Reactive Patterns
I intend to write about the protests but it’s been a lot, and I’m still in the middle of it. Teaching Shanda to feel safe (enough) in a riot, making trouble at the office about our racism, watching Dog start to limp again even on drugs, the end of the Long Dark and all the associated activity. But I will write about it, when I have an inch of perspective. For now just know that I’m angry, and you should be too. The protests are supposed to help you engage with that anger. Be sure you use them to point it in the right direction. No one is protesting your commute, their protesting police murder. Be angry at the cops rioting for their right to murder, the local politicians who empower them with curfews and funding, and society as a whole that has elected authoritarian violence as a means of oppression.
And if you want to carpool to the riots, let me know. I’m renting a car for a few days in part to make protesting a little easier.
The day job is fine. Got down to 2 SRs last Friday and one of them is brand new, so I should have a restful couple of weeks on that front. I am agitating about racism and that’s probably bad for my career but it’s a relief from being quiet about it. It’s a relief to be angry at someone who isn’t threatening to hit me, or at least isn’t authorized by law to do it.
Shanda has been less than well since Saturday. Nothing major, but enough to make protesting complicated, particularly with all the chemical weapons the police are rioting with. It’s tough in part because it makes you more afraid, and it’s not a great time to be more afraid. But I think you can mix some more anger into your reaction to that fear, and we can practice being angry instead of afraid in public, to make ourselves (eventually) more safe.
Did LI in therapy last week, about the way its difficult for me to submit to harm from a person who is nervous about the way they will hurt me. This came to mind because I had a new and very nervous phlebotomist a few weeks ago, and my brain wanted me to pass out real bad. I came away with a few insights. One is that 4-year-old me believed that I could not have help with my body unless I was unconscious. If I needed medical care – a minor wound tended, for example – it was only available if I passed out. While I was conscious Mother would only offer more pain. I built more accurate beliefs over time, but that belief (not to mention the related abuse) did a lot of damage.
Another thing I learned is that I feel manipulative for wanting to pass out. In the original context I was doing it both to escape, which i have explored before, and to make Mother feel bad. I needed to interrupt her angry projection at me and replace it with some feeling that didn’t cause me so much pain. If I passed out I would get instantly away, and it would help break the projection – it’s harder to read your own emotions on an unconscious face. But if I was lucky it would make her feel bad for hurting me, when she finally noticed it was happening, and then worried she would get caught. In that state she would bandage my wounds, put me on a piece of furniture, maybe even get crackers out for when I came to. So I did do it to make her feel bad, just like she accused me of. I shouldn’t have needed to, but I did do it.
I also saw how, as I got smarter, I moved from making her feel sad and worried to making her feel disgusted. That took longer to get going but it meant that eventually she would learn to avoid whatever behavior I made her associate with disgust. In some ways it was easy because as a narc she can’t keep her feels seperate, and because her only coping skill is avoidance. But it was also hard because it required me to be disgusting.
More specifically it required me to engage with anything she felt disgusted by, so I could direct that disgust later. Sometimes that was things I didn’t care about, like her disgust at my clothes. But sometimes that was hearing her tell a story about sexually abusing me, seeing her fear when other people were disgusted, and then acting sexual while she hurt me so she would connect with the disgust. When I was 4 this happened as emotional reasoning, reacting to the way she and others acted. But it’s a thing I did on purpose when I was older, about a wide variety of things I wanted her to stop thinking about. I adopted many genuinely disgusting traits to make my life better.
This is a place I have trouble getting connection. People want to tell me that she was disgusting while denying my participation in it. They tell me that I didn’t really mean it, hoping to use my motivation as a defense, but I did mean it. Maybe not when I was 4 but certainly later. I was in disgusting situations, willfully participating, choosing to be disgusting. Denying that denies part of me. It doesn’t protect me to draw a fake line between me and the pain, because I already lived it. If you want to offer reassurance, start with seeing where I am, then accepting it. I have to be okay with having been that person, and if you want to support me you do too.
ZiB
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Sent from a phone.
