Swiss psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross identified five stages of grief in her terminally ill patients: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance.   There has been some controversy over this progression since she introduced it in her 1969 book On Death and Dying, although Kübler-Ross clarified that these stages do not necessarily occur in any order and that some will experience only a few, or none, of them.

I found myself thinking about this yesterday in the context of my recent loss of two of my oldest friends, their adult children, and likely some common friends of ours, forced to take sides in a senseless conflict that will only end with death.   I was suddenly filled with anger at being defamed and hacked up this way while still alive, the irrationality and injustice of it, and wondering where the unexpected flood of anger came from.

This death during life is a hard business, and it is natural, I suppose, to deny that you are carrying a dead friendship around with you, once you enter the danger zone where every comment can lead to new accusations, threats and angry indignation.  So denial was certainly at play in the year or more that I fought to keep the dead friendship alive. 

Try facing folks incapable of solving conflict, compelled to fight any suggestion that they are less than perfect. They fight each other this way, the mutual silent treatment goes on for days on end.  They are both of a particularly rigid, competitive type, with perfect social faces and terror and rage at being seen as less than perfect.  I kept denying this could be true in two people I loved, laughed and cried with for so many years.

There was bargaining, every step of the way: if you calm down, and stop threatening me, I will prove to you that I have your best interests at heart, that I am the same as I always was, that we are friends for life, as we’ve been for decades, that I will always forgive you.   It was futile to bargain, since I was unwilling to yield the most essential point: that I was completely to blame for all the bad feelings between us.  It was the same kind of bargaining Kübler-Ross observed in her dying patients trying to bargain with Death.

I tried my best not to succumb to anger during the long, frustrating, life-draining cold war that followed a relatively straightforward and easy to sort out conflict (for anyone with minimal conflict resolution skills). I did my best, and refrained from venting, though my restraint and the look on my face as I restrained myself was apparently infuriating, and the fury directed at me was constant.

Depression certainly was a feature of the long struggle to not see the unsettling horror that was suddenly thrust in my face.  It was an agitated depression, sleep robbing and sharp-edged, filled with self-recrimination because I was somehow unable to reanimate the rapidly decomposing corpse of a beloved friendship.  Expecting the impossible from yourself, and berating yourself for your inability to do the impossible, are features of depression.

With luck you learn, in the end, to accept what you cannot change, no matter how hard you work, no matter how unacceptable the thing you must accept is.  Sometimes you get help, in the form of confirmation that you are not crazy, that the interpersonal conflict is not yours alone to solve, that you are not the one driving the bus that is heading over the guardrails and into the gorge.  

So you accept in the end that all of your goodwill, patience, your bargaining, your attempt to refrain from judgment, and anger, your attempts at reconciliation, making amends, extending understanding and the benefit of the doubt, self-reflection, are of no use in the situation you are up against.  Implacable anger that arises from a deep sense of shame does not yield to these things and, after enough pain, you hopefully understand and accept your powerlessness against this.

After accepting all that, and sleeping better, I was surprised to find myself feeling so fucking angry yesterday.  I don’t blame myself for the now eternal falling out (neither do these two blame themselves, of course) but I find myself in the position, with our mutual friends, of dancing around the supremely ticklish question of how I lost the love of these two saintly pillars of their community.  I find myself avoiding old friends out of discomfort I never felt with them. They believe a certain amount of the lies that have been deliberately told about me, or so it would appear. One has chided me more than once for being unforgiving. Without a short, frank discussion, I’ll never know how things actually stand, and possibly even with that discussion I may not know.

I find myself composing talking points like this, should I speak openly about the uncomfortable subject of being suddenly deemed unworthy of my old friends’ love (and how can it not come up, except through strenuously applied denial and avoidance — who do you talk to about such things if not old, trusted friends? [1]):

A terrible challenge is how the unthinkable end of this long friendship has impacted my relations with other old friends.  If I mention anything about our falling out with your friends, until recently my very close friends, it’s not to start a painful discussion or put you in the uncomfortable position of having to take sides.  I make mention of any aspect of it only in the context of talking about something I learned, and I hope that can be separate from sounding judgmental or influencing you one way or another in your feelings.

Trying getting your mind around delivering that talking point about the sinister shadow now hanging over your friendship with just the right fucking nuance.   Why must you master this delicate bit of high wire walking when your old friends have already spattered the walls with your blood in defending their perfectly moral actions?   Because your old friends are angry, judgmental, unforgiving, childish adults who have justified themselves by lying about the falling out between you, putting the entire blame on you, placing it squarely where you stubbornly, unforgivingly, refuse to accept it.  Fair is fair.

Chew on that one, if you love the taste of bile.  

[1] The answer to that, of course, is a skillful therapist.

What I am about to write may mark me, to some, as uncharitable and harsh in my judgments, but see if you’ve had a similar experience.  This might ring a bell and give you a different way of viewing a vexation from your own life.

When someone you know tells you they are sick, badly injured or facing a scary diagnosis, it is customary to say things like “please let me know how it turns out” and “let me know if there’s anything I can do.”  As kids we learn to say these kinds of things from the empathetic adults around us.   If we are involved in the health-challenged person’s life, able to do things for them, and have shown ourselves willing to exert ourselves to follow through, the phrases land as a show of sincere concern and friendship.   If we say these things in a show of concern and never actually follow up, it is performative empathy.  Don’t look at the intention and the history too closely and everybody feels a little better.

Sometimes the performance of empathy is unintentionally feckless.  It is not that they don’t want to help out, it’s just that they are terminally distracted.  They intend to do the compassionate thing, but, goddamn it, there is so much to do, it’s relentless, and, plus, the person they extended the invitation to didn’t seem too grateful, seemed to doubt them, so isn’t there an element of judgment there?   I said the right thing and they judged me as being insincere.  I was sincere, but their silence in response to my offer of help really hurt, made me feel like a bad person.  It was like they didn’t expect me to follow up, as if I said it just to make myself feel like a good person!

Some people always follow up on their offers of support.  Some people rarely, if ever, follow up.  It is better to speak less and do more, given the choice.   For some, speaking in a generous manner is the best they can do.  They are honestly overwhelmed by the million details of their day to day activities, trapped in the rushing cascade of their own highly programmed lives.  When they speak generously they don’t intend not to follow up, it’s just that they are so busy, all the time, that they will not always remember the sincere gasp of concern they emitted when you raised the spectre of a cancer diagnosis.  And it’s not as if you would be there for them.

Along it all rolls, until, for one or the other of us, it stops rolling and all consideration is in the past tense, for everybody else.

I had a close friend, for decades, who always said that maintaining healthy friendship takes work.  He was always ready to jump in any time someone needed him, his expertise, his services, his sympathy, his honest counsel.   Then, a few years ago, he started putting up a fence around certain subjects he’d always been candid about, they were no longer up for conversation.  

Something was clearly tormenting him, he was looking increasingly grim and reporting awful moods, agitation and sleeplessness, but he was no longer willing to discuss it.  His walling himself off was a mysterious process.  The unexplained closing down of certain topics was subtle at first, then it began eating at our friendship.  After a relatively simple conflict arose between us, this shutdown of our ability to freely discuss problems devoured what was left of our long, close friendship.  

“No matter what you say, you will never convince me that you have a legitimate point of view,” was his stance on the question of whether I had a right to feel hurt by things he and his wife had done.  That they had both vented at length, while demanding I not mention anything ever again, was my own fault.   “We made MISTAKES, and you want to crucify us, for mistakes, while you…” a knowing look, “what you did was no mistake, which is what makes it so hard to forgive.”   

He’d get indignant if I pressed, or asked “what the fuck?” or looked at him the wrong way.  I had no real idea of what was suddenly making my old friend act with so little friendship.   We were now locked in a zero-sum conflict, familiar as a kick in the nuts from a childhood that had featured a long-running, zero-sum, no-holds-barred conflict with my brilliant, implacable, tragically damaged old man.

At a party a few months back I met a charming, mischievous looking man who told Sekhnet and me a heartwarming story.   Two minutes in I was greeted by someone I hadn’t seen in 35 years, who burst into the little circle to hug me, smile and reminisce, and so I missed the remainder of the man’s anecdote.   Over the course of the next few days it emerged that the charming, mischievous looking man had fairly advanced early onset dementia.  He would stand and sit over and over, uncontrollably.  He would get agitated and cry out.  He was unable to speak.  He was always attended by a kind, attentive young man who steadied him, calmed him, gently got him to stop calling out, directed him back to breathing, helped him reel himself back in.

I think now of my friend’s unwillingness to discuss certain things, the downright silly defenses he made several times over the year of our unsuccessful peace talks, the stubborn irrationality of points he insisted on, and wonder if I missed a similar decline in faculties.  Maybe his change in behavior was not unwillingness to be himself but inability with an organic cause. The charming guy we met at the party was able to put on a front, at first, maybe I was unable to see that my friend’s torment is related to the terror of losing his ability to maintain his personality in the face of a disquieting change in his capacities.  Unable to face what is happening to him, he lashed out at someone who had always reciprocated his care, concern and friendship.  Ironic and terrible, that.

Even if the theory is true, it leaves me with no real option at the moment.  After all, I am the trusted old friend who deliberately, and with depraved indifference, sadistically stuck a dagger into the hearts of these two beloved old friends, for absolutely no reason.  I pressed on when I saw they were upset, and their defensiveness and anger were entirely natural, and 100% caused by me.  I am the kind who does not make mistakes, my hurtful behavior is knowingly malicious and I operate under ruthless principles, justified by the “abuse” I suffered decades back when I was a helpless, angry child, my distorted point of view supported by demonic skills at argumentation and persuasion.

The thing about a traumatic childhood is that when the trauma is reawakened in adult life, as mine was after a long glare of rage was directed at me by a frustrated old friend going through torments she couldn’t openly discuss, the pain is identical to the original.  As an adult you have tools to resolve the pain that are not available to the child, or so you would think.  Another adult may act childishly in response to your need for mercy but, until you see this clearly, you remain locked in the pain of the reopened childhood trauma.  

“I need to talk about what happened,” you say, seeing that the current situation is intolerable.

“You need to shut up about what you think happened, unless you want some more,” is not a response that will cause your roiled emotions to relax. “You brought this all on yourself with your aggressive, threatening, angry reaction to my attempt to be considerate, you vicious prick.  You want to accuse us of being insensitive bastards who don’t know how to treat people.   How dare you, you unforgiving, unloving monster!”

Demented or not, that’s some fucked up shit, Larry.

You can find yourself in a perplexing emotional cul-de-sac, very, very hard to see any way out. You can ruminate, follow theories, compare your situation to others, but the limitation in your point of view is partly that it is only your point of view, uninformed by the views of others.

As soon as you share a perplexing riddle with somebody you trust, you open the door to an insight that might seem obvious once it is expressed out loud but would never otherwise occur to you.

For example, I had an embattled friend who lived in a war zone, who could not help provoking me whenever we got into a conversation. No matter how angry I became, I always restrained myself from bashing this annoying guy in the face, because he was my childhood friend, because I try to conduct myself peacefully, because I don’t bash people in the face. This aggravating cycle continued for several years, until, unable to get him to even acknowledge that he was provoking the shit out of me regularly, I had to walk away from our long friendship.

Recently, I entered a vexatious revolving door dispute with my closest friend. No matter what progress we seemed to make in our peace talks, he regularly became indignant and angry. Each time I exerted myself to reassure him of my friendship and calmed him down. This happened more times than I can recall. He recalls this pattern too.

Talking to an old friend who also knew this guy very well, and has lost contact with him, I described the maddening dynamic. My friend becoming instantly angry, me calming him down. As I described this my friend emitted a knowing chuckle.

“Every every time he got mad and you reacted not with anger but with compassion, you were giving him exactly what he’s been looking for, and never received, for his entire life. And you wonder why he couldn’t stop doing it?!”

And it is kind of funny, how easy it is to see, when somebody else points it out. In both of the cases described above, these are people locked in war who lack good impulse control and basic conflict resolution skills. They are both required to hold in enormous amounts of frustration. In each case, when they vent their anger, which they are not generally allowed to do without severe consequences, they were met, in my case, with the mildness of friendship and understanding. Why would either one of them stop doing it? They wouldn’t, they can’t. Until they succeed in killing the thing that is sustaining their belief that they are worthy of love.

Being so patient in a one-sided arrangement like this is not a long-term strategy for friendship or life. Without mutuality, what’s the point of a relationship?

You can ask this question of people who care about you, and you may be surprised by the obvious insights they may have for you.