Remember "Gerald McBoing-Boing"? He was the cartoon kid who riveted everyone's total attention with his ability to make virtually any sound out of his mouth, including things like car wrecks, train whistles and tap dancing. Well, the "center stage" has the same kind of effect on people. They are absolute past masters of gaining and maintaining attention ad infinitum by being incredibly colorful, exciting, entertaining and delightful -- or by being loud, invasive, entraining and demanding.
The fact is that the "center stage" is desperately driven to "keep those cards and letters coming in" 100% of the time, lest they vanish in a puff of smoke. They were so assiduously ignored, neglected or restricted as soon as they started to initiate interactions, around 9-10 months of age, that they ended up with a horror of abandonment-annihilation. And of course, they assumed it was all their own fault, so they are both staving off death and seeking to earn the "God Housekeeping Seal of Approval" when they are so continuously needy of attention. Attention is literally the lifeline of their body and soul.
HOW DID THEY GET THIS WAY?
The parents were in no position to handle the responsibilities of parenthood because they were so love-starved that they wanted oceanic love from the infant. Or they were so grossly incompetent at intimacy and availability that they couldn't have been there for the infant if their life depended on it. Or for any number of other reasons, they were simply not able to be there for the child, though their heart was in the right place, or at least they bore the child no ill will -- at least until the child started demanding its needs incessantly.
In effect, they then had no room at the inn for the child because of all the stress the child caused them. The child couldn't provide them the oceanic love they needed, and on top of that, it was demanding that they love the child! So in essence, the parents tried to ignore the existence of the child. They devoted everything they had in the way of denial, repression, selective attention, and immersion in activities and heavy restrictions to keep the child from imposing and intruding on them. "Children are to be seen and not heard" couldn't fit their functioning better as a description.
The "center stage" reacted to this with a massive survival effort to get the parents to provide their lifeline. With the inevitable result that the more the parents tried to ignore the child, the more intense and insistent the child became. Out of this escalation spiral came two things. One was a massive amount of assertiveness and demandingness on the part of the child. The other was an ever-growing repertoire of guaranteed attention-getting mechanisms -- some utterly brilliant and captivating and others incredibly alienating and overloading.
Unfortunately, it all fell on deaf ears, so to speak, and the individual was left with a "mausoleum" for an intimate environment. Exuberance was met with silence and non-response, demandingness and invasiveness was met with intense restriction and withdrawal, and self-destructive activity resulted in disinterested distant cleanup operations, period.
BUT, just to stir the stew continuously, the family did get something out of the "center stage's" never-ending attention-generating activities. The "center stage" got the subterranean message that the parents needed the individual's expressiveness to do it for them, to generate vicarious experiences for them, and to act out for them. Needless to say, this precipitated a huge double bind for the "center stage", which only threw fuel on the already roaring bonfire.
In the more severe situations, where there was active rejection and other forms of more serious pathology on the part of the parents as well, they treated the "center stage" as a non-entity, and there was a lot of subtle punishment for being, needing and wanting. There was also a lot of soul-slashing messages were sent to the "center stage" along the lines of, "If only you weren't born, none of this would have happened!".
The resulting scarcity of attention, combined with the lack of love expression and the difficulty of impacting produced a situation where the individual was reduced to putting all their eggs in the weakest and least meaningful form of support, attention. The trouble was that they not only had to overcome indifference, they also had to overcome resistance. They therefore end up in effect "selling their souls" for the attention and impact for the worth-validation and love that was implied as a promissory note, but which was never forthcoming.
WHERE ARE THEY COMING FROM?
The fundamental existential question for the "center stage" is, "Am I?", and their primary state-of-the-moment question is, "Am I still here?". They were so neglected/rejected that they feel at a very deep level that they may well not even exist, and therefore need continuous reassurance that they do. They become a fanatic attention-controller for acknowledgement and validation, and all incoming energy goes way inward and very deep, like a bottomless well. It all translates out to the right to live, and attention is their evidence that they have another "reprieve" -- for the instant.
They are, of course, extremely fear-driven due their fixation at the mid-infant stage of emotional and interpersonal development, with all of the implications and ramifications of that. They are death-terrified of giving up their demand tactics for fear of losing the only power they had in their family and in their life. They are literally afraid they will die if they don't limelight-seek or if their desperate efforts don't prevent an interruption of the "spotlight" -- they are utterly gut-convinced they will die on the spot.
The "center stage" is an individual who bottom line feels that they neither deserve love nor can really hope to love, and they feel they are violating the moral order and their parents' ("God's") wishes by continuing to exist. They even often fantasize precipitated grief, guilt and misery in their family by their self-destruction, and the more severe ones are not above trying to live out all such strategies.
They are paranoid for notice, impact and acknowledgement that they are important, that they matter. It is such a life-and-death lifeline that they become quite extreme in their desire to dominate every scene, to hold everyone's eyes and ears, and to win over all competitors. They feel that they are nothing because they were never loved or willingly attended to, so they are in effect existence-deprived and impact-starved.
Because of the basicness of their need, they have almost no interests outside of themselves. They are so worth-uncertain that they systematically denigrate competitors, and non-attenders will be coerced and guilt-induced. They experience themselves as incapable of contribution and competence, only as sources of entertainment, distraction, "cuteness/cleverness" or humor.
Some of them do get into super-service as a self-validation and gratitude-earning strategy, but they are the exception to the rule. Others get into continuous self-destructive activity for the attention involved. Still others get into super-challenge-mastering (the Olympic gymnasts come to mind here). They are constantly trying to impact and impress, and to make the world aware of what they are doing.
Bottom line, they feel worthless, useless and powerless, due to their feeling that they have no function other than to divert attention to themselves. They have an overwhelming need for the feeling of power, so they do a lot of excitement-seeking and thrill-generating, which characteristically is the only way they think/feel they can have a potent influence on anything.
Their whole experience is basically a continuous massive cosmic loneliness-avoidance and self-reassurance undertaking. Unfortunately, the more severe ones ultimately do end up alone due to the extremities of their behavior, and when this happens, death is usually not far off.
HOW DO THEY FUNCTION?
"Center stages" have a very poorly developed ability to structure themselves and to self-regulate, due to the impoverished and primitive inner identity upon which to draw. They therefore have little to rely upon as their means of guaranteeing that their needs will be met. As might be expected, therefore, they are very controlling, demanding, egocentric, distracting, histrionic (excessively dramatic or emotional), and continuously dominating in their behavior.
They can't allow anyone to do or be anything that doesn't centrally involve them. They are past masters at utilizing whatever is happening around them to put themselves at the center of it all. They have a response to every occasion to turn it to their attention-domination advantage. They are very flexible but very primitive in their functioning.
They will do things like hook another person's scripts to get their attention by "entering into a game" with them. They will also use questions about the other person to give them grounds to make self-reference. They will self-denigrate to such an exaggerated degree that it pushes people to reassure them and to allow or even urge them to stay on. They are full of irrelevant self-references, and everything is connected to anecdotes of personal history "proving" how wonderful they are with hyperbole. They will do a phony laugh to another person's comments and then follow through with 6 or 7 stories of their own.
Withholdings attention from them is like waving a red flag in front of a thoroughly aroused bull, and it enrages and escalates them beyond all reasonable limits. They go to quite spectacular behavioral extremes of aggression, crudeness, and dramatics if they feel threatened with "nothingness" or apathetic indifference indications. They always have to be right, with it, on top of the situation, and at the center of everyone's attention. Pathetically, though, they get an impish smirk when they do get attention -- which they experience as undeserved "get away with".
In their desperation to impact, they have great difficulty allowing themselves to be impacted. They also tend to react to other people's capabilities and contributions with belittling and undermining, which can even reach the blistering assault level. Unfortunately, giving them feedback only feeds the "monster" and adds fury to their attempts along the lines of, "I've obviously got to work much harder at it to make up for this!".
The tragically sad and ironic outcome of all this that others are led to ignore, adapt their presence out, domination-escape, and retreat into protective apathy with them -- all the things their parents did in the first place. Needless to say, this only profoundly compounds the situation and the intensity of their behavior. Even when they are being incredibly engaging as only they can be, it can have the paradoxical effect of being too much of a good thing, and it turns people off -- with disastrous results of course.
They are massive attention controllers because they so desperately want to connect, but they don't know how, which only feeds the fire. They also sense the self-set-up pattern of their drainingness, and they know they will be abandoned because of this. This all re-validates their gut feeling that they don't deserve connection, especially as a peer (as opposed to a parented child).
This makes their process in intimacy very difficult. They have such a draining lifestyle that it continuously drains out and drives intimates away -- their worst case scenario and worthlessness-validating experience. To make matters worse, they can't stand to have their intimates be a peer or superior in any sphere, and when the intimate starts to grow (threatening to grow away), they get really abusive and point out the intimate's every weakness. They effectively castrate and incapacitate their intimates by over-demanding and total narcissistic domineering and undermining. And sadly enough, it has the effect of sooner or later driving the intimate away . . .
HOW CAN THEY BE HELPED?
Intervention involves a lot of love input and realistic worth-validation from relationship therapy figures. It also involves a gradual introduction of reality feedback and insight-induction, once the individual is assured that they are in an unconditionally accepting relationship -- which is no mean task of course. Once their worth-anxiety has subsided enough, training in competence and contribution can commence.
WHAT IS THEIR PURPOSE?
When the "center stage" clears their worth stuff out, they retain their sensitive antennae, their brilliant ingenuity and their colorful ways. They then become self-appreciating, self-sharing, and all-enhancing in a delightfully entertaining manner. They can also use their superb presentation and projection skills to convey great amounts of wisdom drawn from their experience.
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