Grandiositet och självförakt

”Det som är mest karaktäristiska för den narcissistiska personligheten är den paradoxala klyvningen mellan två konträra självbilder; en grandios och en skamfylld, hatisk” (Johan Cullgerg i Skaparkriser).  Den grandiosa delen söker hela tiden bekräftelse för att kunna hålla stånd mot den negativa självbilden. Detta gör att människor eller företeelsen i omgivningen idealiseras, men bara så länge detta tjänar personens eget syfte. På samma sätt nervärderar man och den människan som tidigare idealiseras får uppleva nedvärderingen i samma stund som idealiseringen tar slut. Samma gäller idéer och engagemang som man tidigare har idealiserat men som av någon anledning har hamnat i ”onåd” och inte längre ger något narcissistiskt tillskott till självbilden.

Personer som lider av denna problematik är ofta på olika sätt begåvade och talanger och de kan vara charmiga och ofta ser de även bra ut. Eftersom de är målmedvetna går karriären ofta spikrakt uppåt och man ser dessa personer ofta som framgångsrika; man ser ju bara de ytliga framgångar men inte de inre misslyckanden som dumpas på omgivningen. Narcissisten har aldrig fel utan det är hans eller hennes medarbetare eller annan närstående som får stå för felet. Narcissistens medarbetare, make eller maka och vänner ses som förlängning av den egna personligheten och dess behov. Och när de inte längre duger  till det har de inget värde och narcissisten vill inte längre veta av dem mer än möjligen som syndabockar. Narcissistens samvete är flexibel och detta möjliggör att han eller hon kan utan problem ha ”hemligheter” som till exempel dubbelbokföring samtidigt som den moralen personen visar utåt verkar ligga på hög nivå. Bakom allt detta döljer sig en inre tomhet som måste fyllas med andras beundran. Narcissisten vill inte på några villkor komma i kontakt med sin negativa självbild och därför söker personen hela tiden nya personer och engagemang som fyller tomrummet och ger den grandiosa självbilden näring. Ibland kan självbilden vara starkt hotad av något som leder till raseri som annars ligger djupt inne i denna människa. Då kan narcissisten kränka någon även om han eller hon annars har en god impulskontroll.

Detta är narcissistens liv: att visa sin grandiosa sida utåt och gömma självföraktet och skammen in i det innersta hörnet i psyket och bara ibland kan man se en liten glimt av denna sida. Men om man inte känner människan bra tänker man oftast: Vilken framgångsrik och charmig människa!

The Fundamental Attribution Error

This means that we explain others’ behavior as due to internal causes, and this means that we explain our own behavior as due to external causes.

We do that every day without thinking about it, without noticing it. This has nothing to do with your intelligence, or your personality. Actually, intelligent people seem to go into this trap more often than others.

You go into this trap, even if you know it’s a trap: If a person behaves friendly, your conclusion is that this is a kind person. And if the person behaves the way you feel is problematic, your conclusion is that this is a difficult person. But you don´t think that you yourself can consciously behave as a difficult person or you can behave friendly no matter how you actually feel. Or can´t you?
Now you should be aware of that you interpret others’ behavior like your mind tells you it should be; a good man and a bad man.

Imagine a social event and you have to be there. You feel nervous, but everyone else looks like they are very relaxed. Your conclusion is that everyone else is relaxed; it’s just you who are nervous. But your nervousity is probably not visible, no one can see it, and all the other are thinking the same about you: what a relaxed man.

If someone runs into the ditch with his car you immediately think that the person must be a bad driver.
But if you run into the ditch, you have an explanation; it is because it was a bad road, ice, or there were other external circumstances that caused the accident. Maybe not every time but quite often. This is because we see things from different perspectives depending on who is acting:
when you are doing something yourself, you often see the surroundings, ice on the road etc., but when another person does something stupid, strange, whatever, you see that the person is causing what happens.

If we would see ourselves in a different way, we should understand that even we ourselves affect the things happening more than our experience tells us. But we all have a certain image, true or not, about ourselves and the image is controlling our own experiences. If there are changes in the environment, we don´t see them.

We now feel that a person who behaves friendly is friendly and for example, the vendors can use it, and they DO use this information; they know that a personwho sounds happy is selling more than a person just using few words. This is something we all know and they know it too.

And you see the errors if you are looking for errors … but if you do not want to see an error somewhere (in yourself) you will not see it.
So; my bad luck depends on the circumstances but my neighbor is a son of a bitch who made himself unhappy buy buying the expensive house, having a bad job, behaving like an idiot… etc.

Are Aliens visiting you during the night

by Ulla Sarj”The hypnagogic and hypnapompic hallucinations are both a product of the unconscious and our unconscious is playing very real and agonizing scenes for us; we can see aliens, dead people, monsters, religious beings like the devil, angels, demons, or Jesus and other strange things when you are in this alternate state of consciousnessHypnagogic and hypnopompic hallucinations can give rise to extremely horrible experiences. The experience can occur for you and for me and it has nothing to do with the ”victim´s” normal state of mind. It is only after the experience, you may have benefits if you are a skeptical thinker. The actual experience may at worst be described as terrible horror movie.

Hypnapompic hallucinations with attached sleep paralysis are often those that make people most scared, because the person usually wakes up to the physical reality rather brutally after having this kind of experience. At the very awakening just before the paralysis release, you may experience extreme horror at the same time as your heart rate is speeding because of pure and primitive fear.

Should this occur in the middle of the night and you are a very imaginative person, you may very well experience such an event as quite real, while a skeptical-minded person, at best, realize that it was the subconscious that played a prank. But it may take several minutes after waking before logic and common sense gives an explanation for the tumultuous event. It is thus not surprising that there are people who swear that their experiences are real, it’s actually the way they have understood it all. To convince these people that it was only their brain that played them a trick can be an impossible task.

Religious manifestations, ”alien abductions” and perceived ghosts are common manifestations of this type of hallucination. If the ”victims” say they have been paralyzed and completely unable to move, while being able to describe the event in detail, it should be pretty easy to uncover the cause. The experience can often be very unpleasant but also show up on normal everyday events that in retrospect, of natural reason are not experienced as being important but quite natural. You can e.g. ”hear” bells or someone calling your name, you can see a family member coming into the bedroom, etc. It is very common that you are experiencing that you are falling down and then when you ”hit the ground” it generates a great pressure throughout the body that makes waking up suddenly and quite brutal. Have you ever experienced this scenario, it has also partly seen and known as the hypnapompic hallucinations.

This condition is quite much same as Night Terror (Pavor Nocturnus), a panic attack that children can have during the night, the sleeping child suddenly sits up and screams, or even start to go around (Sleepwalking). It may take several minutes before the child calms down and it seems that the child doesn´t even recognize his parents, or the child can even be afraid of his own parents. This panic attack usually lasts a few minutes and the child probably doesn´t remember this in the morning.

All of these conditions, and speaking when sleeping, and other similar experiences seem to have genetic base, which means that if a parent is a ”Sleepwalkers”, a child may experience the ”Night Terror”.

I have myself experienced all these states and even Lucid Dreaming but I am a skeptical nature and I am sure that the things I have seen are coming from my own brain. I have even been a sleepwalker and sleeptalker and one of my children has had Night Terror attacks, only when he was sick and had fewer.
My own hallucinations use to come when I am very tired and paralysis is not a very comfortable experience but you can actually learn techniques how to break it and once you know what all is about there is no reason to be afraid. And Lucid Dreaming can be real fun.

It is all about to be aware that our brain can create all these things.

Borderline - a lost soul in the wind

Borderline - a lost soul in the wind

by Ulla Sarja

Psychiatry Center in Karolinska Sjukhuset, which is running the Borderline Unit in Stockholm, writes on their website:

”Patients with borderline are often impulsive, intense and emotionally unstable. They often have a negative mental image of themselves, and their images of people in their immediate surroundings tend to alternate between black and white. Their mood is often rapidly changing, emotions tend to be intense and they are triggered very easily and the environment can have difficult to understand the borderline patient’s response patterns. Self-mutilation, suicide attempts, and comorbidity by, for example depression, eating disorders, addictions and anxiety disorders is common.

Patients with borderline personality disorder are usually impulsive and emotionally unstable people. Impulsivity and instability pervades most of the borderline patient’s inner and outer worlds. Self-image is often unstable, and people with Borderline Personality Disorder often have beliefs, meaning, deep-seated opinions about themselves, which in most cases are about that they are ”worthless” or ”impossible to love.”

Their relationships tend to be stormy, intense and chaotic, and their perceptions about others commute often between idealization and devaluation. This often gives rise to problems when they are in health care, perhaps particularly in psychiatric care. If the attending staff is not really aware of the patient’s difficulties with the integration of ”good” and ”bad” sides in the patients thoughts, the care may be troubled and difficult to handle without conflicts. Although the patient is rapidly changing moods, it can cause a lot of difficulties.

People with borderline are extremely emotionally vulnerable. Some little thing can get them completely out of balance, and often it is very difficult to understand what it is having triggered the strong emotional reaction. The emotional vulnerability, combined with impulsivity often leads to self-mutilation or even suicide attempts. People with borderline often stay in relationships because of their extremely strong fear of separation, separation anxiety. Separations are painful for most people but a person with borderline often perceive separation as a bottomless pit of despair, a feeling of total abandonment and a bottomless emptiness that seems impossible to live with, quite often involving self-mutilation and suicide attempts because of the fear to be left alone.

The mortality rate by suicide is very high. Approximately 90 percent of patients with borderline who have been treated at a psychiatric clinic have one or more serious suicide attempts. 10 percent of people with borderline die by suicide.

Patients with borderline have a very high comorbidity compared with other psychiatric disorders. The most common triggers include depression, anxiety disorders, eating disorders and addiction, in the end, leading to death. Comorbidity and suicide attempts are the most common reasons that people with borderline want to have psychiatric care. They understand that otherwise, the whole thing is going to end…
Patients with borderline often describe that they have difficulty in managing to get others to understand how they feel. It may appear if they are wearing a ”mask”, which makes it difficult to understand them. For example, a deeply depressed, suicidal borderline person can on the surface seem to be almost neutral, so the therapist doesn´t even get the idea to ask about suicidal thoughts. Self-injury behaviors and suicide attempts can sometimes be triggered by the patient’s difficulties in communicating their inner pain to the world. Here we find the young girls who are cutting themselves.

”I thought I had everything I could ever wish for me,” complained Sara, ”but now I feel just emptiness. There is no longer anything I think is important.” She described the waves of boredom followed by tension, which escalated to such intensity that she just could banish it by causing the pain. So she began beating on his ankles with a mallet, just enough for it to hurt. This time, she had underestimated the power of the beat.

This is about Sara in the book Vilse i speglingar by Richard A. Moskovitz (I don´t remember the English title just now).

Dissociation and splitting are the defense mechanisms that are used by a person with borderline personality disorder, BPD. The painful memories are locked up in a corner and there they can stay. If they come out, the anxiety is coming with the memories. Some of borderline patients cut themselves, some use alcohol and drugs.

In extreme cases, the dissociation is so severe that it develops a multiple personality and the child (and later an adult) is living in the same body, as two, and possibly some more personalities, and they live there without knowing about each other’s existence.

The person with BPD doesn´t knows who she/he is. Instead, he or she feels a chronic sense of emptiness and the mood is swinging very much and all the time. Paranoia may occur as well as impulsive and suicidal behavior. It is likely, but not sure, that the person has sometimes been a victim of abuse, but this is too painful to remember. Instead, the person keeps it away by having a self-destructive behavior.

There are many varieties of this disorder, but these persons use to need medication before beginning therapy. Otherwise the therapy doesn´t work.
Sara in the book could accept her experiences and she became a functioning individual. This does not apply to everyone but not everyone with BPD is in the condition she was.

Goodbye Norma Jean

The photo from:http://www.mobieg.co.za/articles/borderline-personality-disorder/

The Whole is Always Greater than the Sum of It´s Parts

A very important reason for difficulties in resolving conflicts is the fact that the parts
involved have quite different imaginations of what the whole situation is about. They have
different stories about what happened, what was the main point in the thing happened, what is
important and what should happen next.
Because os my own story seems so obvious and so sensible, it is easy to overlook that the other persons story also may be
reasonable, though in a completely different way.
I have to always remember that what I see and hear is NOT the absolute and objective truth!!!!!There are as many truths than there are participants. That is why it is unnecessary to try to understand what happened when the parts involved are not there in person.

Difficult talks are difficult when/if each of the involved parts insist that their own description of what the conflict is about, is the only authentic way to see the things. Seeing the things from your own viewpoint is often the only reason for you to think that the other is not more flexible, that they are malicious, reckless, stupid or something else negative.
Then, how can we talk to each other about what happened and what should happen without going to personal attacks, filled with debt, negative testimonials, sarcasm and other meaningless things?
Experience shows that the discussions can be more difficult than needed because of the people involved are going into the the discussion with false assumptions
There are three kinds of false assumptions that are extra ordinary:
1. My picture of the situation is the true picture.
2. I know what the assumtions behind your actions were.
3. Someone is to blame for what happened, and it is not me.

These assumptions have harmful effects on the discussion because they are not on a conscious level.
We simply assume that it is so and therefore do not want to find out if it is true or not. An important part of the art of bringing constructive talks in conflicts is to transform these three assumptions.
If you instead assume the following basic settings, chances are greater that the problems you have can be handled constructively:

1. I do not know how the other's thoughts of the whole situation are, therefore we must begin with finding out the main features of everyone's story.

2. I know what effect the other's behavior had on me, but not the intentions of the other guided by in different situations.

3. To determine who is to blame for the problems is an ineffective way to avoid similar problems in future. It is more interesting to
find out how all contributed to the point where an unfortunate situation occurred, so that
we can find ways to prevent it happening again.

Never do the mistake you are sure about what another person thinks!!!!!

Never do the mistake to interprete the other persons intentions before you have asked him/her!!!!

There do not need to be someone to blaim; no one can discuss or argue alone!!!!

And never use the power of i.e. your higher position in the profession to claim your opinion is the right opinion!!!!



The truth gets its meaning through the story it is the part of.

Draft conflicts can often be solved by simply defining what
the facts are. The conflicts that seem difficult to solve do not arises because the of involved parts can not agree on facts, but because they have different experiences of the
facts important in the situation and the facts insignificant in the context. So why do not find out what the other part means?????

A very important prerequisite for the art of the constructive talks is you being aware that different people's perception is filled with completely different things.
Everyone has their own story about what happened and is happening. It is the story as a whole, that gives the individual facts a meaning: The whole is always greater than the sum of its parts.

Relationship of Eating Disorders to OCD | OCD Chicago

Relationship of Eating Disorders to OCD | OCD Chicago

The Whole is Always Greater than a Sum of It´s Parts

A very important reason for difficulties in resolving conflicts is the fact that the parts
involved have quite different imaginations of what the whole situation is about. They have
different stories about what happened, what was the main point in the thing happened, what is
important and what should happen next.
Because os my own story seems so obvious and so sensible, it is easy to overlook that the other persons story also may be
reasonable, though in a completely different way.
I have to always remember that what I see and hear is NOT the absolute and objective truth!!!!!There are as many truths than there are participants. That is why it is unnecessary to try to understand what happened when the parts involved are not there in person.

Difficult talks are difficult when/if each of the involved parts insist that their own description of what the conflict is about, is the only authentic way to see the things. Seeing the things from your own viewpoint is often the only reason for you to think that the other is not more flexible, that they are malicious, reckless, stupid or something else negative.
Then, how can we talk to each other about what happened and what should happen without going to personal attacks, filled with debt, negative testimonials, sarcasm and other meaningless things?
Experience shows that the discussions can be more difficult than needed because of the people involved are going into the the discussion with false assumptions
There are three kinds of false assumptions that are extra ordinary:
1. My picture of the situation is the true picture.
2. I know what the assumtions behind your actions were.
3. Someone is to blame for what happened, and it is not me.

These assumptions have harmful effects on the discussion because they are not on a conscious level.
We simply assume that it is so and therefore do not want to find out if it is true or not. An important part of the art of bringing constructive talks in conflicts is to transform these three assumptions.
If you instead assume the following basic settings, chances are greater that the problems you have can be handled constructively:

1. I do not know how the other's thoughts of the whole situation are, therefore we must begin with finding out the main features of everyone's story.

2. I know what effect the other's behavior had on me, but not the intentions of the other guided by in different situations.

3. To determine who is to blame for the problems is an ineffective way to avoid similar problems in future. It is more interesting to
find out how all contributed to the point where an unfortunate situation occurred, so that
we can find ways to prevent it happening again.

Never do the mistake you are sure about what another person thinks!!!!!

Never do the mistake to interprete the other persons intentions before you have asked him/her!!!!

There do not need to be someone to blaim; no one can discuss or argue alone!!!!

And never use the power of i.e. your higher position in the profession to claim your opinion is the right opinion!!!!



The truth gets its meaning through the story it is the part of.

Draft conflicts can often be solved by simply defining what
the facts are. The conflicts that seem difficult to solve do not arises because the of involved parts can not agree on facts, but because they have different experiences of the
facts important in the situation and the facts insignificant in the context. So why do not find out what the other part means?????

A very important prerequisite for the art of the constructive talks is you being aware that different people's perception is filled with completely different things.
Everyone has their own story about what happened and is happening. It is the story as a whole, that gives the individual facts a meaning: The whole is always greater than the sum of its parts.