“What is it about me that so offends you?”, I asked.
In a way I understand, but it feels like something that is in its totality, something given me in my character and personality that, like my body, is felt to be unacceptable, and that I cannot change. I feel trapped in myself.
No matter what I do it will not change what evokes her feelings of repulsion, attack, or invalidation of simply my presence.
So what are my choices?
I think this calls for denial, so as to ignore it—this is not a choice most have while living in a closed circle. (or is it?) I am always going to feel a kind of deficit with my being locked up in something that I will never be free from. I think this is something built into the ego in order to keep the self in check. It is like an organic regulator for pathological, runaway narcissism.
The need for humility is in contrast with the ego’s function of focusing on the self. This is what drives the individual ego/self to provide for itself.
Its presence is a “given” in order to provide the aggression of living. Its balance is this feeling of being trapped in inadequacy.
I think this is a universal, built-in contradiction—an organic polarity in order to give vitality to an organism. Its manifestations are epic from those who seek isolation—withdrawal from all and everything. Many, perhaps, with a sense of complete humility in an embrace of inadequacy.
The other extreme is the complete disregard of any inadequacy. We call this degree of self-centered identity narcissism.
I sense the narcissist is subconsciously repelled by loud feelings of their inadequacies, so much so that they have to deny any limitations in themselves, in a neurosis of self tyranny—overall feelings of limitation.
I use “neurosis” to indicate this to be something embedded in the genetic matrix. It may be reflected biologically in the hereditary pattern of the clan leaders children.
The scale or degree of this quality of the individuals investment in their ego self is now a bit more clear. Each has a level of intolerance of viewing their inadequacies. Many have no tolerance of objective observation of themselves in their struggle with self esteem.
All of this depending on heredity, social development, and experience. The successes and failures, both social and personal, as reflective feedback stimulating the neural character of the individual to ignore any limitations of capacity or inadequacy. This is valid for any species and its members, including humans.
What appears in all of this is the level of awareness, or lack of awareness, of one’s individual knowledge of themselves. Since this is a dominant factor in what drives one’s behavior and sense of self, it might be a clue as to the key factor in choosing and being a “leader”?
The political nerve being the confidence in “playing” the character of the image the ego projects of itself .
Their confidence compensates for the lack of confidence of those who support them. This grabs on to the feelings of the followers in alignment with not being listened to, being left out, unacknowledged in an inner argument of their own worth. Disapproving.
A person like the current president is like an electric showing of the contrast of neurotic dialogue with ego-doubt being smothered in a psychotic projection of a flawless self. This kind of ego contrast will be found to be at the foundation of almost all past leaders, social and tribal, who have detached themselves from the reality of humility into the narcissistic illusion or image of a flawless ‘God” like self.
It is perhaps something universal given at the root of life, a trap of being alive without the aspect of knowing our dependence on the forces within our biological being that creates us. Like all life forms, we create ourselves in reproduction.
“So, Kelly, thank you for driving me into rejection-reflection in feelings of inadequacy.”