I’ve been here before. And this is what I learned. No, it wasn’t a pandemic last time I was here. Instead, it was my experience escaping the toxic relationship in question, the subject matter of this blog. But many of the relevant details are similar enough. Perhaps, the Narc lessons have some usefulness. Perhaps, drawing from the Narc past, we might glean tips of navigation through current circumstances.
First of all, there's the isolation thing. Many of us the world over are currently being encouraged to isolate, to physically distance. For the past few months, we’ve been encouraged or ordered to stay home, to shelter in place, to limit our human interactions. Thus the isolation. Feeling cut off. In the dark. Alone. As though we’ve awoken on some alien planet in 2020.
Certainly, the reasons for why we are currently isolating are complex. We are aiming to do something for the greater good on many levels by slowing the speed of new cases enough to keep our healthcare systems within capacity in terms of the number of cases. But to stop our thinking at that point is to ignore the nuances of the situation. Isolation is not an especially neutral enterprise. The tactic of isolation often favors those in power--the rich, those in control, those at the top. Isolation can be a powerful means to obtain the upper hand in many situations. It is often one of the first tactics in the coercion game. Physical isolation. Case in point, Jeffrey Epstein and his toxic, isolated island of abuse.
I suspect a question worth asking in this pandemic is who benefits from our collective isolation? Who asymmetrically gains more power from all the physical distancing going on? And who loses power in all the physical distancing?
But physical isolation is not the only kind of isolation. My experience suggests that to be isolated in the mind can be utterly horrific. When you reach the conclusion--even if the wrong one--that you are entirely alone in the world--that there is no one to reach out to--that there is no one who will listen, the pain cuts deep. It can quickly drive you with an almost religious fervor toward wanting to escape the pain so intensely, that taking yourself out of the equation starts to look like a good option.
I recall this level of despair when my ex managed to cut me off from my own family. About the same time, I experienced being cut off from various friends. Previous social gatherings that had been regular events suddenly became off-limits. I was shut out, uninvited from places that had once welcomed me. Oh so stupidly, I believed him when he told me that people didn’t want me around, that I would make the event uncomfortable, that people would prefer my absence to my presence. These lies fed the downward spiral of my already obliterated self esteem. These lies also added to the sense of feeling trapped in warped funhouse, overwhelmed. I couldn’t see his lies as tactics to further isolate and thus control me.
This leads me to a second set of questions worth asking in this pandemic. Whom has control of which reality gets supplied? Which powers dominate the message? By what venue does said supplied reality get to us? How does the reality further our sense of isolation?
In my past, if I would have recognized the point of isolation--that it is often to control the supplied particular reality, perhaps I would have been suspicious of he whom wanted me to ingest a decidedly gloomy perspective of my experiences.
Isolation can also trigger you itself, especially when coupled with gaslighting--getting you into a flashback, into a state of panic, into an easily manipulatable state, in despair, and not capable of making rational decisions. This is why it is such an effective tactic of control.
Which leads me to a third set of questions we ought ask in this pandemic. In what ways are we being gaslit? How are we being manipulated? What information can our own emotional responses tell us about what is happening in this pandemic? Are there other perspectives we are missing? If so what are they?
