DADDY-MAN

By now the internet has become so intrusive that it's full of paywalls attached to click-bait, popup ads, automatic definitions in boxes, reconfigurations, questionnaires, and money offers, etc etc. that it is clear that what they say is true:  the internet doesn't belong to the user.  It is dominated by those with money who want more money.  I'm constantly prompted to bring up whatever I brought up before, whether I'm any longer interested or not.  To find what I really want, I have to thrash through the underbrush and not triggering more junk from the cloud.

Grannon and Vaknin, for example, not that I don't value them.  They make a lot of other people look like wimpy simps.  They must be paying YouTube or just getting a lot of hits.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=23tQTkf2F0U  The first half of this Vaknin vid struck me as evidence that fear has surfaced his old hangups, like discrediting naive math analysis, hairsplitting concepts, and claiming to know better than everyone else when NO ONE does when dealing with this coronavirus.  But the second half of the same vid hit one of my persisting concepts dead center.  (starts at 8:20 minutes)  Where he gets his theories is beyond me since he can't have much of a clinical practice, but these ideas are very useful to me.  I think they're sound.

It is an analysis he has come to recently and it has a tiny bit of a vengeful edge so I wonder how his marriage is going, which is none of my business.  The idea he has recently been exploring is that the narcissistic man is often accompanied and engaged by a borderline woman.  It's about boundaries, meaning identities, personas, how we know who we are and how we get it wrong, to the point where the two share a psychosis.  (We used to call it more elegantly a "folie a'deux.")  In this vid he offers the idea that this pair, both of them sometimes to a psychotic degree, are acting out "daddy issues," at least on the woman's side.  And the solution of this insoluble problem for an abused woman, often ends up with boundaries so tough that the person is isolated.  But not before she makes a helluva lot of trouble for the narcissist.  In my case, after his death because the attachment persists and now it is safe.

Vaknin's description closely fits my marriage but with the additional element of the Male Narcissist being a genuinely talented and much admired man.  And this Female Borderline being deeply disappointed and frustrated by the failure of my own father.  A lot of this is reanimated by the behavior and demeanor of Trump, although my father in public was never a predator, never criminal, never sociopathic.  Just never dynamic.

My own personal Male Narcissist was the same with the wife before me and the wife after me, which made it easier to figure out.  I never cheated on him and I don't think the others did either.  The first one did.  In my case the "prove-you-love-me" trials he asked became more and more life-threatening, like delivering a load of bronzes to Cody in a major blizzard or sliding under the museum to turn off the main water valve when the space was a yard deep in ice water.  I mean, I'm not stupid now but then I had no boundaries.  

The problem on his side was that such sacrifices meant he had to prove he was worth it with more and more amazing sculptures, but he was aging, almost sixty.  He framed his success in money.  When we went for marriage counselling, he took along an adding machine tape that showed we had made a quarter of a million dollars that year.  The shrink was very impressed.  (All the money went back into the business.  The fourth wife cashed it out when he died.)

Freely admitting this is a good way to understand the consequences of my  early determining decade (the part about fearing entrapment, for instance)., Where I am now is accepting most of that while exploring how it reaches back through generations.  That is, my "daddy man" struggles are linked to those of my mother with her father.  How he got to be such a narcissist is due both to a patriarchal culture that made him responsible for everything, crippled by a problem (Irish) temperament insulted by the deaths of loved ones, a brother and a daughter.  He denied their deaths while secretly thinking he killed them. He was a working class man who wanted to be gentry and lacked education, though he was clerk of the local school board because he bought the house from the former clerk and all the records were in the attic.

On my father's side the dynamics are slightly different. His grandfather was also a volatile, erupting man but his father maintained a mild manner, idealizing as though these homesteaders were gentry.  The culture of the Edwardian turn-of-the-century was his: progressive but not in a demonstrating way, educated, a man of the forming Middle Class without the prosperity or the degrees.  He sent his oldest son (my father) for a Master's degree, but both lost the prosperity element.

So my father was a narcissist and my mother struggled with her borderline.  For both, a good-deal of fakery and suppression were necessary, an avoidance of change.  For me, it rises to the level of moral failure.  Nothing to do with sex but a lot to do with gender roles.  But the culture was on their side, particularly in rural places.  And there is a good deal of dementia at the end of my father's life, which I think has something to do with failure to resolve internal life.  He was supposed to be a hero who saved everyone, but didn't know how to do it -- or really want to do it.

There's another element in my mother's life which I might describe with Grannon's fav approach.  Stoicism.  "The Stoics often refer to the four cardinal virtues of Greek philosophy: prudence, justice, fortitude, and temperance. (Or if you prefer: wisdom, morality, courage, and moderation.)"  In modern terms, she persisted.  I have a little of that Faithfulness.  Hers was to human relationships, but mine is to abstracts.  I don't know how all these cats got into it.  But that belongs to a different subject, the attachment system of mammals and why it exists.  It's quite a stoic sort of love based on sensory experience, cross species.