Category Archives: Gratitude

Neurotic

I don’t know for sure what the clinical definition of the slippery term “neurotic” is [1], though anxiety is its’ hallmark.  The following illustration comports with my understanding of what it means to be neurotic, that is, so anxious, guilt-driven and chagrined, that you often do things that sabotage your own best interests in relations with other people.

My last remaining friend from a childhood that ended more than fifty years ago was in a desperate death spiral with his wife.  It had long been a very tense, combative, distrustful marriage, and it was coming to an end.  At one point, not long before their divorce, his wife and a marriage therapist convinced him that he had to confront me for deliberately or callously trying to end his doomed marriage.  His wife didn’t respect him as a man, found him weak and contemptible, and only confronting me would demonstrate that he had any spine at all.

I was supportive as I gave him a convincing, and true, response for his wife and the idiot therapist.  He seemed relieved, even grateful.  Things continued to go from bad to worse, and finally, after months of trying, it was impossible for me to maintain my friendship with my old friend.

Recent events in my own life made me realize that I should reach out to the poor devil, a guy I hadn’t exchanged a peep with in a few years.  We made plans to talk, by text (as it is done these days) and there were a few hits and misses due to his busy schedule until we could find a mutually good time to talk.   He was very happy to hear from me.

I told him about a long chat I had with his mother, after she dreamed about me and left me a message.   I described the traumatized friend who was in the hands of a great therapist who’d provided her with some excellent rules about life.  I quoted rules 12 and 13, texted them to him afterwards.   

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.

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.

We discussed these revelations and then he promised that the next time we talked he’d share his revelations.   He’d had some major revelations since the last time we spoke.  I told him I was looking forward to it.

“This might sound funny,” he told me, “but you never actually left my life.  I see you frequently in dreams, just passing by, or sitting around, but you are there pretty consistently.”

I paused and said “well, then I hope this was a dream conversation for you.”

He laughed, and we said goodbye.

One month ago.

[1] apparently the term is no longer used clinically, psychiatrists have replaced the squishy term neurotic with more concrete and identifiable ones. Here’s a general definition from thefreedictionary.com

neu·ro·sis (no͝o-rō′sĭs, nyo͝o-)

A mild mental disorder characterized by excessive anxiety, insecurity, or obsession, usually compensated for by various defense mechanisms.

To write or not to write

I had a girlfriend many years ago, very cute and much younger than me, I was 30 and she was 20. I was the first boyfriend she had who wasn’t a boy and she responded very well to all of my attentions. We had as harmonious a relationship as I could manage at the time.

When she was getting divorced many years later, and needed to be cheered up, encouraged as a desirable woman I suppose, she said to me “if I come to New York will you fuck me?”

My hesitation surely gave away too much, then I told her that I was in a long-term monogamous relationship, sadly, and for some reason my hand wrote on a piece of paper “if I come to New York will you fuck me?”

I folded the paper and put it in my pants pocket and forgot about it. Until weeks later, when it inexplicably showed up on the floor on my side of the bed. Sekhnet picks it up, unfolds it and reads to me “if I come to New York will you fuck me?” I give her a short, sheepish, truthful account of the call. Years later I had dinner with my still very cute younger ex and her very smart, good looking 16-year-old daughter. That was the only time I’ve seen her in all those years that I can recall, except one other time, about fifteen years earlier.

I mentioned to my friend today that there’d been flooding in her area recently and I’d thought of calling her to make sure she was okay. My friend said “and if she said ‘if I come to New York will you fuck me?’“

“I wouldn’t write it down,” I said.

Two excellent rules about life to consider

From my friend’s therapist, Dr. John House.

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.

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.

How do I make it stop?

When you are in a brutal conflict that will not stop, when every move anybody makes (or doesn’t make) to try to solve it twists the knot tighter and tighter, and the standoff seems increasingly hopeless, how do you begin to resolve a mutually painful and desperate impasse?

Fuck if I know, though one thing I’ve learned is that no solution to any painful interpersonal battle comes from the application of logic. I’ve also learned that Reason, once everybody’s pain is inflamed, is sometimes entirely irrelevant.

Paradoxically, the more reason is on your side, sometimes, the harder the other party, now accused of being unreasonable on top of everything else, will have to resist and the worse it will go for you, for everyone.

Sometimes you will turn an emotional corner for reasons you can’t completely understand in that moment but your emotions will tell you something true and important that you need to do immediately and you can do that, and sometimes that may help.

It will certainly help more than being stuck on the senselessness of placing all blame on one person, alone responsible for putting a world of trauma on loved ones. The exact reason for your emotional pivot may be revealed to you afterwards, if you puzzle over it long enough, though that reason also doesn’t matter.

Fucking humans, man, no wonder this planet is always at war.

I hope this doesn’t sound judgmental

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.

You will rarely get exactly what you need from another person

You can become emotionally paralyzed sometimes, holding out for exactly what you need from another person.  All color and nuance will disappear and you are left in a grim black and white, either/or zero-sum stand off where understanding becomes impossible. Character, integrity, maturity, decency and insight all become matters of heated debate. Issues reduced to enflamed morality rarely end well. Sometimes a few words intended to make all the hurtful things go away is the best you can fairly expect.   

The words may not be the ones you need to hear, they may even annoy the shit out of you with their insistence on some detail or another, but recognizing they are the best a loved one is capable of is the key to ending an emotional stalemate.  If you can’t accept that, you need to keep suffering or cauterize the wound and feel done with it.  The hardest part of accepting an imperfect apology (particularly if held out as proof that you are unforgiving) is remembering that apologizing is hard for many people in our culture. It is also rare to ever get exactly what you need in this life, no matter how clearly you ask for it, no matter how seemingly reasonable what you are asking for appears to be. 

An old friend told me it is humiliating to have to ask a loved one for something that should be given without asking.   Sometimes it is.   The sympathy and care we expect, we provide, have become mutually accustomed to, may not come sometimes.  There will always be a reason the other person is not able to extend sympathy or care, since nobody acts without a reason they believe is a good one.  It may be a good reason or a weak one.  It may be a rationale you don’t agree with, even find ridiculous.  Whatever they say to try to make things right afterwards, even if it still contains the need to defend what they did as the right thing, somehow, you must accept as the best they are capable of.

If the relationship is important to you, you can either accept the best they can do as the best they can do, and good enough, walk away or remain locked in a senseless conflict that can never end well.  In the end of intractable existential conflicts, everyone loses.  

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: