Category Archives: personal

The Fundamental Terror/Beauty of Life

The most terrifying thing humans are up against is the erasure of our right to exist.   This is why my grandmother used the phrase “screamed bloody murder” so often, why she drank so heavily as she got older, why she got tearful when her vodka-fueled gestures of affection toward us made us uncomfortable.   She had good reason to feel this way, her entire family had no doubt screamed bloody murder, though their screams were drowned out by drums, out of tune brass and drunken catcalls, in the ravine where they all met a nightmare end.

Death is one thing.  We can be philosophical about it, since it is inevitable, but until we find ourself in unbearable, unrelievable pain it is not an option anyone finds palatable.  Life is the precious, irreplaceable thing, and feeling grateful for our place in this ongoing miracle, breathing and loving for the wink of an eye that we exist here.

The most painful thing, as far as I have experienced, is having your feelings erased, contested, fought to the death by people who claim to love you.   It is a pain I recall well from my childhood, it is a pain I revisit every time something I say is met with silence, dismissed, contested, fought to the death.  I don’t want to fight to the death, but many cannot restrain themselves, they must fight to the death, these clueless gladiator fucks.  The alternative is the humiliation of being wrong, admitting imperfection, which is unbearable to this type. 

I can fight as well as any clueless gladiator fuck who has ever come against me with a sword or ax.  I have had to fight, from my earliest memories.  My life has been a long, slow journey away from the need to fight these senseless, idiotic battles with people who profess to love me.  I spent decades learning to control my temper, with some success, although never enough sometimes.  For example, I still suffer from instant Tourettic outbursts whenever I am buggered by technology.

Having a supportive social network is one predictor of longterm health.  Sadly few people have these networks in our modern, corporate world.  There is an epidemic of loneliness in America, which expresses itself in deaths of despair.  If nobody gives a fuck about you, after a while you conclude “what the fuck?” and whatever you must do to answer that question seems legitimate, even if it kills you.

The only antidote to this life threatening isolation is talking to someone who cares.  It is a true horror that so few get this chance to be heard when they need it.

If you have a painful medical procedure and find yourself abandoned by your social network, amid recriminations and expressions of your unworthiness to be loved, your recovery will be slower than if you are visited, checked up on, wished well, sent jokes and funny videos.  As Martin Luther King, Jr. observed “in the end it is not the words of our enemies that we remember, it is the silence of our friends.”  Dig it.

An anguished soul can be a heavy burden to carry from day to day, even for people who love you.  I have to be sensitive to Sekhnet’s frayed nerves and her endless worry for me.  I isolate myself today and tap here, speaking silently to the universe of anyone who may stumble on these words, instead of troubling her.  We all need a day off.

This is where imagination and creativity come in.  I noticed at a very young age that I was closing myself in my room with the intent to set my dismissed feelings out on a page.  My drawings were often disturbing.  My writing was grandiose and rambled, trying to cover every subject in the world at once.  Sixty years on my drawings are often oddly cool, my writing focused and somewhat compressed.

The beauty of writing is that you can go back as many times as you like, comb through ambiguity and weak expression to make your writing as clear and elegant as possible.  A piece of writing is as perfectable as our delicate, malleable human souls. 

The phrase neuroplasticity is used to describe the ability of a pain damaged brain to heal itself.  It doesn’t happen without hard work, but what better work is there, during the wink of an eye we get to participate in this ongoing, if often tragic, miracle?

Morality is not theoretical, it’s practical

In talking there is always the chance of accidentally rescuing a broken friendship. In silence, only the grim certainty of continued death during life, a true shame on both of us, to share the short remainder of this brief moment when we are both alive and waste it in mutual anger.

Given the choice between redemption and condemnation always choose redemption when it is within reach.

If your parents lie to you

If your parents lie to you, you’re fucked, kid

Trust me when I tell you that your parents cannot help lying to you, if they are the kind of parents who tell their children lies.  Liars truly cannot help themselves, except by telling lies.  Whatever actually happened to make them this way is too shameful for them to talk about at all, let alone honestly.  Impossible to share this with children whose love and obedience they desperately need.  A good lie covers that painful, gaping wound, though it comes with a cost.  

The cost to the child is almost incalculable.  It is impossible for a five year-old, a nine year-old, to consider that her parents are lying.  For years the most outrageous lies are taken as true, until such time as the cognitive dissonance in your head makes it impossible not to question the more outrageous lies you’ve been told about yourself. 

When your truth-challenged parents tell you anecdotes to illustrate your terrible fear, when you were tiny, they are telling you about their powerlessness to protect you, to overcome their deep pessimism about anything beautiful coming out of life.   When they tell you that you were a fearful, untrusting, oversensitive little kid plagued by nightmares and hypochondria, that’s as close as they can come to telling you they surrendered, because they couldn’t do any better, because nobody can change, because we’re all already doomed to our fate.   We are already doomed to lie instead of confront anything painful about ourselves, and if you don’t believe it, we got some serious pain for you.

What lesson can a child healthily take from lying parents?   An understanding that nobody lies to someone they love unless they are supremely damaged and live in terror of their shame.  Shame is the motivator of all violence, and lies are a special category of violence, they damage your ability to trust, to perceive reality, to act with integrity based on simple cause and effect.  

You can learn from your lying parents’ inability to be vulnerable, to acknowledge faults in themselves, their mad need to never be wrong, their inclination to punish those who insist on “truth”, not to be like them.

You can understand that the greatest treasure in life is making loved ones comfortable enough with you that they can be vulnerable.   We are all very vulnerable.  Only an asshole can deny this, and they always do. 

Don’t be like them, don’t close your heart to everything but the need to protect yourself at all costs. 

You will be much less unhappy once you can consciously act with integrity, based on real experience in the real world, instead of conforming to a twisted universe of lies.  You never have to confront lying parents about their lies, it is almost always futile (and can expose you to desperate rage), but you have to acknowledge in yourself that you were lied to about essential matters from the time you could form memories.  Then you adjust accordingly, the work of a lifetime, boys and girls.

Superficiality is its own reward

The demons that may descend on you in moments of weakness, the worries that rob you of sleep, the doubts you may harbor about your ability to overcome these things, to ever feel better — a terribly debilitating pack of torments. I’ve known many people who adopt a simple solution for this. It doesn’t work for me, but I try not to judge those who adopt it. It is hard not to judge them, I have to say, but here we go.

Here’s the quick fix: simplify, deny and stick scrupulously to whatever is on the surface of things, the things most easily controlled. All the risk and terrors involved in vulnerability to others and honesty with yourself, swept away at once with a magnificent, unwavering commitment to the superficial. In this world of appearances you can actually, clearly win. Here’s all you have to do:

Have a beautiful home that people will admire. Have a large circle of social friends you can point to as proof that you are well-loved. Have children who willingly do what you tell them to do. Have a well-paying, high-status, job. Dress well, exercise religiously, avoid gaining an excess pound. Allow your charitable work to be publicly honored by your peers. Accept all awards graciously and with modesty. Cut anyone from your life who does not adhere to these simple rules for a good life. Make sure everybody else in your life knows these sick fucks are good and fucking dead and that communication with them will be punished harshly.

The things that torment you at night, that wake you early, in dread? Hide them from everybody, hide them from yourself. Remember, above all else: I am perfect and nobody can see these silly things that torment me and everybody else. There, under the surface of things, be dragons, here, where all is above board, be peace, security and no threat from anyone. Here on top be victory.

People of the Lie

A friend sent me a book, People of the Lie, that had greatly impressed her. It was written by a psychiatrist named M. Scott Peck, who subtitled it The Hope for Healing Human Evil.

That human evil arises from unbearable pain and searing humiliation in the person who practices it is not hard to observe. Peck’s book was case study after case study of people who routinely hurt others brutally and convince their victims, themselves and everyone else of a lie that leaves the perpetrator completely blameless. He isolated human evil, describing these people of the lie, as well as I’ve ever seen it done. Evil is always based on inhuman, mercy-negating lies.

The story that stuck with me was of a suicidal young man who was brought to Peck by his concerned parents. The parents had a plausible story for the boy’s depression. Peck eventually spoke to the boy privately and learned the truth of the precipitating event — the parents had given the boy a gift, the gift rifle from them to his beloved older brother, who had recently used it to kill himself. The parents went into a rage when this story was revealed, as if it could have explained anything, and immediately terminated therapy for their depressed son. Such is the nature of the lies destructive people routinely tell to hide their rage and the shame that provokes it.

It is one thing to read about this foul trick in a book. It is much more powerful to experience it unexpectedly in your own life. It is viscerally unsettling to find yourself close to this kind of destructive desperation. It smells like death and conjures atavistic images of devils and eternal darkness. Get a good whiff of this evil and it will take a very long time to get the stench of it out of your nostrils. You are unlikely to completely recover without expert help, help I am still trying to secure.

Case study from my own life: old, beloved friend reacts with rage to what she perceives as her friend’s defiance. Leave aside the entire concept of defiance — a stubborn refusal to yield to the will of another. Just look at the display of rage — a focused, hostile glare of the kind described as ‘if looks could kill’ directed at you for long, silent minutes, as her husband tries to gently translate her glaring silence, explain why she is too upset to speak. It is not a transient moment of rage, it continues, through the end of the tense negotiation and ends with a snarled refusal to compromise in any way and a closed bedroom door.

Never go to bed angry at a loved one is very good advice. You eventually learn that these two do it all the time, the one who must never feel defied and the martyred appeaser, silently locked in an angry struggle when they go to bed and when they wake up the next day, and the day after that.

Now, granted, having an ugly side of your relationship seen this way by dear, long-time friends is objectively embarrassing. It should not be the end of friendship, or anything like that, but it is something to be talked about afterwards. If it is actually felt as humiliating, the impulse to lie, and blame the witness, becomes irresistible. The alternative is acknowledging that you have no idea how to resolve conflict, how to deal with anger, are locked in a hideous farce of a beautiful relationship that everyone must admire, an admission that you need help.

The one who must be right at all costs forces all the other family members into therapy, because she cannot be wrong, will not be challenged, will do whatever needs to be done to feel right, superior, beyond reproach or even criticism. She simply will not tolerate defiance, and she will NEVER go to therapy because she is perfect the way she is. All of her friends and colleagues tell her so.

If her son is depressed, to the extent that he must be hospitalized for it? Sadly, the young man inherited his father’s depressive DNA instead of her genetic predisposition for happiness and high achievement. She and her husband have been the ideal parents to this hypochondriacal, oversensitive, vacillating, embarrassingly unrealistic young idealist, as everyone who knows them knows. If their former closest friend, the aggressively, threateningly defiant one, is told by a mutual friend that the boy is in a mental ward, that is betrayal. It is none of his fucking business! He is DEAD to us, DEAD. What do you not understand about DEAD?

The funny thing about being dead is that if it happens to you while you’re still alive, well, you’re a dead man talking. You are right now reading the words of a dead man (which will be true enough, by and by, if you happen upon these words once I am truly gone), a dead man about to go to the kitchen and get a cold drink. Kind of funny, this kind of death, in an ironic kind of way, no?

The person who is not damaged to the point of destructiveness is always the last to understand, the game of people damaged enough to be evil is always to the death. There is no irony at play when the Nazi says “we are going to kill every last one of you, Jew.” Nazi irony is of a special kind, winking to its cohort and the world — “Work Liberates” on the gates of a slave labor/death camp, “Special Handling” stamped on the passports of those transported to such workers’ paradises and so on. Every evil must be accompanied by the lies that make it possible. With the wonderfully flawed human understanding that if you honestly believe that a lie is true — it is not a lie.

In a place where there are no mensches, strive to be a mensch

A mensch is someone who strives to be honest, to keep their word, to do what they know is right, even if there is a price to be paid for right action. Real mensches are rare, we treasure them when we meet one, and, if we are decent, we try to live by the example they set. Jews are commanded “in a place where there are no mensches, strive to be a mensch”. So this is me, on the holiest day of the Jewish year, striving to be one.

I refrain from telling two longtime dear friends, too damaged by their own childhood trauma to refrain from assassinating my good name, that they are teaching their children a vicious and wrong lesson about life. I manfully avoid writing them and their family a note to ask: are you really teaching the three children you love that your own inability to deal with your pain, humiliation and rage entitles you to decide who they may love?

I would not be wrong to write those words, but I have to first consider if they would have any practical effect, if they could possibly improve anything between me and people who have decided I am dead because I was hurt by them and refused to simply shut up and pretend everything was as it always was, or as it always seemed to be.

My words would have no effect except to make two people already too humiliated to act with decency feel even more humiliated. It would increase their rage. It would harden their resolve to make sure the lid of my coffin is hammered tight shut and I remain, for all concerned, dead and silenced forever.

So, I am reduced to thinking these dour thoughts and writing those words here, as we all fast and consider our good and bad acts of the previous year, and who we still need to make amends with. I strive to be a mensch, and they have long avoided reading anything I post here, so there is little chance of them ever reading this. Still, there’s a chance they might. If they do, call me pisher.

The duty to do the right thing

Your righteous anger, your pride, the terrifying depths of your crippling childhood injuries, does not relieve you of your duty to do the right thing toward people you care about. Anyone who is not a psychopath knows the difference between right and wrong, though this line is easily colored over by strong emotions and righteous group think.

You can find yourself at the end of a once beautiful relationship, with no further obligation to endure what has soured into mutual contempt. That happens between humans sometimes, it is impossible to unsee contempt once it is shown to you by someone you trusted. This is very sad but sometimes, in human affairs, as inevitable as death itself.

Once you feel contempt directed at you from someone you love and trust, the hurt and betrayal you feel is usually transmitted right back to them. Faults you have long overlooked in your dear loved one transform into unresolvable obstacles to love, as do your faults to them. It is difficult to keep feeling generous toward someone who treats you with contempt. Once this transition happens, the odds are very low of overcoming it and restoring the relationship to what it was before mutual hurt corrupted it.

Finding ourselves at an ugly juncture with loved ones who hurt us does not relieve us of our obligation to act in the way we know is right. The hopelessness of a situation, until it is revealed without any further doubt — like when the Nazis began machine gunning Jews who showed them their humanity and soul power, as Gandhi advised them to do — does not change your moral obligation to do what you know is right, to refrain from doing what is hateful to you. It is OK to kill a Nazi who is trying to kill you, to defend your life and your loved ones from Nazis, once the killing starts, it is even praiseworthy to do so. It is never OK to become a Nazi.

The human dilemma, how to continue to act attuned to your higher nature when you are suddenly thrashing in a toxic sea of the lowest human impulses. There’s a riddle that will keep an honest person awake at night, especially during the ten days when we are commanded to make amends with those we have hurt and with those who have injured us.

Authoritarian Personality Dysorder

I have avoided using psychiatric language to describe the personalities and autocratic actions of old friends who have acted badly, but I can’t resist making a suggestion for the next DSM, the official bible of psychiatric diagnosis, since it already contains diagnoses like “temper dysregulation disorder with dysphoria” – an affliction of young children and adolescents who unfairly blame their parents for their own inability to control their little fucking tempers and then get depressed about it.

I guess the thing to do is create a list of signs, symptoms, if you will, that define this personality disorder, or perhaps, to give it a bit more gravitas, dysorder?

Authoritarian Personality Dysorder, diagnostic criteria

1) An unshakable belief that there is always only one right answer to every question. A concomitant belief that your answer is always the right one.

2) An absolute entitlement to be obeyed without question.

3) The perception that criticism of any kind, even mild questioning, is defiance.

4) An entitlement to do whatever is necessary to punish defiance and enforce obedience.

5) A belief that every action you take to maintain absolute dominance over others is fully justified, in fact, righteous, perfect and unassailable.

6) The firm conviction that compromise of any kind is humiliation. A request from a loved one to compromise is treason, a capital offense.

Of course, it is easy enough to dismiss this new diagnostic category as simply a restatement of others, among them American Asshole Disorder, Fucking Dickhead Disorder, Narcissistic Personality Disorder, Oppositional Defiance Disorder, etc.

Psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk, in The Body Keeps the Score, describes his work with trauma patients. Most patients’ psychiatric diagnoses appeared to flow directly from their attempts to deal with trauma. For example, a child who is regularly raped by a highly respectable parent may display signs of Temper Dysregulation Disorder with Dysphoria. It is pretty natural for a child abused this way to be angry, irritable and depressed.

When van der Kolk proposed new diagnostic criteria for some childhood diagnoses, and an approach that included identifying possible trauma as the root of the behavioral disturbance, he got a curt letter from the august board that revises the DSM informing him that he seemed to have pulled this provocative idea out of his own ass, without copious clinical trial data to back it up. His own work continues to show the value of addressing the actual underlying traumatic injury, while the DSM continues to diagnose these behavioral disturbances the same way.

We note that until 1973, the DSM listed homosexuality as a diagnostic category of mental illness/personality disorder. The first DSM, published in 1952, listed it as a mental illness. In DSM-II, published in 1968, being gay was still considered deviant, but it was now a personality disorder rather than a mental illness. It took pressure from gays who did not agree with being diagnosed by the American Psychiatric Association either way, and others who agreed with them, before a 1973 vote to remove homosexuality as a diagnosable disorder. Just to say, none of these diagnostic categories, most based strictly on a list of observable symptoms, are carved in stone.

So why not have Authoritarian Personality Dysorder added to the next DSM? Probably because the authoritarian personalities who always preside over such decisions would be fucking furious, dysregulated and dysphoric.

For this and other reasons, I refrain from using the popular, descriptive term “narcissist” to describe the characters in this story who cannot be wrong, cannot accept responsibility for hurtful behavior, and will kill you to prove that they are as blameless, with intentions always as perfect as those of the original authors of the DSM.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to try to give myself some at home electro-convulsive therapy as I wait for my next intake appointment at the mental health clinic where a skilled therapist has been highly recommended to me.

From Chapter 42

So I can only take the lesson from other people I have loved who, I find out in the end, can never be wrong. They all lash out the same way when they feel defensive, they will effectively kill you to prove that they can never be wrong. Once you’re dead you have to finally shut the hell up, they don’t have to listen to another mortifying word.

I don’t know what it is with this type. Actually, I do. It’s irreparable, traumatic damage done to them early and persistently, disabling them so badly that they cling to a fragile belief in their superiority and are compelled to destroy whenever their projected virtue feels threatened. This type also, of course, is very easily threatened.

They understand the world as black and white, win-lose, zero sum.  They resonate with other winners who are easily threatened, and they band together with them. They all intuitively grasp the basic rules and boundaries — when threatened, they form a herd and protect each other because they’re all the same kind of animal. They understand the extreme dangerousness of life, the finality of rage, the importance of social status, the limitations of love, trust and friendship in the same way, and they love, trust and befriend each other in the same conditional way.

I have known a bunch of this type, and it’s taken me sixty-seven years to recognize the infernal consistency of this tribe they are all perfect examples of. You don’t want to be on the wrong side of their predictable moral certainty, when the time inevitably comes, trust me.