Trauma and immature parents

I’ve got to keep writing the same idea until I get it into a gentle enough form that it might be heard and considered. My credulous former friends are just what they are, there is no reaching those who uncritically embrace hateful lies, angrily close their minds, or what’s left of their minds.

I’m trying to reach a young man who is living in hell, the identical hell I escaped decades ago only by the best of luck. He is living with parents who had no hesitation to fly into a rage at a hurt old friend, arguably their closest, and embark on a deliberate campaign of lies, to destroy my good name among our fellows, when I needed to talk through a conflict with them. This poor guy is their oldest son.

Trauma, observes Bessel van der Kolk, is when we are not seen or known. When a child is upset, and parents look away, wait for the bad mood to pass, will not yield in any way, there is your basic recipe for trauma.

No reason can explain why the kid is acting this way, no explanation or understanding is possible, the crying simply must stop. Parents act this way only if they suffered similar abandonment when they needed to be comforted as infants.

An inconsolably crying child presents a challenge to every kind of parent. Emotionally immature parents, who have been damaged by the same kind emotional distancing when they were crying children in need of comfort, feel embarrassed at their helplessness. It makes them look terrible in public, too, not being able to control their child. The upset child is now assaulting the immature parent’s image as a great parent. The situation instantly becomes about the parent’s feelings, not the child’s.

It can take you decades, if ever, to recognize a basic fact about your childhood. Your strong-willed parent, who can neither be wrong nor apologize, may turn out, when you add up years of evidence, to be a bully. Bullies are created by abuse that damages them to the point they lash out at others whenever they feel threatened.

A bully is, obviously, not a good parent, they are too hurt themselves to help anyone else in trouble. They will do terrible damage they can never acknowledge or take responsibility for.

The best you can hope for, if you do enough hard work and have enough help and luck to untangle complicated emotions, is a deathbed reconciliation with the bully, full of regrets as they are about to leave this world.

I had a deathbed reconciliation with my father, a raging, frightened bully. I felt it was a beautiful mutual gift at the time, a blessing, but his “I wish we could have had this kind of talk fifteen years ago, but I was too fucked up” is about the most poignant line I can imagine a dying father saying to his son. That I can’t cry about it to this day is one of those mysteries of being a male in our toxic society, but the line is no less tragic.

If your parent is still angry at their own mother or father, in adulthood, chances are they will not be able to give you the kind of nurturing they never experienced. They will demand obedience in all circumstances and blame you as defiant and irrationally angry if you show any hesitation or resentment.

Parents who need to be right will not tolerate that kind of behavior for a minute, it will enrage them. The child learns early to avoid this rage any way they can. In the end, expressing true feelings becomes futile.

The damage is done, congratulations, the bullying parent insists they are fully justified, and now your challenge begins. You will be second-guessing your true emotions for the rest of your life, trying to avoid conflict. You may be subject to episodes of mania, rage or depression. Strictly speaking, it’s not your damaged parents’ fault, but that’s cold comfort, I assure you.

What emotionally immature parents teach their children

I pose the following for the consideration of the brother of a young man who is suffering from an episode of depression. His father believes the condition is purely the bad luck of genetics, unrelated to any environmental factors (like competitive, judgmental parents who can never be wrong) and apparently beyond the reach of human intervention. This belief is preferred to understanding that a child judged by emotionally immature parents since birth, love conditioned on not making problems, will often grow up with certain morbid sensitivities.

Consider what your parents are teaching you and your suffering brother.

In every conflict, your parents are absolutely right, and blameless, no matter what actually took place.

The world is zero-sum, black and white, without nuance or the possibility of compromise.

Anyone who challenges our need to be right, defies our family. Defiance is a capital offense.

Defamation is permissible, if the stubbornly defiant party keeps insisting on “fairness” and “compromise.”

Being raised by immature assholes is a heavy burden on the soul. It will take years, with insight and luck, to begin to emerge from the endless layers of manure that have been heaped on you since before you had any inkling of what manure is. Immature parents have every opportunity, during the years you are a helpless infant, to do infinite harm to your brand new soul. As children, they may have had it even worse than what they are doing to you, but still.

Consider, my friend, if these lessons have anything to do with a good life or are only iron guidelines required by rigid people who can never be wrong.

Nice indictment

Technical problems (internet and phone service dead for a couple of days, thanks T-Mobile) prevented posting this the other day, but here you are.

The second federal indictment against Donald Trump contained many familiar elements: the continuing lies (which are not charged, so goodbye first amendment defenses) that were weaponized to fuel a conspiracy to deprive millions of voters of their right to vote and have that vote counted, as a hoard descended to violently take the Capitol, some intent on hanging Mike Pence, others calling for Pelosi, the now familiar horror of that day only happened because of lies the US does not contest Trump had every right to peddle. The lies are not the issue, the far-reaching conspiracy to use those lies to illegally cling to power is. There’s some good new stuff in the indictment. Here are a few:

With respect to the persistent false claim regarding State Farm Arena, on December 8, the Senior
Campaign Advisor wrote in an email, “When our research and campaign legal team can’t back up
any of the claims made by our Elite Strike Force Legal Team, you can see why we’re 0-32 on our  cases. I’ll obviously hustle to help on all fronts, but it’s tough to own any of this when it’s all just conspiracy shit beamed down from the mothership.”

And, the old chestnut, the perfect call to Georgia’s Brad Rafesnsberger:

The Defendant said that he needed to “find” 11,780 votes, and insinuated that the Georgia Secretary of State and his Counsel could be subject to criminal prosecution if they failed to find election fraud as he demanded, stating, “And you are going to find that they are-which is totally illegal- it’s, it’s, it’s more illegal for you than it is for them because you know what they did and you’re not reporting it. That’s a criminal, you know, that’s a criminal offense. And you know, you can’t let that happen. That’s a big risk to you and to [the Georgia Secretary of State’s Counsel], your lawyer.” 

Ouch

Co-conspirator 4 is apparently Jeffery Clarke, American Eichmann. 2 is Eastman, 1 is Rudy,

The Deputy White House Counsel reiterated
to Co-Conspirator 4 that there had not been outcome-determinative fraud in the election and that
if the Defendant remained in office nonetheless, there would be “riots in every major city in the
United States.” Conspirator 4 responded, “Well, [Deputy White House Counsel], that’s why
there’s an Insurrection Act.”

I was gratified to see one of my favorite lines from Trumpie’s pep talk at the Ellipse right before he sent his angry mob off to peacefully protest the steal of the election.

The Defendant also said that regular rules no longer applied, stating, “And fraud breaks up everything, doesn’t it? When you catch somebody in a. fraud, you’re allowed to go by very different rules.” 

Finally, after exhorting that ”we fight. We fight like hell. And if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore,” the Defendant directed the people in front of him to head to the Capitol, suggested he was going with them, and told them to give Members of Congress “the kind of pride and boldness that they need to take back our country.”

Then there’s this curious bit where the quote could only have come from one of the most spineless homophobes in government, the man with the fly on his head during the Vice Presidential debate with Kamala Harris:

On January 1, the Defendant called the Vice President and berated him because he had learned that the Vice President had opposed a lawsuit seeking a judicial decision that, at the certification, the Vice President had the authority to reject or return votes to the states under the Constitution. The Vice President responded that he thought there was no constitutional basis for such authority and that it was improper. In response, the Defendant told the Vice President, “You’re too honest.” Within hours of the conversation, the Defendant reminded his supporters to meet in Washington before the certification proceeding, tweeting, “The BIG Protest Rally in Washington, D.C., will take place at 11.00 A.M. on January 6th. Locational. details to follow. StopTheSteal!”

read the whole thing

Living in the Age of Narcissism

What do you call a prosperous society where it is perfect, even praiseworthy, for a highly successful winner to relieve himself in a gold toilet bowl costing hundreds of thousands of dollars while, miles away, newborn babies, born to losers, die at “third world” rates because of poverty? Not a trick question. Say it with me, USA! USA!!!

If an individual prioritizes his own luxury and limitless appetite for acquisition over the lives of people he deems worth far less than him, you’d call that asshole a narcissist. It would be the most polite thing you could call him, actually. What do you call a society that prioritizes the values of a handful of these supremely entitled, socially venerated, insatiably covetous assholes over everything else? Exceptional. Unless we are living in the Age of Narcissism. A pretty good case can be made for calling the age we live in the Age of Narcissism.

It wearies me to make that case at the moment, a case so obvious and in-your-face that it hardly needs to be made. I will get at it in the future, on another day like this, when all I can see, and smell, are the evils done by these toxically virtuous pieces of shit. Some days, literally everything you see, hear and smell confirms this horrific fact: fucking narcissists rule, and they always have.

Back to hell, devils!

Clear, objective analysis and patient exposition are very important to healing from wounds that were inflicted by others. Intellectually, you can come to understand the harm done to you, the mechanism, the hows, the whys and all that other stuff. The much harder part is the emotions you are left holding, like a bag of rotting flesh.

So to those pathetic, determined devils who have done such damage to my life, out of their own damage and their undigested, unslakable rage toward parents alive and dead, I say back to hell with you, you fucking devils.

Context is crucial

Without context, the most idiotic, lying claim can fly, since there is nothing to really measure it against. Every single legal proceeding against the insane former president is a hoax, a witch hunt, a political hit job, yea, illegal partisan election interference, motivated by irrational hatred of the greatest man ever to be president of the smoldering carnage of this once great nation.

With context, well, that kind of broad, moronic claim can be easily seen as the idiotic manipulation it is.

I love the context for the superseding indictment in the documents case that former FBI agent Pete Strozk provided in about a minute. The day after a draft subpoena is sent to Trumpie’s attorney the obstructive frenzy begins: attempts to hide requested documents, destroy servers, delete surveillance video of lackeys hiding documents, deceiving his own lawyers, causing one to sign a false statement about retained documents. All starting right before (and after) the subpoena for the surveillance video was served on the Orange Polyp.

How’s that for context (and consciousness of guilt), Trumpie? Well, done, Pete.