If Emotional Vampires Are Children, What Does It Take to Be a Grown-Up?
So far as I’m concerned, maturity and mental health are the same thing. Both are made up of three essential attitudes.
To be psychologically healthy, we have to believe that what we do has some effect on what happens to us. Even if the perception of control is delusional, it usually leads to more productive action than believing that what we do makes no difference.
Over time and with reflection, our choices get better, and we perceive ourselves as having even more control over our fate. This is the main benefit of growing up.
Emotional vampires never grow up. Throughout their lives, they see themselves as victims of fate and the unpredictability of others. Stuff happens, and they just respond to it. As a result, they have no opportunity to learn from their mistakes, and they just keep on making the same ones over and over.
Human beings are social creatures. We can experience our full humanity only in the context of connection to something larger than ourselves. It is our connections and commitments that give meaning to our lives.
Becoming an adult human being means learning to live by social rules that become such a part of our reality that most of us follow them without even thinking.
Other People Are the Same as I Am As normal people grow, they come to appreciate more and more their similarity to others. Empathy is what maturity is all about.
Vampires just don’t get this concept. To them, other people are there to supply their needs.
What’s Fair Is Fair Social systems are based on reciprocity in everything, from back-scratching to telling the truth. Adults develop a sense of fairness and use it as a yardstick for measuring their behavior. Vampires don’t; their idea of fair is that they get what they want when they want it.
What You Get Is Equal to What You Put In Adults understand that the more you give, the more you get. Vampires take.
Other People Have the Right to Deny Me Human relationships depend on a clear perception of the psychological line between what’s mine and what’s yours. Robert Frost said it well: “Good fences make good neighbors.”
Vampires have a hard time seeing this all-important boundary. They believe that whatever they want should be given to them immediately, regardless of how anyone else might feel about it.
Social creatures trust each other to follow these basic rules, and emotional vampires betray that trust.
Their lack of connection to something larger than themselves is also the reason for vampires’ internal pain. The universe is a cold and empty place when there is nothing in it bigger than your own need.
To grow is to do things that are difficult. Without challenge, our lives shrink to safe but unsatisfying routines. Challenges come in all shapes and sizes. The ones that help most force us to face our fears, back them down, and widen the scope of our existence. Vampires are sometimes better at this than we are. In addition to being pains in the neck, emotional vampires are artists, heroes, and leaders. Because of their immaturity, they can do things that we can’t. The forces of darkness always swirl at the edges of creativity and great deeds. A world without vampires would be less stressful, but deadly dull.
To deal effectively with vampires, we have to think new thoughts and take unaccustomed actions. At times that may be scary, but facing fear is the kind of challenge that makes us grow.
Just as some of the newer stories about real vampires ascribe their delicate condition to a blood-borne virus, so there are many theories about the personality disorders that afflict their emotional cousins. At present, some of the most fashionable involve unbalanced brain chemistry, early trauma, or the long-term deleterious effects of growing up in a dysfunctional family.
Forget the theories; they will hurt you more than they will help you in your quest to understand vampires. There are two reasons for this. First, understanding where a problem comes from is not the same as solving it. Second, emotional vampires already see themselves as the innocent victims of forces beyond their control. If that’s how you see them, their past can distract you from paying attention to the choices that you and they are making in the present.
Many self-help books have long sections about how difficult people got to be that way. This one doesn’t. After years in the therapy business, I have come to believe that it is far more important to understand the mechanics of human problems—how they operate and what to do about them—than it is to speculate about what causes them.
Emotional vampires are not intrinsically evil, but their immaturity allows them to operate without thinking about whether their actions are good or bad. They see other people as potential sources for whatever they happen to need at the moment, not as separate human beings with needs and feelings of their own. Rather than being evil itself, vampires’ perceptual distortion is a doorway through which evil may easily enter.
The purpose of this book is not to consider the morality of emotional vampires, but to teach you how to spot them in your life and give you some ideas about what to do when you find yourself under attack by the forces of darkness.
Understanding emotional vampires’ immaturity is your ultimate weapon. Many of their most outrageous actions would make perfect sense if they were done by a two-year-old. Don’t let vampires’ chronological age or positions of responsibility fool you. They are two-year-olds, at least when they’re acting up. The most successful strategies for dealing with emotional vampires are precisely the same ones you’d use with young children—setting limits, arranging contingencies, being consistent, keeping lectures to a bare minimum, rewarding good behavior and ignoring bad, and occasionally putting them in time-out.
You probably know these techniques already, but you may not have known that they were applicable to adults. Or perhaps you thought you shouldn’t have to use them with grown-ups. You do, at least if you want to keep from being drained dry. Vampires are difficult enough to handle already; there’s no point in ignoring effective strategies just because you think they’re only for kids.
Human beings don’t fit neatly into diagnostic categories, no matter how elegant or well conceived. As you read further, you’ll probably discover that everybody you know, including yourself, has some characteristics of each of the vampire types. Everybody has some; nobody has all. Most difficult people are a blend of two or more vampire types. The chances are good that you will find your bullying boss or your supercilious former spouse scattered all over the pages of this book. Feel free to use the techniques that seem most appropriate, regardless of which chapter they appear in. Many of the techniques are introduced in the earlier chapters and refined later in the book. You’ll probably find it most helpful to read straight through, so that by the time you reach the later, more complex types of vampires, you’ll have a whole arsenal of techniques from which to choose.
If you see yourself among the vampires, take heart; it is a very good sign. We all have some tendencies in the direction of personality disorders. If you recognize your own, they are apt to be less of a problem than if you have no insight. Each section ends with a description of treatment approaches for the various vampire types. These should help you in working on your vampire issues yourself, or in selecting an appropriate therapist or therapy technique for yourself or for the vampires in your life.
Emotional vampires have a tendency to prefer therapy approaches that make them worse rather than better. People who throw tantrums like two-year-olds hardly need to be encouraged to get their feelings out into the open or, God forbid, get in touch with their inner child.
The opinions about therapy are, of course, my own, and certainly not shared by all psychologists. No opinions are shared by all psychologists. I believe that emotional vampires can grow up and become healthy human beings, but it takes a real effort on their part. And yours.
I hope you’ll find this book useful, both at home, at work, and everywhere else in your life. Beyond that, I wouldn’t be in the least upset if it gave you a chuckle here and there—and, if it would not be too much to wish for, the occasional glimmer of hope for the human condition that comes with understanding.