By the way, the inability to enjoy life has two names. One is decent and scientific, and the other is ridiculous. The first is anhedonia, that is, the absence of the ability to receive pleasure. We'll talk about the second later. In the chapter on the inner critic, I described in some detail the mechanism that inhibits the capacity for pleasure and joy. Since all of life is subject to the grandiose and idealized demands of success and adulthood, there is no room for relaxation or joy in life. The inability to enjoy even those things that are at the disposal of the narcissist.
He cannot rejoice in even the smallest success or achievement.
He cannot derive real satisfaction from all these attributes to which he so longs to possess.
Many joys pass him by which might have enriched his inner life. But no...
For all this he would need to be more alive. But it is his nerd-rational part that rebels against this, which is always yanking and nurturing. What else is she supposed to do? For one thing, she's so used to it, because a narcissist's main goal is to grow up and become normal. This means that you have to work on yourself all the time and rush far away, toward the unattainable ideal of developing "like all normal people. A step to the right, a step to the left is punished by punishment, because it does not lead to any goal and generally pampering.
One part of Little Narcissus really wanted to learn how to enjoy life. And the other part thought it was all stupid, ineffective, and useless. And so they lived. Never seeing each other and sometimes compulsively switching between them.
And secondly, about pampering. Where it is, there is infantilism and childishness. Where there is joy, lightness, pleasure, and happiness, there is the squeaky gauge of the loss of the defenses that the narcissist has been building up for so long.
False adulthood stands firmly guard over anything that threatens the loss of control. So it's nothing personal! The narcissist simply takes control of everything that makes up the natural but spontaneous parts of life. Pleasure will distract the narcissist from improving and moving upward. And any stopping is a waste of time that could have been spent more effectively. Any relaxation is a fretfulness and a slipping into the mass of ordinary people. And these are the narcissist's worst nightmares!
Exercise
At this point, we’ll go back to our very first exercise and the first list you put twenty of your accomplishments on. Do you remember? And then you observed exactly what ways you typically handled your inner capital.
I’m pretty sure you then discovered one of the ways listed, which is exactly what you do to stay empty:
- devaluing what you have accomplished and achieved;
- comparing yourself to others, staying in a position of inferiority;
- comparing yourself to the ideal results you demanded of yourself;
- You sincerely do not notice what you have done, but fixate on what you have not done;
- belittling your contributions to projects you did not participate in alone;
- counting something as an achievement, and five minutes later it already turns into nothing, and so on.
And all of this is perfectly legitimate. Because the criterion that is used to count what you have done as your achievement is fundamentally wrong. I offer you another.
In this exercise, you are to rate each of the accomplishments you have previously written, not in terms of any significance, but in terms of your personal enjoyment — on a scale from 0 to 10.
One day while doing this exercise one girl asked me: “Yulia, what should I evaluate? The process or the result? After all, sometimes the result itself does not bring pleasure, and in the process of achieving it was a lot of drive, excitement and pleasure.”
Well, first of all, I want to point out right away that if you have the same question, then most likely you do not have a serious deficit narcissism. Because such people don’t know how to feel pleasure from the process without being connected to the result (and a grandiose one at that). And secondly, answer yourself the question as you understand it and feel it inside. This, too, will give you a basis for observing your typical ways of evaluating or feeling pleasure.
And after you’ve done this, look inside yourself again: has anything changed in your attitude toward your accomplishments?
The key to the exercise
Narcissists are very surprised when they are asked to evaluate their accomplishments in terms of pleasure. That’s because for them it’s not a criterion at all. One of my clients, in particular, talked long and hard about why one can’t feel pleasure if one’s efforts haven’t yielded the expected results. And another attributed his greatest pleasure to the red diploma he earned so that his parents could be proud of him. For himself, it was neither gratifying nor satisfying. Rather the opposite, as it turned out on closer inspection, he was angry at his parents and at himself, and regretted the wasted time…
As you may have realized, the point is to experience the pleasure of the steps themselves. More accurately, it’s even about learning to see the reason for it. More often than not, we don’t notice how many feelings we experience on the way to the achievement itself: interest, curiosity, excitement, excitement. And the pleasure of setting a challenge, exploring new horizons, etc. Don’t be frightened if this seems fantastic to you so far. Just assume that this skill can be developed.
Fragments from the forthcoming book “Fragile People: A Secret Door to the World of Narcissists”