You’re Applauding the Wrong Robert

Or, How could De Niro’s blurt be bad when it feels so good?

Alexainie
CROSSIN(G)ENRES

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He Who Must Not Be Named

Back in mid-2016, when the world had yet to completely break me, I left Facebook (mostly-I still shopped there once in awhile), so I could stay intact through what was on the horizon. The last straw for me was watching people I cared about trying to eviscerate each other on social media over a political race destined to elect one more person who couldn’t possibly have any idea what their actual lives were like, from up there on their gilded thrones. It was witnessing our broken political system manifest grotesquely, and begin to devour itself from the inside out. We all watched as the plague of xenophobia and narcissism evolved from something we tolerated from an odd uncle at annual family gatherings into a national (maybe global) movement. Or, we finally allowed ourselves to see what had been there all along, in any case.

We all picked a side. We all felt justified. We became self-appointed allies or experts or or enforcers or martyrs and we all had opinions and answers and criticisms and advice and I remember telling a good friend of mine, who had what seemed like good instincts, to just stop — because every time he ripped the words of those defending the other side to shreds, all I could hear after a few sentences was a message just as venomous as the one he condemned, and that NAME. And I heard it at the top of his voice. When I went to sleep at night, that name had appeared in the words I read and heard at such a large volume that it would be the last word I heard; the last syllable I spoke; it would provoke the last image I saw; and inform my nightmares as I drifted off, if in fact I could sleep at all. For a while, it was louder than the love of my children. My fear for their future was bigger than my hopes and dreams for them. For the first time in their lives.

You see, I had walked this path before. I was intimately familiar dancing with narcissists, and I knew no good could come from turning up the volume. I knew that if we nurtured a person like that, he would burn through our resources only to grow and thrive. And the Tony Awards were just another example of how we continue to throw fuel on the fire of our narcissism epidemic.

Resistance is not futile, but constantly screaming about how resistant we are certainly is.

When we are trying to escape the tangled web of a narcissist, a couple of important terms are introduced. One is “no contact”. This is, obviously, the ideal one should aspire to regarding the narcissistic relationship. Unfortunately, and as it is in our case as a nation, this ideal is often impractical or impossible. That’s when we learn about going “gray rock”. See, narcissists feed on emotion. They prefer the kind that’s born of adoration and adulation, but they’ll take any emotion. Don’t have any hero worship handy? Heck, they’ll take the hatred, or disgust, or rage. They’re like toddlers — any attention, even negative, is better than none at all. What narcissists can’t abide is disinterest. They need stimulation. Bore them. Keep emotion out of it.

We need to heed the gray rock method now. When Bob DeNiro (whom I ADORE, btw) said what he said the other night, I was on my feet with everyone else. But the more I thought about it, the more clearly I could see the flaw in the logic. One more target on the back of liberals. And not the “radical leftists” we love to attribute any negative attention to, but just us normal, run-of-the-mill please don’t take more from me and give it to people who already own the whole country; please give to the schools instead of the prisons; please normalize equality, etc. liberals. And the bigger the target on our backs, the less legitimate we’ll be made to seem. This is the narcissist’s game, and we won’t beat him by being louder than he is, because he is not bound by things like ethics, or decency, or diplomacy.

The lines we won’t cross he’ll pole vault over in a heartbeat. So, that plan will fail every time.

The only way to win against a narcissist is to starve him. He’s an emotional vampire.

We gave our attention to the wrong Robert the other night

To illustrate what we should do instead, may I direct you to Robert Mueller?Mueller has mastered the art of “gray rock”. He does his work — IMPORTANT WORK — in silence. Tweet, after tweet, after tweet and still he refuses to be baited. We, on the other hand, continue to take the bait day, after day, after day. And all we do every time we do it, it further empower the powers that should not be.

I love DeNiro, but in this fight, I’ve gotta say, my money’s on the other Bob.

See, I like the strong, silent type.

But, narcissism sure doesn’t.

Source — The article that coined the term “gray rock”.

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I still don’t know what I want to be when I grow up, but I know I want it to be spelled right and punctuated correctly. I guess that’s something.