Tag Archives: mental-health

Terror of humiliation leads to violence

Some people who experience trauma as young children never escape the cycle of emotional violence and neglect they were raised in.   Parents who routinely neglect or humiliate a child do this because of their own inescapable pain.  Why wouldn’t a parent incapable of nurturing a young human being seek help?   It is humiliating to them to admit they are not perfect and all-knowing, and besides, our culture doesn’t offer this kind of help to “losers.”  The child, therefore, is the problem, demanding, weak, selfish, needy, emotionally draining, never happy, critical, hypochondriacal, crazy, ungrateful, unfair, vicious, etc.

Much easier for someone who can never be at fault to have a long list of their child’s critical defects, never mind that the child is three months old, or a year old, or three days old, for that matter. It is well known that some babies are born placid and “easy” while others are more agitated and “difficult”. It is the pure bad luck of a parent who can never be wrong to have the latter kind of baby and absolutely no fault of their’s if the child grows up to unfairly harbor ill will toward them.

I don’t have much sympathy for the authoritarian personality.  I have almost none.  It is a shame, terrible, regrettable, lamentable and to be mourned, seeing a parent like this with her child, but sympathy for the moral dilemma of the snarling, other-blaming autocratic parent?  None.

I’m sure most childless cat ladies and cat men, and many parents, feel the same way about domineering parents who angrily insist on blaming their children for the parents’ unresolved issues and inadequacies.

Imagine my horror, sharing a vacation house with a couple of old, dear friends who were seething at each other day after day.  Watching the manic discomfort of their oldest son when he came by, the mother’s clear inability to connect with this unconventional young man, the father’s amiable attempts to be a good guy, even though he was unable to protect the kid from even the worst abuse when his son was young, or ever. 

As their anger at each other simmered and escalated, and I later found out they often go days locked in a silent battle of the wills, I fell deeper and deeper into the quicksand of someone else’s unresolvable pain.  I had seen too much, too clearly, too horribly, humiliatingly.  In the end, if I didn’t stop insisting on my own right not to be abused, which I eventually was, I would have to be killed.  They made it crystal clear.  Every single time.  They would rage, storm out, insist the only problem was me, that I am unloving, unforgiving and disloyal.   I suppose witnessing their rage at each other made me all of those things.

So when the lynch mob of the rest of my old friends came for me, disorienting and painful as it was, I could only thank God for a neck made super strong and resilient by decades of working to restore my neuroplasticity, the ability of the emotions and intellect to roll with the fucking punches without getting destroyed.

I find it is helpful, when facing an unfair attack, to keep in mind that “all violence is an attempt to replace shame with self-esteem.”

Trauma for beginners

Trauma is the unbearable feeling of being powerless against a malevolent, deadly force intent on destroying you. It is the searing terror felt in a nightmare, the panicked vulnerability of not only being defenseless against a deadly enemy, but also finding yourself unprotected by anyone you’d expect to defend you. Trauma is an actual wound, of a different order from the things that annoy, frighten, hurt and threaten us because it is deadly, relentless and will certainly kill us.

A quick internet search adds this: trauma is a person’s experience of emotional distress resulting from an event that overwhelms the capacity to emotionally digest it.

Being traumatized regularly changes our reactions to the world, our health and even our DNA.

When you need understanding and a loved one suddenly shows you a face like this:

You are fucked. If you have experienced trauma, and a pattern of betrayal during moments when you were most vulnerable, you can smirk and shake your head at an old friend glaring silently with the implacable mask of an indomitable psychopath. You can opine to someone else about what an immature, enraged asshole the glarer is. You can shrug it off like an adult and go about your business.

It is only later, when you try to close your eyes and go to sleep that you find yourself unable to keep your eyelids closed. You are suddenly hyper-vigilant, disoriented, in a world unaccountably turned vicious and supremely threatening. The essence of trauma is that terrifying feeling of defenselessness, of betrayal by those who claim to love you.

There is a class of traumatized people who become reflexively brutal dominators of others. They only feel safe when they’re certain that they can control everyone around them, that there is no possible threat to them in any given room. They exert this social dominance using charm, guile, a politician’s toolkit, all sorts of devices, until they feel threatened. Then their only possible response is to attack and eliminate the source of the threat, and they do this by any means necessary. They will literally kill you, if it comes to that.

There are other traumatized people who, able to feel the heavy weight of betrayal without being crushed by it, maintain their empathy toward others. This type seeks reconciliation after a conflict with a loved one rather than demanding capitulation on pain of eternal, blind revenge.

I don’t know what decides which traumatized person emerges from trauma as the sadist/masochist or the injured nurturer. It may be that the latter group found themselves saved by someone who showed them real compassion when it mattered most while the destructive ones never found any relief when they were in the most extreme pain.

What I do know now is how essential it is to stay away from the extremely damaged type that lives in a dark, zero sum world where there is no possibility of redemption once hurt occurs. Those fuckers will kill you, if it comes to a choice between you and them. If they become dictator they will build death camps to put disloyal, betraying fuckers like you in. Count on it, their type has no other choice.

The need for validation vs. the need for good feedback

People with an insecure sense of self are outer-directed, they live their lives for the validation of the people around them. Since they felt belittled and neglected when they were too young to do anything but suffer, they take pains to look physically perfect, according to the fashion of the day, they seek praise, status, social position, awards from their peers. All these are part of a lifelong attempt to make themselves feel better, more valuable and worthier of love, than others. They live in a hierarchical world where some people are simply much more important than others, by virtue of working to earn their self-worth in an objectively quantifiable way.

They live in a win/lose competitive world where winners win and are admired by those around them for having the will and talent not to be losers. As far as I can see, that world is the destructive illusion of superficial idiots, but I have always been super-opinionated about things like the justness of rigid social hierarchies and those who conform to social systems without any real questions about their validity. I keep thinking of the billions of people this worldview consigns to inferior, permanent, inter-generational loser status simply as the way things are.

I have always felt a need for the useful feedback I almost never got as a child. What is different about my need for a response and the need for outer validation I’ve sketched above? In both cases we are looking for assurances about the good effect our words and actions have on others. Everyone likes a sincere compliment, it’s always gratifying to be spoken well of by others. In the case of validation-seeking, the thing sought is praise and admiration. That is different, to my mind, than seeking an intelligent critique of your work, sometimes your deeds.

A person writes to convey thoughts, ideas and feelings to others. Writing is an extension of the desire to have a good, mutual conversation, one of the great pleasures of being human, as far as I can see. There is really no better way to gauge how well a piece of writing achieves the goals you intend than by getting good notes from a reader. This feedback allows us to understand what is still unclear to others in our work, or objectionable, or feeble, or unconvincing, and to address ambiguity, sloppiness, or assuming the comprehensibility of complex things we have not sufficiently laid out the context for understanding. With those comments in mind we can fix those things and come closer to our aim. Comments we can mull over keep the conversation moving forward, which is integral to why we communicate in the first place. Silence by way of response is a real conversation stopper, to state the obvious.

Validation-seeking people tend to stay very busy, they are socially active, work hard, program their leisure time down to the minute, consult the clock for when it’s time to end the party and get eight hours of sleep to be up and at ’em full force the next morning. Their every waking effort goes toward earning the self-acceptance and self-admiration they can’t feel except as reflected back to them by others. Sitting quietly by themselves, unless they are exercising their abdominal muscles, burning calories or something useful like that, is unthinkably difficult for them. It is as if they literally can’t see themselves unless they are engaged with others who appreciate them.

Of course, I probably only feel this way because I’ve always spent most of my hours alone. One could make a decent argument that I like nothing better than the company of my own constantly rippling thoughts and ideas. I learned early to soothe myself this way when I felt ignored – learning to play music, drawing, writing, cooking. I am always happy to spend time with other people, or talk to them at length – and I need these contacts as much as anyone does, maybe more – but I also accept myself the way I am and have as much compassion for myself as I do toward anyone else I care about.

Am I a great guitar player or any kind of virtuoso? No, but I am the greatest guitar player I can be at the moment. It means a great deal to me to play every note as cleanly, purposefully and soulfully as I can, to learn new ways to play the same melody, new positions on the neck for chords and little tricks, to become a more fluent improviser. Most people don’t think of any of these things, like the many different ways to play the same note, which I think is a shame.

To those who focus almost entirely on what the outer world says about us, you are either a professional musician getting paid and recognized for your work or an amateur with a slightly obsessive hobby which is nice, but a bit vain, because what does it really say about a person if they waste hours a day playing Beatles tunes?

It would be marginally better to the validation-focused, perhaps, to play sophisticated, challenging jazz tunes, or the best of classical guitar, if they would even notice that difference in material. They’re often not even able to hear any of it very clearly because it is just – they don’t even know what the hell compels someone to do it. Beatles, jazz standards or classical — best, to me, is playing what you love best and can make sound the most beautiful, but, fuck, enough about me.

Chapter 72 Authenticity

We are living in an age when weak, needy, ruthless, vengeful, endlessly covetous men (and a few women) are seen as geniuses, visionaries and strongmen. Acquiring everything possible for themselves while promising horrific retribution for offenses real and imagined is seen as strength and cheered by admiring crowds. We are living, boys and girls, in an Age of Idiocy, more specifically, the Age of Narcissism. It appears to be dawning on us all slowly.

The most searched for word in 2022 was “gaslighting”. This form of psychological manipulation gets its name from a creepy old film, Gaslight, where the wealthy female protagonist is wooed and married by a man who convinces her she is insane, to cover his own criminal activities. He pretends to go out every evening and secretly searches for stolen treasure hidden in the attic of the mansion, under gas light. Because he’s using lights in the attic, the lights in the rest of the house dim. The husband convinces the wife she is going insane when she tells him about the lights, and for a time she believes him. Hence, gaslighting – lying to make you doubt the reality of your own perceptions, feeding you a diet of deliberate falsehoods to make you fear you’re going mad. Any wonder it was Word of the Year in 2022?

In 2023 the Word of the Year was “authenticity”. It means 1: not false or imitation; real, actual 2: true to one’s own personality, spirit or character 3: worthy of acceptance or belief as conforming to or based on fact, conforming to an original so as to reproduce essential features, made or done the same way as an original.

This is the essential quality a gaslighting narcissist forces his victims to abandon. They will tell you what is true, what is false, what you should believe, why you are wrong to believe otherwise, how you should act, look, feel. Your feelings and ideas are wrong, they will tell you authoritatively. They demand that others to be as inauthentic as they are.

It is impossible for a “perfect” person to be authentic, to act according to their true character. They never were allowed as children to develop a true character and be loved for it. Their only choices after that damaging deprivation are a grandiose veneer of perfection or utter, humiliating worthlessness. In order to foster a created, performative persona of strength and perfection, very fragile when held up against reality, it is necessary to keep all those around them in a state of inauthenticity. Everybody in their orbit must be true not to their own spirit and character, to what they need in order to feel comfortable, but to the narcissist’s need for unconditional admiration and obedience.

These kinds of sick fucks have always ruled others, it is easily observed turning the pages of any history book. The rule of the select few is always explained and justified by the mores of the time, slavery was for centuries the norm, for example, but over time the same privileges of a tiny, all-powerful minority are maintained the same way, using the leverage of great wealth, intimidation, fear and violence to hoard the wealth of the majoritarian masses.

Parents who can never be wrong teach their children that they’re wrong even when the kid is right. Narcissism is a zero sum game, meaning there is only winning and losing, controlling and being controlled, the image of perfection or terrifying annihilation. This black and white worldview afflicts people who have been crushed in their soul at a very tender age. The abuse and emotional neglect they suffered renders them unable to compromise or even to listen to anything that contradicts their brittle sense of their special wonderfulness. They are the furthest thing from authentic, since they rigidly cling to an unrealistic view of themselves as perfect, the only alternative to feeling hideously, unlovably flawed, none of it having anything to do with authenticity.

It is a terrible constant in human affairs, the outsized influence these inhuman bastards tend to play on the world stage. Scroll from window to window, you will see these very important pricks pontificating on every platform. They simply cannot shut up. The appetite for their brilliant opinions is seemingly endless. We are fascinated by men who acquire 100,000 times more than any wealthy person needs. Accumulating billions in wealth appears to be proof of their indomitable will to have everything, which many reckon the mark of someone to be admired, even idolized.

As for me, I’ll take someone who can look at herself and the world honestly, in all its color, nuance, light and shade, and speak authentically, with humility and openness, about the hellish odds we are all up against, just trying to be authentic, empathetic and offer each other shared things we all value here in this threatened miracle of a world.