narcissisticabuse.com 
             youareincontrol.info                                             


                                                              What It Means To Be With a Narcissist and One Way of Coping

ABOUT YOU

It isn't easy being you. You might be unsure yourself if you are with an abuser because they can so easily turn on the charm or maybe they might say, "C'mon, aren't you being too sensitive? What's the matter with you?" And there you are again, back in the cycle of abuse.  You might be questioning yourself and asking, "Why can't I make him happy? What am I doing wrong?"   It isn't easy being you when he says, "You make me be this way."  And it isn't easy being you when you wonder if you've wasted your whole life and if it has any meaning. And it isn't easy when you think about leaving and get scared because you don't know any other life.

It isn't easy being you whether the abuse is overt or not.  Your abuser doesn't have to yell at you -  he or she can be condescending, make jokes at your expense, can find ways to slight you in so many different ways.

So there you are, confused, or maybe not - perhaps you are sure at this point that you are with a narcissist.  You may be trying to figure out what to do and how to proceed.  You are scared, anxious, maybe feeling sorry for yourself, and probably angry.

Doing Nothing

Now is the time to do....nothing.  Counterintuitive as this may seem, it is the best thing you can do. Acting from anger of neediness can lead to some really bad decisions.  You may walk out, threaten divorce or some other act and all of a sudden you are in a major war with no resources.

You've spent so many years feeling down, maybe feeling worthless, and now you want to take action.  That's good - but  it has to be done with your strengths and not from your weaknesses. And most important it has to be done from a calm mind - one that is not blaming or angry.  If you think of your emotions like a 5000 lb elephant (thanks to the psych professor and author  who came up with this idea) and you are the rider, you must always keep the emotions under control.  Let them go, just a bit and you can be in for a dangerous ride.

A Door

Positive psychology is one relatively quick intervention that can allow you to get in control to make decisions.  Take the concept of what you say to yourself.  Think: ABC. A is the adversity in your life, B is the belief about that adversity and C is the consequence.  B is also known as self talk.  How you describe the adversity determines the consequences.  If, instead of saying, "this is the worst thing that can happen to me", you say, "This is not a good situation, but there is a way out.  It may be difficult but I can find it." the  consequence is that instead of becoming entrenched in the belief you are doomed, you begin to train yourself to look for answers and possibilities.  Do this enough and you are training your brain for optimism instead of pessimism.  Optimistic people feel in control.

This is not "The Secret"

Positive psychology is not positive affirmations and visualization.  It is an empirically based method that makes lasting changes in people and enables them to respond to difficult situations in a manner in which they can feel control.  It is based on the original work of Martin Seligman on learned helplessness.  He found that dogs could be trained to "unlearn" helplessness and so could people, and when they did their depression was gone.

Depression is not anger turned inward. This Freudian concept is no longer accepted as being correct.  Depression is loss of feeling in control, which leads to sadness.  Being the victim of a narcissist or sociopath is a fast track to depression.  Being able to control your emotional response to a situation is the beginning of taking back control.

Positive psychology never disputes reality, it makes reality easier to handle. The feeling of having some control is the difference between continuing to feel traumatized or not. No matter how controlling or abusive your partner, and no matter how long the 'learned helplessness' it has been proven that beginning to exert control jumpstarts the process of "relearning" and loss of control feelings diminish.

Optimism is critical in abuse. It does NOT mean you do not see how bad things are. It means that optimists have better outcomes in negative situations and that is your goal. There are solid reasons why this is so and methods to obtain this outlook. This is not to be confused with Vaknin's phrase "malignant optimism".  By that he means an outlook based on unrealistic hopes and dreams of a better life, changing the abuser, and you the victim, learning to be a better person. These are indeed useless acts. You will not change the abuser.

Pessimists see the causes of failure as permanent (it's going to last forever), pervasive (it's going to ruin everything) and personal (it's all my fault). Optimists dispute pessimistic thoughts: if this becomes a habit, this skill stays with you and the changes take place in physiological ways such as brain patterns letting you calm down enough to think more rationally and logically. It also allows you to become resilient. The next "bad thing" will depress you for a shorter period of time. You will think of options, you will bounce back quicker.  You will take risks, and by doing so, begin to take control.


                                                                   Interview with Dr. Seligman, University of Pennsylvania
Q:    In your work thus far, is there one piece of research that you would like to see on every
bumper sticker, and chalkboard, and refrigerator door in the country?

  Dr. Seligman:   I think it’s basically that if you are a pessimist in the sense that when bad things
happen you think they are going to last forever and undermine everything you do, then you are about
eight times as likely to get depressed, you are less likely to succeed at work, your personal relationships
are more likely to break up, and you are likely to have a shorter and more illness-filled life. That’s the main discovery that I associate with my lifetime.

                                            Q:    People often ask how to start shifting from pessimism to optimism?
Dr. Seligman:     I think the way most people start is to find out the costs of being a pessimist. As a pessimist, it’s always
wet weather in the soul, they don’t do as well at work, and they get colds that will last all winter. They find themselves
failing in crucial situations and their relationships go sour very easily. So when people have those kinds of hurts, if they
can find that there is something useful in positive psychology, that’s where people start.
                         
                                   It Might Make You Feel Better If You Ask, "Why?" and then understand your response


          This is from an academic paper examining helplessness and its variations and how attributing causes to situations defines
          outcomes.  This is called attribution theory. See why it matters if you say, "I'm to blame." or "He abuses me." Your response
         may define how well you do in getting what you need.

    



Sometimes human helplessness following uncontrollability was
chronic; other times, it was transient. Sometimes human helplessness was
pervasive; other times, it was circumscribed. And sometimes human
helplessness was marked by a striking loss of self-esteem; other times, it was
not. The original helplessness theory was silent regarding these variations.
Abramson, Seligman, and Teasdale (1978) revised the learned
helplessness theory as it applied to people, and especially to depression, by proposing that
when individuals encounter an uncontrollable aversive event, they ask
themselves why.

The answer people give to this question—the causal
attribution they entertain—sets the parameters for the helplessness that ensues.
Three dimensions of causal attribution were claimed to be important. If the
attributed cause were stable ("it's going to last forever") rather than unstable,
then helplessness would be long-lasting. If it were global ("it's going to
undermine everything") Maier, Peterson, & Schwartz 17
rather than specific, then helplessness would be general.

And if the causal attribution were internal ("it's me") rather than external, then
helplessness would be accompanied by a loss of self-esteem. The pattern of
causal attributions for a particular instance of uncontrollability would affect a
person's expectations for the future. And these expectations would in turn affect
the person's behavior.

Reality or social consensus may sometimes dictate the causal explanation
that a person embraces; but in more ambiguous circumstances, the individual
relies on habitual tendencies to explain bad events in a given way, a personality
characteristic described by Seligman as explanatory (or attributional) style
(Peterson & Seligman, 1984). Those people who tend to offer stable and global
explanations for bad events are not only at risk for helplessness, but also for the
failures of adaptation in which helplessness figures in the wake of
uncontrollability. Those people who tend to offer internal explanations for bad
events are at risk for self esteem loss in the wake of uncontrollability.

This revised account of learned helplessness—the attributional
reformulation—is an explanation of human problems that presupposes that
people are rational, acting "logically" in accordance with their interpretation of
the causes of events. The rationality inherent in the processes proposed by the
attributional reformulation of helplessness theory may be what allows it to be
used in the service of a positive psychology. For this rationality can explain
resilience as readily as helplessness, hope as well as despair, and good cheer as
well as depression. It tells us how to intervene to undo passivity as well as how
to prevent passivity in the first place. In all cases, how a person thinks about the
things he or she experiences is taken seriously. At the same time, it is important
to stress that one of the potent determinants of explanatory style is reality, so
that interventions cannot be so simple as just urging people to "think positive"
when the world in which they live is relentlessly negative.

The attribution reformulation of helplessness theory is a diathesis-stress
theory, proposing that the conjunction of objective bad events (the stress) and a
pessimistic explanatory style (the diathesis) is necessary for negative behavioral
outcomes to ensue. This position builds from the roots of the helplessness
approach in the experimental psychology of animal learning, where bad
events—the stress (e.g., uncontrollable electric shocks) are presented to research
participants. When guiding research with people, the attributional
reformulation has usually focused on the cognitive diathesis, which proves a
consistent correlate of expected outcomes.

When one of us (Peterson) originally went to the University of
Pennsylvania in 1979 to work with Seligman, Seligman supervised both a
thriving animal laboratory and a thriving human laboratory. The attributional
reformulation of helplessness theory had just been proposed, an Attributional
Style Questionnaire (ASQ) to measure attributional style had been created, and
the initial investigation of explanatory style had just been published (Seligman,
Abramson, Semmel, & von Baeyer, 1979).

Over the years, explanatory style research has become increasingly popular, and many ways to measure this individual difference variable are now available. The original Attributional Style
Questionnaire (Peterson, Semmel, von Baeyer, Abramson, Metalsky, & Seligman,
1982) was expanded, to boost reliability (Peterson & Villanova, 1988), and then
simplified (Dykema, Bergbower, Doctora, & Peterson, 1996), to facilitate use with
general population samples. A Children's ASQ with a forced choice format was
developed by Nadine Kaslow and Richard Tanenbaum (Seligman, Peterson,
Kaslow, Tanenbaum, Alloy, & Abramson, 1984) and then refined (Thompson,
Kaslow, Weiss, & Nolen-Hoeksema, 1998). Forced-choice measures suitable for