Revoco

I´m coming to the conclusion that narcissism has essentially become worthless as a concept and that it should be abolished as a psychiatric term. I´m not saying this to deny the interpersonal misbehavior and the hard-to-trace abuse going on in some families, workplaces and relationships. I just think “narcissism” is a fairly meaningless explanation for those phenomena. To begin with, it is an awfully broad term. Psychiatrists and psychotherapists can´t even agree whether everyone possesses it to a certain degree or not. That´s not a question that can be decided based on empirical testing. It is a question of how you define narcissism, and if there is still any dissent regarding the frequency of narcissism in people, then it´s because there is no clear, agreed-upon definition. Without such a definition, I don´t see why patients should be freaked out by having such a stigmatizing word attached to their self-concepts.

Then, narcissism can mean one thing and it´s exact opposite. Narcissism implies arrogance, selfishness and thinking highly of oneself. It is also claimed, however, that deep down narcissists are even more insecure than everyone else, that they have no self-esteem, and, ironically, people-pleasing is also described as narcissistic behavior. In some accounts I don´t even see the difference between narcissistic and anxious-avoidant PD. If you want to, you can cast every kind of behavior as being narcissistic in nature. The reason why anyone even accepts this twisting of words and the nullification of their meaning is that we are already used to it from one hundred years of psychoanalysis. Apparently, in the murky puddle called “the unconscious”, at its core everything is the same. I just wonder why we chose to call it “narcissism” then.

Another thing I often read is that mentally, narcissists are six years old. This reveals a strange hostility towards children, and it is even stranger when such a hostility comes from people who claim to have been narcissistically abused as children. This hostility, too, however, is far from new. The idea that children are selfish, sulky, aggressive and narcissistic, though, might have given rise to exactly the kind of cruel child-rearing methods so many children of “narcissistic” parents shudder to remember.

On one website I read even more bizarre claims, such as: “Narcissists frequently look surprisingly young, maybe because they don´t mature emotionally.” Or: “Narcissists have strange eating habits, they have an eating disorder called pica!” That disorder indeed can be found in the ICD-10, but I just wonder where the hell such claims are coming from. To me, it sounds like this is merely a mechanism of establishing “narcissists” as a specific group of people among which individual differences don´t matter since they are erased by the overwhelming common traits.

And that is a great mistake. Due to the diversity of conditions, symptoms, feelings, behaviors and character traits that can gain a person the narcissism label, a great variety of people will be labeled as narcissists. And to imagine that all these people might somehow associate with themselves and their own biographies the stories of narcissistic abuse circulating on the Internet…! So that´s what I did to everyone who ever loved me? Without realizing it, maybe even thinking I was in the right?

Here is another strange thing: On the one hand, apparently you can consistently wrong and abuse people without even realizing it. On the other hand, though, you are fully responsible for it and you had evil intentions all along. How does this work? It´s a complete reversal of logic. Again, that´s the theory of the unconscious. A theory which, for all I know now, is wrong.

It makes me sad that I spent so much time trying to pin this concept to my family. Whatever their vices, I was looking for a blanket explanation that made them the villains and absolved me from all the guilt I felt. At the same time, I myself was already struggling with having had this concept attached to my own self-image. It is part of why I needed someone else to be the villain so badly in the first place.

It also makes me a tad angry how long I´ve struggled with this concept. How long I tried to clear my own name. There should have been no need for that. When reading through my blog now I realize just how hypocritical I often was. All my complaints about other people wrapped in “buts”. “Of course I know that…, but…” Never owning my true opinion, always exacerbating my own insecurities, always saying “I feel this, but of course I know the truth is different from that”. Then, last autumn, I was desperate enough about my occupational situation to try to write down what I wanted. I was criticized for it, and there again was that word: “narcissistic”. More than anything else, I felt I was being treated unfairly, and for the first time in years I actually stood up for myself. Without but or apology. It proved to be a turning point.

Shortly afterwards, I managed to come out to myself as who I was without ever leaving my own side. I held that person I was by the hand and stood by her. It is something I never consistently managed to do throughout my blog before. Allowing myself to take my own side had always depended on a certain version of events which made sure that whatever I was, I could definitely not be found guilty of any of the traits associated with narcissism. Those version of events was not in all cases false, but it was incomplete and it could only gain me an incomplete sense of security.

One would believe that taking your own side is easy. In fact, it isn´t. As long as you don´t take your own side, people will forgive you a lot of things on the premise that you judge yourself the way they do. Athena even made that premise explicit. Her respect for me depended on me judging myself and trying to improve. At the same time she spoke of unconditional love. It might not have been a lie, but it is humiliating to be loved without being respected.

Taking your own side can be very similar to siding with a poor football team being beaten five-nil. You force yourself to stand by someone or something you want to turn away from because it embarrasses you. Even something you don´t know how to justify. About a year ago, one of our main players was involved in a scandal that abhorred us all, but the loyalty our club is famous for forbade us to openly distance ourselves from him. That´s taking your own side. It is just that hard. The fact that it is so hard, however, is also a small moral comfort. It is a new kind of courage which can help you overcome some pits of demoralization.

That criticism from a fellow blogger showed me how much my unofficial identity as a child of narcissistic parents limited me. It would in no way allow me to be who I really was or to pursue my dreams. Also, though, it was a reminder how silly I really think the condemnation of what is colloquially called narcissism is. I don´t see the point of condemning peoples´yearnings for fame or attention. I don´t see how such condemnations could ever be anything other than hypocritical and self-righteous. As long as people aren´t harming anyone, and the mere wish to be famous doesn´t, why can´t you just live and let live? Why is  it impossible to just once spare people shame and ridicule?

This touched right upon my core values. Live and let live, don´t judge what does no harm. And those are values I constantly find violated by the way the term narcissism and also other psychiatric diagnoses are flung around both by experts and laymen. It is something that has kept on sickening me even throughout those confusion-ridden last ten years, and I´m grateful for that. It shows I was never gone completely.

It makes me uncomfortable to see the word “narcissism” in so many search requests that lead people to my blog. It comes second only after “maladaptive daydreaming”. I wonder what I wrote back then, what people who come to my blog read, it makes me uneasy that they could think I´m still behind statements and ideas I no longer support. I´d like to put a disclaimer over all entries before last November, but it seems pointless. They were part of the road that led here, and I don´t feel confident to judge if there might have been a shortcut to enlightenment. Actually, I have better things to do with my life, and I consider that good news. I just hope that people out there don´t stumble into the same trap I was caught in, and I wish they didn´t get this image of my family as a bunch of villains. It is hard to decide whether I should delete some posts or not. The thought that I could erase parts of what I did seems undeservedly kind to me. It doesn´t seem as honest as I´d like to be. I don´t want people to have a better opinion of me than I deserve. To think of me as more wise and balanced than I am. Besides, where would I start? What would remain of this blog, and how much sense would it still make? I don´t know. Maybe the greatest disclaimer always lay in the name, anyways.

Possible truths.

No definite judgements.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The suppressed truth

I had an emotional implosion last night, that is to say, I sat there feeling so miserable I wanted to punch myself, but I kept it all inside. I had been reading all day in that psychotherapy forum about people saying that they had to learn to accept love, and how emotionally challenging their therapies were, and how much they loved their therapists and at some point I realized that this tense, biting feeling inside of me was neediness, and the anger I felt at the people whose posts I read was at least partially envy.

What came before that realization, though, was the realization that I don´t believing in learning to accept love. If something that is called love doesn´t feel like love, then something about it hurts you, and you don´t have to learn to accept something from others that hurts. During my time with Athena I thought that if only I could accept that she loved me unconditionally, her vivisection of my personality wouldn´t hurt any more. When my father took rough-and-tumble too far I thought that if only I could completely surrender it would start to feel good. Both is psychologically plausible, but seeing this kind of acceptance or surrender as a worthwhile aim legitimizes treating me in a hurtful or even violent way.

There was one time when I experienced the kind of being in love I would have expected to happen in therapy. That was when I had a crush on my professor. And in this relationship, I had to learn to accept doodley-squat. I unequivocally felt that he liked me and that I was safe with him. And I had many daydreams about him doing hurtful things to me which wouldn´t have hurt all too much. In any healthy relationship, the trust and love should come before administering any kind of pain, and not after the fact as an attempt to alleviate the hurting.

If I hadn´t remembered those feelings and if I hadn´t had that realization, I might not have been able to acknowledge my envy. Or maybe not so much my envy as my own neediness. I need that kind of relationship, too, were I can be in the lower position, where I´m the one who´s taken care of, not the one who takes care. I need someone I can look up to for answers, guidance; someone who wants to give something to me. I´m very grateful for the normal relationships I have, where we are on the same level. But although we´re technically on the same level, I feel strongly responsible for those peoples´ feelings and that´s exhausting. I like taking care of others, but sometimes I just need someone to take care of me.

Here´s where accepting love comes into play. The ordinary explanation is that I look at others´ needs too much, and since I wouldn´t do it if it didn´t give me something I have to be an absolute control freak. My inability to voice needs of my own and get them met is just a symptom of me trying to be above everyone else. Actually, I´m not caring, I´m arrogant. The only way to make me feel better is to bring me down a couple of notches so I can accept that others have something to give, too.

What I realized yesterday is that the real explanation is far sadder. Sometimes people simply aren´t interested in meeting my needs. Sometimes people enjoy taking (which is a gift to anyone who loves to give), but don´t enjoy giving at all. Sometimes when I tell them what´s going on in my head and what bugs me they look at me in confusion and I know that they´ll resent me now for making them feel like my thoughts are too difficult for them to comprehend. Sometimes they´ll blindly look up to me and admire me for what I do, such as writing stories, and then I´m the one who has to give again: In order to get something out of the relationship (and admiration can cover up the wound of not being understood and cared for at least for a while) I have to deliver. More stories, more good ideas, until the other person´s admiration runs dry. Sometimes I´ll stay in the background and just let people talk and assume that I have nothing interesting to say anyway because I rarely get positive feedback for my remarks, or any feedback at all. Sometimes I´m just ignored. I´m just the invisible, shy friend. Sometimes people tell me what a stupid look I have on my face if I do as much as raise my eyebrows. Often people flat out tell me that what I say is too complicated for them if I just about open my mouth. Go talk to someone else about that, not me, I´m too stupid and that´s okay, intelligence is overrated. Is it really such a surprise that I stick to listening to others talking about their interests, about their worries, about their conflicts?

I feel like my truth, my own subjective experience is in such conflict with my environment that I have to keep it under wrap, that I cannot even access it myself. It´s like dynamite. If I assume that everything I wrote in the paragraph above is true, then how can I still love anybody? It does make me angry to be treated like this, but I feel like I have to take the blame for it if I want to be able to have satisfying relationships. Which sounds lunatic if I write it down like this. How is a relationship satisfying when you constantly have to take the blame for every blow you are dealt?

The therapeutic answer I hear in my head now is, of course: “But it wouldn´t hurt so much anymore if you could learn to put less emphasis on the intellectual!” But it´s not me who puts all that emphasis on the intellectual! I just say things! It´s not like I want to talk about astrophysics at breakfast, cell biology over lunch and Kafka at dinner! All I want is not to have to censor myself all the time without everybody left and right taking offense at how “complicated” I am!

I´m scared of these truths because they might lead right to abandonment, including terrible accusations about how selfish, arrogant and uncaring I am. Still, putting the truth out there gives me a little bit of self-confidence. Nothing can replace the sense of security that comes from allowing yourself  your own perspective.

But back to the original topic. Accepting love. For me, the idea of learning to accept love was always an exercise in lowering my own self-worth. That sounds crazy, sure, but it makes sense if you look at my history of social conflict. I typically took the role of the giver and at times let people downright exploit me because that was the only way I could relate to them at all. It takes a lot for me to feel exploited, anyway. Sometimes other people told me I was being exploited while I just thought: Well, but I can take it, it doesn´t really matter to me, I don´t feel any loss. I gave to myself, too, what I needed by creating in daydreams the kinds of givers I longed for. Often I completely forgot they weren´t real. By doing so I learned what to give to others, and giving something to them made me feel comforted, too. I´m not per se a martyr, I like to give.

And yet there is a sense of deficit, a yearning for attention, yearning to be seen, yearning to be important enough for someone to selflessly take an interest in shaping me, developing me, challenging me, pushing me to the top of what I can achieve instead of leaving me alone to do just about enough to leave a positive impression on my teachers and otherwise try to save friends who have all kinds of dramatic problems which are all more important than me and my life. This reaches a point where watching movies makes me miserable because I can never identify with being the main character, the one whose struggles are important and who gets all the help. I´m always just the helpful friend who gets on so well that her own life isn´t interesting. Nobody ever feels the need to mentor me.

Then along comes Athena. She goes all the way from wide-eyed admiration to scornful condemnation. She admires me for my self-critical introspection, she gets terrified and in turn angry whenever I´m anything other than self-critical, whenever I dare lash out and be angry and accuse the world of being a pile of shit. She needs me to be a certain kind of person and if I´m anything else I´m on the same level as the people she sees as the villains in her life and our friendship cannot be the same anymore. She´d just be playing a role, she´d be dutifully giving, but she wouldn´t see me as her intellectual and moral equal anymore. Her conflict isn´t so different from mine, it just takes an interesting new edge when she starts to compete with me, and, yes, essentially she started it although she blamed it on me. It was her who thought she suddenly had to learn all the time, study all the time, be the top of her class in order to prove herself. And, yes, that did affect me and I started to learn and study, too, in order to keep up with her. It was my very own realm I was defending, so far I had been the intellectual one, and now she simultaneously wanted to be in my place and wanted me as a mentor.  So at the same time she was competing with me and wanted me as someone to look up to, someone to mentor her. She wanted me to be someone to look up to and yet she forbade me to compete with her, but how would I have kept up with her, then? What happened on an intellectual level also happened on a moral level: She wanted me to make her a better person by criticizing her and pointing out her character flaws, yet at the same time she was so mercilessly dissecting everything I said, did and felt that I didn´t feel competent any more to make any judgments on others. I was longing for kinder standards, less inquisition, but that was impossible to admit, as it was asking for lies, hypocrisy, make-believe. It was betraying our friendship, admitting failure, weakness, it warranted nothing but disdain. I saw her as hopelessly superior, as a punishing force than went down on me with increasing frequency while I was blindly stumbling around trying to get it right. My failure to criticize her, however, was interpreted by her as an attempt to hinder her development so she didn´t rise any higher above me. 

When I looked at the story of Athena and me just a second ago, I thought that all this terror would never have happened if I wasn´t such a competitive person, and I despaired thinking it. Now I suddenly realize that the opposite is true: It wouldn´t have happened if I was a properly competitive person.* Right at the beginning of this studying race, when Athena and I had had the first conflict about me competing with her, my mother said to me: “Well, just keep on studying and don´t talk to her about it!” At the time I thought this advice was typical of her: Antisocial, secretive, hypocritical. She gave me that advice at a time when I thought I came from a very bad family (for the record: other than when I started this blog, at the time being I don´t bother myself with trying to access how good or bad my family is). Now I think it´s the only reasonable thing to do in such a situation if you don´t want to leave straight away. I live in a country whose constitution grants me a right to self-growth. Nobody can reasonably demand that I stifle my own development in order to serve theirs, other than, possibly, my own nonexistent children. Also, I have a right to privacy and to self-protection. A healthily competitive person would have followed my mother´s advice. I, however, would have felt guilty, and so I more or less had to negotiate with Athena how much and what I was allowed to learn.** We had a similar discussion at a later point when it came to weight loss. The premise was always the same: If I was going to compete with her, I was ruining our friendship. The question was, thus: What is more important to me, my ego or our friendship?

What I see today is that no friend should force another friend to make such a decision. No friendship should rely on one person arresting her own development. That is truly antisocial. Competition is a fact of life, and somehow, inexplicably, love manages to exist alongside it in a great many cases.  Maybe we were both too insecure and competitive to have the ultimate, special, radically honest friendship we wanted. She wanted. A certain distance would have been needed, and there would have been some things we couldn´t have talked about. I believe we still could have had fun, felt close to each other, even felt deep affection for one another. There were such moments before the inquisition started, and even afterwards, when for some precious moments we disentangled ourselves from one another, we could just be comfortable alongside each other. I believe feelings of friendship can be honest even if there are things which aren´t talked about. Right now that is so self-evident to me I don´t know how I could ever not know it. Sometimes trusts shows in how much people dare tell each other, sometimes trusts shows in how much they don´t need to know. We tried to dare tell each other more than we should have known, up to the point that I felt like I had to report to her. And yet this is just what ruined all remaining feelings of trust for each other. Even though we appeared to know each other more intimately, we weren´t truly more intimate, and where feelings of intimacy arose in me, they were the result of emotional violence, a false dawn, an internal flowers phase where I anxiously hoped that from now on I´d never do anything wrong anymore, never doubt anymore, that my ego was finally gone. This is what I connect with “learning to accept love”.

Then I enter therapy. I perceive the comments I get from my therapist as shallow and meaningless, if not plain wrong. I´m told in not too tactful words that I´m demanding and arrogant and that I don´t value other people. He´s wrong, but he´s only partially at fault for it. He doesn´t know me outside his office. Outside his office, I´m a giver. He wouldn´t accept that; I´m pretty sure he´d stick to the “arrogant control-freak” explanation. Still, he certainly didn´t get to know the most pleasant side of me because I entered therapy thinking that this was a situation where I was allowed to take, to demand. I think I made it very hard for him to want to give something.

One reason I can now divine is that in ordinary life, I don´t assume people can give me this strange, mysterious thing I´m looking for. Therefore, I don´t really blame them if they don´t, or if I get mad or frustrated, I don´t let it show. I assumed that a therapist, however, can give this to me. I feel bound to him, anxious, because he seems to have so much power, and then when I realize he cannot give this to me at all I respond with scorn. At the same time there´s this fear he´s just withholding it to torment or punish me, and so I cannot resolve the bound, I stick around, angry, looking for proof that he really doesn´t have anything to give.

I still think I was right – he didn´t have what I was looking for, his comments were shallow, he had nothing to give to me. I´d deal with it differently now, though. I´d act the way I acted towards Mrs. I don´t remember it if was D or B. I wouldn´t demand anymore that he tells me all his thoughts and plans, but I wouldn´t reveal everything to him and leave everything open to his judgment, either. I´d either leave straight away if it becomes clear that he is intolerant towards BDSM folks, or I wouldn´t even put him to the test and keep aspect of me secret from him. I´d keep my distance and treat him with the same politeness with which I´d treat an ordinary doctor, but I wouldn´t adopt his view on me, either. I wouldn´t even ask for his judgment, and I´d never see a therapist again without a clear-cut aim and a reasonable expectation that he can help me with it.

So – where is my envy coming from? It would seem that I learned a lot and if the forum users´ experiences in any way resemble my experiences with too close relationships and “learning to accept love”, then there is no reason to envy them. Indeed sometimes I´m just relieved I´m out there. And yet it makes me angry to see how they are validated by other users for what they write. I feel like they might actually experience something which I couldn´t experience. Maybe I´m too difficult, maybe I´m too skeptical, too much of a threat even to my therapists.

Then I remember my professor. He was so blatantly a giver, at least in his role as professor, and he was so selfless in the way he supported me, and for some reason I had no trouble accepting this at all. My only worry was that I would disappoint him and that he would find I´m not worth the trouble. I told him so, and his reply was simple: “You need to be content with what you write, not me!” I could cry just thinking about it. He was the first person I could look up to without feeling like I had to crouch down first. He was so sure of himself that he didn´t feel threatened by me. I could ask him any obscure, complicated question and he never reacted defensively, he just sometimes gently stopped me from getting caught up in a labyrinth. I feel like I´ve ruined everything for me by not sending him my revisions of that essay, I beat myself up over it, but I know exactly why I didn´t do it: 1) I fear I´ll get on his nerves, be excessively demanding. 2) I don´t want to have to deliver something in order to be cared about. I don´t want him to be my intellectual mentor, I want him to be my mentor in life, but again, not completely, not as some kind of authority figure. I want it to be a game we play, like in D/s, something we can stop anytime. And yet that is something I will never get from him. When I read about peoples´ therapies I sometimes fear that this is exactly what they get from their therapists, and the idea that they might have this kind of sadomasochistic relationship I´m thinking of makes me jealous. It also makes me laugh, though, to think how they´d react if I labeled it as such. That´s some comfort after all.

*Then again, I doubt I could have evaded it other than by ending the relationship. I´d have had to pretend I didn´t know the things I knew, and her believing I was getting the grades I got without learning as much as I did would just have fueled her fear of inferiority and she would have studied even more. If I had ever slipped up and revealed I knew something about the subejcts she was studying….well, I can almost hear the deadly coldness in her voice asking me: “How do you know that?” It probably wouldn´t have ended worse, but it would have ended just the same way.

**A typical answer was that she didn´t forbid me to learn anything, she just wanted that I only learned stuff because I was genuinely interested in it, not because I wanted to compete with her. What I was interested in, though, was knowing stuff, not any specific kind of knowledge. The only kind of knowledge I´m genuinely uninterested in is trivia about movie stars and other celebrities. I pursue knowledge because I value knowledge as such, not because I have a passion for math, physics or biology. If I´m really passionate about something, I prefer to think about it myself because I´m jealous of everyone who has ever written something about it.

Knowing things makes me feel self-confident, not knowing things while the people around me know them lowers my self-confidence. I guess that´s fairly natural. In a way, her sudden eagerness to study burdened me because I realized I might have to get to work now, but on the other hand it was a positive push. Healthy competition is something that can help people grow, it can be that extra bit motivation to actually pursue the goals they value. Also, I can turn this around – if she had been studying purely out of passion, then why would she have minded if I had competed with her? I was hardly the only one with an ego to feed, and I don´t see why she would be the only one who had the right to look for food. She actually openly admitted that if I “started” to compete with her, she´d have to compete as well and she didn´t want that because competition ruined friendships. As a matter of fact, I so far had never ruined a friendship by competing with someone! And besides, why was she allowed to recourse to a deterministic self-conception and tell me she would “have to do” something harmful? She told me all the time that I had a free will and the power to decide how I dealt with the character I had, that I could change and that if I didn´t change I simply didn´t want to! How I wish I hadn´t been oblivious to the irony of this back then!

 

 

 

The session with Mrs D in detail

This stupid appointment with Mrs D still bugs me. I don´t know if picking it apart will or won´t help me, but since I´m going to do it anyway, what´s the point of asking myself that? So…

Every place has its specific smell, atmosphere, air. It´s similar with groups of places. If you go to the dentist, there´s certain kinds of noises and smells, even certain kinds of colors and materials. I think the same thing goes for therapists´offices. And even the waiting rooms.

The predominant sound here is silence. The chairs are very comfortable and it´s nearly impossible to sit upright in them. I was starting to feel ill the moment I sat down in the waiting room. I´d gone into the counseling area without showing hesitation, without looking away from the male student passing me by in the hall, because I´d wanted to be confident. Show confidence, prove to myself I was confident. In a difficult situation, yes, but confident. I´d gone into the secretary´s office, smiled, said I had an appointment. Again, I wanted to be confident. Act like I would if I was at work. Friendly, confident, without showing too much of myself. Not so much for their benefit, but for mine. Not everybody needs to know me by heart.

It´s funny (sorry, I digress), but this is a fairly new development. For most of my life I never tried to protect myself that way. I typically assumed I had to be 100% open about everything – or I went into complete shutdown. I think one reason for this new behavior is that right now I´m in a situation in which you need to be careful not to be disenfranchised. Failing college could make people doubt my ability to make decisions or to achieve something in life, and I´m trying to counter that by acting as if I was decisive and accomplished. I didn´t know anymore I had any useful instincts.

Anyway, the moment I sat down in the waiting room I started to shrink. Maybe it begins with the chairs, you cannot sit upright, so you kinda slump down. I grabbed a magazine in order to look busy, competent, like someone who isn´t waiting desparately because this counselor is the last straw to which he clutches. Because she wasn´t, really. As Natalie put it: “Go see them, and if it´s any use to you, great, if it isn´t, well, just put it behind you and don´t think about it anymore!” I really didn´t intend to develop particularly strong feelings about this.

I think I had to wait for about ten minutes. I had been very anxious to be there on time, and I think that´s no coincidence. It was the memory of Dr. Stoneface and that first cold, stern stare he´d had for me when I arrived at his door fifteen minutes late because I´d gotten lost. This, of course, was very much at odds with the confidence I was trying to radiate. Cognitive dissonance, once again, but I tried to be confident and not beat myself up over it. This happens, yeah. I´m scared of authority figures, yeah. I´m scared to be scolded like a little girl, alright. It doesn´t mean that my confidence is a mere facade and that I should drop it and signal that I expect to be victimized. It means that I should display even more friendly confidence. As I was sitting there in this grey, windowless waiting room, though, breathing in that weird, characteristic smell and listening to that silence, my deliberate confidence was starting to slip a bit. I sat there with time to think. I don´t believe in “time to think”. I think while I write. I´m active while I think. I either write, or I walk, or I pace my room listening to music, and that´s when the thoughts and the words come. When I´m sat down in a silent room void of stimuli I don´t think, I sink. I had some dark thoughts about how this was probably the purpose of making me wait, that I should have time to sink. What was supposed to sink in, in this dark vision, was the graveness of my situation. You aren´t supposed to be confident when you´re about to drop out of college. It easily looks like you´re being cocky. A person who´s just fucked up like that is really not entitled to contradict, right? Apparently she doesn´t know how to live her life!

Then Mrs D emerged from her office. She was sort of smiling, but something about her smile failed to draw me in. I remained cautious. She gave me a questionnaire, I filled it in and then I had to wait again until she finally asked me to her office. Her office was very small, just a desk, and then a small table with two chairs. I´d nearly sat down in hers. I should have realized it was hers because there was a notebook lying on her side of the table, but somehow my mind took that notebook as an invitation. Anyway, she told me where to sit before I could actually sit down in her place. I´m really glad about that, because that would probably have frightened me a lot more than being late. On the table, there was the traditional box of hankies. I had no intention of needing them.

The atmosphere in the room was depressing, if not oppressive. It was small, no pictures, very plain furniture. I was sitting with my back to the window, so there was really nothing redemptive in my line of sight. Another thing that might have escaped me in those first moments but which I became aware of later was that this woman didn´t have a computer. She still used a typewriter. I felt like I was back in the 70es. Everything about this room screamed 70es.

“Yes…” She said. “Well, so you already wrote us a thing or two!” She said that as if I had been more talkative than others. It surprised me a little. I had thought a while about how much I wanted to reveal in an e-mail to the secretary, and eventually I had given them the basic information. What do I study, what situation am I in, I´m looking for re-orientation but I´m having trouble making a definite decision. It had been four lines, but the way she talked she sounded as if she already knew everything there was to know. If so, though, what did she want from me? I mean – what did she expect me to tell her now? Did she have any questions, did she see to the bottom of my problem already, was she going to say anything about it?

Nothing.

I tried to talk about the career I´d considered and found myself sounding unenthusiastic if not pathetic. When I´d told Natalie the same she´d told me she sensed a certain energy taking hold of me when I mentioned this option. After two minutes in this dreary 1970es room with Mrs D, that energy had evaporated. I thought that I´d never convince her I really wanted to pursue that career, and at the same time I thought that I was acting like a child by seeking for random peoples´ approval. If I really wanted to do this I didn´t need anybody´s approval, and if I needed anybody´s approval, I didn´t want to do it – or at least I wasn´t nearly sure enough yet.

I´d expected our conversation to continue similar to the way my talk with Natalie had gone. I expected an in-depth discussion of my feelings about the various options I had. Or maybe the mere question how I was feeling now. I could have told her some things. Like the frequent anxiety attacks, my lack of sleeping rhythm, the nausea, the physical pain and exhaustion. She didn´t, though. She asked me what made me doubt the career option I´d just laid out in front of her. I told her I feared it would leave me no time for my partner and also that I wasn´t sure I was going to be able to do such a stressful job.

“Yeah, you´d have to learn a lot when you study for that career!” she said. “I don´t really have a problem with learning…” I stuttered. “At least I used to be quite good at that when I was at school! It´s more…” But I wasn´t able to explain it. That I was scared of what would happen to me if I had such long work hours. Hours in which I´d have to be a professional all the time. Wouldn´t that alienate me from myself? Would I still know who I was when I came home after this?

I also told her that a career counselor had advised me to go after this career and that the alternative had been writing. I said that I liked writing but that I couldn´t control my creativity and that I´d need a day job anyway and that I was no longer sure this model suited me. She then asked me if I was sure I didn´t want to write my thesis. She smiled, saying “because you say you enjoy writing!” At that point she sounded to me like a grandma who tries to be nice but is totally out of touch with the topic at hand. Writing novels is not quite the same as writing a thesis, even in philosophy.

I explained to her that I didn´t really identify with the topic and that I didn´t have enough time left anyway. “Well, you´ll have to ask for more time!” she said in a somewhat harsh tone, as if I was merely being lazy. “You can get three more months!” As I learned the same day, you only get three more months if you have a medical certificate detailing why you couldn´t deliver your paper on time.

I explained to her that another problem was that I never really read much throughout my college years. “Well, of course that shows now!” she said. I was wondering if I should interpret this as some kind of “serves you right” response and decided I didn´t have enough evidence to be righteously pissed off at her. Confident people are careful to feel attacked. Feeling attacked makes you vulnerable.

“So you never managed to identify with your subject, you could never own it?” she said. “No, not really.” I replied. Later, when I was out there, I struggled with the way she´d said this. Managed.  Would it have been an achievement to identify with something that isn´t really me? Should I have made it my own just because at some point I decided to study it – and for the most irrelevant reasons? Had I failed at something that would have been my task in life – identifying with the choice I´d made? That would have implied, though, the choice was a given, something irreversible, something that couldn´t be corrected. On the inside, I angrily refused to see it this way, and when I came home from the store later that day I was on the verge of tears thinking back to this conversation.

We started talking about my family, she asked about my relationship towards my parents, my sister – and felt like I was supposed to press the information and insights gathered in years all within one hour. I felt like I needed to say something definite, something conclusive that made it clear to her I had dealt with these subjects or at least kept them in mind when making my decisions. I felt nagging worry as to what she might be thinking, what she was writing down in her notebook. I stopped myself from asking, though. I knew that being defensive would make everything worse. It would lead to one of those truly torturous conflicts with psychotherapists I´m so bloody good at. If I wanted to radiate at least a little bit of confidence, despite my stuttering and looking away and not knowing how to respond, I sure shouldn´t act paranoid. I had to act as if I didn´t fear her judgment.

Then, she asked me since when I knew I was a lesbian. I said that when I´d been 19 I´d fallen in love with a girl and I´d decided to just go for it and see where we ended up. Actually I´m still waiting for that moment when I wake up and know by divine revelation what my sexual orientation is. I can fancy guys but I probably wouldn´t have sex with them – what does that make me? Bicurious? 😉

At any rate, this topic seemed to be of some importance to her as she asked me if I´d had any male friends at uni. I said, well yeah, I had some…uh…pals. It felt weird to even use the word “pals” around her, it was such a stiff atmosphere. I´ll never know what she did with that piece of information. She might have asked if I´d ever had boyfriends and I said, yeah, when I was a teen, but my longest relationship then was six months, it just never was right for me. I don´t even know why I answered. A truly confident person might actually have asked her how this was relevant to my career issues. I mean – here´s the point: Even if she´d have wanted to find out if I had an underlying psychic illness that caused my inability to make a decision asking questions about my sexual orientation shouldn´t have been part of a diagnostic assessment because – lo and behold! – even the DSM has caught up with the fact that homosexuality is not a disease! So what was that about? Personal curiosity? Or old-fashioned psychoanalytical bigotry?

At some point, anyways, she reached the conclusion that I was unable to make a decision on the spot. I needed time  to get to know my needs, myself. And I even thought that´s what I´d spent the last six years on. If I need much more time I can move on straight to retirement. Her idea, of course, was that psychotherapy might help me get to know myself. I told her I´d undergone more or less extensive therapy already. She wanted to know more. I told her about my first therapy attempt, when I was 16. She asked me why I´d been in therapy. I told her that the diagnosis had been depressive episode, then I went on to tell her that my depression had been caused by an external event. I actually managed to put the whole Lola drama into four or five sentences, talk about integration of burdening events that somehow tear your identity apart! It annoys me now, though, that it was so important to me to assure this woman that actually I was sane, I had just been faced with some burdening events which had caused my low. What was behind this was my fear that I´d be seen as inherently pathological, as someone whose perception can´t be trusted. I think the reason I´m angry at myself is that I failed at that. Eventually she did doubt my perception, however subtly.

Then I talked about my third therapy attempt, Dr. Stoneface. I skipped the second because that would have made things too complicated. Besides, I didn´t want to look even more ill. I wanted to look sane, especially for the sake of that career option I was toying with. I explained that this therapy attempt had turned into a power struggle and that at some point I´d have liked to switch to normal and ask him, amongst adults, if this really made sense anymore, but that he didn´t let that happen. She asked me if I´d taken nothing positive from my therapy. I sensed a trap in that question. If I answered it with no, I´d compromise myself because I´d basically say I hadn´t made any progress in all those years. I´d sound like a sulky kid or a disgruntled, paranoid griper. So I told her that I´d learned some important things when reflecting on my time with Dr. Stoneface a couple of years later. It was both true and false. I did dare say, though, that the therapy itself had been a rather negative experience. Understatement of the century.

She next asked me why I´d been in therapy then. And I tried to tell her about Athena.

I can explain what happened between me and Lola in four or five sentences. Same with Dr. Stoneface, mostly thanks to this blog. With Athena, though? No. Not by a long shot. If I tried I´d sound delusional. You cannot really capture the subtelties of tone, mimic and meanings and her words alone might not be understandable in their impact on me. I stammered something about how it was hard to explain what had happened in that relationship, and that there had been a lot of accusations which I felt couldn´t defend myself against. I guess that´s fairly okay for a spontaneous, preliminary explanation.

Next she asked me if the career option I was toying with might appeal to me because I hoped to understand myself better with the help of it. I thought it was pointless to deny it completely, so I said that I wanted to compare the insights I´d gain there to my own insights. She said: “So you want to confirm your view?” Well, ideally yes, but I do trust myself to work scientifically even if I don´t like the results! Besides, everyone is biased to some extent!

I said: “I think the idea of man predominant in this subject could prove to be very humane. It´s like…you see, I´ve experienced a lot of judgment in life, and accusations, some of it very cruel. There were times when I felt like I was inherently toxic and now I´m looking for an alternate view. Both on me and on human beings in general.”

It might have been right away or some time later, but then, in attempt to sum up my situation, she said: “….and, you were invalidated – felt invalidated a lot in your life…” If she´d said “felt” right away I might have let it slip. But the fact that she corrected herself was too much somehow. Like she had to specifically remind herself that she couldn´t take my word for what it was. Or remind me. There´s always this implicit question hanging in the air: “Are you sure it was quite like that?”  I get this on some level – she cannot know what exactly happened, and human relationships are so difficult to judge as an outsider (for some reason you aren´t deemed competent to judge them from the inside as well, though) yada yada. But considering that I spent a remarkable part of my late teens feeling like I should kill myself because of those perceived invalidations and given that sentences like “you must be the most deranged person there is” don´t leave much room for interpretation it might also be understandable that I´m growing sick and tired of this kind of wariness.

Again, I didn´t say anything while I was sitting in that room, but later that day I felt shaken and sick with anger. While I was sitting there, protesting just didn´t seem worth the effort. Why argue with her, why go through the pain of looking like an emotional wreck while still not reaching her, why even try to convince someone who has already decided I´m not a reliable witness anyway? Why, given that I won´t see her again after I leave this room? I can keep my thoughts to myself. I won´t let her matter that much. I´ll keep her out of my head. Let her think whatever she wants, it doesn´t matter. Behavior-wise, this is some kind of progress, but the motivation behind it is not that I´m more mature, it´s just that I´m more cautious. I know when I´ll get hurt and I shy away from it. I find it hard to judge when I´m being politic in order to protect myself and when I´m starting to act like a coward. What if it hadn´t been my own perception that had been invalidated? What if it had happened to someone else? Would I have protested then, or would I still have tried to protect myself? Where´s the line between self-protection and self-betrayal?

Next came the same old fun. She told me she´d recommend I seek psychotherapy (maybe analytic group therapy) or go to a mental hospital. To her great credit, she said that she didn´t want to exclude I could do it on my own, she merely told me what she´d recommend if I wanted to do psychotherapy. I thought about it quickly, the thought of being at one of these hospitals (they actually aren´t that bad, in some ways they´re more like hotels), talking to different therapists, being in different kinds of therapies, meeting all kinds of people with similar and different problems. Having to take care of nothing and no one but myself. It sounded good on some level. And on yet another level I knew it wouldn´t stabilize me. Au contraire. It would be another hole in my narrative. Quick and sudden fixes don´t work on me. They make me panic. A sudden change of environment, a sudden change of daytime activities and sleep rhythm, never being alone? That kind of stuff makes me go into overload. It puts me under stress, I´m not myself in such situations. There´s been so much drama and radical steps and false dawns in my last ten years, I´d seriously be content to try something that works slowly. Going to a hospital would only bring back the illusion that I need a sudden and radical change. How would I still fit into my everyday life after such a stay? I don´t know. The worst thing is that I´m scared of authoritarianism and you find that a lot in those kinds of hospitals. I´d probably just anxiously submit and later be very angry about it. Maybe angry enough to become stronger and less of a pushover, but if things go awry it might take me another eight years to recover and I´d rather not take that risk.

Again, I merely nodded and let her give me the address for that hospital, thanked her and left. As I went out of the building I tried to mobilize my confidence, my slightly amused anger, whatever I had. I tried to go out there laughing incredulously. I didn´t want it to get into my head, those things she´d said. At first I thought I´d succeeded, but the breakdown came later that day.

I´m dead tired and I guess this post is really long enough, so goodnight for now!

It was supposed to be a post on safewords and empathy and then I suddenly started to talk about bullying

What are safewords?

I think safewords are merely an explicit version of implicit clues which we all learn (or should learn) as kids. Safewords are a safety net which catches you in the case of empathy failures.

Most people only know safewords from a BDSM context. Think about this situation, though: Two kids are playing house, the “mother” tells the “kid” to go to bed, the “kid” doesn´t want to. “Mother” becomes all strict. “Yes, you go to bed now or you won´t get lunch tomorrow!” The other kid starts to cry and yells: “You´re stupid! I´m not playing anymore!”

That is a very explicit way of stating that you´re leaving one level of interaction and move on to another. Later, it gets more difficult. Two teens teasing a mutual friend should know where to draw the line between friendly banter and real hurt. If they do, that is: The friend perceives their teasing as good-natured and isn´t hurt, then they´re doing it right. Banter is some sort of play, as it is a playful fight. If it goes wrong, though…

The victim might feel hurt and at the same time deem it unwise to let it show. That´s very much me. One minute I´m on the same page with everyone, the next moment I don´t trust them anymore. I don´t trust that if I let them know they hurt me they won´t use this against me. Which might be understandable because it happened to me. I guess most people have experienced situations in which even crying didn´t make their opponent stop. Or maybe they haven´t? No idea. Maybe they were able to fight back, tell their opponent to fuck off or something.

The victim might also get angry, and this might make her friends angry because it seems unfair – they didn´t want to do harm, they didn´t mean what they said and one minute ago they had ALL been okay with this and now they look like complete villains. I´ve been in such a situation as well: You don´t want to invalidate the other person´s emotional response, but on the other hand you think it´s inappropriate to portray you like a villain. If you contradict, though, you risk becoming a villain. If someone is hurt, he´s hurt and there´s no point telling him he´s overreacting. It´s actually mean to do so. Still, if you didn´t mean to hurt him and didn´t expect something you did to hurt him, is it fair that you have to share his perspective on the whole thing? Should you have to think of yourself as a villain?

At best, you realize a change in the “victim´s” behavior before your banter becomes hurtful. You realize that apparently it´s getting too much and then you stop and show the other person that you don´t want to hurt her or mean anything you say before she explodes, cries or withdraws. I guess that´s how empathy works in real life. It´s impossible to have safewords in such situations. Safewords require a certain kind of meta-communication, where you talk about what level you´re interacting on. You don´t have that meta-communication with everyone. You need to read implicit clues, and that requires empathy. Empathy is what you need if you don´t want to become guiltlessly guilty.

***

If you give implicit clues of distress and people override them, what follows is inner conflict. You´re hurt, but you don´t know if you´re righteously angry because maybe they didn´t intend to hurt you? Still it hurts, so isn´t it normal to be angry? Do they have to be so insensitive? Still, haven´t you hurt people in your life? Who knows what you overlooked, who knows how miserable you´ve made people! But you can´t always walk on eggshells, can you? In that case, though, I can´t demand that other people do this. I shouldn´t react so strongly, why do I have to be so bloody sensitive?

This is what happens to me nowadays if someone hurts me. 1) I hurt. 2) I am angry. 3) I think I have no right to be angry. 4) I think that I´m being a doormat. 5) I crumble under a mountain of potential guilt. 6) I wonder if I´ll need to be hypervigilant in conversations for the rest of my life and always restrain myself. 7) I realize I can´t do this. 8) I think in that case I´ll need to accept that others hurt me.

If I look at it through the lense of different layers of interaction, this is a clear non-sequitur. I don´t need to accept that others hurt me. I can tell them they hurt me, though it might make sense to do so in a fashion that allows them to save face. I shouldn´t make them feel like villains because I don´t know yet if that´s what they are. If they signal that they didn´t mean to hurt me and that it dismays them they did, they´re okay. If they don´t care, I most definitely have a right to be angry. I guess that´s how I would ideally see it. It´s just that emotion-wise, it doesn´t work that way for me. When someone overrides my explicit clues of distress, I falter.

There is a good example in one of the diary excerpts I posted a while ago. Something Athena says makes me cry, she tells me my tears are an attempt at escaping, at deceiving myself, at pretending I´m a poor, suffering victim. My reaction was something akin to shock, and then heavy self-accusations. At first I couldn´t believe how she reacted, and then I grimly thought that I had to be one particularly soft, spoiled and childish piece of shit if I truly thought that crying could get me out of anything. Was I still stuck in the narcissistic phase? A little kid who won´t take responsibility? Was that Athena´s problem? No, she was perfectly right. My tears were just another proof of my weak character. My level of shock itself was ridiculous, it showed just HOW self-centered and naively demanding I was. But that was no surprise, I´d never suffered in my life because my parents had spoiled me to death, so of course now that I encountered real life I couldn´t cope with it. How embarrassing! How pathetic!

At the same time I knew contrary facts. I knew that my father had been the kind of person who, if faced with the smallest stressor, started to yell at people left and right. That´s not exactly what you call spoiling, or idyllic childhood. Neither were other experiences I´d had, though they had more to do with witnessing bad things happen to others. But somehow that didn´t seem to matter. I had a vague feeling that this was unfair, but maybe that feeling was just a sign of resistance? An expression of my fervent desire to somehow see myself as a victim?

When people override your explicit clues of distress, it´s scary to say the least. As a kid I once spend the night at a friend´s place, and when we were lying in bed in the dark bedroom, she suddenly started to parrot me. When I said something, she repeated it in a parody of my tone. At some point I said: “This isn´t funny anymore!” – “This isn´t funny anymore!” she replied. I tried various things. I tried to provoke her, I tried not to say anything for a while and then see if she´d reply normally if I said something, I tried to sound my most earnest. Nothing helped, and in the end I more or less begged her to stop. At that point I was already feeling first signs of genuine panic, otherwise I wouldn´t have been begging. It´s not like begging doesn´t hurt my pride, after all. I felt there was no way to remove myself from the situation without risking repercussions which seemed severe to a child. How would her parents react if I went to them late at night? How would my parents react if they had to pick me up? Would I be allowed to spend the night at hers again? Would she get into trouble and in turn be mad at me?

What was so bad about this was not that she parroted me. What was bad about it was my complete helplessness. There was nothing I could do about this. I think it´s experiences of helplessness that damage, not the circumstances in which they occur. When people override even explicitly stated distress and there is no way you can remove yourself from the situation, you´ll experience terror. I remember another situation with a different friend who was actually pinching me. When I told her to stop she pretended to stop for a while, then did it again. Again, I didn´t dare go to my or her parents about it. They were friends, after all. I´d be the cause of embarrassment. Someone would be bound to wish I didn´t exist, right? Could I really not take a little pinching? It might be a funny coincidence or a real connection, but I still can´t stand pinching. Well, sometimes I´ll take it for someone, but it freaks me out.

I guess someone who will ignore explicit clues of distress would also ignore a safeword – unless we´re talking about a BDSM scene where you have agreed that it´s okay to cause you genuine distress. I think psychotherapy kind of compares to staged non-con scenes: You kind of agree that it´s okay to deal with touchy subjects that might make you cry, or to use interventions which might make you want to run away or actively fight with your therapist. In order for this to be okay three requirements need to be fulfilled: You know what you´re getting into, you want to get into this, AND you know how to get back out there safely if you need to. And by getting back out there I don´t mean just quitting therapy. Getting back out there safely includes that within the therapeutic relationship there´s a level of communication where your therapist is straightforward, empathic and aiming to stabilize you. Where he aims for you to go out there feeling good about yourself. And okay with what transpired between you. And safewording should force your therapist to immediately switch to that level. After safewording, your therapist shouldn´t be allowed to keep on nailing you about your feelings on a touchy subject, or provoke you, or asking “why this is so important to you”. He simply has to accept it is important for the moment. And most importantly, he is not allowed to question your use of the safeword. No “could it be that by safewording you´re trying to run away from a difficult feeling?”! Some people might argue that this way patients can “abuse” their safewords to resist therapy, but the way I see it, you shouldn´t treat someone against his will unless his life is in imminent danger, end of. If they keep on safewording, then apparently the therapy approach in question doesn´t work for them. It´s better for them to leave and look somewhere else than to spend time and money (we´re talking years rather than months here!) on something that tortures or at least overwhelms them.

There´s probably a whole lot more to be said about nearly everything I wrote today, but I think that´s enough for now.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This is not coherent.

I´m toying with the idea of a new start. Study a different subject, pursue a certain career. I like the idea a lot. What worries me, though, is the question if I´m even capable of the hard work it would involve. I used to be able to work hard, but I´m not sure if I still am. My brain has gone to pieces over the last seven, eight years. It´s not like I´m not having any insights anymore, but I feel like my rational thinking is suffering. Along with my ability to focus. Maybe this ability is what I miss most. I cannot rely on my mind powers anymore. I can barely even make myself keep on writing this post. I feel the urge to look at another tab, or maybe I shouldn´t be online altogether, maybe I should read a book or write. As a matter of fact, it doesn´t matter what I do as long as I manage to do it for longer than five minutes.

I had some absinth a couple of days ago, my girlfriend persuaded me to try it. The effect it had on me might have been purely down to the mysticism surrounding it, but for a glorious twenty minutes there was silence in my head. The way it is, with the constant low-level or medium-level stress vibrating through my brain I cannot think. I can never get rid of this. I wonder if antidepressants would have a similar effect. If so, that could almost endear me to them.

I still believe the solution to my problem is not to make me stop thinking. I guess the style of thinking is the problem. I need to have more inner distance, more patience, and then I can think all I want. It has worked sometimes on this blog. It has gotten me somewhere, I´m sure. It´s this tension, this sense of urgency that´s the problem. I´ve mentioned that before on here, or if I haven´t I´ve thought of it: that manic urgency is a sign of craziness. I don´t remember such insights from one onslaught to the other. I feel like my focus is narrowed so much that I only see what´s right in front of me, but not the bigger picture. Which is a pity because it´s an impressionistic picture and you only recognize anything when you look at it from afar.

What might help now? One option is processing. The theory behind this is that I haven´t been writing for a while and that too many thoughts and feelings and inner struggles have build up. They put me under pressure, and by dealing with things one after the other I can alleviate that pressure. Somehow I don´t  like the idea, though. I don´t feel like talking about everything I´ve been thinking about over the last week. That feels like I´m forced to report to someone and next my “performance” or the quality of my thoughts will be judged.

Another option is stream-of-consciousness. I´d love to and to some extent it´s probably what I´m doing, but somehow it feels forced. It´s like the processing thing. I somehow expect I´d talk about a whole lot of things I don´t want to talk about. There´s a touch of mischief to it: “You want to repress everything, but it won´t let you, it wants out, you have no control, you can only try to keep up appearances, but we´ve already seen what it looks like inside of you!” Ick. I might let out my feelings if I felt like I´m alone in my head. I cannot afford any feelings of misery and failure when I need to defend myself. I want these constant attacks to go away.

I saw a college counsellor two days ago because of my trouble with my thesis, she said that I tended to think about everything at once instead of one thing after the other. She said I connect things which aren´t necessarily connected. Such as: “Should I pursue this new idea I´m toying with” and “should I try to get my philosophy degree”. If I got her right, it´s not one or the other. It can be both, it can be none. Maybe that way I can get through this confusion. I never took my time properly thinking about what she said. So, I´ll try to think about these questions separately.

Question two seems a little easier. Do I want that degree? I answered that question a year ago. I don´t really identify with philosophy. I´m tired of having to justify myself for studying it, and I´m tired of having to justify myself for not wanting to finish it. I feel like I´m failing just to prove a point, but I think that point is worthy of being proven. The point is that I´m tired of fulfilling anyone´s expectations. I cannot forgive my father for the way he treated me after I graduated from high school so surprisingly well. At least to him it came as a surprise. I cannot forgive him for the way he criticizes me on the fly. We have a normal conversation, and then suddenly he slips in a remark about how he doesn´t think it´s okay or “a good idea” that I do or don´t do this or that. It´s not the words, it´s the tone. His tone somehow gets more intimate, as if he knew me inside out, and often his accusations aren´t even justified. Sometimes there´s also stiff aggression in his voice, and when I contradict he easily gets impatient. Actually he treats me a bit like Athena did. He knows the sole truth and he´s demonstrating me his benevolence (the intimate tone and the way he signals that normally he doesn´t talk about it, he only mentions it now that we accidentally stumbled upon that topic), but if I contradict I´m just playing games and he really has no time for that because the point he´s trying to get across is so damn important. He has a way to talk to me that makes me feel like I´m looking into an abyss of guilt. Like I´m a terrible person. Even if he just criticizes that I don´t open my mail, which I´ve actually started doing regularly as of late.

We had this discussion recently: He told me of some ad he´d seen on a letter from our bank. Apparently they are looking for trainees. He told me I´d sure seen that. I said that I actually hadn´t. He said: “Yeah, well, I know sometimes you don´t open your mail, which, by the way, I don´t think is a good idea…” Me: “I´ve always opened my mail since I´ve moved! I didn´t get a letter with an ad!” Him, impatiently: “Well, you must have overlooked it! Of course, you overlooked it!” It doesn´t sound like much, but the subtext is: “You miss opportunities because you are lazy and apathetic and don´t look at things properly!” He has undermined my trust in myself that way ever since I can remember. He pulled some similar shit after my high school graduation, which is why I suddenly had to think of this. I think what I wanted to say is: When he realized I was actually capable of more than he thought he suddenly got angry at me whenever I fucked up a tiny little thing. Like put the wrong stamp on an important letter. He reads so damn much into such things. I don´t know how else to explain his overreactions.

Okay, here´s a point where I should stop thinking. Alright, I was under pressure when I had to decide what to study. I came from a life time of being accused of being lazy and indifferent. I studied philosophy in order to escape. I made a decision that required the least possible support and the least possible effort just to get everyone off my back. And then I had to defend it. At least this is part of what happened.

My god. Three people in my life who constantly read something into tiny little things and terrorized me over that. My father. Athena. Dr. Stoneface. I couldn´t take the latter entirely seriously. Still, I described how his behavior intimidated me at times. I think with regards to him I had just resigned. I didn´t assume he could like me. Or that I could have a positive relationship towards him. I feel like I´ve also resigned when it comes to my father. I cannot imagine liking him. I just want him out of my life.

Anyway, maybe the feeling these three people give me is completely unjustified. The abyss of guilt, I mean. And maybe I´m not even lazy, indifferent and irresponsible. Maybe I´m just constantly trying to dodge bullets. I run away to where ever, fantasy worlds, alibi life choices, dead end streets, just to evade the onslaught that´s bound to follow as soon as I don´t seem to know what I´m doing.

Whatever I am, this feeling is not my friend and this feeling is not the truth about me. It´s something a person who has been with me since my birth manages to instill in me. But how do I make this feeling go away? How do I replace it with a minimum of confidence? Maybe it is enough to say that I don´t know if I can trust myself. Maybe everything else will be met with too much of a backlash. If I say I don´t know if I can trust myself I always can counter the voices who say that I definitely can´t trust myself.

At any rate, I do understand now why I must always appear competent and like I know what I´m doing. I cannot stand to write entries like this one, without structure or anything else. Entries which let on my confusion. I´d rather make statements about insights and opinions I have. Anyway, it´s not about vanity and looking omniscient, it´s about warding off attacks. If I don´t have an answer to everything then I´ll get criticized. Or demoralized in some hard to describe way. Maybe that´s why I´m having such a hard time making decisions, or why I need to make sure I´m making the right decision. I can´t just try stuff. I can´t just not know stuff. I always need to be able to make a case for everything I do. Feelings don´t matter.

Then, for this lack of feeling and for my making a case and my knowing it all I got criticized by everyone outside my family. Arrogant, too complicated, unempathic, zombie, overbearing, narcissistic. Isn´t it sad how I victimize everybody else just with who I am. I feel a different kind of rage for those people and their attitude. Something in my brain just refuses to even take them seriously. Why should I let them hurt me when they never even gave me a chance? If they have so much empathy they should be capable of a little more than judgment, but unfortunately they aren´t. I get all my narcissistic supply from my intellect, they get it from their alleged ability to feel and empathize. Difference? Zero. If you feel superior because you have actual and real feeeeelings then you might as well be me.

How am I ever supposed to be okay if I´m attacked by two sides at once? Again, I need inner distance. Patience. The rage needs to stop. It shouldn´t even matter to me what other people think. I don´t even know what they think, they probably aren´t constantly thinking about me anyway. Still, they said what they said and these words have burnt themselves into my mind. They are timeless, they could have been said yesterday. Another sign of madness. No sense of time. They are like flashbacks.

I´m just going to post this because it´s better than nothing and it´s not going to get any better than this anytime soon. I´m too tired to draw conclusions and in a way I just don´t want to. That´s just another way of pretending I know what I´m doing and I´m on my way to improve, right? Well, I´m not. Improving, I mean. Or at least right now I´m not confident and right on track and on my way to achieving something. Right now I´d rather have to right to feel apathetic and helpless. I don´t want to constantly fight against feelings. Being allowed to feel miserable in fact makes me feel a whole less miserable. My complete refusal, and also my failing college is an attempt at breaking free. Maybe it´s a test. How people react to it. In a way I´ve already decided that whoever reacts negatively to my failure isn´t really my friend.

I feel so sorry for my former self. The self who had hoped to prove herself and get somewhere with studying philosophy. The self who had hoped to shine and find a place in life. I´ve failed her. On the other hand, those ambitions themselves are nothing I have to bury. I just need to look for a place somewhere else. I hope I can make it. In a way I´ve made my decision already.

 

Don´t look back in anger. Sarcasm will do.

Here are some excerpts from the diary I wrote about my friendship with Athena.

I don´t know if I´d show my diary to Athena. I´d be scared she´d disapprove of it, that something in it exposes I´m still stuck in the same old mechanism.

And I felt like a failure because of that.

Athena is the only person I tell everything – at least I think I tell her everything. I think that´s because it´s only in front of HER that I stop playing some kind of role. She demands nothing but total honesty from me and she is so smart that she always sees through me. On the one hand I´d never be as honest (no matter how destructive my honesty might be) if I wasn´t so scared of losing her. On the other hand I want to be honest because she is the most important person to me and she always accepts my true feelings and motivations. Other than everybody else, she doesn´t judge me.

Not judging me, by the way, didn´t mean that she didn´t make some very cruel verdicts about my thoughts and alleged motivations. It just meant that she thought I was somehow special anyway, and therefore deserving of her… true and honest friendship.

Once again I´m thinking things Athena might disapprove of. (…) It´s strange that I just can´t stop it.

Yes. Somehow I´ve never learned to keep my mind under control. It would only have taken a little bit of discipline, but I wasn´t willing to make that effort. How can a person be so unwilling to control her own thoughts? There must be some very sinister reason for that. Obvious irony is obvious.

We talked today. She said that unconsciously I didn´t want to face myself. I felt indifferent, I think that was some kind of escapism. (…) I still cannot grasp that she likes me. Sometimes I feel humiliated and believe she does that to me on purpose. (…) It hurts when she just shoots down everything I say. But it didn´t need to hurt if only I could emotionally accept that she likes me. Why exactly does it hurt? Because the sentences she shoots down are failed attempts at playing some pretentious role? And when she called my tears an attempt to escape… I think I just suddenly realize that showing suffering doesn´t gain me sympathy, care and attention. This, too, is disillusioning and makes me feel ashamed. That the world expects more from me. That I cannot fulfill those expectations.

This passage is so…massive that I´m afraid some snappy remark won´t do. Just please tell me I´m not the only one who sees the craziness in this!

To this fear and dependence towards her I sometimes react with a pleasant feeling, like my soul was floating apart. I think I know why: My fear  forces me to be honest. Then I am the way she wants me and since that´s important to me I´m glad about it. By being honest despite myself I ignore my wish for self-respect and pride. I become aware that I´m breaking – or rather melting away – my pride with my own hands, because she wants me to. This sounds like a terrible friendship, but it isn´t. This process is not the rule. It just connects us further, why else this dependence?

This, ladies and gentlemen, is me explaining to the world why our friendship is the best, deepest and most sincere friendship that has ever existed. I mean – even back then I apparently realized I was not making the best case for that…

I can´t really be arsed to analyze this today. I just thought I´d put it out there, just to let everyone know how crazy people can be. Also, maybe I can one day get rid of the effects of this lunacy. Wouldn´t that be nice…

Cognitive dissonance and breaking

In the light of my last post I thought I´d probably do best adhere to strictly rational thinking. I read some skeptical views on recovered memories and quack therapies and again and again I was told that one main reason why people stick to false beliefs even after being faced with contrary evidence is cognitive dissonance.

Every theory on the human mind and soul has its list of sins. On some lists, the sins are selfishness and narcissism. On the list of rational thinking, the mortal sin is giving in to cognitive dissonance.

The effects of cognitive dissonance are, of course, depressing. “I mustn´t be wrong so I can´t be wrong”, or “being wrong would be too costly for me personally, so I simply ignore the facts”. This is painful for the individual in question, too, though. It is not “the easy way out”. If that´s the easy way out, I don´t want to know what the hard way is. I think skeptics are taking the easy way out if they treat giving in to cognitive dissonance as a mere character flaw which they themselves are above. I´m not saying that´s what all of them do this, but I rarely see people treating the issue with a whole lot of sympathy.

I think cognitive dissonance is one of the most powerful psychological forces there are. I think it´s ultimately what is behind breaking people. Take a look at 1984: Winston wanting to give up Julia to save himself from the rats is so at odds with his love for her that after doing this he cannot feel love for her anymore.

I think about my reaction to understanding what my priorities were with regards to Lola: “That isn´t me.” Acting like my obsession was more important than my best friend was indeed “not me”. Just one year before Lola herself had told me that she wouldn´t know what to do without me because I was such a good listener. I was generally known as a good friend. Nobody could understand what was happening. And neither could I. How could my obsession be more important than a friend who had been through terrible things? I couldn´t find an even remotely sensible reason. Not even a psychological mechanism. It was as irrational as a rat phobia.

I always sensed there was a connection between Winston´s and my situation. A few months after Lola´s letter I was close to putting it into words when I wrote: “How do you make a person want the wrong things? Make him do the wrong things!” It was more complicated, though, than mere brainwashing or an ideological conversion. What happens in Room101 is psychological mutilation. In my case, that mutilation was accidental.

If cognitive dissonance can kill off two peoples´ love for each other, then we shouldn´t ever take it lightly. “The truth hurts, suck it up!” is not a solution. If cognitive dissonance is a universal psychological power that has the same effect on everyone, then there´s no point in judging people who are deformed by it. Maybe you´ve just been luckier than them. Essentially, it can happen to everyone. Statements like the one above deepen the cognitive dissonance and the shame. They are part of the problem.

If we accept that our identity is a construct based on a narrative of our lives, then cognitive dissonance rips holes into that narrative. Our identities don´t work anymore. We need new narratives which explain how we could do something that is not who we are. Maybe we´ll find reasons for our behavior we can identify with. I tried that. A lot. I tried real and imaginary reasons. It didn´t work.

I wonder what Winston would have done if he´d still had the psychological capacities for doing anything at all other than getting drunk. And the logical step would have been to look into his past for anything that justifies his rat phobia. I´m sure he would gladly have made up any horror story just to be able to love Julia again. Or at least bear look at himself in the mirror.

This has nothing to do with being particularly narcissistic. This accusation is similarly cruel as the “suck it up” response. They are, at their core, the same thing.

Now all I´m wondering about is how you cure this.

Genuine craziness

I´m realizing again and again that my sanity is a very frail thing. In the past ten years I´ve been trapped in three situations which were either an expression of my frailty or even played on it.

Here is the first one: Me believing I had repressed memories of childhood sexual abuse. This turned into the theory that I had DID.

What was insane about it:

1) This came out of nowhere. I had no reason to believe in it. Since I was a rather strange child I found plenty of odd or even worrying behaviors I showed as a kid, but I never checked for alternate explanations.

2) I was not open to challenges to this belief and I got extremely upset when anyone challenged it.

3) As a theory, it is impossible to disprove. If you have forgotten something, the fact that you can´t remember it doesn´t prove it didn´t happen. Your perception is not reliable. It is, in its essence, a conspiracy theory.

4) Even after I acknowledged all this, two years ago I suddenly fell back into this old thinking pattern and manically tried to prove something had happened to me.

This is scary. I mean it when I say “insane”. I wonder if this actually is some kind of…I don´t know. Mania? Psychosis? Delusion? I´ve looked into the build-up of this, and…oh god, the scary thing is that I often had episodes like these! As a kid, I was convinced that I had superpowers and that one day someone would come and tell me how to use these. I actually tried to prepare myself for this. And this carried on until I was about twelve. When I was fourteen I had a vision about a future dictatorship. I´m sorry if it sounds contrived, but I was actually told so by “the voices”. I had them since I was little and I always called them like that. I was convinced I had seen the future, I was looking for signs everywhere and I got very angry when people contradicted me. Again, I felt like I had to prepare myself. From one day to another, my sense of normalcy and my feeling of connectedness to my past was wiped out. Only when I didn´t watch it seemed to return. Like during family dinner. Or at school. Much of the time, though, I spent in a parallel universe where the future was already happening.

Here´s the thing: Until the abuse mania, all of these fixed ideas had dealt with the future. Therefore, it didn´t have as much crazy-making potential. No one can be sure what the future will bring, after all. I had no alternate conception of the future which contradicted the one I was fixated on. That was different when it came to the past. Also, when looking into the future I could imagine whatever kind of personality for myself without harming my current identity. “One day I will be…” is a relatively harmless game to play. It doesn´t hurt “right now I am” or “yesterday I was”. What happens, though, when you become obsessed with proving that in your own, personal past events have happened which, for all you know and can know, never have happened?

You stop believing in your memories. Your perception becomes your enemy. Your normal identity is not who you really are. Imagine you´re playing the “one day I will be” game and suddenly you start to believe that your future self is already there, hidden somewhere inside of you, and the person you know as yourself is some sick, crazy alien installed there by people who hate and abused you. A lot of popular psychology seems to come down to that, doesn´t it? Still, people seem to be able to hear such things without going crazy. They take that metaphorically. I took it literally.

Until then my normal identity had always co-existed with my craziness. I lived fairly much like a normal kid, that is I didn´t act on my loony beliefs in real life. They were reserved for alone times and daydreams, and, when I was younger, playing with other kids. When I was alone I would talk to these voices in my head and sometimes ask them to guide me somewhere so I could find something important. At other times I imagined myself as an entirely different person and interacted with real and imaginary others in my head. And by the way the past tense is a lie.

When I started to have fixed ideas about the past instead of the future, though, the craziness started to actively attack my normal identity and my sense of normalcy. My sense of normalcy included, after all, my belief that I´d had a happy childhood and a good family and that I was basically sane. That may all be true or not: It was, at any rate, something I could always come back to. Peace of mind. Something I felt sure of. What happened now, though, was that after years of peaceful co-existence and mutual ignorance the abyss stared at me.

How could this happen? My abuse mania started a few months after I had received the fatal letter from Lola. And…here´s the thing. The reason I had abandoned her was in no way rational. I had abandoned her because I was preparing myself for the dystopian future I´d had that vision of. I was sucked up in a fixed idea. There are probably a couple of good reasons why a sort of troubled 15-year-old would abandon a person who had never been a good friend in the first place, but this was none. You don´t abandon a depressed friend because you believe you will have to fight against an evil dictatorship soon. The harm I had caused her I had caused her because I was busy marveling at an abyss inside of me. Fighting imaginary wars in an imaginary world. How was that even possible? That wasn´t…ME! Not the me that I knew!

I´m realizing now that what was destroyed, what broke back then was my sense of normalcy. Or my sense of identity. The co-existence of sane and crazy lost its equilibrium because my craziness had caused harm in real life. I did not know I was crazy then. I simply did not understand myself. I couldn´t grasp what had happened here and how I could have done such a thing. That sounds like I felt tremendous guilt, but in a way it was worse. I didn´t know what to think of myself anymore. All the damage was done right that moment, and everything else just followed.

It´s a terrible realization, but in a way I´m glad for it. It is, paradoxically, the first time I even come close to being able to tell that story without feeling like I´m somehow lying or constructing something. I tried very hard to find an explanation for what I had done, but the only explanations that came close to the truth were terrible. I looked for motivations as to why I had been so obsessed and the best I came up with is that I wanted to be a martyr and that I had envied Lola her status as the queen of darkness in our group. That, as I realize now, would have implied a level of emotional involvement with her state and the group which I probably never had. Still, I used it as a stick to beat myself with for years.

So…craziness. I was faced with something that wasn´t me. Was too loony to be me. I didn´t know what to think of myself anymore. Then followed the next onslaught of craziness that did harm in real life. The abuse mania. If I may use an analogy once more: I feel like someone who turns into a were-wolf at times, kills the people he loves and then wakes up and wonders how he could ever do such a thing. It´s not just guilt, it´s just that he is completely puzzled by his own motivation. There is no tangible reason why he would do something like that. What else is craziness if not this?

I tried to explain my abuse mania in similar ways as I had tried to explain my abandonment of Lola. I needed to play the martyr, I couldn´t cope with the fact that my needing to play the martyr had harmed Lola (that is: I couldn´t cope with the depth of my guilt), and therefore I made myself believe I´d suffered even worse a fate than Lola. I tried to admit this to myself a million times, but it never brought me relief. I don´t know if the truth really sets you free or if we choose to believe that whatever makes us feel better is the truth, but this particular “truth” never did anything for me other than make me feel miserable and stuck.

If I´m really crazy, then I mustn´t look for typical “neurotic” explanations for my behavior. Such explanations could be repressed guilt or envying the victim. If I´m crazy then the crack in my sense of identity I experienced is not disappointment in myself or the narcissistic injury that comes from defeat, nor is it simple shame over something you did wrong. If there is no way your actions could make any sense, then you can never redeem yourself. Understanding why we did something wrong helps us forgive ourselves. Or at least we try to arrive at that point. We forgive ourselves when we have developed some kind of compassionate understanding for ourselves. If you are insane, there´s nothing to understand. There was no psychological, understandable reason for what you did. Just neurological ones. Without psychological reasons for your actions, though, the narrative of your life breaks down. You can no longer tell your story. You don´t know what exactly you did when you cannot say why you did it or what you felt while doing it. It´s the first time I come even close to being able to tell this story. By acknowledging that I´m not in control of parts of my mind.

I´m not sure if knowing this makes me sane. Can I prevent such episodes from happening by knowing they tend to happen to me? My experience says no. Actually this thought causes me a lot of distress. It is painful, tedious and certainly crazy-making in itself to constantly watch your mind. It´s how I responded to my two outbreaks of craziness (dystopia-mania, abuse mania) for a while. I tried not to slip into daydream states. It was one of the other two crazy-making situations I wanted to talk about, but somehow I doubt I´ll manage to do that now.

The thought of exercising constant control over my mind scares me shitless. I can´t do that without stifling my intellect. Besides, like I said, it´s a form of crazy itself. And not the fancy kind of crazy.

It´s a great relief to just say: “I don´t know why this happened!” By “this” I mean my obsession with the future overriding any concern for my best friend. There is no particularly good explanation for it. No psychological explanation, that is. I´ve never been the kind of person who fights to dominate relationships or get more attention than her friends. I usually accepted the subordinate position without protest. I never questioned, often hardly even realized it. Explanations that play on me being motivated by narcissism and thirst for attention are vastly out of character with my usual behavior in relationships. Also, I´d have to have known what I was doing on some level. At least I should have been able to feel a need for attention. But in fact I withdrew from the group as a whole and only stuck to a friend who, to some extent, shared my obsession.

There is no psychological reason for my behavior. Does this mean that I get back my normal character? That I don´t have to make this event part of my narrative and identity?

It actually seems like the sanest thing to do. “I wasn´t myself.” It´s a loaded sentence because we´re used to hearing it from wife beaters. Like I´m trying to avoid responsibility. The truth is that I´ve been trying to take responsibility for almost ten years now and that it doesn´t work! I don´t… In order to feel responsible for it I´d have to know what exactly I did there and why. But I don´t! I tried to tell the story in a way that absolves me from guilt and I tried to tell the story in a way that makes me fully responsible. And neither story did anything to help me understand what happened and make sure it doesn´t happen again. And what those stories had in common is that they played on psychological explanations. An “I´m not guilty”-story could look like this: “She was always mean to me and I was troubled, too, at that time and she didn´t take it seriously even though I was probably only feeling so bad because I was abused, too, and by a much closer relative!” The other kind of story went like this: “I saw she was depressed but I was angry because I wanted some attention, too, and I couldn´t bear that she was more of a victim and therefore more deserving of attention, so I abandoned her!” The truth is, unspeakable as it seems, that me abandoning her had hardly anything to do with her and our relationship. Therefore, I cannot even blame it on her bullying, even though this, other than my “abuse”, did happen for real.

I don´t think there is a reason why those insane states come over me. At least not a psychological one. Maybe, in some ways, I´ll always be broken, there´ll always be sanity and craziness. I don´t think anymore it´s “a personality thing”. Maybe one day I´ll be tested and it will turn out I have schizophrenia or whatnot, and then I´ll have to try to integrate that knowledge into my self-conception, but at the moment trying to integrate things I did while under the spell of such a fixed idea into my identity is trying to make sense out of nonsense. If I still haven´t found any psychological explanation after ten years, despite my openness to the most shameful possibilities, then maybe there really is none. This rings particularly true since as soon as I admit to my craziness I feel like I´m finally telling my story right.

But….and this almost makes me want to cry – could it be that if those were genuine episodes of craziness, that is, something neurological I´m not responsible for, could it be that my actual character is not that bad? If no selfish, petty, aggressive wish motivated these episodes, if those episodes weren´t caused by feelings, or only by feelings pertaining to the fact that I have such episodes, then they don´t really say anything about who I am. Then the person I am is just this sad, humbled human hacking these words into the keyboard, and is that person really so unlikeable?

 

 

 

 

Talking cure my ass, call it silent treatment!

I´m in no shape to write since I´m dead tired, but I´ll try it anyway. And I´ll even be talking about a nicely crazy-making subject. Maybe, though, that´s a helpful combination. There´s nothing like apathy when the alternative would be feeling like I´m going mad.

I´ve just read Jay Haley´s “Strategies of Psychotherapy”, and especially the last chapter: “The art of psychoanalysis”. I´d recommend anyone to read it for themselves, you just need to google it and somewhere you can download the pdf. If it reads like a torture manual, that might be because it is one. The essence of it is that psychoanalysis is intended as a power struggle. All human communication behaviors are seen as strategies to take control of relationships. The analyst has found a way to maintain the upper hand no matter what: All attempts at “manipulation” by the patient (that is: all attempts at eliciting any response at all) are met with indifference. This is frustrating or even torturous for the patient. Apparently the allegedly non-directive therapist then waits until the patient shows “acceptable” communication attempts and rewards them with at least a little reaction. Which would render psychoanalysis of all things an overcomplicated and yet stunningly primitive and brutal form of conditioning. If Haley is correct, it could rightfully be called “the silent treatment” and apparently if you pay money for them, abusive relationships can heal you, though you should otherwise avoid them. Yes, sarcasm. The only thing that comforts me is that at least some analysts are probably unaware themselves of what they´re doing.

Reading Haley´s stuff I feel like Winston when he reads “The Book”. It tells me nothing I didn´t on some level already know, it feels good to be validated, and now that I definitely understand the how, I can´t help but wonder about the why. I mean – just what the hell? Why do we, in a supposedly civilized society, subject suffering, mentally ill people to such things? Or rather: Why can´t we seem to see the evil of this? Why do I feel like a rambling lunatic when I call this practice a form of subtle, refined barbary?

In Haley´s last chapter, there´s a description of typical communication strategies the patient will use and how the therapist will block them. This happens in phases. When I was starting to read, I thought: “Yeah, well, so the patient gave him that emotion, and then he showed him this vulnerability, and then he proved that he needs….well, goodness, I could do better!” Then, I continued to read, and gradually virtually all possible behaviors were listed. One moment I thought of one, the next moment I saw it listed there. Literally all possibilities at taking control or getting at least a fair share of it are snuffed out. Which means that each behavior by the patient is punished. He cannot get it right. If there was one right behavior that would gain him approval, he could use it to take some control. This reminds me of intimidation techniques where you will be yelled at, no matter what, where the rules you are given are just smoke screens and where nothing is predictable. What Haley describes is a far more subtle version of this, but nonetheless it´s cruel.

I think what is most hateful about this is that the patient is morally condemned or deemed psychologically immature for attempting something the therapist does in excess: Manipulation the relationship and trying to control the other. There are so many psychological texts that talk about how manipulative behaviors are pathological symptoms that cause trouble in relationships. There are so many online forums on which people talk about how manipulative their parents, they husbands or even themselves are. Being manipulative is sold to the public as being something sick and bad. The therapist is viewed as a contrast: authentic, capable of non-violent, honest communication, someone who doesn´t do all those “evil”, “pathetic” things the disordered person does. He wouldn´t be manipulative, ever! He enjoys the benefits of this image, while consciously and cold-bloodedly manipulating the ill, suffering people who come to him as he sees fit.

After reading that chapter I felt unable to move. I froze on the inside. Imagine you live in a cage where each of your movements is punished with an electric shock. That´s what Haley´s scenario is, just that we´re talking about mental movements. Once you have internalized the system, thoughts can gain you punishment. Each time you think about how you might break out from your cage, a poison dart of shame, ridicule and impotence shoots you down again. That´s what I mean by “voices” in my head: Imaginary conversations in which I am defeated again and again because they are set up so that I can´t win, and yet I cannot walk away. Not because I´m locked up. I´m hooked up. It´s my own weakness that keeps me there. Being told so from somewhere inside my head again and again, essentially each time when I get angry, is the most poisoned dart of all. It numbs and paralyzes me, as it renders all my struggles so pointless. There are so many great things out there in life I could focus on, and yet I choose to stay here and tilt at windmills! Why am I doing this?! Oh, there´s an arsenal of poison darts to choose from! Maybe I just love to complain? Maybe I need to fixate on something because my small, sad life would be too empty otherwise? Need any more clichés?

Knowing how skillfully I´ve been manipulated and realizing that I still cannot walk away from it, that I continue to slam my head against the same four walls five years after I quit therapy;  in short: knowing how ruined I am – that is utterly humiliating. I can bring it out like this, as anger, I can say: “This is bad, you shouldn´t do this to people, you are assholes!” What I can´t do is acknowledge that I am “people”. That it has happened to me and that it has worked. That I couldn´t beat it and that it continues to make me feel stupid, exposed, inadequate and immature. And do you know where the real fun starts? I know that saying this is a form of manipulation. Making a point of how humiliated I am suggests the opposite because people tend to HIDE humiliation! It makes me look non-defensive, it makes me look as if I could live with myself being the way I am and having been mindfucked the way I was! But I´m not trying to fool anyone! Not even myself! I´m just trying to exorcise all this somehow! And, sadly enough, I cannot even believe myself when I say this. Another thing I have learned: If you say that something isn´t true, that means it actually is! I guess no also means yes to some people. How exactly do people get away with this kind of thinking??

It´s so devastating. I know exactly how nutty and fucked-up this kind of thinking is, and yet it is stuck in my head! Whoever I was ten, fiften years ago – maybe I was difficult, arrogant, callous and insensitive – but BLOODY HELL at least I could THINK STRAIGHT!

This post starts with a new conception of sanity and then somehow drifts elsewhere only to gracefully return to the start

Warning: This post contains reference to childhood sexual abuse.

After days of hysteria and wretchedness I got back something beautiful: My sharpness. That practical, analytical state of mind where I look at problems unemotionally. Where I painlessly slice through myself and don´t shy away from anything that turns up. Where I look ugliness straight in the face and try to stare it down. Where no truth is inconvenient. It must be the specific kind of happiness reserved for me. My style of sanity.

It´s a very threatened sanity, a threatened happiness. It is threatened by fear – fear which leads to lies I tell myself (and others). Trying to live a lie is like trying to juggle too many plates at once. The underlying stress and anxiety only increase, until at some point I realize something is about to crash. I´ll have to let go of some of those plates. At least I might get to decide which ones it will be. Today I chose to tell some pen pals the truth about how well I get on with my thesis and that I consider quitting. It was a symbolic act, it felt like writing a manifesto rather than a confession. It was an act of protest, though oddly enough protest and humility exist closely together in me.

One of my pen pals replied, very sympathetically, and yet I noticed with a certain chagrin that she seemed to interpret my admission of failure and my wish to quit as an act of self-destruction. To me, it is an act of saving myself. It gives me back my sense of integrity. Doing things that have outward negative consequences for you can and often is part of maintaining your integrity, though. Actually, that´s the whole point of integrity.

My sister once did something incredibly brave. When she was working on her dissertation, she had a fight with her tutor, an influential professor. She didn´t want to let go of her concept and looked for another tutor, who was much less influential. If she had stayed with her old tutor, she´d have had to adept her concept to his, but he would have helped her find a job at a university in the US and she could have stayed together with her boyfriend. She didn´t, and now she had trouble finding a job and the two of them are living on two different continents.

Integrity can look incredibly stupid. It isn´t particularly practical to throw away the chance for a great job and a future with your boyfriend for a philosophical idea. It might even be seen as incredibly selfish. Maybe it is. Some psychologists would probably see it as a personality deficit. It is bound to lead to decisions which make you unhappy, isn´t it? It´s almost like self-sabotage. And yet, in some way, it can be the only way to breathe. The only way to not be neurotically anxious. I don´t feel much self-respect when I compare my sister´s decision to my own life.

My cold, unfazed, analytical gaze led me to believe I was somehow evil. Now I think that wasn´t true. I think I was a more loving, more helpful person when I was still the old, sharp me. At least I didn´t need so much from other people. Maybe others see it differently. That´s a harsh thought. I don´t want to make them feel unloved. It seems wrong for me to make anyone I love feel like that. I don´t think I could live with me being like that. And still I cannot breathe if I´m not myself. I have nothing to hold on to and I start to get anxious and clingy and dependent.

Maybe the loss of my integrity started with a high school friend of mine, Lola. I had analyzed and evaluated her with my cold, observant mind, and there came a point in our friendship when I emotionally separated myself from her because her behavior became too frustrating. She was sitting around, staring into the void, and, as it looked to me, letting everyone pity her. In my own, cold way I was angry at her for being like this. I still feel like on some level I have a point. That what she did was manipulative to some degree, and that she never cared very much about anyone but herself. It doesn´t mean that my reaction didn´t hurt her, though. I pretty much put her on ignore. She was still an unresolved issue, though, so after some time I wrote her asking how she was doing.

The reply might be among the worst letters I ever got, and there are actually some. She told me that one little detail I hadn´t known about: That she was an incest victim.

I´m not even sure why that threw me. I´m definitely cold-blooded enough to believe that this doesn´t oblige me to like, actively pity or spend time with her. Maybe it wasn´t this particular revelation, maybe it was just the terrible caricature she painted of me in that letter. My coldness, my bizarre interests and my cruel rationality. The things I got emotional and angsty about. And not to forget the aggression itself that radiated from the letter. I could hear it scream at me. Add to this my shame about my more or less secret sexual fantasies. Any allusions to this I made to her were now ringing back and forth in my head loud and clearly and, given the background, that sound was demolishing.

Amazingly, I did many things right following the letter. I wrote her back, apologizing, validating her view, offering her that she could talk to me anytime (which she, of course, declined). Then, knowing there was nothing any of us kids could really do, I went to the school counsellor and told her about the case. I don´t know what exact steps were taken and what the outcome was. In some ways I did more than her other friends, and in some ways I had done less. I guess I´d do better as a therapist than as a friend. It´s events like this which make me feel like I have nothing to give. Nothing on the emotional front at least.

I think it is ironic that on the one hand I was able to imagine Lola´s state of mind very well once I knew what was going on, and yet on the other hand I was completely unable to feel any closeness to her while she was feeling so bad and in a way it even seemed fake to me. I was very careful not to disclose her real name to the school counsellor at first because I thought that Lola wouldn´t want a secret she kept so long to spread like wildfire all of a sudden. Before I decided to see the counsellor I actually came up with the plan of killing the man responsible for her abuse, but, besides being realistic enough to know I wouldn´t do it anyway, I figured that Lola might not even want this, or at least that she wouldn´t want things to be taken out of her hands. And yet before I knew what was wrong I was unable to react to her behavior the way a friend would. Even afterwards, I was to some extent glad I didn´t have to be around her. I was glad I could try to help her from a distance.

I don´t know what to make of my reaction to her depressive behavior. Was there really something deliberate to it, something passive-aggressive, and did I notice and respond to something the others missed? Or am I simply an incredibly bad friend? (To my defense, Lola never was the best friend, either. For a couple of months, she practically bullied me.) You could probably argue for both. They´re not necessarily mutually exclusive. It depends on how you define friendship duties. Do you have to put up with months of “I´m the queen of darkness and nobody else´s problems matter! Everybody watch me stare into space and try to make me talk!”, even when the background is tragic? And what are you supposed to think when you´ve asked a million times what is wrong, you get told “I can´t tell you”, and when you finally turn away all of her other, not-as-close friends start telling you “you´d look at her behavior completely differently if only you knew her story, but we really can´t tell you!”? She could tell them, apparently. Even my own fucking boyfriend knew before I did, and even he played this bullshit on me, in his uniquely condescending way! He wasn´t even on our school! He barely knew Lola, so how did he learn about it, other than through the rumor mill? Which could apparently supply anyone but me! And did any of those self-righteous fuckers do anything other than pat her on the head and tell me how ignorant I was and how I´d totally forgive all the bullying if only I knew? Nah! It was me, the designated asshole friend, who had to get an adult involved! Because apparently everybody else was just sitting back and enjoying their goose-bumps!

As much as I did for her in the aftermath of this letter, as much did I maltreat myself. The vague thoughts of suicide I´d harbored at the time turned into a definite death sentence. I. Should. Not. Live. I felt like I neither had a right to be happy, nor did I have a right to be unhappy. Unhappiness inspires sympathy and attention and I deserved neither. I was still analyzing my growing depression the way I analyzed everything else, but analysis didn´t show me a way out, though sometimes I believed to have recognized the problem. My mother kept on bugging me what was wrong, but I, following Lola´s pattern now, refused to tell her. It didn´t seem right to let just anybody know what had happened to her. It was something I could only tell a professional who was bound to a vow of silence. Not my mother. It would have been insensitive towards Lola. My mother knew her, after all. Also – could I rely on my mother´s silence? If it made me feel so bad, she´d probably want to discuss it with my father. And who would he talk to? Thus, it took weeks until I finally let my mother in on why I wanted to die.

I realize that, other than self-hatred, my most prominent emotion when I think of all this is anger. I used to think that I´m only angry to ward off shame, but reading what I wrote I wonder to what extent my anger was actually justified. Maybe it doesn´t really matter. Maybe the belated lesson I should take from this is that conventional friendship behaviors are not my strong side. It doesn´t mean that I´m not helpful, or necessarily more harmful than others. Conventional friendship behaviors seem to include gossip, after all. Or maybe the lesson is that I´m a different kind of friend. I´m not emotionally there when you need me, but I´m the kind of friend who still tries to get you help after you call me an indifferent, disloyal asshole caught up in her ridiculous teenage problems. Being able to emotionally detach at the right time has its benefits. It doesn´t mean the rage isn´t there somewhere.

If the emotionally detached analytical state of mind is my style of sanity, though, I should go into a direction where I get to help people rather than emotionally support them. I´m not completely incapable of emotionally supporting people, I´ve actually learned a thing or two, but other than helping, fixing, looking for the right thing to do, that is something which exhausts me emotionally. It eats up resources, whereas analyzing humans and their problems revitalizes me.

I see a connection between my urge to analyze people and my sadism. It is a similar state of mind. In some ways, though, it is also different. I love the feeling that my mind, or, in the case of sadism, my voice, is like a very sharp scalpel which I drag through humanity´s flesh. In the case of analysis, this is typically the only pleasure, whereas in sadism, there is the added kick of the other person´s reaction. Which, in order to have that effect, ought to waver between pleasure and voluntary suffering. It is kind of reassuring to realize that I actually don´t get anything out of analyzing people who react with anger and protest. I don´t react with triumph to that, but with self-doubt. Good to know. So maybe this whole analysis-thing is not as evil as I thought it was. What both experiences have in common, though, is that if successful, they end with a high. I´m feeling righteously tired, nicely relaxed, and I have a hunch that ultimately everything will be alright.