The last article described the relationship between a narcissist and a codependent as a product of anxiety and emptiness. This article will describe further consequences of emptiness and anxious productivity.
Explore the Survival Complex on Miro: Survival Complex Map
When a stone skittering across a lake slows it sinks. So it is for those in the Survival Complex. The mask they wear that covers their emptiness requires maintenance and enhancement with new tasks and achievements. This causes them to move through life in a fast and anxious way. They scurry from one task to another. These are the scurriers.
The Scurry is the anxious way the adult moves through life. Head down, back and knees bent, moving fast. The scurry causes poor time estimation because of wishful thinking. The adult estimates based on how long it wishes a task would take instead of how long it really will take. Every task is then rushed through because there is never enough time set aside for it. Many tasks are done poorly or left unfinished because the adult needs to get to the next task. Anything that is done fast enough is not done well enough and anything that is done well enough is not done fast enough. The adult will never be satisfied. It is always behind schedule and always late for the next task. It lives like a bird in a cage thrown from a fatal height.
The scurry makes everyone and everything an obstacle to the next task. The adult is forever looking over the shoulder of the current task or person. The scurry makes the adults intensely present but also absent; suffocatingly close but also distant. The scurry crushes the life out of the things the adult wants. This means that the things it wants will seem to continuously fail it. The adult wants children, a family and to be happy.
When the adults marry and become parents their child is incorporated into their system of scurrying work and codependence. The child is subsumed by the parents’ selves and schedules; it is diluted in the parents’ troubles and their attempts to ease them. The child is one of the narcissist’s projects; it is one of the codependent’s patients.
In psychology this is called triangulation. When two people are in a dysfunctional relationship and are unable or unwilling to resolve it they draw in or focus on a third person. This third person can be used to distract the couple or to act as a confidant or as a messenger between the couple. Triangulation leads to enmeshment which is also known as “emotional incest”. In enmeshment the boundaries between parent and child become blurry the more their emotional lives interact and overlap.
The parents turn to the child for help with getting their tasks done. They turn to the child for help with how they feel about themselves, the other parent and others. This makes the child an extension of the parents physically and emotionally. The child becomes a tool on the parents’ belt; it is their imaginary friend.
The narcissistic parent scurries after their tasks and the codependent scurries after the narcissist. The child tries to help them both. This causes an upward emotional vacuum in the family.
The child may hear both sides of the parents’ struggle but it can only understand what it sees. It sees the codependent crying because of the narcissist. It doesn’t see the narcissist cry and it doesn’t see the debt it is in to the codependent. The child has had to help the narcissist the most and has gotten the most help from the codependent. This draws the child to the side of the codependent.
Relating is transactional for the parent. If they are not helping or being helped then they don’t interact. The parent can’t make direct contact with the child because of the scurry, the mask and the emptiness. The parents make indirect contact through their tasks. The parent and child look at the task instead of each other. The task mediates contact.
The child thinks that if it can help the parents finish their tasks then the parents will turn back to the child. The child does not know that the parents don’t want to get caught up. It doesn’t know that the distressed state is the desired state.
This is so because at the end of every task is silence. The parent might begin to pick at their mask. No matter how much they do the mask remains brittle. At the end of every task, like the bottom of every bag and bottle, is emptiness.
The busy bee has no time for sorrow. - William Blake, Proverbs of Hell