RSWinters wrote:
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Just in case any apologists are reading this post. NO, I don't thank an LGAT for showing me this. I hold them accountable for making a deep emotional wound in me go atomic in blowing up in my life as it produced very destructive damage across every area of my life. I mean ALL AREA'S of my life have been destroyed by applying this crap philosophy.
The reason why professional psychotherapy is done slowly, for just 50 minutes at a time, is to prevent the process from going too deeply, too quickly, and instead, paces the insight process precisely so the client's life will NOT be disrupted and will not 'go atomic.'
Here are some observations from the Pressman's book:
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In a narcissistic family, the responsiblity for the meeting of emotional needs becomes skewed--instead of resting with the parents, the responsibility shifts to the child. The child becomes inappropriately responsible for meeting parental needs and in so doing is deprived of opportunities for necessary experimentation and growth. (pp 12-13)
A very interesting feature noted by the Pressmans is that some narcissistic families do very well at nurturing the children when the youngsers are babies or very tiny children, then as the children grow up, become autonomous and require a more skillful degree of parenting, the adults become less and less capable of parenting the children and instead, expect the children to adapt to the needs of the parents.
This is remarkably similar to the kind of 'bait and switch' reported by many cult survivors. Often, early in one's cult involvement, the group actually supports growth and development, but over time, the person is pressured to feel shift more and more into a parental/codependent relationship and ends up emotionally abandoned by the group, yet sacrificing more and more of his or her integrity to keep the group going.
The Pressmans write:
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As the child's psychological needs become more of a factor in the life of the family, the narcissistic family truly develops. ((that is the inability of the adults to adequately parent the children is unmasked as the children grow older and in need of more skilled parenting than these adults are capable of--C)) The parent system is unable to adapt to meet the child's needs, and the child, in order to survive, must be the one to adapt. The inversion process starts: the responsibility for meeting needs (that is, parenting-C)gradually shifts from the parent to the child. Whereas in infancy the parents may have met the needs of the child, now the child is more and more attempting to meet the needs of the parent, for only in this way can the child gain attention, acceptance, and approval....the needs of children, especially the emotional needs, increase geometrically as their tractability decreases.' Pressman and Pressman The Narcissistic Family pp 28-29
Parents who were able to do well caring for a child in infancy and who are less capable of parenting that same child when she is older may seek to disguise their lack of parenting skills by constantly talking about all the great sacrifices they made taking care of their child as a baby.
The child who is no longer getting adequate care from this same parent is shamed into disowning her own sense that something is going wrong.
Likewise cult leaders love to dwell on how well they once took care of their devotees, using their rhetoric to distract from how, in the present moment they are either neglecting their group--or becoming downright abusive.
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The high functioning survivor of a narcissistic family may appear to have let the walls down, be emotionally available in an appropriate way. And for all intents and purposes, he may be--most of the time. When he is feeling threatened, however, he (abruptly) detaches, becoming aloof, cool and distant. Significant others can suddenly feel cut off. They become frightened, fearful of losing thier loved one or parent; they may feel guilty and responsible. page 128
Intimacy and connectedness get abruptly turned on and off, like a water faucet, in ways that bewilder others.
This resembles how persons in many LGATs are trained to 'drop the connection' as soon as an encounter takes a direction that challanges the LGAT--the narcissistic family from which the person has sought healing.
Persons who have already, without knowing it, been "pre-formatted' by growing up in the kind of narcissistic families described by the Pressmans may have these reaction patterns further entrenched if, later in life, they get recruited into an LGAT that re-enacts the covert narcissistic dynamics of thier famlies of origin.