Narcissus Needed An Odyssey and Cluster B’s (Borderline, Histrionic, Narcissists) Need a Hero’s Journey
Learned far too much about story and psychology the past few years. Learned too much about people overall, in the hardest ways. To understand is to forgive. The only thing better is to understand and take correct action and to change, and that's what this ramble is all about.
At some point on this examination of people and story and identity, I realized that the hero's journey isn't about becoming a god, or even a hero. The hero's journey is about the mundane, run of the mill, everyday identity changes that we all go through several times in our lives as the world changes around us. But a certain segment of people never make these changes. Cluster B's are stuck as the hurt, scared children they were when they formed this false self. They can't cross the threshold.
Someone who's genes I carry is the same person he was in my earliest memories. He tells himself the exact same story about who he is that he did fifty years ago. I noticed this as a child, long before I had the words for it, and I'm forever grateful for that, for being given an example of what not to do. I've always known that change is crucial to being a full human being, but we can't always change right when we need to. Life often gets in the way of itself.
I still made more than my share of mistakes, many of them. And I still built problems for myself by failing to change when the world told me to change. Matter of fact, I'm probably doing it right now in some way I can't see--yet. But the one thing I never did, the one mistake I never made: I never believed that my identity was made of stone, that I could not change. I've done my best to remain adaptable, flexible, pliable, malleable. To remain able to change as the world requires it.
Let's define identity: An identity is simply the story we tell ourselves about ourselves at that moment. Identity is story and story is identity and they are inextricable. And every single story ever told is an identity crisis. An old identity is no longer useful, therefore a character must go into the unknown, and comes back changed.
Before we get into this: I should mention that this is not a hard rule for every Cluster B. Some are capable of change if they receive enough external help. And not all Cluster B's carry a fragile identity. Cluster B diagnoses are very limited, narrow boxes for very complex human beings. When I refer to Cluster B's, I'm referring to those with fragile identities who protect that identity by sacrificing reality, and refusing to change.
Understanding our own story, and knowing that we can change it, is crucial. If you tell yourself that you are who you are and you can't change, it's a self fulfilling belief. You can't change because you believe you can't change.
Back to the heroes. Every myth, every religion, every culture, tells some version of the same story: A child leaves home. They enter an unfamiliar world. Something in them crumbles and falls away. Something stronger is built in its place. Joseph Campbell spent his life studying and preaching the gospel of the hero's journey. The call to adventure, the threshold, the trials, the ordeal, and the return. They never return the same as when they started because every story ever told is trying to tell you that you can change. In addition to the hero's journey, A resurrection, to be born again, is another representation of shedding an identity that is no longer useful.
Campbell's insight applied to someone looking to change their identity sounds something like:
The call to adventure is life interrupting your story about yourself.
The threshold is letting go of certainty.
The trials expose the limits of your old way of being, your old identity, your old story.
The ordeal is the death of who you used to be.
The return is still you, but renewed, more confident and capable. The same person, and also not.
The hero's journey isn't a one off. The hero's journey, the thousands of stories you've consumed, are the operating instructions for life.
The person I was growing up in a dilapidated trailer in rural poverty had to die when I took a white collar job.
That person had to die again when I traveled the country and searched for something without knowing what that was.
The traveler died when I found what I didn't know I was looking for: another new identity.
There's more nuance to it than that, but you get the idea: We must hold our identities loosely so we can shed them regularly, and improve upon them.
Erik Erikson said the same thing in clinical language: identity is never finished. Every stage of life hands you a new problem, and you either become someone who can handle it, or you don't.
And after a lot of rambling, we get to the point: Cluster B's with fragile identities never finish the hero's journey. Not once. They never leave the metaphorical home that is their identity. They spend their lives defending the identity they formed as a child instead of revising it, no matter the costs to them, and the people around them. This is exactly why we must avoid them at all costs. Perhaps some people with these disorders are capable of change, but I ain't sticking around the chaos to find out. I suggest you do the same.
The reason Cluster B's double down on an ineffective identity is because to change their identity is death. Not adaptation. Not growth. Not progress. And they're not wrong. It is the death of the false self they built to protect themselves, the mask. To build a new identity, the old one has to wither and die first, and that same old story they tell themselves is what kept them alive this long. Sacrificing that mask is death to them. So they keep being the same person designed to survive childhood in a world where that strategy actively harms them and others.
In order to understand this fully, we have to go back to where the hero's journey was refused, and the mask was built.
Donald Winnicott called it the False Self. When a child's real feelings and real needs aren't welcome, the child stops organizing around what's true and starts organizing around what's safe and that produces a persona who sacrifices reality for perceived safety. But this false self isn't pathological unless it's taken to an extreme. All of us do some lesser version of this. We have to in order to navigate the world. Nobody says every thought in their head out loud, even to those we trust the most, because a lot of those thoughts are cruel, false, or nonsense. A mask is a normal tool that we all use.
Carl Jung had a different name for that same tool: the Persona, it's the social mask everyone wears to move through the world. Also totally normal as long as it stays a tool.
The tragedy Winnicott and Jung both point out is what happens when the mask stops being something you wear and becomes what you are. A Cluster B bets their life on the False Self as a child to keep themselves safe and get what they need. But this becomes a tragedy when they continue to make that same bet for the rest of their life despite the consequences. Every challenge to their identity doesn't feel like a chance to grow. It feels like an attack on their being, their existence, because, functionally, it is. And Cluster B's need a lot of help in order to recognize that they're making this choice.
Once you see it this way, the projection, the splitting the world into black and white, the idealizing and devaluing, the gaslighting, the rage, the strange behavior that comes out of nowhere starts to make sense. That's because they're not a personality, they're a security system that runs the same program regardless of whether it's effective or not. The program is: protect the identity at any cost. The cost is objective reality, and relationships.
None of this excuses the harm that these disorders put on others. But it explains it, and to understand is to forgive. Forgiveness isn't for them, it's for you. The child who built that False Self did exactly what they needed to do in that moment. It made perfect sense at the time. The child didn't make a mistake. The mistake is the continuing false belief that the mask and the person underneath it are the same thing.
I know what it costs. In 2011 and 2012, I kept betting on an ineffective identity. I discovered that hell is a place we create for ourselves, not a metaphor for an afterlife. Hell is the place we build by refusing to change when reality demands adaptation. I got out by letting the old story die and writing a new one.
That's the difference. A healthy identity, faced with a problem it can't solve, asks: Who do I need to become? A fragile identity asks: How do I survive this without changing? Certainty is the tell of a fragile identity. Certainty is the opposite of wisdom, certainty is the opposite of faith, and faith is exactly what is required to keep remaking an identity, to keep adapting to a world that requires it. Faith in the world and the self keeps us malleable.
An aside: I told a friend about a stack of old notebooks I intended to burn recently. She couldn't fathom why. I replied "That person doesn't exist anymore."
Campbell, Jung, Winnicott, Erikson, each one with a different discipline and language, all had the same idea: psychological health is the willingness to surrender your identity and adapt to the world as necessary. The old identity is released the same way you'd toss aside any strategy that failed.
It is liberation, not loss.
Adapt or die.
Let the old identity die so you can adapt.
The hero's journey was never a story you complete once and hang on the wall. That's why it's told in a new way everyday. It's a loop. Healthy people run it constantly, in miniature, every time life hands them a problem the old version of themselves can't solve. The people who refuse it, the fragile identities, the Cluster B's who mistake the mask for the person trade the temporary pain of change for the ongoing pain of staying the same. That particular flavor of pain comes with daily compound interest, and they share their debt with everyone around.
If you're close to someone like that, the truth is hard to accept, and the truth is that they are never going to change. However, if they own their behavior and are actively seeking help in changing, that's worth a lot. But don't trust words alone. Actions always speak the truth, not what you wish were true. If they're trying to take that hero's journey and rewrite their story, you'll know based on their actions. People trying to change apologize for inappropriate behavior. Cluster B's who have no interest in changing never apologize or hold themselves accountable in any way. If that's the case, cut them out of your life, or let them consume you.
