Responding to a Redditor who wrote, "I only 'love' myself when I achieve things that people admire me for," I wrote...
IME with many young adults who were precocious intellectual children (see Claudia Jankech's groundbreaking article for sure, for sure), the fast-processing but highly sensitive child in distressing circumstances often becomes the family's "duty rescuer," "golden child" or "responsible hero."
In serious, truly "committed & active" recovery since 2003, and with a lot of schooling and research, I've been able to see that Richard Schwartz's Internal Family Systems Model makes total sense, at least for me.
My mind was conditioned, in-doctrine-ated, instructed, socialized, habituated, normalized and neurally “hard-wired” to Learned Helplessness, Dread & the Victim Identity very early on, beginning to develop a case of compensatory narcissism at about 15. My brain's default mode network became so infested with that stuff that pretty much any other way of perceiving, believing and acting accordingly was blown out save for periods of extreme (often totally debilitating) anxiety and depression. But after those periods, the compensatory narcissism would reassert itself even more densely.
After plowing through about 90% of what's in this earlier post from 1984 to 2013, I stumbled onto this stuff and this concept and began to understand what Schwartz was really talking about: My crushed ego had gone severely codependent and created a "protector" scheme I not only used on that ego, I used it as did so many others in the "helping professions" to put others on Karpman Drama Triangles so that my ego could "rescue" them and feel good about itself.
In time I was able to begin to Dis-I-dentify with Learned Helplessness & the Victim I-dentity (see also not-moses's answers to a replier's questions there) and have made a lot of progress into being able to use an "observing self" to spot the addiction (because, neurobiologically, it is that), get immediately into "de-shaming" via 10 StEPs of Emotion Processing, and yank myself out of that I-dentity at least some of the time, more or less in the fashion described by addiction whizbang Gabor Mate in his book, In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts. The yanking does not produce a permanent exit from LH&VI, but can be used as often as necessary to do so.
Over time, the general urge to rescue to be significant and admired in that default mode network is increasingly -- albeit slowly -- diminished via neuroplastic reconstruction, and far more quickly quashed when it is noticed, recognized, acknowledged, accepted, owned and appreciated. But, as they say in AA, it's been a case of "progress, not perfection" and "God is faithful, but He's slow."
John Bradshaw's, Merle Fossum's, June Tangney's, and (especially) Gershen Kaufman's books on the treatment of shame were helpful, along with so many others in A CPTSD Library. Alice Miller's The Drama of the Gifted Child may also be worth a look.
Good work
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