Category Archives: Family

Questions for the jury

Imagine a vexing event from your own life, a time someone treated you badly. Take all the names out and present it to an imagined jury of twelve reasonable citizens, like so:

An overbearing, tyrannical father talking to his college grad son who has moved back home while looking for a job, tells the young man that he knows of a good contact to get into his field, television, writing and media. Then he tells his son that he’s not going to set up a meeting with this excellent lead because “what would that teach you about life?”

In hindsight the adult son knows his father probably knew no such person. Falsely claiming to know him, to be able to help, gave him the power to fuck the son he hated almost as much as he hated himself. So, armed with this knowledge, and a time machine, the son goes back to the original moment of abuse with the father.

“OK, dad, I get what you’re saying. Give me the guy’s name and I’ll do the legwork to get an appointment with him.”

“How would that teach you about pulling yourself up by your own initiative, will and strength of character?”

“By teaching me to help others, when it is within my power, instead of hindering them. Please just give me the guy’s contact info and I’ll take it from there.”

After more tap dancing from his grandiose father, madly insisting that by providing a phantom lead and then hindering him in his moment of need that he is actually building his character, the son comes to the point.

“If you actually know this guy, let me call his office. If you’re lying, what is your fucking problem, father?”

Questions for the Jury:

If the father doubles down with the whole “I’m doing this abusive thing for your own good, son, and I’m right and you’re wrong, no matter what” bullshit, is the son within his rights to get angry?

If so, and the father escalates to yelling, is there a point where the son might be justified in grabbing his father by the front of shirt?

A point where a slap might be in order, with a stern instruction to stop talking?

Is there any point to any of it? Should the son just tell the father to have a nice day and get as far from him as he can?

BUT, he is unemployed and broke. He is living in the abusive father’s house.

Discuss equitable remedies, in light of the requirements of justice.

A group’s greatest love

There is no greater love, believes the group, than undeviating antipathy toward a hated betrayer of the group. This principle seems to operate everywhere, throughout history. If you can show someone is disloyal, a traitor, has betrayed a loving group, well, whatever is coming to such a person is well deserved, in the eyes of the loyal, loving group.

We see it daily with MAGA. We see it with groups like the Klan, Nazis, all those fine people, in every insular group. We see it on the left and on the right, though it is most conspicuous lately on the right. There is nothing a beloved member of the far right can do that will cause other members to condemn the behavior. Loyalty über alles. On the other hand, criticize the beloved member and you will be promptly vilified and tossed out of the group. MAGA has a great term for traitors like Bill Barr, lately come to a realistic assessment of his former master: RINO. Republican in name only, like Liz Cheney and her filthy ilk.

Having experienced this ostracism recently in my personal life – a minor conflict with two people who can never be wrong, a series of threats and long periods of silence, lies about my behavior, unanimous judgment by old friends insisting they love me but won’t talk about what they already know I did and am now lying about — I understand that the evil involved in this human reflex is almost incidental. Going along with the group is as natural as taking the underdog’s side in a fight.

At the same time, the person who tells the initial lies, no matter how desperate they feel when they assassinate the good name of an old friend, has no right to do that. The group, if they take her side, is acknowledging that truth and falsehood are trifles when it comes to the seriously hurt feelings of an overwhelmed, beloved member of the group. You could also call those reputation killing lies evil, I would, but, fuck, I’m judgmental enough without bringing good and evil into it. Ask any of my former close friends.

The ongoing gift of childhood trauma

If your parent, whenever you were upset and needed comfort, told you that you were weak, cowardly, needy — well, that is a gift that keeps on giving. If they alternated between merciless blaming and name calling and silence, well, silence by way of response will take on a magically painful quality for the rest of your days.

It’s very easy while waiting for a reply, if you’ve been subjected to cruel, strategic silence, to imagine, just because somebody is being silent (they could, of course, be busy, preoccupied, forgetful, distracted, ill, in a crisis, taking care of someone else), that they are silently seething at you. You can picture them glaring, arms folded, in a hostile posture of complete opposition and denial. Whatever you say their answer is ready – a silent glare of negation and blame.

Silence, to which you have been morbidly sensitized from before you can do anything to defend yourself against it, will be your kryptonite. Loved ones who know this about you, when smarting over their own issues, may deploy it from time to time, as blamelessly as the parent who simply kept quiet when you most needed a few sympathetic words.

The emotional mind is literally like a bucking bronco sometimes. When it starts to kick all you can do is take a few deep breaths and use your rational mind to try to rein it in. “This steep path is very rocky, “ you might say calmly to your bucking bronco mind, trying to recall it to reason. “There’s a long drop down the side, maybe a thousand feet… OK, OK … there you go… there you go, good mind, good mind!”

Thought experiment

Imagine you had a relatively minor conflict with two of your oldest friends. Afterwards, as they withdrew from you, you remained patient, reassuring when they threatened you, or told you they were unsure that they could ever forgive you, or were angry at you. Imagine you extended friendship to them, no matter how wildly they attacked you.

Now imagine that after a year of this they told all of your friends in common, and everyone in their family, that you were implacably enraged, unforgiving, bent on being right at all costs, sadistic, harshly judgmental and totally unloving.

Then imagine that all of your friends embraced this series of lies, this character assassination. The only problem, everybody agrees, is your immature paralysis, the result of a painful childhood that left you incapable of dealing with your rage.

Now the thought experiment is not imagining how to get through or make peace with these people who, there’s a very strong case, were never really very good friends in the first place, but how do you move on with your fucking life?

$64,000 question, doc.

It’s not that hard to understand

Hard to swallow as a bone crosswise in the old craw, no doubt, but in the end not that hard to understand how people can believe an inflammatory lie about you if it is confided with passion and great sorrow.

picture the story that destroys your good name among a group of old mutual friends:

“You know how much we all love him, and how long we’ve been close, like family, but something happened to him, something we can’t understand. We’ve told him over and over how sorry we are that he seemed to have been hurt but nothing we say is ever enough to reassure him of our love. He seems determined to fight, to never forgive something that happened TWO YEARS AGO. He remains stuck in his abusive childhood, he’s never been able to trust anybody, or make himself vulnerable enough to accept love. We can’t tell you how many times we tried to make him understand how much we love him. but it’s like talking to a wall. It’s so painful and frustrating, nothing we say or do can get through to him. He insists we’re not listening to him and he’s already told us all this dozens of times. Not once, not twice, believe us if we say many, many times. But it’s never enough, because his father abused him and he can’t recover from that. We even offered to hire a mediator to help him realize how much we love him, but after pretending to be on board, he fought us on this, and you know how he loves to argue, and in the end told us to fuck off. It is one of the most painful things we have ever gone through, to have a friend we’ve loved so long, unfairly treat us like we are dead.”

Imagine the horror

A couple you always thought of as your closest friends, a friendship you never questioned, are acting oddly distant to each other during a vacation in a beautiful rented house. After a few days, tensions are turned on you and one of them rages at you, glaring with a laser beam of hostility for long minutes, in a display of anger you haven’t seen since your father was alive. You endure a sleepless night after a door is angrily closed.

In the morning your friend drags his wife out to apologize to you. She is humiliated, apologizes with enough caveats to render the apology meaningless. While she is apologizing your friend coldly observes that you catalogue and remember every offense everybody’s ever committed against you, in spite of your claim to the contrary.

You spend an entire year afterwards, agonizing about why it is so hard to make peace with these two suddenly implacable friends. They are intent on never talking about anything, acting like everything is fine. Everything would be fine, they insist, if you’d only shut up. In the end, after months of silence and ongoing displays of indignation and anger, one of them suggests mediation.

Mediation, of course, can only work when both parties are interested in compromising. Here there can be no compromise: the only solution is that you are a hurt child who cannot accept that people who love you sometimes act in an abusive way. They are planning on the professional, impartial mediator being able to point out to you that you are acting like a hurt child and that you must act like an adult.

The proof of this is that they will agree to nothing prior to mediation. You point out that the mediator can only work with the facts we provide, the things we agree about, the things we disagree about. The mediator must know our respective positions. Although you are clearly in a terrible conflict, you are hard pressed to identify positions beyond “I’m hurt” “No you’re not!”. Instead of agreeing to a set of facts, your friends fight you like devils until you are literally banging your head against the wall.

It becomes clear that mediation will not help. You tell them so. They respond with another month of silence. One rainy Friday afternoon you get a phone call from your one time close friend telling you that his therapist told him he must tell you that he is not willing to be responsible for fixing things. He wants to be friends, he says, but he’s not going to take responsibility for fixing a broken friendship. After a moment of honesty on your part he tells you he’s going to hang up the phone now.

Now comes the horror: everybody you know in common accepts the story that you are an unreasonable, childish, unforgiving sadist with a pathological need to upset people by acting like an immature, self-righteous asshole. Not only did you refuse to accept numerous apologies, not only did you keep venting the same babyish anger over and over, you rejected a good faith offer for mediation and, in the end, when your friend gave one last effort to make you understand how much you were loved, in spite of being such a difficult person, you used the f-word and the c-word. What kind of fucking cunt does that make you, pal?

She corrected my sloppy writing (take two)

“instead of ‘you,’ you should have written ‘I,’ ” she said, confidently.

It goes without saying, she said with that terse, global editorial improvement, that only a weak, needy person like me would require this type of hyper-empathetic friend. It takes one to know one, if you know what I’m saying, darling.

And as for why it’s so hard to get over this kind of thing, which happened almost a year ago — the intolerable shock comes back again and again because it’s so hard to internalize that someone you loved, someone who loved you, could decide, for all the world, that you are fucking dead.

Dead men tell no tales.

Message from the Holy Land

Dearest Elliot [sic],

I got your letter yesterday and after trying to read the whole thing a few times, I stopped and just slept on it.

I tried to think about why you were writing it and why to me.

I can’t say I was able to make sense of it, but my heart clearly understood. 

I felt how much pain you are in and how deep your suffering goes. It obviously didn’t begin with the event that triggered your divorce from your bosom buddy and the community that came with him. It began way back within your own family and all the unfinished business you carry like an albatross throughout all your relationships and life.

The letter was more like a purge than an invitation to a conversation. 

I also don’t believe there’s anything I can say to you that will assuage your suffering. If you’re willing to unpack it all, you have to see a professional.  I can tell you that Ilan found his peace many many years ago through meditation. I can attest to the change the man internalized over the years and the impact it has had on our life together. 

If you’re comfortable with just being ‘right’ you’ll spend your life brewing and it will take it to the grave. If you want to find your peace, you know what you have to do. If you want to face your demons you have to find a neutral setting and do all the hard painful work that it takes. You can’t change all the people in your world, but you can change yourself and heal.

Think about it Elliot [sic]. Do you want to throw away the remainder of your years by being angry, by being ‘right’ or do you want to find your peace.

Only you have the answer. 

With much love,

Redacted

I replied with more explanation of why I’d been so hurt and so forth. That night I had a call from the Flying Monkey, Redacted’s best friend and confidant. After that loving chat, I had no choice but to amend my reply:

Oh, one last thing.  You asked why I sent you the pages you could make no sense of.   A reason I forgot to mention in my previous email is that I consider you perhaps the sharpest and most perceptive person in the circle.  I was hoping for understanding, which, clearly, you could not provide.

In replying to you a few days ago I made the same stupid mistake I’ve been making all along, since that hideous year bookended by two angry Yom Kippurs.  I tried to use reason to persuade someone who had clearly made up her mind, based on the other party to my ugly “divorce” from X/Y having already persuaded everyone we know in common that they behaved perfectly and Eliot is, alone in the history of divorce and every other conflict, entirely to blame for everything that happened.  When he’s frustrated he says the fucking f-word!  And worse!

It was very clear from your moralistic response that you follow that interpretation, only one party has behaved aggressively and immaturely (from my point of view, I am not that party, of course – and I have the receipts, if anyone who has judged me unworthy of friendship were interested in being fair, or empathetic). 

Consider for a second: if I was the enraged person you portrayed in your pitying judgment, would I have reacted as mildly as I did to what can fairly be seen as the judgment of someone who feels infinitely superior to me?  Based on a false account imparted during a successful attempt to assassinate my good name among people I have long loved, listened to, made laugh?   No feelings I might have about being unfairly judged and banished by an entire group of old friends, most of whom I never had a hint of a quarrel with, are appropriate — except as manifestations of a need for intensive psychiatric work?  

When someone you care about is upset, you ask them what happened, you listen to them.  You offer to help, if you can. 

When someone is upset and you tell them they have no right to be upset, that they are wrong, and immature, and irrationally clinging to childhood pain, and unable to get past their previous abuse, are aggressively angry, unforgiving, hellbent on being right at all costs and trying to change everyone in the world but themselves, and are unwilling to do the hard work everyone else in pain has presumably done to become more fully human — well, you really shouldn’t sign that kind of message “much love,” darling.

I’ll leave our dear friend the final word on this ugliness (well, me, actually, but you know how I am).

The only way to flush these hard feelings, dear Seedj, is by having the last word in a quiet battle with self-righteous, toxically clannish pinheads.

[Part two is here]