When a Narcissistic Loses a Family Member Has

Loss is a fact of life for all of us—whether it is failing to reach a goal we set up out for ourselves, losing a football game, having a friend motility away, or experiencing the death of a loved one. Such losses can be a blow to our egos and create the emotional pain known as egotistic injury.

James Frosch, Grand.D.: "Patients frequently search endlessly for the ideal because they cannot accept the limitations of the real."

Credit: Joan Arehart-Treichel

Psychoanalyst James Frosch, Thousand.D., an assistant clinical professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, discussed the subject at a meeting of the American Psychoanalytic Association in New York Urban center in Jan in a presentation titled "From Grievance to Grief: Narcissism and the Disability to Mourn."

The reason that people experience egotistic injury in the throes of losses goes back to their earliest life experiences, Frosch said. This is the realization early in life that yous are separate from others and that those separate others may non fulfill your needs and wishes. After comes another agonizing discovery—that the people you need and care near will i day die and that you besides will eventually dice. In short, "Living presents narcissistic injury to all of us because we all have the unconscious wish to alive in a globe where people are not carve up from each other and where we never disappoint or leave ane another," Frosch emphasized. "Beingness itself is a narcissistic injury."

When people are narcissistically injured, they may react to it in various ways, Frosch said. They may appoint in magical fantasies in which they imagine that there is no separateness. They may feel helpless, shamed, or humiliated, and they may feel anger or arraign themselves for the loss.

In some cases, fourth dimension helps heal people'south egotistic injuries over a loss, Frosch continued. In others, it does non. People may become permanently aggrieved. In a dramatic example, Miss Havisham in Charles Dickens' novel Great Expectations stopped the clocks in her firm to the time when her fiancée jilted her. If people become permanently aggrieved, they may appoint in vengeance. He found some other literary instance to illustrate this signal in Edgar Allen Poe'south story "A Cask of Amontillado" whose narrator buried a man live because that man had offended him. These people forever harbor grievance rather than being able to mourn losses, he pointed out.

People vary in their power to cope with losses, Frosch said. Cynics might be viewed as individuals who have failed to achieve their dreams and who cannot deport the hurting of this failure.

To spare themselves the anguish, rage, or other negative emotions provoked by loss, people need to develop a chapters to tolerate loss and mourn, Frosch asserted. "In that location is much that we do not understand near what enables resilience in the face of loss and egotistic injury and how to facilitate this process in psychotherapy and psychoanalysis."

All the same, Frosch did offer one example of how psychotherapists can help patients cope with loss and narcissistic injury. Say a patient experienced an excruciating loss during childhood—the suicide of a father. The suicide flooded the patient with both rage and self-recrimination. Why had his male parent abased him? Why hadn't he been able to save his father? The suicide likewise gear up the phase for an adulthood characterized by dysthymia and joyless living. In a case such as this one, psychotherapy could slowly increase a patient'southward tolerance for such unbearable impact, Frosch suggested.

Also, in a subsequently interview with Psychiatric News, Frosch made several suggestions as to how psychotherapists can help patients cope with loss and narcissistic injury.

For example, "When working with patients who are aroused and who accept a sense of grievance, psychotherapists should ask themselves whether, beneath the anger, there is a warded-off sense of unbearable loss," he said.

And if patients are narcissistically injured because they accept disappointed themselves or because someone else has disappointed them, the therapist should aid such patients have that some wishes, however understandable and legitimate, volition not be fulfilled and will have to be relinquished, he advised. And relinquishing such wishes is really a grieving or mourning procedure, Frosch emphasized. "Patients oftentimes search endlessly for the ideal because they cannot have the limitations of the real. Or they are chronically aggrieved."

Take the example of a man who continuously complained about his wife'south defects and failures, Frosch said. "I would start by saying to him, 'It's so painful when your married woman doesn't respond to yous the style you wish she would.' I would explore the nature of his wish and how it feels when information technology does not come up true. Over time I would try to help him understand how painful it is to have that his wife might not exist able or willing to fulfill his wish, all the same that he needs to practice and then, and that the way to achieve this acceptance is by giving up, or mourning, the loss of his ideal."

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Source: https://psychnews.psychiatryonline.org/doi/full/10.1176/pn.46.5.psychnews_46_5_9_2

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