-A non-scientifically based (i.e personal) conclusion I’ve reached.
This is somewhat tongue in cheek but I think it makes some sense…
After communicating to someone about malignant narcissists (I’m afraid they do exist whatever they’re labelled) and thinking about why my parents lived to a ripe old age (over-ripe in my subjective opinion
) with what I believe would’ve been very high ACEs and very low Resilience scores, it just didn’t make sense to me why they could live for as long as they did, given the data by Felitti and Anda about this subject matter.
I have given my parents this label of (malignant) narcissism among other labels because I needed to make sense of their thinking and behaviour and (unfortunately) no one else was going to give me any insight. Not my parents, not my mother’s doctors and others in the health field. One kind psychiatrist did sit me down once and briefly explained what she believed was happening to my mother, to me as a 15 year old. It was definitely better to have some enlightenment than nothing at the time. It seemed, generally speaking, to be a no go zone.
My theory is: if you stay in denial your whole life, unexamined and unhappy as it may be for you and those around you (especially your children), you can live a long, pretty much guilt free (only my observation – blaming others seems to work!) and extended life and not succumb to an early death of approximately 20 years earlier or thereabouts.
Before you may possibly disagree: think of the people you know who could possibly fit into such a (agreed: it may seem loose) category. Does it hold true for them??
The moral of the story is, of course, to sort out the issues as much as possible AND live longer, but it can be a little fraught with difficulties as we all know: you have to be consciously aware of what is going on. You have to embrace the EXAMINED life, at least a little. You have to want to know, want to heal as much as possible; not pass on the baggage.
I feel as a society it could be that as a generation (or the not so young among us), we’re right in the middle of this evolutionary (revolutionary?!) process: we’re becoming so much more aware, but in terms of definitive high impact ‘answers’ for such healing (well, as near 'complete' as possible) for many of us, we are still seeking, still have a way to go on the continuum of living life to one's fullest capabilities.
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