Narcissism is too specific

Re-humaning the distinctions so we can actually love life again

So is psychotic, suicidal, depressed, bipolar, and well, a whole bunch of other labels we bandy about. To be clear I was raised by a classic narcissist and am not arguing with the reality that this pattern expresses itself in the world but am bringing some jaws-of-life distinctions so we can function, grow and re-human together, rather than run away from everyone because they are a monster and we are a peach pie. When the reality is something closer to we are all monster peach pies.

The specificity of these labels distract from getting a crucial overview. Let’s climb some trees y’all. We’ve gotten a little lost in the woods and vantage is wanted.

I do things when my gut says yes. In human design I’m a sacral design and if I have a gut yes on something that means it’s going to yield all sorts of soul fruits. It doesn’t mean I’m gonna like it. Following an intuitive urge usually flies in the face of my preferences but grows my capacity to live my values. The decision to come up and spend Christmas with my family of origin was a sacral yes. Which led me to the nearly psychotic-feeling experience on Christmas day of having a cruel, bitterly critical woman, with a lifetime of disappointed rage at all of humanity, reduce me to the broken cliches in her head. I have lost the knack of pretending so I didn’t know how to deal. I mostly sobbed myself dehydrated. The woman is my beautiful, calm, happy mother, who had gotten her wires tripped and her circuit temporarily disconnected.

From my year of visual diary entries I’m doing this year

Patterns are like truth. Remember how hard a lie was to remember when you were a kid? Truth is easy to remember because it’s just what it is, so it’s easy to remember because it is something. But lies are the negative space around the true thing, avoiding it, so they’re literally not a thing and are difficult to remember because they correlate to no inner reality.

The pattern/codes, that correlate with Higher Good and the wisdom of soul, sit right, easily, they wear well. In a convo when someone bumps into one of those codes, you tend to go deeper into alignment, the circuity gets strengthened by running truth codes.

Running false/out of synch with the good of All codes is innately corruptive to the circuitry of Beingness. They don’t sit or wear well and are VERY easy to trigger because they’re not anchored to some inner truth and are arduously and exhaustingly maintained by the personality. They’re like the coffee table that’s alway sticking out and everyone keeps kicking their shins on.

We are highly programmable carbon-based life forms

prone to being imprinted and conditioned. Maybe cuz we’re so squishy? Or so watery? Water is so BEAUTIFULLY imprintable! It’ll carry love codes all day long. The patterns we run create self fulfilling loops that just prove themselves which make them very sticky and hard to come awake to.

So when you walk into someone’s coffee table, there is a general kicking of shins that can go either way. One, it’s LIFE-GIVING to see a shitty pattern that’s been looping in your life for so long, “hey, hey, wait, WHO PUT THIS STUPID COFFEE TABLE ON MY TOILET??” and this interaction just revealed it so you open your heart and take a look. Or, the more common (currently, but not for long! We are RISING) approach which is where you run into an unconscious pattern they are running. You hit it with something you say or do and the jolt of bashing into the pattern itself topples their janky, country hustle circuitry they’ve wired over and under all the hidden patterns they don’t know what to do with, in other words you break the circuit, the lights go dark. Survival lights come on. Imagine someone sneaks into your house at night and cuts the power for no reason. What do you do? Hunt. Protect. Stop the pain.

So when I see people painting monster portraits (myself included) and running witch hunts on people who express narcissistic (or other truly shit) tendencies I jump here and start pouring out heart distinctions so that we can experience challenge and conditioned patterns but grow from them and learn from each other and not create more war. NO MORE WAR. Every time we other or monster another we create more ground for more war. We are bringing a war of awareness to the patterns that cripple us and keep us from living the love that we are, not on each other.

For example, in a narcissist, I see someone who is living mostly with a broken circuit. With a lack of innate funding or energy, they turn others into batteries. I was a narcissistic little shit. As a single young mom, I got survivally and victimy and took from others and didn’t honor the light in others. Slowly, over time, I’ve loved open many of the patterns that were making my lights go so dark that I felt I had to use others. I see self obsession as a survival-induced pandemic. With a lack of meaning or purpose people are setting themselves on self obsessed fire. It’s ugly and it’s a pattern. Patterns want to run in their most efficient form. Which is soul-trued.

Let’s get to the rich and steamy broth of it all.

Because false patterns feel as much or more like you as do soul-aligned ones. You’re more familiar with them. So what do we do when someone’s flip gets switched and they become unrecognizable to that person in the kitchen you just intimately joking with a moment before (calls to mind that scene in every spicy love movie where someone screams, “I don’t even know who you are!?!!” They do, just not this new information which now includes how this person reacts with this level of circuit break.)

So the brothy part is that

the moment when the other person goes dark, and their pattern is laid bare and you’re just sitting there, jaw agape, legs ready to RUN FOR THE HILLS OF IRELAND OR SOMEWHERE VERY VERY FAR AWAY, that moment is for you. It’s your gift. They likely won’t be able to see it, but you can, and if you’re running into it, it correlates to some inner run you’re running and so you need to see it. You’re mystically right on time in the seeing of it, right now, right here. The coffee table wouldn’t be in your way if it wasn’t in your way. Calling the other person a narcissist or poopoo face is the equivalent of calling them a “coffee table on a toilet.” Othering it lets you dodge some really clutch moves your soul is excited for you to start making on the reg.

Move one: we live in a vibratory and reflective universe. What you experience on the outer correlates (somehow, someway) with the inner reality. Inner tangles call our attention. The patterns we keep running into (and refusing to get tangled up in the person or situation that highlighted said awareness!) are our inner campadres trying to call us into the fire of presence where we can love open a wonky pattern expression.

Move two: we are all lit by the same animating spark, not just those who believe the way we do or the ones who act nice. All us bitches. Lit. so when we monster or other our precious camerados we indulge in the dangerous illusion that we are not all one consciousness, struggling to come awake to our true nature together.. a broken circuit is a cry for awareness and compassion. (That doesn’t mean a lack of frank and heart-centered boundaries) which leaves to the next move…

Move 3: Poet and mystic Richard Rudd brings the distinction between an inner and outer compromise. Never do the first, often do the latter. An inner one feels fundamentally off and soulfully wrong, tho, if you’re running a lot of false patterns, you won’t really know where these lines really are for you so be gentle, as you become clear, they become clear. An outer compromise is a preference not a value and we do them all the time in our relationship dance, which is one of the reasons our devoted relationships expand us so much.

Because make no mistake sugar cubes, relationships are where Earth School is currently all the way in session. But most people are playing hooky because we’ve lost the whole glorious wild-circus sacred are that is devotion. We arrive at the temple drunk and half hearted and wonder why the door won’t open.

“In all people I see myself, none more and not one a barley-corn less,/

And the good or bad I say of myself I say of them./. I know I am solid and sound,/.

To me the converging objects of the universe perpetually flow,/. All are written to me, and I must get what the writing means.” Walt Whitman

And this is where my advice train putters to a stop in the middle of a vast desert. Because the track has run out. What’s up ahead?

I get off the train, a little trembling. I don’t know what move 4 is. The desert becomes the new stairs to the entrance of the wild circus temple that is love and relationships. Here are a few pieces I know that help me embrace the mystery of what we are cocreating together.

I know, in my soul bones, that our future doesn’t get better if we don’t co-learn how to operate the soul tech that is our own human hearts.

I know that devotion is the fire circle that holds us warm and still long enough to get thru that “you are a tiger” phase where some false pattern in us has been jostled, our circuits have just been cut and we don’t know how to freaking Be.

My current moves (ish.). I have an inner(ish). Gah. EVERYTHING, EVERY SINGLE THING IS JUST SO FERKING GROWY AND MUTABLE RIGHT NOW. Let’s just assume there’s an ish after every word.

My inner circle has people who consciously understand they are moving towards Essential, Good for All Expression and away from Matrix-programmed Hurt Everyone and earth unconscious sort of expression. Green soul growth is a shared value and a necessity for me to be able to truly relax. We have a shared willingness to be full soul camerados with and for each other and to say super sorry and how do we repair when we treat each other like coffee tables on toilets.

If someone is unconsciously running patterns that are inner compromises for me and are unwilling to come awake to and transmute them, then they get the appropriate amount of space and boundaries from me. I try to actively remember the coffee table thing when I’m in their presence so I can grow and learn from them more easily as those lessons are one of the things that keeps us in each others orbits and me learning and transmuting can release the pressure and allow the relationship to shift up or go away.

Tho my Christmas had complicated and hard parts I’m deeply glad I traveled up to New England because this is where devotion called me. The rewards were a thousand soul layers deep. For example, before I left I’d been struggling with a judgey and roving dissatisfaction in my marriage that came out in critical barbs. I didn’t know how to get at the pattern, it was so diffuse.

So to walk, smack dab into the heart of that pattern in my matriarchal line, to witness the stark destruction of that pattern on the men and kids around it was like a christmas miracle to unfold with presence.

Weeping with crutches is all the more weepier

Also, this is the first Christmas in conscious memory that I didn’t abandon myself in some way. I don’t know that I can celebrate that adequately - it’s such a giant win.

I cried when I felt sad, ate what felt right for me, gave presence when it felt genuine, rested when I was tired and set boundaries even when they were fought and gaslit enough to start a bonfire. What’s the saying? It ran in my family until it ran into me? Gaslighting is full of fuel. Let’s light this up in a new way.