Category Archives: personal

Two excellent rules about life to consider

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

12. A lesson is repeated until it is learned.  A lesson will be presented to you in various forms until you have learned it.  When you have learned it, you can then go on to the next lesson.

13. People always do the best they can.  If they are doing poorly, it is because they have not learned the lessons that will enable them to do better.

How do I make it stop?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Striving, belatedly, to be a mensch

The Yiddish word mensch, (a word European Jews took from the German word for “man” [1]) refers to a person who acts the way we all recognize everybody should act.   A world populated by mensches, with mensches in charge of governments and communities, would be much different, and much fairer, than the one we live in now.

When a mensch makes a mistake she doesn’t justify it, or blame someone else, she rectifies it as quickly as she can.   When a mensch sees somebody being attacked, she steps in to try to prevent harm.   When a mensch sees you’re hurt, she comforts you.  You can be confident taking a mensch’s word they will do what they say, knowing they’ll do everything they can to keep a promise.   Here’s google’s first hit when you ask for a definition of mensch:

mensch

  1. A person of integrity and honor.
  2. Alternative spelling of mentch.
  3. a decent responsible person with admirable characteristics

It is my experience that most people consciously try to be a mensch, challenging though it is in many situations.   We all do what we believe is right, we try to treat others in ways that wouldn’t be hurtful to ourselves, we try to extend understanding to loved ones who hurt us. 

The hardest part of being a mensch is when we are hurt, especially if we are blamed for being hurt.  In that situation it can suddenly be impossible to act according to your better nature, your pain blocks the way.  You can find yourself isolated in an emotional dead-end with no way out, unless your hurt is acknowledged by the person who hurt you.  That situation can be a mensch-trap, since hurt caused accidentally is very hard to take responsibility for.  Hurt you actually, objectively, didn’t cause, though insistently blamed for it, is almost impossible to acknowledge or seek forgiveness for, because, truthfully, what am I expected to apologize for?

I put somebody I love in this position recently, for a long time, blamed her for an impossible, almost year-long stand-off and couldn’t see the unfairness of my position until yesterday, when I finally wrote a chronology that helped me see her role in a very difficult situation differently.  She is not to blame for any of this ugly shit, she and I actually worked out what we needed to on the phone almost a year ago.   

I feel awful for blaming her and will try my best to get her to accept my apology, express my understanding of why she had every right to be upset with me,  why it was wrong of me to demand an apology for her doing the best she could under circumstances so emotionally tangled that right now I can’t imagine how to explain them to her at the moment without making things worse.   I’ll stick to making amends. She would be perfectly within her rights to still be mad at me, but I hope she won’t be.

Trying my best to belatedly fix things with somebody I hurt doesn’t make me a mensch, but it hopefully makes me less of a schmuck.    If I can manage to reassure her of my love without bringing in too much of the impossible tangle (not her fault) that may need a professional’s help to untangle, I will have done the best day’s work in a long time.  I hope she’ll be able to forgive me.

[1] A certain generation of Germans refined this term to classify menschen by category, there were menschen, regular guys, ubermenschen — supermen — and üntermentschen, subhuman, contemptible excuses for humans that needed to be dealt with as harshly as possible to avoid contamination of the rest of the population.

I hope this doesn’t sound judgmental

You deserve friends who make you laugh, feel loved, comfort you when you need comforting, accept your limitations and quickly work out any problems with you when they see you are unhappy.   

You deserve friends who always give you the benefit of the doubt, who accept when they’ve hurt you and always do their best to make amends and not let you sit in pain. 

You deserve friends who return your best efforts at kindness and friendship with their own best efforts.   We all deserve that. 

We are lucky when we find real friendship and should remember to be grateful for every day of it.  Friendship should never be taken for granted, it is mortal, just like us.

Complainer

My best advice to you when times are tough for you — and what I’m going to say might seem like very, very tough love — never, ever lose your patience with people who hurt you, no matter what.

Once you lose patience, and the ability to hold pain inside, forever, if necessary, you become the problem and the focus of everyone else’s defensiveness. How can you be worthy of friendship when you make people who hurt you feel so defensive?

Think about it like this, my constantly complaining friend, giving in to frustration is like inconsolably protesting that it’s wrong for the corpse you loved so much in life to keep lying there like it’s dead and not getting up to hug you.

I may not be able to take this advice about endless, limitless patience myself, you understand, but if you don’t, you are going to have big problems. Trust me on that one.

You deserve love

You deserve friends who make you laugh, feel loved, comfort you when you need comforting, accept your limitations and quickly work out any problems with you when they see you are unhappy.   You deserve friends who always give you the benefit of the doubt, who accept when they’ve hurt you and always do their best to make amends and not let you sit in pain.  You deserve friends who return your best efforts at kindness and friendship with their own best efforts.   We all deserve that.  We are lucky when we find real friendship and should remember to be grateful for every day of it.  Friendship should never be taken for granted, it is mortal, just like us.

The hard part of friendship is when you are deeply hurt by a friend who then feels defensive and needs to feel understood themself about why they hurt you, tells you why you shouldn’t have been so hurt, why they couldn’t respond to you any differently, why what you needed by way of honest acknowledgment of what happened was impossible for them for a list of perfectly valid reasons — and, perhaps most importantly, how hurt they were by you saying they hurt you.  Your emotional emergency, they might explain, does not make it their emotional emergency, since they are very busy with many responsibilities and loved ones to take care of.   It can sit, until there’s time, until people are not under stress, until everyone is nice and calm.  That period of silence will give the hurt party time to heal, presumably, and then cooler heads will prevail and everything that is bothering everybody can be left in the past as the simple human mistake that it was.

The hardest part about friendship is the expectation that, no matter what, you need to take our undying love as beyond question or doubt, to understand things we can never explain, acknowledge or stop justifying.  We all have reasons for our actions and inaction, we all believe we are justified in what we do or don’t do, that we are not emotionally volatile assholes who hold in a lifetime of painful feelings and simply lash out in frustration and misplaced anger sometimes.   

“OK, fine, you want to blame us for your pain, your childish need to be the eternal victim?  Yes, we could have behaved better, we could have listened, we could have responded, we could have reached out after you reached out to us, but we didn’t, so just get over it, either accept our understandable human limitations, and our love (which you obviously don’t know how to return) or be on your miserable way.   Our life is good, and full, and fulfilling and we can’t really help you with your immense reservoir of pain, anger and need to blame others for your own problems.” 

If we are filled with infinite love, patience, wisdom and compassion we may be able to understand that position as a somewhat defensive expression of true, deep friendship, in spite of its seemingly harsh nature.  If not, we remain hurt, locked in a childish feeling of being unloved and ready to lash out even when our old friend drives hours after a day of work to prove his friendship by being there, even if unable to offer any actual comfort, to absorb a final, typical, angry outburst or two.  Push an asshole far enough emotionally, et, voila, they revert to their sickeningly aggressive, threatening, childish type.   

“Nobody wants to hear your justifications for why you felt entitled not to continue to hold your pain and frustration in, after way less than a year of simply not being heard.  It’s just sad that you need to weaponize a few months of innocent, perfectly understandable silence.  Friends don’t make you sad, friends help you.”

You will rarely get exactly what you need from another person

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

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

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

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

Emotional Maturity, anyone?

I don’t know how the artificial intelligence of YouTube algorithms determined to send me this particular video, (and I shudder to think about the sophistication of the surveillance we are all under using our smart devices) but as I watched it I said “damn!” A pretty smart little film clip with a short, powerful comparison of emotional immaturity and emotional maturity.

The narrator asks what our characteristic reaction is when someone we love hurts us. We can sulk, hoping for a magical solution. We can rage, like the cartoon of a powerful autocrat. We can grow cold and withdraw. Babies and children act this way, why shouldn’t adults?

For one thing, the world would know nothing but war and no interpersonal conflict could ever be solved.

Three characteristics of emotional maturity needed to actually solve musunderstandings and mistakes: The capacity to explain why we are hurt. The capacity to stay calm and extend the benefit of the doubt when hurt. The capacity to be vulnerable.

The narrator asks reasonably and humanely how we can expect to emerge from childhood with emotional maturity if we are raised by people lacking the emotional vocabulary, or emotional maturity, to show us how adults deal with pain? Lacking that, it’s just years of hard goddamn work not to act like a baby when we’re fucking hurt. Here’s a neat six minute primer: