from my journal for July 13, 1992<\/p>\n
More realizations have crystallized out of my experience of V last week. One is how the narcissist is hollow, all surface, for all the self involvement, there isn’t any “self” there.\u00a0 <\/span>I went back and read the episode with V after Fiona’s death and that reminded me again that the cruelty is unconscious<\/span>, the result of a powerful intuition combined with no awareness of unconscious process and a conviction of one’s “niceness” that leaves no room for questioning one’s behavior.\u00a0 <\/span>That made me think again that mother’s cruelty is probably the same sort of thing.\u00a0 <\/span>or else a defense of her drinking.\u00a0 <\/span>I just typed up the part from last year where I said that it really hurt me to be with her when she’s drinking and she said “well then you’ll just have to hurt for a long time won’t you” in such a cruel way.\u00a0 <\/span>I thought at the time that I would hurt until the day she dies, but now I see that I’ve cut off from her so completely that that particular pain is not there any more.\u00a0 <\/span>I’m no longer trying to connect with her, my concern is how to protect myself from her.\u00a0 <\/span>The irony is that now I would be able to go out on the porch and “talk” to her (what she wanted last year that I refused to do that set off her cruelty) because I have now found the safe way to do it: volunteer nothing at all.\u00a0 <\/span>She called Saturday night from Cincinnati because the electricity was off, I’m sure she was hoping for some entertainment.\u00a0 <\/span>All I said was “yes”, “no”, and “nothing new \u2014 we walk the dog, we water the garden.”\u00a0 <\/span>If she feels it as sad and impoverished, she has no skills for dealing with it \u2014\u2014 ah!\u00a0 <\/span>but perhaps she sees me<\/span> as sad and impoverished, not the conversation<\/span> \u2014 oh, freedom!\u00a0 <\/span>safe under my cloak of invisibility.\u00a0 <\/span>No, mom, my life is not “exciting”, it never was exciting enough for you, though I tried so hard to make it sound<\/span> exciting (now I understand why I was so put off by mom talking about her birthday “I want to go some place that excites<\/span> me”).\u00a0 <\/span>I suppose you could call “Journey into Courage” and Neskaya exciting, but I choose not to tell mother about them.\u00a0 <\/span>But I’m not really interested in excitement any more, I don’t know that I ever was, I think all the “excitement” in my life came out of the search for truth.\u00a0 <\/span>And the real depth and richness of my life is not something that mother is capable of perceiving.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
For Fiona’s death, see post for December 8<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
from my journal for July 13, 1992 More realizations have crystallized out of my experience of V last week. One is how the narcissist is hollow, all surface, for all the self involvement, there isn’t any “self” there.\u00a0 I went … Continue reading