Traumatic Narcissism and Recovery

Leaving the Prison of Shame and Fear

Daniel Shaw

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000405040
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psicologia
• Subtopic: Psicoanalisi

This book looks at the trauma suffered by those in relationships with narcissists, covering topics such as surviving a cult, dysfunctional families, political dysfunction, and imbalances of power in places of work and education.

This new volume by author and psychoanalyst Daniel Shaw revisits themes from his first book, Traumatic Narcissism: Relational Systems of Subjugation. Shaw offers further reflections on the character and behavior of the traumatizing narcissist, the impact such persons have on those they abuse and exploit and the specific ways in which they instill shame and fear in those they seek to control. In addition, this volume explores, with detailed clinical material, many of the challenges mental health professionals face in finding effective ways of helping those who have suffered narcissistic abuse. From within a trauma informed, relational psychoanalytic perspective, Shaw explores themes of attachment to internalized perpetrators, self-alienation, internalized aggression, and loss of faith in the value and meaning of being alive.

This book will be especially illuminating and rewarding for mental health professionals engaged in helping patients heal and recover from complex relational trauma, and equally valuable to those individuals who have struggled with the tenacious, often crippling shame and fear that can be the result of relational trauma.

Chapter 1

Introduction

Introduction

I did not know, when my book Traumatic Narcissism: Relational Systems of Subjugation (Shaw, 2014), which was intended for mental health professionals, was published that I would soon be hearing from so many people who were not mental health professionals, but who were instead people in the general population – people who had experienced traumatic subjugation in relationships with highly narcissistic significant others. These people, more of them than I could have imagined, let me know that my ideas about traumatic narcissism had helped them understand their relationships with these traumatizers in ways that were more tangibly helpful than they had previously experienced.

The trauma these people describe, mostly having taken place in their families, is usually not characterized by violence, beatings, rape, incest, being starved or otherwise grossly neglected – although I have in fact worked with many who have these horrific stories to tell. The traumatic abuse/neglect that I most frequently encounter is relational. Relational trauma was long recognized but unnamed until the American psychologist and researcher in the field of neuropsychology, Alan Schore, coined the term (Schore, 2001). The terms “attachment trauma” and “developmental trauma” hold similar meaning. These terms are describing what happens in infancy and throughout the period of human development from child to adult, when caregivers we depend on, not just for our physical needs but for the need to feel recognized and loved, are chronically misattuned – ignoring, dismissing, or discouraging the expression of the developing child's needs, thoughts, and feelings. When chronic misattunements go chronically unrepaired – no accountability, no empathy, no recognition – the traumatic wounds are deepened, held in the memory of the body, the brain and the nervous system, even if not held in conscious awareness. Studies in infant research, attachment theory, neuropsychology, and the observations of trauma researchers and clinicians, have led many to describe the difficulties suffered later in life by those with this background as a complex form of post-traumatic stress disorder.

The traumatic experiences I have focused on in my work and my writing, those that result from relationships with highly narcissistic significant others, are relational. Even if a person grows up with no history of gross neglect and abuse, even when someone grows up with every socioeconomic advantage, every kind of privilege – the lasting impact of relational trauma can lead to emotional pain and suffering on a spectrum from mild to utterly incapacitating. The more extensive the traumatic relational experience, the more adults with this kind of developmental history experience that certain aspects of relationships, or relationality in general, cannot be trusted.

Of course, it is not only people on the client side of the mental health profession who experience the difficulties stemming from relational trauma. Many professional colleagues have greeted me at conferences and speaking engagements, saying, “Thank you for writing a book about my ____________,” with the blank filled interchangeably with the terms mother, father, sister, brother, boss, or former therapist or clinical supervisor. I also hear from these colleagues that their use of the traumatizing narcissist concept has made a significant difference in their efforts to help their patients. The confidence I have gained in the concept of traumatic narcissism has also led to more meaningful therapeutic results in my own work with traumatized patients.

In this book, a follow-up to Traumatic Narcissism, I have collected mostly previously published papers written for various journals and conferences, which offer my further thinking on and expansion of the traumatic narcissism concept, focusing especially on clinical work with adult children of these traumatizers. As I continue to encounter those whose lives have been derailed by this kind of relational trauma, I discover new challenges and new paths toward healing, and I share here what I have been learning, and what my patients have been teaching me. I also return to look at traumatic narcissism in the politics of the United States at the time of this writing, with my cult-expert hat on. As the reader new to my writing will learn, surviving my experience in a cultic religious community, and working for many years with cult survivors and their families, continues to inform and inspire my thinking about what it means to break free from exploitative relationships that require subjugation. And I return to themes of love and faith in analytic work, themes that have been especially meaningful to me since the beginning of my career.

A unifying theme throughout these chapters is my goal of bringing greater transparency to the psychoanalytic process. Therapy patients benefit when they understand what the aims of psychotherapy are, and how those aims can be reached. Psychoeducation is a way of offering transparency about the therapeutic process, about the possibility of and the challenges to being able to change, heal, and grow. Where relational trauma is the focus, I also emphasize the importance of psychoeducation about the psychology of the traumatizer. It is important to stress that I do not endorse diagnosing the traumatizing people that patients describe. Rather, as I listen to their stories, I encourage patients to think about what could have motivated their abusers; what could help explain their behavior. I see the construction of a plausible, coherent narrative that helps explain what compels and motivates the often shocking, mystifying relational behavior of traumatizing others, as therapeutically crucial. Far more than a diagnostic label, it is a plausible narrative of the abuser's psychology that helps the traumatized patient move toward breaking what Ernest Becker described as “the spell cast by persons – the nexus of unfreedom” (Becker, 1973).

The importance of the demystification of the ways that traumatizers do harm naturally calls for the therapeutic process to be free of mystification as well. My bias toward transparency applies not just to the therapy process but also to the therapist as a person. Cartoons in The New Yorker are still showing an inscrutable, note-taking psychoanalyst, bearded with glasses, behind a couch, unseen by the patient who is, ostensibly, baring his soul. We know this is a tired cliché because for one thing, most psychotherapists today are women, not men with beards and glasses. The authority of the analyst is no longer unquestionable, and so we must consider: what happens in psychoanalytic work when the analyst is not hidden, when the analyst has been published, is online, and can be googled, and is sitting face-to-face with the soul-baring, or the soul-seeking, or soul-concealing patient? My response is to try not to be hidden while trying not to be obtrusive – a balancing act I am always practicing without expecting that it can be perfected. I explain more about my thoughts on the theme of the analyst's transparency, its importance, and my own preferences about it later in this Introduction, and in the clinical work I present throughout the book.

In its earliest stages, the traumatizing narcissist concept emerged out of my efforts to make sense of my experience as a follower of a charismatic guru (see Shaw, 2014, Chapter 3). I was a full-time worker in and loyal member of the religious community led by this guru for over a decade, before I came to view it as an abusive cult, a totalitarian community led by an individual, the guru, I perceived as a traumatizing narcissist. My training as a psychoanalytically oriented psychotherapist began just as I left the group. I became, along with a number of others who also left, active in exposing the group's abuses. Initially thinking that I was putting my cult experience behind me as I developed my new career, I was soon struck by the strong parallels between the nature of the trauma experienced by cult survivors like myself and the impact of traumatic relational experience on the many others with whom I was working who had no history of cult participation. The struggles and challenges for both groups are similar in many ways. Both seek relief from the sense of powerlessness, the shame and the fear, that has resulted from their traumatic relational experiences. They want to claim the sense of worth and value that has been lost to them; they want to find their lost strength, courage, and power. I came to believe that there were ways of understanding cult trauma that could contribute to provide an explanatory framework for abusive and/or neglectful relationships in general, and this belief has only grown stronger as I continue to work both with those with no cult experience as well as with cult survivors.

A prison of shame and fear

At some point in my personal exploration of what I had done and what had happened to me in my cult years, I rebelled against my overwhelming feelings of shame. Like many people when they first leave a cult, I initially experienced intense social phobia and frequent panic attacks. Good therapy and good friends helped me get through this period, as I gradually gained my orientation and grounding and began to find my anger. Finding a fight response was the necessary antidote, at that point, to the submission that I had become used to, that was demanded as the price of belonging in the cult community. As I saw it, the abusive, shameless guru was the one who should be ashamed, not I. Holding undue shame is a form of submission. It echoes and perpetuates the perpetrator's use of intimidation, belittling, and humiliation as their weapons of control – and I had had enough of that. I once believed that my community of worshippers and meditators had something meaningful to offer. But as is the case with all authoritarian groups led by traumatizing narcissists – which is my loose, partial definition of a cult – the leader of this community strove above all for the narcissist's goals – self-aggrandizement and the power to sustain a delusion of omnipotence. I could spend the rest of my life being ashamed that I fell for the scam, afraid of what others would think – or I could do something about it. Over time, I was able to come to terms with my shame and fear, and I learned to bear those feelings. What I discovered was that for most people who have been traumatized, this is one of the greatest challenges – finding the strength to bear feelings of shame and fear so that one can go on living with some sense of dignity.

How this can be accomplished is difficult work. Shame is powerfully adhesive, and why that is so is far from obvious. In working with the shame states of traumatized people, and with the fear of exposure and judgment that comes with shame, I’ve come to think of shame and fear as hellish. Shame and fear, the lingering residue of trauma, punish and torment the traumatized. The traumatized are bedeviled, held in a freeze-frame of ruin and despair in subjugation to their traumatizers. Liberation from the prison of shame and fear is a central theme of the therapeutic quest, and it is often a labyrinthine journey.

Finding a way out

It was hard, especially at first, not to have some trepidation about what my choice to be open about my cult experience would mean. So many people, to this day, will ask, “how could you have been so deluded? How could you fall for something so false? Why did you stay? What is the pathology of people who get into cults?” among other not very polite questions. Many people, sensitive people, intelligent people, believe that they would never allow themselves to be deceived or taken advantage of. I, on the other hand, am fairly certain that such experiences are far less “other” than is comfortable to acknowledge. Deceiving and exploiting happens in families, marriages, jobs, schools, doctor's offices, places of worship, financial investment relationships, political parties – and for some people, in therapy. Many people are staying in situations and relationships of subjugation. We usually don’t call those relationships cults, but often the similarities are greater than the differences.

After I left the cult, I was especially moved by the work of Emanuel Ghent, who made an astute distinction between surrender and submission (Ghent, 1990). He thought of surrender as a letting go of defenses, and an opening to the possibility of something more real, authentic, and alive, internally and interpersonally. Ghent observed that longings for surrender could all too readily lead to vulnerability to the demands of others for submission. Frustrated strivings to be recognized and valued could paradoxically find expression in the enactment of sadomasochistic dynamics, in relationships where the price of recognition would be masochistic submission. When submission is mistaken for surrender, one may attach to someone appearing to offer special love and attention, without realizing that this “love” is given on condition of much greater self-negating submission than was originally bargained for. If the abuser is charismatic and skillful at manipulation, he can convince others that masochistic submission to him is not what it seems at all, but actually its opposite – an esoteric form of self-empowerment that only a special group of privileged adherents can understand. Many of the individuals and groups that offer programs for self-empowerment in today's “wellness” market are exploiting followers by persuading them, seductively at first and then with greater and greater pressure, to allow their critical thinking to be aborted and their boundaries to be violated. Ultimately, only complete subjugation – emotionally, spiritually, financially – will yield the self-empowerment, self-realization, the perfect body, the greatest affluence, the most success, having the most transformational influence on the world, and so on, that is supposedly awaiting. Authority figures in this kind of relationship or group become especially skilled at moving the goal posts, again and again, so that only greater dependence is achieved, not self-empowerment. Adults who find themselves in this kind of exploitative relationship struggle to find a way out, often after having lost a great deal. The struggle to find freedom is often even more difficult for those who are born into families and/or communities where submission is the price of “love.”

Giving oneself in self-negating submission cannot lead to self-realization, nor to the secure feeling of knowing that you are loved and deeply recognized, as much as that might be the manifested or dissociated hope. Ghent's understanding, free of shaming, has been quite meaningful in helping many I have worked with recover not just from cult trauma, but from many other kinds of relational trauma as well. Many people who have never gone near a cult have been subjugated in their families or in other relationships and are similarly trapped into submitting, consciously or unconsciously, to the control of one who lays claim to superior power over them.

My experience of traumatization at the hands of a charismatic, traumatizing narcissist guru certainly led me to a deeper level of self-exploration than I had previously experienced. My own psychoanalytic therapy while in training to become a psychoanalyst covered that territory quite extensively. But I was not satisfied with a one-sided exploration of me. I wanted to understand the abuser. I wanted to know what leads someone to abusively control and exploit others, and what is it about how they relate to others that allows them to succeed. Over two decades, my formulations about abusers and those they abuse crystallized into an explanatory framework that I termed the relational system of the traumatizing narcissist – a system of subjugation, in which a highly narcissistic person, through psychological manipulation that involves coercive persuasion and undue influence, disavows and projects shameful dependency into their target(s). By finding recipients for these projections, he can control and exploit the shameful dependency he has cultivated in them, successfully disavowing shame and dependency, and avoiding having to come to terms with it, within himself. It's a game of hot potato (see Davies, 2004), where the narcissist persuades his target that “I’m not the shamefully dependent one, you are. I’m not the wrong and bad one, you are.” When I am able to point out this dynamic to those who have described this kind of relationship, they begin to see that the Emperor, or in this case the narcissist, turns out to be naked, delusional about his nonexistent omnipotence. The illumination of the perpetrator's delusional psychology is demystifying, a first step in the process of freeing oneself from the gaslighting, from the traumatic attachment bond to the abuser. Liberation from the subjugation of narcissistic abuse includes the painful, demystified realization that those who give love only on condition of submission are not really giving at all. What they give is not life, love or recognition; they give a pseudo-life, at best.

At this point of perceiving more clearly the psychological makeup of the abuser as it drives his behavior, many patients say something like: “I understand the abuser and the abuse. So why do I still feel trapped? What do I do now?” When one's attachment bond is to a narcissistic abuser, it is hard to stop waiting for and hoping to receive what the narcissist does not give. It is hard to stop feeling resentful and enraged about the recognition that was or is withheld. It can be hard to feel hopeful about one's potential to thrive as a person when your primary experience of self has been the experience of feeling negated. I view psychotherapeutic work on traumatic abuse as the process of finding, one way or another, how to become free of the fear and shame the abuser has bequeathed: fear of being ruined, of having run out of chances for love, for life; shame that one is too weak, too much of a failure to go on trying. Working through shame and fear is the path toward being able to unlock frozen grief, and it is the path toward the liberation of the self from the bonds of subjugation. Many of the chapters in this book illustrate the struggles, the highs, and the lows, my patients and I have been through together in our search for this freedom.

Transparency

Understanding how undue shame and fear is induced in traumatizing relationships, and making the abuser's manipulation transparent is part of what is healing for survivors and is an important part of what happ...