Your True Self

[NOTE: please read the second and third paragraphs from this post before continuing. Important–don’t skip reading them!]

I’ve written much about the False Self of the narcissist and of the golden child, and of how they can’t bear to confront their True Selves. The scapegoat, or identified patient, also has a False Self, though, one imposed on him or her, a projection from the abuser, of the hated parts of the abuser’s self, just as the golden child’s False Self is based on projections from the narcissistic parent’s idealized version of him/herself.

My late, probably narcissistic mother (she was never formally diagnosed, so I, unlike her, won’t pin a psychiatric label on her as if I were 100% proven right; I merely call her what I, in my limited knowledge, believe she was) tried aggressively to make me believe I have an autism spectrum disorder.

Two psychiatrists I was seeing for depression back in the mid-1990s, each of them over a period of several months, told me they saw no signs of autistic symptoms in me. About seven or eight years ago, I took the Autism Quotient Test, and my low score (13/50) reconfirmed the two men’s observations.

My mother’s pushing of the classic autism label on me in my childhood, then fifteen years ago deciding I have Asperger Syndrome (the fact that I don’t manifest any autistic symptoms, let alone extreme ones, should be obvious to anyone talking to me for a few minutes, so she fabricated a ‘milder diagnosis’ for my idiosyncrasies, for the sake of plausibility), is best explained as her projecting her own narcissistic traits onto me; for she’d always describe “my autism/Asperger’s” in the language of narcissism (I’m “self-absorbed,” “egotistical,” etc.), talk which also displayed her total ignorance of psychiatric concepts.

In her condescension, a typical narcissistic trait, she insisted that her “objective” conclusions about me were only motivated by a wish to “help” me. Call me crazy, but I fail to see how making me feel inferior, isolated, and alienated from everyone was supposed to help me.

No, she wasn’t labelling me in this way for my sake: she was doing it as a dysfunctional solution to her own emotional problems. As with any bully, the purpose of calling the victim ‘abnormal,’ ‘stupid,’ ‘weak,’ etc., is to make the bully feel less shitty about himself, by making the victim feel shitty. This is the exact opposite of help, especially when it comes in the form of blatant lies.

So if you, Dear Reader, have been subjected to a barrage of verbal abuse, gaslighting, lies, manipulation, and threats from an emotional abuser, remember that that is all shit coming from his mouth. It’s his, not yours.

Since all of those hurtful words were nonsensical rot coming from your abuser, and they have nothing to do with who you really are (in spite of whatever faults you may actually have, which may have given him an excuse to blow up at you or insult you); I am now giving you the right to regard yourself as being the opposite of all those mean labels.

What I’m proposing isn’t sentimental fluff. It’s based on Hegelian dialectics, the idea that there’s a unity connecting all opposites. Consider those vicious words to be the thesis; what you should be thinking about yourself is the negation of those words; a sublation of these contradictions should resolve into your True Self.

So, to negate your abuser’s thesis about you is to say to yourself that the real you is none of those awful things he or she called you. You can’t just know this intellectually; you must feel it, and repeat an affirmation of all that is good about you, over and over again, as a negation of all that verbal abuse you heard. You must transform the negative beliefs you currently, instinctually believe, into positive beliefs, also instinctually believed.

This will be a gradual process; the change won’t occur overnight. Resist the urge to repeat in your mind the negative self-talk your abuser imposed onto you, and repeat, like a mantra, the positive opposites of all that verbal abuse. It won’t be easy, for as I said above, what I’m proposing isn’t mere sentimentality.

List out every horrible thing he or she said to you, to manipulate you into thinking you’re stupid, wimpy, selfish, immature, irresponsible, talentless, or whatever nonsense he or she was projecting onto you. Then, beside each nasty descriptive, write its opposite: intelligent, strong, caring, mature, responsible, talented, etc. Don’t be afraid to consider the possibility that you have, at least in part, those good qualities.

No, you aren’t fooling yourself: you’re offsetting years of verbal poisoning squirted into your ears, squirted in to fool you into thinking you are whatever the narcissist needed you to be. By repeating these affirmations over time, you’ll be transitioning into a new you…your True Self.

As for your actual flaws and imperfections, that’s where the sublation of the dialectic comes in. This working-through process of resolving the contradiction between the narcissist’s cruel thesis of you, as cancelled out with your self-caring negation of those cruel words, will sublate into a realistic assessment of your faults.

…and you won’t hear those faults in the voice of a narc.