To be civilized does not mean having studied at university, or having read many books, or possessing great wisdom: we all know that certain individuals with these characteristics were capable of committing acts of absolutely perfect barbarity. To be civilized means to be capable of fully recognizing the humanity of others, even though they have different faces and customs to ours; to know how to put oneself in their place and look at ourselves as if from outside. No one is definitively barbarian or civilized and each one of us is responsible for our actions. But we, who today receive this great honour, have the responsibility to take a step forward towards a little more civilization. Tzvetan Todorov
Oscar Alberto Martínez Ramírez and his daughter, Valeria.
Photo of Oscar Ramirez and his daughter, Valeria found on twitter, attributed to Maria Estela Avalos. I do not own this image.
Header image is a photograph of a poster seen at the 2019 Women’s March
In this post I use ‘we’ instead of ‘I’ because my subjective experience is that of multiple separate people.
The children of pathological narcissists must blind themselves to behaviors that healthy people consider unspeakable.
Food deprivation, the killing of pets, theft, forced sex, gaslighting and other forms of psychological abuse and the threat of psychological annihilation.
The child of a narcissist must have no dreams of his own, and no vision of life without the clinging demands of a parent or parent surrogate who is essentially a two-year old without mercy.
My Mother despised my intelligence and did everything in her power to kill it.
A male who must contend with a female pathological narcissist is at a disadvantage in this culture because the assumption is that the male always has power.
This assumption doubles the power of a female narcissist.
My Mother used her advantage as a ‘helpless woman’ to destroy my Father, who ultimately lay down and died.
My Mother’s threat to me was if I wasn’t ‘careful’ I would end up like
my Father.
People Like Us
We’re still blind to most narcissists but we are now alert to certain clues.
A narcissist is usually charismatic, charming, flattering and warm.
My Mother was a waitress at a greasy spoon.
When she worked she was on stage.
Everyone loved her.
A narcissist looks vulnerable and reserves for herself the right to pass judgment on others. This is not the same as learning another person’s strengths and weaknesses.
The people who loved my Mother were dismissed as undeserving trash.
The suggestion that she might be one of them was the same as asking for a beating.
A narcissist traffics in envy and in her mind everyone wants what she has.
If the meaning of a word doesn’t suit her she changes the definition.
Vicious beatings are acts of love.
Letting guys rape me is getting me ‘straightened out’.
A narcissist never gets the attention she thinks she deserves.
“Dr. Martin Luther King was pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama, when he was twenty-five years old, in 1954. As a Christian minister, his main influence was Jesus Christ and the Christian gospels, which he would almost always quote in his religious meetings, speeches at church, and in public discourses. King’s faith was strongly based in Jesus’ commandment of loving your neighbor as yourself, loving God above all, and loving your enemies, praying for them and blessing them. His nonviolent thought was also based in the injunction to turn the other cheek in the Sermon on the Mount, and Jesus’ teaching of putting the sword back into its place (Matthew 26:52). In his famous Letter from Birmingham Jail, King urged action consistent with what he describes as Jesus’ “extremist” love, and also quoted numerous other Christian pacifist authors, which was very usual for him. In another sermon, he stated:
“Before I was a civil rights leader, I was a preacher of the Gospel. This was my first calling and it still remains my greatest commitment. You know, actually all that I do in civil rights I do because I consider it a part of my ministry. I have no other ambitions in life but to achieve excellence in the Christian ministry. I don’t plan to run for any political office. I don’t plan to do anything but remain a preacher. And what I’m doing in this struggle, along with many others, grows out of my feeling that the preacher must be concerned about the whole man.”