#i highly recommend reading elinor greenbergs articles about it and also

[arrozaurus]

Hiya, I really love your thoughts about Rose and I esspecially love your descriptions of her characterisation. I was wondering if you had an similar thoughts on White Diamond? Since she is the antithesis and the antagonist of the series I would love to hear your thoughts about her. It's cool if you don't have any, I am just curious.

im glad you enjoy my writing and thank you so much for the question. im sorry i took so long, i really want to talk about this but i was trying to gather up material. i hope its apt

white diamond is an incredibly fascinating character from a psychological perspective. but i think you can only start to understand her if you dive into the psychology of the narcissistic adaptations. the more i read about it, the more i am convinced the scaffolding of her character relies heavily and intentionally on this description.

elinor greenberg, who is known for having an extensive research and experience working with people with these adaptations, states that all narcissists have a couple of characteristics in common:

lack of whole object relations: when we are young, we learn to recognize that people that can be bad sometimes, can also be good. we develop the understanding that people are painted in greys. but a narcissistic person lives eternally in that inmature mindset of blacks and whites. they cant see the greys, the shades of color, so for them people are either all good or all bad at a time.

lack of emotional empathy: because of this distorted view, they find it impossible to relate to them. they don't care about people themselves or their feelings and accomplishments unless they can make it about them, and therefore they lend no compassion when manipulating and humiliating others.

a hierarchical view of the world: because of this distorted view, a narcissist idea of the world is structurally like a very narrow ladder where only one person can fit in each flight of stairs: a "status totem pole" where people they consider beneath them will be absolutely worthless and people that they consider above them will be either idolized or threats to their own status.

a fragile sense of self: they have an atrocious lack of respect for other people's boundaries because of that failure at emotional empathy, and this is especially relevant for their "children" in the fact that they will ever be seen as an extension of the n-parent's self. the n-parent's self however... well, the narcissist is too busy fighting to stay up in that ladder to reflect upon what it actually means. a person dealing with a narcissist will find that it is impossible to discuss feelings, even if it's the n-persons feelings, because the truth is, there is nothing inside them that doesn't depend on others.

i can't even begin to express how genius the narcissistic portrayal in white diamond is, how well they were able to translate the real world descriptions into an alien context with metaphors taken literally. her color white is both at the same time a facsimile of how she doesn’t take anything in, and a hint of how she literally sees the world in extremes. or how she can physically and in a very real sense project her self into others and turn them into extensions of herself for her to “improve” according to her own ideals.

it is no coincidence homeworlds power structure is also scaled like the totem pole we mentioned before, with every gem lined up in their place going from expendable to insanely powerful, all of them working, sacrificing and supressing everything they are under a senseless preassigned purpose in order to please a mechanism that will never be satiated with their accomplishments. colonies after colonies, that will never be enough, never mind appreciated, by the narcissistic parent that is white diamond.

all of this doesn't deny the fact that gem society is a network of oppression. there are still privileged gems that help to perpetuate the system of power of the diamond. that happens at a smaller scale in these real families as well, which is why the trauma and the parenting style are often inherited by the next generation: you won't know how to unconditionally love, or even at all, if no guardian ever told you how to.

in the case for white, all of these narcissistic maladaptations must also come from the absence of a nurturing role model. and i think this makes so much sense when you look into her history: she was the first to emerge (implied) and she probably was alone for quite a while, which resulted in that she never learned to socialize, and that there was no one really there to watch her behavior. added to the fact that she was born very powerful with the almost godly ability to sprout life out of nothing, that is pretty much the recipe for the concoction of what pete walker calls a "fight type".

Many fight types avoid real intimacy by alienating others with their angry and controlling demands for unconditional love. This unrealistic demand to have their unmet childhood needs met destroys the possibility of intimacy. Moreover, some fight types delude themselves into believing that they are perfect. They see the other as the one who needs to be perfected. This defensive belief then entitles them to totally blame their partners for relationship problems. From Surviving to Thriving

you cannot even imagine how lucky white was to realize that her whole mindset was strangling everyone and sabotaging her chances to connect with other people. greenberg distinguishes a little fraction of narcissists that are "self-aware" enough to recognize they may have a problem and seek help to improve their ways, and it's usually because something they value is at risk to be lost or that they didn't expect to happen at all—such as an ultimatum, a divorce, or in white's case, the shocking confirmation that steven wasn't pink after all.