Category Archives: musing

A lie is more powerful than the truth, if needed

When someone is desperate, they will cling to a lie with the religious fervor of a martyred saint.   The lie, you see, is their rock and their foundation.  Without it, they are humiliated.  The lie protects their good name, their true intentions, their very value as human beings.  The lie becomes essential to their integrity and they will defend it as though their life depends on it.

Take the example of a woman married to a criminal.  She has been shocked and angered over and over by his criminal acts and the lies he told her to conceal them from her.  It is humiliating to her that he has never acknowledged being wrong — every “crime” he ever did was for her sake —  or asked for her forgiveness, even when his crimes, and the lies surrounding them, destroyed her dreams at the moment they were about to come true.  

Think about this scenario for a second.  If she ever said aloud what I just wrote above, how could she live with herself?  She couldn’t.  So… the lie!  It’s not her husband, it’s her fucking brother the self-righteous, unforgiving prick who is judging and torturing her entire family, always a threat to blow the lid off decades of carefully guarded shame.   He can’t keep anything secret, his mouth is an open faucet, he doesn’t care who he hurts with his pernicious moral uprightness.   He self-righteously hides behind “truth” when all he wants is to hurt people and feel virtuous being a sadistic piece of shit.

How do the sister and brother retain a relationship in this hostile situation?  They talk about books, movies, a little celebrity gossip, dogs, some commiserating about the political cesspool we are all bobbing in, their health.  Everything else, everything personal and important, is off the table.  The lie that her brother is a liar remains undisturbed. 

The brother tolerates this the best he can, which often is not very well.  His name is assassinated, since he is a threat to the children if he starts fucking blabbing and telling his precious “truth” to the kids.  The kids must be kept away from a destructive agenda-driven fuck like that. 

On the other hand, the brother must remain eternally patient, hopeful and generous.  If he ever shows frustration, or, god forbid, anger, he has shown his hand, proved the case against him and that’s the ballgame, ladies and gentlemen.

And so it goes.  You could say that a lie, if desperately needed, is more powerful than the truth.

Making amends

Making amends is trying to fix something that’s broken. If a guest’s bone gets broken, as a result of you accidentally placing a stumbling block in a place that resulted in a fall and broken bone, making amends might be contritely driving the person to the hospital to have the broken bone treated. It might be helping the person while they are hindered by the broken bone. It should include assuring the person that you will do your very best to make sure never to put a dangerous obstacle where they can trip over it and get hurt.

It doesn’t seem to me that making amends with somebody you have hurt is all that hard. Unless you consider that you must take responsibility for the pain you caused, which makes you vulnerable, which puts you at risk of being rejected by the person you are trying to make amends with. Making yourself vulnerable is the price of trying to make amends. It is also the price of meaningful friendship.

I understand it may seem a fearful price to some, but it is hard for me to understand how to retain a facade of friendship with a person who is incapable of acknowledging the pain they cause. Fake friendship with people I can no longer trust is not for me.

It is particularly hard to do during this time of year when we Jews are instructed to make amends, to speak the truth, to move beyond lies that people tell to make themselves feel righteous, instead of ashamed, when they are wrong and continue to act badly.

I understand that some people are weak, damaged and desperate to be right at any cost. If the cost is my friendship, so be it, I suppose. As long as they refrain from assassinating my good name among mutual friends. The inability to behave with emotional maturity confers no right to kill.

כל עכבה לטובה

Every pause is for the best.

This was written on a pocket-sized card in a small meticulous hand by the paternal grandfather of an old friend of mine. He’d write down these aphorisms to remind himself of things that he wanted to remember.

One thing was this phrase. If you are upset and thinking about doing something decisive, a bit more delay is rarely a bad idea. If you are thinking of doing something that will hurt somebody, and you hesitate, that little mercy is a good in itself.

I suppose it’s a good thing to remind yourself of once in awhile, if you don’t know what to do, if you’re in turmoil, if you feel hurt, in a tight spot, it’s not a bad idea to hesitate rather than take an action or say words that you might not be able to take back.

What you can tolerate will depend

We have different thresholds for what kind of treatment we can tolerate from others. One person’s tough, challenging, funny wise-ass is another person’s humorless abuser sometimes. It all depends on our personality, our experience, our other relationships and what we feel comfortable with.

To some people periodic displays of intense anger are fine, providing the person quickly calms down and becomes reasonable. It’s not hard to understand or identify with anger, we are all subject to it from time to time. We are able to tolerate different levels, displays and durations of anger, depending on the circumstances and our tolerances.

Pirkey Avot, the Ethics of the Fathers, is found in the back of many Jewish prayer books like the ones that are usually at the Bar and Bat Mitzvahs I’ve been forced to sit through over the years. So as the congregation is rising and being seated, (please rise, please be seated, please rise), and praying in unison, I am scanning Ethics of the Fathers, the whole short book is in there, after all of the prayer services. I used to read Pirkey Avot looking for little bits of eternal wisdom from ancient times. There’s one about anger I’ve been greatly influenced by. It describes the four kinds of temperaments with a beautiful, clean logic.

There are four kinds of temperaments when it comes to anger and peace.

One type of person is quick to anger but quick to be pacified. His loss is offset by his gain.

Another type is slow to anger but slow to be pacified. His virtue is offset by his deficit.

Another type is slow to anger and quick to forgive. This is a virtuous person.

The fourth temperament is quick to anger and slow to forgive. This type is evil.

I always thought the Father’s (whoever the hell they were) laid that out profoundly and indisputably. My cousin Eli was quick to anger, and I made him angry many times. But because he loved me he was also very quick to be placated and we would soon move on from the thing he was so angry about a minute before. It was a beautiful thing about our relationship.

My mother had the same kind of relationship with him before I did. She would fight with Eli hour after hour, day after day and when they said goodbye they hugged and kissed and had big smiles on their faces and couldn’t wait to do it all again soon. It was beautiful to see.

If Eli didn’t like you he had no qualms about making a face, turning away and closing a door on you, or, if needed, making a great display of his purple faced anger, which was terrifying to see. As a young man he had no hesitation to punch somebody in the face, if it came to it.

But in spite of his fierceness, his face deadly as a springing jaguar’s, teeth ready to bite, foam on his lips, his face purple, his white hair trembling on top of his head, neither my mother nor later I, ever backed down from his terrifying displays of dominance.

We would say “come on Eli, you have to be honest, if your daughter said that to you you would be pretty pissed off too.” And Eli would rage a bit more, give a few last groans and cries and flashes of teeth, but then he would say “fine, but I have to tell you what happened after that” and he’d continue until the next fight.

After a few fights it was time to go get dinner, take a long time-out, to talk about other things, eat and have coffee in peace and drive back to his place. Only once we were settled comfortably back in our chairs would we resume the fights, which would sometimes go on until late in the night. Every time I left Eli we hugged and kissed and agreed to talk soon and make plans for the next time.

Eli didn’t have that kind of relationship with any of his estranged children or grandchildren. Or really anybody besides my mother, that I knew of. I certainly didn’t have that relationship with my father or mother, I mean we fought all the time but there was none of that hugging and kissing and laughing at the end of it. I guess I was lucky to know somebody like Eli, who could be infuriating, and furious, but was at the same time very easy to get along with.

Strange are the blessings and curses of this life.

Damaged souls

Both of my parents were damaged souls, as are my sister and I.  It is a struggle to do certain things, because of the damage.  To resist anger when we feel unfairly judged is hard for everybody, harder for me and it was harder still for my parents, whose struggle with intense frustration only ended when they died.   

My parents were severely damaged because when they were young, instead of a soft hand on them when they were hurt, they got harsh blows from a mother who was very damaged and physically aggressive when angry.   In the case of both of my grandmothers, I have no idea what damaged them.   They were beating their children long before their entire families were murdered by other damaged people, following the lead of a charismatic uber-damaged person who told them to destroy everyone like my family. 

Trauma is, sadly, a common part of our experience as humans, it is also part of our shared experience and history.  Lucky are those few who grow up without experiencing any trauma.   A girl can have a wonderful childhood, grow up to be a fairly happy young woman, and one day, minding her own business, fall victim to a vicious predator, which will traumatize her, no matter that her life has been so kind to her so far.  Her trust in strangers will be snatched from her forever, she will never walk alone down a street again without fear.   

Knowing that people who act like destructive assholes are acting out of their damage is little help, of course.  Being damaged confers no right to damage anyone else, but it is also sometimes irresistible, to someone in great pain, to inflict pain on somebody else.  I’m not just talking about whipping a baby in the face, breaking a sturdy wooden stick over a child’s ass or throwing them on the ground and kicking them over and over.  You can inflict exquisite pain merely by refusing to extend mercy when it is asked for.  The beauty of this form of sadism is its subtlety. 

“You assume my silence means I am refusing to extend mercy, because everything is about YOU.  I am very busy, I am thinking about a lot of other things, I have responsibilities and things I have to do every day, I have people who depend on me.  Unlike you, I do not enjoy the leisure to sit and brood, and write, and draw, and play the piano, and cook, and imagine, while doing so, that I live in a better, higher world where creativity for its own sake is of great value.  I live in the real world, and in that world you suck up your childish personal feelings, you forget about things you say ‘hurt’ you and you just move on like an adult, instead of being a pathetic, dependent, needy little worm. I am strong, you are weak, why would I surrender to you?”

Of course, you will seldom get this kind of detailed response unless you press someone for it.  Once you get the indignant summary of their total innocence, and your utter unworthiness, you will know the story in better detail.  The damage done to them made them ignore you when you needed understanding and sympathy.  That’s easy enough to follow, but what do you do then?

I wake up thinking about this quite often.   Friendships seldom last a lifetime, and when they begin to fray this is the kind of thing I wake up thinking about.  Why is it so hard for a friend to just acknowledge that it was wrong to do something that hurt me, wrong to tell people an untrue story about our respective roles in the death of our friendship?   

I consider the cycle: we are all sometimes hurt, develop defenses, get hurt again, build walls, try different strategies, get hurt again, fortify our fortifications.   I think the only way out of the cycle, if we care about the other person in the conflict, is extending the benefit of the doubt, having an honest exchange, reaching mutual understanding.  I also realize the vulnerability required in this process is impossibly threatening for some people.  Too painful for those who insist they are what they are, take it or leave it, nothing fundamental can change about them, plenty of people love and admire them and that it’s your problem if you need more than they are capable of giving you.  On one level this is absolutely true.  

My father, a man who stuck to that formulation of life, had deathbed regrets about living that way.  “I think now of how much richer my life would have been,” he said in that raspy dying man’s voice, “if I hadn’t seen the world as black and white, if I’d been able to see all the nuance, gradations and colors that are actually life…” Then he died.

Personally, I think making the effort not to die that way is important.   Different strokes for different folks, I suppose.  It is much easier to act like you’re not damaged than to live with the damage done to you and trying to heal it.   That there, to me, is one of the great tragedies of the human world. 

How to start to heal from trauma

Here in the home of the brave, the rugged, macho, eternally prevailing individual in a winner/loser culture where a real man will shoot you in the face to take what you have, as long as the law allows it, you might as well pack it in if you’re weak, or squeamish, or traumatized.

In playing the game as it is laid out here and trying to compete as though this culture of indifference, addiction and exploitation is “normal,” you can easily lose the thing that makes us humans in the best sense of the word — empathy. The quality that makes people rush into a fire to save a crying baby they never met.

Dr. Gabor Maté, who has made his life’s study the effects of trauma and various addictions, drugs, junk food, work, exercise, avoidance, danger, self-destruction, recently wrote a book called The Myth of Normal. Some of the craziest, most damaged and destructive people I’ve ever met have been obsessed with the idea that they are the most normal people in the world. They are so normal that they will kill you before they will ever look at their own behavior, their own pain, their own trauma. Maté quotes James Baldwin “not everything that’s faced can be healed, but nothing that’s not faced can be healed.”

You can hear an excellent interview with Gabor Maté here:

https://www.democracynow.org/2022/9/16/myth_normal_gabor_mate_trauma_mental

DR. GABOR MATÉ:  Well, the key here is trauma. Trauma is a psychological wound that people sustain. And I’m saying that in this society, most of us, because of the nature of the culture, the way we raise children, the way we have to relate to each other, the very values of a society are traumatizing for a lot of people, so that it’s false to say that some people are normal and others are abnormal. In fact, we’re all on a spectrum of woundedness, which has great impact on how we relate to each other and on our health.

And when you isolate people, atomize them, you make them feel guilty or weak for their illness, and tell them to get over their trauma, you’re just shaming them more, you’re isolating them more, and you’re entrenching them more in a traumatic imprint.

What people need is community, contact, compassion, safety. That’s what allows people to work through their traumas. And unfortunately, that’s not really available.

Do Not Forget — sometimes the narrator is unreliable

If a deeply damaged person, a huckster or a psychopath, tells you a story, from their point of view and in a way that seems to make perfect sense, don’t forget Boof Kavanaugh’s mother’s sound advice for judges:  what comports with common sense, what sets off your sniff detector, what does the storyteller have to gain, and lose, by telling the story the way he told it?

If you steal boxes of classified documents, some of which are eventually seized in a legal search by the FBI, proving that you have been lying in your negotiations with DOJ and that your lawyers swore, incorrectly/falsely, months earlier, that everything had been returned, although they prevented agents at that time from checking.   Not a promising scenario in court — unless you change the story to one that makes more sense to your needs.  

Here’s one: the FBI is lying, because of personal and political animus, another smelly, baseless partisan witch hunt, these people are vicious monsters who illegally stole MY stuff and won’t give it back.  Protecting my good name means much more than a bunch of spies being killed, or nuclear secrets of the US or our allies being sold, and the irreparable harm to ME is the most terrible thing ever, nobody’s ever seen harm like that before.

Or, in the case of a person no longer speaking to you:  YOU stopped speaking to me when you deliberately ended our friendship for no reason, you vicious, relentless fuck.

Take the sniff test on each of these scenarios.  Blow your nose.  Smell something you like.  Forget about it, but, of course, do not forget that many times when we are told a dodgy story, the narrator is unreliable.