Author: Skipper

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Déjà-vu All Over Again

Once again, the political stage is mirroring things I went through on a personal level 5 years ago.  This article was particularly poignant, the way certain sentences read to my eyes.

Anger is a useful emotion for people who are in unbearable pain.

“… it is painful to try to convince someone that you matter. “Please care about me,” is a hard argument to make without shame, because the fact that you’re making it means two things are true: they don’t care about you, and you do care about them.

“It’s safer to say, “Fuck you,” than “Please don’t hurt me anymore.”

“…know how it feels to be the smallest voice in a crowd that fucking hates you and will scream you into silence, or turn their backs on you as if you could not make any impact whatsoever on their day.”

“Who do we think we are, asking questions? Who in the hell do we think we are, wanting answers?”

“We are grieving. We are discovering how many people we love won’t stand next to us.”

On another note, a good friend just had HER BROTHER ASK HER TO GO FOR A WALK SO HE COULD YELL AT HER about family issues.

It was kind of hilarious, although not really, because she is the one I had lunch with after that lousy reunion in 2012 and the first person I told what had happened to me and from her reactions I got my first inkling that THIS WAS NOT NORMAL.

She said when he asked her to go for a walk, her immediate thought was of my experience, and she thought, “Oh, I know what this is about!”

Sure enough, his wife is mad at her — probably jealous — and so the one-sided “discussion” was all about what my friend is doing wrong, and was probably meant to pick a fight so the brother would have some justification for the choice he was being forced into making, between his wife and his sister.

Did I mention the wife is a raging alcoholic?  She lived for a year with my friend while the brother continued working in CA, before they moved up here.  My friend saw first hand how bad it was, but put it down to the stress of the life changes, and helped her cover up her drinking from the brother.

So yeah, the wife is triangulating, trying to separate the brother from the sister, because the unhealthy wife feels threatened by the healthy sister and oh, how familiar the dysfunctional pattern.  The brother is appealing to my friend, “the reasonable one“, to please, PLEASE put up with this bullshit dysfunction so the wife doesn’t have to do any real work on her personal issues, and can go on being the missing stair that everyone will agree to work around.

Because, of course, that’s the easy way out for everyone — except my friend.

Being a brother, he knew what buttons to push, but I am proud of my friend for doing a better job than I did — she is literally 20 years older and wiser than I was, and she had my example to learn from — and she didn’t let it become a fight.

We discussed her next steps and she is going to talk to her brother and say something like, “Look, there’s clearly a conflict between her and me.  I didn’t create it, and I don’t know exactly what it is.  You’ve been put in the middle and you’re supposed to “take a side” [literally the way he put it] and it sounds like you don’t want to do that, so you came to me to try to find a way out of this mess.

“I just want to make it clear that you’re talking to the wrong person.  You’re in a tough position and I understand that, but I’m not the one who put you there, and I’m not the one who can get you out of it.  She’s the one who put you there, and if you’re unwilling to make that choice, she’s the one you need to talk to about it.”

I wish her luck.

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Relevant

Unread and irrelevant

“Several times a day I want to put a pixelated arm around a digital stranger and say, “My god, who did this to you? Who gave you these bad ideas? You know it doesn’t have to be this way, right? This way you’re thinking… it’s not really real. Come over here and take a seat. Here is the land where we read whatever we want and we like what we like and we don’t tweet nastiness to strangers. Have some punch and a cookie. Do you feel better?””

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Making it political (Seth Godin)

Well this explains a lot.  Goes well with not dealing with reality, by starting with what you believe or want to be true and working backwards:

“if it could be demonstrated that there’s a more effective or just solution to this problem, would you change your mind?”
“no.”

The difference between an actual discussion (where we seek the right answer) and a political one is simple:

In a political discussion, people don’t care about what’s correct or effective or true. Facts aren’t the point.

…In political discussions, we don’t have enrollment in the scientific method. We’re not open to effectiveness or proof. We’re engaged in a tribal conflict.

…[When] they’ve already made up their minds, they’re not thinking at all. Merely arguing.

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Catastrophic

What separation from parents does to children: ‘The effect is catastrophic’

Notes from here

I have to assume that the reason my father hospitalized my mother twice during my first year was also a catastrophic one.  I sure as hell hope so.  My sister insists that there is no proof of such a thing, and my older siblings suggest that it was something Dad did out of — oh, spite or maliciousness or something, because of course he was a bastard, and of course there could not possibly be ANYTHING wrong with Mom…

This is what happens inside children when they are forcibly separated from their parents.

Their heart rate goes up. Their body releases a flood of stress hormones such as cortisol and adrenaline. Those stress hormones can start killing off dendrites — the little branches in brain cells that transmit mes­sages. In time, the stress can start killing off neurons and — especially in young children — wreaking dramatic and long-term damage, both psychologically and to the physical structure of the brain.

“The effect is catastrophic,” said Charles Nelson, a pediatrics professor at Harvard Medical School. “There’s so much research on this that if people paid attention at all to the science, they would never do this.”

“To pretend that separated children do not grow up with the shrapnel of this traumatic experience embedded in their minds is to disregard everything we know about child development, the brain, and trauma…”

For decades, Romania’s communist dictator Nicolae Ceausescu had banned birth control and abortions, and imposed a “celibacy tax” on families with fewer than five children… the government ended up opening massive state-run orphanages to deal with more than 100,000 children whose parents couldn’t afford to raise them.

At those orphanages, Nelson said, “we saw kids rocking uncontrollably and hitting themselves, hitting their heads against walls. It was heartbreaking…”  As the children grew older, Nelson and his colleagues began finding unsettling differences in their brains.

Those separated from their parents at a young age had much less white matter, which is largely made up of fibers that transmit information throughout the brain, as well as much less gray matter, which contains the brain-cell bodies that process information and solve problems.

The activity in the children’s brains was much lower than expected. “If you think of the brain as a lightbulb,” Nelson said, “it’s as though there was a dimmer that had reduced them from a 100-watt bulb to 30 watts.”

The children…had been separated from their parents in their first two years of life… Their fight-or-flight response system appeared permanently broken… What alarmed the researchers most was the duration of the damage. Unlike other parts of the body, most cells in the brain cannot renew or repair themselves.

The reason child-parent separation has such devastating effects is because it attacks one of the most fundamental and critical bonds in human biology.

From the time they are born, children emotionally attach to their caregiver and vice versa, said Lisa Fortuna, medical director for child and adolescent psychiatry at Boston Medical Center. Skin-to-skin contact for newborns, for example, is critical to their development, research shows. “Our bodies secrete hormones like oxytocin on contact that reinforces the bond, to help us attach and connect,” Fortuna said.

A child’s sense of what safety means depends on that relationship. And without it, the parts of the brain that deal with attachment and fear — the amygdala and hippocampus — develop differently. The reason such children often develop PTSD later in life is that those neurons start firing irregularly, Fortuna said. “The part of their brain that sorts things into safe or dangerous does not work like it’s supposed to. Things that are not threatening seem threatening,” she said.

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Real Wealth

“Real wealth is never having to spend time with assholes.” ~~ paraphrased from John Waters’ commencement speech at RISD, 2015

Here’s the salient part of the actual text:

“… I have figured out how to never be around assholes at any time in my personal and professional life. That’s rich. And not being around assholes should be the goal of every graduate here today.”

And he brings up another excellent concept here:

“…the poor of spirit… can have a big bank balance but is stupid by choice – uncurious, judgemental, isolated and unavailable to change.“

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“Indifference and neglect often do much more damage than outright dislike.”

Kindergarten, 1974/75  (5YO)

One day when walking to kindergarten, I had dawdled along the way, and I was late to school.  We were supposed to arrive during lunch recess, and play in the kindergarten playground until the bell rang for everyone to come in.

This time, when I got there, the bell had already rung and the playground was deserted.  So I knew I was late.  I didn’t know what happened to people who were late but I was pretty sure it wasn’t anything good.  I was terrified of having to walk in there in front of everyone, so I turned around, walked back home, sneaked into the house via the side door, and hid in the basement.  My “plan” was to hide down there until it was time to come home, at which point I’d come out and pretend that I’d been at kindergarten all day.

Mom found me down in the basement at some point – I have a hazy idea that I had come out of the “fruit room” to see what time it was, and had not closed the door fully, which she noticed.  (Knowing how paranoid she was about checking that all the basement windows were locked every single night, I expect there was a lot more fuss when she suspected an intruder in the house, but I don’t remember much about being found out.)

She took me back to school, or possibly walked me there the next day, and they tried to tell me that the bell didn’t always ring at the same time — so that if it ever happened again I’d go inside the school, I guess.

I’ve already written about the day I “ran away from home”, when I was around 4YO.

I “ran away” by going up the sidewalk until I couldn’t see my house any more. Once I was out of sight of our house, I plonked myself down in front of the second house from ours, maybe 300 feet up the hill.

I don’t know how long I sat out there, but I eventually got tired of being a runaway and went home. I found out much later that the neighbor had seen me sitting on the sidewalk in front of their house and called my mom, WHO JUST LET ME STAY OUT THERE. Where I wasn’t a bother to her.

Her excuse was that well, once the neighbor called, then she knew where I was, so that was OK.

Neither of these stories were ever told as cute little kid stories.  You know, the kind that get told when you bring a date home to meet the family.

I suspect this is because there is something really off about them:  the lack of concern shown by my mother for her younger daughter is disturbing.

It might not be as obvious in the school story — it’s easy to miss (or deliberately ignore) if you don’t know that my elementary school was 3/4 of a mile away from our house and my mother sent me, a 5YO little girl,  to walk there every day by myself.

Easy prey for anyone who just might have noticed a little redheaded girl walking alone, at the same time, day after day.

(And let me tell you, after a lifetime of living it, people notice redheads in situations when everyone else is just part of the crowd.)

Her not being inconvenienced was more important than the fact that something horrible might happen to me.

It’s even more appalling when you add in that there was a known or suspected child predator in the area.  This man lived alone, a few doors down from one of my best friends in elementary school.  Every kid who walked home after school in that direction knew that if you climbed the steps and rang his doorbell, he would give you a few pieces of candy.  Decades later, my friend told me that her mom had once cautioned her, “If he ever asks you to take the candy out of his pocket, don’t do it.”

[In contrast, with my sister there was once an elaborate chain of walking, a bus ride, and someone’s mother driving, in order that she attend a Catholic school.  Maybe that’s the “excuse” that was made for my mother’s lack of care — that if it wasn’t a Catholic school, she wasn’t concerned about me getting there.  Of course, that makes her a fine Catholic — but still a neglectful mother.]

Then there was the time one winter I was signed up for after-school ice skating lessons.  This was not long post-divorce, possibly the very first year post-divorce, so I was about 8 or 9YO at most.

The lessons were Mom’s idea.  It wasn’t time for us to spend together — she didn’t participate in or even come to the lessons to watch me skate — but the agreement was that she was supposed to come down to the Auditorium after work, and make sure I got home.

One night she forgot me.  The lesson was long over, everyone else was gone, and my mother hadn’t come to get me.  It was dark, and I was scared, and I didn’t know what to do.

I waited and waited in the lobby, alone and worried, hoping that Dad would come and get me.  There was a pay phone in the lobby, but I didn’t have any money to use it.

Finally, an older gentleman came into the building, and although I was scared to do it, I also knew I had to — I asked him for a dime so I could make a phone call. He took me up to the office area, and they called the house.  I don’t remember much else, but Dad was furious.

And then there was the continual problem of me walking the 4 blocks home from her apartment — by myself, in the dark.

This cropped up over and over again through the years.  Mom didn’t see why she should walk me home, because then SHE would have to walk back in the dark by HER self.

I clearly remember her and Dad arguing about it once, at the front door, after Mom and I had walked home from church one Sunday.  There was a clause in the divorce decree that said that visitation with Mom had to be “reasonable times and reasonable places” — a phrase that resonated throughout my childhood — and that she had to be responsible for our safe transportation to and from.

I can remember Dad clearly making the point that if I was sent to walk home from her apartment by myself, “something” could happen to me.

My mother’s literal, actual, word-for-word response to this was,
“But what if something happens to ME?”

So.  Clearly she was keenly aware of the potential danger — when it pertained to her.  And just as clearly, she was absolutely unconcerned about exactly those same dangers threatening her daughter.

While she was entirely aware of the hazards of a woman walking alone in the dark, she was perfectly fine with me doing it — apparently the idea that something might happen to me didn’t bother her at all, as long as it didn’t happen to her.

In the beginning, she would walk me to the front of the house and then wait for me to go in.  She was supposed to stay until I turned off the light that was left on in the foyer, which would mean that I was safely inside.

At some point, my mother came up with the compromise that she would stand on the uphill corner, safe under the streetlight, and watch me walk the long downhill block to our house, past the wide open, empty park.  This required a new “signal”, which was that I was supposed to flash the porch light on and off a couple of times once I got inside.

God only knows what the plan was if someone nefarious jumped out of the bushes and grabbed me as I walked the rest of the way alone to the house.  (Well, of course there was no fucking plan, other than to keep herself safe at the top of the hill.)

I know that at some point Dad found out about the “compromise”, and he was mad about that too, but I don’t remember what might have been done about it.

My older siblings — who were of course not living at home during this period —  while defending my mother’s loss of custody in The Divorce, once claimed that she couldn’t possibly have been neglectful, saying that she’d have had to be “leaving us in a car to go drink in a bar”, in order to REALLY be neglectful.

Now read this, and look at this little girl’s picture.

April Tinsley: DNA snares man in Indiana girl’s 1988 murder

April Tinsley

DNA evidence links an Indiana man to the murder 30 years ago of an eight-year-old girl, police say.

John D Miller, 59, has appeared in court facing charges for the 1988 abduction, rape and murder of April Tinsley in Fort Wayne, Indiana.

Police matched his DNA from used condoms to evidence found on the girl’s underwear, an affidavit says.

It also states he has confessed. The killer apparently taunted police and threatened other little girls.

The murder

On 1 April 1988, April was abducted while walking to a friend’s home.

Three days later, her body was found in a ditch 20 miles (32km) from her neighbourhood. She had been assaulted and strangled.

Despite finding DNA evidence on April’s underwear during the initial investigation, police failed to narrow down a suspect.

This story literally nauseates me.  It makes my stomach heave.

This could have been me.  And my mother would not have given a shit.

In fact, it’s taken me over a week to write this post, since I first read the news story — because it makes me so sick and appalled.  Because what I realized — with the force of a punch to the gut — was that for my mother, me getting abducted would basically have been a huge positive for her.

  • She would have gotten a ton of sympathy, and she always loved being a martyr and having people feel sorry for her.
  • Me being gone would have eliminated a whole lot of work for her — especially since I was the youngest, which meant that I was the only thing keeping her from being able to do as she pleased all day.
  • Finally, it would have been a “get out of jail free” card for absolutely anything the whole rest of her life.

Given all that, and all the times this issue cropped up over and over again in my childhood — when I read this news story the other day, it suddenly became very clear to me that my mother would have loved for me to disappear.  It would have been great for her, just as it would have been great for her if Dad had died:

I have wondered just what would have made my mother happy at this point in the narrative. She needed and wanted Dad’s income, and refused to give up being provided for in the manner to which she had become accustomed — but she hated Dad, and living in the same house with him, as his wife, made her miserable, and by extension, everyone else too.

The only thing I can think of that would have “fixed” the situation would have been if Dad had conveniently died, and left her with all “her” kids and a big beautiful house, and a big insurance policy, so she would never have to work.

The really sickening part of it is that Mom had to be completely aware of what would have been likely to happen to me if I had been abducted on my way to school, or after the ice skating, or any one of hundreds of times I walked home alone.  She was able to sexualize my father’s love for me and my brother’s pre-teen erection – she got both of those out of thin air, on her own.  So the idea of someone sexualizing a little girl was not something she couldn’t comprehend.  And again, she was obviously aware of the dangers of a woman walking alone.

Yet she let it happen, again and again, over years and years.  And I heard from her own mouth how her safety was more important than mine.

Look back at April’s picture.  Read what happened to her.  And see if you can still claim that my mother was not neglectful.

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On Tuesday morning, I saved my husband’s life.

Zero exaggeration. His heart had stopped.  Sudden cardiac arrest.

I did CPR on him while waiting for the EMT’s, who had to shock him twice to get his heart going again — so no possible mistake or misinterpretation about it.

A day later I interrogated the electrophysiologist, and he said he read the strips from the EMT’s himself, and he said my husband was definitely in ventricular fibrillation, which means his heart had completely stopped. (This will be important later. When talking to the doctor, I had to make sure there was actual hard, inarguable data.)

I have since learned that in sudden cardiac arrest, brain damage occurs after 5-6 minutes without blood flowing, and death occurs in 6-8 minutes.

The ER nurse confirmed that the CPR I did kept him “perfused” — meaning I was moving the blood around adequately to keep his brain oxygenated and free from damage.

The survival rate for SCA outside a hospital setting is less than 10% — and that’s just survival, let alone surviving “neurologically intact” (my new favorite phrase in the whole world).

My husband survived, neurologically intact, and beat those dismal odds, thanks to me.

I not only saved him from dying, I also saved the part of him that is him.

The EMT’s said it; our GP said it; the ER nurse said it, along with countless other hospital staff.  Over and over the EMT’s said, “You did everything right” and explained to me that I was the first two links in the Chain of Survival.  The ER nurse said, “You did exactly what we hope everyone would do.”  (Here we see me amassing evidence from outside authorities to back up my “claim”.)

I am writing this because my reactions to being told, “You saved his life!” again and again over the past few days have been most illuminating.

At first, it was almost annoying. My initial internal response was, “Well, what the hell else would I do?”

Then it turned into saying self-deprecating things, diminishing what I had done. I said things like,

  • “Well, I really didn’t do anything, I just followed instructions.”
  • “We were just super lucky.”
  • “There was a job to do and I just did it.”
  • “Honestly it does not feel like I did much of anything other than follow directions.”
  • “The dispatcher walked me through everything … I really just did what the dispatcher told me to do.”

The one and only thing I was genuinely proud of in the immediate aftermath was that I remembered to run and unlock the front door before the 911 dispatcher told me to. When she told me to, I said “I already did!” and I felt that was the only part I could really claim to have done myself.

The next day I was of course doing a lot of googling and rapid self-education on cardiac arrest, and I sent this message to a friend:

All right, maybe I did save him. I wasn’t sure that the CPR was enough to keep his brain going. Heart, yes. Brain, I wasn’t too sure about that.

“Luckily when you are horizontal like that just the action of squishing the ribcage is enough to force blood through those aforementioned one way valves and keep the brain from dying.“

(Here I found another outside authority to quote — and even then I could only say “maybe”.)

A couple of days after the event, I posted about it in a closed group of online friends. The responses were, of course,  overwhelmingly positive and supportive, because they are decent people and they genuinely care about me.  These are some of the things they said to me:

“holy shit, way to go, YOU! Never been in a situation like that but can only hope I’m as capable as you were”

“You FREAKING rock. But we knew that.”

“takes great presence of mind to handle this situation and you are incredible!!”

“I am so proud of you!!”

“you saved him (YOU SAVED HIS ACTUAL LIFE!!! … accept the accolades, you badass life-saving muthafukka!!!”

“OMG! You’re amazing”

“Damn, that is some scary shit! You were a real champion”

“You’re a strong woman. I think you need a cape.”

“You did so well to “keep the heid” as they say in Glasgow and not lose your shit completely in a panic. Well done you!”

“not many people have an amazing and focused wife”

“I’m going to goddam pieces here for you. I AM PROUD OF YOU.”

“Great job! You are a freakin’ HEROINE!”

“Holy fuckballs! But seriously yay for you keeping your head and the blood flowing.”

“I guess now you know how you react in a crisis. Can I be on your team when the zombie apocalypse hits?”

But the most important comment was made by a friend in The Netherlands:

Nope. You don’t get to downplay this. You played a major part in saving your husband’s life.

I expect that certain people who might read this have by now assumed that I am writing this to make a big deal over myself and brag to them.  Right around “My husband survived, neurologically intact, thanks to me”, I figure.

That assumption would be incorrect on a couple of levels.  First of all, because there is an underlying assumption that to be justly proud of this accomplishment is  a bad thing for me to do.  If one of them had done it, I am sure they would be getting (well-deserved) praise from siblings.  I would not.  Which is pure bullshit.

In fact I suspect any such readers instantly made various excuses in their heads about what I did, to minimize it, to downplay it, to make it so I didn’t really do anything awesome, which is something I’m not allowed to do.

This is why I had the need for the hard data and the outside authority.  To push back against the negativity, the scapegoating, the criticism and minimization and sabotage that I have historically gotten from certain people for my accomplishments.

One of the rationales for minimizing what I did will probably be “so what, Susan’s done this plenty of times.”  Well yeah, she’s a fucking nurse and gets trained and paid to do it.

And right there I am defending against a critical observation that I can reasonably predict will be made, and the one which can’t be refuted with the hard data and the outside authority.  Here it’s at least admitted what I’ve done, but it’s minimized because someone else has also done it.

And you can fuck right off with that.  The EMT’s and the ER nurse have done it a thousand times too, but they all congratulated me anyway.  Because they don’t have a pathological jealous need to minimize what I did.  They are simply happy that my husband is alive and that I did the right things and saved him.  If you can’t do that too, there is something fucking wrong with you.

And this is also the source of the annoyance at the beginning.  Because I already knew EXACTLY what I’d done.  It was fairly obvious I’d saved his life.

But having been trained really thoroughly by a bunch of jealous people, my reaction to having people say it out loud to me was not a feeling of pride or relief; it was annoyance that it now became “necessary” for me to start downplaying it, even though I didn’t want to.  More emotional work for me.

After a couple of days I figured out that I was saying the self-deprecating things as a defense mechanism — to say them BEFORE OTHER PEOPLE COULD DO SO, because it hurts a little less coming from my own mouth than from others.

Who I was expecting to “say” those things?  I could put names to them.  Names I have known my whole life.  Sister, Brother #1, Brother #2, Brother #4.  These negative, self-diminishing things are what I would expect to hear from them, and the positive, affirming things my friends said are things that I cannot actually imagine my siblings saying to me.

It’s a toss-up on those first two, which sibling would be the first to claim it was all God’s doing, which is just another way of taking credit away from me — although Brother #1 is the one who would go further and try to take some credit by saying that it was because THEY STILL PRAY FOR US, because they are such good people as to pray even for us, even though we don’t deserve it.

There is probably some form of “all those online people saying nice things about you don’t really know you” being thought, as well.

I’m not making these derogatory things up.  Every single one of them is rooted in some factual past incident; every one of them has been said and/or done to me by someone in that group, many of them at the worst time of my life.

Secondly, I am writing this for the same reasons as I always write on this blog: in order to help me understand the past, process things that have happened, and work through realizations I’ve made.  This one is a biggie, and I would be hard-pressed NOT to write about it.  And I decided my need to write about it is more important than my biggest reason not to write about it.

Which is of course the “no contact” decision.  It’s been written here before that under stress, old patterns take over.

If he had died, the decision would have already been made.  We already have a pact that if either one of us dies, the other is NOT to notify any of my relations.

But this wasn’t death, although it was the next thing to it.  And so, over the past four days, there have been moments when I thought about letting some of my estranged relations know about this.  Old habits die hard, and at a time of severe crisis, the idea of being able to turn to the people you’ve know the longest, and having them love and support you, is still a very attractive fantasy.

And I thought through it some more, and decided against it, because it IS a fantasy.  If they read it here on the blog, well, as I said it’s more important to me to write about it for myself, than to let them know about it.  I don’t care what they think, I don’t care what they do, nor what they know or assume or conjecture.

Because interestingly, after realizing what voices I was “hearing” — and subsequently telling them to all fuck off, both mentally and through writing this piece — the voice that I can finally hear is my Dad’s.

Dad’s “voice” is now not silenced by my own self-deprecating words, or those I can imagine coming from others — it is now amplified, by what my real friends, and even the strangers, have said.  I know what I would hear from him today, if I could tell him what happened, because it is echoed by the normal healthy people around me now.

And I see that his is the voice that the others have always been trying to silence with the things they’ve said (and not said) — because his is the voice that has always been hugely proud of me.

ETA (2 days later) — To clarify:  I’m certain if my siblings read this, or their kids, or their friends, or whoever, they will insist that “they’re not like that!”

Maybe they aren’t.  It’s been several years since I’ve interacted with them, after all.  And maybe they aren’t like that — to other people.

“…even everyone’s favorite “nice guy” (or girl) can be an abuser. Sometimes abusers are really nice and funny (until they’re not)... Sometimes they’re really sensitive, caring people who lose control once in a while…  Sticking with the pervasive idea that abusers are monsters makes it easier to overlook… otherwise regular folks… People are complex and complicated, but they’re rarely all bad, all the time…

They will defend themselves, and others will defend them, by saying that what I have written is wrong.

Nope.  It is not wrong, and no one can say that it is wrong.

Because — and this is one of the crucial points that has always been missed — this isn’t only about THEM.  It is about HOW THEY TREATED ME.  It is about my experiences at their hands.  The people who I imagine, who obviously still have hold on some real estate in my head, are based on my history, my experiences, my memories of how they acted towards me.

I have positive memories too, but not as many — and they are pretty much overwhelmed by the shitty things they did to me at the worst of times (and echoed by somewhat less shitty things, done over decades).

“… there can be a lot of happy times. A lot of calm times… A lot of fun…

“If someone you know says, “But I loved them and I miss them,” the correct answer is not, “Are you an idiot?” It’s something more like, “Yeah, we can love and miss people who aren’t good for us and who can’t be in our lives. It sucks, but it gets better with time.”

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Can we call it something else?

Notes from here:

“Let’s talk instead about the psychological concept of toxic masculinity. Let’s talk about our pushing boys into dominance, suppressing emotions, devaluing women and obsessive self-reliance, often interlinked with violence.

“A couple of weeks ago, CMS teacher Justin Parmenter wrote an article objecting to carrying a gun as a teacher and pushed for increased socio-emotional support in schools. He got a response from a father mocking his physique, challenging his manhood, dismissing Justin’s thoughts and calling him a “wuss.”

“What was ironic about this father’s response, however, was that this limited perspective of manhood and attempts at shaming Parmenter are symbolic of the toxic masculinity linked with these shootings.

“Be clear, masculinity is not automatically problematic. Wanting to take care of one’s family, sports competitiveness and being devoted to work are some traditional traits that can be positive.

“Yet toxic masculinity is often linked with substance abuse and domestic violence…

“I imagine there are men reading this who are thinking that the traits I mentioned are what makes them successful. And that is the seduction of toxic masculinity. It can “work” in our society, until it doesn’t.

“…The thing about emotion suppression is that if you don’t tell on your disease, it will eventually tell on you.

The push to mask pain, shame, fear and insecurity with limited responses like anger or intellectualization is lethally toxic.”

Other stereotypically masculine traits, such as self-reliance and emotional repression, are correlated with increased psychological problems in men such as depression, increased stress, and substance abuse.

I suppose the name for it comes from the fact that it is the traits that are traditionally considered masculine (or “macho”) that are toxic: toughness, dominance, self-reliance, and the restriction of allowable emotion to one dimension, which is anger.

These lead to misogyny and promote violence, including sexual assault and domestic violence, which are mostly performed by men against women.

So “toxic masculinity” doesn’t just apply to men attacking other men for perceived weaknesses.  It might not be so bad if they limited their stupid aggression to each other — but toxic masculinity leads men to attack women too.

The concept of toxic masculinity explains a lot about our family situation, as well as the end of my engineering career.  Men who feel entitled to treat women as decoration, as tokens, as things to leer at in the office — those men are the reason I left engineering, and leaving was the only option I had.  When you are being treated poorly by someone who will not change, leaving is your only healthy choice.  I learned that the hard way, twice:  once in engineering and once in my FOO.

(I suppose there was a third event, actually, in my leaving the Catholic Church — an organization that treats women and children poorly and will not change — although that was far less traumatic for me since I never fully bought into it in the first place.)

But it’s not only men who can be toxically aggressive toward someone they consider “less than” or “not one of us”.  I came to recognize that that “family” is full of men — and one woman — who feel entitled to belittle a younger sister when she says she has been hurt; to tell her how wrong she is about everything; who write angry, attacking comments and emails, instead of asking or listening; and go behind her back to others to make her look bad.

I have brothers AND a sister who have made nasty remarks about my looks; challenged my womanhood (I am wrong and a failure since I chose not to have children); dismissed my thoughts, reasoning, words, emails, blog; and while I didn’t exactly get called a “wuss” because I’m not actually male, I did get told things like “you gave up too easily” on the career, and I should have just “gotten over it” and buried all that pain that Joe and Susan deliberately caused, for the sake of the family.

In other words, I wasn’t strong enough.  Maybe I wasn’t “man” enough.  But it’s not only men who can behave this way.

I have one brother that I know of who abused his wife:  and lo and behold, the cycle of pain and unaddressed issues continues to the next generation.

“If you do not transform your pain, you will with 100 percent certainty transmit it to others.”

His daughter called me almost three years ago, wanting to get away from her own domestic violence situation.  Her husband had repeatedly held a gun to her head, knocked her down, and finally kicked her out of the house without her phone.

Fortunately she had my phone number in her wallet, and she called me, instead of anyone else in the family, because she didn’t want to listen to a bunch of judgemental bullshit.  I just sent her some cash, and told her she needed to go to a battered women’s shelter.

She said in surprise, “That’s not what I am.”

Of course not.  Because fish don’t know that water is wet.

A long time ago I learned this truism from a knitting friend:  “When you’re in it, you can’t see it.”

I thought I had a loving, supportive family — until I didn’t.  Until it was painfully clear, even to me, that I was no longer in it, I was not “in the club” — what I was, was a useful scapegoat.

And even then it took me 10 years of repressing my pain, and another 5 of working through it, until I got to that truth, and fought with it, and argued with it, and finally accepted it — and a life that is now free of that  scapegoating, undermining, criticism, and rejection.

The next day my niece’s husband “wanted to talk” and she went back to him.  And that’s not at all uncommon:  battered women generally make 5 or 6 attempts to leave before they finally succeed.

I haven’t heard anything from her since.  I’m guessing he told her something along the lines of, if she really loved him, she would cut off contact with me, as I was obviously trying to break up their marriage by supporting her.

Well yes, I suppose I was.

When you are being treated poorly by someone who will not change, leaving is your only healthy choice.  But it’s a hard, hard lesson to learn — especially when it involves people you loved, and who you thought loved you.

I hope she’s OK, wherever she is now.

Posted on

How to survive gaslighting

Notes from here:
“What’s happening on a national level is activating and retraumatizing a lot of people who have been gaslighted in the past. The crazy-making, mind-bending, massive confusion-inducing effects of our current administration’s recklessness with the truth and disregard for verifiable facts is creating an emotional and psychological whiplash.

Four survival strategies:  check, check, check, and check.

Remain defiant

…anger protected me, because I knew what I knew. It couldn’t be erased. Being defiant does not make you difficult. It makes you resilient.

Recognize there will never be accountability

The person who is gaslighting you will never be able to see your point of view or take responsibility for their actions. They will never get it. They will never say, “Oh, you’re right – you have a point.”

Acknowledgement is not on the cards. And asserting yourself is not just useless but harmful. Because the person gaslighting will never be able to respond to logic and reason – and so you have to be the one to recognize that logic and reason can’t be applied.

Let go of the wish for things to be different

The wish for things to be different is very powerful and inoculates you to the tumult. It allows you to continue to believe logic and reason will prevail. You want to believe the person will change. You want things to make sense. But they won’t. You want to feel you are on safe ground. You have to let go of this wish. Because things will never make sense. You will never be heard.

Develop healthy detachment

“You feel confused and crazy. You’re always apologizing, wondering if you are good enough, can’t understand why you feel so bad all the time, or know something is wrong but can’t put your finger on it. You thought one thing, they say another; you can’t figure out which is right.”

A tip she offers for handling things is to write down what actually happened in the conversation. “Once you are not flooded with emotion, you can reflect rationally. Look at the conversation and see where it took a turn.”

When someone is so certain about what they believe and they keep on insisting and trying to convince you – over a period of time – it erodes your own perception. And having to verify reality is in itself destabilizing.

With gaslighting, it feels as though the ground is always shifting beneath you. There is no center of gravity. And while we’re being told up is down and black is white, the only way to make sense of it is to remain resolute. Let people have their alternative facts. You’ll stick to reality.