Imagine the horror

A couple you always thought of as your closest friends, a friendship you never questioned, are acting oddly distant to each other during a vacation in a beautiful rented house. After a few days, tensions are turned on you and one of them rages at you, glaring with a laser beam of hostility for long minutes, in a display of anger you haven’t seen since your father was alive. You endure a sleepless night after a door is angrily closed.

In the morning your friend drags his wife out to apologize to you. She is humiliated, apologizes with enough caveats to render the apology meaningless. While she is apologizing your friend coldly observes that you catalogue and remember every offense everybody’s ever committed against you, in spite of your claim to the contrary.

You spend an entire year afterwards, agonizing about why it is so hard to make peace with these two suddenly implacable friends. They are intent on never talking about anything, acting like everything is fine. Everything would be fine, they insist, if you’d only shut up. In the end, after months of silence and ongoing displays of indignation and anger, one of them suggests mediation.

Mediation, of course, can only work when both parties are interested in compromising. Here there can be no compromise: the only solution is that you are a hurt child who cannot accept that people who love you sometimes act in an abusive way. They are planning on the professional, impartial mediator being able to point out to you that you are acting like a hurt child and that you must act like an adult.

The proof of this is that they will agree to nothing prior to mediation. You point out that the mediator can only work with the facts we provide, the things we agree about, the things we disagree about. The mediator must know our respective positions. Although you are clearly in a terrible conflict, you are hard pressed to identify positions beyond “I’m hurt” “No you’re not!”. Instead of agreeing to a set of facts, your friends fight you like devils until you are literally banging your head against the wall.

It becomes clear that mediation will not help. You tell them so. They respond with another month of silence. One rainy Friday afternoon you get a phone call from your one time close friend telling you that his therapist told him he must tell you that he is not willing to be responsible for fixing things. He wants to be friends, he says, but he’s not going to take responsibility for fixing a broken friendship. After a moment of honesty on your part he tells you he’s going to hang up the phone now.

Now comes the horror: everybody you know in common accepts the story that you are an unreasonable, childish, unforgiving sadist with a pathological need to upset people by acting like an immature, self-righteous asshole. Not only did you refuse to accept numerous apologies, not only did you keep venting the same babyish anger over and over, you rejected a good faith offer for mediation and, in the end, when your friend gave one last effort to make you understand how much you were loved, in spite of being such a difficult person, you used the f-word and the c-word. What kind of fucking cunt does that make you, pal?

Can you spot any media bias?

According to this local news report, Lauren Boebert “refuted” the scurrilous claims, made by a liberal super PAC, that she had two abortions and had worked as an escort.

She didn’t sue these liberal haters for defamation, she “refuted” their lies by calling them liars. Now they’re suing her for defamation! Fucking cucktards! We’ll see who wins in court! USA! USA!!!

That feeling in your gut is often right

It can be right or wrong, but that discomfort in your body is an invitation to stop, and think about what the discomfort is trying to tell you and whether it’s right or wrong.

A pause will prevent you from lashing out, in obedience to the upset feeling in your insides. It may also give you time to understand that your body is telling you something directly that your mind can’t see yet.

I had two telephone chats with a therapist I found on the internet. I’d contacted him telling him I’d undergone narcissistic abuse recently, that an entire group of old friends was buying into harmful lies told to isolate me, and that I need a professional to exchange insights with as I continue to understand and heal, rather than bouncing things off poor Sekhnet, who has trouble hearing any more about this long-running painful situation.

I don’t need someone to cry to, or hold my hand, or tell me I’m absolutely right. I need someone to bounce insights off and talk with. I need an objective sounding board, the thing I described in my initial request for help.

After session one the therapist announced his clinical findings, presumably speaking out loud as he made his notes. “Beset by negative emotions,” and “with a history of ostracism”. I corrected him on the second point, at 66 I experienced ostracism for the first time in my life.

Toward the end of the second session, when I revealed a particularly poignant detail of a talk the last night of my father’s life, he asked me if I ever cried about that. I did not. He had come to the conclusion (coincidentally shared by the group that cast me out) that my primary way of reacting is as a hurt child, rather than an integrated adult. Suddenly he got excited and gave me homework.

Clinical finding number two: You are still reacting as a hurt child and you need to conduct an imaginary conversation with your abusive father, confront him with the pain he’d caused and vent anger at him, anger so red hot, white hot, so unbearably powerful, that you’d be exhausted by the end of venting. So, based on two hours of talk, he had pinpointed my immediate problem as being locked in unresolved childhood pain and unable to express anger at someone who had abused me when I was growing up.

I began the writing assignment, which is easy enough for me, I do this every single day. After a few pages I realized it was worth considering what my gut was trying to tell me. This motherfucker is not listening very well, in his rush to come to a therapeutic diagnosis I did not ask him for. I could tell him this gently, I could tell it to him in a way that demonstrates I have no hesitation to express anger when it is warranted. For example, by gratuitously sprinkling “fuck” into my fucking comments. At the same time, I’d point out, in fairness to him, that what I’d asked him for was difficult and would require great insight and high emotional intelligence. Is it really fair to be angry at someone who thought he was doing the right thing, the helfpful thing, who didn’t know any better? You’re doing the best you can, man, it’s just not what I asked for or what I need. You know what I’m sayin’?

When you pay someone to listen and react intelligently, and they insist on quickly diagnosing and problem solving, your gut might not be wrong to tell you “fuck this guy, old friend. He’s not able to do what you need him to do for you.”

The law seems to require Aileen Cannon to fuck off

The Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals found that Judge for life Aileen Cannon had no jurisdiction to interfere on behalf of Donald Trump in Trump v. United States. Trump v. USA was the legally incoherent lawsuit Trump brought to stop the Department of Justice from conducting their criminal investigation of his illegal retention of presidential records and his obstruction of the investigation. Trump has since been indicted for those crimes. Cannon is the judge assigned to make all rulings in the case the United States v. Donald Trump, in which her benefactor stands accused of unlawful retention of government documents and obstruction of justice..

The unanimous Eleventh Circuit panel ruling overturned all of Cannon’s baseless partisan decisions in Trump v. U.S. They reprimanded her for abusing her discretion, first in not dismissing the case, and then by making findings with no basis in law (and with no jurisdiction to rule on any of it in the first place) and ordered her to dismiss the case she should never have stuck her loyal partisan nose into.

If that does not amount to reasonable questions about her ability to judge the case impartially, the case she already made rulings to delay and suppress evidence in, nothing does.

As to her legal credentials for serving as judge in this historic case, well… Being nominated for that lifetime appointment used to include relevant experience and a proven track record, outside of fidelity to Federalist Society doctrine. Aileen Cannon has had virtually no relevant legal experience and no track record to speak of. The perfect candidate for Trumpie!