Mitch, thank you. I deeply appreciate your reply, its thoughtfulness and heartfelt pursuits. You have a kind nature about you that is consistent, while willful and direct, ever honest and compelling. As for your opinions, I do not agree on most points you consider foundational to most if not all of your perspectives. As your experience has taken you far...and deeper than most, so has mine. And within that journey I have come to the conclusion that narcissistic proclivities that define the disease are in the DNA.
To be born helpless and needy is not a sign of love. Or does the love of the parent, being an adult and hopefully well centered, come as no surprise yet, when you posture this reality and the new born with we are all born to love and be loved is to far a stretch for logic to get its head around. You state you are an environmentalist...the person being the product of what the environs creates, like oaks in the Midwest and cactus in the desert, but hold on, that is the point. Each grown as they are preordained to survive in while beginning as plants we see them evolve consistent to how they were seeded. Hence the narcissist as I personally watched one of my three children since birth...day by day...year by year living with her two siblings and the same parents, merger her proclivities into real time acts of terror. Born and then merged with her surroundings she created a world alien and departed from the rest. Her mother being a covert narcissist, her mother's mother an overt monster. None new love. nor gave it. Love is for the others as long as the disease is creating the world it is meant to create.
My sense is your work focused on the criminal minds is a wondersome sight to behold. Although I much rather deal with a killer who knows better than one who doesn't. Please understand, I appreciate your sacred calling. Yet, when it comes to the narcissist and the theory they are to be loved as a mode or tactic to reconstituting their better angles, I see wishful thinking replacing logic and reason.
Every narcissist you love can not reply in kind, not genuinely so. They see weakness and possibilities to advantage themselves to. It is there mental state when triggers take heed. And reactions form bonds with cause and effect. And if the disease is real, and doing what it is diagnosed to do, he or she wlll not comprehend you for to truly feel something you must have capacity.
Narcs are born with needs, desires, and covets but not the capacity to love. Or be so. A child at birth is not experiencing what it has created but that which it was created to do. It must simply survive. Love is an entirely different matter. You alluded to this fact, love being learned....or not. Not inborn which you argued against although inherently we are all seeking it as you suggest nevertheless. Confusing as matter might have it.
As for learning love. I agree it and its capacity can be acquired over time and space. But not if you are hard wired to not be able to. As you say, its in the doing not the feeling. The disease is a different matter but the proclivities are already there, birthed and ready for action. Seeds growing, only needing a place to create what comes naturally.
When was the last time you witnessed a narc act according the authentic love? Acting as if the other was someone worth giving all to and then, asking nothing in return. Or maybe its something else entirely.
What if the dark shadow that we all have is the narcissist? No masks but simply it is the person. I think not for what if the mask and the shadow are the same then it implies no light at all. But then, among those you have worked with, the killers and rapists or the dark narcs who are no better, do you see the spark. The light...that each of us possesses and by your estimation born with?
Lastly, as I stated at the outset, I appreciate the nature of what creates your perspectives. The love of love is what I am speaking about. Thank you for that. And stay the course, we need to hear your views and their perspectives ala a wish mind and the tinder hearted you...the honest and courageous person you have become.
Eric