Category Archives: Ahimsa

Complainer

My best advice to you when times are tough for you — and what I’m going to say might seem like very, very tough love — never, ever lose your patience with people who hurt you, no matter what.

Once you lose patience, and the ability to hold pain inside, forever, if necessary, you become the problem and the focus of everyone else’s defensiveness. How can you be worthy of friendship when you make people who hurt you feel so defensive?

Think about it like this, my constantly complaining friend, giving in to frustration is like inconsolably protesting that it’s wrong for the corpse you loved so much in life to keep lying there like it’s dead and not getting up to hug you.

I may not be able to take this advice about endless, limitless patience myself, you understand, but if you don’t, you are going to have big problems. Trust me on that one.

Why it is better to write than to bang your head against the wall

Sometimes the quiet focused conversation you need to address vexations is best done on a page, between yourself and an imagined reader.  In a tense real-time conversation about things that trouble us, tempers can quickly become inflamed.  As soon as people feel defensive it becomes a tit for tat pissing contest between righteously offended parties instead of a productive conversation.   People will sometimes expect much more from you than they do from themselves.   

“You made them feel defensive!  No wonder they attacked you!” a crying loved one will conclude afterwards, when anger erupts and all attempts at peacemaking have been angrily batted away.  Your loved one will be too upset to help you much at that point and you will strain things between you by continuing to try to puzzle through it aloud.

So, a blank page.  And the opportunity to finish the thoughts angry, upset people won’t let you finish, a time to puzzle through, find and state a difficult thing clearly without static, interruption, endless challenges before you complete a sentence.   

Look, right here I can pause (with no pause showing), in a way that’s impossible to do when someone is indignant at something you are saying, will not hear it, glares and angrily points to your inability to control your emotions.

Anger happens between people when there is hurt.   In my experience, when you are upset, the best thing to do is start with a thought and a blank page.   Look how many times you can stop, read, reflect, remove a distracting word, add a sentence that clarifies what you need to express, to make your thoughts and feelings understood.  The primary benefit of this exercise, this struggle toward clarity, is for yourself, I have learned.

Others will not often be persuaded, by even the most gentle statement of something they don’t want to hear, are incapable of hearing.  It is hard to read something intended to make you question your own certainty, the rightness of your own behavior.  We live in a defensive, competitive society, a litigious culture.   In this place, if you have a problem, be prepared for a battle, even if (or especially if, perhaps) you write with the dispassionate  mildness of a sage.

“See, you’re using your talent and training, and fifty years of daily practice, to get an advantage over me because you don’t have the courage to confront me to my face!”

Be under no illusions about anyone else being influenced or moved by what you write, no matter how carefully you try to treat their injured feelings.  I had a tremendously long email correspondence with an argumentative old friend who had exploded at me several times, angrily hanging up on me the last time we spoke, after firing off a string of curses.  Some, perhaps many, would have pronounced the friendship dead at that point, but. realizing he’d been at the end of his rope, I tried to patiently lay out the tensions between us, trace what had led to his anger, point to ways we could repair our frayed friendship and become better friends to each other.   

He wrote back thanking me for my patience, and for showing him understanding instead of anger or blame, but told me he still didn’t grasp what I was actually trying to say and therefore was unable to respond to any of it.  He asked me to try to make it clear for him. I clarified each thought I’d sent him, in detail.  He thanked me for my efforts, but indicated he was still at such a loss that he was unable to respond to any point I’d raised.  Perhaps if I dropped the mildness mask, he suggested, and just honestly and directly told him why I’d been upset with him (I had, but not in a way this longtime lawyer could understand, apparently).   When I did, he was outraged and claimed to have read all of my long emails again “searching in vain for the slightest clue” about why’d I’d been so upset, though I was certainly making my anger at him clear.  Case closed.  I gave him the last word.

You may write something so clear that in the writing of it you finally understand a thing that has been too painful to confront.  The beloved child you have been carrying on your back for so long, the kid who hasn’t been responding when you talk to her, is actually dead.  The most beautiful poem ever written will not bring her back.

You deserve love

You deserve friends who make you laugh, feel loved, comfort you when you need comforting, accept your limitations and quickly work out any problems with you when they see you are unhappy.   You deserve friends who always give you the benefit of the doubt, who accept when they’ve hurt you and always do their best to make amends and not let you sit in pain.  You deserve friends who return your 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.

The hard part of friendship is when you are deeply hurt by a friend who then feels defensive and needs to feel understood themself about why they hurt you, tells you why you shouldn’t have been so hurt, why they couldn’t respond to you any differently, why what you needed by way of honest acknowledgment of what happened was impossible for them for a list of perfectly valid reasons — and, perhaps most importantly, how hurt they were by you saying they hurt you.  Your emotional emergency, they might explain, does not make it their emotional emergency, since they are very busy with many responsibilities and loved ones to take care of.   It can sit, until there’s time, until people are not under stress, until everyone is nice and calm.  That period of silence will give the hurt party time to heal, presumably, and then cooler heads will prevail and everything that is bothering everybody can be left in the past as the simple human mistake that it was.

The hardest part about friendship is the expectation that, no matter what, you need to take our undying love as beyond question or doubt, to understand things we can never explain, acknowledge or stop justifying.  We all have reasons for our actions and inaction, we all believe we are justified in what we do or don’t do, that we are not emotionally volatile assholes who hold in a lifetime of painful feelings and simply lash out in frustration and misplaced anger sometimes.   

“OK, fine, you want to blame us for your pain, your childish need to be the eternal victim?  Yes, we could have behaved better, we could have listened, we could have responded, we could have reached out after you reached out to us, but we didn’t, so just get over it, either accept our understandable human limitations, and our love (which you obviously don’t know how to return) or be on your miserable way.   Our life is good, and full, and fulfilling and we can’t really help you with your immense reservoir of pain, anger and need to blame others for your own problems.” 

If we are filled with infinite love, patience, wisdom and compassion we may be able to understand that position as a somewhat defensive expression of true, deep friendship, in spite of its seemingly harsh nature.  If not, we remain hurt, locked in a childish feeling of being unloved and ready to lash out even when our old friend drives hours after a day of work to prove his friendship by being there, even if unable to offer any actual comfort, to absorb a final, typical, angry outburst or two.  Push an asshole far enough emotionally, et, voila, they revert to their sickeningly aggressive, threatening, childish type.   

“Nobody wants to hear your justifications for why you felt entitled not to continue to hold your pain and frustration in, after way less than a year of simply not being heard.  It’s just sad that you need to weaponize a few months of innocent, perfectly understandable silence.  Friends don’t make you sad, friends help you.”

Emotional Maturity, anyone?

I don’t know how the artificial intelligence of YouTube algorithms determined to send me this particular video, (and I shudder to think about the sophistication of the surveillance we are all under using our smart devices) but as I watched it I said “damn!” A pretty smart little film clip with a short, powerful comparison of emotional immaturity and emotional maturity.

The narrator asks what our characteristic reaction is when someone we love hurts us. We can sulk, hoping for a magical solution. We can rage, like the cartoon of a powerful autocrat. We can grow cold and withdraw. Babies and children act this way, why shouldn’t adults?

For one thing, the world would know nothing but war and no interpersonal conflict could ever be solved.

Three characteristics of emotional maturity needed to actually solve musunderstandings and mistakes: The capacity to explain why we are hurt. The capacity to stay calm and extend the benefit of the doubt when hurt. The capacity to be vulnerable.

The narrator asks reasonably and humanely how we can expect to emerge from childhood with emotional maturity if we are raised by people lacking the emotional vocabulary, or emotional maturity, to show us how adults deal with pain? Lacking that, it’s just years of hard goddamn work not to act like a baby when we’re fucking hurt. Here’s a neat six minute primer:

insight?

When I was in my late twenties, visiting the farm of my parents’ best friemd, Arlene, she laid a great truth on me. As we watched the sun set one evening she said:

“You feel like you disappointed your parents, like you’re responsible for their unhappiness. I love your parents to death, as you know, they’re my best friends, but they are both very unhappy people. They just are, they were that way long before you were born. Their unhappiness has nothing to do with you, there is nothing you can do to change it, the burden of it is not something you need to carry through life.”

Though what she said sounds obvious to me now, it was like she’d reached up and pulled a string to turn on a light in the universe.

That understanding was an immense help to me, comparable to my father’s older first cousin Eli, years later, describing how he witnessed his beloved Aunt Chava grab the thick, burlap covered cord for her steam iron, from a drawer behind her seat at the kitchen table, and whip little Irv across the face with it.

“In the face?” I said.

“Yep, over and over,” said Eli.

“Jesus,” I said, “how old was he?”

“However old you are when you can stand on your two feet without falling over,” he said, with limitless sorrow. He saw it many times after that, and he said that over time all she had to do was rattle the drawer where she kept the whipping cord and young Irv would stand at rigid attention, staring at the ground, trembling, waiting for the whipping to start.

how writing helps you clarify things

I was raised by parents who had been physically and psychologically abused as children.  They grew to adulthood with little ability to restrain themselves when frustrated and, quick to anger, took out their unbearable feelings on their children.   My sister and I were blamed for all kinds of things, some of them ridiculous.  I trace my need to express myself to my childhood desperation to untie the knot of the incoherent story I was expected to accept about myself, about my sister.   I started writing fairly young, and before that I drew, constantly.   

“Why are your drawings so scary?” my mother would sometimes ask.   

“Because I can’t write yet,” I might have told her.

I had a girlfriend and her baby visit me in New York decades ago, saved up, sent them plane tickets.  The child, who I loved very much, is now in her thirties, maybe forty (damn!).   I last saw her on her fourth or fifth birthday.   Her mother was beautiful, talented, had a great sense of humor, we got along great, I loved her, but in the end things didn’t work out between us.  During the week they were my guests, the two year-old had a few temper tantrums, as two year-olds do, and her mother tried to press me into moving to California and join the community she lived in with her Indian guru, Baba Hari Dass.  I felt increasingly pressured as the week went on.

After they left I found a drawing I’d done while they were in NY.   It was a shapely woman’s leg, standing firmly on its lovely foot, with a leash tied to the thigh, where a garter would be.   The leash was taut and straining against it was a dog with a human face, and a huge boulder on his back.

“Fuck,” I thought when I saw that drawing afterwards, “that self-portrait says it all…”

I find this unexpected revelation of my deeper feelings with writing sometimes.  I read something I wrote and a phrase jumps out to clarify a complicated quandary for me.  Here’s a paragraph I wrote recently that made me realize something very important about a prolonged estrangement from two of my oldest, dearest friends.

Long, deep talk with old friends recently [different ones — ed.], reminding me of the healing power of being heard and of forcing yourself to hear things you may not like to hear.  These are crucial perspectives you can’t come to on your own when you are impaired by pain. Good friends don’t always have to agree with you, though they often do, but they always treat you with care when you need care. 

Simple test: did my oldest friends always treat me with care when I needed care?

Well, not always, and lately, for the last nine months or so, no care at all.  In fact, the opposite of care. They insisted I was wrong to feel the way I did after one jumped ugly with me, since in their story she was only reacting to my threatening attitude.  They blamed me for ruining a wonderful vacation with a flash of anger the last day, denied there was any tension at all leading up to my outburst, just a simple misunderstanding I blew up over, until seven months later one of them admitted things had been very tense, because she had been micromanaging everything to make sure it was all perfect.  The other one later threatened me that he’d walked away from friendships for less than what I’d done to him.  The first one had a temper tantrum, then was so shocked later that I still needed to talk about it that she went incommunicado for months, then had another temper tantrum when I dared to bring up the troubling pass our long relationship has come to.  

Understanding does not lead to a clean solution to your vexations, but it is better to see the thing clearly than to have it muddily painful in your head, waking you hours too early, like a toothache.  I compare this depressing impasse with my dear, old friends to having a knife stuck in my side by one of them, unintentionally, let’s say.  When I pointed to it, the other pushed it in a little further.   Months later, when I gestured toward the still unhealed knife wound, the first one stuck her finger deep into it and wiggled it around.  I didn’t bleed out, I didn’t lose consciousness, so what am I fucking blubbering about?  That’s a tiny flesh wound, asshole, I’ll give you something to blubber about!

To forgive is divine, truly, and to be slow to anger is praiseworthy.  I managed not to respond to either of them with anger, but their conditional apologies turn out to be hollow, empty, without form or substance, without any change in behavior.   I don’t need apologies anyway, as I explained to them, I need to be heard and understood by loved ones when I’m hurt. You know, empathy, understanding, the benefit of the doubt — basic friendship.  I expect to be treated with the same care I extend to them.  But that turns out to be unreasonable when the only pain the other person can truly relate to is their own.

We are all capable of casting ourselves as the victims when things get ugly, and things are ugly enough for all of us right now on this imperiled little planet, at the doorstep of climate destruction and surging worldwide fascism.  There are also not always two equally compelling sides to every story.  Treating friends with care is the most basic duty of friendship.  Dereliction of that duty, especially if repeated over and over, is an indication that the friendship you are clinging to may already be dead.   

I still have a hope that these two dear friends will have an unexpected change of heart the next time we meet, whenever that might be.   I’m ready to be pleasantly surprised, delighted and relieved, by that change of heart, that deeper understanding.  It’s a slim, wan, simpering hope, I know, but it is a hope and I appreciate it.  Hope is always better than no hope, I believe, until the proof is irrefutable and the hope for something better is crushed by dull, heavy, merciless reality.

The first casualty of a frayed relationship

When a relationship is strained, lines are drawn, sides taken and moral stances struck.  The first casualty in such standoffs is often honesty, which is a shame, since it’s also the only way back to health.   But since feelings are strained, hackles are easily raised and things are at a breaking point, you must be very careful about what you say, how you say it, what you leave out, what is safe terrain and what is a minefield that will blow everybody up if you set a toe on to it.   

Though this limited honesty may feel to you like a kind of death, if you are used to an honest back and forth, it is nothing like death.  It is an attempt to save the life of a frayed relationship in the only way possible, by putting things on a respirator in hopes of an eventual return to health and good cheer.

Only time will tell if your efforts towards repair succeed.   A primal wound feels the same every time someone pokes a finger into it.  The loss of a long, close friendship, in spite of your best efforts, always hurts exactly the same way, is identical to the grief of death in its inexorable finality.  I will say, from my experience, a friendship that ends with someone screaming at you or bullying you is much easier to walk away from than one where your friend expresses only hurt, confusion and exasperation.  It is as if the anger of the friend you are trying to reach cauterizes the wound, since you feel immediately relieved to be away from someone who can’t stop hissing and snarling.  Good riddance to the raging bastard.

It is a tricky business, to be a human, as anyone who has tried it will tell you.   The most important tool to mending hurt is mutual understanding. 

Trying to reach understanding with only limited honesty, certain things never on the table for discussion, is supremely challenging.   If the relationship means enough to you it is possible to find the patience to wait, even though it may seem impossible to be that patient at certain points.   As long as you don’t lose your temper there is a chance of repair, even with the prickliest, most defensive of characters.  The hope is that at that point mutual honesty will also be restored, everyone wiser for the long, terrible disruption of good will.