Nobody loves the externalizer

This book will probably appeal mostly to people who are internalizers because it’s designed to help people understand themselves and others, which typically isn’t a strong interest of externalizers. - Lindsay Gibson, Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents

Once upon a time, there was a child who received many beatings from their parent. The beatings were emotional and physical, for reasons “big” and “small.” However irrational or disproportionate the response, the child was always informed what they had done wrong. So there was always a reason. Had the child been “obedient” or done “better,” they theoretically could have avoided the abusive outburst. The child will cry while being beaten, and the parent will say they have no right to cry. The parent will outright say “what good have you done, that you think you deserve the right to cry?”1 The child will try to hold back tears but find it impossible. On a different day, the child will cry for an entirely different reason, and the parent will mock them for being emotional. So the child tries their best to be good and appease the one who beat them. The child then goes on to become class valedictorian, have partners who are only sometimes loving, and have a successful career due to their hard work and social sensitivity.

In another home, there is a child who considers themselves happy. They make messes, scream, and hit other children who displease them. The teacher finds this child difficult, is concerned for the child who does not stop hitting the other students even when the teacher says “stop it” but the parent says that the teacher is just another bully and has it out for the child for no reason. The child is allowed to do whatever they want. Sometimes the parent is happy and good-natured. Every night they hug and kiss the child before going to bed. Other times, the parent is violent without making sense. There is no obvious correlation between the child’s actions and the parent’s outbursts. The child is subject to their abuser’s whims. This child turns to alcohol, echoes the outbursts of the parent, and finds themselves out of control for reasons they don’t feel it’s their duty to know. They were wronged.

From a child development and material outcomes standpoint, the first child, the one subject to authoritarian abuse, is sometimes considered the more fortunate one. This child is likelier to make it to adulthood not in incarceration, with fewer behavioral issues and a lower risk of substance abuse. They may be a self-harming people pleaser and anorexic, but it’s still considered favorable to being a “mess.” They keep up appearances because they always need to be in control. If they slip up, there is a hell to pay. If there are no consequences, they will create the consequences and punish themselves.

This theoretical child from the unpredictably abusive and permissive parent may likelier to grow up to be “visibly” troubled, less likely to conform to the norms and rules of our society. Theirs was a world indifferent to reason, a world where bad things happen to them without cause and they could do nothing to stop it. They are slaves to their emotional impulses.

Of course, neither of these are fixed outcomes. These are only two archetypes, among many. And there are others who are simply anomalies who don’t fit into archetypes. We make space for that here. But our culture venerates the first child. The first child picked themselves up by the bootstraps, “made the most of a bad situation,” and exhibited the kind of “growth mindset” that all victims “should.” Never mind the way they suffer by taking on responsibilities that aren’t there. Never mind their issues with control or their belief that they deserve to be treated poorly because they aren’t perfect.

Certainly, not every internalizer is a perfectionist. But they tend to be correlating characteristics.

“This idea — that who you are abides somehow outside of what you do — is the defining fantasy of our culture, and it appeals particularly to children. The world of the middle-schooler is a world of types. My son talks incessantly about VSCO girls and Karens and other categories of people he has learned about from YouTube. He described a classmate as “the kind of person who borrows your pencil and doesn’t give it back,” i.e. she borrowed his pencil and didn’t give it back. For a while he tried to propagate a type of his own invention, “the Suzan,” whose behavior was ill-defined but tracked closely with that of my mother of the same name. It did not catch on, and eventually he concluded that he was not the kind of person who could come up with memes.

The Suzan thing was a real won-the-battle/lost-the-war moment for me, since one of my specific ambitions for my son is that he not try to make a career of saying stupid things on the internet, but my more general ambition is that he challenge himself to master new skills and try things of which he was not previously capable. His school calls this idea a ‘growth mindset.’ A growth mindset encourages us to try new things and treat setbacks as an opportunity to grow, which is better than the ‘fixed mindset’ that we’re either good at something or we’re not.

I agree! Seeking to explain this concept, the school sent home a flyer divided into two columns. The left column was headed “People With Growth Mindsets” and listed traits like ‘sees setbacks as an opportunity to grow’ and ‘welcomes criticism as part of the process.’ The right column was headed ‘People With Fixed Mindset’ and listed things like ‘think they have predetermined limits.’ Even when professional educators set out to tell the kids their qualities were not fixed, they explained it in terms of types of people.

I submit that this habit of thinking is bad for us — particularly for adolescents, and especially for adolescents who know of their biological fathers only that they impregnated and abandoned six teenage girls of whom their mother was the fifth. It is disheartening, when you have devoted a large portion of your life to teaching a boy that he can achieve what he wants by working hard and choosing actions that express his values, to look at the cover of his school planner and see a word cloud — ‘responsible,’ ‘safe,’ ‘thoughtful,” “diverse,’ the irritatingly un-parallel ‘spirit’ — with the giant word “BE” in the center. Don’t be things, middle school children! Do things!” - Dan Brooks for The Outline

“If you are extremely high agency, probabilities based on the average person don’t apply to you.” - 2024 proverb from a member of the future “permanent underclass”

(“Permanent underclass” is a meme among software engineers, who say things like “you only have one year before being locked into the permanent underclass,” because of AI.)

I’m generally more similar to the internalizer archetype, and I suspect that my upbringing fostered a disgust towards “victim mentality.” Beyond what I was taught at home, the world never seemed to reward the unrepentant. I mean, obviously, it does. But that’s not the narrative I was given. There’s this clear hierarchy. Those with a “fixed mindset” can never expect to succeed in our capitalist society, and those with “fixed mindsets” are the most likely to see themselves as never able to succeed.

The “fixed mindset” seems to go hand in hand with “victim mentality,” a quality that I’ve been trained to see as repulsive. These people operate under the idea that the self cannot be fixed, that the world is out to get you, that it’s everyone else’s fault and never your own. To me, these seem to be people who participate in learned helplessness.

But I now do see them as genuinely helpless in their own unfortunately unpitiful way. It’s not that I don’t feel bad for them; it’s just that I’d rather stay away. That type of mindset plus rejection sensitivity (as introduced to me by Eurydice) is no joke. It somehow seems more compassionate to see them as broken than to see them as having made the wrong attitude choice. To them, it doesn’t feel like a choice.

I admit that feels like an area of cultural bias, whether national or socioeconomic or ethnic. I imagine that in other cultures, taking accountability could be considered a mark of shame and the strong never admit wrongdoing. If you shift blame and freak out at someone, you become the alpha because everyone else has become scared of being the next target.

I’ve also come around to the idea that self pity could be a necessary step to self-improvement. If you don’t acknowledge that your pain is a problem, you will walk around with a bleeding open wound and get infected. It’s not something to “indulge” in. It’s possibly a necessary part of the healing process. To avoid it can risk further damage.

So who loves these people? Who loves the externalizer? Clearly, not the author of Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents. She writes for internalizers and externalizers of internalizer experience, portraying externalizers as their troubled and needy tormenters.

One positive quality I’ll say about externalizers, specifically from a Christian perspective, is that they actually “run into the arms of God.” These are people who spend their lives looking for someone else to fix them and their problems. There is a humility to this. Original sin is an answer that makes sense, and God is an eternal ever-loving being who promises to help them no matter who they are or what they’ve done. They become zealots, and often you find them giving testimonies about recovering from drugs or alcohol abuse.

Internalizers tend to have a harder time accepting the idea because they are fixated on the idea that they must “earn” love and forgiveness. So they spurn the forgiveness that is freely given to them by God, choosing to live in a form of hell they’ve created in their minds. Here, they are free to be loveless, unloveable, as horrible as they’ve been told they are. They are free to reinforce those ideas. Internalizers seem more attached to their pain and prone to fetishizing it. They don’t see value in themselves unless they are a martyr. They don’t understand that there could be a life of peace.

To be clear, both of these coping mechanisms are bad. A person is not meant to respond the same way to every situation. Sometimes, the right answer is to crash out and get help. Other times, you fix it yourself. There is a balance that should be met. I’m sorry to “noble savage”-ify the externalizer, but the problem with the internalizer is their belief that their self-imposed suffering is somehow nobler than making others suffer. A friend of mine said that a person who makes themselves suffer cannot be trusted to fully be there for the suffering of others. That may sound a lot like “if you don’t love yourself, how can you possibly love others?” but I think it’s different. In theory, a state of constant crisis and emergency in one’s own body leaves little room to help heal others.

One book I read recently that portrays the misery of being an internalizer is Ghost Chilli by Nikkitha Bakshani. Consider this a “post coming of age” novel. The protagonist Muskan shares a lot of qualities with the “aspirationally suffering eldest daughter.” She’s a writer for a notable food publication and is college-educated with college-educated friends. Although her family disrespects her, by most definitions she is an obedient Indian-American daughter. And none of her distorted thinking is appealing to me. I would say Muskan suffers from “second best never good enough” disease but I think she’d counter me and say something like “Second best? I’d be lucky to be somebody’s fourth choice!” You see what I mean by distorted thinking? She really has that quality of “what is so wrong with you that you think there’s something so wrong with you?” But also, I get it.

We get scared of letting people down and it’s easier to “lower” others’ expectations by having a horrid opinion of yourself. We’d rather hear people say “you’re not as selfish as you led me to believe” as opposed to “HOW DARE YOU!!! YOU SELFISH ASSHOLE!!!” I mean obviously, but I just mean they already have thought to themselves “HOW DARE YOU!!! YOU SELFISH ASSHOLE!!!” so many times that they hope they get used to it and it stops hurting. We want to be able to defend ourselves with self-awareness and steps we take to improve it. One day we want to be seen as someone who is fighting their natural nature, and is therefore more noble for their choice to try to be good.

And that does not work. Outcomes are always better when you like yourself. I didn’t invent that rule; it’s just the way it is. But I still really am against that RuPaul quote, “If you don’t love yourself, how in the hell you gonna love somebody else?” It sounds nice but might be one of the worst things you can tell someone who hates themselves. A self-loathing person may find it an accurate reflection of reality and use that as an excuse to withdraw from their loved ones. If I don’t love myself, that means the love I give others is an inferior type of love, which makes me unworthy of love. I should cut myself off from everyone I love because it’s not fair to them to receive this horrible burdensome parasitic “love” that I offer.

That’s the kind of thing Muskan might think. She’s working in this crumbling world of 2010s media at jobs that sound pretty cool but are actually either incredibly understimulating, where she is disrespected and underestimated or where she is crazy overworked and underpaid. Cat Marnell’s How to Murder Your Life would be an apt comparison, other than the fact that when Marnell caught the magazine bug, she landed in a world of abundance and expensed limo rides. Muskan would be one of the nice, overworked (never the show pony) gals at XOJane who might thanklessly cover for Cat while she got high on angel dust. Muskan is “responsible” to the point of overwhelming self blame. I find her neuroses familiar to me in ways that often aren’t flattering enough to have been depicted honestly.

I enjoy Ghost Chilli’s little slice of online media life, the kind that I glamorized for a while even as its participants always felt that they were getting the short burning end of a stick. I could picture her perhaps getting minorly played by Nathaniel P, who ghosts her after they get borscht at a tiny super authentic Ukrainian deli. And then of course, at some literary event where Muskan is feeling insecure because she is too “literary adjacent” and not an “intellectual heavyweight,” she sees Nathaniel P chat up Liesel, her pretty friend with low self-esteem who works at The Times and think something incredibly ungenerous about herself.

As unpleasant as a self-loathing main character can be, I can’t help but root for Muskan. If this were 30 years ago, I might have wanted her to find her Ruth Reichl at Gourmet. (Read Save Me the Plums, too! For a warm, sumptuous memoir about a woman who’s good at her job.) But for now, I’ll just say that Ghost Chilli is a cozier book than it seems like I’m giving it credit for. It read really comfortably, to the point where I was staying up late to finish it. Breezy enough to read performatively at a cafe while drinking a hot warm drink, but with the emotional heft to keep me invested.