Do Ga Ni Tang Part Two

I realize that there is no Do Ga Ni Tang Part One, it's really Sul Long Tang revisited, but whatever; Sun Nong Dan has become a near weekly ritual; though not always the same day of the week.

Today I arrive at 10:30 just in time to get the breakfast special price. By the time I order, every other patron has left, and the waitress shuts off the music. This reinforces the idea that the music is designed more to be an irritant than to provide ambiance; they want you to eat and get out!

The relative silence suits me as I go through the ritual of tasting and flavoring my soup.. It's as if circumstances have all contrived to create my own little oasis. The universe revolves around me for a few seconds, before I renounce my narcissistic tendencies. I suppose everyone displays narcissistic behavior at times, but there are those who consistently reframe situations to make it about themselves in some way.

Narcissism perpetuates itself; narcissistic parents produce narcissistic children - kids get neglected when the parent makes everything about themselves and resort to the same behavior to get the attention they didn't receive as children. It's even more challenging because narcissists can't/won't be told anything - their narcissism won't allow them to accept an idea unless they believe it was their own idea to begin with.

I used to enjoy watching the sitcoms "Everybody Loves Raymond" and "Two and a Half Men". It took me a while to recognize that a common link was the narcissistic mother in the family and seeing the consequences of that in the behavior of their sons. I resonated with that even though my mother doesn't act like either of the mothers' characters in those shows and it took me a while to accept the idea that my mother's behavior fit the category of the behavior of narcissists n part because it was camouflaged by shame based values of Asian culture and in part because I then had to deal with the consequences of that behavior. In short, my mother defined being a good mother by doing certain things that she thought a good mother should do, which usually wasn't what I needed at the time. My not getting the attention I needed at the time prompted me to seek getting that attention elsewhere.

We all exhibit behavior like this at some level when we make it more about appeasing our own anxieties about a situation. I imagine that each of us has thought something along the lines of: "I couldn't forgive myself if I let you ________", the point being that we make it more about our sense of guilt instead of the other person's well being.

An irony I have found is that one can behave exactly the same way in certain situations but be motivated entirely by the joy to be found - and when everyone finds it, it does become about you - but not to the exclusion of everyone else. The bottom line, we still end up doing good sometimes even when the motives are less than pure.