Powerful Series of Posts; Excellent Journaling Opportunity.

MMX2010 · September 3, 2014

I've decided to devote myself to learning Game, not specifically to pick up women, but to empirically decide whether it actually helps with women and life.

This series of posts sounds very much like what Stefan offers to an FDR-caller, right down to diagnosing the author's childhood and offering tailored-advice.

If you don't want to explore it all, I've extracted the following terms and definitions - (which appear in part two) - that form a powerful journaling / self-reflection opportunity.

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Before we get started, I’m going to bring you up to speed on some key psychological concepts from a variety of sources that will come into play in discussing your codependency: primary inferiority; secondary inferiority; faulty coping strategies; surrender; overcompensation; avoidance; final fictional goals; false, idealized self; narcissistic injury; repetition compulsion.

To start, let’s discuss Alfred Adler’s concepts of primary inferiority and secondary inferiority.

Primary inferiority is the type of inferiority feeling that defined your childhood. You can also refer to it as your core issues. Everyone as a child unavoidably has some feeling of inferiority, because all children are weak, helpless and dependent. However some children develop a more exaggerated feeling of inferiority growing up than others, sometimes due to perhaps neglectful, abusive or over-pampering parents, sometimes due to comparisons to siblings and other children, or sometimes due to other trauma like physical defects, harsh environments, mental limitations or socioeconomic limitations.

Most people learn deal with this primary inferiority feeling by using one or more of the following three faulty coping strategies as defined by Jeffrey Young, developer of Schema Therapy: surrender (freeze), overcompensation (fight), or avoidance (flight). For example, say my parents intentionally or accidentally, through neglect, bullying or pampering, made me feel growing up that my job is to self-sacrifice and be responsible for their emotions. I may surrender to this feeling and decide to accept these self-sacrificing values, and become a caretaker who seeks out dysfunctional people to fix, and I always emotionally and physically give without ever asking for much in return, hoping one day it will be my turn to receive. This is the codependent’s solution. Or I may overcompensate by rebelling against the idea that I should self-sacrifice, instead choosing to give as little as possible while taking as much as I can. This is the emotional vampire’s solution, particularly Cluster Bs. Or I may choose avoidance (flight) of all situations that involve giving or taking altogether. This is the solution of the paranoid and the recluse.

People often create adult goals when they get older that are based on their primary inferiority feelings and the particular faulty coping strategies they’ve chosen to follow. Adler called these goals that guide our adult quests our final fictional goals. People believe on some level that these final fictional goals will fix whatever primary inferiorities they developed as kids. The codependent wants to erase his feelings of worthlessness by finding someone to please, impress or fix in the way he could never please, impress or fix his parent. The narcissist wants to erase his feelings of worthlessness by always appearing perfect, being a superachiever, demanding things from others and making others serve his emotional needs. And the paranoid or recluse wants to avoid people and the feelings of worthlessness they bring about in him because as a child avoiding his parents wasn’t an option.

Other examples of final fictional goals can include a certain high-status career, sleeping with a certain amount of women, finding a rich man to fulfill one’s Cinderella fantasy, having a certain type of family, living in a certain type of house in a certain neighborhood, having a lot of political power, being a famous celebrity, living a high-profile jetset life, being a celebrated author, or being a spiritual leader. The options are endless.

Whoever you feel you have to become in order to fulfill your final fictional goals is your false, idealized self. This is the mythical person, the symbol of perfection, that you imagine you have to be in order to be found worthy and to overcome the childhood traumas created by your primary inferiorities and eradicate your self-loathing. Many psychologists like Karen Horney and D.W. Winnicott discuss false, idealized selves. Freud also touched on the idea, but called it the “ego ideal.” Dealing with the false self plays a big role in Buddhism as well.

Another important concept is narcissistic injury. This is a very complex concept but for the purpose of this article I’ve going to oversimplify it a lot and say that narcissistic injury is anything that bruises our ego and has the potential to expose our false, idealized self as a fraud either to ourselves or to others. Don’t be fooled by the name, you don’t have to be a full-blown clinical narcissist to suffer a narcissistic injury. We all have an ego or idealized, false self to some degree, and therefore are all capable of suffering narcissistic injury as a result, although the bigger your ego or idealized, false self is, the worse the damage you suffer when the narcissistic injury happens to you.

Secondary inferiority is the pain we feel whenever we suffer narcissistic injury from failing at these adult goals we created for ourselves and feel unable to live up to our false selves. Not only do we end up feeling the current failure, the second inferiority, but we end up having our childhood buttons pressed as well, and all the childhood pain from the narcissistic injuries associated our primary inferiority gets reactivated and comes rushing back into awareness as well. We end up reliving our primary inferiority feelings and childhood feelings of self-loathing that we forgot about. This is especially true the more the dynamics of your secondary inferiority mirror the specific dynamics of your primary inferiority.

For example, say your current girlfriend rejects and abandons you. This creates a secondary inferiority. You end up not only feeling that current pain, but suddenly you feel that primary inferiority from your past that lies at your very core and that you worked so hard to repress: the same crushing feeling of worthlessness that your parents used to create in you when they used to emotionally reject and abandon you by offering conditional acceptance.

Repetition compulsion is an idea introduced by psychoanalysis and expanded upon by many mental health professionals that can be summed up by the folk saying “what you don’t complete, you will repeat.” This means that the situations and dynamics we had growing up, whether functional or dysfunctional, are what are the most comfortable to us, and we will feel compelled throughout our lives to seek out and repeat similar situations and dynamics in our adult relationships, often even when we believe we’re setting out to find the exact opposite of our childhood experiences.

Repetition compulsions are especially pervasive when you’ve built up a lot of defense mechanisms over your life to avoid dealing with your core issues head-on. It can be one of the most pervasive and counterintuitive self-sabotaging strategies we have to deal with in our lives.

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http://therawness.com/reader-letters-1-part-1/

http://therawness.com/reader-letters-1-part-2/

http://therawness.com/reader-letters-1-part-3

http://therawness.com/reader-letters-1-part-4

http://therawness.com/reader-letters-1-part-5/