abuse

A Conflicted Society – the Dreamer, Part #2

Jeff/neighsayer10 Comments

My family was always involved peripherally or otherwise, in psychology. My mother was a great reader, we always had copies of “Psycho-cybernetics,” “How to Win Friends and Influence People” and such around the house, “I’m OK, You’re OK” – self-help classics. In my late teens and when I returned home in my early twenties, it had gone to Alice Miller, Jon Bradshaw, ACOA. This was the early 1980s. My brother was working in an emergency shelter for teens and getting his degrees, and one sister did that sort of work as well. Both of my sisters were big readers and were on voracious journeys of psychological self-discovery. I’d say the elder was more based in the classics, Freud, Jung and R.D. Laing, and the younger loved Alice Miller during that period – I’m embarrassed to say I don’t know who she’s been reading since. So this is what all the conversation was about in that time, around Mom’s house. Suffice to say, I came by this obsession honestly.

Mom had been taking in foster kids, teens. Screwed up kids were our world, either we worked with them, or we were still busy being one, like me. Or both, I guess. We’d also had some sexual abuse in the family.

During this period, talking Bradshaw, ACOA (would invoking Suzanne Summers’ name help or hurt here? She was the voice for Adult Children of Alcoholics, wasn’t she?), and Miller, it seemed that there were many sorts of abuse, and that almost no-one escaped them all. After all, we all have problems, and this whole survivor movement was based in the idea that it was childhood trauma that caused our disorders. Physical, sexual, verbal, emotional abuse, abandonment, alcohol and substance abuse, divorce, there were books, support groups and movements for all of these traumas . . .

. . . and it was starting to look to me that lines were being drawn between them all, I had a creeping feeling that everybody, despite the support, was somehow on their own, fighting their parents’ particular brand of abuse. It began to look to me like all parents were abusing their kids, and yet no-one was saying that, no-one would say all parents were abusive. It was starting to feel apologist in that way. Most parents are good, they all mean well, but a certain percentage of them are violent. They all mean well, but a certain percentage of them are drunks. They’re mostly OK, but some are child rapists. Mostly, they’re good folks, they’re doing the best they can, but some abandon their kids, and some are emotional blackmailers. Parents are good and selfless, but many are verbally abusive. Now, I know this is to some degree the ranting of a developmentally arrested person, but it’s all adding up, isn’t it? I was starting to sense the presence of a common denominator.

I wish I could say when the exact moment was, when the crux of the matter occurred to me, that punishment was abuse, that punishment, despite its legitimate status was, uh . . . scientifically, functionally . . . made of the same stuff as abuse. I can’t, though. This wasn’t the moment, but maybe it was the catalyst: when I moved from my rooming house in the town where I took my trade school and home to Mom’s house, I was twenty-three, and I ran into a girl I’d known before, during my lost years. It was love at first sight, well, first sight after several years.

She was twenty or twenty-one, she was just separated from someone, and she had a little boy. He was around one year old. It wasn’t long before we had bought her parents’ condo and we lived together for three years, and I brashly, foolishly took the role of the boy’s father, as if he didn’t already have one. These are regrets, I look back on that time and I’m embarrassed and horrified, the whole period seems like a bad dream. Taking on the role of husband and father with that prefabricated family was like putting on a suit of clothes or something. It seemed to me that I knew everything about it, automatically; it felt like a programmed thing, like I was living on autopilot, and I barely remember it now. I don’t think I was actually conscious. But one episode I do remember.

She was emotional and kind of volatile, and I had come home from work one day and found her at critical mass, waiting for me at the front door. The toddler was driving her nuts, and it going to be my turn.

“He’s not doing” something, or “He won’t do” something else, she said. I don’t remember much, I’ll warn you. I wasn’t high or anything, I wasn’t smoking during my time with them, but drinking weekends. I was just unconscious. I wasn’t angry before, I don’t think it had been a bad day or anything, but as soon as she complained about her son, as soon as she gave me a target, it triggered me. I was instantly pissed off too, and I marched into the house, yanked that two or three year-old’s pants down and smacked him several times, hard. That is the end of that fragment of memory, I’m afraid, I can’t say how we got through that, what the rest of that evening was like, but I think the spell was broken. I think after that I realized that I was living someone else’s pre-programmed life. That was nearly thirty years ago, and I’m pretty sure I’ve never hit another kid.

His mother and I went our separate ways, and a few years later I met my present and only wife, the mother of my kids and by the time our girls were born in the mid-nineties, the thought had come. There would be no punishment, at all.

The lesson of my poor little rent-a-kid, the guilt of that beating, and the unconsciousness, the feeling of having been . . . used, there is no other way to say it, used by some generational repetitive process with a life of its own, that lesson stuck with me. I hated that feeling. It cropped up on other occasions while my girls were young, while my wife and I were fighting over our child-rearing (I mean, what were the odds my wife would come to all the same conclusions as me, and on the same schedule?), that feeling of repetition, that feeling of doing just what my parents had done. It was like Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence, or some evil Deja Vu experience. I hope it’s not necessarily true, but I worry that the feeling meant I was doing something terribly wrong. Of course I did. I was a full-time pothead through those years, always out in space, emotionally unavailable, physically unavailable for half an hour or more at a time, every three to four hours, for a smoke. The smoke was there to make that feeling go away, but of course it only operates on the feeling and doesn’t change anything concrete.

Still, though. Those are problems, things that will have their impacts on the kids, bad things that will leave some scars, but even so – most kids get stuff like that, and punishments and all that they mean as well.

You know, maybe addiction is a fractal sort of thing, a theme that runs all through the lives of folks like me and the people around us. I think maybe that feeling of unconscious repetition was the same one that made it so easy, and made it seem so natural to slide into that first family situation, with my live-in lady and her little boy. Feeling automatic, feeling that I could know how to do it, having never studied it, having never put conscious thought to it for a minute, it was like my first high, the free one, the best one, the one you end up losing the farm trying to recapture. Did I learn to associate that sense of comfort with a trauma, like a kid who gets wasted and crashes the car, killing a loved one? Was whooping that kid’s ass my car crash, and now the feeling of repetition and familiarity, that sense of life as it has always been fills me with terror and guilt?

Whatever it is, I have tried very hard to be a father and a husband consciously this time out, and that has had my wife and I swimming against the current since the kids were born, fighting the grandparents, at odds with our friends, the parents around us, and fighting our own urges for control, because we feel control requires force. If it weren’t for each other, meaning all four of us, which it always has been, it would have been a lonely journey.

It hasn’t been though.

My first experience as a father was a trauma, a horror. This time around has been the exact opposite.

A Conflicted Society – the Dreamer, Part #1

Jeff/neighsayer10 Comments

I’m not special. I’m no genius (no shit, Sherlock!), nobody would describe me as ‘brilliant’ or ‘visionary’ – quite the opposite. I mean, I don’t expect I’ll be noticed or remembered for my ideas. I may never achieve my first big dream, of having anyone call me a writer. Those are just fantasies, I know that. I’ve never taken those dreams seriously, they’re just embarrassing little voices that perhaps we all have in some form or other, and while we’re in our right minds we don’t converse with them. Plus, every sane person has doubts about themselves and their ability to perceive and deal with reality, and therefore has doubts about their whole worldview. Please note, I said ‘sane person.’ Of course many people appear not to doubt themselves at all. When it’s more than appearance, when they really don’t, they’re not sane. Well, of course, sanity is relative, but those folks are not sane enough for many social responsibilities, like philosophizing or voting.

So maybe what I call My Insight, or My Epiphany, (nothing delusional about Capitalizing your Thoughts, is there?) that punishment is damaging abuse and misguided in all of its applications has some of its roots in my fantasy, that it is born from grandiosity and immaturity. I think, in psycho-babble terms an unwillingness to accept the world as it is and ourselves as we are is ‘immaturity.’ I did have a psychiatric assessment done when I was fifteen, and ‘dreamer’ was the diagnosis; it didn’t take a lot of years for me to accept that description, and that was almost forty years ago now but I imagine I’d assess the same way today. I accept the label, but still immaturely reject the premise. A society will survive without noticeable impairment if some small percentage of its citizens are not pragmatic. No harm, no foul. To paraphrase the great mariner poet of my youth, a yam, what a yam, and that’s all. What a yam (say it out loud).

I was depressed and unmotivated when I was checked out at fifteen, and a puritan at the time with the discovery of marijuana still a few years off. It was just that point in high school when we are to start making choices about what sort of career path to take, wood or metal shop, science or law, and none of it appealed to me, I was dreading adulthood and work. When you’re fifteen, a few things apply: one, I thought a thirty or forty year employment was forever; and I couldn’t seem to find my way out of a teenage rebellion that I somehow knew could bring no change. There was a primal scream of “NO!” welling up in me, but no imaginable reward to come after I let it out.

So I rebelled, dropped out of school at the legal age to do that, and did nothing for several years until I simply picked up where I left off, chose a trade and went back to school. It had taken me five years of dependency and poverty before I saw any upside to having a job and leading a pedestrian, working man’s life. During those years I discovered I was a poor drinker, too many blackouts, too little control, and I knew that couldn’t be a regular thing for me. It still was, to some degree, throughout my twenties, but in those lost years of my late teens I also discovered the heathen devil-weed, which seemed to make life tolerable for some thirty years. By the end of that dalliance though, it was just never enough, and I gave that up.

Now I have this. Now, in order to face what depresses people, what depresses me in particular, life’s apparent meaninglessness and life’s even more apparent hopelessness, I have this idea, that punishing is causing all of our problems.

It seemed to me at some point that what I just called ‘life’s hopelessness’ was really just My Hopelessness, and perhaps not only mine, but many people’s, and if it was personal and individual like that, maybe there was something for it. The ‘hopelessness of life’ – that is existential, a parameter we have to live within, but Our Hopelessness, that’s a little more down to earth, perhaps that is somehow . . . manageable. That’s not how we get there, though, let me back up a little.

When a young person gropes with the question of meaning, at least the way I recall it, it’s phrased thusly: Why are we here? Towards the end of my adolescent sabbatical from life I was reading some philosophy, some religious stuff, and sometimes consuming small, five dollar bits of paper or semi-toxic mushrooms on the weekends, and for a stretch in my twentieth year every weekend would bring about a new perspective, I would have a new philosophical or semi-religious idea. Still depressed then, I needed an explicit reason to keep breathing and going to work, and I worked through several of these hallucinogen fuelled constructions in fairly rapid succession. I’ve got to say, despite the suspect nature of the mental states that seemed to produce them, some of the thoughts from those weekends have stayed with me for life. One of them was this: ‘why are we here?’ struck me as a pointless, meaningless question. People from all over ask it, people from, here, here and also there ask it, and truly, if we were somewhere completely elsewhere, another planet, another universe, another form, we could still ask it! What is the meaning in asking why am I here, when I would ask it wherever I was? So after that mental leap, I started to think that the surface meaning of this universal question wasn’t the point of it, and certainly wasn’t the sense of it, so to understand its appeal would require a subtext, and that goes to the person asking it. Why do we ask it, is the proper question, and the answer is, because we’re sad.

‘Why am I here’ is not a question a happy person asks, and it isn’t a question one asks when they’re somewhere they want to be. But now, again, it’s personal, it’s at the human level. ‘Why are we here?’ – that is cosmological, religious. But ‘why am I sad?’ that is in the here and now. That we might have a chance to answer. If we look at meaninglessness, hopelessness and the mystery of why we are here as universal, philosophical, as pertaining to some predetermined Human Condition (not all grandiose, Capitalized Thoughts are mine), then they appear unanswerable. But what if that’s not it? What if universal sadness either isn’t universal, or at least isn’t necessarily universal?

What if the near universality of sadness and hopelessness has a nearly universal real life cause, in the here and now? Or to put it another way, what if we could imagine a human being who was happier, a person who might never ask ‘why am I here?’ In what ways would this person’s life have to be different from the rest of ours? This question must have been lying dormant in me when I finished my interrupted education, got my trade, and returned to my home town to take up life as a normal, working adult.

A Conflicted Society – Police Brutality

Jeff/neighsayer1 Comment

Violence is a problem, right? No? Depends? Depends on who’s doing it and why, the ends justify the means, greater good and whatnot? Wait a minute, I need to start again. An attitude like that will get you nowhere.

Deep breath, and a pause.

OK.

In our society, the police are intended to be a force for good, set against the forces of all things bad, that is, crime, larceny, violence, all manner of negligence. Of course, it works as well as anything that we force; it “works” as well as forceful discipline of children works, which is to say that it “works” in these ways –

  • It works best on the criminals with the least intelligence. That is to say, a child of one or two can be fooled that the only way to avoid the penalty is not to misbehave – but by three or four, they know better. Many criminals re-learn this lesson when they escape the consequences of their very first crime, because discipline works best when there is a certainty of being caught, and it begins to fail when as soon as that certainty does.
  • It works best on the criminals with the fewest resources, which is to say, it can be difficult for a poor policeman to punish a rich criminal, like the poor gardener hoping to control the rich employer’s child, who may wield more power to adversely affect the life of a poor and dependent adult more than the adult can the wealthy child.
  • It works on particular individuals in particular incidents, and stops the particular individual’s crimes from continuing, at least during the period of their detention.

Of course, it “works” in these ways, because of the force the police bring to the task. Adult criminals, especially violent ones, are not likely to line up for their punishments because they are politely requested to. Along with detection and investigation, force is what the police get paid for. I’ve made the point elsewhere that no amount of force will ever be a permanent solution for society’s ills, that in fact, force and violence exist on the “causes” side of that equation rather than the “cures” side, despite that the “good guys” are doing it. Having said that, and bearing in mind that most of us don’t agree with that thought, the police are the folks that we pay to use force and violence for good. And as long as it works, it’s all good.

Well, as long as it works well, as long as the police can’t be shown to have crossed the line and used too much force and/or violence so that a conviction can’t be obtained on a guilty suspect. As long as the police don’t use even the normal, acceptable amount of force and/or violence on an innocent (or apparently innocent) suspect who can afford a lawyer or get the attention of the media. Then it’s Police Brutality, and we’re all properly shocked and horrified. I’m not saying we’re hypocrites, just . . . uh, conflicted.

We are conflicted as regards violence generally, but mostly specifically in this way: we think it’s good and bad at the same time. At once we think it’s bad, and it’s a problem, but when we cast about for a solution, there it is again, violence – here to save the day! At once we see the damage it causes, the never-ending cycles of harm spiraling down through the years and the generations – and yet still, every problem looks like a nail. We still somehow think everything can be solved with the hammer.

(There’s a Freudian joke in there. I didn’t intend it as part of the argument, but maybe he wasn’t such a dope . . . but we’ll save that thought for another conversation.)

I’m not saying I have all the answers, of course not, but I wouldn’t be alone in history if I were someone who thought he could at least indicate the direction we need to go. The direction we should go, the place we need to work toward if we are ever to create the sort of society we wouldn’t be lying about if we could describe it to our kids in family-friendly, positive terms is this: less violence, not more. Less violence – and I want to make this perfectly clear – less violence, even from the good guys. Less violence, even towards the bad guys. Because the truth is, Police Brutality, the bad, shocking kind, and police brutality in lower case, the sort that we like, the sort we think we need, they both feed the never-ending cycles of violence.

These seemingly eternal cycles are persistent, and it’s not for no reason. They persist, because half of our conflicted selves love violence and force; it is we who are preserving the cycles, and it simply due to a failure of reason, a misfire in our minds. The truth is, abusing the bad guys is no more helpful to society in the long run than abusing the good ones. We know abuse often turns good guys into bad ones.

What we need to realize is that it moves the bad guys in the same direction, from bad to worse. Yes, even when it’s the good guys doing it.