Category Archives: Ahimsa

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.

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.