If you find yourself in a fight with someone close to you, feel threatened and believe there is no way out, you will fight to the death, or flee forever. If you are in conflict with a loved one, and knowthat experience and adult insight offer you more tools to resolve conflict than you had as a child, there is hope of healing.
In the first instance, the fatalistic belief that nothing ever changes for the better will keep you at war. In the second, there is a real chance for peace, if the other side also believes in learning from past mistakes, accepting human foibles, acknowledging the importance of reciprocity, mutuality, adjusting better to the other person’s actual needs.
My father, for whom the pain involved in trying to make his life less painful, a life rooted in hellish abuse and deprivation, was unimaginably intense, always argued that people cannot change themselves in any fundamental way. Those who “work” in therapy, he said, are merely deluding themselves, real change on a deep level is not possible. You cannot change your inborn nature, he always insisted.
I argued against this hopeless proposition, pointing to the improvements people I’ve known have managed in their reactions to frustration, sorrow, guilt, bitterness, the need to blame others. I offered my own changes for the better, my improved control of my temper, for example. He always dismissed the so-called change as self-delusion, which he could always prove, for many years at least, by goading me until I finally lost my temper. That was his triumphant proof that nobody can really change for the better. See, you claimed you can control your temper, but I can make you lose it, you haven’t learned to control shit! Even when I eventually learned not to lose my temper, it was only an act I was performing, one he could easily demean as superficial, self-deluded performance art.
Relentless in his unshakable opinion, as anyone arguing for fatalism must be, my father always argued that people might succeed in changing some superficial aspect of their behavior, but their fundamental nature was as innate and unalterable as mortality itself. His position, I have to say now, is a supremely depressing, deterministic one.
It is also characteristic of someone who cannot be wrong, no matter what. My father was right for himself, as I realized recently. He could not change, the first step involved was crippling to him. The same goes for anyone stuck in the narcissistic person’s tragic trap – either seeing themselves as perfect and never wrong or abjectly, humiliatingly unworthy of love and self-respect.
For someone who lashes out in pain and believes experience plus insight can lead the way to changes that will result in less pain, change is a tangible goal. You can learn to control your angry reactions, for example, and with practice you can become better at it. This step forward can lead to another, and so on. We are all works in progress, if we’re willing to work with our limitations, talk things out and learn new things. Except for those who truly cannot change because acknowledging the need for change involves looking at things that are terrifying to them.
Someone who lashes out in pain and cannot be wrong must believe themself perfectly in the right whenever they are in pain. They are in pain simply because they are the victims of some fucking devil. That devil must be killed. There is nothing that can be done except to identify, isolate and kill the source of pain.
If your emotions are inflamed, in a conflict with the wounds of a traumatic past reopened, and you can change, you have a chance to learn to redeem a ruptured relationship. If your emotions are on fire, in a painful conflict, and you are certain that change is impossible, you are simply fucked up and beyond the reach of redemption. All that is left is retribution against the devil who has wounded you.
If you also cannot be wrong, you must convince everyone else in your life that the person you are in a conflict with is 100% in the wrong and irredeemable. If a person is a piece of shit, has done horrible things to hurt you, and people can’t change, as you know deep in your heart, that’s all she wrote, set and match!
From time to time I try to imagine the accusations against me that caused a group of friends of fifty years to unanimously agree that I was beyond redemption. How atrocious my crimes must have been! The anger could not have been more unyielding if I’d molested all their children, repeatedly, while brutally blackmailing them all into eternal, shameful silence, while I’d been poisoning everyone’s food and drink for decades while lying with every fetid breath I exhaled as I pretended to be funny and angrily denied I was the living incarnation of Adolf Hitler, with a field of corpses to prove it and very proud of myself for what a sly pretender I am.
For someone as evil as this, unless they apologize to everyone they’ve been raping, assaulting and trying to kill for years, admit their heinous crimes and despicable nature and beg for the mercy of the jury, there is not even the remotest possibility of forgiveness. Welcome behind the scenes of the greatest, deadliest shit show it has ever been my horror to participate in!
I also note how painful it must be to live in a world that is as hopelessly, painfully rotten at death as it was during the earliest painful memory. The belief that people cannot change is truly undefeatable in people unalterably deformed by crippling past pain.
When my father insisted that people can’t change, he was speaking with 100% conviction. He knew, as well as he knew anything, that someone like him, someone so deeply damaged that he could not be wrong, on pain of feeling utterly, contemptibly, self-loathingly humiliated and undeserving of love or respect, could not change. Being certain you cannot change will effectively prevent any effort to do so and keep you convinced, since if you can’t do something nobody else can, that people, all people, are incapable of making meaningful changes in their lives to have more peace and less war to the death.
As for somebody who makes a little positive progress toward a less painful life? KILL THEM!
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