This picture was taken in August of 2020. After years of watching so many beautiful feral kittens living their short, adorable lives, we decided we had to save this litter. A smart mother cat had dropped this batch off in Sekhnet’s garden, site of the neighborhood’s best cat buffet. Sekhnet was clever, these five never knew they were being turned into adoptable pets. They were all very willing and all five were quickly adopted. This is my favorite photo from that period, lost until a few moments ago.
A fear of shame being revealed drives desperation. Feel desperate enough and you will lie, commit violence, do anything necessary. The terror of having your shame revealed is behind most unreasonable demands, contempt and much of the violence in the world. Shame is the engine of abuse.
My father, according to my sister, led a shame-based life. She reached this astute conclusion shortly after he died. He wished for peace and justice, admired peacemakers and those with the courage to fight for justice, was a friend of the underdog — yet his shame made him maniacally oppress and abuse those closest to him. He couldn’t help it.
I don’t excuse his actions, everyone in pain who hurts others is responsible for their own healing, but I understand that the humiliation he suffered as a baby disabled him in a fundamental way. He lived his life in terror of ever feeling as helpless, and ashamed, as he did when his mother terrorized him as an infant. That his children had no intention of humiliating him never seemed to have occurred to him.
The need to dominate others arises in people with deep shame. As any despot or bully knows, as soon as you show vulnerability, you’re finished. So you need to ruthlessly dominate anyone you feel challenges your dominance, there can be no compromise with your indomitable will. Your need to be invulnerable blocks out all other human aspirations. The need to dominate others leads to a lonely fucking life, in my observation.
Shameful things, hidden, acquire a terrible power. If I know your shame, and hold it over you like a sword, I can torture you with it at will. How does one liberate oneself from shame? It’s got to be a long and painful process. Imagine your wife is holding some shameful secret of yours as a nuclear option with the kids, if you get too far out of line. Picture a guy who reacts as though whipped in the face when his wife playfully calls him a faggot. In a sense we are all playing poker here in the world, holding our cards close, trying not to tip our hands. Then, there are tells.
A couple you always thought of as your closest friends, a friendship you never questioned, are acting oddly distant to each other during a vacation in a beautiful rented house. After a few days, tensions are turned on you and one of them rages at you, glaring with a laser beam of hostility for long minutes, in a display of anger you haven’t seen since your father was alive. You endure a sleepless night after a door is angrily closed.
In the morning your friend drags his wife out to apologize to you. She is humiliated, apologizes with enough caveats to render the apology meaningless. While she is apologizing your friend coldly observes that you catalogue and remember every offense everybody’s ever committed against you, in spite of your claim to the contrary.
You spend an entire year afterwards, agonizing about why it is so hard to make peace with these two suddenly implacable friends. They are intent on never talking about anything, acting like everything is fine. Everything would be fine, they insist, if you’d only shut up. In the end, after months of silence and ongoing displays of indignation and anger, one of them suggests mediation.
Mediation, of course, can only work when both parties are interested in compromising. Here there can be no compromise: the only solution is that you are a hurt child who cannot accept that people who love you sometimes act in an abusive way. They are planning on the professional, impartial mediator being able to point out to you that you are acting like a hurt child and that you must act like an adult.
The proof of this is that they will agree to nothing prior to mediation. You point out that the mediator can only work with the facts we provide, the things we agree about, the things we disagree about. The mediator must know our respective positions. Although you are clearly in a terrible conflict, you are hard pressed to identify positions beyond “I’m hurt” “No you’re not!”. Instead of agreeing to a set of facts, your friends fight you like devils until you are literally banging your head against the wall.
It becomes clear that mediation will not help. You tell them so. They respond with another month of silence. One rainy Friday afternoon you get a phone call from your one time close friend telling you that his therapist told him he must tell you that he is not willing to be responsible for fixing things. He wants to be friends, he says, but he’s not going to take responsibility for fixing a broken friendship. After a moment of honesty on your part he tells you he’s going to hang up the phone now.
Now comes the horror: everybody you know in common accepts the story that you are an unreasonable, childish, unforgiving sadist with a pathological need to upset people by acting like an immature, self-righteous asshole. Not only did you refuse to accept numerous apologies, not only did you keep venting the same babyish anger over and over, you rejected a good faith offer for mediation and, in the end, when your friend gave one last effort to make you understand how much you were loved, in spite of being such a difficult person, you used the f-word and the c-word. What kind of fucking cunt does that make you, pal?
It can be right or wrong, but that discomfort in your body is an invitation to stop, and think about what the discomfort is trying to tell you and whether it’s right or wrong.
A pause will prevent you from lashing out, in obedience to the upset feeling in your insides. It may also give you time to understand that your body is telling you something directly that your mind can’t see yet.
I had two telephone chats with a therapist I found on the internet. I’d contacted him telling him I’d undergone narcissistic abuse recently, that an entire group of old friends was buying into harmful lies told to isolate me, and that I need a professional to exchange insights with as I continue to understand and heal, rather than bouncing things off poor Sekhnet, who has trouble hearing any more about this long-running painful situation.
I don’t need someone to cry to, or hold my hand, or tell me I’m absolutely right. I need someone to bounce insights off and talk with. I need an objective sounding board, the thing I described in my initial request for help.
After session one the therapist announced his clinical findings, presumably speaking out loud as he made his notes. “Beset by negative emotions,” and “with a history of ostracism”. I corrected him on the second point, at 66 I experienced ostracism for the first time in my life.
Toward the end of the second session, when I revealed a particularly poignant detail of a talk the last night of my father’s life, he asked me if I ever cried about that. I did not. He had come to the conclusion (coincidentally shared by the group that cast me out) that my primary way of reacting is as a hurt child, rather than an integrated adult. Suddenly he got excited and gave me homework.
Clinical finding number two: You are still reacting as a hurt child and you need to conduct an imaginary conversation with your abusive father, confront him with the pain he’d caused and vent anger at him, anger so red hot, white hot, so unbearably powerful, that you’d be exhausted by the end of venting. So, based on two hours of talk, he had pinpointed my immediate problem as being locked in unresolved childhood pain and unable to express anger at someone who had abused me when I was growing up.
I began the writing assignment, which is easy enough for me, I do this every single day. After a few pages I realized it was worth considering what my gut was trying to tell me. This motherfucker is not listening very well, in his rush to come to a therapeutic diagnosis I did not ask him for. I could tell him this gently, I could tell it to him in a way that demonstrates I have no hesitation to express anger when it is warranted. For example, by gratuitously sprinkling “fuck” into my fucking comments. At the same time, I’d point out, in fairness to him, that what I’d asked him for was difficult and would require great insight and high emotional intelligence. Is it really fair to be angry at someone who thought he was doing the right thing, the helfpful thing, who didn’t know any better? You’re doing the best you can, man, it’s just not what I asked for or what I need. You know what I’m sayin’?
When you pay someone to listen and react intelligently, and they insist on quickly diagnosing and problem solving, your gut might not be wrong to tell you “fuck this guy, old friend. He’s not able to do what you need him to do for you.”
As much as we need connection to others, attachment, to live full, healthy lives, we also need to be authentic — to act in accordance with our deepest needs and beliefs. If you can’t be honest with people you are attached to, you are in a vise that, eventually, will squeeze the life out of you.
So if you need to express something that may affect your attachment to people close to you, and you’re aware that the expression will place pressure on the relationship, you might as well just express the full thing as clearly as you can. If you try to hedge, be polite, respect the feelings of people who can’t accept you as you actually are, well, you’re probably already being sucked toward that treacherous waterfall anyway.
If you say gently that you’re having a hard time living with certain untruths that have been told, you are already gently assenting to your own punishment which is as sure to follow as night follows day. If someone is lying to you and expecting you to silently agree that the lie is necessary and proper, there’s not much point being attached to someone like that.
So whether you gently object, or make your objection as plainly and unmistakably as you can, the effect will be the same. Someone who knowingly lies will not tolerate a word like “untruth”. Anodyne expressions like “debatable”, “questionable” or “not necessarily true” will strike them as forcefully as the proper word, adorned or unadorned, a fucking lie.
In the end, no matter what you do, you cannot convince someone who has already decided that you are dead that there is really no reason to kill your memory too. There is every reason to! You are coming in after the conversation is finished, as you yourself are also finished. Nothing infuriates righteous killers more than when the accursèd dead insist on fucking speaking.
What I needed from my old friends was just to be heard. That was a lot to ask, apparently, and the united, principled voice of the group is like the voice of Switzerland circa 1942 — there is nothing to talk about here, we take no sides, we love and respect everybody, and if only you Gypsies, Jews and Reds would stop making such a racket we could all go on with our lives in peace.
I like it better as “you” because then this description of close friendship pertains to everybody. I was told I’d used the wrong word with “you,” that I should have used “I” , Lets see how that actually changes it, not much, really, though it does work as a chilling epitaph for that particular friendship:
I deserve friends who make me laugh, feel loved, comfort me when I need comforting, accept my limitations and quickly work out any problems with me when they see I am unhappy.
I deserve friends who always give me the benefit of the doubt, who accept when they’ve hurt me and don’t let me sit in pain.
I deserve friends who return my best efforts at kindness and friendship with their own best efforts. We all deserve that.
We are lucky when we find real friendship and should remember to be grateful for every day of it. Friendship should never be taken for granted, it is mortal, just like us.
To my dismay, I had another email lecture from that friend in Israel. (Part 1 is here) She told me she was my friend, and loved me, no matter what I thought, though she couldn’t force me to be friends with her. She told me if I was looking for a judge, she was not the right person. She accused me of trying to make an enemy of her. She told me again that I need professional help. She assured me that she did not take sides in this “divorce” from my old friends. She wrote “WTF!” followed by an indignant protestation that her characterization of me and what I need to do, and have, according to her, refused to do thus far, was not in the least bit judgmental. She asked, as if I hadn’t explained it in detail a few times already, why I was so angry.
I took a few breaths, and a day and a half, and sent her this. Hopefully the last thing I’ll have to write any of these righteous, loving, dear, judgmental former longtime friends. Their need for attachment to each other, and identity in the group, has short circuited their ability to reason or be in the least bit objective, it would appear. I wrote:
Sure I’d like to remain friends, that’s why I sent you the best explanations I could write about my painful banishment from a group of lifelong friends based on these old friends all accepting the false narrative that I am the irrationally angry, unforgiving aggressor in the falling out with my “bosom buddy” and “the community that came with him”, as you put it. I’m not looking for, or seeking to make, enemies, I’m looking for basic fairness from my friends, the same thing they rightfully expect from me.
You ask why I’m angry. Look up “reactive abuse” online and you’ll get a taste of what I was subjected to for a year, before I finally saw what I was up against and took myself off the wheel of implacable mistreatment. Is it really so mysterious that someone would be hurt that a group of his oldest friends would all assume that he is deluded by anger and that people who have lied about his actions are telling the truth? That this innocent little cherem caused by an unresolvable conflict with two of the members is justified by how upset I seem to remain about it after total war was declared against me and blamed 100% on me?
Shocking, traumatic and difficult as it was to grasp that my two closest friends are unable to take responsibility for their actions or resolve conflicts and resort to making up and spreading an inflammatory story about my ongoing rage to justify their anger, my life is a hundred percent better without them in it. To the extent it’s possible, in the times we are living in, I’m pretty much at peace with most things in my life, outside of a group of my oldest friends believing this kind of slander about my character, seemingly out of tribal loyalty to the prom king and queen from high school. I’m almost over that too, though it’s taken a lot of painful work (such as writing the pages you read, without understanding anything but how much pain I was in).
I don’t need a judge, or a referee. I appreciate that you wrote what you wrote out of a desire to help and will be talking to a dispassionate professional for the first session in a couple of hours. What I needed from my old friends was just to be heard. That was a lot to ask, apparently, and the united, principled voice of the group is like the voice of Switzerland circa 1942 — there is nothing to talk about here, we take no sides, we love and respect everybody, and if only you Gypsies, Jews and Reds would stop making such a racket we could all go on with our lives in peace.
If you read your original reply again you may understand why it struck me as so judgmental. You’ll see that you concluded that I carry my childhood pain around like an albatross that encumbers all of my relationships (every one of them, apparently), leaving me friendless, and that my need to be right poisons my life (how would you know that one way or another? was I vicious as I consoled your gentle brother during the shiva visit? have you ever personally known me to be mean, or to lie, to anyone?) that I refuse to look at my own faults and have never done the hard work to overcome a painful childhood and become a better person, preferring to blame others and take petulant refuge in my “rightness”, as you chided me. Again, how would you know any of that about me, except via a false story told by other hurt, angry one-time friends? And how is any of that not a harsh moral judgment? That it’s all based on lies my former closest friends have spread about me makes it worse still.
So you give me earnest, reasonable advice motivated by your deep concern and love for me, which just happens to accord with the common understanding of the group. The innocent, stressed out X and the noble, persecuted Y have spread their story of my insane, unappeasable anger in our circle, and I’ve been repeatedly moralized to and now excluded from that intimate little group. Everybody has made it clear to me, often indignantly, that they love me and they take no side, though they all clearly have (as your email indicated — pointing out very clearly that the real problem here seems to be my pathological need to cling to unresolved childhood pain, and my readiness to judgmentally hurt people who’ve done nothing to me but, uh, maybe judge me a tiny bit unfairly).
I know a fatal falling out with Y and X would never happen to you, but can you imagine how it would feel if I — and everyone else we knew in common — told you it only happened because you’re immature and clinging to childhood pain?
Your friend (Redacted II) has been quite insistent, the two or three times I’ve spoken to her in the last six months, that I am the only one in the loving group who has a problem “forgiving”, a view echoed in your email. Apparently, I’m insane to think the group has any opinion, has taken anyone’s side or has excluded me — and that I’ve only been excluded because I am so insanely angry that nobody wants to be around my crazy rage. Again, see “reactive abuse”.
I was hurt at being told, gently, firmly, every single time, with perfect moral uprightness, by everyone, the humanistic rabbi, Redacted II, you, silent V, silent W, before that X & Y themselves, to swallow what I feel happened to necessitate the painful end of a cherished, fifty year friendship that nobody but me could fix because the only thing wrong with it, apparently, is my own inability to forgive. If I was upset, I had no right to be, it’s my problem alone, because I’m an angry baby who can’t face his own demons and just wants to inflict his pain on and try to change everybody else. No moral judgment there?
A main feature of friendship is listening to a friend who is in pain, that box is conspicuously unchecked by my righteous old comrades. By “taking no side” and requiring me to be quiet, and urging me to get professional help to look into my own heart for why I alone am so hurt to be harshly judged, the sides you all deny taking are drawn quite clearly. With not one of you seemingly able to put yourself in my position for a moment to imagine how painful it is to be treated this way, or to extend to me the benefit of the doubt friends give each other, like I extended it to X and Y time after time while trying to work things out with them.
Here is the short description of friendship that X told me I’d used the wrong word in. She said “you should have written ‘I’ instead of ‘you’.” That observation was spontaneously made when I called to make amends with her, after a long WhatsApp negotiation, last August. friendship
Here’s a quick one about how most of us tend to listen to people in pain, even if we don’t know them. the human need to be heard
It’s one zen koan inside another. We can’t forgive somebody who can’t forgive. Your hurt and anger, Eliot, are both completely irrational, though we refuse to hear or consider any points you’re making because you’re so irrationally hurt and angry — from your childhood and completely unrelated to how you claim your two closest friends, people we all love dearly and unconditionally, may have treated you for more than a year during which you claim you consistently, patiently tried to make amends with them. We don’t judge you for being a bitter, childish, angry, unforgiving, defensive, lying, other-blaming asshole, why do you judge us so harshly merely for being imperfect human friends?
We are, every one of us, damaged in some ways by life, Redacted. Some of us strive to be mensches and some just damage others and constantly justify it, while performing virtue and victimhood. Responding to slanders about oneself does not make one the aggressor, unforgiving or obsessed with being ‘right’ at all costs. Calculated lies about your character, and moral lectures based on those lies, from people who claim to love you, are intolerable, no matter how lovingly you’d like to spin it. If you can’t see that after my several long explanations, I don’t know what to tell you. Pass this email on to Zebediah, I guess, he may be able to be more objective.
Outside of that, as you say, zehu.(Hebrew for “that’s all” or “done”)
“instead of ‘you,’ you should have written ‘I,’ ” she said, confidently.
It goes without saying, she said with that terse, global editorial improvement, that only a weak, needy person like me would require this type of hyper-empathetic friend. It takes one to know one, if you know what I’m saying, darling.
And as for why it’s so hard to get over this kind of thing, which happened almost a year ago — the intolerable shock comes back again and again because it’s so hard to internalize that someone you loved, someone who loved you, could decide, for all the world, that you are fucking dead.
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