Category Archives: Ahimsa

Sadists view pain differently (notes for the ongoing work)

They say isolation is the best thing for pain, physical, and emotional. By they, I mean, of course, the sadists.  

A sadist will always insist that whatever hurts you the most is the best thing for you. After all, that’s their fucking credo, getting a superior thrill out of the pain they cause another.

“Don’t worry,” they will say “your suffering is really for the best. Truly, it’s the best thing for you and it will improve your character and your outlook both. You just can’t understand it because you’re too weak and by weak I mean fit to be dominated, to your breaking point, by the unsmiling likes of me.”

I never understood, until my fatal falling out with two old friends and their extended family, (actually, it was about a year before the fatal falling out became irrevocable,) that both partners in a couple can be both the sadist and the masochist.  They take turns in these roles and their grim struggle over who will give the merciless pain, and who will receive it at any given moment, is a highly addictive feature of their sacred bond with each other.

Mind you, these two were my very best friends, friends I never thought to doubt.   Thinking about it now, though it made me very sad to watch day after day of that vacation from hell, I have no problem with their painful arrangement, truly.   It is how they express their love for each other and it’s much different from my best idea of how to do that, but seeing them mercilessly at work on each other was not the deal breaker in our long friendship.  It was their shame and anger afterwards at being seen that way, and their need to blame and kill the witnesses, after destroying my good name among a large group of our friends.  Like enraged, morally rigid three year-olds in a brutal war to the death with a hated enemy with infectious cooties.  More grotesque by far at the age, nearing seventy, when the last chapter of our lives is unfolding, culminating, winding down, amid all the usual tragedies. 

They will blame their inability to reconcile conflict completely on you, and you will be the cause for all the terrible hurt, the rage and all the unforgiveness.  The worst thing of all, they will piously inform you and everyone else, is not to forgive someone who loves you.  And because you’re unforgiving, they will demand that nobody they influence or control forgives you either. Being united in punishing your inhumanly unforgiving nature is a rare instance of justice in an unjust world.  A group can really bond around a righteous cause like that.

The Aftermath (another thought)

The reflex to react with pain, to lash out, to righteously mete out punishment according to its due, is a feature among humans, and very common. The thing that matters most about this impulse to lash out is what happens next.  If you calm down, listen and speak softly, like mensches, like friends, this kind of human exchange usually pacifies everyone. If it doesn’t, if the conflict must last to the death and everybody must choose between good or evil, black and white, on pain of their own death, you may have to reevaluate the other parties in the conflict.

A word from our old friend physical pain

Emotional pain hurts like hell, unless you can isolate the cause and find some kind of peace.   Physical pain works the same way, but the immediate and inescapable physicality of it demands our full attention sometimes.

Emotional suffering can find a moment of relief in distraction and a good laugh makes your heart work and pumps out endorphins.  Pain in your body is a different animal, insistent and hard to distract yourself from for long. I am reminded of this every few minutes recently as I await tests to determine the source of bleeding (and inflammation, stiffness and pain) in my prosthetic knee joint, installed eight months ago, and see what the medical industry has in store for me next.

What the child of a narcissist never gets

If your parent cannot be wrong, ever, then you must be wrong whenever you feel they have hurt you, are being unfair or indifferent to you. It’s simple math, really. For a narcissist, admitting fault and expressing regret is as humiliatingly painful as conceding they are worthless and unworthy of love or respect. They live in a perilous black and white mine field of a world, zero-sum, win-lose, and see all conflict through that wary, limiting, reptilian lens.

The child never gets the chance to experience being treated fairly, since that could involve the parent, incapable of being wrong, feeling bad about something unfair, thoughtless or cruel that they did. The child never gets to be heard in any dispute, same reason. The child never learns from her parents that people can resolve disputes amicably, since all they will see in any dispute is a grim and threatening war face and the angry, unbending insistence characteristic of narcissists.

In another family the child might learn that everybody makes mistakes, and that mistakes should be acknowledged, forgiven and learned from. That an honest conversation can clear up a lot of misunderstanding and lead to real peace and growth. That feelings can be safely expressed. That one willful adult doesn’t always get the last word on everything. If you know that everyone makes mistakes, that talking things through can make everyone feel better, that sincere apology and forgiveness are real things, then you have optimism about life. You understand that change is sometimes necessary and growth is a real possibility.

If you grow up in the paranoid, adversarial world of someone who can never be wrong, all bets are off for hope and change, unless you do tremendously hard work to recover some optimism. If someone cannot be wrong they also can’t be introspective or vulnerable. A person like that has little hope for progress of any kind, only continued implacable domination of anyone they fancy weaker, or stronger, than they are.  

This video lays things out beautifully. The survivor of narcissism has a hard time grasping that basic things people not raised by narcissists take for granted, some kind of fairness, a bit of respect, the right to be listened to when troubled, are actually possible.

transcribed from the video:

I can tell you what normal is not. It is not normal to grow up hating yourself or wondering why you aren’t enough or for a child to believe that they are responsible for a parents feelings, or that a child who wants to just be seen and heard, and loved for who they are is being a needy brat.   It is not normal to be in a relationship where you walk on eggshells and feel crazy and feel that the only way to get your needs met is to give in on everything. 

It is not normal to hold back on saying something for fear of being shouted down or gaslighted.  It’s not normal to watch a parent being manipulated and devalued and broken down by your other parent. None of this is normal.  

Normal, if I were to speculate, is feeling safe, feeling that you are worth, at least, being listened to.   Normal is respect.  Normal is  empathy.  Normal is being able to say what you need and maybe the other person can’t or won’t meet it but they do not shut you down and tell you that you are selfish or greedy for wanting something basic. 

Normal is being able to have a normal disagreement, where everything is not  personalized and you are attacked for just not getting into line with the other person.  Normal is people getting along and collaborating and not just one person holding court.    But folks, normal, that’s all survivors of narcissistic relationships want and it is not grandiose to want normal.

You might be a writer

It could be that the reason you write every day, the reason you need to write and edit what you write every single day, is because you are actually a writer. This is a quirk of personality in some people, they need to clearly set things out in front of themselves, set them in front of other people once in a while.  Not everyone feels this need, you know.  You might really be a writer if you can’t stop, if you have to write every goddamned day.

On the other hand, you might just be a narcissistic jackass who thinks the same kind of things that everybody sometimes wrestles with in their lives, thinking these common thoughts are particularly interesting in your own case. Something that strikes you as an insight makes you feel a sudden need to put into words and share because doing this makes you feel focused and important for a moment, this fleeting thrill of self-revelation.

There are plenty of other hands, too. You might’ve really stumbled on something truly interesting. You might actually be an introspective, receptive person who thinks interesting thoughts, expresses them in a personal way that other people might actually be interested in, but who the fuck knows?  Unless, of course, you get paid for your words, in which case, there is no doubt.

If I were writing a book, and that’s not to say that I’m not, I would be steadily assembling all these pieces of a perplexing puzzle, a puzzle that vexes me, anyway, and struggling to tell the story in a way that might shed some light on somebody else’s similar struggle. How many asshole parents have left their adult children with partial puzzles, most of the pieces missing, set them into a dark, cold room and said, often from the grave “I always told you you were a clueless piece of shit.” 

Personally, I have no idea how many people need to write every day, there are no doubt statistics that can be pulled out of the collective anus, but that is a story for another day, and one that wearieth me too much at the moment to wrestle with and render in feeble, tottering words.

Until tomorrow, my friend, I salute you.

Happy 75th, Universal Declaration of Human Rights

Seventy-five years ago today, on December 10, 1948, the United Nations General Assembly announced the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR). 

At a time when the world was still reeling from the death and destruction of World War II, the Soviet Union was blockading Berlin, Italy and France were convulsed with communist-backed labor agitation, Arabs opposed the new state of Israel, communists and nationalists battled in China, and segregationists in the U.S. were forming their own political party to stop the government from protecting civil rights for Black Americans, the member countries of the United Nations nonetheless came together to adopt a landmark document: a common standard of fundamental rights for all human beings.

The United Nations itself was only three years old, having been formed in 1945 as a key part of an international order based on rules on which nations agreed, rather than the idea that might makes right, which had twice in just over twenty years brought wars that involved the globe. In early 1946 the United Nations Economic and Social Council organized a nine-person commission on human rights to set up the mission of a permanent Human Rights Commission. Unlike other U.N. commissions, though, the selection of its members would be based not on their national affiliations but on their personal merit. . .

. . . The U.N. official noted that the commission must figure out how to define the violation of human rights not only internationally but also within a nation, and must suggest how to protect “the rights of man all over the world.” If a procedure for identifying and addressing violations “had existed a few years ago,” he said, “the human community would have been able to stop those who started the war at the moment when they were still weak and the world catastrophe would have been avoided.”

Drafted over the next two years, the final document began with a preamble explaining that a UDHR was necessary because “recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world,” and because “disregard and contempt for human rights have resulted in barbarous acts which have outraged the conscience of mankind.” Because “the advent of a world in which human beings shall enjoy freedom of speech and belief and freedom from fear and want has been proclaimed as the highest aspiration of the common people,” the preamble said, “human rights should be protected by the rule of law.”

Heather Cox Richardson

Truth and Reconciliation

Reconciliation is a beautiful thing. After a bitter struggle, if the two sides can regain trust in each other, reconcile and live in peace, it is the greatest example of redemption imaginable.

What makes reconciliation so difficult is the necessity for truth, the requirement that what causes the pain between the parties is addressed, so that there can be real resolution of the bitter conflict.  Without truth, reconciliation is one side agreeing that anything bad that caused the strife is better forgotten than actually addressed and rectified.

Certain things can’t be rectified without tremendous willingness to forgive on the side of the person wronged. No matter how great the willingness, truth is always an essential ingredient of real reconciliation.  Without an honest back and forth there can be no real meeting of the minds, no chance for true redemption.

If I lynched your brother, no matter how badly I felt about it afterwards, I still lynched your brother.   If we want to have reconciliation and I insist that at the time I lynched your brother I was completely right to do it, that story will never be reconciled with what you need after I lynch your brother.  

If I tell you to get over that unfortunate thing that happened to your brother, (distancing myself from my actions with the passive voice, as first year law students are taught to do when they have to admit an inconvenient fact), we have nothing: no truth, no reconciliation.

We can’t heal from an injury inflicted by someone else unless that injury is addressed, unless we have some assurance going forward that the same actions that caused the injury won’t be repeated. Humans usually get very defensive after they lose control and do something atrocious, they would rather not look squarely at something terrible they may have done when they lost control. 

Much easier to forget, justify, split hairs about it, tell you to get over it, blame you for being unforgiving if you don’t get over their little mistake or their long pattern of consistently similar little mistakes.

When the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa worked, former apartheid torturers cried in guilt for what they publicly acknowledged they’d done to their victims. Sometimes the victims would be so moved by the showing of remorse that there would be tears all around and actual reconciliation in the face of deep, deep regret, after honesty that had to be painful as hell, but no real peace comes without truth. 

The harder that truth is to admit, the more essential it is that it be sincerely acknowledged aloud for peace to follow.  Without truth, reconciliation is as empty as any political slogan you can think of.

Death during life, a grim tragedy

When people you love, who you’ve long celebrated with and comforted in their time of sorrow, who have supported you when you most needed them, all turn their faces away, stop listening to you, tell you to shut up if you need to make an uncomfortable point, insist the problem is you needing to talk about something painful and dark, it is a little foretaste of your own death.

When we are in pain the first thing we need from those closest to us is for them to listen, to hear, to understand why we are suffering. If you are forcibly silenced, on the threat of expulsion from the community, you either meekly accept your muzzling, and live a bullied, depressed, greatly diminished life, or continue trying to make yourself heard. If you persist, with a righteously angry crew that can never be wrong, you will get to experience that special foretaste of death while you and your loved ones are, for the moment, all very much alive.

Chapter 60 Be the change you want to see

If you find yourself in a fight with someone close to you, feel threatened and believe there is no way out, you will fight to the death, or flee forever. If you are in conflict with a loved one, and knowthat experience and adult insight offer you more tools to resolve conflict than you had as a child, there is hope of healing.

In the first instance, the fatalistic belief that nothing ever changes for the better will keep you at war. In the second, there is a real chance for peace, if the other side also believes in learning from past mistakes, accepting human foibles, acknowledging the importance of reciprocity, mutuality, adjusting better to the other person’s actual needs.

My father, for whom the pain involved in trying to make his life less painful, a life rooted in hellish abuse and deprivation, was unimaginably intense, always argued that people cannot change themselves in any fundamental way. Those who “work” in therapy, he said, are merely deluding themselves, real change on a deep level is not possible. You cannot change your inborn nature, he always insisted.

I argued against this hopeless proposition, pointing to the improvements people I’ve known have managed in their reactions to frustration, sorrow, guilt, bitterness, the need to blame others. I offered my own changes for the better, my improved control of my temper, for example. He always dismissed the so-called change as self-delusion, which he could always prove, for many years at least, by goading me until I finally lost my temper. That was his triumphant proof that nobody can really change for the better. See, you claimed you can control your temper, but I can make you lose it, you haven’t learned to control shit! Even when I eventually learned not to lose my temper, it was only an act I was performing, one he could easily demean as superficial, self-deluded performance art.

Relentless in his unshakable opinion, as anyone arguing for fatalism must be, my father always argued that people might succeed in changing some superficial aspect of their behavior, but their fundamental nature was as innate and unalterable as mortality itself. His position, I have to say now, is a supremely depressing, deterministic one.

It is also characteristic of someone who cannot be wrong, no matter what. My father was right for himself, as I realized recently. He could not change, the first step involved was crippling to him. The same goes for anyone stuck in the narcissistic person’s tragic trap – either seeing themselves as perfect and never wrong or abjectly, humiliatingly unworthy of love and self-respect.

For someone who lashes out in pain and believes experience plus insight can lead the way to changes that will result in less pain, change is a tangible goal. You can learn to control your angry reactions, for example, and with practice you can become better at it. This step forward can lead to another, and so on. We are all works in progress, if we’re willing to work with our limitations, talk things out and learn new things. Except for those who truly cannot change because acknowledging the need for change involves looking at things that are terrifying to them.

Someone who lashes out in pain and cannot be wrong must believe themself perfectly in the right whenever they are in pain. They are in pain simply because they are the victims of some fucking devil. That devil must be killed. There is nothing that can be done except to identify, isolate and kill the source of pain.

If your emotions are inflamed, in a conflict with the wounds of a traumatic past reopened, and you can change, you have a chance to learn to redeem a ruptured relationship. If your emotions are on fire, in a painful conflict, and you are certain that change is impossible, you are simply fucked up and beyond the reach of redemption. All that is left is retribution against the devil who has wounded you.

If you also cannot be wrong, you must convince everyone else in your life that the person you are in a conflict with is 100% in the wrong and irredeemable. If a person is a piece of shit, has done horrible things to hurt you, and people can’t change, as you know deep in your heart, that’s all she wrote, set and match!

From time to time I try to imagine the accusations against me that caused a group of friends of fifty years to unanimously agree that I was beyond redemption. How atrocious my crimes must have been! The anger could not have been more unyielding if I’d molested all their children, repeatedly, while brutally blackmailing them all into eternal, shameful silence, while I’d been poisoning everyone’s food and drink for decades while lying with every fetid breath I exhaled as I pretended to be funny and angrily denied I was the living incarnation of Adolf Hitler, with a field of corpses to prove it and very proud of myself for what a sly pretender I am.

For someone as evil as this, unless they apologize to everyone they’ve been raping, assaulting and trying to kill for years, admit their heinous crimes and despicable nature and beg for the mercy of the jury, there is not even the remotest possibility of forgiveness. Welcome behind the scenes of the greatest, deadliest shit show it has ever been my horror to participate in!

I also note how painful it must be to live in a world that is as hopelessly, painfully rotten at death as it was during the earliest painful memory. The belief that people cannot change is truly undefeatable in people unalterably deformed by crippling past pain.

When my father insisted that people can’t change, he was speaking with 100% conviction. He knew, as well as he knew anything, that someone like him, someone so deeply damaged that he could not be wrong, on pain of feeling utterly, contemptibly, self-loathingly humiliated and undeserving of love or respect, could not change. Being certain you cannot change will effectively prevent any effort to do so and keep you convinced, since if you can’t do something nobody else can, that people, all people, are incapable of making meaningful changes in their lives to have more peace and less war to the death.

As for somebody who makes a little positive progress toward a less painful life? KILL THEM!

The desire to heal vs. the need to win

If you want to heal a conflict with a loved one, you need to listen to everything they need to say and consider it carefully, without getting defensive or angry. This tricky process requires talking about harmful patterns in the past, behaviors on both sides that led to the conflict. No one (even fucking historical revisionists) can change the past, of course, but with the desire to heal a valued relationship we can safeguard each other’s feelings going forward — once we know best what the other person needs. We can only do this if we honestly hear what has caused the other person pain, learned our role in causing the other discomfort and anger, and both parties make merciful adjustments in the days ahead.

The need to win is much easier. All you have to do is assign blame. One side is right, the other side is 100% wrong. One side is moral, human, good, and perfectly justified in their anger, the other is wicked, inhuman, willfully hurtful and eternally, unforgivably unforgiving. Life, to a winner, is about convincing allies to support you in a war to the death. Do this repeatedly and you win. If you live in a culture of Narcissism, such as hyper-competitive America 2023, you are seen as a winner every time you righteously smite a hated enemy, no matter how many lies you must tell in order to “win”.

The reservoir of pain each of us carries inside ranges from a gigantic sea in a traumatized person to a fairly small pond in someone who was supported and treated lovingly in their formative years. We each maintain a wall that protects us from this pain in a variety of ways, some healthy, some harmful. Take a wrecking ball to someone’s wall and repeatedly smash that dam and you create a flood of pain that will sometimes drown a hated enemy. If there is something praiseworthy in doing this, I can’t think of it. Outside of being an undefeated winner in the psycho sweepstakes.

Two sides, at least, to any conflict

If you find yourself in a conflict with someone who says, over and over “nothing you can say will ever get me to change my mind or take your side” believe them. These are the words of someone unwilling/unable to resolve conflict, except on terms they will dictate to you. Accept the terms, or you are dead to them. They tell you this up front and every time they fly into a nasty mood and blame you for causing all of the problems between you.

This kind of person will be familiar to anyone raised by a bullying parent. The insecure, prone to rage parent cannot be wrong, so no matter what they do, no matter how neglectfully, hurtfully or abusively they may act, they will always blame the child. They bring this personality quirk into every relationship. They can be charming, generous friends unless a conflict arises, in which case the problem was created by the other side. If the guilty party does not back down, the conflict is inevitably fatal.

Living with integrity is much harder than going along to get along. You ignore your own pain at your peril. The body keeps the score, as Bessel van der Kolk demonstrated in his book of that title. Your sleep suffers when you feel abused, your blood pressure and resting heart rate rise, your digestion gets fouled up. If your suffering continues, beyond bodily manifestations of your psychic pain, and you continue to push the causes for that pain down, you eventually find your health compromised all the way down to your immune system.

Integrity is the best gift you can give yourself, challenging as it also is. When someone tells you they will kill you if you don’t comply with their demands and pretend their abuse is completely justified, you are dealing with what the literature calls a piece of shit. You cannot reason with them. Get away from them and save yourself. Being true to yourself means listening to your body while it is painfully telling you the score. The alternative is betraying what you know is right for the sake of an imaginary peace.

There may be two sides, or ten, to any conflict. But one of those sides is more true to what actually happened, makes much more sense, than the other stories. Learning to base your actions on reality is much healthier than basing them on the fond hope that those who treat you with contempt will come around to love you one day, if only you can find a way to their hearts. There is no way to the heart of someone so damaged they will silence others to prove they cannot be wrong.

Not all stories are of equal validity. Your body will tell you when you are being force fed a load of shit that will eventually kill you. Ignore this truth at your peril.

Y’mach shemo

There is an expression in Hebrew, y’mach shemo, which means “may his name be blotted out”. This expression is reserved for particularly heinous enemies of the people, murderous villains like Hitler, Himmler, Haman. People sometimes accompany this expression with a spitting gesture, or an actual huck toward the spittoon, to suggest the casting out of the hateful poison these inhuman types inject into the world.

I’m here to say, you have not truly lived until a group of your closest longtime friends agrees that your name needs to be blotted out, henceforth and until the death.

What crimes have I committed to make me deserving of inclusion in the worst people in history? Don’t ask. I made two people feel bad about themselves, forced them to lie just to defend themselves, was so relentless in my demand for “honesty” that a story equating me with Hitler was the group’s only alternative. After all, just because the oldest son of the couple I so mortally attacked was committed to a locked mental ward two days after he returned to live with his parents is no reason to make any judgments about their ability to be honest, loving, nurturing, supportive or vulnerable. How dare I bring such a viciously unfair idea into the world!

Sure, blame the parents. It’s always the parents’ fault when the adult child suffers from depression, is susceptible to self-doubt, self-sabotage, cannot form lasting friendships, according to the most childish among us. I am among the most childish, according to the hideous story of my irredeemable evil that justifies the blotting out of my name forever.

Every gathering of people who have written me off as deserving of permanent enmity, you know, for being such an unforgiving, smart, formidable fucking enemy, is like another funeral for me. The accursed name of the justly hated corpse will never be spoken aloud in mixed company. No question about me will ever be asked again, nothing I have ever said or done by way of empathy, humor, sensitivity, kindness or generosity will be recalled.

Only the danger I pose to the community of those who must accept the well-established, if slightly twisted, version of my threatening aggressiveness must be kept in mind. After all, if they could blot my name from history, what can they do to yours, fuckface?