on their feelings, wants and needs. Parents take care of their own needs or seek help from adults. As a bonus, the children have also learned how to be good parents through the process of observational learning.

In narcissistic families, this basic goal becomes skewed and the meeting of parental needs becomes of primary importance for the family. This twist generally takes place some time after infancy, as the authors point out that most children of narcissistic families were well cared for as babies. In fact, it is mostly likely to occur some time after the child begins to differentiate him or her self from the parents and begins to assert their own needs. This normal developmental process is difficult for parents who are most concerned with fulfilling their own needs as a result of job stress, physical or mental disability, or lack of parenting skills, to name a few reasons [or in the case of Bill's parents, divorce - T.]…

To compensate, the parents fight back, ignoring the child’s needs and at the same time forcing the child to respond to their own by withholding attention and affection until they do so. In this way, the children’s emotional needs go unattended and they are deprived of the opportunity to experience gradual independence and learn about themselves. Instead, they learn to wait to see what their parents expect and then react, negatively or positively, to those expectations. [as a result, they also end up dealing with their adult relationships the same way, by ancticipating needs and reacting accordingly rather than asserting their own needs. - T.]

The consequence of this parenting style is that the children become a reflection of their parents’ expectations and are deprived of the opportunity to be unique. Furthermore, the children learn to ignore their feelings or become completely detached from them altogether. As a result of having no emotions on which to direct their actions, the children become dependent upon others for guidance. This is the process of becoming what the authors term a reactive and reflective individual. [and eventually, a codependent. - T]

The tendency towards reacting and reflecting will follow children of narcissistic families into adulthood. Eventually they are likely to become distressed by their own pervasive need to please others, chronic need to seek external validation, and difficulty identifying their own feelings wants and needs. They tend to suffer from a myriad of emotional stressors including anger that lies just below the surface, depression, chronic dissatisfaction, and poor self-confidence. Many also struggle with indecisiveness as they have learned to make decisions on the basis of other’s needs and expectations. Interpersonally, they tend to share a history of failed romances and have difficulty trusting in others.

So let’s look at some more key excerpts from Bill, and keeping in mind the previous article excerpt, let’s see if the dynamics of a narcissistic family as described above apply to him (again, emphasis and additional comments added by me):

I was and wasn’t blindsided by [my parents' divorce].  I knew something bad was happening, but not to that magnitude, though the second my father sat us down to explain what was happening, I knew. That was the first and only time I’ve ever seen dad cry. Mom was a wreck for awhile. [Father is crying, mom is a wreck, all in front of the kids, who should be the ones being consoled at this point. The kids begin to feel the need to start worrying about their parents' emotional states instead of vice versa. - T.] She took it very hard and believed that all the fault lay on her. She seems to be over things now, though I also get the feeling living with me can be hard for her because I look like dad, and have some similar mannerism. [Feeling somehow responsible for the feelings of others, just by his physical appearance and his mannerisms. - T.] I took the divorce hard. I tried for the longest time to step up and be both the older brother and father figure to my younger brothers. [On top of worrying about your parents' emotional needs, now you feel responsible for the emotional needs of your younger siblings. More examples of putting your own emotional needs second. More examples of developing caretaker values. - T.] One is sixteen..The other is 13, he resented me for trying to step up like that and it created a lot of friction between us. My dad seemed to get over things rather quickly. Within a few months he had a girlfriend (who he is still with) though everybody swears my father didn’t have an affair with her. [You're father getting over things and moving on so quickly can register as a form of abandonment, even if on an unconscious level. And if you suspect he had an affair beforehand while still married to your mom, this can register as a form of abandoning your family behind the scenes even before they decided to divorce. - T.] My relationship with dad and with mom has been strained ever since… [Between the mother taking things hard and blaming herself and the dad embarking on a new relationship, both parents are too absorbed in their own emotional needs to properly help the kids develop into independent, emotionally healthy adults. - T.]

I became my moms emotional support for awhile. [Once more, you are meeting a parent's needs instead of vice-versa. - T.] She needed someone to talk to, that much was plain, and most of her friends turned against her after the divorce. Mom vented a fair amount about the divorce, though she tried not to. [Making you her emotional support is a form of enmeshment or emotional incest - T.], or Dad has vented once or twice. The most memorable thing being when he sat me down, and write out on a piece of paper how much he made each month, then subtracted out the payments he made for us. Then the rent and everything else he paid, just to show how little money he had. [The implicit message? "Your needs are a burden and conflict with my needs." Yet another instance of being taught to prioritize your parents' needs over your own. - T.] I didn’t really talk to anyone about things. I tried to be strong. [This became part of your coping strategy, a survival tactic -T.] It was insisted that I see a psychologist for a time, but I balked and refused to say anything important. The thing is, about the only person who helps me through anything now is Lindsay, my ex. I mostly felt I had to be there for other people and look after everyone. I felt I wasn’t really allowed to express my own emotions. [This is exactly what the article I quoted above warns about. You've been taught to repress your emotions in order to better serve the emotional needs of others. You probably have trouble even identifying your emotions, I bet. - T.]

Using terms from therapist Jeffrey Young’s Schema Therapy model, I’d say your primary inferiorities revolve around feelings of emotional deprivation, abandonment, mistrust, enmeshment, self-sacrifice, approval and recognition seeking. You’ve mostly chosen surrender to these primary inferiority feelings as your primary coping strategy. Additionally, there is a little bit of secret, covert narcissism in the codependent as well. There is a part of the codependent that overcompensates or rebels against the feelings of low self worth by quietly developing a grandiose self-image and magical thinking when it comes to his own powers to heal and fix faulty people and situations.

Through this blend of surrendering and overcompensating , you created a certain idealized, false self that you thought would redeeem and conquer your primary inferiorities from childhood: The guy who doesn’t express or burden others with his emotional needs. The “good guy” who sacrifices and doesn’t hurt people. The “fixer” who helps people and attends to their emotional needs. The guy who derives value from what he can do for others and how perfect he is rather than from simply existing as who he is, imperfections and all.

However because of your repetition compulsion, you are drawn to people who are unable to meet your emotional needs in the exact same way your parents were unable to meet your emotional need. You link loving relationships to the sensations that come with trying to please someone who is hard to please, being emotionally nurturing to someone who can’t reciprocation emotion, and being self-sacrificing. Because these are the types of people you “failed” to win over when your primary inferiorities were created, these are the exact same types of people you are driven to succeed with when making your adult goals. Winning over such people as an adult is a proxy for winning over your parents in childhood. If you win over someone who isn’t emotionally distant or hard to please, then it feels like a hollow victory because you don’t feel like you’ve finally symbolically won over your parents. Winning over people like your parents is a way to prove to yourself once and for all you are no longer that lonely, alienated child and you have finally conquered your primary inferiority by become your idealized, false self at long last.

You’re determined to repeatedly refight the same battle from your childhood until you finally win it. However you keep using the same tactics that didn’t work the first time, while expecting different results.

Based on the combination of your primary inferiorities, your preferred coping strategies and your repetition compulsions, you then created final fictional goals for your false, idealized self that involved:

• pursuing and remaining in relationships with partners who are emotionally damaged and need your help, advice  and emotional support, yet constantly refuse to reciprocate appropriately;
• pursuing and remaining in relationships with partners who are emotionally depriving,  commitmentphobic, covertly abusive,  and controlling in the same ways your parents were, and you not only allow this behavior but are even very forgiving of it;
• giving a  lot to others while not asking others to meet your needs, yet hoping they’ll eventually decide on their own to meet your needs  out of appreciation for seeing how much you do for them;
• living through and for your romantic partners;
• acting to win the approval of others while going out of your way to avoid situations where you might have to possibly face rejection;
• maintaining a flat, emotional exterior when you can, and avoiding situations where you have to be emotionally open and express and discuss feelings (hence why you couldn’t open up to a therapist; doing so conflicted with your false, idealized self);
• doing whatever you can to avoid emotional and physical abandonment and rejection, even if it sometimes leads to clinging, smothering and jealous behavior that produces the exact opposite effect and drives the other person away;
• overachieving and seeking perfection through roles, careers and partners who you think will please and impress the people who matter to you.

That is how your codependency and caretaker values were created.

The unfortunate Catch-22 of this however is that you need to find and win over people as emotionally unavailable and conditional with their approval as your parents, or it feels like a hollow victory and your primary inferiorities remain. However, it’s precisely because they are as emotionally unavailable and conditional with their approval as your parents that you’re as doomed to eventually fail with them as an adult as you did with your parents as a kid.

These adult failures create a secondary inferiority, which in turn reactivates the primary inferiority that lies at your very core, and it all comes crashing down and you feel as hurt as a wounded child.

This installment was way longer than I originally planned, so I’m going to add another installment to make it a four part series instead of a three parter. The next part of the series is called “Chemistry,” because part of  your letter describes the incredible chemistry you had with your ex-girlfriend. In the next installment I describe exactly what chemistry is and why it can often get us in trouble. Part four will address another of your questions about whether the pickup artist strategies described by author Neil Strauss in the book “The Game” are the solutions to your problems (short answer: no).

Last year, a reader named Bill wrote me asking for help with an ex-girlfriend who was making his life hell by spreading false rape rumors about him around their community. We spoke back and forth, and I determined she suffered from Cluster B personality disorders, particularly Narcissistic Personality Disorder, Borderline Personality Disorder and Histrionic Personality Disorder. Smear campaigns are a big part of a narcissist’s M.O.

I gave him some advice, he took it and reported back that it helped him greatly. He thanked me, and I didn’t hear from him in a while. Last week, I got another email from Bill:

Hello T,

I don’t know whether or not you remember me, I sent you an email quite some time ago asking for advice with a girl who was trying to ruin my life, after asking for some more information you got back to me telling me that she most likely had a narcissistic personality disorder.  I know it has been a long time, but it looks like, I once again am having woman troubles, I don’t know what to do about it.  All of this is me once again asking for help.

I started dating her awhile back, and the relationship burned hot and fast.  Part of the reason it burned so fast was that I was caught up in my emotions and allowing them to rule my actions.  I became a very jealous boyfriend, not to mention protective.  Eventually she broke things off with me, citing that we were too good friends, and she loved me, but “Not in the way you want me to love you.”  For awhile I didn’t talk to her after that, trying to get my own emotions under control, until one day she started texting and calling me again, acting totally normal, just wanting to be friends.  As it turned out we have become best friends, however, I still couldn’t quite get it out of my head that I wanted to be with her in a physical, romantic relationship, as opposed to this platonic relationship.  By best friends I should elaborate to say we shared pretty much everything, talking all of the time, hanging out at movies, telling each other everything, things like that.  Recently she has started seeing another guy, and I went damn near crazy with jealousy.  The thing about the guy is that he is a player, and I know it, I am not just jumping to conclusions either, I knew it well before he started seeing my ex, and I have also talked to women he has been with.  I can say that this guy is not afraid to play the numbers game, though for him it seems the numbers game is all about quantity, and not about quality at all.  Also, when she started seeing this guy, I attempted to cut all ties with her, for the sake of both of our sanities.  She is the one who reinitiated conversation, and broke down at the thought of no longer being friends.

Like last time I am willing to answer any and all questions you might have.  I am just hoping for some solid advice, which you always seem to give.  I have gotten the entire gamut of advice from friends, ranging from just leave her, to she will come back to you after she is done with him.

On a total side-note, I would also like to ask your opinion of the PUA community as discussed in the book The Game by Neil Strauss.  And made famous by the peacocking Mystery.

After I read this, plus remembering his dilemma from the year before, I began to get a feeling about what could be at the root of his problems.

I sent this response:

What are your parents like? Is one or both of them a perfectionist or very demanding and hard to please? Is one or both of them very self-sacrificing and goes along with the other most of the time in order to keep the peace?

Also, did you grow up feeling unconditional approval, that you were free to be whoever and whatever you had to be or did you grow up with a feeling of conditional approval, meaning you were told only some roles, careers and paths are acceptable and if you don’t pursue them you are somehow less valid a person?

Bill responded:

My parents are divorced, they have been for almost six years now. They got divorced when I was 12. My mother has custody. I’m not sure if that information will help or not, but there it is. My mother alternates between being hard to please, and seeming to almost not care. Whereas my father, he is grudging with approval, that is the best way I can think of putting it. He is a very ‘manly’ kind of man. He is a police officer, outdoorsy type guy. He is also very distant most of the time. I never really know if I have his approval or not. I have known from an early age that my father would be most proud of me in a masculine type of profession such as military or policing. Mom on the other hand, she is uncomfortable with the very idea of me having a dangerous job and would be happier if I had some kind of desk job. Something that made a lot of money.

I then asked:

How blindsided were you by the divorce? Did it seem like something inevitable that you saw coming? What were your impressions of their marriage before they got divorced? Did you think they were somewhat happy and were devastated by the announcement, or were they unhappy and fighting to the point where you felt almost relieved they were splitting?

Bill:

I was and wasn’t blindsided by it.  I knew something bad was happening, but not to that magnitude, though the second my father sat us down to explain what was happening, I knew. That was the first and only time I’ve ever seen dad cry. Mom was a wreck for awhile. She took it very hard and believed that all the fault lay on her. She seems to be over things now, though I also get the feeling living with me can be hard for her because I look like dad, and have some similar mannerism. I took the divorce hard. I tried for the longest time to step up and be both the older brother and father figure to my younger brothers. One is sixteen..The other is 13, he resented me for trying to step up like that and it created a lot of friction between us. My dad seemed to get over things rather quickly. Within a few months he had a girlfriend (who he is still with) though everybody swears my father didn’t have an affair with her. My relationship with dad and with mom has been strained ever since.

I then asked:

Did you become your mom’s or dad’s emotional support for any period of time? Like, did she or he vent to you about what they were feeling for a while, especially about the divorce?

Did you have people either inside or outside your family to work out your problems, whether they were general growing up problems or problems about the divorce specifically?

Most importantly, growing up did you feel you mostly had to be there for people emotionally and take care of their feelings, or did you feel the reverse, that people were mostly taking care of your emotions most of the time?

Bill:

I became my moms emotional support for awhile. She needed someone to talk to, that much was plain, and most of her friends turned against her after the divorce. Mom vented a fair amount about the divorce, though she tried not to. Dad has vented once or twice. The most memorable thing being when he sat me down, and write out on a piece of paper how much he made each month, then subtracted out the payments he made for us. Then the rent and everything else he paid, just to show how little money he had. I didn’t really talk to anyone about things. I tried to be strong. It was insisted that I see a psychologist for a time, but I balked and refused to say anything important. The thing is, about the only person who helps me through anything now is Lindsay, my ex. I mostly felt I had to be there for other people and look after everyone. I felt I wasn’t really allowed to express my own emotions.

Here’s my take on this:

When I heard you developed two high-drama relationships in a row, it was a major signal. That is why I asked those follow up questions.

I could give you short term tactics to deal with the current drama you are dealing with, but with the way you’re currently emotionally wired, you would just end up getting into another high-drama relationship. That’s what happened after the last time I gave you advice. On an unconscious level you seek these types of relationships out.

So I decided to delve into the big picture on this one.

At some point you developed what are called “caretaker values.” This means you feel responsible for other people and their emotions. You pride yourself on being a giver. The problem is, such a mindset makes you the perfect mark for people who are takers, or emotional vampires. Emotional vampires are the type of people who make other people responsible for their feelings and emotions and never take responsibility for anything. They always blame, accuse, whine, etc. Examples include narcissists (egotists), borderlines (Jekyll-and-Hydes), histrionics (drama queens), sociopaths and more.

For someone who blames everyone else and takes no responsibility, a person who always blames himself and feels responsible for others and their feelings is a dream come true. No one with a healthy sense of boundaries and self-esteem would put up with them, so they don’t like to let such a person go easily once they find them.

There is a psychological concept called narcissistic supply. Narcissistic supply can be defined in the broadest sense as anything that feeds the ego. It’s what narcissists live for, but one doesn’t have to be a full-fledged clinical narcissist to enjoy narcissistic supply, as all of us enjoy ego boosts to some degree.

In movies like Blade and shows like True Blood, there are often “pet humans” who hang around the vampires, letting them feed off their blood, but the vampires never fully turn them into fellow vampires. They just keep them around to feed on, stringing them along with the promise that they will eventually become vampires. The humans are so grateful to be around the exciting and seductive vampire and so desperate to eventually enter the vampire’s inner circle that they keep letting the vampire feed on them at will, in hopes that one day the vampire finds them worthy enough to fully accept into his or her inner circle and convert into a vampire.

In the meantime, however, the vampire will be feeding on plenty of others, and these others the vampire will either convert into vampires and put into their inner circles immediately, because they find them more exciting than the pet human, or just kill them dead, because that person isn’t the type who will voluntarily agree to be a pet human and a long-term food source.

The vampire usually never plans to make the pet human a vampire or take the pet human as a permanent mate. That’s why while he’s stringing the pet human along and feeding on the pet human for days, months and years, he’s also still feeding on others, and even letting some of them become vampires and enter his inner circle while the devoted pet human is still waiting.

In real life there are emotional vampires, and what they feed on is not blood but the aforementioned narcissistic supply. In real life there are also pet humans, except we call the codependents. Like the pet humans in Blade and True Blood are great long term sources of blood for fictional supernatural vampires,  codependents are great long term sources of narcissistic supply for the real-life emotional vampires.

Narcissistic supply can be different things to different people. Something that is a major type of narcissistic supply for me may provide absolutely no narcissistic supply for you, and vice versa. It’s important to understand the preferred form of narcissistic supply for the person you’re dealing with. A big problem, however, is that many guys out there don’t understand the major forms of narcissistic supply for the average woman: flattering attention.

Everyone likes flattering attention to a degree, but not everyone likes it as an end in and of itself. The average guy for example enjoys flattering attention, but mostly as a means to an end, that end being a short-term or long-term sexual relationship. If a man has no interest in a sexual relationship with a woman, he won’t actively court flattering attention from her. And when they give flattering attention, they usually give it  in hopes of getting a short-term or long-term sexual relationship in return.

So a lot of guys mistakenly project these same mindsets onto women, and think that if a woman is giving them flattering attention or is willingly receiving their flattering attention, she must be interested in an eventual sexual relationship.  What guys don’t get is that for many women, especially immature and damaged women, flattering attention is often an end in and of itself. And while guys usually only give flattering attention to women in hopes of getting a sexual relationship, women will often give flattering attention just to ensure they get flattering attention in return. Guys, once again projecting their own mindset onto women, don’t get this and believe the women must be giving him flattering attention for the same reason he gives it to her: because she has sexual interest in him. Unlike men, however, women will often pretend to be interested in a guy just to receive narcissistic supply in the flattering attention and nothing else. This is an incredibly crucial thing to understand.

What is a means to an end for the guy, in this case flattering attention, is an end in and of itself for the woman, a dynamic I discussed in my post about the means-end paradox. And if you read that post, you’ll see one of the aspects of the means-end paradox is that the person who is treating something like a means to an end gets more emotionally invested as time goes on, while the person who is treating that same thing like an end in and of itself gets less invested as time goes on, thanks to the sunk-cost trap. This is why guys get more into a woman as they exchange flattering attention with her and nothing else, but the woman gets less into a guy the more she exchanges flattering attention with him and nothing else.

For young women flattering attention is as major a form of narcissistic supply as sexual notch count is for young men. This is why people like Tariq Nasheed say that all guys need to go through their player stage and all women need to go through their attention-whoring stage before settling down. (Just like the male mid-life crisis is an example of a guy reliving and completing his unfinished player stage from his younger days, the cougar phenomenon is a woman’s version of the mid-life crisis, where she’s reliving and completing her unfinished attention whore stage from her younger days.)

Many women outgrow this attention-whore stage after high school or college, but for immature and damaged women this can be their preferred form of narcissistic supply until the day they die, as any man who dates a Cluster B soon discovers. Also, because North American women are maturing slower and slower all the time, attention-whoring is especially an epidemic among them compared to women in other parts of the world.

Anyway, what are some types of flattering attention women use for narcissistic supply? One is having guys for friends that she knows wants to fuck her. The longer she can string a guy along in one of these pseudo-friendships just in the hopes that he will eventually fuck her, the more her ego gets boosted. Women know most of their guy friends want to fuck them, even though they often play dumb about it or sometimes even lie to themselves about it. Any woman can keep a guy coming back for sex, but a much bigger ego boost comes from getting a guy to repeatedly come back for months or years just for the slim hope of one day lucking into sex. Getting guys who have no chance of being in a sexual relationship with them to keep trying or loitering is very flattering and a big mental win for them.

Another form of flattering attention women use for narcissistic supply is triangulation, which is making guys compete over her. Immature and damaged women are especially excessive with this tactic. On some primal level, in their lizard brains, women evolved to make men physically fight over them. It was the more surefire way to test two suitors to see which one would be the best protector for her and the better mate. Because modern values are different and society frowns upon such violence, the modern women have sublimated this desire into the game of making men compete with each other on the mental and emotional planes for her approval.

It’s also a test to see where your self-esteem is. If she succeeds at getting you jealous, you have failed the test. And no one’s perfect, I’ve fallen for this test myself in the past. We’re all human. But there are other dangers in getting jealous. When you get jealous, you unconsciously communicate that you think the guy is better than you, that you are threatened by him and feel you may not be able to compete. On some level, whether consciously or subconsciously, she will pick up on this communication and regardless of what she was originally feeling for him, your jealousy will start to make him more attractive in her eyes. The more jealous you get, the more attractive he becomes to her.

Another form of flattering attention women use for narcissistic supply is entertaining male companionship and entertaining male conversation. Entertaining male companionship can include but isn’t restricted to brunch dates, lunch dates, dinner dates, movie outings, bar meetups, coming to see her perform somewhere, showing up to a get together she’s throwing, visiting her on her job is she works in the service industry like as a bartender, etc. Basically any platonic activity she could invite a girlfriend to.  Entertaining  male conversation can include can include long platonic conversations, either in person or on the phone, where the guy is doing things that include but aren’t restricted to playing therapist and listening to her sob stories, having long gossip sessions with her either about people they know or celebrities, is listening to her superficial and frivolous thoughts and acting like they are the most profound, mind-blowing insights ever, or is just keeping her “company” on the line while she does something boring like go on a cab ride, do her laundry or walk around the supermarket.

Guys regularly employ these strategies as an indirect means of getting laid, but the irony is that the longer a guy engages in them, the more he kills any sexual attraction that was originally there. By being too available, too open and too talkative, he’s taken away all the mystique, all the sexual chemistry, all the intrigue, all the sexual polarity, and most of all he’s robbed her of the blank canvas she desires to project all her fantasy and desires onto.

Women love these forms of narcissistic supply, and in you this woman has found one guy who will supply all of them. And if she’s an emotional vampire, her thirst for narcissistic supply is insatiable, just like the supernatural vampire thirsts for blood. And like the fictional vampire can keep pet humans around for a backup blood supply when no other blood supplies are available, she’s using you as her pet codependent that she can keep around for emergency narcissistic supply when other options aren’t available.

This is why each time you try to cut ties and move on with your life, she keeps reinitiating contact and calling you back into her life. Because she knows there is still narcissistic supply to be sucked out of you. You’ve been such a good, dependable source of it so far, and why take the time to groom a new one when she already has such a good source in you?

The problem is, one of two things is going to happen: (1) much like people gain a high tolerance to a drug the more they get used to taking it, emotional vampires get a tolerance to narcissistic supply from a particular person and it doesn’t excite them as much as it used to. (2) the codependent reaches his or her breaking point and either gets angry or starts getting passive aggressive. In either case, the pet codependent no longer is a optimum (or is that optimal? that always confuses me) source of narcissistic supply for the emotional vampire and quickly gets discarded without warning. Once you are drained dry of narcissistic supply, believe me you will be unceremoniously dumped, even as a platonic friend, in favor of a better, newer source of narcissistic supply.

So my immediate advice is to forget her and move on. You’re too deep in the friend zone to recover, and the longer you stay in this situation the worse it will be for your self-esteem, and I can guarantee you’ll be unceremoniously dumped anyway when she feels she has no use for you anyway so you might as well do the dumping yourself.

However if I just stopped with the immediate advice, I’d be ignoring the roots of your problem, and you’d find yourself back in this situation again, possible with an even bigger vampire than the previous ones. So I’m going to do two follow-ups to this post. First, we’ll discuss the roots of your caretaker persona and your codependency issues. And in the installment following that, we’ll go into whether the PUA community is the answer to your problems.

Click here for Part 2.

I’ve been working on lots of stuff offline, as well as taking care of some personal issues (important and immediate stuff, but nothing tragic).

Also, I’ve experienced a seismic shift in outlook somewhat and didn’t want to write until things in my head slowed down and I had an idea where my worldview was heading. I took what was intended to be a short internet detox that ended up becoming an extended one.

You’ll immediately notice what I’m talking about when I return.

Two things in the meantime:

• The comments from now on will be moderated. There’s been such an increase of spamming attempts that it became a necessary step.

• I am soliciting advice questions for a new advice column feature. Send your questions via email to t (at) therawness.com. They can be about any human nature or interpersonal relations topic. I get a lot of email, so don’t take it personally if I don’t pick your letter to showcase or if I don’t send you a response, because I can’t answer them all. It also may mean that I simply don’t feel qualified to answer your question to be honest. I’d rather give someone no advice than knowingly offer half-baked advice. I bring this up because I’ve gotten butthurt and irate emails in the past from people who felt I owed them an answer to their questions, so I hope to nip that in the bud preemptively.

Self-handicapping via high standards.

I think this is a more dangerous form of self-handicapping than low standards because so much of our narcissistic culture is geared toward encouraging high, perfectionist standards (the whole “man up!” and “you go, girl!” movements), while that isn’t the case for low standards, so high-standards self-handicappers are much more likely to find enablers.

Give it a read.

I.

Yesterday, reader Nupi left another comment. I think Nupi is taking the analogy of the “good business” I made in this post and in this post a little too literally:

However,I would still care for a comment on the second part of my comment, namely how to effectively and efficiently implement the screening process in the relationship context. Similar to the business content, a gut feeling of whether a candidate will make it you can usually get in 5 to 10 minutes, yet the company dedicates hours and hours to the process of interviewing them – after having had a full department focused on sifting through resumes… Seems like in ones private life, the process described will need heavy adaptions…

Overscrutinizing the minor details of my analogies too much causes you to (pardon me for using another analogy) miss the forest for the trees. I attract a lot of intellectual readers, which is great, but the problem with intellectual people is that they can veer too hard in the direction of being pedantic and nitpicky, focusing on details that, while interesting, are ultimately irrelevant if not downright counterproductive.

Just because you are inviting a lot of people to apply and are actively trying to recruit them doesn’t mean you have to dedicate hours and hours to the process of interviewing them. Some never get called. Some applicants often get screened just from a bad initial gut feelings and never even make it to the interview process. Some interviews get cut short immediately because they go so badly the interviewer doesn’t even want to continue the pretense of an interview. Some people only merit short interviews. Some people make such a good impression the interview goes longer than planned. Some people only get one interview. Some get four. That’s how our personal lives should be too. We’re not obligated to ignore gut feelings and spend the same amount of time screening everyone. In fact, that would be terrible.

The main points of the “good business” analogy are simply this, and it goes for all relationships whether business, platonic or romantic: Make it a numbers game and attract as many qualified applicants as possible. Screen firmly and quickly but fairly. Don’t ignore or minimize the red flags that show up early, only to have to deal with far later in the process when they become way more difficult to deal with. And be vigilant about recognizing and terminating the lost causes who do manage to get their foot in the door.

The “fairly” part is very important. Some people, tired of being doormats or self-sabotaging by wasting their time on counterproductive people end up overdoing it in the opposite direction and being overly punitive. They become too vigilant and hypersensitive to perceived slights, and screen people or terminate them from their lives for the slightest imagined offenses. They read too much into everything or get outrageous standards for how they want to be treated. Being too respect-obsessed and reactive is as big a sign of weakness and is as counterproductive as being a doormat, and both styles often end up in the same place in the long run: fragile ego, overtly or covertly self-hating and feeling alone, even when in relationships.

The proper  balance can only be achieved through lots of trial and error and a consistent willingness to pursue brutally honest self-awareness.

II.

Back to Nupi’s point: He says “Seems like in ones private life, the process described will need heavy adaptions…”

I disagree. Making dating a numbers game like businesses do with job applicants is not that difficult. It can easily be replicated in one’s social life. There are several reasons why it isn’t difficult to apply to one’s life.

The truth is, a lot of guys don’t approach enough women because they’re deathly afraid of rejection. They usually luck into partners via work or social circle, or they let women approach them first or they get introduced by strangers. They approach unknown women once in a blue moon, and even then only when they’re drunk and emboldened or they have a reason to be sure the woman wants them. That’s why when they have someone interested in them, they are loathe to cut them loose and move onto the next, less certain yet potentially better prospect. It’s safer for the ego. They’d rather quit while they’re arguably ahead the minute someone gives them positive feedback than expose themselves to any more rejection than they absolutely have to.

For many guys it has to be evening in a nightclub or a bar before they even think of hitting on a strange girl. These people limit their options by just focusing on certain hours of the day and certain venues. Even then, once in the club they’ll only approach if they’re drunk enough, their target is drunk enough, or it looks like it will be an easy layup. More conditions to be met.

For other guys, they only date if she’s from their social circle or their social scene, like the frat life or the hipster circles. These people limit their options by just focusing on a narrow demographic. Then there are those guys who are scared to approach women unless they get a clear signal beforehand or unless she’s already in their physical vicinity so then they don’t have to self-consciously do the “walk of intent” across the room to hit on her or the “walk of shame” back to their friends if it goes wrong. They limit themselves to only extremely face-saving scenarios.

Then there are the guys who at least can approach strange women and start conversations but are afraid to get sexual in tone unless she gives a clear sign of sexual interest, and end up never leaving the platonic zone during the first conversation. They’re afraid of turning the conversation sexual and making their intent clear, because if they do and she doesn’t reciprocate, they have no excuses to hide behind and the rejection is too brutal to take. Never going overtly sexual is another form of self-handicap. It gives one the alibi, “Well, I never actually got a chance to verbalize my interest, so technically I didn’t get rejected. I may have scored if I did go through with it.” More ego protection.

With all these artificial constraints people place on themselves, along with all the self-sabotaging ego protecting strategies they put into play throughout, they make a numbers game harder than it has to be. Why just limit oneself to nightime in a bar when one could use the whole day and every place they go to meet women? If one aimed to talk to even just two new people a day regardless of time of day or place, including their daily commute, they’d probably end up meeting twice the amount of people they would from just barhopping on Friday and Saturday. People can also vary up the rotation, like trying things like cafes in the evening or wine bars or local haunts after work. Too many people are only receptive under self-imposed constraints. Like, they’ll do it at a bar at night, but not in a concert during the day. They’ll do it on the street after a club lets out for the night at 4 AM, but they won’t do it on the street during their work lunch break.

What makes these bad strategies worse is not only does it really limit windows of opportunity, but you’re doing it when competition is at its absolute highest, and the women are either out to attention whore, have their defenses up or are tired and sick of being hit on all night. This last factor is why I also think it’s unconsciously a form of self-handicapping, a concept I describe here. It’s easier on the ego to get rejected when one can also see a bunch of other guys getting rejected and not feel alone in your failure. It’s easier on the ego to be able to say she was a party girl obviously attention whoring. Or to pass off the rejection as being because you were too drunk. Or she was too drunk. Or she was sick of being hit on nonstop.

III.

There are less available ego-protecting alibis involved in approaching a stone cold sober person while you are also stone cold sober, in broad daylight, in a regular weekday, daytime setting like a lunch break, a bookstore, or a restaurant line, and just hit on them. This type of rejection hits many guys too hard. This comes from an age-old trap that everyone from the stoics to buddhists to cognitive therapists have warned about: confusing your emotions or thoughts with your identity.

See, most people confuse their feelings with their identity. If something good happens to them and they feel awesome, they’ll say “I am awesome!” rather than “I am a worthy, acceptable guy who happens to feel awesome.” And it works in reverse too. If someone rejects them, instead of saying “I am a worthy, acceptable guy who happens to feel rejected,” they’ll say “I am a reject.” If they make a mistake, in stead of saying “I feel stupid right now,” they say “I am stupid.”

See the difference? In one example, the person has a stable identity that is independent of their feelings. In the other example, the person makes their feelings into their identity. The problem with that is, feelings are temporary and able to change at a whim, all day long. Therefore if your identity is tied into your feelings, that makes your identity at any given time also temporary and able to change at a whim, all day long.

Your identity becomes based on your feelings, which means your identity becomes as fragile, temporary, volatile, and easy to influence as your feelings. Thus in order to maintain a positive identity, you constantly need to cling to any good feelings you have and avoid any potential bad feelings. Keep in mind, we have evolved to weigh bad feelings heavier than we way good feelings, which means bad feelings are especially easy to catch and hard to shake off.

The other thing people associate with their identity is appearances. If I appear like something, on some level I am that thing. Therefore if I am only seen doing something awesome, I am actually awesome. And if I am never seen doing something embarrassing, likewise I am actually awesome. Hence the term “keeping up appearances.”

This tendency to equate our identity with our emotions and our appearances is one of the big reasons why ego-driven superiority fueled by external validation is such a big problem. It explains materialism (“as long as I buy things that make me appear superior and feel happy, I am a happy, superior person.”). It explains hedonism (“as long as I am seen doing exciting things and am chasing happy feelings, I actually am an exciting, happy person.”). The flip side is, you’ll be deathly afraid to do anything that if your material goods aren’t up to snuff, or you can’t find an exciting thing to do or attain a happy feeling every moment, your identity and the sense of self-worth that comes with it will suffer too.

And it explains why guys make a numbers game harder than it has to be. They can’t withstand the negative emotions that come from numerous rejections, because those emotions will become their identity. They can’t stand friends or even strangers seeing them strike out because by appearing to fail, they’ll believe their actual identity is failure. Even when they are willing to do a numbers game to some degree, the moment they find a taker, they’ll stick in a bad situation way longer than they should because it gives their ego a temporary reprieve from further rejections. And so on and so on. They key is to remember that emotions and appearances, whether good or bad, are not your identity. They’re externalities. That’s also why it’s as important not to let good occurrences, appearances and feelings define you because by doing so, you open the door for negative things to define you as well.

People artificially create these super-small windows of opportunity along with these self-sabotaging thinking traps for meeting people and then wonder why running a numbers game seems so hard. Change how you view things and suddenly you’ll start seeing opportunity everywhere.

[By the way, when embracing the numbers game, one shouldn't fall into the opposite trap of being so addicted to the numbers game that you run it into the ground. This becomes a self-sabotage in itself. Black guys do it a lot. They just keep moving on and hollering at new women, even when they have good potential prospects on their hands, because they want to appear like they're macking hard and it feels empowering to them to be aggressive. Or it can be an ego and appearance thing in that the person is obsessed with making sure they absolutely have the best of the best, and no one's partner can top theirs, so no matter what they get they're always looking to top it and "trade up." Even though on the surface the excessive numbers game guy's the polar opposite of the guy who never approaches and clings to every half-decent prospect who shows interest in him, the compulsive hollerer is actually similar in that he's self-sabotaging due to creating his identity through his appearance and feelings.]