Pinocchio - My Own Personal Jesus

12”x18” encaustic/ mixed media, 2022 September.

“It’s not intentional. … All he’s trying to do is to recreate a new Mommy, and then separate from her, to become an individual. Rerun, reenact the early childhood conflict with much better, favorable outcomes… and you pay the price.”

“There’s a desire to fuse & merge, but the fuse & merge is only stage one. So the devaluation, betrayal is baked into the cake. ‘I have to fuse with you so I can separate from you and individuate. It’s not necessarily that I’m trying to hurt you, it’s just that I have to experience individuation, and there’s no other way. I need you, my partner, to be my mother for a while; to allow me to heal, and the only way I can heal is for you to allow me to discard you. Distinct from my original mother, I need YOU to let me go. I need you to allow me to separate from you to become an individual.’”

“’…I become an individual negatively, because all my experiences in my childhood were negative. The only way I know how to become an individual is to push people away.’ That’s how there’s a very strong correlation between narcissism and anxious-avoidant or anxious-dismissive attachment styles. That’s a fact. Their sense of self-identity critically depends on rejecting people. They feel that they exist when they’re not someone else. It’s an absence aspiring to become a presence, by rendering you to become an absence. ‘If I’m empty inside, if I were to succeed to hand over this emptiness to you then I will be fulfilled.’ It’s like Pinocchio. The narcissist cannot identify love as a basic skill – to grasp love, to digest love. But in emptiness, he’s an expert.” - Sam Vaknin