The Walking Dead
30 thoughts on “The Walking Dead”
Vent Your Spleen! (Please see the Rules in Formal Info)
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PS. I may have been describing joy instead of happiness. Happiness is the fleeting emotion from circumstances while joy is the extension of happiness even when the circumstance has already passed or changed. Both emotions not experienced by the narcissists I knew in my life.
Just coming from my observations from living with my N mom for 26 yrs, N sister twice, and interacting with my N stepdaughters for many years, happiness is definitely different from power. It’s not just in the labeling but they are different emotions in their essence.
Happiness can stand on it’s own. You can be an isolated monk in a cave and have never interacted with humans for more than a year and still feel happiness inside you. The happiness doesn’t even have to come from anything, it can just be inside you and for no reason at all. It doesn’t have to feel euphoric; it can just feel like something solid and peaceful inside you where you just have a strong connection with your inner self.
From my perspective, power has negativity attached to it. You cannot feel power unless you feel superior. You cannot feel superior unless you feel that someone is inferior. That is negativity from my perspective because I have empathy towards people. The exception is when the other person has been actively taking my power and happiness away from me. That is the only time I enjoyed feeling more powerful than someone else. But generally the feeling of power doesn’t give me fulfillment and it actually seems like power is inversely proportional to my level of happiness. Choosing happiness over power is always healthier for me.
I remember hearing stories from people who said they had the best of everything and they actively sought it thinking it would give them what they need inside but they felt so empty so they decided to give up all of that and aim for a much simpler but fulfilling life. I wonder if those were the case of people who were misguided that a narcissistic way of fulfillment and perspective of success is the objective meaning of fulfillment and success but they have empathy and are not wired like narcissists so it didn’t work for them.
I also notice sometimes a smirk when a narcissist feels power as they smile. A smile from happiness looks different to me.
Emotions are sensations in the body caused by (conscious and un/subconscious) thoughts. Due to human physiology I think their “happiness” can feel similar, but not the same because narcissists’ brains are different.
Their “power” may feel physically similar to happiness, but theirs is superficial and fleeting. I don’t equate emptiness with loneliness. I think emptiness is the states of being completely untethered. That’s terrifying.
BC30,
Is untethered the same as unhinged? I’ve been called unhinged before now ! Ha ha xx
Haha! I’m only unhinged when I punch back. That’s never my fault. Oops, those pesky narcy traits!
I had a thought whilst listening to this.
I have no doubt that many positive emotions are missing in the narcissist. Compassion being an obvious one because it is directed outwards to someone else.
What about positive emotions that are directed inwards? So looking at happiness. You aren’t required to share happiness as such. There are many different things that make different people happy. Some are even materialistic yet the feeling of happiness is still experienced.
Given the lack of controlled environment experienced and the rare occasions where happiness would be illustrated or felt by the child, what if it’s more of a naming issue? It’s hard to describe happiness exactly. If you try to put your finger on how it feels, my description may be very different from that of another empath. So what if my ‘happiness’ is your ‘power’? What if your ‘emptiness’ is my ‘loneliness’. Your emptiness is remedied by fuel which requires contact with people. My loneliness is remedied by contact with other people also.
Your description of power and emptiness might be almost identical to my description of happiness and loneliness. For some emotions we might have more of a labelling issue. My description of the colour blue will be different to yours. Even if you narrow down and say Azure blue. We still could both be looking at the colour blue.
I have wondered about this also.
Hey LET,
Agree, as empaths happiness does tend to involve others but it doesn’t have to. The trigger for happy might be different and our actions when happy are different to those of the narc. But the feeling itself, the actual feeling we describe as happy, could that not be power to the narc? I feel ‘high’ when happy. I feel ‘ confident’ when happy. I feel like ‘I could take on the world’ when happy. Is this a description of power? Or happiness? For us we want to share the happy feeling but by not sharing it it doesn’t negate the feeling itself.
Loneliness I’m not sure about. You can be in a crowded room and feel lonely. Unlikely the narc feels empty in a crowded room! Loneliness is an inability to connect as you say and for whatever reason. The narcissist doesn’t connect either. He pretends he connects. So is he lonely or empty or are both of us both ? The fact is, we don’t have the vocabulary to express feeling accurately so it becomes more action based in terms of conveyance. The actions are different but I’m not sure if the feelings experienced are closer than we think.
Hi TS 🙂
I can concur with so many things you say here and how happiness makes us feel.
I once posted another comment here to HG about how power might feel to an empath. There is a song “The Whole of the Moon” by the Waterboys. The lyrics “I saw the crescent, you saw the whole of the moon” sums it up perfectly for me. I love that song. It makes me fell powerful. So I understand the sense of power. Even as an empath. I can imagine how it feels to a narcissist. Maybe my narc traits relate to that song. It’s in all of us.
I’m not sure happiness is in a narcissist, but we know there are unaware narcs who may believe they feel happy, even if what they are feeling is powerful. It’s such an interesting topic and I’m absolutely on the same page as you in wanting and trying to understand.
It’s true we don’t always have the words to convey what we are feeling. I am just basing what I say on what HG has explained. He says he doesn’t experience happiness, I believe him. When he says he feels empty, I believe him. How those things correlate to our own experience is an interesting area to contemplate. And I’m always glad when you bring these thoughts forward as it causes me to think more carefully about them, too <3
Fuck – *feel*
Ha ha LET!
You do what I do, read comments back after and think, did I get that right? Is that what I meant to say?
I tried to answer a question for AV and read that back several times to check. It’s in moderation so I’m thinking I bollocksed it. It’s lengthy so by sheer law of averages some of it must be right!
I apologise for my wordiness and inaccuracies HG. (I would have put a kissy face emoji here).
I always try to read my comments before sending and also after sending, LET. I still miss things, or my autocorrect takes over when it’s from my phone. I will try to weed out what’s important in your answer and I appreciate the effort! So much! I learn so much from all of you!
LOL, TS, always love to read you thoughts, musings and explanations <3
Occasionally I fall down in the editing department, simply because I don't always take the time to read things back as the whole thing flowed as I wrote it. And I am excited to post it 🙂 Then, I might take a look post moderation and, well, *fuck*!
Often I won't try to correct a mistake as it's too late and I'm only human 😛
Sometimes a word gets left out all together as I read back with my mind's eye and as far as I'm concerned the word is in there even if it isn't! Another lol.
Anyway, I'll look forward to reading your reply to AV (it hasn't appeared in my feed yet) and hopefully you can get your 'kissy face' emoji off to HG soon x
Hi AV, I don’t use autocorrect and refuse to have anything to do with ‘predictive’ text. No wonder I’ve got problems, but I’m also not responding on my phone (which is where I lack emojis as well – I’m sure HG is glad 😛 ). I don’t use those options on my phone either. It comes down to not letting a machine have control over me, correcting me or second guessing what I want to say 😛 My brain is sufficient and if it fuck’s up, well then, so be it. It may take more time (and drive my kids crazy as they, of course, operate with the speed of lightning when it comes to technology) but let the fascination with old fashioned notions begin 😉
We learn from eachother, AV xox
Haha, see, right there, that last comment should have been to TS!
Laughing xx
When I was being shelved (as I recognize now to be the the case) and I was questioning the behavior, mine gave me this whole spiel about being on this inner peace, yoga journey (re: excuse for the distancing). I believe the devaluation was starting right around that time. And when he said some things to me that I believe were supposed to get some sort of reaction out of me, and I didn’t react how he wanted (instead of “chasing” him, I basically told him fine, go do your thing), he did a 180 from his “inner peace”, and lashed out at me, and said some really, really nasty things. Things I wouldn’t say to someone whose guts I hated.
Funny how quickly he went from “inner peace”, to a complete nutjob. It did make me take pause. I blocked him, and even though I did unblock a couple of months later around the pandemic start , I’m grateful in a way for that I’m-so-peaceful to completely unhinged in a matter of moments interaction. Because even though there was that part of me that didn’t want things to be over, deep down I know I can’t be walking on eggshells, waiting for the other shoe to drop, never knowing when there will be that Jekyll/ Hyde “switch”. I refuse to live like that. And it did show me how different definitions for “feeling states” can be, for sure.
WV22, I’m so happy to hear you escaped! Sucks to be him–fleeting and superficial “inner peace.”
Such an interesting comment, TS. I wonder what HG thinks. I definitely see where you are coming from.
I perceive the notion of power compared to happiness very differently. Happiness is a benign emotion and will spread out to others who are receptive. A sense of power denotes a different kind of fulfillment, solely for the beneficiary. I don’t see it as benign, but potentially more malign.
So in my mind it is benign (happiness) vs malign (power). Both could be euphoric but have a different basis and intent.
Loneliness to me indicates an ability to connect and a sense of missing that connection when it isn’t available. Emptiness is more a sensation of having no sense of connectedness, even to oneself. It is a vast chasm, as HG describes, which can never be filled apart from momentarily. Loneliness can be assuaged with company and the connectedness that comes with that. While to two may seem similar, I think fundamentally they are very different.
It is very hard to comprehend at times and explains a lot about our inability at times to grasp the narcissist’s perspective and vice versa.
TS and AV,
I’m not going to gaslight a N who says they are happy, but it’s definitely going to be 1) superficial and 2) based on validation, from getting their way, recognition, schadenfreude, watching’ *their* child win, etc. and 3) fleeting. That is not empathic, compassion-based happiness.
Even when the N is having a perfect day, there will be ONE thing that will upset them and burst their “happiness” bubble. This is why they can suddenly go on a tirade or become violent when you ask them what kind of jam they want on their toast.
When I see someone win star baker on GBBO, I get happy because I empathize with them and feel what they are feeling. I don’t imagine it. I feel it. I smile, get warm and flushed, jumpy and clap, and maybe shed a tear, my voice cracks because I am so happy FOR them. N’s can’t do that. They don’t experience that. All Ns have weak, surface-level “power.” The happiness and power induced bodily sensations may be the similar, but they are not happy. Not at all.
BC30, thank you for your description, this does help with my understanding of their lack of empathy/emotion.
TS, do you know if you have Savior cadre? I’m wondering if this is why I wonder about this, if it’s hope giving in some way.
AV,
Hope tends to be more a hallmark of the Magnet cadre. That’s not to say a Saviour doesn’t subscribe to having hope. Saviour is more about righting wrongs and going in to fight if they perceive an injustice has taken place. So if you were looking at an opinion from a purely cadre perspective, then hope would link to Magnet more than Saviour. Xx
I see, nope, no Magnet. It was a try at connecting dots. Thank you TS!
I was waiting to see what you would say about this, TS, and I was leaning strongly towards justice as being the motivator for the Saviour cadre. I think you are right about hope being related to the Magnet cadre. These two both go to make up my empath cadres along with some Martyr and I am high on hope most of the time.
BC30,
As empaths, happiness is often linked to someone else. Like your bake off example. But what if it’s just to do with you? I don’t know, you win the lottery for example. The narc also wins the lottery. He might say I feel powerful because of what that money now enables me to do. You are jumping up and down laughing and crying, I’m jumping up and down but not crying ha ha.
That feeling in your stomach though that you describe as happiness, how different is the feeling that the narc has? He calls it power but in many ways the thinking is the same. The lottery win affords opportunity. We would help our family, the narc might add an extra wing to his mansion, that’s what we do not how we feel. Do we both feel so much different from each other? I can’t actually describe what happy feels like. I can describe what I do when I’m happy but can’t accurately describe the feeling. If I’m happy I feel more confident. Is that not power too?
I’m struggling to describe what I mean I think.
TS, “As empaths, happiness is often linked to someone else.” Totally true.
If I am following correctly, the question is do empaths and narcissists experience the same emotions but name them differently? That they may not be missing these emotions like happiness but their perspective on them is skewed?
I’ve wondered that as well, but the way I see it, we will never really know because even if it were true (and there is no way of proving that), they would never agree because it would place them in with the weak and inferior (us, from their perspective) and the narcissism will not allow that. It insists on superiority, so it has to reject any indication that they could be like us in any way (so it would automatically overwrite or assign other meaning). They believe they have been stripped of these emotions (not sure how they see that process as having occurred) so that they can never fall victim to the vulnerability we allow for ourselves and that the narcissism believes would place them in grave danger or even demise. We don’t believe that, but they have to.
In that vein- take love, sex, and empaths. There is no universal definition – we experience them differently. Some might describe them as being vulnerable, feeling safe, sharing etc. Still others – a sense of justice, responsibility, or even power. We don’t really seem any better equipped to articulate what love (or any emotion ) feels like or equates to than they do.
Blame T.S. She started it.
NA,
Exactly what I’m getting at yes.
The narcissism dictates that those emotions are superfluous to requirements. The narcissism itself is a self defence mechanism. If I was narcissism I might just reject ‘happy’ or ‘content’ and call it ‘power’ instead, because being in control and feeling powerful, where the host once felt powerless is the most effective approach.
As Empaths, through the activation of Emotional Thinking, we successfully con ourselves into believing a relationship with a narcissist can be fixed. It follows therefore that a narcissist could successfully con himself into believing he has shed the ‘weaker’ emotions through the activation of his own Narcissism. Let’s face it, it’s not as if we don’t have evidence of the inflated superiority of the Upper Mid Ranger for example.
Was it me started it? Probably.
Dearest Truthseeker6157,
Very interesting and thought provoking discussions going on here
My thoughts are of Mr Tudor’s black n white examples
I feel the narcissist can only relate and equate to their fuel tank gauge levels
Basically, runs extremely well on full capacity and as it decreases, panic starts to set in if there is no pit stop easily accessible ….. must have back up fuel at all costs! No fuel is like breaking down in the desert, lost, alone, desperate and panic sets in…… they think they’re gonna die! When a passer by stops to give assistance, their feeling of relief is nothing more than that warm feeling of having peed their pants ! Zoom zoom again ! ⛽️
Nothing more nothing less !
Luv Bubbles xx 😘