The time has come for silence. As I wrote and published at Substack and theruffdraft.com:
It was made abundantly clear to me yesterday, by more than one person, that they have little to no interest in my words. If they fit into accepted boundaries, they’re harmless and can be engaged with (but then, what is there to say?). If they stray but a little, on the other hand, they are simply not to be countenanced. Believe it or not, I’m grateful for this insight. For 55 years, I worked my ass off trying to make people understand me (and I treasure the few who do)—turns out it’s no way to make a living. So, I am taking a well deserved vacation. I don’t know when I’ll be back.
The insight that followed my writing that post, as I thought about the defense for my persecutors that someone made when I shared the details of a situation, is this: telling me that I should cut someone some slack because their tormenting me is unconsciously done, that I should think about their intentions, not their words or actions, is nothing more than telling me that I should continue letting them abuse me. And the answer to that is an emphatic NO. Someone else’s intentions, unless clearly expressed by them, is none of my business, but the way they treat me is very much my business.
Another thought from moments ago: for a real conversation to be possible (and this applies to reading a book, as well as speaking to a human), at least two things are necessary: 1. the willingness to listen with an open mind and heart—and this needs to include the courage to risk having your Story challenged; and 2. an agreement on terms; for instance, if the subject is God, both parties need to understand that they are talking about God (a divine entity usually imagined as the Creator of the universe, but even this should get hammered out in more detail), not religion.
This might just end up being a list of insights, because here’s another: people living in the Traumaverse tend to respond to enunciations of genuine emotion, like “I hate him” or “What an asshole,” by clutching their pearls and delivering a lecture on forgiving others or speculating about intentions (those of the speaker or “the asshole”) because they are unaware that they are living in the Traumaverse and are therefore controlled by fears developed in childhood that no longer apply but continue to exert massive influence. Attaching judgments to emotions is what hurled 99 percent of humanity into the Traumaverse in the first place, so breaking free from those judgments is critical for breaking out of the Traumaverse and living without fear.
What’s more, we are taught to clutch those pearls via lessons on manners, etiquette, and social and religious conventions, but what are those things designed to do? Keep emotions safely locked up and control the people who feel them.
Alice Miller writes in the essay “What is Hate?” in Free From Lies (perhaps her most straightforward book):
We tend to associate the word “hatred” with the notion of a dangerous curse we need to free ourselves of as quickly as we can. An opinion also frequently voiced is that hatred poisons our very being and makes it all but impossible to heal the injuries stemming from our childhood. I too believe that hatred can poison the organism, but only as long as it is unconscious and directed vicariously at substitute figures or scapegoats. When that happens, hatred cannot be resolved. Suppose, for example, that I hate a specific ethnic group but have never allowed myself to realize how my parents treated me when I was a child, how they left me crying for hours in my cot when I was a baby, how they never gave me so much as a loving glance. If that is the case, then I will suffer from a latent form of hatred that can pursue me throughout my whole life and cause all kinds of physical symptoms. But if I know what my parents did to me in their ignorance and have a conscious awareness of my indignation at their behavior, then I have no need to redirect my hatred at other persons. In the course of time, my hatred for my parents may weaken, or it may resolve itself temporarily, only to flare up again as a result of events in the present or new memories. But I know what this hatred is all about. Thanks to the feelings I have actively experienced, I now know myself well enough, and I have no compulsion to kill or harm anyone because of my feelings of hatred.
We frequently meet people who are grateful to their parents for the beatings they received when they were little, or who assert that they have long since forgotten the sexual molestation they suffered at their hands. They say that in prayer they have forgiven their parents for their ‘sins.’ But at the same time, they feel a compulsion to resort to physical violence in the upbringing of their children and/or to interfere with them sexually. All pedophiles openly display their “love” of children and have no idea that deep down they are avenging themselves for the things done to them as children. Though they are not consciously aware of this hatred, they are still subject to its dictates.
Such latent, displaced hatred is indeed dangerous and difficult to resolve because it is not directed at the person who has caused it but at substitute figures. Cemented in different kinds of perversion, it can sustain itself for life and represents a serious threat, not only to the environment of the person harboring it, but also to that person him/herself.
Conscious, reactive hatred is different. Like any other feeling, this can recede and fade away once we have lived it through. If our parents have treated us badly, possibly even sadistically, and we are able to face up to the fact, then of course we will experience feelings of hatred. As I have said, such feelings may weaken or fade away altogether in the course of time, though this never happens from one day to the next. The full extent of the mistreatment inflicted upon a child cannot be dealt with all at once. Coming to terms with it is an extended process in which aspects of the mistreatment are allowed into our consciousness one after the other, thus rekindling the feeling of hatred. But in such cases hatred is not dangerous. It is a logical consequence only fully perceived by the adult, whereas the child was forced to tolerate it in silence for years.
Alongside reactive hatred of the parents and latent hatred deflected onto scapegoats, there is also the justified hatred for a person tormenting us in the present, either physically or mentally, a person we are at the mercy of and either cannot free ourselves of, or at least believe that we cannot. As long as we are in such a state of dependency, or think we are, then hatred is the inevitable outcome. It is hardly conceivable that a person being tortured will not feel hatred for the torturer. If we deny ourselves this feeling, we will suffer from physical symptoms. The biographies of Christian martyrs are full of descriptions of the dreadful ailments they suffered from, and a significant portion of them are skin diseases. This is how the body defends itself against self-betrayal. These “saints” were enjoined to forgive their tormentors, to “turn the other cheek,” but their inflamed skin was a clear indication of the extreme anger and resentment they were suppressing.
(pages 52–54)
Over the years, I’ve read about hundreds of Catholic saints, and while I didn’t specifically notice skin conditions, I did notice, over and over, the abusive childhoods of so many of them and the physical ailments of most, zeroing in for a time, on digestive disorders, as I was always open to anything confirming the theory that humans are not designed to digest wheat.