Your own mind
The other night, I was searching online for a Tony Robbins documentary called “I’m not your Guru.”
Instead, I came across a 13-part series about Napoleon Hill. You may recognize the name from his seminal book Think and Grow Rich. This documentary, however, is a how-to for achieving your goals and creating success in whatever area you choose based on his interviews with Andrew Carnegie, the Pittsburgh steel tycoon, along with many others.
I think a lot about what it means to have my own mind versus how I grew up as a child: taken over (brainwashed) by the narcissistic structure I was born into. So naturally my jaw dropped when the first episode of Hill’s documentary, filmed in 1954, was about the importance of possessing your own mind! Not just for overall good health, he says, but in particular, to achieve your life goals. Because in order to achieve your goals, you first must know what they are. And in order to know what they are, you must possess your own mind.
Gaining possession of your own mind is an essential step in healing from the effects of a Narcissistically Structured Family (NSF). In fact, you could say it’s the crux of the healing. Narcissistic abuse is the act of taking over another person’s mind and using it to build up the false image of the narcissist. The psychological and emotional aspects of narcissistic abuse are all encompassing. It tends to affect every aspect of you.
Moderate to severe narcissism requires you serve as an object for their false self image and have no internal identity of your own. In severe NFS’s, your only role is to serve as a positive reflection for the narcissist. This includes but is not limited to complementing, reassuring, praising, and idealizing. Anything that makes them look good fits the bill. Narcissistic personality disorders (NPD) need and require a steady stream of positive messaging from others. It’s the food their false image (as-if self) needs to stay intact.
When you’re expected to be a perfect mirror-like reflection this leaves little to no room to be yourself. What happens is that anything outside of what the narcissist wants becomes off limits. You’re generally not allowed to say anything negative or to challenge them. If you try, you’ll likely meet narcissistic rage, blame, and retaliation. These can be overwhelming and scary, especially for a kid.
A baby needs connection and belonging just as much as they need food. This means you had no choice but to join your parent’s psyche (mind) and abandon your own. Even though joining wasn’t actually real connection, at least you got their attention. When necessary, attention can be a believable enough stand-in for real connection. After all, it wasn’t a choice- but a survival mechanism- to leave your real feelings behind. This is how you lost possession of your own mind.
If you were born into a NFS, this was likely demanded of you from the beginning. It’s not that you had to shut yourself down, you didn’t even get the chance to develop yourself otherwise. Your brain didn’t even get a chance to begin to form it’s own thinking. And because you never got what you didn’t even know you didn’t get, you don’t know the difference. As you develop on this path of healing and growth, you’ll come to realize you missed out on something essential.
Losing the ability and freedom to develop and possess one’s mind is a generational loss, and one that your parents most assuredly suffered, too. Otherwise they would never conceive of demanding such a thing from you. But don’t fret. Through developing awareness and real connection within, you can interrupt and change this generational pattern. If you possess a desire to know the truth and to feel real, no matter what it takes, then you have the power for this cycle to end with you. As Napoleon Hill so aptly described, you have already achieved your first step: you know exactly the goal you wish to achieve.
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