I love the gnarly contradictions of the word itself. It means to perplex, confuse, make impossibly complicated. It also means to carefully analyze and untangle an impossibly complicated situation. In one word, the story of my life!
The world is full of broken souls. Some souls are broken early, by cruel or neglectful caretakers. If you are a baby who does not get comforted, or fed, regularly, your tiny soul will get a few deep cracks, always there as you grow. Others are broken later by life itself, injury, sickness, disability, bad luck, death of a particular loved one, abuse, meeting the wrong person at the wrong time and things going badly, and then the depressing pattern repeating.
We are all broken in some way, at least everyone I’ve ever met. The popular goal of achieving a state of permanent happiness appears to be an illusion. Can we remain happy when we read the latest accounts of babies killed, women and girls raped at gunpoint, explosions killing random innocent people in the name of one god or another, popular politicians angrily promising retribution and a return to the good old days of vast concentration camps for all enemies? Chasing after the abstraction of happiness, like the single-minded pursuit of “success” or wealth, is a kind of myopic idiocy, it seems to me. As my ex’s guru put it so poetically: chasing happiness is like a deer who runs after a mirage of water and dies of thirst. Well said, Babaji.
We love others in spite of their brokenness. We help each other heal a bit, by the application of a steady, empathetic love we all need. Every human being has a need for this healing connection to others, being given the benefit of the doubt and treated with kindness. Too many of us live without it, or even the hope for it. This precious love can be perverted, it turns out, when desperate souls place it on a scale against loyalty, righteous grievance and an appeal to harsh judgment and anger. It is a complicated business, being a decent, loving human being.
I think of my cousin Eli, my father’s first cousin. He was a very loving man, though he was rough, volatile, prone to fits of rage, capable of violence, estranged from his children, filled with hatred at times. I say he was very loving because he always showed that side, with warmth and humor, to me and to my mother before me. Both my mother and I fought with him regularly, vehemently sometimes, and in the end we always smiled, kissed and hugged and looked forward to our next battle. It was the complete recovery from our conflict, every time, no matter how fierce the fight had just been, that continually proved our love for each other.
You can look at a guy like Eli, conclude he’s dangerously nuts, give him a wide berth and have only the most polite and superficial interactions with him. Or you can see part of yourself reflected in him, a need to be heard, to have a strong opinion, to duke it out whenever you feel unfairly challenged, and above all, a need for reconciliation and reassurances of love. There was nothing false about my mother’s love for Eli or his love for her. They would each do anything for each other. But accept something from the other that struck them as bullshit? Why would they do that?
So in spite of our brokenness, we can form strong bonds, find love, set boundaries, overlook terrible faults in another because we also feel the steadiness of their love. Love is a stronger thing than happiness, which changes according to circumstances. We may get angry at someone we love, but the love remains. If it can be destroyed by a single conflict, eradicated by unyielding anger, it was not very sturdy, healthy love to begin with. It was the best our broken self was capable of finding at the time we first felt love toward that person.
As we grow, ideally we learn more about ourselves and the reasonable limits of our tolerance for the brokenness of those around us. Those who can’t acknowledge their own pain are the most dangerous motherfuckers on the planet. No amount of love can save someone who is hellbent on never being wrong, always being some childish notion of “perfect”. Can you imagine a love that can truly help a poor devil like that?
There are times when an insistence on telling the truth will cost you your head. Honesty is not always welcome, and we all know when it is best to smudge the truth a bit. A friend serves you a culinary creation that is not tasty, you compliment the consistency of the crust, smile as you point out how beautifully the greasy contents reflect a rainbow of light. You try your best to keep that look off your face as you pretend to enjoy the nasty dish, while looking for the dog to furtively offload it to.
In contrast to little lies to spare the feelings of people we care about, there are times when swallowing the truth you need to tell is like sucking down poison. If you can’t be honest with a friend, when it really counts, that person is not actually your friend. Sometimes a hideous choice will be presented to you by someone with a firm resistance to an unpleasant truth. I had a poisonous condition placed on me if I wanted to preserve my lost friendship with a group of lifelong friends, after a conflict with two friends raged in spite of all my attempts to make peace. I was told I had to admit that I was a sick, vindictive, torturing, unforgiving, venomous piece of shit who was totally to blame for all the bad feelings in this little group of old friends. Maybe then I could be forgiven for being unforgiving.
Accept responsibility for an insane conflict I hadn’t even caused? No can do. I found myself mostly able to refrain from sinking to their level of unreasoned anger — not to mention their uncritical embrace of a grossly counter-factual account of a simple conflict — but being called toxic (in a text) for simply being honest about a series of easy to understand events that actually took place, literally made me spit. I was spitting out the toxin of being mercilessly treated by people I had long loved and trusted.
Gabor Maté points out that the two strongest human needs are for attachment and authenticity. Attachment comes first, as helpless babies we need to be cared for by our caretakers and, because our life literally depends on it, early on we learn to smile, cuddle, do endearing things so that our parents will become attached to us and protect us. Authenticity is the need, once we become conscious individuals, to express ourselves, have our feelings taken seriously, our needs and wants respected. These two primal human needs are often at odds and sometimes, although we shouldn’t be, in a better world than this, we will be forced to choose one or the other.
A parent starts off enchanted by their baby’s seeming adoration and complete need for them. Conflicts arise in any parenting situation and the terrain can begin to change. It is crucial to some parents to keep their child subservient to the parents’ needs. Then the lifelong cycle begins — the child must always navigate the narrow, treacherous terrain between honesty and flattery, authenticity and fear of abandonment. There are many weapons deployed in this ongoing, uneven struggle for supremacy, among parents wired this way by their own fucked up childhoods.
A parent who was traumatically shamed and humiliated as a child will always fear their child’s authenticity. Imagine a more horrifying situation for a parent than the possibility of being shamed and humiliated by their own child. If there is a conflict, this kind of parent must set the entire blame on the kid, there is no real choice for them. To admit weakness, or being wrong, or being fallible, are all direct invitations to a nightmare of shame and humiliation. It’s the goddamn baby who’s the asshole, not me!
It seems comical to state it that way, but otherwise intelligent, educated, sophisticated parents may believe that formulation to the end. I was a good parent, how it is my fault my child was born angry, contrary, needy, stubborn, vindictive? My own very smart parents, to the end of their eighty year lives, both insisted I was born hostile, senselessly fighting them about everything from the day I was born.
“One day old?” I’d ask them.
“As soon as you opened your eyes you glared at us with hostility, you challenged us. I was aware of your judgment and anger toward me from the day you came back from the hospital,” my father always insisted, and my mother would nod along, often citing an idiot pediatrician who confirmed I was having a precocious temper tantrum for absolutely no reason.
“Oh, wow. I guess I don’t remember that. No wonder you always treated me as a dangerous enemy.”
“Now you’re trying to be cute.”
“I never attempt the truly impossible.”
And around it went.
With tyrants there is always a foundational lie that must be accepted as beyond question, an article of faith that must always be pledged to. If there is no evidence to support the lie, and a mountain of evidence that it is a lie, it is that much more important that everyone publicly insist the lie is true and the so-called truth, devastating to the leader’s cause and credibility, is pure, evil, godless, pedophile commie bullshit. This clinging to the truth of demonstrable lies is a consistent tic with those who can never be wrong. If the truth is harmful, create a truth that is invincible.
Be true to yourself, painful as that may sometimes be. It will rarely come down to having your head literally cut off. I am living proof of that (so far).
Narcissism has come into popular consciousness after almost a decade of a malignant narcissist dominating the news cycle every day, amplified by the destructive behavior of the ambitious psychopaths who justify his rage to dominate, all normalized by profit-hungry corporate media. One key feature of narcissists, because their ability to see things from anybody else’s perspective was destroyed early on, is a rigid insistence that they can never be wrong, no matter what they have done.
If they are wrong, it is somebody else’s fault for making them wrong, so they’re actually right. They justify every excess by blaming others for their temper tantrums, hurt, rage, shame, need for revenge and everything else that makes them unbearably uncomfortable. You get a great encapsulation of narcissistic rage, and its reflex to justify retribution, from our former president as he made his lying case during the privately organized, privately funded pep rally at the Ellipse on January 6, 2021, the tasteful prelude to the peaceful, patriotic Trump riot at the Capitol.
Very different rules. You can “illegally” take millions of dollars from foreign powers for your campaign, in exchange for promised political favors, because the other side is cheating. You can claim your predecessor illegally wiretapped you, because he wasn’t even a legitimate president, he’s a liar. You can order your attorney general to violently remove peaceful protesters from the streets so you can show strength in a photo op, because the protesters hate America and are violent terrorists. You can have the wife of a Supreme Court justice walk into the West Wing at will, and when she leaves, decide which disloyal members of your staff need to be fired, because, separation of powers (or States Rights, or whatever). You can make political martyrs of those who violently attacked police, because, when there’s fraud, you know… You can lie to your supporters over and over, and steal money from them based on those lies, because the other side is a powerful cabal of cannibal pedophiles who advocate the murder of newborn babies and are legally killing them by the truck loads in Blue States.
I think of my one time closest friend, today on his 68th birthday. His primal wound is that his father, a strong and generally admirable man, never protected him from a crazy mother with a violent temper. He grew up triggered by his manipulative mother, now over ninety and as able to reduce him to anger as when he was a child, and mourning the loss of a father who emotionally abandoned him.
The punchline, I suppose, is that he inflicted the identical damage on his own children, by being helpless to intervene whenever they were raged at by a mother who became abusive whenever she felt challenged. Here’s the man’s perfect rationale for nonintervention, as he’d explain to his children when they insisted on being hurt: what you think was abuse was really not abuse, you have to understand, because mom loves you so much, it’s just that she’s used to being in charge, has been since she was a girl, and so when you defy her she gets her back up, understandably.
Imagine falling asleep at night after your mother unfairly raged at you and your sympathetic father fed you that big, comforting spoonful of shit. Why would you not find yourself prone to panic attacks?
Demonstrating that someone is an idiot, talking out of their ass, constantly contradicting themselves, making no sense as they toss out their word salads, transparently lying, then insisting they are not the liar, (you are!), that they get angry rather than answering simple questions, and so on, is not hard to do. An idiot speaks for himself. All you really need are a handful of their quotations in context to prove your point. Still, what do you actually gain by proving someone is an idiot?
A charismatic or powerful person who is an idiot gets admiration, and a pass for being dumb, by people who fall under the spell of the admirable idiot’s performed personality. You will not change the mind of anyone who follows, or even worships, an idiot, by offering proof that the object of their fandom is, in fact, an idiot, cretin, imbecile or other person of sub-average intelligence. Having true faith and personal loyalty means that you are impervious to “rational” arguments against the indisputable truth of the thing you fervently hold dear. There is no objective proof that can make a dent in true belief.
So the argument about a malicious idiot who is also loved goes round and round and there is no exit from the cul du sac of that senseless, unresolvable debate. In the end, it is idiotic to expect to prove to someone with a closed mind on a subject that they have been influenced by an idiot and that their belief in the idiot is, uh, not smart.
Belief, like other strong feelings that give meaning to our lives, is not really subject to proof or disproof. The end of an argument over beliefs, with a certain percentage of offended believers, is a punch in the face or other outburst of violent indignation.
When we observe that certain people we encounter are idiots, and we are in forced contact with them, it is best to stay away from topics that might provoke them. Avoid anything but idle chitchat, smiles and good natured jokes and everything is generally more or less OK. It is not hard to be pleasant, even if you sometimes have to be somewhat false.
Of course, moral idiocy is not limited to stupid people. We also see very intelligent people who lack empathy, are stubborn, cruel, manipulative, vindictive etc. Idiots have no monopoly on being assholes, it’s a character flaw that works across the spectrum of human intelligence. Even though it’s hard to do sometimes, it is better, I’ve found, to avoid arguments with anyone, smart or idiotic, who shows you they will never, under any circumstance, actually take in what you have to say and give you a thoughtful response.
I have learned this seemingly simple lesson the hard way, and paid a high price for the understanding I have now, an understanding I remind myself of by writing things like this. I offer it to you for free, for whatever it may be worth to you.
The mind/body connection in health is well-known to anyone who has ever had a painful bodily reaction to stress. Stress can literally cripple a person, as in migraines or disabling back pain. Emotional pain robs us of resiliency and limits our ability to heal.
The concept is pretty basic and easy to observe, but many American doctors fail to take it into consideration, in my experience. After a painful surgery, repeated difficulty obtaining refills on pain medication for failure of the office to return multiple telephone calls may be considered (as it was by my knee surgeon’s office) the difficult patient’s problem, for example.
A vivid illustration of the emotional component of bodily pain for you:
I had a massage recently from an excellent masseuse. Lying on my stomach at the start of the massage I was aware of a painful hemorrhoid that threatened to ruin the massage. For the first ten minutes or so I felt the sting of this literal pain in the ass more than the hands that were massaging me. Then the massage began relaxing me. The pain of the hemorrhoid disappeared as I relaxed. It was gone for hours afterwards too.
So if a doctor discounts your emotional upset about anything related to your medical condition or its treatment, or expresses anger or frustration toward you, you are not in the right hands. Take the advice of someone who has experienced this a few times. Find a more sensitive, emotionally mature doctor.
Also, remember that it’s futile to argue with an angry asshole, it only makes things worse, in the short term (since it inevitably makes them angrier and more determined to prove they are not the asshole, you are) and afterwards. Better to walk away, find a new doctor and relieve yourself of the need to explain anything.
Sleep deprivation, as every dark site practitioner of “enhanced interrogation” knows, is the ultimate torture. Deprive the most well-trained partisan torture resister in the world of sleep for long enough and you will eventually break them in half, even as you render them insane. Being unable to sleep night after night, for whatever reason, will rob you of optimism and eventually destroy you.
On the other hand, a good night’s sleep is the best medicine. When you wake up after enough sleep your day starts off better, your mood is lighter. Get enough sleep day after day and your faith in the goodness of life and a large range of possibilities returns.
Of course, all bets are off when it comes to psychopaths. They may be insomniacs or machines that sleep exactly eight hours a night. What’s the difference?
I am an old man, made older by an implanted prosthetic left knee that developed an intractable inflammation and limits my walking to the range of an 85 year-old. I am grateful to have finally learned this simple but elusive life lesson, after experiencing it many times since childhood: those who act abusively toward you are incapable of doing anything else.
You can employ every trick you know to get along with someone who occasionally treats you with contempt, in the end, your best efforts will earn you more contempt and anger. When you see rage, get away from it. It took me 67 years to learn this seemingly simple thing, and I am grateful to know it now, but damn.
How can something so simple be so hard to see? Our need for love and connection is powerful. We are instructed, by virtually everyone, in the importance of forgiveness. If someone we have a deep connection with acts like a psychopath once in a blue moon, the proper thing seems to be to see it in the context of a long, loving relationship and forget about it. It makes us feel good to act with this kind of philosophical maturity. It also marks us as the perfect victim of an enraged loved one who needs to take their anger out on others from time to time.
Not so easy to look dispassionately at someone who swears they love us, someone we have shared many a wonderful time with, and grasp the brokenness in them, the terrible damage that makes them lash out unfairly, always blame others, insist on their indignant right to rage whenever they need to, at whomever they choose to direct it. Someone who acts this way is not a good partner for anything important. They are not someone you can work with or trust with your vulnerability. They lack all problem solving tools and any ability to compromise. Whenever the slightest conflict arises they always lash out in boundless, childish frustration.
Love them or not, believe their protestations that they love you or not, these damaged souls cannot be fixed. Not by you, not by a team of the world’s greatest experts. There is only one productive way to deal with them. It is not by trusting them to act less abusively next time. It is by completely removing yourself from their reach.
The greatest gift you can give yourself is learning this hard lesson and walking away from these unredeemable creatures whenever you encounter them. There is nothing you can do for them, and equally hopeless, nothing they can do for you — except rage at you, when the time is right.
For a period of time I persisted in writing impossible letters, longshot attempts to persuade people I cared about to communicate with me, even as I knew they were now well beyond reasonable discussion. These letters attempted to do something no letter can do, silently get through to someone on the other side of a locked, fortified door and change their heart. I have a number of them here on this blahg. That I kept writing these letters is proof that I had not yet grasped an essential feature of human life — there are deeply rooted emotional positions that can never be changed.
I wrote these letters to try to repair painful estrangements. Only one, a letter to an old friend, a rabbi, ever achieved its short-term goal of reestablishing dialogue. That letter was perfected over the course of weeks, calmly making every painful point I needed to make while removing anything that could make the rabbi, who had behaved with surprising hostility toward me, feel defensive. It appealed irresistibly to his desire to be a mensch, to be admired, forgiven, to have his vanity stroked. We had a single warm but pointless talk as a result of that excellent letter. I realize now that the most moving letter I can write will change nothing.
At one point, after much agonizing, I wrote one of these letters to my niece and nephew, after years of estrangement. My sister is humiliated about certain true things that I witnessed in her family. She lives in terror of my big fucking mouth. If her children had relationships with me, the odds, she fears are overwhelming that eventually I would impart some of these humiliating true things to her children and she would never be able to reclaim their admiration and love.
A smart young man, around my niece’s age, offered to read the drafts of the letter and give me his feedback. He soon found himself at a loss. I mentioned to his father what a hard job his son had signed on to, and that I felt a little bad to have put that weight on him. The father volunteered to read the letter-in-progress as well. In the end, father and son both told me that my final draft of the letter was warm, loving and an excellent attempt at reaching out. I sent it.
I never heard back from my niece or my nephew. I have not heard from my sister since the letter to her children arrived. That was around three years ago. Now for a bit of impossible irony.
My old friends’ son, who had read the letter, visited us in a rented vacation house. He was unusually hopped up. His father had shared my pain about the silence from my niece and nephew. There was inexplicable, rising tension in that house that eventually became unbearable. Within a year the son would move back in with his parents and, two days later, be locked in a mental ward. His father and mother, after months of silence punctuated by anger, would be spreading the dubious, but apparently emotionally convincing, claim that I am the reincarnation of Adolf Hitler. I am dead to all of them. At least I’ve finally grasped the ridiculousness of writing impossible letters.
We live and learn, those of us capable of profiting from our most painful mistakes. Many have learned everything essential that they will ever learn by the time they are two years old, clenching their fists and vowing never to be hurt again, no matter what kind of person they are obliged to become. Writing a letter hoping to successfully question this kind of rigid, brittle self-confidence is pointless. Success is impossible, and the mission is futile, if also a supreme artistic challenge. I have finally learned that it is hubris to expect to succeed in that particular challenge.
Years ago an old friend, let’s call her Gina, decided that her old friend was not her friend anymore, in fact, that they were never really friends, in spite of their closeness in former times. She told others that the woman, in whose apartment she lived for a year or two decades earlier, was an “energy vampire” and everyone simply accepted that, like any of us, she had an absolute right to choose her own friends.
The old friend she rejected, and smeared as an energy vampire, was understandably devastated by this sudden repudiation. In my experience she is not an energy vampire, but the charge was enough for people who barely knew her to assume that Gina had every right to cut ties to someone who was demanding and emotionally draining. I had zero insight, at the time, into the narcissistic psychopathy of dear Gina, the woman who decreed her former close friend a life-draining energy vampire.
Fast forward a decade or so. I now have 100% insight into the raging personality problems of this damaged, controlling, easily enraged, terminally insecure woman of great charm, and former beauty. I, in fact, was reckoned far more dangerous than an energy vampire and she and her sychophantic [1] husband (she holds a humiliating secret over his head and she’s not shy about playfully flaunting it) deliberately assassinated my good name among a group of old friends.
I had a call the other day from a friend in France. At one point he mentioned a satire of a reality TV show called What We Do In The Shadows. A film crew lives with a group of vampires. He was laughing that the most feared vampire in the house doesn’t drink blood, it is an Energy Vampire. He’d never heard the term, he loved it, and he described the creature beautifully.
The energy vampire finds an empathetic listener, plays to the person’s kindness and then proceeds to latch on and suck them dry by droning on with the most boring possible monologue for hours on end. The energy vampire preys on its victim’s empathy and is expert at eliciting sympathy as it moves in for its long, painful drink. Once it senses kindness it gets its hooks into the person and never lets go until it has drunk its fill of the nice person’s empathy.
If we are too nice we can fall victim to these creatures, sure enough. That’s why maintaining healthy boundaries is so important.
Thinking more about energy vampires, and that unfair charge my old friend Gina made against her old friend, I realized how ironic Gina’s smear is. For one thing, Gina is not the least bit empathetic, though she does a convincing performance of it socially. Feelings make her very uncomfortable and she is adept at making anyone who needs to talk about feelings feel weak and pathetic. Energy vampires are powerless against someone like her, they will die of thirst if she is their only target.
Additionally, in her need for admiration, Gina is far more of an energy vampire than the woman she smeared as one. The moment you question Gina’s right to control everyone else, she rages. In her inchoate, irrational anger she is capable of things far worse than sucking someone dry of energy. She is capable of anything any tyrant ever thought of. I’d rush into the arms of an energy vampire to get away from someone as damaged and soul-destructive as her.
The GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English •
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