Category Archives: personal

Insecurity on steroids

The thing with someone who can never acknowledge they were wrong, or behaved hurtfully, is that it comes from a terrible insecurity. We all have insecurities, it is part of the human condition to wonder and compare yourself to an ideal you have of how you should be able to act in the world. People who can’t be wrong live in a different world than the rest of us fallible earthlings.

If you admit you’ve hurt somebody, it makes you a bad person, in their crabbed, black and white worldview. People who hurt others are bad, they need to be perfect, so it is impossible that they could have hurt someone without a very good reason. That reason is always the same: “that person who claims I hurt them, that liar, actually hurt me, really, really badly. I am the victim, not them! How dare that morbidly oversensitive defective attack my perfection, and expect me not to react!”

“I was only reacting, like any normal person would, reflexes got the best of me. You made me shoot you in the gut, because I was rightfully afraid you were going to attack me. You didn’t see that terrifying look on your face, I had to stand my ground. Everyone has a right to self-defense, that’s all I was doing when I shot you a few more times just to make sure you couldn’t get up and beat the living crap out of me, pistol whip me with my own gun. Don’t pretend that’s not exactly what you were thinking as you were lying there, fake bleeding!”

In my personal life I’ve recently experienced this insecurity on steroids, in my face so constantly I had to grapple with the underlying principle of how these emotionally driven motherfuckers truly believe they are acting righteously. Coming from a loved one, someone you’ve long trusted, it really fucks with your mind. A person who is sometimes wrong, who apologizes from time to time, cannot understand that for someone with crippling insecurity these simple human acts are impossible. The logic is not hard to understand, once you grasp the basic principle.

I am so insecure that any criticism or complaint against me is a deadly attack. I cannot be wrong, because everyone loves and respects me. I am an exemplary person. I will not be attacked by people with mental problems. You are insane if you don’t understand that you are wrong and I am right, no matter what.

You can’t reason with these good folks, they are beyond the reach of introspection, empathy or the ability to see nuance or take responsibility for the harm we all sometimes do to others. All they see is deadly threat, competition to the death and victory. Once you realize this about them, how paralyzed they are by insecurity and anger (which hardens immediately into implacable rage) during even the most minor conflict, the only thing you can do to preserve your integrity (and what’s left of your sanity) is follow the advice of the second best fortune cookie I ever opened:

The best throw of the dice is to throw them away.

The subtle details of long-term damage

I just thought of something that happened to me more than sixty years ago, and it sheds light on my present day sensitivity about not having my feelings taken seriously. The lack of empathy shown after this long forgotten incident appears rather subtle, in a way, and petty to remember. Except for the deep impression it seems to have made, as I feel any time my feelings are dismissed by others.

My childhood best friend, Michael Siegel, who lived across the street and was two years older than me, had a vivid imagination and a great sense of adventure. He and I would roam the neighborhood, claiming new forts in the spaces between garages. We would travel surreptitiously from one fort to the next, navigating a dangerous war zone like two well-armed expert spies. Each fort had a name, Green Gate and Bramblebush are the only two I recall. We had to carefully navigate a low, spiky, barbed wire-looking brown coil hedge that looked like the Crown of Thorns, to find safety inside Bramblebush.

We also had the Waterbug Club, whose charter demanded that we jump through any sprinkler we passed on our way from fort to fort, or chasing the ball during our one on one baseball games in the street in front of my house. We did a lot of chasing, because the street sloped down to Union Turnpike, which was behind the home plate he’d painted in the street one day. Where the seven or eight year-old got a can of green pain, or how he painted home plate so perfectly, I never learned. When the sprinklers were running a river ran down our street toward the Turnpike, against whose inexorable flow we always hurried to build a heroic series of dams out of twigs and mud.

We used to regularly patrol the alleys behind the stores on Union Turnpike. These alleys, for some reason, always contained empty deposit bottles. There were the two cent regular Coke bottles and the larger sized ones which fetched a nickel. We were diligent collectors and eventually had over a dollar in our coffers. We decided to go to the candy store and spend the whole bundle on candy. In those days, 1961 or so, you could buy a ton of candy for a dollar. A Milky Way, Mr. Goodbar or bag of M & M’s cost a nickel.

Michael hatched the plan. The candy store opened early. On Saturday we’d get there as soon as the store opened, buy a shit ton of candy and eat it all. At five or six I didn’t have an alarm clock in my room, or even a clock, but Michael figured everything out. He must have known how to tell time and had an alarm clock. We’d tie a long rope to my ankle, I’d go to sleep with the rope hanging out of the window, and in the morning Michael would give the rope a yank, I’d wake up, get dressed and off to the candy store.

The only weak link of this plan was that we didn’t have a long rope. We managed to get a bunch of ropelike material, more like very flexible long plastic straws than rope, but there was no reason it couldn’t work. We tied enough of them together to make a long rope. We made a loop at one end, which I inserted my foot into, and I went to sleep, excited about the brilliant plan we were about to pull off.

I woke up the next day with the loop still around my ankle. Michael had come by early, as he promised, and yanked on the “rope”. The rope came apart in several places, as we confirmed later. Five and seven year-olds are not always intuitively expert knot tiers, it turns out. I was pissed off about the failure of this brilliant plan. I guess I shared my frustration with my parents.

They might have found it mildly funny, how pissed off I was, but what I remember is for years afterwards my father would bring up a similar moment of frustration I’d expressed. “You were inconsolably angry because it RAINED,” he’d say, shaking his head with a dismissive smile. The rain had apparently canceled something I’d been looking forward to. I was upset and frustrated because something I’d been excited to do had been washed out. “You were in a rage because it RAINED,” said my father, many times during my childhood, demonstrating the ridiculousness of my disappointment and the irrational anger it caused.

From my irrational feelings about an act of God it was easy to trace all of my other frustrations and anger to this same need to rage for no reason. As an old man now myself it is easy enough to see that my father had never experienced empathy as a boy. In his mind I was a spoiled middle class kid who expected his excited plans to work out. He’d survived so much worse, that my childish disappointment was something to dismiss, mock. The pain he’d been forced to endure rendered him incapable of ordinary empathy. Profoundly sad thing, that.

Priceless memories of old friends

When, after a painful conflict with two lifelong friends, you behave with patience, kindness and maturity and an entire group of old friends unanimously condemns you for childishness and cruelty —

Priceless!

On the downside, when one of these hanging jurors is suddenly diagnosed with end stage cancer, and another is battling a serious degenerative disease, and neither one will speak with you unless you confess your unforgivable, unforgiving childish rage and acknowledge the unspeakable harm you’ve done to everybody, well, there’s a price to that, for everyone involved.

I used to make these two ailing friends laugh often. We spent many a wonderful weekend with them and all I ever felt from them was love and warmth. They now need all the love and support they can get, as we all would in their situation.

Except that I am suddenly their enemy to the death because two mutual friends who can never be wrong, terrified about their humiliating imperfect/damaged/dark sides ever being revealed, struck first and struck hard. With only a few sincerely imparted poisonous lies they convinced an entire righteous group of old mutual friends that I am a destructive monster who can neither love nor forgive.

Evil, we learn, often presents itself as righteousness. The most aggressive attackers always present themselves as the most unfairly persecuted victims. Which, itself, is also:

fucking priceless!

My father was a sometimes charming monster

He was not alone in this category of monster. Some of the most destructive monsters of all time were good looking, funny, smart and engaging. While you were admiring them they were not monstrous at all. They were wonderful, lovely, cool, special, easy to be around, fun.

Once they show you their monstrous side they are obliged to kill you. It is humiliating for them, the possibility they could be revealed as monsters. Better to take no chances, kill all the witnesses, kill them, kill anybody who tries to help a witness!

The painful challenge of the adult child of a narcissist

When somebody who can’t be wrong feels challenged, defied, they fly into a rage. It is embarrassing to lose control like that, humiliating even, and this type will blame the person they raged against, every time. “You did this to me, I just reacted. I did nothing wrong, you did everything wrong. You owe me an apology.” If you are a child, and this person is your parent, you stand up for yourself at your psychological peril.

No allowance. You’re grounded. You’re in my doghouse. You don’t love, or deserve to be loved. You can’t forgive. You cling to your hurt like a baby. You’re crazy. You don’t have the slightest clue how the world works.

This last bit is true. These types literally run the world, because they are deadly determined to always be in control so as not to risk being humiliated. It was their early life humiliation, and that terrifying feeling of powerlessness, that created their zero-sum worldview and tyrannical personality. My way or the highway, asshole. I’ve cut people dead for less than what you did to me, you ungrateful piece of shit. They demonstrate their terrible power by making good on their threats to exact payment for disobedience. If you want to be dead to them, keep insisting they had no right to rage at you.

The adult son is locked in a psych ward after some dramatic display of desperation, two days after arriving back at his childhood home. You, my friend, would be desperate too, if, whenever you needed support, one parent always blamed you for their rage and the other one always quietly agreed with the abusive parent. “We have to present a united face, so as not to confuse the child, it’s just basic good parenting” the abuse enabling parent will explain to others.

To his son he will say “your mother needs to be right, and she is right. She is used to being the boss, she took charge of her devastated family at age twelve and has always been in charge. You need to accept that she can’t be wrong, because it’s true. You are dead wrong if you think either of us is ever going to tell you that she was ever wrong, let alone abusive.”

Not surprising that two days after the adult son moves back into his parents’ home the weight of it all comes crashing down on him. I don’t know how he got to the mental ward, but I know he stayed there until they could stabilize his mood well enough to send him back into the place where his soul was crushed from the time he let out his first unanswered cries for empathy.

It is the biggest part of my current torment, to have the keys to his cell in my pocket and no way of getting them to him.

Trauma and immature parents

I’ve got to keep writing the same idea until I get it into a gentle enough form that it might be heard and considered. My credulous former friends are just what they are, there is no reaching those who uncritically embrace hateful lies, angrily close their minds, or what’s left of their minds.

I’m trying to reach a young man who is living in hell, the identical hell I escaped decades ago only by the best of luck. He is living with parents who had no hesitation to fly into a rage at a hurt old friend, arguably their closest, and embark on a deliberate campaign of lies, to destroy my good name among our fellows, when I needed to talk through a conflict with them. This poor guy is their oldest son.

Trauma, observes Bessel van der Kolk, is when we are not seen or known. When a child is upset, and parents look away, wait for the bad mood to pass, will not yield in any way, there is your basic recipe for trauma.

No reason can explain why the kid is acting this way, no explanation or understanding is possible, the crying simply must stop. Parents act this way only if they suffered similar abandonment when they needed to be comforted as infants.

An inconsolably crying child presents a challenge to every kind of parent. Emotionally immature parents, who have been damaged by the same kind emotional distancing when they were crying children in need of comfort, feel embarrassed at their helplessness. It makes them look terrible in public, too, not being able to control their child. The upset child is now assaulting the immature parent’s image as a great parent. The situation instantly becomes about the parent’s feelings, not the child’s.

It can take you decades, if ever, to recognize a basic fact about your childhood. Your strong-willed parent, who can neither be wrong nor apologize, may turn out, when you add up years of evidence, to be a bully. Bullies are created by abuse that damages them to the point they lash out at others whenever they feel threatened.

A bully is, obviously, not a good parent, they are too hurt themselves to help anyone else in trouble. They will do terrible damage they can never acknowledge or take responsibility for.

The best you can hope for, if you do enough hard work and have enough help and luck to untangle complicated emotions, is a deathbed reconciliation with the bully, full of regrets as they are about to leave this world.

I had a deathbed reconciliation with my father, a raging, frightened bully. I felt it was a beautiful mutual gift at the time, a blessing, but his “I wish we could have had this kind of talk fifteen years ago, but I was too fucked up” is about the most poignant line I can imagine a dying father saying to his son. That I can’t cry about it to this day is one of those mysteries of being a male in our toxic society, but the line is no less tragic.

If your parent is still angry at their own mother or father, in adulthood, chances are they will not be able to give you the kind of nurturing they never experienced. They will demand obedience in all circumstances and blame you as defiant and irrationally angry if you show any hesitation or resentment.

Parents who need to be right will not tolerate that kind of behavior for a minute, it will enrage them. The child learns early to avoid this rage any way they can. In the end, expressing true feelings becomes futile.

The damage is done, congratulations, the bullying parent insists they are fully justified, and now your challenge begins. You will be second-guessing your true emotions for the rest of your life, trying to avoid conflict. You may be subject to episodes of mania, rage or depression. Strictly speaking, it’s not your damaged parents’ fault, but that’s cold comfort, I assure you.

Back to hell, devils!

Clear, objective analysis and patient exposition are very important to healing from wounds that were inflicted by others. Intellectually, you can come to understand the harm done to you, the mechanism, the hows, the whys and all that other stuff. The much harder part is the emotions you are left holding, like a bag of rotting flesh.

So to those pathetic, determined devils who have done such damage to my life, out of their own damage and their undigested, unslakable rage toward parents alive and dead, I say back to hell with you, you fucking devils.

A rage to be right

There are some people, you’ll discover, if you ever have a conflict with them, who are incapable of ever being wrong. These can be close and loving friends, it turns out, and everything will be fine as long as you are always conciliatory and never make a fuss about the occasional mistreatment you may experience. Their tragic, aggravating flaw is that they cannot compromise because such weakness is intolerable to them.

When real conflict arises, and you don’t pretend not to be irritated, you will suddenly see that you are up against a monster, because to them the stakes are not the human ones of sometimes feeling bad about being wrong, but utter humiliation for them. They simply cannot tolerate being wrong and they will kill you, if necessary, to prove that they are the most loving and perfect people ever created.

It’s tempting to call these kind of people psychos but I prefer to think of them as extremely damaged. The problem comes when these damaged people become destructive, as they always do when they feel threatened. They are hypervigilant about threats.

They act with no regard for the brutal harm they inflict because they are always justified in their rage. Their only interest is in being above reproach, being right, being superior. They cannot control their fury to “win” and will do whatever it takes to prove themselves perfect and beyond reproach. They are some of the most dangerous motherfuckers in the world. They tend to write, and rewrite, history.

My two closest friends, for literally decades, turned out to be people who cannot be wrong, people who, if they are wrong, will prove themselves right by any means necessary. After a nightmarishly tense long weekend in a rented vacation house they barely made eye contact as we said goodbye. The anger I had witnessed between them in that house required the end of our relationship and my removal from our circle of friends. They made it very clear to me that unless I admitted that I was the cause of all anger and bad feeling in that house, we were not going to be friends.

Somebody else would have told them to go fuck themselves, and would not have been wrong to do so, but, out of love for them, and valuing our long friendship, I spent over a year trying to make peace with them. It was possibly the most difficult year of my life. I did learn a few important, painful things. One is that you can’t make peace with people who can never be wrong.

Long periods of angry silence did not cure me of the need to talk about the hurtful events of that vacation from hell. Threats to walk away from our friendship, for the unforgivable things I had done (unspecified) did not deter me. I sent letters they claimed never to have received. They got angry whenever I tried to talk about healing our friendship. They began lying.

After a joyous wedding we attended with a group of longtime friends I got a text saying we could only talk to each other in front of a mediator. When I suggested a meeting to agree on facts to present to the mediator they agreed. Covid was still raging so we sat outside to talk, as the temperature dropped. It was literally cold as hell as they squared off with me. They both were angry during the conversation, resisting everything I said. There was no fact they’d agree to, facts would be left up to the mediator.

This type sees people like mediators as tools to prove themselves right. Why not let the professional decide who is right and who is wrong, that’s what mediators do — according to people who cannot be wrong.

If two parties go to a mediator with no agreement about the nature of the conflict, or what their respective interests and positions are, the mediator cannot possibly help mediate any kind of compromise. That’s not the point for people who can never be wrong.

These two would present reasonable, successful, normal faces to the mediator, complain that I, an unreasonable, unsuccessful, abnormal and tormented person simply refused to accept responsibility for being an asshole, and that they greatly loved me in spite of that. The mediator might be convinced. Then, in their mind, I’d finally have to shut the fuck up. Set and match.

When it became clear they would fight every attempt to heal, except for their fail safe mediator ploy, I told them it was useless to go to a mediator. A month of silence followed.

During that month they got busy, working on all of our mutual friends. The story all of our mutual friends heard was that Eliot sadistically tortured them for over a year trying to bend them to his will. Not only that, his rage was unappeasable. He refused their desperate last ditch attempt to heal with a professional mediator. They had apologized to him over and over and over but it was never enough. So Eliot was also unforgiving, inhumanly so. Eliot was so enraged at them, because of his childish childhood pain, that he simply could not recognize how much they loved him, how hard they were trying to convince him of their love. Eliot had made it literally impossible for them to live. Eliot had killed them, Eliot was a murderer and a lawyer specializing in denial, distorting the plain facts to make other people look like liars. Eliot had laughed as he slashed them to death, laughed and joked as he was slaughtering them. You think Eliot is an easygoing, philosophical guy with a quick wit, but that’s his mask. Eliot is a cruel, vicious, venomous monster. Once you are determined to “win” at all costs, trifles like truth and lies be damned.

I’d like to say that these long-time mutual friends all called me and asked me what the hell was going on. None did.

In fact, they all told me that I had nothing to say, that they were not prepared to listen to my longwinded protests about what I claimed actually happened. They spoke in one voice: unless I was ready to do the hard work to heal from my irrational childhood pain, and honestly forgive people who loved me dearly, I was as good as dead to the rest of them.

And so it was, and so I am.

One could say I’m better off, not having these brittle friendships in my life anymore. I’m not so sure. We shared a lot of love and many laughs for 50 years, and none of us is perfect (outside of the two assholes who smeared my good name).

But if you can’t be wrong, and you’ve lived your life acquiring the power and the manipulative skills to do so, you will kill anybody who threatens the image of you as a perfect being. Such is the treacherous world we make our way through on our journey toward death.

Note to a depressed young man (draft one)

One hallmark of a depressive episode is how impossible it is to understand that depression always passes. This is impossible to imagine when you are depressed. Depression removes all hope, closes off all creativity, every possibility for overcoming it. Depression is rage turned inward, against the self.

I speak from experience. I was in the dark pit of what felt like a major and endless depression around the time I turned thirty. I could see no possibility for moving forward. I spent months in therapy, walking, avoiding people and falling asleep on a friend’s couch when I went to visit him after therapy.

Depression removes all options for action, preemptively torepedoing any thought that might lead you away from self-torment.

Though it feels impossible, reach out to people who can listen to you and help. Your support group is very concerned but not often up to the task of offering you perspective or relief from the burden of other people’s harsh judgments that have led you to the dark abyss you find yourself at the bottom of. You lose all sense of your own value, and decency, all sensitivity turned against yourself for disappointing those who love you.

Though it feels impossible, and I understand why, reach out to people who have made you feel loved. They are the only ones who can help you up and out.

And know this. While it sounds impossible, this depressive episode will pass, depression always does. You could look it up.