Category Archives: Ahimsa

Telltale sign of what you’re up against (from a work in progress)

Chapter 69  Telltale sign: simple questions lead to anger

When you are confronted by an indignant person who has shown over time that they can never be wrong, no matter what, even the simplest request for clarification or empathy will fuel their anger.  People who can’t be wrong, on pain of utter humiliation, have only one aim when they feel challenged — destruction of the enemy.

When you encounter someone who gets mad every time you need to talk about something hurtful that happened, you will find that kindness, patience, friendship, extending the benefit of doubt, love, humor, generosity are useless against this kind of anger. The reason for this anger is that being imperfect in the eyes of others is unbearably painful and humiliating to them. If you insist on being understanding, while needing to finish a badly needed conversation, you will incur only their rage and desire to silence you forever. Trust me on this one, I’ve lived it more than once. 

F__ doesn’t deny that he told me, after weeks of icy silence, “I’ve walked away from friendships for less than what you did to me.” G___ regarded me coolly as her husband drew his line in the sand. I reassured him of my friendship and he seemed momentarily soothed, although this mild, anticlimactic outcome, instead of the desired outrage on my part, meant that the planned hit was not carried out, much to determined G__’s momentary disappointment.

Here’s the thing I know now that I was blind to then. It is essential to understand that when you are in an incoherent conversation with people desperate never to be wrong, all problem-solving tools become useless.  I should have calmly asked F___ what it was that I did to him. This would not have led to any kind of good outcome, but F____’s resulting temper tantrum, with tactical provocation from righteously enraged G____, could have opened my eyes, saved me months of anguish trying to solve a puzzle that had only one solution, a solution I resisted with my entire soul: mutual death. There is no way to avoid it in a conflict with this type. A year and a few months later they were as irreversibly dead to me as they’ve made sure I am to them and anyone who knows them.

What reason to kill when it is a blessing to be merciful, particularly to a loved one? Only one – you are in the hands of someone so damaged that death for you is the only outcome where they feel they are saving face, somehow not being humiliated by having to acknowledge imperfection.  Better, they reason, to righteously kill you than to be seen as a cowardly murderer, or a liar, or someone consumed with unslakable, inchoate rage that is so easily provoked.

We encounter situations where there is a perplexing question that must remain unanswered. The reason for not even asking these questions is having experienced a ferocious reaction to a reasonable question over and over. It makes one hesitant to set off the same kind of savagery in a moment that appears to be emotionally fraught. Experience teaches us that a meaningful answer to a painful question is beyond the capability of someone damaged on a primal level.

Here’s a koan that has become quite familiar to me, I’ve heard it now in five or six restatements but the sentiment is always identical. F___’s version was: You have to understand that I am too upset to hear why you are upset. In other words: my actual pain is much more important than your claimed pain.

There is no question that can clarify this or make it appear to be the reasonable statement of a friend and partner in understanding. Months later I asked F____ about this and he conceded it was not something a friend says to his close friend when they are both shaken up. Notably, he did not express regret or apologize for it. The obvious follow up questions all become useless after you learn that any of them leads to fresh indignation and anger.

This is the wall we face when confronted by a conclusory statement meant to stop us in our tracks, put us on our back foot, silence us, disable us in a fight to the death. The fight to the death starts long before someone who is not destructively damaged is aware of it.  It is unthinkable, except to those compelled to kill, that this kindred soul I thought I knew and loved intimately is determined to beat me at any cost, spread lies to destroy my good name, kill other friendships and forbid their adult children to get back to me.

It is mind-fucking, even after you have seen it a few times in your life. I suppose it takes the trauma of experiencing it as an adult to force you awake, to make you aware that the signs of this intractable sickness are always identical, that motherfuckers who act this way are all interchangeable, they must be seen as perfect or they will make sure you’re good and fucking dead.

Not being allowed to speak bites (plus upside)

When I say that somebody is not letting me speak, it’s not that they’re really able to make me stop speaking, but they make it clear, over and over, that they’re not willing (or able) to hear what I have to say.  That’s what I mean by “not being allowed to speak”. More precisely, it is a refusal to hear anything they don’t want to hear.

A person intent on not letting me speak constantly reframes the conversation, accuses, becomes indignant if I persist, insists on things that are often ridiculous and refuses to discuss the absurdity of their untenable claims. So I can, of course, speak as much as I want, even after the other person physically walks out of the room, hangs up the phone or cuts off communication, but “not letting me speak” is a way of saying someone is making it plain that they will never tune in to what I need them to hear.

Finding yourself in this situation, and feeling the human need to express what you are feeling, you may take up a musical instrument, begin to paint,  become an interpretive dancer, master any one of a number of things including the art of writing clearly. This clear expression of the things you need to say that others in your life refuse to hear over time becomes a necessity, an important muscle that you exercise every single day.  

In exercising this muscle you feel a certain mastery of things that are otherwise impossible to hold steady before you, the crucial things others refuse to let you say by refusing to hear you.  I’d have to call this strong impulse to do something creative and soul-soothing to express what you need to put out there a major upside of being told to shut up by people who claim to love you.

The unreliable narrator

Some people, when they hear a story, assume that it’s a mosaic of strategically placed lies and omissions deployed to benefit the storyteller. The storyteller, they assume, is a salesman, like everybody else, giving only details that will help them sell their product. Isn’t this what all politicians do, with their research teams and spin doctors, speechwriters, donors, advisors, pollsters, surrogates and influencers? Isn’t that what everyone does to try to close the deal? Since everybody will say whatever they need to say to get over on somebody else, truth skeptics reason, why would you even hold lying against someone, as long as it’s done with style and a touch of humor?

Creating reflexive skepticism about knowable, objective facts, cause and effect and common sense, has been the long, deliberate, generously funded, meticulously engineered project of the far right. It is at the center of the far right’s eternally angry focus. Guns, for example, don’t kill people — lying, insane libtard cucks do, radical left corporate media does, those who call for the mass murder of fetuses, defenders of rigged elections do!

The idea that facts are infinitely malleable and that all conversation is 100% transactional is a staple of narcissism, the inability to ever be wrong about anything. If nobody believes anything but what I say right now, if faith in the existence of discoverable truth itself is destroyed, well, every kind of irrational monster can be released, nobody can ever work out any disagreement, conflict will inevitably be fatal and those entitled to keep every privilege for themselves will be the sole beneficiaries of this war of each against all. 

When you hear two opposing stories and one makes much more sense than the other, you believe one narrator is more reliable than the other. Compare these two stories about a long, combative, nightmare marriage.  

One: The wife always, mercilessly and without any cause at all, tortured the poor husband for thirty years. She was ruthless and never let up on the poor devil, who hung in there valiantly for the sake of the children, but was eventually forced to ask for a divorce.

Two: The marriage was doomed from the start — they fought from their first date until the finalization of their divorce. The engagement was called off before the wedding, the wedding had some tense moments, the honeymoon was fraught, fighting was continual until they both finally threw in the towel — after the husband was forced by his wife and the marriage counselor to confront his best friend and accuse him of deliberately trying to destroy their marriage.

I don’t know about you, but the first story makes much less sense to me than the second, though they are both pretty insane stories. We evaluate sense and buillshit through the lens of our experiences. How many conflicts have you experienced in which only one side was completely to blame for all the ugliness? It makes little sense to describe a hellish marriage as entirely the fault of one party. It takes two to Lambada, after all.

When evaluating the reliability of a narrator, use the test that fucking Boof Kavanaugh’s mother taught young Boof: use common sense. What does the person telling the story stand to gain, what do they stand to lose? What smells funny about the story? What makes no sense, in light of your lived experience, what has the ring of reasonableness? Which story is a more complete explanation of the thing being described?

Guys like Boof, of course, always reason backwards from the outcome they desire to the argument they need to achieve that outcome. There are liars out there, plenty of them, and an individualized curse on each one of these cynical motherfuckers. There are also more and less reliable narrators, as life teaches us over and over. This is just a simple fact of life here on this ball of confusion.

What perversely determined parents teach their offspring

On Passover, when Jewish families gather to retell the story of the long journey from slavery to freedom, we are instructed to remember that we were once slaves — and to identify with those who are oppressed. We’re supposed to take humility and compassion from our history, but you can be taught,  at any age, by a willful parent, hurt and eternally angry, that personal history can be erased in a single broad stroke, along with humility and compassion. 

On Yom Kippur, the holiday of repentance and forgiveness, these same pious teachers will instruct you that certain people who love you and have never harmed you don’t deserve to be forgiven for what it is said they did to a willful, eternally angry hanging judge with the right to never be questioned.  

HaShem looks down and shakes His head, thinking “It’s on me, I gave these motherfuckers free will, after all…”

Positions for the mediator

Party one:

I got my back up after he was very threatening and aggressive to me. He claimed that I hurt him very badly, traumatized him, in fact, the way his father used to, so we were suddenly talking about his traumatic childhood, and not anything that actually happened but after I got my back up, I apologized to him. I told him I was sorry that he made me feel threatened, and that I had acted incorrectly by getting my back up when his defiance reminded me of terrible battles with my daughter, which was very upsetting to me. 

Even after I apologized, and months later, even a year later, he couldn’t let it go, he kept obsessively insisting on talking about what he claimed I did to him. He wouldn’t let it go. He kept trying to make it my problem that he had a bad childhood and he tortured my husband for supporting me. He wouldn’t forgive us, no matter how many times we apologized, even though he kept saying he did forgive us, that he would “always” forgive me. He can’t forgive anybody.

Party Two:

After she flew into a rage during a minor disagreement, she glared at me steadily and did not respond to anything that I said. She literally just stared at me, tight-lipped and beaming hostility, as if I was a defiant child and she was my overwhelmed mother, trying her best to hold it together in the face of such disobedience.  I later accepted her apology, pathetic and blame shifting as it was.  I told her I had more to say about this but that I didn’t want to speak while I was still upset (after having not slept a minute the previous night) because I didn’t want to say anything that might damage our long friendship. 

Although she told me she’d be happy to hear what I had to say, she never let me say what I needed to say, the two times I tried she had temper tantrums.  My calls, texts and letters were ignored.   They began accusing me of being mean to them. Her silence, and her husband’s, went on for weeks and months at a time, complete with angry threats and false accusations against me, libels they’d later spread to our mutual friends and their children, their indignant claim that I was an enraged child irrationally trying to blame them for my obvious problems.

Mediation was the only possibility for fixing things, they finally said, after refusing to talk to me without a mediator present, but would not agree about anything — the conflict that sparked the end of our 50 year friendship, the tensions that mounted during that troubling holiday, the extreme coldness by the end, the angry fallout afterwards — claiming that the mediator would know what to do, without any input from the parties.  When they insisted that no agreement was needed, or possible, I understood that mediation was a ruse, a facially generous offer I would have to turn down, once they heaped impossible conditions on it. The beauty was that I could then be plausibly blamed for blowing up their desperate, endearing peace talks.  The one thing my friends can never forgive is someone who can never forgive.

Surviving betrayal

I was lynched recently by a small group of my oldest friends. It was not the traditional necktie party of places like Texas and Louisiana where a worked up crowd grabs you, puts a rope around your neck, tortures you a bit and lets you hang, sometimes burning you afterwards, sometimes before. My lynching was conducted in slow motion, over the course of months, with many a twist and turn as the rope was tightened, and loosened, and I managed to forget about it for days at a time, hoping for the best. Fortunately for me, when these righteously aroused fucks finally pulled the rope tight I survived.

It may seem offensive to describe my sudden and unanimous ostracism by friends of five decades as a lynching. Lynching is offensive, one of the most disgusting things humans do to each other. Perhaps we might better think of it as a pogrom, a worked up crowd comes to your neighborhood, breaking windows, plundering, setting things on fire, beating, killing and showing perfect contempt all around. There is no anodyne image to conjure being put to silence forever by a group of your closest friends.  

You may not speak about it with any of them, which feels like a great betrayal. since these are people you used to have heart to heart talks with. They will not listen, do not care about your feelings, since they’ve already blamed you, convicted you, excommunicated you and felt perfectly righteous doing so. A secret trial is all a despicable criminal deserves when the crime is so hideous, inhuman, unforgivable. 

You will undoubtedly feel a strong urge to defend yourself, set the record straight, correct outright and obvious lies told about you, but let me assure you, as I would have assured myself had I known sooner, nothing you can say will change an outcome that has already been agreed to. You can’t unsee the face of contempt and the firm intent to make you shut up forever if you have a problem being treated the way you are lyingly complaining about being treated.

Human society functions by believing stories, sometimes absurd ones, that explain the world in a way that makes emotional sense. Love is the highest value, and kindness to others, and forgiveness. Makes a lovely story to believe in., to live by. Someone who does not love, is cruel to others and can’t forgive is clearly beyond redemption. Tell that story about someone with enough passion, get a length of sturdy rope, let the guilty party talk his head into the noose and the rest follows naturally.

Live and learn, to me, is a much better formula for a good life than live and be enraged and never take a single lesson from anything painful. Many people are average, many below average, many are emotionally incapable of anything beyond the superficial performance of friendship. As long as everyone is smiling, joking, hugging and laughing, everything is fine in a group of old amigos. As soon as conflict arises and one accuses another (usually behind their back) of being a vicious, sadistic, unloving, unforgiving Nazi the real fun begins, masks come off and you see what your friends are actually made of.

We have a strong need to belong to a group, to be attached to people who love us, think like us, understand and forgive us. This attachment need explains the enthusiasm of sports fans, fans of angry politicians, cults, militias and so on. We are also born with a strong need to be authentic, to be listened to and heard, to be allowed to express things that trouble us, talk about things that need to be fixed going forward.

As I have learned, in my seventh decade of life, there are people who grow up with no tools to resolve conflict, no way to compromise. When you get into any kind of conflict with one of these super-competitive, hierarchy-embracing folks good will, extending the benefit of the doubt, demonstrations of friendship, patience, kindness etc. are of no use. If you have done all these things and are treated like a monster, it is not you, trust me. It is right to extend loving indulgence to friends, until they demand that you shut the fuck up about what you claim is your hurt and accept that they have every right to do the same whenever they want and to shut you up any time you make them feel bad about themselves. Fuck those putos.

And a very happy, productive 2024 to all!

 

Narcissistic rage is not just anger

Anger is a response to something that feels like an attack. When the attack subsides, and the threat is gone, healthy anger, having served its evolutionary purpose, fades away. Rage is a different, deeply rooted, much more destructive creature. When it is unleashed it calls for destruction.

I grew up in a home where outbursts of anger were common. The thing that took me decades to understand was that sometimes this anger was rage. Rage has no end. It can’t be reasoned with or placated, ever. It erupts like a volcano and melts everything in its path.

When you encounter rage, know what you are up against. If a person flies into a rage because they feel defied, and cannot be calmed down, it tells you they lack an adult ability to resolve conflict and operate at an immature emotional age.  Being stuck in the helpless feelings of hurt they had at three years old is a shameful thing, and the humiliation of being seen losing control fuels rage, the desperate cover-up of rage and the reflex to blame someone else, everyone else, for your own inability to control your emotions.

It took me years to understand why telling a person prone to rage that they played a role in causing pain sends them into a rage. Rage is their defense against feeling vulnerable, which they equate with being fatally humiliated. In attacking someone else they feel momentarily powerful. If you tell them they hurt you, they immediately compare your claim of pain to their own much greater claim to much deeper pain. You will never get anywhere in this contest of competitive suffering, truly a game for losers.

A person who becomes enraged believes the unbearable pain they have endured in silence entitles them to tell anyone else in pain to shut up. Solipsism is a feature of a person who cannot be wrong, the fatalistic view that there is no possibility of anyone understanding what someone else thinks or feels — so shut up about your unknowable interior world. The best response to an enraged person is to get away from them.  

Schematic of those who can never be wrong

Every conflict is fatal

You learn that when you are in a conflict with someone who can’t be wrong, no matter what, that you will always be killed in the end.  Your death is preordained and can only be avoided by sacrificing your integrity, agency and any need to be authentic. In addition you must assume complete responsibility for the other person’s unhappiness, indignation and rage.   Failure to assume all blame, or relinquish control, integrity and responsibility are capital offensess to someone who can never be wrong.

they behave with frightful consistency

The narcissist always behaves the same way and one case is hard to distinguish from every other case.   They cannot be wrong because they believe they are better than others.  They are better because they are perfect, charming, beautiful, generous.   This grand self-image is very fragile and easily offended by anything it perceives as critical.  Once threatened with humiliation— the only alternative to grandiosity — this type always behaves the same way — a grim, desperate, sometimes irrational struggle to prevail by any means necessary because they cannot lose.  Losing is death to them and being a loser is a slow death sentence and any scenario where they don’t prevail is an unbearably humiliating outcome. The struggle is always to the death, and they never intend to be on the short end of that contest.

Change equals death

They cannot change.  Change requires honesty, openness, willingness to feel and acknowledge pain, the ability to accept fault, the understanding of what a true apology is, vulnerability, the ability to accept causing someone else pain, to sincerely make amends and many other things that a narcissist can never do.

When they argue that you cannot change they become determined to prove it to you.  Remember that they can’t be wrong, no matter what. If you offer your undeniable improvement in controlling your temper, they will prove you are not immune to anger, no matter how insanely they must turn up the heat to prove it.