"SLIMY COLONIES" AND "FLYING MONKEYS"

“Slimy Colonies” is the phrase often used to describe biofilms of bacteria.  Little bacterial lifeforms are different when they’re floating round separately (planktonic) than when they attach and stick together (sessile).  Humans are much evolved from their original bacteria life form but they likewise are different when individual, free-floating, from when they are anchored in a group.

“A biofilm is any group of microorganisms in which cells stick to each other and often these cells adhere to a surface. These adherent cells are frequently embedded within a self-produced matrix of extracellular polymeric substance (EPS).”

“According to the Center for Biofilm Engineering at Montana State University, biofilms form when bacteria adhere to surfaces in aqueous environments and begin to excrete a slimy, glue-like substance that can anchor them to all kinds of material – such as metals, plastics, soil particles, medical implant materials and, ...May 26, 2008”

One of the fascinating but scary psych concepts is narcissism.  This idea started out to describe people who admired themselves and is now used to describe people who are control freaks demanding others admit how wonderful they are.  Beyond that, premises are developed about whole societies who believe they are the most wonderful and demand compliance to that opinion because they share the belief in the splendidness of the narcissist.  These loyal and compliant people are called “co-dependent” and that becomes a new category by itself.  So far, it appears that the co-dependents are better at forming into social biofilms than are the narcissists or the people who treat narcissists, most of whom tend to be arrogant and feel superior to others.

A class of "helpers" has developed around these folks.  My fav of these “narc” treaters (the confusing nickname is provided by co-dependents) is Sam Vaknin.  I think he should not have called his theories “Cold Therapy,” which is a term he used to get away from the “warm” therapies full of talk about love and embracing and fuzzy reassurance — what I sometimes call “hot tub therapy”.  Rather, I think Sam should have called his theories “Dry Therapy” with the same goal but emphasis on clarity, a bit of humor, a long perspective through human history and society.  But that’s just a quibble that explains why I prefer his ideas, esp. the early versions, over most of the others.

Ross Rosenberg lost me as soon as he talked about Alice Miller and wanted to tell all about his own childhood trauma.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rVKRaAJDelE  When I was in UU circles EVERYONE seemed to claim that Alice Miller accounted exactly for how brilliant they were and how traumatic their childhood was because of deficient parenting.  Earlier, in seminary, it was Henri Nouwen’s idea of “The Wounded Healer” that so popular that one of the dangers for seminarians was being “insufficiently healed healers,” people who had finally found enough relief to leap to the idea that they could now seal their value by helping others, but still didn't really have the needed skills.

Richard Grannon “Spartan Life Coach” put me off with his athletic club enthusiasm for what rather sounds to me like a roomful of people madly pedaling on stationary bicycles.  He is younger, good-looking, and I’m sure attracts co-dependent women like flies.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1YUkv86n1Hc

His opposite might be Ollie Mathews  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bcL6wujvMqs  with his knit cap and readings of mailed-in indictments from victims.  He talks a lot about “flying monkeys”, those co-dependents who do evil deeds on behalf of narcissists.

Indeed, the flying monkeys who seem to see competition between Grannon and Vaknin and who want to “help” Grannon have made so much fuss about Vaknin with accusations against him that Vaknin’s Facebook website was removed.  (Facebook has a hair-trigger in this regard and doesn’t seek confirmation or defense.)  These coach/guide/ consultant/therapist guys make their livings with speeches, books, and clients that are often dependent on Facebook as a marketing device.  Indeed, that seems to be the main function of Facebook: advertising.  So being suddenly blacked out can hurt.

The female co-dependents, who in their most toxic form are flying monkeys, are the main constituents of the biofilm culture that begins to be a cult.  With some innocence and a  little value, the idea that was originally meant to describe the dynamic of an individual in a particular (and painful) situation becomes a label for a culture that takes an obsessive view.  Amazon lists pages of books. Pretty soon it is a morality, a command, an accusation, the basis for divorce -- and impeachment.

The flying monkeys pose as enforcers, insulting people in social media, demanding that people be fired, and becoming a political force full of toxic vitriol.    Sometimes they are secretive and use some hapless narcissist as a sock puppet.  Must I name names for you to recognize them?

Over the years I’ve had a lot to do with narcissists and I dearly love some of them.  Not the pitiful whingers, but the ones who use the energy to achieve something remarkable.  We hear about malignant narcissists, psychopathic narcissists, and other nasty kinds.  Not much is said about the achievers who have a narcissistic dynamic, who are achieving in reaction to perfectionist, overwhelming, punishing parents who drove them and who are passing on that drive to be better, to live up to what is sometimes an impossible demand.

The problem for the faithful co-dependent -- who joins the narcissist in the creation of something worthy -- is deciding just how worthy it is.  One weighs one’s ability to overlook callousness against the value of the end product.  The problem for the narcissist whose achievement depends on collaboration with co-dependents becomes how to keep that help.  Some have the erroneous idea that insulting, punishing, limiting will make people stay, but people are not like most dogs, who will accept punishment even for not coming when called.  Even among dogs there are some who stop coming, some who run away, and some who attack.  

A few co-dependents go crazy, or are they co-dependent because they were already crazy?  Like Camille Claudel or Zelda Fitzgerald.  The relationships are confused because our gender-role assignments are narcissist/male and co-dependent/female.  And then there’s the confusion from hierarchies, which privilege high-status people with the right to be narcissists (indeed, even justify their boasting as part of their status) and oblige lower status people to accept co-dependence.  This is also economic.  One way to survive as a low-status person is to attach to a driven narcissist.  

Eventually, the most empowered narcissist ages or drifts out of sync with the supporting milieu.  It’s hard on everyone.  Except that the media loves it.  Another juicy media subject.  And flying monkeys love to chatter.

SAM VAKNIN IS A GOOD SPRINGBOARD

I finally re-found the url for Sam Vaknin’s interview of his sweetheart of a wife.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dETUK_u4R1o

In another vid, Sam talks about “Cluster B” personality disorders, so I had to go looking for what they were.  The term is from the diabolical DSM-5, which struggles all the time to understand how to name things better than the labels they use for insurance forms.  This time around they tried to avoid defining the boxes of psychoses or neuroticisms, which always attract a nasty cloud of social accusations, like Sam’s diagnosis of narcissism.  Such labels are short of criminalization, but can still justify chemical restraint or even confinement — for your own good.  

Even psychoanalysts, who intend to use empathy is a benign and insightful way, make their entry through the complaints of the client because that’s the only way the analysts know them, the only reason the clients come with their checkbooks.  This leads to the grotesque cop-out of docs who say that Trump is not crazy because he isn’t in pain enough to come to their office asking for help.  Crazy people suffer, they say, and Trump is not suffering.

I see it differently.  I think he is delusional because he cannot bear to leave his fantasy — he wouldn’t just suffer, he would die.  That might happen yet.

But okay, what’s the latest thinking that leads to these “clustered” personality disorders.  I’m relying on a website called MentalHelp.net.  https://www.mentalhelp.net/articles/defining-features-of-personality-disorders-distorted-thinking-patterns/   Lots to read there.  These are the four arbitrary factors of personality disorders.  (Assuming you think you know what a personality is.)

1) Distorted thinking patterns,

2) Problematic emotional responses,

3) Over- or under-regulated impulse control, and

4) Interpersonal difficulties.

To translate, these are characteristics of assholes, clingers, the childish, the energy-drainers, the bullies, the individuals that bug everyone else.  And once in a while, a misunderstood genius, like Vaknin. Otherwise, most people and their dysfunctions just chug along with the rest of society finding workarounds and tolerating the friction.  But sometimes the situation or aging or economics demand that something be done — then what to do is a puzzle.  The idea of the DSM is that if you’ve got a diagnosis of some kind, it suggests treatment strategy or at least justification for eliminating the pain-in-the-ass.

Each of these have links on the website above.  There are roughly ten “personality disorders” which overlap each other, seem connected some way, and so are “clustered.”  

Cluster A is called the odd, eccentric cluster. It includes Paranoid Personality Disorder, Schizoid Personality Disorder, and Schizotypal Personality Disorders. The common features of the personality disorders in this cluster are social awkwardness and social withdrawal. These disorders are dominated by distorted thinking.

Cluster B is called the dramatic, emotional, and erratic cluster. It includes:

• Borderline Personality Disorder.

• Narcissistic Personality Disorder.

• Histrionic Personality Disorder.

• Antisocial Personality Disorder.

Cluster C is called the anxious, fearful cluster.  It includes the Avoidant, Dependent, and Obsessive-Compulsive Personality Disorders.  These three personality disorders share a high level of anxiety.

This cluster system is not that much more helpful than Freud’s imaginary system of “ego, superego, and libido” or his anatomical categories of stages of development: anal, oral, and genital.  Everyone has a little of most of these clusters in them.  In one counselling group (part of preparation for ministry) I was labeled “borderline.”  It was confusing that both of the group leaders (one male, one female) had also been diagnosed as “borderline.”  None of us fits into the description of “borderline” according to the DSM-5.  (Five means this is the fifth version.)  

The definition and description over the years has shifted around so much that it isn’t helpful anymore.  (I may have moved from Cluster B to Cluster A.  Is this progress?)  I’m NOT erratic, overemotional, polarizing, or inconsistent.  I don’t compensate with substance abuse, risky sexual liaisons, self-injury, overspending, or binge eating.  But I’m an investigative and reflective writer which means I try to find the truth, which can seem like borderline — detectives search borderlines on both sides.

Using a word derived from politics, nations, and territories, means assuming that it has to do with drawing a line, socially acknowledged, and then enforcing it — Foucault would say defining failure to observe a border line as “insane” is a control mechanism, a surveillance and contamination label.  It means “you stay on your own side or there will be consequences.”  Lately this has been vividly contested by people violating the Victorian (Freudian) lines about sex and gender roles.  People are forcing binary thinking over into continuums and asking “why not?” instead of “don’t you dare!”  What that means is that the line dividing the binary is erased.

Much more unfortunately, borderline morality in regard to wealth has redrawn the line of what is honourable far over into the gray area that always separates business from crime.  Eliminating regulation in these areas is an attempt to erase the “line” so there is no more chance of criminalization.

The Rachel Maddow show interviews over the past few days has illuminated how the “line” about interfering in other nations through cyberspying and rigging elections has been erased, partly because we’ve become calloused and habituated by the steady practice of those previously taboo acts on both sides.  But also because our video fictions like “House of Cards” and video strategy  games have made people we would see as villains in the past into attractive role models because they are powerful and wealthy.  Our ability to see through charlatans is badly damaged.  Anyway, time has wiped out those whose senses were sharpened by major war, whether atomic or cold.  Reporters now tend to look pretty, be young, and want personal followings on the basis of their personalities.  At every level — not just nightly news.  And they are controlled by editors and owners who want drama that sells.

So my idea is that borderlines become ecologies.  When Trump slams the borders shut, he doesn’t realize that the nurses along the High LIne are often “travel nurses” who come down from Canada, because in Canada the major cities are as “south” as they can get, along the border.  But on the US side the space along the border tends to be “empty,” just ranches and small towns, because it is daringly “north”.  Over time one side weaves into the other.  For instance, the St. Mary’s valley along the east edge of Glacier Park empties into geology on the Canadian side.  If you are there and need a hospital in a hurry, you go north, and if necessary you smash through the barrier.  Many of the kids up there are born in Cardston, Alberta, which confuses citizenship issues.

Coming out of the St. Mary’s hydrology complex is Milk River which long ago was redirected away from Canada into the USA because they had the money and will to do it and Canada did not have the will to prevent it.  Over the years, one of the flumes necessary for diversion began to deteriorate and leak, so that there was a kind of water oasis in dry terrain.  A cluster of plants and animals and birds formed there.  Now repairing the flume would destroy that little ecology.  Eliminating lines is eliminating the standing order, the status quo.  

“Healing” a human and his/her little community can have the same effect.  People who realize this will resist.  Some communities SHOULD be scattered, because their borderlines don’t do anything good and only create pain.  And assholes.  But others are shelters for atypical people with high value, even for the typicals.

More tomorrow if nothing disruptive happens.

WHAT'S SO BAD ABOUT NARCISSISM?

 by KessieLou on Deviant Art

When I was junior high age — we didn’t have junior high schools in those days so I was still in grade school — I spent a lot of time drawing paperdolls.  My friend from across the street joined me in creating a whole society of “people” and their clothes.  They were not Barbies so much as patterns of what we thought the world was like.  (There were no Barbies yet, but I had a Toni doll who was bigger, 3-dimensional, and had wild red hair, like mine.)  

The key was that each of we two had two figures (based on Winnie Winkle, Lil’ Abner and Brenda Starr comic strips in the daily paper), one who was blonde and a force for good and the other who was brunette and a force for wickedness — not violence or murder, but machinations to hurt other figures and dominate stories.  Because they were from the comics, they were VERY sexual (big boobs, tiny waists, painted eyes).  Because we made all sorts of clothes for them they were naked, but not explicit.  (No nipples.)  We did hair extensions and big earrings.  

Of course, they were about puberty and trying to understand “female” both socially and physically.  We stopped when my friend’s cousins, who were older and more sophisticated, took an interest and began to make more elegant figures, clothed and detailed with skillful watercolors, which took them higher on the culture scene into “art.”  Distanced.

But there was one figure I made for myself who was nothing like any of this and was not shared with my friend.  She was very tall and skinny with gray hair braided tight around her head and she wore a long black dress with long sleeves and a high neck.  She is a figure often found in gothic BBC films — the strict governess, the stern housekeeper, the prison warden.  I named her “Minerva.”  I didn’t think of her as evil nor even wise as in the Greek myths— maybe more like constricted by virtue, rigid.  Once a Blackfeet community college student in a class of mine told me that she expected I would be bony and humorless like this.  She was surprised by my actual appearance; she was not the first.

Minerva came back to mind last night because I was chasing the “narcissism” trope again and watching Sam Vaknin’s YouTube posts.  He looks like a male version of Minerva and takes her attitude to some degree.  This linked post is about how he feels when listening to music.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9QVoqDTjLCE  

He says, “the decomposing sweetness of my childhood” makes him “unbearably maudlin”.  He cannot breathe then.  He claims otherwise he feels nothing but emptiness. Except that he has a sense of stored-up emotion that — if released — would destroy both him and us.  Pretty grandiose.

When I listen to Sam for a while, I feel as though I’ve been watching a stripped version of an Ingmar Bergman movie, one like “The Seventh Seal” or “Wild Strawberries”, except without the redemption of the (blonde) forgiving mother.  But then recently comes a new Vaknin vid, which I can’t find when I go back to make a link.  It’s about he and his wife, who previously had had relationships with malignant narcissists.  Most of the really raging attacks on narcissism, the ones that want vengeance, are from women, who often transparently invited themselves into the relationship in the first place, seeing it as some kind of privileged access.  They want to “fix” Sam, which is grandiose.  Like a child wanting to “fix” parents.

Vaknin and his wife

But grim Sam accepts that he IS a grandiose narcissist, maybe with malignant psychopathic or sociopathic aspects, a fact impressed upon him by a failed marriage, a failed business, and a jail term that gave him time to think.  Rather than reject or even repent, he decided to claim the label and exploit it, which he has done rather successfully.  He now claims and probably deserves to be described as the world’s expert on narcissism.  It’s interesting to hear him talking about Trump — he joins the consensus of most people that Trump is an extreme narcissist, both grandiose and malignant.  

In the vid with the wife (she is younger but mature, quite pretty with an expressive face that shows amusement and tenderness), she says nothing for a while, but then he invites her to speak and asks her why she cares about him.  She puts a tender hand on his shoulder and they exchange some jokes.  Sam can’t help smiling.  But he fights it.

To tell the truth I share her warm feelings for grandiose narcissists (maybe not the more malignant ones) and am not bitter about my time with them, energy spent on them, even wounds inflicted by them.  I sort of regret the wounds I made on them. This world is not drawn by Disney.  And, like Vaknin and his wife, I find that a little humor is a powerful sting remover.

https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=sam+vax+narcissism  

This is a link to the Vaknin menu.  By now he’s established an identity and is making a comfortable living as an expert.  He’s much more interesting and useful than the “Neoatheists”, though there’s still something we associate with religion about him, like a cranky old priest or rabbi or imam.  He’s not either the invisible psychoanalyst nor the reassuring papa.  (His full name is technically Shmuel Ben David “Sam” Vaknin, born in 1961, which was the year Kennedy was elected and I came to the rez, almost immediately hooking up with a grandiose narcissist.)

Such a strategy is a lazy form of discipline, "valorized" or "virtue" ethics in which one takes as a guide an admired person.  This is also a child’s strategy.  Children are always exceeded by the demands on them.  I feel this very sharply — I think the times are pressing this on us all, no matter how truly powerful and wise we are.  There’s currently an advertisement about a little white dog showing up with a subway rider and asking to be adopted.  Soon the dog is joined by homeless people, abandoned children, powerless races, mortally ill, elderly people until there is a crowd following this helpless man.  I teared up.  It’s hard to accept or even tolerate the need in the world.

One way is Sam’s.  He takes the position that he is impossibly superior, to the point of being alien.  Admitting all that neediness in himself and the world would release impossible rage.