Personal Responsibility

Shanda had lots of therapy feels today. They still aren’t out yet. Something about feeling validated by C-PTSD descriptions but simultaneously motivated to deny your own pain. One of those things all victims of trauma say, about how theirs doesn’t count because someone theoretically had it worse. We’ll see how that feeling shakes out as you process it. But for now known that I see it’s hard, and I think it’s fine for you to have this feeling and that it will be okay.

I also know, from painful experience, that there is no such thing as a better or worse trauma. There’s trauma that was singular and trauma that was repeated. There’s trauma you were able to get help with and trauma you had to deal with alone. But it’s all trauma. The pain of others is the same as our pain. There is no meaningful way to compare and no reason to try. Mother told me for decades that none of mine counted because some other was worse. But that’s just a lie abusers yell and the world asks you to believe, so that they don’t have to think about your pain. I know it’s not easy to feel that way.

It’s so ingrained in me that I spent my whole childhood imagining ways my life could be worse and believing that most other people were dealing with that. It’s why I felt so incapable, to be in what I was told was a privileged position and still unable to handle life. It’s why I believe that the worst pain I’ve ever felt is less intense than the pain you feel on a typical day. But I’m pretty sure it helps to imagine that all pain is the same, and that comparisons are a tool to deny responsibility, not a tool for compassion.

Had my own therapy today. Talked about the way I feel responsible for 100% of everything everywhere. Not that it’s my fault that things are bad, but that it’s my duty to make it less bad. Which is admirable when I apply it in some way that’s useful and sustainable and a serious disability the rest of the time.

We did an LI exercise about being very young – 4 or so – and wanting my infant sister to be fed. It was one of the times that Mother was hiding in her room, pretending to ignore cries from baby but realistically just making herself upset by trying. I had already checked her diaper and tried bouncing and blankets and talking and touching, but food was what she needed. There was a bottle in the morning that Pete had mixed but that was long since gone. Usually there was milk in the fridge but this was day 3 or 4 of Mother being unavailable so there was no such thing.

Mother had been hiding all day and hadn’t fed her (or me, or probably herself). I moved Alex as far away as I could manage in the house, to try to keep the noise down. I was hoping maybe I could manage Mother’s feelings. If I could just need less, help baby need less, maybe I could calm Mother enough to let her come out. But I couldn’t make baby quiet. And it would be hours until Pete was home. He wasn’t much help but he could at least make Mother leave her room. It would make her angry to be “forced” to take care of baby but at least it would change something.

So I had to feed her. Or smother her to make the crying stop and let Mother get some peace. Things would only get worse until I did. I needed to keep Mother from hurting us for letting this situation persist. There was formula in the cupboard over the sink. Pete kept some there for when he had to deal with baby. I knew how to make it — did sometimes when Mother permitted it — but under the current circumstances I was not allowed. I knew from experience that baby would drink cold formula — she already had earlier today. But I had only ever seen it prepared with heat, and I assumed cooking was necessary. My experience with other foods suggested that warming to room temperature was not the same as cooking, even though things that had cooled to ambient were still edible.

This was before we had a science oven, so stovetop preparation was the only option. The process required climbing up onto the sink, using a tool to pull open the door and drop out the canister, obtaining several ounces of water, getting out a pot, heating, bottling, and then cleaning and returning all the equipment you used. And it had to be done in silence, least Mother detect it was happening. I could maybe do the climbing and fetching in silence. The stove was electric and basically silent. I could probably hide the pot until it could be smuggled into normal dishes. But Mother listened for running water. And getting the pot out without making any noise is a game of Operation where the buzzer is an angry 250 pound narcissist.

So there was a low probability that I could complete this entire task without alerting Mother to my activity. Her response was difficult for me to predict with precision ¹Adult me guesses it would have been her either punishing me later for giving unsafe food to baby or her coming out, trashing my work in progress, and taking baby away with her into her room (which may or may not have resulted in feeding).. But I was afraid to try, for fear of further upsetting Mother. For fear of hurting baby, as I had been told would happen if I fed it incorrectly. For fear of being punished, or for getting baby punished.

So I did nothing. Sat helpless with crying baby and tried not to freak out. Tried not to be angry with baby. Tried to talk baby into what I knew the be true — that keeping quiet and waiting until evening was the best option to get food. Most days Pete came home before I went to bed, and many of those days he expected that I’d eat at the same time he did. Tried to teach baby about how to be quiet even while things were upsetting, because losing control – giving in to the demands of your body – was a sure way to make the day worse.

The goal of the LI exercise is, generally speaking, to help you have compassion for young you. To relieve you of the feeling that you’re to blame for all the pain. To help you be more compassionate toward your current self, and to more easily overcome all the maladaptive coping mechanisms you’ve developed in response to past trauma. And often it works, in that it puts me in a place where I can better work on it over time. Today my therapist clearly hoped that I’d feel like 4-year-old me wasn’t responsible for the care of baby (or Mother, or myself). But it didn’t work. It failed badly enough that my therapist was tempted to disagree with me ²They caught themselves before explicitly communicating such a thing, but I’m pretty sensitive to this sort of interaction, where someone thinks they are helping me and then is surprised or disappointed that I don’t respond as expected. It’s never a great feeling when your therapist is surprised at how broken you are..

It’s not that I think I’m to blame for this situation. Or that I should have been responsible. But I did in fact need to be responsible for it. No one else was. Not Mother, not Pete, not any other person in the entire world. Granted many of them did not know this was happening, but some of them did, at least on some days, and none of them ever did anything to change it. Other people definitely saw me providing an inappropriate amount of care for baby, and rather than helping — even just that one time — they laughed about how “grown up” I was or worse still, chastised me for being “too controlling”. Every interaction I had for two decades told me that I had to be responsible because literally no one else would.

And I still feel that way. Like ultimately it’s my duty to end all human suffering. I know that I can’t. I know that even trying will kill me. That the sustainable level of care I can provide is not even enough to keep me alive, let alone anyone or anything else. But it’s still how I feel.

There’s a lot of pressure in the world to just ignore systemic problems, to limit the scope of our “interference” into family problems or those of any other exclusionary group, to assume that even noticing and trying to deal with the suffering around us is ineffective and perhaps foolish or even harmful. Which slots right into my childhood belief that empathy was a defect I had that hurt other people when I used it. A disability that I might someday grow out of. A selfish feeling based on my own selfish demands, that I might be able to turn off if only I could stop needing so much from everyone else. So it’s easy for me to imagine that other people really can’t see the suffering, and really don’t want to help. To imagine that I have to save the world because no one else cares.

I know it’s more nuanced than that, and that my perspective is distorted. But the fact that my life could exist in view of the public is sort of the reason I still feel like I will never be safe. Like 4-year-old me was responsible. Because no one else cared, and I can’t figure out how to not care.

I was able to imagine that I could have had help. That things could have been incrementally better even if I still had to live daily with abuse. And that’s sort of like hope. It’s not very much hope, but it’s better than none. And it’s the sort of hope I try to sell other people on all the time, so I should probably try to be less hypocritical about it.

My therapist suggested that there must have been a time before I felt so responsible for everything and everyone around me. I guess that’s plausible, though if it’s true it’s before I have narrative memory. I’m not convinced that’s a thing I want. What keeps me from being a terrible monster if I do not feel responsible for the whole world? How could picking and choosing when to care possibly make me a better person? Obviously I don’t know how this works. THat’s sort of my problem. But it’s also one of those things that no one can explain to me — they tell me that I’ll “just know” or that “[I’m] a good person” or offer some analogy that’d defined in terms I misunderstand in the same way.

We also talked about human needs for a minute. They gave me a list of a bunch [PDF 1] and asked me to consider which ones I was currently best at responding to. The answer is sort of “none”. Obviously I’ve arranged for a certain minimum level of need to be met – I haven’t died of exposure or starved to death — but I also don’t really acknowledge or respond to these needs until my short-term survival is threatened. Mostly I try to deal with these by either A) deciding I don’t need them in the first place or B) arranging some sort of logical plan to make sure that, on average, my minimum needs are met. For example, I’ve got shelter in that I rent a house, but if it were just me and I didn’t have shelter I’d probably make do without and try not to let it interfere with the rest of my life. I’ve actually thought about how I might continue working my day job if I become homeless. And food is a thing I regulate more by logically deriving when I ought to be hungry than paying any attention to when it’s true. I’m not technically incapable of feeling most of these things but I have trained myself to ignore them until and unless they are eminently life-threatening (and even then to prioritize other people’s similar needs over mine).

I also have no frame of reference for what “normal” is. I’ve spent so much of my life being hungry or tired or stressed or cold or lonely or whatever that I don’t even know which way normal is from here. Nor can I easily sort out the particular reason(s) I feel bad at any given moment. That’s one of the reasons it’s so hard for me to track my health, because I sort of can’t tell even when I think about it. Am I tired this morning because I didn’t sleep enough or because I didn’t eat or because I ate too much sugar last night and my liver hates me or because I’m depressed or because my O2 is low or because I’m anxious about my plans today or because I’m light sensitive or because I had too much sleep or because I’m sick? It’s all sort of the same to me. And my endocrine system is fucked up enough from all this that there aren’t a lot of days when I actually feel good to even have a point of comparison.

I know some of you have trouble acknowledging your own needs, and responding to them dynamically. We all do, to some degree or another, and some of us have a lot of trouble. Trouble prioritizing them even if you do notice or have them pointed out by someone else. You imagine, like me, that it’s something you’ll fix eventually. Or that it will eventually get better on its own. The the world will change around you and finally let you get back to feeling okay without making any changes. That you don’t know what changes to make, or are afraid those changes will make things worse. That you can’t possible make any changes because prioritizing X would just be an extra thing to do and you’re already too busy and couldn’t possibly add another thing just to deal with X. You aren’t even feeling very X, certainly not enough to make you skip any of the other vital tasks in your life. If any of that sounds familiar you might look through this list yourself, consider that it means actual need when it says “need”, and do the same exercise I am attempting — considering how good you are at dynamically responding to those needs when your body tells you about them. Not how good you are at planning a life where they, on average, get met eventually. Not how good you are at being prepared enough to not have these needs get too bad. But how good you are at actually noticing when you need these things and then doing something to make sure it happens in the immediate future.

For that matter you might do it even if that doesn’t sound like you. Then you might be able to talk to me about how the hell I’m supposed to do it.

If I had to pick one of these I was reasonably good at it would be sleep. It’s easy for me to not regulate sleep, but I also have been paying a lot of attention to regulating it over the past few years. Not just with rules about how and when I ought to sleep, but actually making changes to my daily life in response to being tired (or to being not tired, though that’s much less frequent). There maybe be others needs I’m okay at if I think about it, but the whole-page list feels a little overwhelming to me. I want to accuse it of cheating because it’s full of synonyms, but of course that’s the point — it’s supposed to give you a lot of perspectives on the same basic problem of being a human and keeping yourself alive and sane.

Ben talked to me today. He’s dying about not being able to sleep. Usually he’s dying about vomiting or lack of nerve function or any of 20 others things but right now he’s dying about not having enough sleep. He’s not convinced that sleep schedules are for people like him. In general schedules are not for people like him — or me for that matter — and lots of the advise about sleep and sleep schedules is about compliance with the demands of synchronized capitalism or other nonsense he doesn’t want to participate in. But sleep schedules are a thing, even without calendars or clocks. Yours may not be 24-hours (though many people do synchronize to light exposure), may not be all in one chunk (multiple shorter sleep periods was actually very common before artificial lighting, particularly at high latitudes), and may not be the same every day. But there’s great value in having routines for sleeping and waking, even if it’s just to trick your brain into doing those things at times that are convenient for you. And it’s useful to try things even if they’re only moderately effective, since trying things gives you sense of control. There are also evidenced-based systems to improve sleep, like CBT-I (which is particularly effective for populations with PSTD, which he definitely has even if he doesn’t like to think about it). I spent a huge amount of time getting my sleep under control. I hope I can help him, though experience suggests he won’t talk to me again for months and I’ll never know if anything ever changes.

The other side of the PDF is a list emotions. If you are someone who feels like your emotions aren’t allowed or aren’t normal or aren’t the right amount — which is something basically everyone here was told me at one time or another — you might check to see if it’s on this list. It’s a list of human emotions that you can have at any time for any or no reason at any intensity and still be considered normal. You might not like how it feels, and that’s fine — to want to feel differently than you currently do — but there’s nothing wrong with any of these emotions. You’re probably having one right now. Several in fact. And now. And at every moment between now and the end of your life. You want to, because you like emotions. Even the scary ones. Even the bad ones. Even the overwhelming ones. They’re all yours and they’re all fine.

I mentioned before that I got a tea shelf up [fig 1]. It still needs some wire management, mostly because it sits directly across from my nest [fig 2], but I’m pretty happy with it in general. And it has helped Shanda make tea part of her bedtime routine, hopefully in place of some of the more anxious bedtime things you used to do, or are tempted to do now.

I promised pictures of my box of socks and have finally got them [anim 1] ³Or a bit slower here, if you want to see them individually: https://vodak.vodka/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/Socks.gif. 7 unique flavors and I was excited to try them all. I wasn’t expecting pictures on them but I really like it. And all the colors too. I can see liking socks for the colors. One of the pairs is full of grey fuzz that looks disgusting when rolled out of the tube but feels nice against my feet, and I’m still wearing it now in bed ⁴I’ve never worn socks to bed, at least not unless I was also wearing my coat. Which maybe isn’t surprising since I’ve never had socks, but socks in bed is a thing that comes up in pop culture and I’m excited to have done it now.. I’m not sure about the rubber grips — I’m feeling a little princes and the pea about it about them — but I’m going to try them for a while and see if I get used to it. Unfortunately many of the socks are too small. People see my big feet and assume that accommodating my length will be the main challenge, but often my girth surprises them particularly as I get further in. I have glorious calves and the constant diameter of typical socks is not terribly compatible with the actual shape of my legs. The socks that are fully elastic are okay, but the ones with a restricted upper diameter are very tight — I had to put them on over my pants and slide them up that to get them on for the animation. I might be able to wear them lower when I’m not trying to produce pictures; I have no sock wearing experience so I’ll give it a shot in coming days.

Went to the gym. Only worked out a little — I am not feeling well today — but it was still good to go and the sauna was above 140 for once. Stopped by the office and got all my stuff ready for next week’s move, so I technically don’t have go in to that building ever again. Got assigned 2 SRs today, even though it’s not me week. The guy who is on-queue is quitting. One of the SRs is one he half-assed in a early, didn’t do quite right, and now has come back to bite him — or I guess me. The other is an external report with a good repo, which is the most interesting kind though can be a lot of work. I’ll have to at least poke those tomorrow. C still hasn’t communicated a time for a our robots meeting, which is a little stressful. It’s the off week for D&D but somehow I’ve picked up an extra game and I just no longer get Sundays off. I was sort of hoping to hear from J by the weekend, to maybe get something setup, but it’s not unusual for them to have unpredictable availability so I will just have to wait. I’m still excited to give it a go when they’re ready.

ZiB

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