I’m sitting on an airplane flying to New York. In the row ahead of me, I have a perfect view of the screen of a woman who is watching Fox News. The story of Donald Trump’s phone call to the Ukrainian president that spurred the move for his impeachment has recently broken and there on the screen is the President of the United States in a blue suit with a sky blue tie answering questions from the lawn of the White House. I can’t hear what he is saying. His face is screwed up into a familiar expression of forceful oratory delivery and righteous indignation. The ticker tape commentary says things such as “We have been treated very unfairly,” “We are looking for corruption,” “I don’t care about politics, I care about corruption” and “The Democrats will suffer greatly at the polls.”

I am fascinated. The man is a genius.

* * *

I learned a new term last week: narcissistic supply. Wikipedia’s illuminating definition begins, 

“Narcissistic supply is a concept introduced into psychoanalytic theory by Otto Fenichel in 1938, to describe a type of admiration, interpersonal support or sustenance drawn by an individual from his or her environment and essential to their self-esteem.”

I learned the term in the context of the Professional Coaching Certification I’m currently enrolled in. Our instructor pointed out narcissistic supplyas one way humans tick. We all require narcissistic supply. However, many of us are addicted to it (some of us profoundly so) and we will manipulate others and situations to get our fix, treating the world as a blood supply for our vampiric compulsions.

            As he spoke, I felt a sharp burning pain deep inside. It’s amazing how simply labeling something can bring it so clearly into the foreground. I recognized my own version of narcissistic supply. Attention-seeking in intimate relationships was the primary method that I recognized in myself. OK, I have been seeing this for a few years now — a form of childish behavior that is unconscious and insatiable. But naming it caught it fully red-handed and it stood there, terrified and blushing, unable to run in the bright light of awareness. I held it gently, with care.

            It felt a bit like breaking out from behind a store window full of costumed manequins and stepping out onto the full noonday sun of the street.

            Asking my friendGoogle about this common psychological dynamic, I learned that the more secure your attachment to a care-giver in the first few years of life, the less likely you are to become pathological in your exterior self-esteem sourcing. If your nervous system comes to know early on that there is a source of attentive love out there that is there for you, and that you are seen for who you really are, you are able to develop a coherent and safe internal sense of essential, true self, which is the ultimate source of your strength to become a real adult.

            I’d wager that a minority of adults living today had that kind of infancy. One’s care-giver had to have had parents with those capacities, or done a lot of personal work to not use the child as a narcissistic supply. 

            It explains a great deal about life on earth right now, doesn’t it?

            The good news is that we have more and more access to this kind of information, and to the support and practices that will help us grow up and out of this very painful way of being.

            Meanwhile, there are people who are deeply under the spell of their own narcissistic supply, sucking the blood of their unconscious codependents, creating all kinds of havoc.

            But at least some of us know what’s going on and can be inspired by their genius at sourcing narcissistic supply on a global scale. We can be inspired as a move of activism to take a loving and unwavering hard look at ourselves — the first step to liberate us all from its grip.