William’s Therapy Session – Spot On

Published April 24, 2020 · Updated July 6, 2022

Hey all,

I forgot to wrote for last week’s telegraph, but this may still be pertinent.

I thought that William’s multi-personality therapy session was spot-on. My dad and his mom are both narcissists, so I am affected by it. When I ran a startup, my own COO told me I’m a sociopath.

Recently I went through 15 months of hell when everything in my life failed – the love of my life and most of my friends left me, my business failed and left me with mountains of debt, and I went from being a somewhat known person in my industry to delivering UberEats just to survive (in my Tesla…) I was thrown into a deep depression with a few months of suicidal thoughts as cherry on the pie. I was consumed with raging guilt of screwing thongs up with the person I was _certain_ I would spend the rest of my life with, not to mention of failing in other places.

It sucked, but it was a blessing in disguise: a good year into this hell I realized that things fell appart because, despite my good intentions and donations to charities and always giving homeless some food and so forth, in day-to-day activities I was being a narcissist. I cut all communication with my dad because his narcissism became an unbearable psychological abuse, and because I hated it so much, I always saw myself as someone who is certainly not the same. Hating it, however, also blinded me: it made the realization that I may be no better far harder to process or even see; it became my blind spot.

Now, narcissism is a spectrum and I must be early enough on it because the very nature of the disease makes people unable to realize there’s something wrong with them. A traumatic event is often the only thing that can make the lightbulb go off, per medical literature. Even then you may suppress it because it requires you to face the fact that you were the bad guy for most of not all of your life – and that is a HARD pill to swallow especially because narcissists inherently think they’re so good that in fact they must be special. It’s as close to a world-shattering event as a human brain can experience – you basically realize your entire concept of identity had been an illusion.

What’s interesting is how different everything becomes once you do go through this shattering of the world. It’s now as if I have different personalities. I do hate the part of me that is destructive, hurt others around me, and by extension caused me so much pain (lest I become dull to it by accepting the story that the world is out to get me, I am the one who is misunderstood and mistreated, nobody cares for me, etc, which is what happens with many narcissists, and it’s not done consciously).

I’m 35, so not yet old, but like William I’ve been searching for what’s special about me, for its the feeling since had since early teens. I did feel like I’m meant to change the world and often have fantasies of being an industry titan a la Elon Musk or President of the US (I told many friends that we have over 20 amendments to the Constitution, so why not another one to let someone born outside the US be president?).

But it’s also that feeling of being special coupled with that hardcore work ethic and doing what’s needed for the sake of the bigger goal that destroyed my relationships. If I could kill these other parts of me, I would. Because now I see just how much pain they’ve caused me, how much they’ve destroyed. Now I want to just have a nice family, live a straightforward life, and help others. I still know that I’m the good guy, but this time I understand that it’s not because I’ve always been special, but because of daily actions I choose. And as soon as I stop choosing them, I’m no longer a good guy, I’m just a guy.

Sorry for it being long, but the point is this: the therapy session was SPOT ON. This is how it feels once you realize that your life has been an illusion; you start seeing your pat self as some other personality within you. And you are so angry at this other personality, you absolutely want to kill it for good because it controlled you your whole life like a ventriloquist controls their dummy.

Thanks for the show,

Alex from Chicago

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