Jamie Raskin lays it out with beautiful clarity. On the other side it is constantly presented with beautifully infuriating fury.
You can take your pick, I suppose, but in the battle between clarity and fury, count me on the side of clarity every time, boys and girls.
This is from a YouTube channel called The Enlightened Target, where a therapist offers help with recovery from narcissistic abuse. This one is a home run.
Something familiar from childhood that I had forgotten, the soothing reassurances by my parents after a particularly savage parental attack. Once you were upset by their angry reaction to your needs they could comfort you, prove to you how crazily wrong you were to feel unloved.
I completely forgot about this practice, a disorienting mindfuck I’d experienced so many times as a child, until I heard the recorded soothing tones of two old friends determined to do everything possible, except listen or compromise, to resolve the raging conflict between us. They sounded so sympathetic and loving, until I told them they still were not letting me say what I needed them to hear.
I had what became a fatal falling out with old friends, who after a few increasingly stressful days in a rented house, were very upset that I’d said the f-word in anger. My apology had to be considered, after all, what I had done was so brutal, so upsetting, so much worse than the distance, coldness and passive aggression I’d seen between my old friends, who it turns out are experts at covert warfare. They let me know that I was on notice, after I’d hurled a curse at the love of my life, that I’d be on trial and would now have to pass an ongoing test to see if I still deserved the friendship we’d always shared.
After months of silence, when one of my friends smilingly made a cutting remark (“homo”) to her husband (who winced), I told them I had a few things I needed to put on the table. Fair is fair, it seemed obvious enough to me. They’d both immediately had the audiences with me they’d demanded when they needed to speak. In the first case I had to hear an apology that was later explained to me, more than once, as no admission of wrongdoing, but said only to calm me because, although I’d completely provoked the justified reaction, I was clearly so upset. The other meeting began with a direct threat — “I have walked away from friendships for less than what you did to me.”
I recognize now that both of these things are characteristic of people who can’t be wrong and who can’t, therefore, honestly accept their role in, or help to resolve, a conflict. It matters not how otherwise easily the conflict might be resolved, the point is: if there is a conflict, we cannot be in any part responsible for that.
They left hastily, as though in shock (“I was shocked,” my friend later explained), after I mentioned there were things I needed to talk about, after a few months of silence. I followed up with an email, explaining my purpose, and had the response that they’d be happy to hear what I had to say, once there was less stress in their lives, once the Omicron variant of Covid was under control, once there were no more family emergencies to deal with.
Three months later I wrote a short peacemaking letter I never heard back about. After a holiday visit where my old friend avoided eye contact with me (I did get one last laugh out of her, eventually) I told my friend that I used to think of him as a person of integrity, but that I no longer did, and that I now understood that when I speak to him I’m not talking to the boss.
This worked as well as his wife stinging him with a tossed off “homo”. Within a few days he had dragged his reluctant wife downtown and we were sitting down so that I could say what I needed to say, and they could listen, and we could all finally move on. It did not go well.
Whatever I had to say, no matter how mildly I tried to phrase it, had an instantly inflaming effect. My old friend did an uncanny impression of a furious, eye rolling, tooth sucking, arm crossing, hissing, head shaking, back turning, cell phone pounding teenager’s tantrum. I somehow held myself back from responding in kind, though her fucking tantrum, not letting me finish a sentence, was very upsetting.
All this time my phone, with their acknowledgment, was recording, so that I could listen to it back and make sure I’d said everything I needed to say in the clearest possible way. In hindsight I understand that needing to document the talk shows that I already no longer trusted them to be fair or honest when it came to any role they might have played in our difficult conflict.
Eventually she told me to turn off the recorder, it was clearly making her feel very defensive. I tapped it off, put it in my pocket and the conversation eventually took on a calmer, more mutual tone, though nothing I said could actually be acknowledged. Hours later, when I went to use the phone, I saw that there was an eight hour recording in progress still going on. The file was 500 MB.
When I realized this I tried to edit the sound file, get rid of the five hours of pocket noise at the end of our conversation. It proved impossible to do, I’m not sure why. The few seconds I did hear, my angry friend cutting me off, instantly raised my blood pressure. The part I wanted to save was two things she said after she finally calmed down.
Both friends had angrily denied over and over that there had been any pressure or tension in that vacation house until I, for no reason except my irrational orneriness, exploded in anger. When she was calm after her tantrum my old friend said “there was a lot of tension” and she explained one factor, admitting that she’d been micromanaging everything in an effort to make things perfect for her husband, the sixty-five year-old birthday boy.
As for any tension between them that I might have found alarming, she said, I hadn’t seen anything to write home about. She then described how when they are really angry at each other they sometimes go days without talking to each other. I remember her mentioning five days, sometimes a week, though nobody else recalls that number. I’d like to hear her statement again, just to clarify that I’d heard what I recall hearing.
All this is academic, however. A friendship, once attacked a few times with an ax, cannot be resumed as though no deadly force had ever come into play. I have written about this, at every stage of my long agonizing try to save the biting zombie of a once beautiful friendship that I was carrying on my back, in unbearable detail, and it is not my intention to delve any further into the decomposing rot of it all here.
Trying to free up space on my stuffed, doddering phone the other day, I saw the large sound file and tried again to upload it to my computer so I could delete it from the phone. This operation proved impossible to do and after several attempts I knew it was a job for Sekhnet, a technological problem solver with infinite patience. At one point, trying blindly to find the two quotes I mentioned above, I tapped in at around the two hour mark.
“What is it that you think we’re not hearing?” I heard my once close friend ask me with the soothing tone of a kindergarten teacher speaking to an upset child in the schoolyard. “I think we know exactly why you were upset, what do you feel we are not hearing?”
My other friend, done with her temper tantrum, came in with the same slow, calm, sympathetic, perfectly reasonable cadence.
For a moment I found myself wondering how I’d missed this conciliatory, loving part of an otherwise frustrating talk. Had I been so upset I couldn’t hear them? Sekhnet, at the time, had said as much to me.
This thought lasted only as long as it took for me to reply on the recording, and for them to shut me down again. The feeling I was left with was long forgotten, but as instantly, elementally familiar as the memory of that time, at eight, that I stepped on a board with a rusty nail sticking up out of it and it went deep into the sole of my foot.
Doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result.
It gets crazier still when you add in the repetition compulsion, a neurotic reflex to serially relive the identical emotional experience in hopes of getting a different outcome.
If you are a long time, trusted friend who suddenly begins snarling at me, I will try to make peace. I will restrain my impulse to say, after threats, after the second or third show of hostility, “what is your fucking problem, asshole?” I will remain patient, try to listen, try to make myself heard. None of these things are effective once someone has turned implacably hostile, nonetheless, strategies I developed as a child for surviving monster attacks will automatically come into play (he said, the passive voice employed) during such conflicts.
Until I finally learn to recognize what I am up against. Once you see it, and confirm it, and confirm it again, it is crazy to think that with enough kindness, understanding, benefit of the doubt, you can win back the friendship of someone who is determined to “win” a conflict. There is no winner in a conflict that results in the death, real or psychological, of one or both of the parties, but that doesn’t matter to someone who cannot bear to “lose”.
The conflict itself, we learn, can be over virtually nothing. The dispute can be elementally simple to resolve, but that’s not the point. All that someone who cannot be wrong and must prevail at all costs needs is something that can be converted into a war cry. Then, you will find yourself at total war with someone whose greatest terror is the thought of “losing”.
They rightly perceive that they are in a war to the death. You may naively believe that good faith can fix what’s broken, but what war ever ended in people of good faith resolving the issues that led to war and setting up a way to avoid future wars? Good luck with that peace plan, idealist schmuck!
While you are searching for peace, the warring party is searching for war allies, convincing people that you are a sick, belligerent, dishonest, sadistic monster. If you find yourself talking to one of the folks who have already taken the warring party’s side: watch out. They will urge you to do whatever you need to do to end the war that you stand accused of starting and stubbornly prolonging. You will hear the unfair charges repeated as truth, and if you protest, your defensiveness proves the truth of the charges.
You remain calm, you refute each point, but at the same time, you begin to wonder why you are bothering to remain calm, logically refuting each point. This isn’t a conversation, it’s a prosecution, at the hands of someone you never exchanged a cross word with. Why am I being prosecuted? Because someone has made me an enemy and recruited mutual friends against me. Why have I been made an enemy?
The common fact, in every case of death during life final falling out, is that by exressing hurt I have made someone feel bad about themselves, feel as if they might have been wrong, thoughtless, perhaps even irredeemably enraged.
The fear of being made to feel shame, even though your entire life is a hard won buttress against feeling worthless, is more than motivation enough to attack and keep attacking anyone who might hold you responsible for things that are intolerable to you, as a perfect person. Perfect people are very dangerous when the obvious is pointed out to them, that there is no such thing as a perfect person.
It can take decades to recognize something you don’t want to see – that few friendships last forever and that friendships with people who cannot be wrong are doomed to end in an ugly way.
Much better to learn than stay in the loop of senseless, repetitive war.
Our feelings, it should go without saying, are always what we really feel, and, while we are feeling them, they are beyond right or wrong. We have to be gentle with our feelings as we consider how to move forward. They send us important messages our monkey minds can’t always perceive through cleverness alone. What we feel is what we feel, and acknowledging that is much healthier than pushing emotions down and pretending we feel some other way.
When you tell someone, particularly a friend or family member, how you feel, you are hoping for understanding. We are sympathetic to people we care about who are aggravated, worried, afraid, in pain, otherwise in need of comfort.
Compare and contrast:
“I’m exhausted…”
That’s not hard to understand, you’ve been working your ass off, and working on short sleep, plus you’re worried, and that takes a toll on your energy too. Hopefully you’ll have a long, restful sleep in a few hours.
“I’m exhausted…”
How come?
“I’m exhausted…”
You shouldn’t be, it’s your own fault, why do you go to sleep so late and wake up so early? You don’t take care of yourself, I don’t know why you do this to yourself. A healthy person knows how important a good night’s sleep is. I always get at least eight hours of sleep, no matter what.
The first two replies are expressions of empathy. The third is not.
So what the fuck is that third response? An inability to empathize? A need to feel superior? A need to have the last, authoritative word? Obliviousness? Moral idiocy? Fuck if I know.
The only thing I can tell you is that when you get this response from somebody a few times, listen to what your roiled guts are telling you – this is fucked up. No matter how nice we pretend to be, it is not right to be treated this way. It is intolerable.
If you dispute somebody’s right to feel the way they feel, you dispute their right to be an autonomous person with as much right to express themselves as you claim for yourself. You can call it love or friendship, but those things both feel much different than whatever the fuck this is.
My friend’s therapist, John House, has a great set of 18 rules of life that make a whole lot of sense. Rule 12 is maybe my favorite, since we see it played out over and over and over and wonder why these nasty, painful cycles continue.
Many people are impervious to the evidence that what they are doing is causing them identical problems over and over. It is always easier to blame others than to search your own life for your own damage’s role in ongoing bad scenes. House’s lessons apply to anyone who is trying to learn to have less pain in their life by changing reflexive habits that cause them pain over and over.
Rule 12: A lesson is repeated until it is learned. A lesson will be presented to you in various forms until you have learned it. When you have learned it, you can then go on to the next lesson.
At my sixtieth birthday Sekhnet threw me a party at the home of old friends. I held forth in front of a room full of loving friends, several of whom I’m no longer in contact with. Most of the people there I’d known since I was a teenager. Most of the people I met back then, and kept as lifelong friends, fulfilled a psychological need for me, to be close friends with people who had many of the traits of my perplexing father. My father had all the tools to be a great friend, he was hampered by a black and white worldview that made it impossible for him to be wrong in any conflict. As long as I avoided conflicts with these old friends who were often similar to the old man, everything was fine, for many years. The pattern of fatal conflict emerged over many years and I could never see it coming or understand it once it arrived.
Tensions would develop, it could be over anything, often over something dear to me, or upsetting to me. I’d be upset because my health insurance had been illegally cancelled (this happened to me three times, including during the first full month of the pandemic). Suddenly a friend would tell me I was overreacting, that my anger was not proportional to merely losing health coverage. According to my friend’s argument, it was an indication of something fundamentally wrong with me, that I was so irrationally upset. Now we had an actual conflict: your feelings are out of line, asshole, and what about my fucking feelings?
This was a mirror of the eternal conflict with my defensive, prosecutorial father — denial of my right to feel the way I did, reframing of my feelings to make them a magnifying glass for my problems and shifting the conversation to his moral superiority in not whining about his, much worse, problems. I’d react to these friends with patience, with a hard-won ability not to explode in anger, extending the constant benefit of the doubt that strikes me as the heart of friendship.
For some reason, I was unable to see, until this shitshow had been repeated several times over the decades, that In a conflict with a narcissist, none of these things will help in any way, except to prolong a maddeningly insoluble impasse. If one person in a conflict is incapable of empathy or compromise, on pain of feeling utterly humiliated, that’s all she wrote, boys and girls.
I was sixty-five when I had my first conflict with my two oldest remaining friends. The conflict itself was supremely easy to resolve, if both parties had been able to remain open, listening, granting the other person their imperfections. I agonized for a solid year, waking every day with the pain of this impasse boiling in my head. It caused tremendous agony to Sekhnet as well, that I was in such pain and couldn’t see my way out of it. I kept thinking of House’s Rule 12, since this conflict had major echoes of several others over the years. What am I not fucking seeing here? I kept wondering.
One day, bingo! When someone shows you they are implacable, will not listen, no matter what, will not grant you the benefit of the doubt that you are extending to them, take notice. When they show you that face it may be a warning of worse to come. The second and third time makes waiting for the tenth or eleventh time an exercise in masochism. How many times can you reassure an angry friend of your good intentions before you realize they don’t have the capacity to care about your good intentions? Three or four unrequited attempts to make peace should suffice.
Lesson 12, in my case, when someone shows you over and over that they must win the conflict, at any cost, including the murder of your friendship, the best roll of the dice is to throw them away. No need to agonize for a year, and extend endless chances for compromise with people who would rather kill you, and murder your good name, than admit they had ever behaved badly.
Lesson 12, when someone shows you that they are a childish asshole, believe them. House’s rule 13 will only be of marginal use at that point:
13. People always do the best they can. If they are doing poorly, it is because they have not learned the lessons that will enable them to do better.
Some people are angrily oblivious to the lessons of their lives. And those who must win at any cost are the world’s greatest fucking losers.
There’s a famous story I’m thinking of, as I can’t find my way out of the loop of my two closest friends suddenly and irrevocably withdrawing their friendship from me. The final communication was now almost four months ago, and it was just my old friend confirming that he would not be honest in trying to resolve our senseless conflict. I have no illusion about anything involving that long running shitshow, understanding fully now how deadly any conflict is with this inexorable personality type.
Yet, almost every day, as similar things are played out constantly in mainstreamed extremist politics — projection, incoherence, lies, vilification — I am reminded of my painful struggle to prevent the fatal falling out with my two old friends. They shocked me by continually using every familiar MAGA technique to blame and silence me.
Two monks who haven’t seen each other in many years meet in the forest. They greet each other and one asks the other “do you still think about those sadists who held us captive and tortured us?”
“No,” says the monk “how about you?”
“I think of them every day and I never think about them without wishing karma to descend on them so that they hurt the way we did when they tortured us” says the other monk.
“Then you are still their prisoner,” says the more enlightened monk.
True enough.
The thought that consoles me, as I am still the prisoner of thoughts of the brutal unfairness of the mistreatment I experienced at the hands of people who claimed to love me, is that I have no ability, at the moment, to blow off much steam, to get things out of my system physically. Strenuous exercise is always good for relieving much of that kind of tension. In recent years I’d go for long, fast paced walks to clear my head, now I can only walk a block at a time, painfully, before I have to sit and rest. Try clearing your head with that kind of halting walk.
So the pain in my ailing knees reminds me to go easy on myself for not being able to break fully out of the prison I can’t think my way out of at the moment. Mercy is a great gift to give yourself. When I am back in shape, after my knee replacement and rehab, I intend to flush the rest of this ugliness out of my system, daily.
So you’re a smart, good looking young woman who has modeled herself after her dominant father, but living in a world of aggressively sexist assholes. You can’t walk down the street in NYC in the 1970s and 1980s, without these assholes making wolfish comments, giving you the entitled, liplicking asshole looks that make your blood boil. What you need is a strong, loyal man by your side to kick anyone’s ass who tries this shit with you.
That much is not hard to understand. The requirements for this guy, aside from size and imposing physical strength, are similar to our father’s requirements for his mate: good looking, charming, smart, good sense of humor, devoted and ready to do whatever I say.
Then we face the law of unintended consequences. She found this man, a handsome, athletic giant, who told her he was separated from his wife when their whirlwind romance began. He would do anything for her, wanted to sweep her away to Arizona, start a new life in Tucson. She was a New Yorker with friends and a good job, not ready for this radical new start. He eventually got divorced and they eventually got married. He was good looking, smart, strong and devoted to making her happy. The unintended part, unseen, and once seen, rationalized: the guy was sometimes a bit of a compulsive liar and probably a gambling addict.
What did he lie about? His academic degrees, his former employment, money, why he lost his job, why he needed to borrow more money, why he couldn’t pay back the money he’d borrowed, why he came home with his clothes sliced to rags and his wallet and keys gone, why he lied about a previous lie, why taking that merchandise from his boss and selling it under the table wasn’t actually stealing, why shoplifting really isn’t stealing, why pretending to go to work every day for a year while taking cash advances on your dead father’s credit cards and handing them to your wife every week as your pay is really a victimless crime and so on.
Bottom line, he was bad with money. At one point he made an excellent living, selling a lucrative yet legal product, but he also spent lavishly, extravagant orders and generous tips at restaurants, many expensive gifts and then, bad news, after a couple of years of living large, a few years scraping by, he finally had to declare bankruptcy.
He did this a few days after borrowing ten thousand dollars from his father-in-law, the DU, for last minute expenses related to the upcoming closing on the dream house he and his wife were about to buy. A lovely home with a beautiful back yard, where their soon-to-be born son would grow up playing with his big sister. The guy was a practiced liar with the gift of looking disarmingly sincere, and vulnerable, when he lied. He borrowed the ten grand from the DU on Monday, waited for the check to clear. On Friday he told everyone he couldn’t repay the loan or buy the house, he’d declared bankruptcy earlier that week.
All of these details are humiliating to have set out in front of you, granted. The only other option is to dummy up about all of it, as he always pressured me to do, about things like his refusal to pay me back money I’d loaned him, back when I still spoke to him.
The vow of silence on sore subjects required to maintain a sociable relationship includes a big IXNAY on any mention of the death threat when his wife finally called him out about his psychopathic untruthfulness.
To be fair, the death threat was a one off. The wife flew into a long overdue rage that had been building for years, after the surprise bankruptcy that ended the charade of closing on the never to be attained dream home. He angrily shot back that he was going to lock her and the kids in the house (I think a bicycle lock and a piece of heavy machinery came into play in this threat to seal them inside– my nephew had been born by then, was a young baby) get in his car, drive the mile to his in-laws, murder both of them with their biggest kitchen knife, come home, kill the children and set the house on fire, burning himself and his wife to death.
In fairness to him, he never did any of this, although the graphically detailed threat got everybody’s attention for a while.
The little family was also teetering on the edge of bankruptcy number two and I offered to look over the family budget, see where they could make cuts to save money.
There was no family budget, no accounts or receipts except for ones showing the interest rates paid by poor people who buy luxury items, like a giant flat screen TV, on the predatory terms imposed in payment plans. I reacted badly to the obscene interest rates that doubled the price of the giant flat screen they were still paying for, years after buying it. I see now, thinking about it again, that it had to have been humiliating to be made to feel bad for just trying to live a decent life.
“You have to explain to your kids why you’re so angry at your husband, otherwise all they see is an irrationally angry mother always grim and stressed out, for no apparent reason,” I told my sister. She wasn’t ready to reveal any of this, assured me her kids had no idea that she was so angry at their father. I assured her that they were well aware of it.
For one thing, she’d been sleeping with her young son, in his bed, for several years, until the kid threw her out one night, old enough to point out the obvious and say “this is weird, mom.”
“They do know,” she told me one day, not long afterwards. She’d been at the kitchen sink and heard the kids out front talking to the neighbors’ kids. She’d heard them describe how much their dad loves their mom, but that their mom doesn’t love their dad.
I offered to be in the room when her husband explained to the kids why mommy had a right to be mad at daddy sometimes, as he’d promised her he’d do, at my urging. Daddy, it should be pointed out, was always playful, gentle and affectionate with the kids, their best friend. Mommy could be demanding, grim and dreaded if crossed, but daddy was a giant, humorous, always a loving pussy cat. He loved to cuddle
I was in Florida for two weeks and offered to help my sister inform the kids of some of the reasons she’d been angry at their loving dad. She agreed, but kept putting me off, in the end assuring me that he’d promised to talk to the kids with her, as soon as I left Florida. No warning I could have given her would have made any difference.
A week after I got back to New York my mother called me. “You’d better call your sister, I just heard from her, today was the day that R____ was going to tell the kids about his sordid past, it didn’t go well. She’s driving a hundred miles an hour on 95, I’m afraid she’s going to crash her car.”
My sister, who was indeed very upset, told me the story. Her husband started his mea culpa to the children by putting things in context for them. “You know how your mother has a hard time forgiving people sometimes? Well, years ago I made a little mistake…” and, as if proving his point about what an unforgiving monster their mother was, she exploded, raced out the door, gunned the engine and started speeding on the highway.
There are things in life you cannot fix, irreparably broken things you had no hand in breaking. No amount of nuance you can provide will change a black and white world view into a gradient where everyone strives for the best, with needed compromise along the way. In the world of someone who must win, and always be in control, everything must be viewed in terms of victory or defeat.
Defeat is the most humiliating thing in the win/lose world and the fierce competitor will do anything necessary to avoid the shame of losing. You can continue to love people, you can be willing to compromise, do your best to be supportive, understanding, accepting — bear in mind, none of this shit will help you when you are trying it with someone in conflict who can never be on the losing end of anything.
Mistakes. These wrong things you accuse me of doing are simple human mistakes, when I make them. When you do bad things, you evil fuck, well, you are completely in the wrong. But my mistakes are merely the mistakes of an imperfect person with no hurtful intention behind them, you merciless, hypocrite fuck.
Get into a wrestling match with an alligator and you get what you get, sucka.
After my mother’s funeral in 2010 we were standing on Mott Street in Chinatown, on a sweltering, humid NYC evening. Me, Sekhnet, my sister and my niece, sucking on cold bubble teas in the elbow of Mott Street. My niece was about twenty at the time. We were exchanging stories about this high strung woman, the older sister of the high school friend at whose house my sister and niece were staying. The woman, a doctor, really was a bit of a cartoon character, a female Yosemite Sam. I listened to a few funny stories and told about the one time I met her.
Her brother and I had arranged to meet at a Queens restaurant he’d been raving about, his brother and sister would be there with him. I sent him an email saying I was unlikely to be done with work in time to join them at the appointed hour, but that they should have appetizers and I’d hop on a train and be there as soon as I could. I got there about thirty minutes after the appointed time. They were sitting in a car in front of the restaurant, which was closed. This was before the age when everyone had a smart phone in their pocket, and besides, I’d been on the subway for the previous half hour. A woman stuck her head out of the front passenger seat and angrily told me that I was an inconsiderate fucking asshole. I said “nice to meet you, Ellen”.
“But if you really want to hear stories about her, ask your father,” I said to my beautiful, smiling niece “he knows her best of all, they were married.”
My sister made a desperate throat slash/ixnay IXNAY!!! gesture behind her confused daughter’s back. I had no idea the father’s previous marriage and divorce was a deeply guarded family secret. My niece opened her eyes wide and looked from me to her mother, back to me, back to her mother, totally confused.
“Mom, what?! Was dad really married to her?”
My sister assured her that dad had never been married to anyone but her. I stood in the street, at a loss for words. I should have not been at a loss for words, and I rarely am, I must not have been ready for nuclear war with my sister at that moment. She’d already nuked one of my major cities, true, by insisting that Uncle Elie was either crazy or a liar, or both, but I stood in the street, not ready to launch my counterattack. I don’t operate that way, blasting first and cleaning up afterwards, for all of my skill at disemboweling desperate enemies with my sharp tongue.
As soon as I was alone with my sister I told her she had to straighten things out with my niece. She had hammered an intolerable wedge between me and the niece I loved. My niece now had to consider if her uncle was insane or just a compulsive liar who couldn’t help himself from spewing whatever gibberish came into his head. My sister told me she understood, and she’d talk to her daughter, explain everything.
Of course, there were a lot of conditions placed on that talk — both kids had to be informed at the same time (what this had to do with my nephew, who wasn’t there, was never explained) and they had to be informed at a time when their father wasn’t there, which he always was. It would be tricky, she told me, but she’d do it as soon as possible.
I know what you must be thinking, dear reader, now that I’ve set out this story for you with the full illumination of hindsight. “You know how your uncle is sometimes really angry and unable to forgive people who didn’t actually do anything to him?”
A year later, the next time we saw each other, my sister told me that she’d tried to keep her promise, but that the time had never been right to tell the kids what she’d promised to tell them, without their father there. Seriously, though, looking at it in the context of the rest of this, how did I not yet understand the world my sister lived in? I wasn’t ready to let her and her children go, couldn’t admit to myself that they were probably already gone.
When our father was dying, during the last night of his life, I asked him to record a little message for his daughter, in the event that they didn’t get a chance to speak before the end. He hesitated for a long time, and everything he said afterwards applied to himself as much as to his daughter.
Except that, naturally, he started off by saying he could never understand how she could stay with that colossal asshole after all the times he’d betrayed and lied to her. I told him that his views on the subject were well known to everyone, but that perhaps he had something of a more helpful nature he wanted to say to her, before time ran out. He had a very hard time formulating anything I could play for her.
“No matter how much you praise her, it makes no difference, her need for affirmation is a bottomless pit,” said the brilliant man who’d insisted, moments earlier, that he’d been the dumbest Jewish kid in Peekskill — “by far!”.
“I must I must have told her a hundred times what a phenomenally talented teacher she was, but it never made the slightest impression on her. It’s like a bottomless hole that can’t be filled.” said my father, a bottomless hole that couldn’t be filled, on the last night of his life.
“A hundred times?,” I said, not able to let that bit of dishonest hyperbole go, not in our last conversation.
“Easily a hundred,” he said. It was probably once, perhaps it was even twice, whatever it was it wasn’t a hundred fucking times. I let it go, aware that I was in his temple, the room he was dying in.
“His life was shame-based,” my sister said after he died. “His whole life was an attempt to avoid feeling unbearable shame.”
Set and match, if you pattern yourself after someone you admire, in spite of the tremendous damage he did.
I went into a fury when my sister told me she hadn’t had a chance to set her daughter straight, claiming that since it was already a year ago that the kid probably had no memory of it anyway. When I blew up, my sister burst into tears. She sobbed like a little kid, I’ve never seen an adult cry that way. She stood on the street, bawling and shuddering for a long time. Then she promised again that she’d tell her kids that she’d lied, that their uncle hadn’t been crazy or lying when he casually mentioned an objective, taboo fact.
“Hi, Uncle Elie,” my niece said over the phone a week or two later. “My mom wanted me to call to tell you that she told us that our dad was married and divorced before my parents got married.”
“Did she tell you why I needed her to tell you this?”
“No, we were both kind of confused about why it was so important to you…” she said.
“A hundred million people have been divorced, people get divorced all the time. Why would I give a shit about you knowing that your father had been divorced?” I said.
“We were wondering the same thing,” she said.
I told her the story. She’d forgotten all about it, just as her mom had predicted. When I finished the story she said “now I understand why you were so upset.”
That may have been the last time I spoke on the phone with my smart, beautiful niece. Ten years later, after periodic texts exchanged, with many heart emojis, I finally set out to write the impossible letter, to her and her brother.
The impossible letter, I understand now, is any letter written to influence somebody who has unquestioning, unreasoning belief. The greatest letter you can conceive will not change deeply held beliefs, unless the heart of the recipient is already inclined toward what you have to say. It’s natural to suspect a nefarious motive when you receive an attempt to persuade you of something you’re not inclined to accept, coming from someone you’ve been warned against. A charming, personal letter from Hitler, no matter how beautifully written, would have little chance of changing my mind about anything.
Impossible letter number two was written to my only two living blood relatives, my niece and nephew. I was disappointed, but not entirely surprised, to have no response from either of them. The back story is long and complicated, though also simple and straightforward.
The roots of this insoluble impasse to-the-death, like most things of a deadly emotional nature, are in long-ago childhood. I have avoided writing directly about this particular tangled emotional web but at this point my need to set things out is greater than my need to be senselessly discreet. When you’re forbidden to talk about things, and they continue to bother you, the most obvious option, for those who sit down every day to write, is to write them out. To me clarity is a much better option than blind emotional commitment to a strong, unreasoning feeling. If you’re like me, the impossible letter eventually begins to take shape in your head, you imagine the clear telling that will set everything straight, in a perfect world.
In the home my sister and I grew up in, our father dominated our mother. Dad “won”, mom “lost” — she always compromised, he almost never did. Our mother was smart, quick on her feet, funny, competent, sociable, a better driver than our father, adroit at solving mysteries, but she always deferred to her strong-willed husband during the hollering matches we had with our dinner almost every night. She bent to whatever he needed, always took his side, out of love, loyalty, sympathy, knowing how badly he needed to be right, fear, weakness, conditioning, lack of confidence, variable self-esteem, a housewife’s expected fealty to her husband in the 1960s, some combination of all of the above. Our father was upset almost every evening, exhausted by working two jobs and the monstrous ingratitude of his two spoiled, mean-spirited children. He flew into a rage easily and in his rage was never without righteousness on his side. He was rightfully known as the DU, The Dreaded Unit, my sister’s perfect name for him.
My sister paid me a great compliment once, when we were young adults. We were sitting in a Dunkin’ Donuts in south Florida. She asked me why I wasn’t like either one of our parents. I told her that if those were the only two options in life, to become one of our deeply damaged parents, I’d have long ago snuffed myself. I asked her why she thought those were the only two choices. I had no understanding then of how inexorably our childhood had marked my sister’s life, limiting her choices to modeling herself after a winner or a loser, righteous dominance or humiliating submission.
“I’m the DU,” she told me somberly, shortly after her second child was born. She fixed me with a terribly poignant look that shook me as much as her statement.
“No, wait, that can’t be, you can’t… you have to do something about that. You need to talk to somebody, you need to do some work, you can’t replicate what was done to us. You don’t want to inflict that kind of damage on your children. You can’t do that to them, come on, they’re totally innocent. What are you going to do? You’ve got to nip this shit in the bud.”
“Being the DU means you can’t do anything about it,” she said.
Decades later I understand that if you are damaged enough to see the world as black and white, win or lose, pride or crushing shame, with nothing in between (compromise is weakness) you believe, in your core, that there is nothing you can do about it but get up every day and fight anyone who makes you feel bad about yourself. My father always argued that people cannot change on any fundamental level.
I understand now, only very recently, that it was a true statement for him. Being the DU means you feel utterly powerless against your dreaded nature. If you acknowledge that others can work and change some of the worst things about themselves, how humiliating that would be. It’s almost like you’re choosing to be too weak to face whatever makes you live in a black and white world.
(part 2 to follow)
Some people are so hurt that, when it comes to inevitable conflict, they see it as hurt others or be hurt yourself, and take no chances — they attack. They commonly deploy a technique known as DARVO, (Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim and Offender) a reflexive strategy whenever there is conflict — make it the complete fault of the other person.
Conflict, to this personality, is not something to be resolved, it is a war for existence itself that must be won by any means necessary. The first rule of conflict, for those who see it as total war, is: deny any role in the conflict and blame the merciless party you disagree with. Like so:
This conflict is entirely your creation and not my fault in any way, so you are the cause of the entire conflict and the only one who can fix it, obviously! I need to defend myself against your unfair, sick, dangerous attacks. I’ve never had conflict in my life, your life is one long conflict, so the entire problem must be you, though, of course, you can’t admit that, because that would make you wrong, which you can never be. You keep insisting I hurt you but you hurt me continually, brutally, unfairly and without the slightest mercy or hesitation, etc.
If you think about it for a moment, the only hope of resolving a conflict is through an honest back and forth, everyone gaining a better understanding of the cause of the problem, everyone willing to compromise to make the mutual pain stop. This takes a certain maturity and faith in the problem solving abilities of the other person in the conflict.
Honest conversation and understanding are the last things a person who needs to “win” every conflict can tolerate. So-called honesty is perceived as a vicious attack on vital organs! So you use all of your powers to transform the other party into the unreasonable aggressor and recruit loyal allies in the brutal war to defend your good name against the slander that you are hell-bent on winning at any price.
Talk about your basic mindfuck. The cherry on top is that people you have known for years, and considered close friends, could believe this simplistic and ridiculous version of events rather than the much more plausible story of what actually took place… perfectly mindfucking…
Remember the acronym DARVO — deny, attack, reverse victim and offender. How did I go all these years with no shorthand for the consistent way every angry person who cannot be wrong that I’ve ever had a conflict with has reacted? What is the word for the flying monkeys who believe the weaponized DARVO version of reality? Oh, yeah, flying monkeys. Oh wee yo…
