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: I originally wrote this many months ago, maybe nine months or more, while I was still wrestling with an insoluble conflict that I have since recognized was insoluble. That particular day my mind and soul were smarting from the ongoing fucking they’d endured for many, many months.

I came to see that recognizing that the people I was in the conflict with were not capable of resolving conflict was the only exit from that conflict.

I kept intending to come back and rewrite this piece, edit it a bit, but I never did. I put it on auto publish for a remote date. That day turned out to be today. Anyway, here it is.

When I’m wrestling with something that upsets me, for example a long dispute over whether it is reasonable for me to feel upset — no matter how intolerable a situation may have become or how long it is extended — I have to be judicious in what I say to the few good friends I still have.  Sekhnet can understand a good deal of what I’m upset about, but she reaches a breaking point, as we all do, trying to think about a conflict so seemingly straightforward to resolve but mindfucking in its prolonged difficulty to put right.    

There are contradictions in human behavior that can drive us mad, people cannot process such difficult things, or even sit with feelings about them for very long without getting frustrated.  Frustration is a short step from anger, and that flares easily enough when confronted with a problem without a solution, or a problem whose only possible solution lies in remaining supernaturally patient, kind and understanding, no matter what the other parties to the conflict do to make that difficult. 

If your patience is rewarded with ongoing accusations of ill-will, it is very hard to remember that everyone is truly doing the best they can within their limitations.   It is not fair, after a certain point, to expect others to be of much help with things so personally painful and so long impossible to fix.   At such times, seeing I am placing an impossible burden on someone I love, I have to remind myself to shoulder the fucking thing myself, which I am still not good at doing.      

“I’m going up to sit down with my shrink,” I said to Sekh just now.  And here I am, sitting in front of this page.

In writing, thinking, rewriting, we can often see things more clearly than when senselessly arguing with people about views they need to dispute every detail of.  Shouldn’t sitting down to write be the end of it, write in my diary and learn what I can from the exercise?  Why post these sessions for anybody to see?  Aren’t these private thoughts about interpersonal pain that are nobody else’s business but mine and whoever it is I claim acted poorly toward me?   They are private thoughts about painful feelings, but, if unexpressed, these feelings will literally choke me to death. 

The reason I post them is to be aware of every word I write, to weigh my experience against counter-arguments, to write as though the whole world is watching, so to speak, causing me to choose my words with care.  I write to clarify, and simplify, things that are impossible to make clear in the snarl of understandable defensive rebuttals.

The only antidote to forced silence during a conflict is dialogue, and if speech is forbidden, or topics placed out of bounds, and a written attempt to begin reconciliation is ignored, the only way for me, personally, to avoid choking to death on that conundrum is to post my wrestling match with those concerns here, in generic form.   If my need to make myself clear, to understand something that has become maddening, is more important to me than making sure people who are keeping their distance from me would not be hurt to read these words, it’s a trade off I have to make, to preserve what’s left of my sanity.   A calculated risk I have to take sometimes because this exercise is essential to my ability to remain at all calm in the face of prolonged demands to understand others while the simple reciprocal good will I need is dismissed and I am blamed for all the bad feelings anyone has.

Few people read these posts anyway.  Names are not mentioned.   The likelihood of anyone I am in conflict with clicking on anything here is very small.  What they read may make them feel defensive sometimes (as I’m told the title of a previous post on friendship, I hope this doesn’t sound judgmental does — in fact, without the title it drew a snide comment), but we are already in a burning emotional cul de sac, a massive shit fire with no way out except through talk, which has been delayed for many months, for a variety of sometimes perfectly good sounding reasons.

Another reason to put these issues here is to set out thoughts that can hopefully be useful to others who may find themselves in a similar predicament.  It’s a relief to read something that makes you realize you are not alone in something mind-fuckingly hard you are going through.   Nothing that happens to any of us is unique to our lives, there are variations of things that cause us our specific pain all around.  It can be helpful to read somebody else’s best ideas about dealing with something you may have gone through, are going through.  We are all damaged, in different ways, all human, we all fall prey to various weaknesses that keep us from always acting the way we hope to act. 

There is no shame in failing to remain your best self at all times, and no harm, as long as you can acknowledge it when it‘s necessary, make amends and try to do better.  Denial and counter-attack don’t help much, to state it as nonjudgementally as I can.

Many people have been raised by parents who were immature, unable to rise above childish reactions to their frustrations.  Only a lucky few have been raised by gentle, always kind and thoughtful parents who generally know what to do when their child is upset, or needs something from them they feel challenged to provide.  Such parents knew how to do this because they were lucky enough to be raised by such parents, or other family members or supportive adults or they had great therapeutic insights after a ton of hard work.   

Most children have to accommodate themselves to whatever their parents’ weaknesses are, accept being unfairly blamed, hit, snarled at, cursed, faulted for things that were only in small part their fault, expected to accept a story about them that makes little or no sense and take the adult’s shady version as the final word. 

Life itself is a sometimes shady story that seems to make little or no sense at times.   We puny earthlings are sometimes forced to do things we can’t really defend, our emotions get the best of our better impulses, our temper flares and afterwards we feel forced to somehow justify things we know we shouldn’t have done.   It is hard to admit you hurt somebody you love, hard to live with the guilt of being reminded you allowed a bad impulse to lash out, so we create scenarios in which we are actually the victim of the person who hurtfully insists we hurt them.   Many people simply hunker down behind their walls, wait for the hurt party to finally realize they are never, ever going to be fucking heard, clam up, and hope that once enough time passes in silence, everything will somehow be OK with that wounded loved one. Sounds like a reasonably insightful plan of action, no?

The only solution, sometimes, is striving to remain the calm adult in a room full of hurt children, suffering over emotional pain they have never been able to get any kind of useful handle on.  Try that one sometime, hardest fucking thing I’ve ever tried to do.

Thanks for being there for me, Doc. I can see our time is up. The check’s in the mail, and this time I’m not lying.

As much as we need connection to others, attachment, to live full, healthy lives, we also need to be authentic — to act in accordance with our deepest needs and beliefs. If you can’t be honest with people you are attached to, you are in a vise that, eventually, will squeeze the life out of you.

So if you need to express something that may affect your attachment to people close to you, and you’re aware that the expression will place pressure on the relationship, you might as well just express the full thing as clearly as you can. If you try to hedge, be polite, respect the feelings of people who can’t accept you as you actually are, well, you’re probably already being sucked toward that treacherous waterfall anyway.

If you say gently that you’re having a hard time living with certain untruths that have been told, you are already gently assenting to your own punishment which is as sure to follow as night follows day. If someone is lying to you and expecting you to silently agree that the lie is necessary and proper, there’s not much point being attached to someone like that.

So whether you gently object, or make your objection as plainly and unmistakably as you can, the effect will be the same. Someone who knowingly lies will not tolerate a word like “untruth”. Anodyne expressions like “debatable”, “questionable” or “not necessarily true” will strike them as forcefully as the proper word, adorned or unadorned, a fucking lie.

In the end, no matter what you do, you cannot convince someone who has already decided that you are dead that there is really no reason to kill your memory too. There is every reason to! You are coming in after the conversation is finished, as you yourself are also finished. Nothing infuriates righteous killers more than when the accursèd dead insist on fucking speaking.

I like it better as “you” because then this description of close friendship pertains to everybody. I was told I’d used the wrong word with “you,” that I should have used “I” , Lets see how that actually changes it, not much, really, though it does work as a chilling epitaph for that particular friendship:

I deserve friends who make me laugh, feel loved, comfort me when I need comforting, accept my limitations and quickly work out any problems with me when they see I am unhappy.

I deserve friends who always give me the benefit of the doubt, who accept when they’ve hurt me and don’t let me sit in pain.

I deserve friends who return my 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.