Irrational Investment

A bit of required reading: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mPOZzYlxh04&t=10m0s From the 10 minute mark, to about the 18 minutes where he starts to talk a out the next topic – grounding. If you identify with complex trauma or CPTSD symptoms I would recommend you watch the rest ¹You can still skip the first 10 minutes – it’s not very relevant if you haven’t watched the last 7 videos. If you do watch the rest be prepared for a bit of corporate schilling for his religious employer, including a line of product placement and a prayer at the very end. You might note the way he distinguishes between theoretical skills and … Continue reading too, but at least watch those 8 minutes just so you can understand the relationship I’m talking about for the next several paragraphs.

Imagine that I am attempting to establish this sort of relationship. Both in that I need people to do it for me, and in that I can help do it for you if you’re someone who needs it.

I need people to do it for me. I need to be convinced that the ideal carer for me is not someone who ignores me when I’m stressed. I have a lot of training that tells me people paying attention is dangerous, and that many times care comes at a great price to me or the carer, so isolation feels safer. I am sure that my need is too great and that I can’t reasonably expect someone to like me if they actually knew me. That I couldn’t trust them to help me even if they know me. But isolation isn’t the solution, it was the problem – that no one helped me – and I need to do something different to fix it. I need someone to teach me how to do it better. Not teach me the theory but provide a space to practice against a background of reliable safety and ongoing interest and care.

Part of that requires me to share enough of my life to let you understand what I’m thinking, which I’ve been trying to do for some time. And part of that involves you noticing what I need and talking to me about it. Pushing up against my flawed thinking so I can understand how things could work better. Helping me figure out where boundaries lie in the places where I was asked to not have them. Paying attention when I need to rant, demonstrating the care and interest I still don’t really believe is possible. I want you to tell me when you think I’m having a hard time, to help me manage my bad reactions when I’m stressed, to be interested in how I’m doing and have your own opinion on that topic.

And some of you could use me to be irrationally invested in you. I already am but I could be a lot better at it if you shared more about your daily thinks and feels. Some of you hold me at arm’s length even as I pay attention, leaving me guessing from very low information, excluding me from all the bits you are most worried about. You imagine you are protecting me from the burden you impose. Or protecting yourself from thinking about the parts of your trauma that crop up when we are close. Protecting yourself from being triggered, from feeling hurt, from acknowledging all your pain. From being rejected when someone sees the real you.

But you need me, or someone like me, just like I need someone in this same role. No matter how well you understand the path out you need someone to help you practice better relationships. Just knowing the answer is nothing like having practiced the doing. You need someone who can truly know you, who can (mostly) keep their shit and yours seperate, who you respect enough to actually listen to, who you can believe is safe. Someone who you keep close enough for them to see you, and who you choose to believe can help you. You can demand this person be safe and reliable in any way you need, but you have to decide to engage with them and to do the sometimes hard work of practicing healthy relationships.

You can do some of that in a lot of different relationships. You can join groups that make you feel safe and invested in, where you can do exciting things with people who care for you. You can learn to feel safe getting help in a specific context and providing connection to other people. You can get certainly types of support and healing from romantic relationships and from other structures in your life. But you also need a least a couple of intimate, non-romantic relationships, particularly if you never had them, or never felt safe in them, or never got what you needed from them. You need to practice relationships to figure out how to do them in a healthy way, and you need to maintain a few very close ones to have access to the support we all need for our whole lives.

I’m not suggesting either of those roles is easy. As the video suggests our closest relationships sometimes require a bit of irrational engagement, ateast to get started. And I’m not suggesting that you need to put me in either role. I am asking you to consider who in your life is filling this need for you, and who you want to be filling it for. And I’m asking you to imagine that I am looking for more of both roles in my life.

Did robots today. Fought with WiFi for longer than was entertaining. The automatic configuration of WiFi Direct and those ancient phones make for some challenges. As does the fact that no one is bothering to engineer sharing features into WiFi the way we have with Bluetooth, or the fact that Windows couldn’t be less interested in helping you diagnose layer 2 issues. I did get it going eventually but it made me sort of pissy. Chatted with Stochastic about encryption and the painful reality of parental rights and dependency court. Saw E and thought for a second about choosing classes but only got halfway to useful discussion. Chatted with S about the balance of focus and avoidance.

I’m down one extra person in my house. And I’m now confident the other two are leaving tomorrow, though it’s not clear when. I missed today’s activity in favor of robots but that seems okay to me. Got a little down time alone with Shanda in the late afternoon, and I got a good walk with Dog by myself early today. Didn’t get to much productive work after that but I think it was a good use of the day.

Watched S2E1 of Killing Eve (BBC). The show is really good at parallel stories about coping. At playing a clear villain as innocent in a way that makes sense. I see a lot of you and your anxiety in Eve. Her stress and coping and absolute insistence on isolation. And I fear seeing a lot of myself in Villanelle – how her developmental trauma is both a disability and a skill, how it makes her both innocent and and dangerous. It clearly shows you V abusing E, and how E’s issues make her vulnerable to it, but between the style and the symmetry in the storytelling and the intensity of the gay it will make you want to root for them as a couple. You really should watch it. S1 is short and hot and full of feels and beautifully constructed, and I want to talk to you about it. Also the theme song is great, though it requires a subwoofer.

I thought about the way I don’t like people telling me that I might need to be protected. When I hear it fear both feeling hurt and being abandoned. I hear it almost as a threat – perhaps not that you will hurt me but that you know I will be hurt. And I resent all the times I was hurt before and couldn’t get help. All the times I was told I would need protection or help but didn’t get any. All the times I was taught that I could only ever depend on myself, and that the amount of help I could get was inversely proportional to the amount that I needed. How I learned to need none so that I couldn’t be abandoned or betrayed. I can see how my response misunderstands the assurance being offered when someone tells me I might feel hurt about a thing that has already happened. But I also think it might help to get reassurance about being alone with it, since that’s the part I feel like isn’t under my control.

I was thinking about pants as armor and pockets as survival. I remembered that I endured shorts so I could have more and bigger pockets (in the 1900s, with cargo shorts). But I was punished for it. Per the rules I couldn’t wear boots or evenong socks with my shorts, so I had to lean to not care about my legs and feet being cold. It was the right call at the time, when I needed to carry survival gear, but I was and is costly. It’s really hard for me to not be prepared for a night living rough anytime I’m away from my house. It’s why I can’t give up my denim hip waders or my knife or my $4. It’s why giving up a leather belt was so hard, even though I like suspenders – a few feet of leather is a useful survival tool. I was punished in elementary school for not having winter gear, when I should have been helped. I punished myself by not having winter gear in high school, choosing supplies over comfort and sometimes over physical safety. It’s no wonder I can’t give up my jeans or like warm feet. Caleb used to tell me about the joy of warm, dry feet but I could never believe him. My world didn’t allow for such luxury – I needed to stay alive and numb feet are still alive.

I also wanted talk about my face colors for a moment. I am not trying to participate traditional social signaling, or to produce a change to my face for the purpose of enhanced attractiveness. I imagine it as self-expression but in a broader context than beauty. I imagine it as art – work that draws inspiration from more common uses of makeup but that isn’t serving the same goals. And maybe as art that’s research into communication, and about ways of sharing that don’t depend on direct analogy.

@BPS replied to my questions about ruination, noting it was a human thing. But I know lots of lies about humsn things, and I find that very few people are willing to attempt to describe them in terms that aren’t self-referential. It’s one of the reasons I imagine my colorful eyebrows might have something to say, particularly when used in different ways than we’ve been taught to expect.

ZiB

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Sent from a phone.

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