Monthly Archives: October 2022

Psych 101

Traumatic experiences in childhood often have long-term effects [1] on a person’s ability to trust, to form close bonds with others, to be honest. Let’s just apply a little psychology 101 to this needy disturbed, dangerous when wounded guy who’s constantly in the news.

His father was known to be a psychopath. He was a famously hard charging judgmental workaholic who parlayed millions of dollars in government grants and his own great business acumen, and willingness to take risks to keep and pass on every dollar of his money, into a billion dollar empire. The father had little use for his young fuck up son as he was grooming his charismatic oldest son to succeed him. Imagine the psychopathic father’s disappointment when he learned that his heir apparent was not a killer, didn’t have what it takes to take everything from everybody by constantly fighting to the death. So the much younger brother, an incorigible bully with limited smarts and very poor people skills, was eventually chosen and groomed to be a killer like Dad.

You don’t get much love from a psychopathic father, the best you get is approval when you carry out his orders. It’s a hard life for a sensitive young person.

When that sensitive young person was in his period of most intense need for his mother’s love and protection, before he was two, his cool, slightly distant and distracted mother became ill and was out of the house for many months, while her youngest son cried for her and got disgusted looks from psychopath dad when he got home from a long day of making the world in his image.

In other words, the time when this kid most needed love, understanding, appreciation and guidance, he was left alone and made to feel weak because of his whining. Is it hard to understand the kind of adult this hurt little boy would likely grow up into?

Imagine his relief a few years later when he got a younger brother, someone he could take out his frustrations on by tormenting every day. Kind of restored the little fucker’s belief in God.

Look at the rest of this now widely adored, widely despised, infamous, beleaguered rich reality TV star/F POTUS. You can draw a straight line from his early childhood injuries to his total war against anybody inclined in any way to contest his will.

And we are all, here in the United States and worldwide, much the poorer, and our lives much more precarious, than they were before this twisted creature came onto the world scene to prove to his psychopath daddy that he’s not a loser.

Winner!

[1]

Adverse Childhood Experiences, Part 23

Demons, fear and reflexive distrust

There are demons within us all, stirring terrors too formidable to face unless we’re forced to.  They are extremely painful to confront, even when we’re aided by somebody who has the skills and gentleness to help.  My father, a man with more demons than most, and better reason than most to host so many of the merciless little fuckers, always stressed that everybody has his demons and that it’s impossible to know what to make of someone else’s demons.  Never truer, in my experience, than with my father.   

Although, towards the end of his life I came to understand the source of some of my father’s major demons:  regular childhood face whippings from his mother, daily hunger, excruciating, humiliating poverty, illiterate, defeated-by-life father, low expectations from his extended family, a feeling of shame for being stupid because he couldn’t learn to read — they only figured out he was legally blind when he was about eight and the brand new New Deal made it possible for him to have his 20/400 vision corrected with glasses (he went on to get a graduate degree in history).   If that’s not enough childhood pain to support a thriving colony of demons, I can only imagine what the rest of the story was.  At the very end of his life, he still believed he’d been the dumbest Jewish kid in the haunted small town he grew up in, by far.

Our most ferocious demons make us rage sometimes.   If someone touches one accidentally WATCH THE FUCK OUT!   Often, after losing your cool and lashing out, you feel embarrassed, particularly if the people you care about are victims of your anger.   If one of your demons is shame, it is humiliating to acknowledge that you did something wrong and hurt somebody. You will have developed strategies to not feel the burning of deep shame.  Better to get angry again, indignant over and over, than to feel mortified that you’ve hurt someone you care about for a weak reason, or no reason you can talk about.

You stop trusting the person you hurt, if they won’t shut up about their need to talk about what the hell happened, their need to put everything on the table.  If everything is laid out clearly, your understandable human weakness is exposed.  Weakness may be understandable to others, but it’s intolerable to you, because your demons will immediately start painfully sodomizing you for being imperfect, weak, capable of hurting others who, sometimes, maddeningly, refuse to pretend they weren’t hurt. 

If you’re vulnerable to the need to be perfect,  you’re in for a lot more pain than the average schmuck who can forgive herself for sometimes acting badly.   We all sometimes act badly, no matter how diligently we try not to hurt people we care about. 

The only way back to mutual care is through making amends and forgiveness.  Forgiveness takes place after the hurt is acknowledged, it can’t happen in any meaningful way if the person asking for forgiveness insists the other person is a pussy who simply can’t put the past in the past and insists on bringing up a painful situation that nobody can do anything about because it’s in the past, duh!  

Many people find it impossible to forgive themselves.  The hurt we suffered at our own hands can only be forgiven by being honest and gentle with ourselves.   It works with the self the same way it does with others.  We truly didn’t mean to hurt ourselves, acknowledge the accident, cure it with taking better care never to hurt ourselves that way again.   This doesn’t mean shutting ourselves off from others, it means accepting they we’re humans who do stupid things sometimes and there is no point whipping ourselves over them, much better to learn important life lessons from mistakes and avoid repeating the same bad pattern.

When you hurt somebody, and they tell you they’re hurt, listen to them, do not allow a demon you can’t control to jump in and angrily cut them off.  Understand why they were hurt, empathize, assure them you will do your best to not do that to them again.  The same goes for when we act in a way that hurts ourselves.  Unless you do yourself the kindness of letting yourself off the hook for dumb mistakes, the hook gets sharper and sharper, sinks in deeper and deeper.  In the end, that hook is never coming out.

The alternative to making amends is that the truth of hurtful past events becomes poison to you, and the one you hurt.  A clear recitation of the thing you can’t talk about is seen as an aggressive, threatening frontal attack.  You marshal your armies, but they have very little to work with in defending something that can only be defended by spraying ordnance wildly.  You accuse, express distrust, and fear, sprinkle in some regret, quickly followed by more anger, and tell them how merciless they are.   Direct questions can be uncomfortable, an assault. What can you say to something like: was anything I said inaccurate, unfair, unkind?  All you can do is hurl something back “you’re unfair and mean!”  Sometimes we are at fault, and if we never yield, do the same thing over and over, fight responsibility and the idea that we can change our behavior in any meaningful way, that’s about it for that relationship.

There is no genius mediator, supremely skilled at her job, who can fix that distrust, denial, anger and inability to forgive yourself enough to reach compromise with people you love, in a single short session where everyone gets a chance to express how they were hurt and the mediator makes sure each one knows they’ve been heard.   At least, I can’t picture that kind of alchemist mediator.   If there’s only mutual hurt and distrust going in, how does the process have a chance to heal anything?

Apologia

Sorry, I keep forgetting that everyone I know is much more sensitive than I am.

That was not your loud, cloying fart, it was my auditory and olfactory hallucination and I should seek psychiatric assistance for my florid psychosis.

I’m sorry for your pain and sad that I can’t carry it for you. Maybe meds or talk therapy will help.

A blessed life

There are among us, I’d imagine, people who don’t need to struggle with demons living inside of them.  Impulses and fears that gnaw and chafe and cause us to exert ourselves, sometimes at terrible cost, not to succumb to terror, shame and rage.  There may be some people who simply don’t have to contend with demons, though I doubt it.

I mentioned to an uncle that his nephew, though I don’t know him well, strikes me as someone who doesn’t wrestle with many demons.  Personable, strong, good looking, doing meaningful work that he is good at and enjoys, surrounded by loving friends and family, he seems to move through the world with grace and ease.  I told the uncle that I imagine he also has some demons.

“He has no demons,” said the uncle.  “He’s never had to really suffer in his life so far, he’s never had to deal with any of the pain the rest of us know.  He will, but up until now his life has been blessed.  From the beginning he’s been loved, protected, respected, treated as well as a person can be treated.”

Pretty good blessing, I thought, even though the uncle’s formulation of his nephew’s demon-free life seemed a little glib.