July 15, 2003

•                        The NPD kid rides again!

  
  

    First, a little background. Okay, a lot of background.  But I have a lot of time here now and if you are in too big a hurry to take some time now, you can bite me.  Or come back later.  Whatever turns your crank.

  
  

  I’m an alcoholic, got drunk the first time almost half a century ago. I went into rehab for the first of several times in 1976.  Right now, I have a 30-day AA chip in my pocket (or would, if I had pants on–it’s HOT up here right now), which tells you how well I succeeded in getting and staying sober.  I am also something of a garbagehead–polyaddict is, I think, the politically correct term.   I am the Will Rogers of CNS depressants–I never met a down I didn’t like, with the exceptioin of thorazine.  I’ve done speed, opiates, DMT, four-way strawberry fields, Thai sticks, synthetics, Xanax and other scrip shit, and so on.  I never used needles, but that was due more to cowardice than prudence.  But I digress.

  
  

  In the program, there is a lot of talk about “character defects.”  That term from the 30s sets my teeth on edge, for a lot of reasons.  One, in my belief system (BS for short) in its present fairly primitive stage of development, everything that god created is perfect.  That does not mean no one needs to grow, to change.  An acorn is perfect, but it is a long damn way from being an oak tree.  Thus, I am perfect as I am now, but that does not mean I don’t have a lot of growing to do until I become the person I want to be.  Two, a lot of what the old-time fundy AA folks call “character defects” are really personality disorders.

  
  

  This is where the NPD thing comes in.  Not long ago, I took a personality disorders quiz (I forget the url, to find it quick, just google “personality disorder quiz,” and it will be the first thing at the top of the list.)  I found out that I have narcissistic personality disorder (NPD for short), with a generous side order of histrionic personality disorder for good measure. 

  
  

  Unlike total nut cases with schizophrenia or paranoia, we do not suffer.  We are not tormented by voices in our head telling us to kill our cat, or live in fear that the mole people from planet Zeta-Jones are beaming weird rays into our heads.  Nope, nothing that simple.  Mostly, having NPD means that I tend to be a complete pain in the ass to be around, that I am shallow in my relationships, that I take offense easily and often wish to kill those who offend me, that I tend to over-dramatize every aspect of my life, that I demand to be in the spotlight all the time, and woe betide anyone who wishes to share the limelight.  Now that I have started to work on my own NPD, I see it more and more often in others.  And boy, are we fucking pains in the ass!

  
  

  Conventional wise guys in the head-shrinking field say that we are lousy clients, that we tend to bail out of therapy, and that we are pretty much incurable when the NPD came on as a result of early childhood neglect.  With the help of god and SuSu (not necessarily in that order) I intend to prove those white-coated nitwits wrong.

  
  

  One of the keystones of AA is that we as alkies cannot deal with our disease (or condition, or bad habit, or whatever you want to call it–I’m on a roll here and have no wish to get hung up on semantics or labelling, except as when totally needful for effective communication) on our own. Many of us rely heavily on god–atheists, agnostics, whatever, may use the group itself as their higher power, or use their neighbor’s cat, or the fucking coffee machine for that matter.  Whatever works, works.  As someone said, effectiveness is the measure of truth.  Or as Sun Bear put it, “If your philosophy doesn’t grow corn, I don’t want to hear it.”

  
  

  Anyway, part of my regimen for staying clean and sober includes asking god for help each morning and thanking him for all the day’s blessings, including sobriety, at night.  It works now–heck, it worked pretty well for seven years once, although I continued to use drugs besides alcohol during that time.  Anyway, lately, I have been asking god to help me deal with this NPD thing, even the lack of empathy part. 

  
  

  When I first learned about empathy, I thought it was for the birds.  Who in their right mind wants to  feel another person’s pain?  Feeling my own is quite enough, thank you very much. But I am told, and accept as true, that NPD folks are not exactly totally human, and since I wish to be human–or at least, as human-like as I can get–I am working on it.

  
  

  So now I ask god to help me feel others’ pain.  What a concept!  Asking god for something bad. But if that is part of the price I have to pay for my homo sapiens membership card, so be it.

  
  

  And something happened the other day that shows me that this all might just  be working, at least a little bit.  There was a tear-jerking story on the front page of the Anchorage paper, complete with full-face close up of one of the surviving victims.  It seems that six buddies–none of them rich, pretty much salt of the earth types (one was a paramedic, another a firefighter)– were living their dream of touring Alaska by motorcycle.  So here they are, buzzing along the Parks Highway near Trapper Creek, maybe twenty or so miles from where we live.  Some old fuck in a rented Kia falls asleep at the wheel, crosses the center lane and plows into the group, killing two of them.

  
  

  Normally I would have thought, fine.  More fucking tourists offing each other, at least they didn’t  hurt any of the locals.  But this time, it bothered me.  A lot.  I kept thinking abut these guys, living their dream one moment, enjoying for a time the awesome beauty that we local yokels enjoy year-round and all of a sudden, BOOM.  Their dream is shattered, two of their friends are dead, and they have to keep on keeping on, picking up the pieces of their lives.  I’m getting teary just thinking about it, writing this.

  
  

  Later on, I got to thininking about the old fuck who hit them.  (The paper said he was a 74-year old, traveling with his 64-year old wife or sister–same last name–who could not be reached for comment.) Evidently the guy was not a drunk, probably was on a raft of drugs–most old geezers are, anyway.  Maybe he had thought about taking a break, maybe even the woman told him to and refused out of stubborn and stupid male pride (THAT I can relate to big-time), and here he is, responsible for the deaths of two young men.  That poor sap, whatever legal penalty he pays, will have to live with that for the rest of his life.  God knows I have a lot of rotten shit I have to live with–a few ADWs, various and sundry other felonies and just plain non-felonious rotten shit–but a least I never killed anyone.

  
  

  So anyway, now I am not only relating with and feeling for the victims of this sad event, but I am relating with and feeling for the perpetrator.  Is this empathy?  Don’t ask me, I’m the last one to know about that.

  
  

  But I am sure as shooting feeling SOMETHING besides the usual cold “fuck you, tough shit, glad it didn’t happen to me” business that used to be my response whenever I heard about something bad happening  to other folks, especially when they were white, and especially when they were rich.

  
  

  I am changing for sure.  I assume it is an improvement.  Luckily for me, I have SuSu here to provide reality checks of that nature.

  
  

  I will be keeping you posted on further developments.

  • 6:37 pm
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