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Chuck Bass Analysis

A few weeks ago, I got the chance to read an article about shame-based personalities that immediately made me think about Chuck and I decided to take the time to write an essay about it. I’ll be using lines from the article to write this dissertation, which means it’s only right to credit it. You can find it here. The blog has many fascinating psychology articles; if you’re interested in the subject you should definitely follow it.

As the article I’m referring to explains, blaming and shaming a person are two different things. While blaming someone implies recognizing a fault in the person’s behavior, shaming someone isn’t about guilt or responsibility; it doesn’t require the person to do something that the accuser interprets as a mistake. Instead, shaming means affirming there’s something wrong with the person accused; in other words, the fault doesn’t lie in the person’s actions, but rather in their personality.

Before I begin exposing my thoughts regarding how and why Chuck’s personality was built through a dysfunctional shaming process, it must be said that both the aspects I’ve mentioned – blame and shame – played a role in his life.

For most of his life, Chuck has lived with a shattering sense of guilt coming from the conviction he had killed his mother by coming to life. I tend to think Bart has never really put into words this accusation, but it is sure that, as a child and later on as a teenager, Chuck read this through the lines of his father’s detachment. Consciously and not, Chuck learnt to consider himself responsible for his mother’s death, because the explanation he gave himself helped him to give a meaning to the emotional and psychological abuse he was subjected to.

That being said, the guilt he took is a “blameless” one; in fact, it might be more accurately described as an original sin, a visceral, ancestral fault that has nothing to do with responsibility (even if Elisabeth had actually died giving birth, the baby wouldn’t have been guilty of her destiny).

This irrational, inconsistent and implicit accusation suggests that there’s something terribly and irremediably flawed in Chuck, it somehow hints to the fact that his role in the world is to destroy – and metaphorically, to kill (“He hated me. It makes sense if his beloved wife died giving birth to me. Sometimes I swear he thinks I killed her” Chuck, from 2X05)

It is likely that, in truth, Bart blamed Chuck for the simple fact that he was Elizabeth’s son – the woman who had cheated on him and eventually left him to raise a child he probably didn’t even want. In Bart’s mind, having her as a mother was enough to make him a worthless and inadequate person – and irreversibly. This “definitive verdict” is indeed expressed through the story he told Chuck: not only Elizabeth “died”, but she was also “killed” by her own son. It’s a vision that allowed Bart to hate them both and set Chuck for being an eternal disappointment to his eyes.

It is definitely a form of shaming. The article mentions a few examples of shaming statements, which sound very similar to many things Bart told his son all the way through the series:

• “You were a mistake; I wish I’d never had you.” || “No matter how I’ve tried to turn you into a man, it still remains the one, big failure of my life” (6X09)

• “You’re useless; you’ll never amount to anything.” || “Nice gesture, but misguided as usual” (2X10), “I haven’t seen anything in the last year that suggests you have what it takes. If anything, you’ve been a disappointment” (3X12)

• “You’ve ruined my life; you ruin everything for everyone” || “Bart thought it would be better if the family bonded without me for a while” (1X14), “Letting people down is your forte” (2X10), “Every time I think we’re making progress, you show your true colors” (2X12).

According to the article, adults shamed in childhood have some traits that I recognized in Chuck as well. I’ll mention each of them and try to see how they showed in his behavior.

1. They are afraid to share their true thoughts and feelings with others.

This first trait is pretty obvious in Chuck’s characterization. However, truth to be told, his difficulty in sharing his thoughts and feelings is only the tip of the iceberg.

Chuck is indeed emotionally crippled. He doesn’t simply have issues when it comes to conveying his feelings; his problems start with his inability to recognize them and then accept them. Season 1 is all about it; Chuck can’t give a name to what he feels for Blair (“I feel sick, like there’s something in my stomach…fluttering”) and when she hurts him, he can’t metabolize the pain he feels and ends up hurting her as well in a way that is absolutely childish – an act of spite.

This is obviously the outcome of an education intended to make him think of feelings as weaknesses. Chuck grew up with the idea that detachment meant strength, while displaying emotions – or even having emotions – was a synonym of vulnerability. And vulnerability was the ultimate fault, the one thing Bart could have never accepted.

Episode 3X12 (but, in general, season 3) is pretty enlightening in this sense, because it gives us an accurate idea of how Chuck has always interpreted his father’s behavior and words – and, as we’ll find out later on, his view of Bart was sadly truthful.

The Bart Chuck sees condemns his love for Blair (“You opened your heart to Blair and that made you weak”), for it makes him immature and unsuitable for being the businessman he is expected to become. The image of Bart tells Chuck he doesn’t have “what it takes”. This conviction Chuck can’t let go of is so weighty and so deeply rooted that it will be one of the reasons that will lead him to betray Blair in order to save The Empire – “I did what I had to to win. I couldn’t let my feelings cost me all that I’ve built” (3X17).

As I said, Chuck’s perception of his father was exact. In episode 5X24 it becomes clear that he judges his son’s love for Blair and in general his feelings as a demonstration of his irresponsibility other than what keeps him from being a “great man” and from “growing up”.

It’s only logical to assume that Bart’s reiterated insistence to urge Chuck to repress his emotions and, overall, his disdain for the mere existence of those feelings and the consequential shaming, led Chuck to try to suppress them as much as he could.

The constant repression is something I’ll talk about later in the essay while analyzing other traits. Though, it is important to underline the fact that Chuck tends to keep his emotions under control through a rigid process of suppression, until he can’t contain them anymore. This implies that when he finds himself unable to shut down his feelings, they tend to blow up in a devastating way – for himself and for those close to him.

It’s something that, with time, Chuck definitely learnt to handle better. It was indeed one of the crucial points of his growth; he still tends to diminish his feelings, but he manages to cope with them in a healthier way. By the end of the series, for example, he is able to accept Blair’s support and to contain the shame he feels towards his weaknesses; it doesn’t happen right away and it takes patience from her and also the special delicacy she reserves him, but eventually he lets her in fully (check this scene from episode 6X08).

However, Blair remains one of his few exceptions. He is only able to show his vulnerability to a very restricted group of people who he is able to trust. Outside his “circle of trust”, he is still an especially cold and detached person – and I assume a pretty ruthless business man too.

2. They are terrified of intimacy and put up walls in relationships. They also fear commitment as they expect to be rejected. “You couldn’t handle feelings,” Blair tells Chuck in episode 3X12, giving us, as usual, the most precise insight on him and his difficulties dealing with emotions. Nevertheless, she comforts him, reminding him that he’s “not like that anymore” and that he’s “becoming a man in a way that his father never was”.

It is absolutely true. In spite of his fear of weaknesses, Chuck has feelings; he cares, loves and is exposed to deep emotions. He is, though, used to block them, out of shame and fear; fear of vulnerability, but also fear of the feelings themselves, of their meaning and their consequences.

The basic consequence of caring is the construction of a bond with another person, with all the risks that come with it – dependence, pain, abandon. Accepting to have feelings with someone means accepting the possibility of rejection and rejection is, to Chuck, absolutely terrifying. One of the most insightful quotes that explicates it is from episode 2X01. Trying to explain Blair why he didn’t spend the summer with her and abandoned her, he says: “I was scared you’d see…me.”

Here lies the core of Chuck’s personality: the conviction that no one could love him for who he is, for he is impossible to love and also impossible to “fix”. He is irremediably broken, a destined to disappoint.

The article I’m referring to also mentions that people with shame based personalities struggle with feeling of worthlessness and often feel ugly and flawed. In Chuck’s case, this is the consequence of a growth and an existence that has always been marked by rejection. “Unfortunately, all I know if what he didn’t want,” he says, talking about his father, “which is me”.

Chuck’s deep self-esteem issues have their origin in the way he’s been shamed and neglected all the way through his childhood. As a result, he is honestly convinced of his inadequateness and of its invariability. The lack of value he sees in himself is deeply characterizing; it guides, sometimes subtly and sometimes blatantly, most of his actions and decisions. For example, he was incapable of waiting for Blair on the top of the Empire State Building because he expected her not to come, since he didn’t think he deserved her arrival. I don’t want to discuss whether his thoughts were valid or not; it’s simply not the topic of this essay. What I’m trying to point at is that it was tragically easy for Chuck to believe that she didn’t love him anymore.

Inevitably, starting from these presuppositions, commitment and especially intimacy become incredibly scary to Chuck. It’s not the dedication and the faithfulness they require that scares him; Chuck is, indeed, a profoundly devoted and loyal person (he values family, he has never cheated, he gives importance to long lasting friendships). Instead, his fright has its origin in the changeable nature of relationships: they’re hazards, they bring with them the possibility of being abandoned.

Only that, to Chuck, abandon isn’t a mere possibility, it is almost a certainness. Trusting that people he loves won’t leave him is incredibly hard to him, since abandon has been a constant in his life. He expects to be abandoned – and, according to him, rightfully so. People who leave him are justified by his worthlessness and their decision to give up on him is only logical.

This partially explains why he is so forgiving; recognizing people’s faults and responsibilities is almost superfluous to him, since, in some ways, he fundamentally thinks he deserves to be hurt. In this sense, it is important to mention how Chuck never really stopped justifying Elizabeth’s behavior; by the end of season 6, in spite of all the pain she caused him, he still hadn’t completely given up on contacting her (5X19), he still had her picture in his room and the combination to his strongbox was still her birthday’s date.

In some ways, this is also connected to the lack of love and affection that sadly marked his growth; he craves to be loved so much and, at the same time, he expects so little from those who are supposed to love him that he’s willing to take whatever he can get from them and to excuse even the most horrible betrayals (see how he allowed Jack to come back into his life). Every bit of care and respect look almost miraculous to him.

As the article explains, another fundamental trait in shame-based personalities is a debilitating false guilt. As I mentioned at the beginning of the essay, guilt plays a central role in Chuck’s life. Though he isn’t shy and definitely doesn’t pay attention to people’s judgement, he does tend to feel responsible even when he’s not. Similarly to what happens with his tendency to forgive, Chuck also expects to be accused and accepts the way people blame him, even when he has no faults.

This ingrained sense of guilt, which clearly has its roots in the childhood and the teenage years spent living with the thought of having caused his mother’s death, leads to the conviction of being unable to make the woman he loves happy. Each time he lest Blair go, he does it because he is genuinely persuaded that he’ll end up ruining their relationship and making her miserable; he keeps giving up on her to give her the chance to be with a better man, a less troubled, lighter person.

3. They may be narcissistic and act as if they have it all together; alternatively, they may be completely selfless, almost to the point of being a doormat.

Both aspects of this trait show through Chuck’s behavior, since, as it often happens, his actions and his perception of himself tend to be extremely polarized and sometimes even contradictory – he goes to extremes.

He builds and invincible persona, “Chuck Bass”, who is powerful, indifferent, perfectly controlled; Chuck Bass is the façade he presents to the world, it’s his vanity, his mania of grandeur, it’s the self-satisfaction he feels when he’s called infamous, it’s his egocentrism and his arrogance. It shows through his eclectic style, through the self-celebratory way he conducts his business (his hotel is “The Empire” and it’s permeated with his notorious reputation), through the way he indulges the sort of legend created around his name. He enjoys his fame, his influence and he’s power hungry. Though somewhat more superficial, none of these aspects are pretended; Chuck can actually be self-centered, self-important, he can be haughty, cold and unscrupulous.

Yet, at the same time, he is incredibly fragile and he is often incapable of recognizing his value. Sometimes, actually, his selflessness is so extreme that he becomes quite literally “self – less”, meaning that he reaches such a worrying level of self-loathe that he ends up neglecting himself; his needs, his ambitions, his desires, even his entire personality (the beginning of season four is the most blatant example of this dysfunctionality, but part of this behavior is also recognizable through season five). He is haunted by the thought people would be happier if he was out of their lives.

4. They have a pervasive sense of loneliness and always feel like outsiders (even when others genuinely like and love them). This trait is noticeable and inevitably linked with the ones previously mentioned. Reluctant to share his feelings and scared of building meaningful bonds with people, Chuck is profoundly reserved. Though he enjoys an active social life (parties, galas, ecc) and he is capable of being sociable (he is, among other things, also a hotel and clubs owner, so it is necessary), he still doesn’t let people get too close; he constantly maintains a distance between himself and the world and he often prefers spending time alone.

It must be underlined that Chuck is an especially selective person. Since trusting people comes so difficult to him, he tends to maintain a few but very solid relationships. As I’ve already mentioned, he defines a circle of trust – one that is terribly difficult to enter and, at the same time, almost impossible to exit.

Making a quick analysis of his relationships, it’s clear how discriminating and at the same time how devoted he is: Blair isn’t simply the only woman he’s ever loved, she’s also the only one he considered building a life with; Nate has been his best friend since they were five and Chuck has never showed the need to create the same kind of bond with anyone else; once he let Lily in, he never stepped back and was actively part of her family – he’s never stopped treating Serena and Eric as his siblings.

That being said, even with his most trusted people, Chuck is still hesitant when it comes to letting his guard down and allowing himself to be vulnerable in front of them. Even Blair, who is definitely the person he trusts the most, occasionally can’t reach him; she has to find a way to connect with him – sometimes she uses sex to get in touch with his blocked emotions.

As a result, Chuck has an inclination to isolate himself, since he considers his feelings incomprehensible and unacceptable; to his eyes, they’re too dark and too horrible. This idea leads him to the conviction that he shouldn’t share them and that he should deal with them alone. Aware of this belief, both Lily and Blair, actually, felt the need to remind him that they wouldn’t have left even in front of his worst moments (“The worst thing you’ve ever done, the darkest thought you’ve ever had, I will stand by you through anything” – Blair, from 2X13, “No matter how ugly and dark your feelings may be, you shouldn’t have to bear them alone. My love for you is unconditional” – Lily, from 5X10).

5. They are often defensive and find it hard to bear the slightest criticism. They feel as if they are being constantly watched and judged.

This trait mainly comes out through Chuck’s attitude towards business and work. He is extremely exigent with himself and incapable of considering failure as a sometimes inevitable part of life. He’s a perfectionist and has Stakhanovism problem. Being driven by an ambition that isn’t completely healthy, Chuck expects the best from himself and has a tendency to push himself too hard to reach his goals. The first few episodes of season 3 are a good example of this behavior. In episode 3X02 Chuck tells Serena: “My father turned his first profit by the time he was 22. I hope to do it by the time I’m 21.”

The fact that Bart is Chuck’s basis for comparison is a crucial element to analyze how this personality trait presents itself. His need to thrive and his greed for success partially have their origin in his fear to disappoint his father. Even after Bart’s “death”, Chuck kept trying to please him through his dedication to business; he was constantly trying to live up to the expectations Bart had.

Driven by his tendency to forgive and by his desperate need to justify his father’s faults, Chuck built, over the years, some sort of idealized image of Bart: the perfect business man, the person he was supposed to become but couldn’t – because of his weakness. And when, by the end of season four, this twisted view of Bart shattered, Chuck found himself having to survive a deep existential crisis. “Everything I believed about my father,” he says in episode 4X20, “everything I thought I wanted to be, what I needed to be for him, it was all based on lies.”

The article also describes people with a shame based personalities as adults who tend to feel judged and controlled. It is important to say that, being a libertine, Chuck generally ignores people’s judgement when it comes to his morality, to his way of living and to his values. This careless attitude, though, has a few essential exceptions.

The first exceptions are Blair and Lily. Chuck truly values their judgements and not only when they’re positive. Since he respects them and feels supported and understood by them, he’s willing to accept even their criticisms. Their opinions and advice have a positive effect on him and they generally manage to encourage him and make him feel better about himself – or, at least, to question his actions. The key of his trust and respect for them lies in the way he knows that behind their words there are acceptance and care. Their loyalty and their affection isn’t necessarily linked with his actions – they would always forgive him and love him for who he is rather than for what he does.

Bart, however, represents a negative exception. His judgement, whether actual or simply imagined by Chuck, influences Chuck’s behavior through fear of rejection

In some ways, for a long time, Chuck lived with the perpetual feeling of being tested by this unreachable man he had to satisfy (“It’s like he’s setting me up to fail from beyond the grave” Chuck, 2X15). In other words, Chuck turned his successes into a mean to finally conquer his father’s love and acceptance and his failures into confirmations that he didn’t deserve his father’s approval and affection. In both cases, affection – or lack of it – is linked to an action; Chuck’s personality, indeed, remains intolerable for Bart.

6. They tend to block their feeling through compulsive behaviors

I will start by stating, just to be clear, that Chuck isn’t an addict. As I said, everything in Chuck’s life is subjected to a rigid repression; and it definitely includes his use of drugs and his drinking. Under normal circumstances, even though he is a drinker and an occasional drug user, Chuck keeps his vices controlled.

That being said, it is true that, during moments of profound crisis, we saw him losing control and showing compulsive behaviors intended to keep him from feeling a pain he couldn’t handle. It especially happens when Chuck has to deal with loss – since he can’t elaborate it, he suppresses his emotions however he can (abusing alcohol and drugs, meaningless sex, ecc). At the beginning of season five, the repressed pain of losing Blair causes him to detach from his emotions in such a deep way that he becomes unable to feel anything – even physically.

It also must be mentioned that, for a long time, Chuck has had almost no respect for his life. Though the only time he was actually suicidal was after Bart’s “death” (2X14), he still showed till season five a dangerous carelessness with his health and with the value of his existence. He was often reckless and irresponsible; to use his own words from 3X22, he “didn’t care if he lived or died”.

His attitude towards sex, though, is probably the clearest example of a compulsive behavior implemented to suffocate feelings.

There’s no shame in sex and it’s not my intention to judge anyone’s sex life as right or wrong. Chuck was a precocious boy; he had his first sexual experience at the age of eleven, he is a very sexual, passionate person and eroticism certainly has an important role in his life. He enjoys sex and he’s completely open-minded about any kind of practices in this area.

However, it’s undeniable that he also uses sex to kill the pain. Generally, to Chuck, sex and intimacy don’t coincide. He doesn’t establish a connection with his sexual partners; he never sees them again after (in 2X21, he mentions he only has sex with people once) and sometimes entertains himself with escorts – the less emotionally demanding way to have sex ends up being paying for it. While sex (even random one) is usually an engaging experience, to Chuck sometimes it is a mere mechanical act that has the only purpose to numb sufferance and anxiety.

Blair, of course, is an exception. She was the first person with whom he managed to build a true connection, to the point that sex became fundamental in their relationship. With her, he reaches a complete emotional involvement; he concedes himself to her fully, he’s generous, trusting and attentive. It is interesting to notice, as I’ve already mentioned, that when Chuck is emotionally blocked, Blair consciously uses sex to reach out to him, for she knows that a physical connection with her will also lead to an emotive one (for example, she seduces him to bring him to say “I love you” in 2X25 and in 3X14 she has sex with him before he manages to talk to her about his mother).

7. They find it hard to establish and enforce healthy boundaries with others.

Considering everything I’ve explained, it is understandable why building healthy relationships for Chuck is hard – and why he had to work so hard on himself in order to handle them better. I think it’s safe to admit, at least from my point of view, that his relationships will never be completely “healthy” (although this is a pretty relative concept), for the simple fact that he is, logically, a profoundly and somewhat irreparably damaged person.

That being said, over time and thanks to a long and hard journey, Chuck learnt to cope with his daemons and to make his relationships work in a less dysfunctional way; he learnt that he doesn’t own the ones who he loves, that trust is fundamental for a bond to be unbreakable, that relationships work through compensation and ability to compromise and, eventually, that allowing the people he chose to spend his life with to see his weakest, most vulnerable sides doesn’t mean failing; it means accepting their love and their support and allowing them to make him stronger.

Above all, trusting people represented the biggest problem to Chuck and his inability to do so was often the main reason behind the crisis of his relationships. Having been tested his whole life by his father (it is my opinion, for example that Bart left him the responsibility of Bass Industries when he faked his death with the intention to see if he was capable), Chuck used to assume that testing his loved ones’ loyalty was the only way he had to be sure of their affection. It’s a behavior that often puts him in a lose/lose situation. What happens in 3X17 is probably the most exhaustive example.

Betrayed by his mother, Chuck tests Blair’s love and devotion in a way that sets him up for losing her: if Blair accepts to have sex with Jack, she gives him a proof of her love, but she betrays his trust; if she doesn’t accept, then her love isn’t what he expected it to be. Either ways, he’ll be destroyed.

His difficulty to trust people is also what brings him to be so jealous and to expect from others the same exclusivity he gives to relationships. In his friendship with Nate, for example, he doesn’t tolerate other people’s intrusions; Nate’s need to have a wider circle of friendships almost feels like a betrayal to Chuck, since his fear of abandon leads him to think those who love him will find someone better than him and realize he’s worthless.

His insecurity tends to make him suspicious and his inability to communicate his feelings and his needs leads him to manipulate people around him to keep them from leaving him.

In conclusion, I think Chuck shows all the traits of a shame based personality. Personality is, according to my view, an only marginally changeable element; consequentially, it is my opinion that the dysfunctionalities coming from the structure of personality Chuck presents still belong to his life and inevitably play a role in it. However, a journey of growth and evolution taught him to live with it in a healthier way, one that allowed such a damaged and emotionally deficient person to build a happy life for himself and for his family.

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