Legal Commentary

How Do I Love Me? Let Me Count The Ways!

By Kevin Funnell

A few days ago, I had a long talk with a former executive assistant I hadn't spoken with in several years. She was my right hand for many years and basically ran my professional life for me when I left Big Law behind 18 years ago and set out to practice law in a more sane fashion. 

This woman is smart, funny, drop dead gorgeous (she was once a professional model), and a serious "natural" body builder. She can stop you in your tracks with her looks and drop you in your tracks with a well aimed right hook or a hilarious punch line. She deserves a mate who loves her completely and unconditionally. Naturally, she married a guy who turned out to be a serial cheater in the Tiger Woods/Jesse James mold.

She finally gave up trying to save the marriage for the sake of their ten year old daughter and divorced him this year. As we were discussing his appalling actions, I expressed incredulity at some of his attitudes, and she replied "But, Kevin, he's a classic narcissist." She was absolutely right.

It brought to mind to mind a post I wrote for an earlier version of this blog and that I have decided  to update and recycle. This one's for you, Annie.

***********************************************************************************************************

This is what Abraham Maslow meant when he wrote, while recuperating from his heart attack: "Death and its ever present possibility makes love, passionate love, more possible. I wonder if we could love passionately, if ecstasy would be possible at all, if we knew we'd never die." This is not simply an expression of "I almost lost this...I almost died," but is a sensing of the rich depth that comes from the awareness of destiny and the new possibilities, the new freedom of aesthetic sensibility, that then opens up.
---Rollo May, Freedom and Destiny

Last week, I came across the web site of a woman I once knew well, who, when I knew her, believed that life was a game and the people in it merely pawns, knights, bishops and rooks placed here for her to move about the board for her exclusive amusement. I thought that perhaps (and only perhaps) if such a person suffered the loss of someone she loved, she might have a fighting chance of finally comprehending what love--true, passionate love of others, rather than of herself--was all about. She was an "artful dodger," a skilled impersonator of human emotions, playing roles that she assumed (wife, mother, lover, sinner, saint) with intelligence and skill. When you compared her words to her actions, however, it was apparent that they were only roles. Life was a play, she the star, and all the rest of us lived only to play supporting roles. Even her love of her son and daughter was framed by her in terms of her self-sacrifice to bear and raise the children, and her love of her husband in terms of her sufferance of his egregious defects.

Her husband was in ill health. At the time, I wondered: would his death, or that of a child, or of anyone else "close" to her, change her profoundly? Certainly, it would many of us. Certainly, it has many of us.

More from May's book:

"Narcissism is self-hate disguised as self-love," says Clint Weyand. "It is probably the cruelest and most insidious form of self-deception, because it destroys the healing power of loving relationships"...There can be no sense of the self without a sense of the destiny of that self. How we respond to the facts of illness, disaster, good fortune, success, renewed life, death ad infinitum is crucial; and the pattern of such response is the self relating to destiny.

After viewing her site, I don't think that even the death of her husband or one of her children would have opened her eyes to anything other than the opportunity to play the role of bereaved widow or mother of a dead child. The head shot of herself that she had recently posted to her web site was such an obviously staged and artificial attempt to create the image of herself as a serious artiste that when I first saw it, I nearly burst out laughing. Then, I simply felt sad. The photograph (and, in fact, the content of the entire site) is a stark demonstration of unabashed vanity.

A narcissist is too powerfully seduced by the mirror ever to learn the lessons of life that death can teach the rest of us.

Of course, one of the inexhaustible and profound capabilities of human beings of all intellectual levels is self-deception. Likely, none of us is completely free of it. Certainly, I'm not. Nevertheless, there are some who appear to be more "profoundly capable" than others.

For most of us the answer to the question of life that is posed by death is "you and me." For others, there is no answer possible other than merely "me."

****************************************************************************************************

So, Ann, you're "broken" now through no fault of your own other than the sad fact that many of us are deceived at one time or another in our lives by skilled narcissistic actors. It may not make the present pain any easier to bear, but know that there are those of us who love you without deception or condition, for no reason other than we've survived long enough to understand that of the virtues of faith, hope, and love, "the greatest of these is love." Also, know that what is broken will mend.

But I?m broken and I don?t understand
What is broken falls into place once again.
Hand of kindness, come and gather me in like a rainstorm,
Again and again and again,
I think I will break but I mend.

Full post as published by Counseling Kevin on May 25, 2010 (boomark / email).