"You're important to me"

Have you had the experience of someone telling you that you're important to them but somehow they never manage to find time to be with you? Or the only times they ever invite you to see them are events to which they have invited several people and they hardly get any time to see you during the dinner or whatever it is? I've gotten a lot of it and it's only in the last few years that I've stopped going along with it.

I think we, or at least I, tend to go along with such things for two reasons. The first is that nobody wants to be a loser and seeing people you've come to think of as family or friends drift away makes us feel like losers. Life moves on and it feels like it's moving on without us when people who once were a huge presence in our life no longer have time for us. The whiny, needy little child inside us clings to whatever tiny morsels of attachment and recognition are offered us. The second reason is that the professions these people make to care for us are sincere. The people who say these things to us really mean them when they say them. They fully believe that they intend to get together with us and reconnect when they say they do. 

As I often say,  when our friends tell us lies they aren't necessarily lying to us. They could be lying to themselves. Indeed, the person who lied this way most often to me was my mother. I doubt she'd have been able to admit to herself how little I meant to her—I'm certain she felt a strong emotion that she was convinced was love for me but the plain fact is that she never had time for me. The only times my mother ever arranged for the two of us to be alone together was when she wanted to influence me to do something or stop doing something. But, and this is the important part, she was utterly unaware of this. Her feelings told her that she cared a whole lot about me, about my siblings and about my father. Her actions, however, rarely lived up to those feelings.

Of course, I've also done this to other people. More often, however, I've been on the other side of the equation. Robert Glover has argued that we tend to seek out relationships like those we had in childhood or, worse, that we tend to transform what should be successful relationships into the unsatisfactory ones we are familiar with. Looking back, I can see that I did that.

But how do we get out of that trap? I don't want to sound more authoritative than I am here as I am still figuring a lot of this out. The first thing is to train ourselves to get to the point where we can be honest about how our relationships actually work without getting angry about it. Psychologists often say, "Name don't blame." I don't think that's quite right because I think it's necessary that we blame. I think one of the reasons that some of us shortchange ourselves is that we're afraid to blame. When people tell us that we're important to them but are never available to us except when they have some ulterior motive we need to be honest enough to blame them, see my above remarks about how a fear of being a loser leading us to accept treatment from others that we should not accept. The issue is not whom we we blame but how we express that blame. The key is to express that blame in a meaningful and useful emotion and not as impotent rage. Then, and only then, will we be able to act in a more positive manner.

The opposite of impotent rage in this case would be cold-heartedness. We might, for example, experiment with withdrawing ourselves in the hope that the other person will reach out to close the gap. I don't know what would be worse, that such a strategy would fail or that it would succeed. Either way, we'd be training ourselves to be monsters. 

On the other hand, there is no point in investing a lot in such a relationship. We should be polite and civil because that is how we should behave to everyone who is not actually attacking or threatening us. We can nod politely and warmly agree that it would be great to get together sometime. We should even suggest an opportunity to do so. It's important to make it clear what we want. If I want to get together with an old friend and talk, just the two of us, I should make an overture. If the overture is never taken up and no counter offers are made, we need to have the courage to accept that we are not actually important to this person and adjust our attitudes appropriately.

I think the real test of that is when that later, inadequate invitation comes in. I had to deal with this recently with a  friend of mine from university days. When we ran across one another, he would great me enthusiastically and we talk about how we ought to get together. I suggested something and he agreed but then stood me up. He apologized and promised to set up another opportunity. A month later I was included in a group email inviting me to a book launch party for a mutual acquaintance of ours. I didn't go. The temptation to go just one more time and maybe we could arrange an actual encounter was still there. It always will be. But I just let it go.

I think what motivates people to tell us that we're important to them when they actually care very little for us is narcissism. It's not the monstrous sort of narcissism we read people ranting about on the Internet. Google "narcissism" and you'll get a whole bunch of hits where someone will rave that their mother or former boyfriend or girlfriend was a narcissist and how they've lived miserable lives as a consequence. But the truth is that very few people suffer from Narcissistic Personality Disorder or anything vaguely like it. Most people who tell someone they are important to them and then neglect them are simply projecting. They feel a strong emotion towards you because they need to feel special and they want you to see them as important. You are important to them because you validate their feeling of being special. To borrow from Robert Glover again, what my mother gave came from a place of emptiness inside her and always had strings attached. That's unfortunate but it's ultimately sad and pitiable rather than monstrous. To pretend that it was monstrous would be to be a whiny little victim (see those Internet hits I mention above) rather than to accept that the only person who needs to do anything about this is me.

Is narcissism driven by a need to feel special?

I've been reading Craig Malkin's Rethinking Narcissism and very much enjoying it so far. I'm only at the beginning of the book but it seems to me like it will be a an antidote to a perhaps too extreme account of narcissism that I've embraced. I bring the book up now because Malkin unhesitatingly diagnoses Draper as a narcissist. 

Malkin resists those who see narcissism as a binary quality. That's a good way to think as very few classification systems are binary. In addition, he seems to think of narcissism terms of a single quality: the need to feel special. Therefore, he sees people who have too much need to feel special at the high end of the narcissism spectrum and people who are too self-effacing at the low end.

Then he applies this standard to Don Draper whom he sees as a 9 on a scale of 10.

Think of Don Draper of the T.V. series Mad Men, hopping from affair to affair, desperately seeking excitement and attention; he can't stop even after he sees the damage his lies and infidelity have inflicted on his family.

Is that right? If it is, why does Don twice marry women he doesn't love?

If we go back to the beginning we find a man subject to impostor syndrome. In the Season 1, Don is man who thinks he is nothing and lives in morbid fear that he is about to be found out. There is something self-abasing about his affairs. A half-joking proposal he makes to Midge Daniels in the pilot reveals this. He lists reasons why she would be the perfect wife and they are not crazy reasons. The problem is that Midge is unavailable—she doesn't want to be married. At the opposite end of the extreme is Betty—the woman he did marry—who is a bad match, seemingly everything he doesn't want in a woman except for one thing that I'll come back to.

To stick with Don, however, he hardly seeks attention. He fears it and flees it. When Roger takes Don and Betty out for dinner at Toot Shor's she is elated. Betty has no trouble feeling special. Don is not. He doesn't know what it means. He doesn't feel like Roger trusts him.

At the dinner, he resists every invitation to talk about himself.

I can easily grant that something has gone wrong with Don Draper. What I have a hard time granting is that the thing that has gone wrong is an addiction to feeling special.

I have met people in my life who have an unfailing ability to see themselves as special. No matter how crushing the circumstances, they see themselves as the star of the drama and everyone else as a supporting player. Malkin provides a very good example of this:

Think of Bernie Madoff, who swindled hundreds of millions of dollars from his clients and who, when caught, scoffed at the "incompetence" of the investigators for not asking the right questions. Even faced with life in prison, he still managed to feel superior.

We might add Donald Trump,  Barrack Obama or Winston Churchill to that last. Like 'em or hate 'em, there are people who achieve amazing things because they never lose their sense of superiority. You probably need to be like that to be a politician today and, this is Malkin's point, you need to feel like that to achieve things.

Most of us, however, can only feel that way occasionally and precariously. I'm like that. Likewise Don Draper—for example, when he writes the letter about quitting tobacco without consulting anyone. But neither I nor Don Draper can sustain that sense of specialness in the face of adversity. If anything, Don needs to be goaded into thinking of himself as a star at the beginning of Season 4. And it's telling that, also towards the end of Season 4, Bert Cooper says of Don, "We've created a monster." (Emphasis added.) Finally, when Don goes to Disneyland he abruptly snaps back to type and seeks meaning not in himself but in a woman who gives him a sense of approval that he mistakes for belonging.

Which brings me back to Betty. It makes much more sense to think of Don marrying Betty because she helped him feel like he was no longer an outsider and not because she made him feel special. That's consistent with the larger context of his life than narcissism as Malkin presents it.

I could go on at some length here about Don's complicated relationship with women beginning with his having been raised by a woman who didn't want him. We could go on about both his biological and adoptive mothers having been prostitutes, readily able to give sex for money, unable to give love for anything. I could but I won't because I don't think I need to. Don Draper is a guy who never felt special, a guy was always told that he wasn't. He seeks meaning in life not in being special but in being part of something larger that will play the part of the family he never had. Someone who unfailing pursued specialness would have had no trouble actually marrying someone like Midge in the first place. Only someone desperately seeking approval would marry a woman like Betty.

Some questions 

Is narcissism chiefly a matter of being addicted to feeling special? Well, it could be. But would a person driven by a need to feel special behave in the dark ways that we associate with narcissism? We need to remember that the word comes from a rather odd Latin legend that we know mostly through Ovid's retelling of the story.

And what of the Last Psychiatrist's alternative view that narcissism is characterized by, among other things, an ability to feel only shame, an inability to feel guilt? I think Malkin would be willing to include that in a list of symptoms of narcissism but would see it as an outcome of the more basic addiction to feeling special. 

Why do I think the Last Psychiatrist's view needs to be tempered? It's that way he handles victims of infidelity. He starts off making the legitimate point that to be cheating on will often produce a narcissistic injury. That is to say, it will so disrupt your sense of who you are that you will react in narcissistic ways even without being a narcissist. That seems right to me. I was deeply in love with a woman who cheated on me. It was a narcissistic injury and my reaction is a deeply troubling thing for me even three decades later. But the Last Psychiatrist writes about these things in ways that completely absolve the woman of any guilt. And that, in a guy who insists that the ability to feel guilt rather than just shame is important, strikes me as odd.