It is a black thing to distrust all people. And you’d think this means we don’t have friends, or didn’t have loving parents, that’s not it.
Let me speak for myself. My mistrust of people is that I cannot show them emotion that makes them potentially lose trust in me. This includes therapists, friends, and yes, you, dear reader, too, if it came to it.
Writing helps. Writing helps because I can be a little more honest. I have a little more space between saying something, and feeling the brief rupture from the fabric of connection, before I restore it, notice my friends won’t make much of whatever it is I am writing anyway, and write it.
Writing saved my life. If I am ever so dramatic as to make statements like this, it is because of this.
The thing you need to first learn to trust if you’ve been systematically undermined in your intuition is to trust yourself. And this means trusting your own mistrust of other people. Feeling allowed to have it.
I wasn’t allowed to mistrust my parents. I needed to love them. The happy, loving family we were, I couldn’t say that I didn’t love them (feel love for them). Trust them (feel trust in them). It didn’t feel like they could handle it, or if I’d tell them, they’d panic, I’d feel the connection disrupt, their reactions would overwhelm whatever I was feeling, and what the fuck.
What the fuck, mom and dad. I was a child. You should be securely attached to your child. When your child says they don’t love you, it doesn’t really mean they don’t love you. I don’t think children get a choice about loving their parents, no more so than parents get about loving their children. Of course they do. But give them space to feel it, or the opposite if that’s what they’re feeling. Trust them also even if they talk about mistrusting you. If anyone is telling you they mistrust you at all, that means inherently they trust you on some base level enough to tell you. Unless they literally can’t leave your home or they’re five, in which case take extra care.
This is a tiny mistake with grave consequences. But it’s repairable.
The fakeness I felt—it’s slowly fading. The blackness of my heart—it’s becoming shades of gray.
This is that story. Of healing the narcissistic wound.
I don’t mean narcissistic in a bad, judgmental, evil way. When most people say narcissistic ex, they mean someone they didn’t like and couldn’t get to relate with. When people who had truly narcissistic parents or exes say narcissistic, they mean master manipulators, who are able to cause untold damage by being high charisma, or being parents, or offering love, but also systematically undermining people’s trust in themselves, and weakening any resistance to the idea the other person should be connected to the narcissist forever, and do whatever it takes to restore connection.
I’m talking about a much more garden variety wound. What it shares with Capital-n Narcissism is that both are driven by a fundamental fracture—a fundamental shame at the core of self, and stories are invented around it to keep that feeling from ever being felt. What it leaves you with is other people can only every interact with the stories. You can’t get a person with a narcissistic wound to actually talk about how they’re feeling, only the stories.
When good things are going good, there are no problems, but when bad things are going bad, I feel the need to escape. That all my friends will tire of me. That no one has the ultimate patience to stick with me through all my feels.
I don’t fundamentally trust the universe to get my “being seen” needs met. It’s fake, and I hate myself for it, and because I am living in that story, even if someone says “it’s fine, don’t worry if you feel this way,” I only mistrust them more. Either that, or I think I’ve got them fooled, they they finally think they’re seeing the “real me,” and they’re endeared and care, in which case things are good again! But I still feel for so terribly and arrogantly thinking I fooled them, and then I’m in my stories again, but this time the suffer privately.
So many stories right? I say it as such, because I experienced it as such. Most of you will be reading with some curiosity and disbelief, and a some of you will be internally nodding furiously, hoping no one notices.
Speaking for myself, here is the version of the stories that is simpler, as simply as I can express.
Child: waaaaaah!
Parent: aw kiss boo / help then poop / whatever
Also parent: *insecure about connection with child*
Child: picks up on it, and realises/decides never to say anything
that would threaten it
[fast forward to years later]
*a child who is fundamentally incapable of telling the truth*
I am unwilling to tell the truth, because I am afraid of people walking away. I’ll lie to you, including telling you I lie but at least look I’m being honest about it, to get you stop walking away. I don’t want you to walk away.
This was my internal experience. You know, the funny unexpected thing it comes with it a superiority complex. “Ha, I got them fooled! I must be better and smarter than them.” Also: “I’m such a bad person and different from them.” They’re sides of the same coin.
At a retreat with a diversity of people, I might simultaneously think, “I think I’m better than most people here.” “Also, I think I’m a piece of shit.”
There is no contradiction, because what people with the narcissistic wound feel is a fundamental separation from other people, a fundamental wrongness they must never reveal to people, and the way they compensate for it is by being really great, or doing in their eyes what they think is really great.
The truth is their friends can probably see through some of this act, they can see the brokenness even, and they love them anyway for it, but try telling the wounded person THAT.
The superiority and grandiosity is a defence against complete collapse. It inflates the personality, and as long as enough supply or oxygen keeps coming in, enough connection secured with other people, the float looks fine, but there is the constant lived, experienced threat of those stories collapsing, the float collapsing, and the cloth of the float touching in the internal black core inside and that is intolerable.
These people, these children, have never had the experience of somebody sitting with their core, and still feeling connected.
Their parents couldn’t give that to them (even if they tried! well intentioned) because it’s too late, the child has already decided to isolate them from the core.
And friends and therapists have a hard time reaching it, because there are so many stories and tests in the way. There is a ton of drama. And why shouldn’t there be? These people don’t trust anyone to come close to their core and not want to leave, remember? So why should they allow anyone to come near?
(For those of you were nodding furiously along earlier, remind me to include quotes from The Drama of the Gifted Child.)
The most important thing to recover in these instances is trust, a basic trust in self.
That is what has been undermined. Because the child had to pretend to like their parents, they had to hide their mistrust from even themselves. It would be tough for an adult to pretend they to simultaneously love their someone else and mistrust them. What kind of an actor do you think a 5 year old is?
Even if they could act, they simply don’t have the template for what it means to trust someone else.
When kittens are play-fighting with each other, it is a hugely important thing. They’re learning to show their aggression, to play. If one of the kittens goes too far, the behaviour of the other one changes. The other ones shows anger, and the first one backs down. This is the case of well-socialised kittens. Kittens who didn’t get to play-fight actually have more issues with anger and socialisation. They don’t have the templates.
Same way, people with this wound often neither have the templates, and also are traumatised (i.e. their body and feeling and sensation system shuts down when they get too close to the thing, only their mind and stories are active; the feelings are shut down).
So the way you heal that is by allowing the wounded person to regain a sense of trust in their self. Specifically, in their sense of trust and mistrust.
This doesn’t happen overnight. It happens with great consistency, and reliability over time, and a *deep non-attachment to the outcome*, which most therapists either miss or don’t show they don’t have enough.
If the therapist has attachment to the outcome, then the grown child will simply go into their stories again.
In my case, I didn’t have a therapist, but I had a friend. Their identity doesn’t matter, what matters is they met those things: consistency, reliability, and a deep, obvious non-attachment to outcome.
I needed to trust they liked me, and they didn’t need me so much they wouldn’t walk away if I did something terrible (they weren’t codependently attached to me, which in my eyes wasn’t “real”), and they kept showing up, and they didn’t seem to particularly need me to always like them.
There are therapists who can be like this too. They are out there. They are just not what I found in my search of six.
Turns out therapists are people too! And not all of them are securely attached. And it matters the most for people with this wound, because they will sniff out any desire to please.
What happens when the child (of grown child) is allowed to trust or mistrust (as secure people allow them to do) is that the child begins developing a sense of faith in their own trust and their connection to the universe. They begin showing more and more real parts of themselves, and develop trust they can be shown and seen without being abandoned appropriately. It’s actually appropriate for this to not happen all at once, because it is a demonstrated, reality-tested trust.
Not a trust-by-fiat. Not a trust-by-fiat of “I love you, therefore you must trust me,” like the parents gave. Nor a trust of “I feel strong emotional feelings towards you in those moment”—that doesn’t mean that person will be sustainable there in the life condition of your life, at that level of trustworthiness, all the time. Also, not trust by “I am also codependently attachmed to you, so I won’t run.” That doesn’t work either. (I tried.)
There are no shortcuts, but slow is smooth, and smooth is fast. It’ll be fast enough. When you’ve lived a life of feeling fake, a year or two is not much more. When that slow sense of warm trust emerges in your life, you’ll notice it slowly too. You’ll see them connected with you for at least six months. You won’t freak out in romantic relationships that are not fast enough, or with friendships that are not fast enough, or with therapists. You come to see the ground of healing not as some peak experience to perform in, or transform from, but the fact of your life. Yes, you get to feel healing in context of your every day life. Yes, this is what you always truly “deserved.”*
You are not a solider who has to go trekking in the mountains of emotional work, and somehow come back fixed. No—you get to have this person, or friend, or therapist at home, and exist with them, because they enjoy you too.
You are home.
FIN