Category Archives: personal

Telltale sign of what you’re up against (from a work in progress)

Chapter 69  Telltale sign: simple questions lead to anger

When you are confronted by an indignant person who has shown over time that they can never be wrong, no matter what, even the simplest request for clarification or empathy will fuel their anger.  People who can’t be wrong, on pain of utter humiliation, have only one aim when they feel challenged — destruction of the enemy.

When you encounter someone who gets mad every time you need to talk about something hurtful that happened, you will find that kindness, patience, friendship, extending the benefit of doubt, love, humor, generosity are useless against this kind of anger. The reason for this anger is that being imperfect in the eyes of others is unbearably painful and humiliating to them. If you insist on being understanding, while needing to finish a badly needed conversation, you will incur only their rage and desire to silence you forever. Trust me on this one, I’ve lived it more than once. 

F__ doesn’t deny that he told me, after weeks of icy silence, “I’ve walked away from friendships for less than what you did to me.” G___ regarded me coolly as her husband drew his line in the sand. I reassured him of my friendship and he seemed momentarily soothed, although this mild, anticlimactic outcome, instead of the desired outrage on my part, meant that the planned hit was not carried out, much to determined G__’s momentary disappointment.

Here’s the thing I know now that I was blind to then. It is essential to understand that when you are in an incoherent conversation with people desperate never to be wrong, all problem-solving tools become useless.  I should have calmly asked F___ what it was that I did to him. This would not have led to any kind of good outcome, but F____’s resulting temper tantrum, with tactical provocation from righteously enraged G____, could have opened my eyes, saved me months of anguish trying to solve a puzzle that had only one solution, a solution I resisted with my entire soul: mutual death. There is no way to avoid it in a conflict with this type. A year and a few months later they were as irreversibly dead to me as they’ve made sure I am to them and anyone who knows them.

What reason to kill when it is a blessing to be merciful, particularly to a loved one? Only one – you are in the hands of someone so damaged that death for you is the only outcome where they feel they are saving face, somehow not being humiliated by having to acknowledge imperfection.  Better, they reason, to righteously kill you than to be seen as a cowardly murderer, or a liar, or someone consumed with unslakable, inchoate rage that is so easily provoked.

We encounter situations where there is a perplexing question that must remain unanswered. The reason for not even asking these questions is having experienced a ferocious reaction to a reasonable question over and over. It makes one hesitant to set off the same kind of savagery in a moment that appears to be emotionally fraught. Experience teaches us that a meaningful answer to a painful question is beyond the capability of someone damaged on a primal level.

Here’s a koan that has become quite familiar to me, I’ve heard it now in five or six restatements but the sentiment is always identical. F___’s version was: You have to understand that I am too upset to hear why you are upset. In other words: my actual pain is much more important than your claimed pain.

There is no question that can clarify this or make it appear to be the reasonable statement of a friend and partner in understanding. Months later I asked F____ about this and he conceded it was not something a friend says to his close friend when they are both shaken up. Notably, he did not express regret or apologize for it. The obvious follow up questions all become useless after you learn that any of them leads to fresh indignation and anger.

This is the wall we face when confronted by a conclusory statement meant to stop us in our tracks, put us on our back foot, silence us, disable us in a fight to the death. The fight to the death starts long before someone who is not destructively damaged is aware of it.  It is unthinkable, except to those compelled to kill, that this kindred soul I thought I knew and loved intimately is determined to beat me at any cost, spread lies to destroy my good name, kill other friendships and forbid their adult children to get back to me.

It is mind-fucking, even after you have seen it a few times in your life. I suppose it takes the trauma of experiencing it as an adult to force you awake, to make you aware that the signs of this intractable sickness are always identical, that motherfuckers who act this way are all interchangeable, they must be seen as perfect or they will make sure you’re good and fucking dead.

Not being allowed to speak bites (plus upside)

When I say that somebody is not letting me speak, it’s not that they’re really able to make me stop speaking, but they make it clear, over and over, that they’re not willing (or able) to hear what I have to say.  That’s what I mean by “not being allowed to speak”. More precisely, it is a refusal to hear anything they don’t want to hear.

A person intent on not letting me speak constantly reframes the conversation, accuses, becomes indignant if I persist, insists on things that are often ridiculous and refuses to discuss the absurdity of their untenable claims. So I can, of course, speak as much as I want, even after the other person physically walks out of the room, hangs up the phone or cuts off communication, but “not letting me speak” is a way of saying someone is making it plain that they will never tune in to what I need them to hear.

Finding yourself in this situation, and feeling the human need to express what you are feeling, you may take up a musical instrument, begin to paint,  become an interpretive dancer, master any one of a number of things including the art of writing clearly. This clear expression of the things you need to say that others in your life refuse to hear over time becomes a necessity, an important muscle that you exercise every single day.  

In exercising this muscle you feel a certain mastery of things that are otherwise impossible to hold steady before you, the crucial things others refuse to let you say by refusing to hear you.  I’d have to call this strong impulse to do something creative and soul-soothing to express what you need to put out there a major upside of being told to shut up by people who claim to love you.

What perversely determined parents teach their offspring

On Passover, when Jewish families gather to retell the story of the long journey from slavery to freedom, we are instructed to remember that we were once slaves — and to identify with those who are oppressed. We’re supposed to take humility and compassion from our history, but you can be taught,  at any age, by a willful parent, hurt and eternally angry, that personal history can be erased in a single broad stroke, along with humility and compassion. 

On Yom Kippur, the holiday of repentance and forgiveness, these same pious teachers will instruct you that certain people who love you and have never harmed you don’t deserve to be forgiven for what it is said they did to a willful, eternally angry hanging judge with the right to never be questioned.  

HaShem looks down and shakes His head, thinking “It’s on me, I gave these motherfuckers free will, after all…”

Positions for the mediator

Party one:

I got my back up after he was very threatening and aggressive to me. He claimed that I hurt him very badly, traumatized him, in fact, the way his father used to, so we were suddenly talking about his traumatic childhood, and not anything that actually happened but after I got my back up, I apologized to him. I told him I was sorry that he made me feel threatened, and that I had acted incorrectly by getting my back up when his defiance reminded me of terrible battles with my daughter, which was very upsetting to me. 

Even after I apologized, and months later, even a year later, he couldn’t let it go, he kept obsessively insisting on talking about what he claimed I did to him. He wouldn’t let it go. He kept trying to make it my problem that he had a bad childhood and he tortured my husband for supporting me. He wouldn’t forgive us, no matter how many times we apologized, even though he kept saying he did forgive us, that he would “always” forgive me. He can’t forgive anybody.

Party Two:

After she flew into a rage during a minor disagreement, she glared at me steadily and did not respond to anything that I said. She literally just stared at me, tight-lipped and beaming hostility, as if I was a defiant child and she was my overwhelmed mother, trying her best to hold it together in the face of such disobedience.  I later accepted her apology, pathetic and blame shifting as it was.  I told her I had more to say about this but that I didn’t want to speak while I was still upset (after having not slept a minute the previous night) because I didn’t want to say anything that might damage our long friendship. 

Although she told me she’d be happy to hear what I had to say, she never let me say what I needed to say, the two times I tried she had temper tantrums.  My calls, texts and letters were ignored.   They began accusing me of being mean to them. Her silence, and her husband’s, went on for weeks and months at a time, complete with angry threats and false accusations against me, libels they’d later spread to our mutual friends and their children, their indignant claim that I was an enraged child irrationally trying to blame them for my obvious problems.

Mediation was the only possibility for fixing things, they finally said, after refusing to talk to me without a mediator present, but would not agree about anything — the conflict that sparked the end of our 50 year friendship, the tensions that mounted during that troubling holiday, the extreme coldness by the end, the angry fallout afterwards — claiming that the mediator would know what to do, without any input from the parties.  When they insisted that no agreement was needed, or possible, I understood that mediation was a ruse, a facially generous offer I would have to turn down, once they heaped impossible conditions on it. The beauty was that I could then be plausibly blamed for blowing up their desperate, endearing peace talks.  The one thing my friends can never forgive is someone who can never forgive.

Narcissistic rage is not just anger

Anger is a response to something that feels like an attack. When the attack subsides, and the threat is gone, healthy anger, having served its evolutionary purpose, fades away. Rage is a different, deeply rooted, much more destructive creature. When it is unleashed it calls for destruction.

I grew up in a home where outbursts of anger were common. The thing that took me decades to understand was that sometimes this anger was rage. Rage has no end. It can’t be reasoned with or placated, ever. It erupts like a volcano and melts everything in its path.

When you encounter rage, know what you are up against. If a person flies into a rage because they feel defied, and cannot be calmed down, it tells you they lack an adult ability to resolve conflict and operate at an immature emotional age.  Being stuck in the helpless feelings of hurt they had at three years old is a shameful thing, and the humiliation of being seen losing control fuels rage, the desperate cover-up of rage and the reflex to blame someone else, everyone else, for your own inability to control your emotions.

It took me years to understand why telling a person prone to rage that they played a role in causing pain sends them into a rage. Rage is their defense against feeling vulnerable, which they equate with being fatally humiliated. In attacking someone else they feel momentarily powerful. If you tell them they hurt you, they immediately compare your claim of pain to their own much greater claim to much deeper pain. You will never get anywhere in this contest of competitive suffering, truly a game for losers.

A person who becomes enraged believes the unbearable pain they have endured in silence entitles them to tell anyone else in pain to shut up. Solipsism is a feature of a person who cannot be wrong, the fatalistic view that there is no possibility of anyone understanding what someone else thinks or feels — so shut up about your unknowable interior world. The best response to an enraged person is to get away from them.  

Psychopaths and Narcissists often seem to “win”

Who is more determined to win than someone who sees “losing” as the utter destruction of their sense of themselves? The competitive ruthlessness of this sort is off the charts. If the price of not “winning” is a humiliating death during life, your motivation to dominate, or to kill your opponent, cannot be higher. It’s impossible to understand that someone you care about is like this, until you encounter that fatal conflict, which will often be the first and last. 

Of course, these words you are reading are being written by a quintessential loser, so take that into consideration. I have no power, political, economic or social. In such conflicts I have only my mind, my integrity and my sense of right and wrong, puny tools, it must be said, against the will of someone who will not be defeated, no matter what. Day to day there is also my sense of humor, which will not be evident in these pages, but that too can be turned into another reason to string me up by people given to that sort of thing. Trying to be funny, and making people laugh as though I am, when I am actually the most despicably camoflagued Nazi on the scene!!! Think of how quickly any funny man’s humor can turn to acid when you learn the guy is, say, a rapist who drugs his victims.

To a narcissist bent on victory, no matter what the facts may say about a given contest, there is always spin – your version of the facts that makes you, in fact, the winner, completely in the right. All you need to do is shut down the so-called facts of any so-called witnesses. Nobody is brave once the brave guy next to them is tortured to death, disemboweled and had their head placed on a pike. If there is evidence that can be used against you, bring pressure to bear to make that evidence go away. If the evidence is needed in a timely manner, say to avoid the statute of limitations, or to get past the ‘stop being an asshole and get over it’ deadline, keep the matter of its admissibility tied up in court until you run out the clock. All one needs is the will to do these things, and the power, and nobody can defeat you.

Oh, you can marshal the supposed facts into a so-called logical, arguably persuasive version of what you say happened? You can speak dispassionately and make your case appealing, intellectually and emotionally, to common sense, fairness and basic goodness? Good for you! I will utterly destroy you, funny man. Those “qualities” of yours can easily be turned against you, vicious hypocrite. I can cry, I can wheedle, I can rage, threaten, appeal to loyalty, to love, mercy, forgiveness, to the head on the fucking pike, to God, family, tribe, country, I can refute your “truth” with very compelling lies that will turn you into the irredeemable liar I say you are. Watch how fast most people will fall in line with this kind of thing, clown.

Watching this horror show play out on the national news every day, with one of our political parties, it is particularly unnerving to see it reenacted by a group of my oldest, closest friends. One day none are my friends, because I’ve had a conflict with another friend in the group who felt I defied her. Defying the will of a friend, boys and girls, a crime only a monster would commit, think about it. Then I made her feel terrible after her husband humiliated her by forcing her to apologize to me for flying into a sustained rage. She was not going to take this defiance from her spineless sadomasochistic husband too, and so he told me, after weeks of aggrieved, tooth-sucking silence, “I’ve walked away from friendships for less than what you did to me.” His wife regarded me coolly as her husband made this announcement.

His threat reminds me of a ridiculous ultimatum issued by another old friend, a guy I knew since fourth grade. A very nervous man, uncomfortable in his own skin to an alarming extent, he texted me that we could not talk on the phone, that it had to be in person. He drove to meet me so we could have the conversation his marriage counselor had urged him to have with his closest friend. He arrived with his eye ticking and face atwitch. After a few moment of small talk, in response to my question, he told me why he’d insisted on meeting in person. He had to confront me because I had, either intentionally or thoughtlessly, tried to deliberately destroy his marriage. His marriage, one should note, was a long hellscape featuring all the ravages of war. I was puzzled, but instead of telling him to fuck himself and his nightmare fucking marriage, and the fucking marriage counselor who had told him “your wife cannot respect you if you’re too much of a pussy to confront your closest friend after what your wife claims he did to you”, I talked things through with him, tried to help any way I could. Needless to say, I couldn’t help.

His divorce a few years later did nothing to improve our chances of being friends again, in spite of my efforts to do so. After all, he had been completely innocent and a good person during the years of our long friendship, while I… he didn’t even have the words to describe me. I was simply wrong, about him, his motivations, everything.

This is often the case, we learn, when you reach any sort of impasse with this kind of person. It is the reason Trump’s lawyers argue he must have an immediate adjudication of his complete immunity from all lawsuits and prosecution in one case against him and, at the same time, that he must be given maximum time to have the issue of his complete immunity decided in another case. He can argue an urgent rush to avoid irreparable harm in case one, and an equal urgency to have the court to take as much time as possible to decide the identical question in another case where delay is his only hope of “victory”.

These motherfuckers are never constrained by a need to be consistent, logical or fair. They have only one aim: victory at any cost, because winning is worth any price – since losing is a fate worse than a tortured death itself.

Schematic of those who can never be wrong

Every conflict is fatal

You learn that when you are in a conflict with someone who can’t be wrong, no matter what, that you will always be killed in the end.  Your death is preordained and can only be avoided by sacrificing your integrity, agency and any need to be authentic. In addition you must assume complete responsibility for the other person’s unhappiness, indignation and rage.   Failure to assume all blame, or relinquish control, integrity and responsibility are capital offensess to someone who can never be wrong.

they behave with frightful consistency

The narcissist always behaves the same way and one case is hard to distinguish from every other case.   They cannot be wrong because they believe they are better than others.  They are better because they are perfect, charming, beautiful, generous.   This grand self-image is very fragile and easily offended by anything it perceives as critical.  Once threatened with humiliation— the only alternative to grandiosity — this type always behaves the same way — a grim, desperate, sometimes irrational struggle to prevail by any means necessary because they cannot lose.  Losing is death to them and being a loser is a slow death sentence and any scenario where they don’t prevail is an unbearably humiliating outcome. The struggle is always to the death, and they never intend to be on the short end of that contest.

Change equals death

They cannot change.  Change requires honesty, openness, willingness to feel and acknowledge pain, the ability to accept fault, the understanding of what a true apology is, vulnerability, the ability to accept causing someone else pain, to sincerely make amends and many other things that a narcissist can never do.

When they argue that you cannot change they become determined to prove it to you.  Remember that they can’t be wrong, no matter what. If you offer your undeniable improvement in controlling your temper, they will prove you are not immune to anger, no matter how insanely they must turn up the heat to prove it.

Sadists view pain differently (notes for the ongoing work)

They say isolation is the best thing for pain, physical, and emotional. By they, I mean, of course, the sadists.  

A sadist will always insist that whatever hurts you the most is the best thing for you. After all, that’s their fucking credo, getting a superior thrill out of the pain they cause another.

“Don’t worry,” they will say “your suffering is really for the best. Truly, it’s the best thing for you and it will improve your character and your outlook both. You just can’t understand it because you’re too weak and by weak I mean fit to be dominated, to your breaking point, by the unsmiling likes of me.”

I never understood, until my fatal falling out with two old friends and their extended family, (actually, it was about a year before the fatal falling out became irrevocable,) that both partners in a couple can be both the sadist and the masochist.  They take turns in these roles and their grim struggle over who will give the merciless pain, and who will receive it at any given moment, is a highly addictive feature of their sacred bond with each other.

Mind you, these two were my very best friends, friends I never thought to doubt.   Thinking about it now, though it made me very sad to watch day after day of that vacation from hell, I have no problem with their painful arrangement, truly.   It is how they express their love for each other and it’s much different from my best idea of how to do that, but seeing them mercilessly at work on each other was not the deal breaker in our long friendship.  It was their shame and anger afterwards at being seen that way, and their need to blame and kill the witnesses, after destroying my good name among a large group of our friends.  Like enraged, morally rigid three year-olds in a brutal war to the death with a hated enemy with infectious cooties.  More grotesque by far at the age, nearing seventy, when the last chapter of our lives is unfolding, culminating, winding down, amid all the usual tragedies. 

They will blame their inability to reconcile conflict completely on you, and you will be the cause for all the terrible hurt, the rage and all the unforgiveness.  The worst thing of all, they will piously inform you and everyone else, is not to forgive someone who loves you.  And because you’re unforgiving, they will demand that nobody they influence or control forgives you either. Being united in punishing your inhumanly unforgiving nature is a rare instance of justice in an unjust world.  A group can really bond around a righteous cause like that.

The Aftermath (another thought)

The reflex to react with pain, to lash out, to righteously mete out punishment according to its due, is a feature among humans, and very common. The thing that matters most about this impulse to lash out is what happens next.  If you calm down, listen and speak softly, like mensches, like friends, this kind of human exchange usually pacifies everyone. If it doesn’t, if the conflict must last to the death and everybody must choose between good or evil, black and white, on pain of their own death, you may have to reevaluate the other parties in the conflict.

A word from our old friend physical pain

Emotional pain hurts like hell, unless you can isolate the cause and find some kind of peace.   Physical pain works the same way, but the immediate and inescapable physicality of it demands our full attention sometimes.

Emotional suffering can find a moment of relief in distraction and a good laugh makes your heart work and pumps out endorphins.  Pain in your body is a different animal, insistent and hard to distract yourself from for long. I am reminded of this every few minutes recently as I await tests to determine the source of bleeding (and inflammation, stiffness and pain) in my prosthetic knee joint, installed eight months ago, and see what the medical industry has in store for me next.

What the child of a narcissist never gets

If your parent cannot be wrong, ever, then you must be wrong whenever you feel they have hurt you, are being unfair or indifferent to you. It’s simple math, really. For a narcissist, admitting fault and expressing regret is as humiliatingly painful as conceding they are worthless and unworthy of love or respect. They live in a perilous black and white mine field of a world, zero-sum, win-lose, and see all conflict through that wary, limiting, reptilian lens.

The child never gets the chance to experience being treated fairly, since that could involve the parent, incapable of being wrong, feeling bad about something unfair, thoughtless or cruel that they did. The child never gets to be heard in any dispute, same reason. The child never learns from her parents that people can resolve disputes amicably, since all they will see in any dispute is a grim and threatening war face and the angry, unbending insistence characteristic of narcissists.

In another family the child might learn that everybody makes mistakes, and that mistakes should be acknowledged, forgiven and learned from. That an honest conversation can clear up a lot of misunderstanding and lead to real peace and growth. That feelings can be safely expressed. That one willful adult doesn’t always get the last word on everything. If you know that everyone makes mistakes, that talking things through can make everyone feel better, that sincere apology and forgiveness are real things, then you have optimism about life. You understand that change is sometimes necessary and growth is a real possibility.

If you grow up in the paranoid, adversarial world of someone who can never be wrong, all bets are off for hope and change, unless you do tremendously hard work to recover some optimism. If someone cannot be wrong they also can’t be introspective or vulnerable. A person like that has little hope for progress of any kind, only continued implacable domination of anyone they fancy weaker, or stronger, than they are.  

This video lays things out beautifully. The survivor of narcissism has a hard time grasping that basic things people not raised by narcissists take for granted, some kind of fairness, a bit of respect, the right to be listened to when troubled, are actually possible.

transcribed from the video:

I can tell you what normal is not. It is not normal to grow up hating yourself or wondering why you aren’t enough or for a child to believe that they are responsible for a parents feelings, or that a child who wants to just be seen and heard, and loved for who they are is being a needy brat.   It is not normal to be in a relationship where you walk on eggshells and feel crazy and feel that the only way to get your needs met is to give in on everything. 

It is not normal to hold back on saying something for fear of being shouted down or gaslighted.  It’s not normal to watch a parent being manipulated and devalued and broken down by your other parent. None of this is normal.  

Normal, if I were to speculate, is feeling safe, feeling that you are worth, at least, being listened to.   Normal is respect.  Normal is  empathy.  Normal is being able to say what you need and maybe the other person can’t or won’t meet it but they do not shut you down and tell you that you are selfish or greedy for wanting something basic. 

Normal is being able to have a normal disagreement, where everything is not  personalized and you are attacked for just not getting into line with the other person.  Normal is people getting along and collaborating and not just one person holding court.    But folks, normal, that’s all survivors of narcissistic relationships want and it is not grandiose to want normal.