The Psychology of Dexter - Bella DePaulo [75]
REACTIVE/REFLECTIVE
In healthy families children are allowed to embark on a path of self-discovery. Through this journey, they become independent, proactive individuals who are guided through life by the feelings, wants, and needs that they develop along the way. This is in contrast to children of narcissistic families who are not able to learn about themselves because they are consumed with anticipating the expectations and needs of their parents. Their own feelings and thoughts may even be buried and not part of their awareness, having gone unacknowledged for so long. As a result, their emotions and actions, rather than being driven by internal motivation, remain, like Echo’s, dependent on others.
The element of skewed responsibility in the Morgan household laid the groundwork for Dexter and Deb to become reactive /reflexive individuals. As both were recruited in fulfillment of Harry’s needs, neither was given an opportunity to grow independent of him. Instead, both brother and sister were consumed by thoughts of pleasing their father, waited to learn his expectations, and then reacted.
Harry recruited his adopted son to satisfy his need to catch bad guys, grooming Dexter to be a killer. He was able to do so in part because Dexter saw his father’s yearning to put away criminals and his pain when they slipped through the cracks in the legal system, and was compelled to respond. In “There’s Something About Harry” (2-10), Dexter had a flashback to Deb’s birthday party years earlier when Harry received bad news about a case he was working on. Juan Rinez, a murderer he had been chasing (and the pimp Dexter later kills), was going to be set free. Harry, highly agitated, shattered a beer bottle and then, calming slightly, went to Dexter and said, “I did the right thing in training you. This just proves it.” In reacting to Harry’s need by participating in his training, Dexter got to enjoy spending time alone with his father and received a great deal of positive reinforcement for his actions. And for a time, Dexter became a perfect reflection of his father’s expectations—a robotic serial killer with a certain sense of morality. Flashbacks of Harry in early episodes conveyed his sense of pride in his son.
Dexter began to change after Rita and the children entered his life. Rita expected him to produce his own feelings and judgments, which had long been buried underneath the code. Encouraged by her, Dexter began to shake off his narcissistic family upbringing and started down a path of self-discovery. In the process, Dexter learned that contrary to Harry’s teachings, he could feel. Moreover, he wanted to feel for Rita and the children. This revelation and subsequent surge of emotion was shocking to Dexter and made him question all that he thought he knew about himself. His ensuing internal conflict was evident during a scene in “An Inconvenient Lie” (2-3) when Dexter stated:
He’s all I’ve got. Nothing else could love me. Not even, especially not me. Or is that just a lie the Dark Passenger tells me? Because lately, there are these moments where I feel connected to something else. Someone. It’s like the mask is slipping and things, people that never mattered before are starting to matter. It scares the hell out of me.
These feelings spurred Dexter to re-evaluate his priorities and before long he was getting loose with the code. Threatening his newfound independence, a critical Harry began to appear in Dexter’s visions, perhaps reflecting Dexter’s unconscious worries about his own emotional growth.
Like Dexter, Deb is also a reflection of her father’s needs. When Harry brushed off or harshly admonished her needs for attention and affection, she began to play a supportive role, anticipating and responding to her father’s needs in the hope of gaining his approval and attention. She learned that