Category Archives: Ahimsa

Learning lessons you do not want to know

With New Year’s Eve approaching on roller skates my mind naturally goes, not to all the great New things of the flipping of the flipping calendar year, but to mortality.  The day after New Year’s Day I’ll be waking before dawn to go to a funeral.  The woman who died was 94, sharp until her last few days, and she went peacefully in her sleep surrounded by her loved ones.  A blessed end to a long life, going the way we’d all like to go, the way we’d wish to anyone we love.  Still, her death causes lacerating pain to her daughter, a grandmother.  There is never a good time to lose your mother.  The permanence of a loved one’s death is always unbearable.

As my life goes along I more and more connect sudden professions of love with a demand, with deadly consequences.   The last three old friends I lost all told me, totally out of character, as things were winding toward their fatal end, that they loved me.  Love, I was meant to understand, means that even if I hurt you, even if I hurt you over and over in exactly the same way, even if I am deaf to your pleas to stop doing it, I DID IT OUT OF LOVE, you heartless, unforgiving fuck! 

It’s not a lesson that I’m happy to learn, that the last card an angry asshole will play before they metaphorically kill you is “I love you!”.  Any wisdom this lesson provides is no comfort to me.   We are all looking for connection in a lonely world, in a life that inevitably ends in death.  Love, like forgiveness, is a steady attitude, a desire not to cause pain to someone we love.  Not everyone lives to experience love this way, it generally has many conditions and strings attached to it.  

“If you really love me you will cut the heads off those people who hurt me by making me feel bad about myself,” is a deadly serious string, and the dutiful partner will go on the quest, decapitate the enemies, and there’s a version of love, I suppose.  Some people, for example, cannot love a fat person — put on one too many pounds and you break the deal.   Some demand total obedience, and if you disobey, you can expect a terrible punishment.  Others require telling a lie and sticking to it doggedly whenever something uncomfortable comes up.

For many, that’s as close to love as they will ever come.  It’s better than no love, I suppose, but not for everyone.

The terror of irrationality, redux

The only way forward in a conflict or problem, any troubling situation that requires thought, planning and an actual solution, is imagining, reasoning, talking and agreement. Some kind of agreement always has to come before the problem can be solved. The really scary part about human conflict is that it is often not amenable to thought, reasonable discussion or compromise. The more willful party, the one who refuses to agree to anything, will insist it has prevailed, to the harm of everyone involved.

I think of the frequent rages of my father. He couldn’t explain exactly why he was raging at any given time, but anger filled him and he needed to vomit it out regularly.

His temper was fierce and he never really forgave. He spoke and reasoned very well, so that amid his terrible curses he was able to mount an argument that was sometimes hard to overcome. Very hard to overcome, because he was adept at constantly shifting what you were actually talking about while he was angry and afterwards. Try talking something out, or calming somebody, when you can’t even agree what you’re talking about in any given moment.

We had an ongoing philosophical dispute over whether someone can change anything significant about themselves. My position was, if you are in enough pain, and motivated to be in less pain, you can change certain things that lead inevitably to more pain. For example, you can learn how to take a breath and be more patient when you are about to lose your temper. In my mind this is kind of a game changer, if your weakness is a proneness to respond to frustration with anger.

My father’s position, understandably, was that my belief in a human’s ability to change anything fundamental about himself was completely idiotic. No matter how much I may have thought that I changed he would always be able to provoke me until he proved that he was right about my fucking uncontrollably violent temper. Even after I proved to him that he couldn’t make me angry anymore, he dismissed any change in me as delusional, a superficial acting job.

It occurred to me recently, after stumbling on some literature about narcissism, and the narcissist’s need to be in control and be right no matter what the facts or the situation, that my father, speaking as a narcissist, was truly unable to change. The whole ball game for a narcissist is about winning the stark black and white conflict that is life, at any cost, no matter how small the issue causing friction. The world is either white, and everything you do is commendable and perfect, or black, and everything you do is despicable, contemptible, shameful. If those are your only two choices, you’re going to pick perfect and commendable and death to all humiliating naysayers. End of story.

What does that leave for everybody else in the narcissist’s orbit? Basically my way or the highway, asshole, you know the fucking rules of this one way road, you contemptible pile of dreck!

Look at any source of media drama and you will see narcissists, like the richest men in the world, our most powerful and greatest genius citizens, acting like petty children to assert their superiority over all of the losers in the world. Facts don’t matter when you’re a wealthy compulsive liar and there is no penalty for lying and calling everybody else a fucking liar. Would you expect a more humane rule in a world run by entitled narcissists?

Interesting how seeing this now through the eyes of narcissism, which is so prevalent in our world today, makes me finally understand that my father, for all his talents and excellent traits, actually was unable to change. The conviction that people cannot change was a core belief that went into making him what he was, because his wounds made change impossible for him. A tragedy, yes, but also very easy to understand, through the right lens.

To me, the terror of irrationality is that nothing can be agreed upon, nothing can be discussed, nothing can be resolved, no conflict can be peaceably ended, except on the terms of the more willful party. This is because all of the tools that humans have to make peace have been taken off the table in the service of one party insisting on their right to do whatever they need to do to the other party in order to control and prevail over their own helplessness in the face of their unbearable pain. So those who can’t solve their own terrible problems inflict their pain on everybody else, fair enough.

Talk about some fucked up shit, Larry...

Why I write everyday

The world doesn’t care very much about any one of us. In fact, it doesn’t care at all. We are fortunate if we have people who love us and treat us with kindness, but as for the world itself, it doesn’t give a rat’s ass about any one of us. It has seen billions and billions of us come and go, often dying violently for no real reason, except that somebody else is angry and takes it out on us in a lethal fashion. The universe itself is clearly indifferent to any individual’s existence.

Hey, that’s a nice Merry Christmas Eve, fella!

That’s not the point, that’s the background. In a universe that is indifferent we have a need to connect ourselves to others who care. And so in this age of the internet, with the illusion of connection to everybody else alive and staring at their phones, we send out our beacon to find others who might have suffered the same things we have, who might care, who might benefit from our thoughts and feelings if we can set them out clearly.

At this moment in history when American deaths of despair have reached these terrible proportions, when millions of isolated people have literally given up on the idea of love, kindness, companionship, decency and fair treatment, voices of calm, voices of reassurance, are so important.

When I write, I feel a connection to people I have never met. It is in part an illusion, since few people ever read these words, but the connection is also real. These posts take on a kind of life, they can be read anytime, they can be found when you might need to find something like them and derive some sense of comfort from knowing that somebody else has gone through things very similar to what you have gone through.

It may comfort you to know that you are not the only person who spent childhood in a senseless war zone, trying to make peace with an insanely implacable foe, and although you are wounded and scarred by this kind of upbringing, it doesn’t have to destroy you.

It may comfort you to know that if you love doing something very much, writing for example, if you do it every day you will get better and better at it. I don’t know that I have much native musical talent, but after half a century of loving to play music I’m a very good self-taught instrumentalist.

Love really is all you need, it makes the world go round. Lack of love is responsible for every terrible mistake that humans make, certainly every act of violence. Loving what you do is a net good. Spend some time everyday doing what you love, you will not regret it.

When somebody tells you over and over who they are, believe them

This turns out to be really hard to put into practice when you’re hearing something new from an old friend. It seems they must be going through some terrible crisis, that they’re not themselves, when they say things like “no matter what you say, you will never change my mind.”

The first time they say this to you, you will say to yourself, perhaps also to them, what the fuck? The second time they say this you should realize they’re being deadly serious. Every time after that, it’s on you that you don’t understand that nothing you can say will make any difference to their immovable position.

And what exactly is their immovable position? Only this: no matter what you say, I don’t care, you’re still wrong and I’m still right.

If you ask what they are right about they will simply repeat “whatever you say, you will never change my mind.”

When you are locked in a tense conversation only about frayed emotions, will and a need to be right, the only way out, since words, thoughts, appeals to friendship and mercy are of no use, is to finally believe that what your one time friend is now insisting on is his absolute truth. Now you will simply have to accept it. Nothing you can say will change it, as has been said over and over.

You don’t have to like it, of course. The point is you won’t like it, nobody likes to be told, essentially, to shut the fuck up. In the end though, you have to believe what they’re telling you, there’s no point wasting your breath in a conversation where nothing you say can will make a difference in any way.

One last metaphorical kick in the nuts, and be on your way, my friend, there’s no longer anything here for you.

Repetition Compulsion and me

A longtime friend, Mark Friedman, was the most dramatic example I ever met of someone with a repetition compulsion. Psychologists tell us that the compulsion to repeat the same painful pattern over and over is an attempt to resolve some injurious conflict that tormented us in our childhood.

In Mark’s case, as near as I could figure it, it had to do with feeling that his father never respected him, and that his mother could not love him enough to compensate for this. The primal wound he suffered is somewhat subjective and I don’t want to sound judgmental, but that he was compelled to repeat the same three act play throughout his tormented life is something I saw up close for many years.

The shape of the story was always the same, the three act tragedy identical each time.

Act one was great admiration, enthusiasm and pure enjoyment of a person who was finally able to provide everything he’d been looking for. This person was cool, smart, funny, ingenious, talented, charismatic and a great friend, the very best person he’d ever met.

During Act two cracks would predictably appear in this exaggeratedly perfect facade, which would become increasingly worrying to Mark.

Act three was the final, unforgivable betrayal of Mark, which happened every time as regularly as the sun rises and sets each day.

I don’t know of another case of repetition compulsion as dramatic as Mark’s. It was so clear to see, and so frustrating to me that as otherwise smart as he was he simply couldn’t see it. He’d get furious, in fact, if you pointed out any similarity in his crashed relationships. That, as much as anything else, was the cause of our final estrangement. Which, of course, fit the pattern, betrayal by his trusty longtime best friend was dictated by the three act structure.

While Mark’s self-destructive pattern was easy for me to see, the compulsion is much harder to recognize in oneself. Why was it that I was always attracted to smart, tormented, bitter, angry, darkly — sometimes sadistically — funny people throughout my life?

It was an attempt to work out with them what I could not work out with my own smart, tormented, bitter, angry, darkly — sometimes sadistically —  funny father. In the end each of these relationships ended in a bitter falling out that I tried, sometimes for years, to prevent.

The lesson that was so hard for me to learn was that these people I cared about so much were literally poison to me because they could never give me what I was looking for, what I tried so hard to give to them — the benefit of the doubt, empathy and friendship.

Without empathy or the benefit of the doubt we don’t really have friendship. If somebody is incapable of these crucial things, out of their own injuries, we often won’t notice it until conflict arises. They say conflict reveals character, and it’s true. Under pressure things you can’t see when everything is fine will squeeze you to death. While everyone is laughing together it’s easy to feel like great friends.

And it was this laughter, this often dark, cruel humor, that bonded my father and me in between our long sessions of brutal combat. These moments of shared laughter were a great release, a relief, as well as providing the giddy hope of finding any kind of understanding with my supremely difficult father.

So these sardonic characters who were my closest friends for many years shared this bond of black humor with me and made me feel I’d found indispensable friends and was not doomed to interminable, senseless mortal combat.

It has taken decades for me to finally learn this sadly simple lesson: just because somebody smiles wickedly and laughs at your sense of humor doesn’t mean that they are your soulmate. Funny as it may seem reading these dry, serious pages I post here, I am a very funny motherfucker and make many people smile wickedly and laugh. It has taken me half a century to untangle reactions to my sense of humor from the deadly limitations of some of my onetime closest friends. Droll, eh?

End of the line

I’ve had this kind of conversation before. Every time it is the saddest imaginable conversation, because at the end, in spite of great affection, both parties will be dead to each other. Alive and walking around in the world, and doing acts of kindness, and trying to be the best they can be, and dead to each other.

We don’t come to this kind of final conversation lightly. First of all, we have to care enough about the other person to extend them the final chance to avoid our mutual deaths. The average jerk who acts like a jerk and hurts us in a jerky fashion does not get this kind of final discussion. We just write them off, smile when we see them and avoid anything of consequence with them. But with people we deeply care about, who have deeply hurt us, it sometimes comes to this final conversation.

Personally, I tend to avoid starting these conversations once I’m fully aware of the hideous terrain we are both stuck in. Once the other party insists that nothing you have said changes anything, you are pretty much done. Words at that point have no ability to change the emotional reality that makes it impossible for us to continue as friends. In fact, if you express yourself clearly you are only making the wound deeper by seeming to blame the other person for being heartless, clueless, unforgiving, unyielding, rigid, needy, childish, etc.

The outline of this talk is always the same. The person calling will say they love you, that they have taken about all that they can take, that they have tried their best to be your friend and give you what you need but nothing they have done has been enough for you. They will place it on you, pronouncing the final death.

After all the aggravation, the soul searching, the health threatening stress of trying to find a mutual solution with somebody who is unable to overcome their righteous anger, their inability to forgive, words are of limited use. That said, it is good to remain honest until the end.

Trust me, you will get no acknowledgment of your honesty, and truly it means nothing in that moment. But you remain true to yourself by not pretending that all of your hard work has produced any tangible result. It is time to put down the cadaver of an old friendship you were carrying, alone, in hopes of a miracle.

I find that at the very end of these talks sometimes a last precisely calibrated insult can be very helpful in allowing your dear friend to permanently write you out of their life. At that moment, it is the least you can do by way of mercy.

What it means to be unforgiving

Being unforgiving means you cannot let go of your hurt and anger, even after someone does their best to make amends. Even when someone expresses sincere regret for their harmful actions and humbly asks for your forgiveness, you can’t forgive.

This kind of angry person, who tends to live in a zero sum world of winners and losers, cannot forgive themselves, cannot calm themselves when they’re upset, have not learned to sit with strong, painful emotions and wait until they are calmer to try to resolve a conflict. Unregulated anger is destructive, it arises from pre-verbal fears and shame and it extends to an inability to forgive.

Holding on to anger is a maladaptive way to try to feel righteous and superior. This type, with its unhealthy bent toward indignation and rage, is clueless about how to resolve conflicts with others and within themselves.

When you think about it, it’s pretty clear that you have no obligation to forgive someone who hurts you and blames you entirely for making them hurt you. When no apology is offered, hurtful behavior is never acknowledged, your obligation to forgive disappears. That is not being unforgiving, it’s health, common sense and what’s best for yourself and other people that you love.

Those who can’t forgive, no matter what? Dangerous, wounded, supremely destructive motherfuckers. We might well feel very sorry for them, if we care about them, but not being able to forgive their eternal blaming anger does not make us unforgiving.

This type will force her mate to kill his best friends, and her mate will do it because he feels he has no choice but to become enraged at his best friends and kill them. Otherwise he will be derided forever as a contemptible weakling. The alligator he is wrestling with will point toward his more sympathetic friends and tell him that they are the vicious alligators and if he doesn’t fight them to the death he’s a pussy.

As long as he stays angry, he will never have to to be tormented by his own immature, self-harming actions, which is the greatest blessing to this eternally trapped poor bastard type.

Good working definition of empathy

This definition comes from Dr Ramani, a psychologist and writer with a youTube channel dedicated to understanding narcissism and the harm it causes.

Empathy is about being present with a person, truly present with all of a person. And being able to respond to their emotions and attempt to understand them and their emotions… Empathy is a deep, reciprocal state.

Take away the reciprocal part and you don’t have empathy. You have a hierarchy where one person’s emotion is much more important than the other’s. Call that whatever you want, it’s not friendship. And there’s not even a whiff of empathy there.

If you’re trying to have a real conversation with somebody who lacks empathy, you might as well talk to a hungry grizzly bear.