Narcissistic Wound: February 2009

Monday, February 2, 2009

On Why I Can't Date -- Part One

I hate dating, and for that reason, I have never done it. I do not understand dating at all. Yet were you and I to meet, this would probably not be your impression; long-time friends don’t really get it either.

It’s not that I don’t like hanging out with guys. I have always loved hanging out with guys; I love the whole guy talk schtick. It’s not that I don’t think sex is good; I think it is quite good. Moreover, although I don’t really see it this way because it sounds bad and inappropriate to me, I am told that I am a catholic flirt: I flirt with young and old men and women, babies, dogs, birds, everybody (except cats).

My point is that, to the world, I guess I seem like someone who would date, and maybe date a lot. No. No freaking way. The mere idea that I would agree to go to dinner or drinks with someone, with the naked subtext of “Do either of us want to sleep with the other?” running like a prurient news crawl underneath the veneer of conversation is so fantastically upsetting and alien to me that it actually makes me sick to my stomach. How could a person do that?

I know that this makes me nuts, everybody tells me I’m nuts. Yet, there it is. My feeling is: Why are we even watching this movie if we’re not getting married? (I would do very well in the Orthodox community, my Orthodox friends tell me. Then I show them my tattoos. Okay, maybe not so much, Susie.)

A brief look back at my psycho-sexual development explains things to some extent. But more on that later.

Stop picking at it, for Godssakes!

Those of us born between 1965 and 1977 (though some research firms put the end birth-date as far out as 1981) comprise Generation X, the age-group that’s so small that it’s a sociological sentence fragment. But, as the old quip goes: we may not be much, but we’re all we think about. According to market research firms and sociologists alike, Generation X takes everything personally, narcissistically.

It is a hard truism that a generation is shaped by its war. The Silent Generation (1929-1943) was forged by the Great War; Baby Boomers (1944-1964) were defined by Vietnam and the Civil Rights and Anti-War movements. Generation X’s war was the ultimate war-at-home: divorce. We didn’t get Purple Hearts or red badges of courage, nothing that could be culturally shared or healed. We got narcissistic injuries: private, secret, solitary.

Generation X, according to a 2004 study of generational differences, "went through its all-important, formative years as one of the least parented, least nurtured generations in U.S. history." Half of all Gen-X children's families split; forty-percent were latch-key kids. Outdoors, there was crack, AIDS, homelessness, racial conflict, Reaganomics. Indoors was the mall, in roving packs. Home? Alone, watching program-length commercials ("Transformers: More than meets the eye!"). “More than this,” crooned Bryan Ferry in Roxy Music’s eponymous 80s lullaby, “there is nothing.”

It’s an axiom from Psychology 101 that if you want to learn what is unhealed from your own childhood, have children. In psychological terms, this is known as a narcissistic injury. In her seminal text on the subject, The Drama of the Gifted Child, the psychologist Alice Miller describes adults who sustained such childhood wounds:

"They continue to live in their repressed childhood situation, ignoring the fact that it no longer exists. They are continuing to fear and avoid dangers that, although once real, have not been real for a long time. They are driven by unconscious memories and by repressed feelings and needs that determine nearly everything they do or fail to do." (p. 2)

Good times. What can you do to get rid of this thing? I'm on that navel-gazing, scab-picking quest. Join me.

Narcissistic Wound

Monday, February 2, 2009

On Why I Can't Date -- Part One

Stop picking at it, for Godssakes!

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