when dreams depart

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When it comes to traumatic events, sometimes the underlying issues are obscured even to those who experienced them. The most anyone can do is to be as objective as humanly possible, trusting he has made the best evaluation possible.

It's usually with apprehension he opens his wounds to anyone, for just as the support of a friend can hold him steady, the disparaging of the latter can throw him into an abyss. At first he seeks support from anyone who'll listen, but eventually comes to realize the subject at hand is foreign to the general public. He therefore devotes large chunks of time to understanding what went wrong and its effects upon interpersonal relationships, health and personal growth.

I came to realize as long as you live with some people in an Gilligan-Island existence, all is love and peace. To the public eye it is difficult to perceive there are human beings who are incapable of sustaining long term friendships except nominally. Some will work day and night to sabotage your connections by 1) seeking to poison your view of others and 2) absorbing your energy with a long list of demands.

Some people also inflict terror so eventually a flash of the eyes is all that is needed.  Cycles of abuse consist in measured doses of sweetness and calm, that eventually lead to periods of tension and hostility, that eventually erupt into verbal attacks. As Darlene Lancer says, "The abuser may be loving between abusive episodes, so that you deny or forget them."

This shift back and forth, can push you into a role similar to Shakespeare’s Hamlet. After each “explosion” he’s walk about in an antic disposition for days not wanting to eat nor take care of himself.  While to others the list below may seem to be a collection of cold clinical data, to me each trait is a condensed prompt that elicits more distressing personal stories.

-- Intuitive Feeling

Paranoid Personality Disorder -- ICD-10 is characterized by the following traits:

- excessive sensitivity to setbacks and rebuffs;
- tendency to bear grudges persistently, i.e. refusal to forgive insults and injuries or slights;
- suspiciousness and a pervasive tendency to distort experience by misconstruing the neutral or friendly actions of others as hostile or contemptuous;
- a combative and tenacious sense of personal rights out of keeping with the actual situation;
- recurrent suspicions, without justification, regarding sexual fidelity of spouse or sexual partner;
- tendency to experience excessive self-importance, manifest in a persistent self-referential attitude;

- preoccupation with unsubstantiated "conspiratorial" explanations of events both immediate to the patient and in the world at large.

-- The World Health Organization

 

waves of anger and indignation

 “Most people tend to notice other people’s energy and actions before they notice their own. They become preoccupied with what others are doing or not doing, projecting their ideas about why they are that way. They carry on with criticism or comparisons, while their deeper feelings go unattended.” - Doc Childr and Deborah Rozman

In the beginning phase of my separation I rode on a wave of anger and indignation that provided fuel for a time. I looked forward to the day when I could break with the past and just move on. However, ending a relationship looks easier from a distance. The final showdown doesn’t ring victory. Your head fills with contradictory feelings that you can’t imagine.

Doc Childr and Deborah Rozman explain how we spend much of our emotional energy carelessly and have never been taught emotional self-care. We don’t even know where to begin or how to start. How true this has been in my life. My way of dealing with prolonged emotionally draining situations has been to sit the valley of indecision, hoping the problem will work itself out (while making the problem only worse and more ingrained). I want to stay in limbo, not wanting to finish what I started.

My therapist once said I needed to mourn my relationship even though it was destructive. I didn’t understand what relevance there could be mourning a bad marriage -- why would I do that? The therapist explained there is another kind of loss that has to do with mourning for what could have been, but never unfolded.

Ongoing Erruptions of Hostility

I feel pleased to be able to write that I had a productive week. Usually, I tend to plod along slower than I would like at work, but these last few days have been different that way. It's a great feeling to be on top of things, especially when you're not used to it.

I wish I had that kind of control over other areas of life -- that I could simply start over with minimum repercussions -- especially to my DD -- but such a peaceful process isn't always in my control.

Last Wednesday DD went out to a movie with some friends. After the show, I pick her up, but when we arrived at the front door to drop her off, MDM wasn't there, so we drove to my apartment instead. In the past, whenever DD's mother is out somewhere, DD and I will wait for a call then walk to a designated pick-up spot. However, that night MDM refused to cooperate, thus ending the evening on a sour note with one more episode of power playing.

I asked myself, "Why does MDM go out of her way to show unprovoked hostility and pettiness? What would it have cost to stop off at the side of the road for a couple of minutes? Then, I remembered who I was dealing with and why I broke the ties in the first place. I remembered her combative nature -- her tenacious sense of entitlement, disproportionate with reality.

I've been under the illusion for some years that somehow I could start life over again without it getting into messy loose ends -- without there being any conflicts of interest -- but I'm now suspecting there is no such a thing (for me anyway). Perhaps that is why I kept putting the divorce proceedings off, because I knew sooner or later I had to face the dark side of MDM and all the FOG she would dish out.

What's the lesson? Life sometimes has unpleasant episodes, not because we want them, but because dealing with PDs is inevitably a toxic endeavor, because sooner or later, you have to contradict that person's self-referenced world.

MDM's snubbing episode shed some light into another relational dynamic of the past that used to frustrate me -- a deeply ingrained pattern. Whenever I became angry (for any given reason) MDM would put up a wall. The message is that anger is never appropriate, so I usually end up feeling bad and apologize. The worst part is that DD has learned to do the same. She goes into her shell and refuses to interact, no matter how I try to draw her out.

I'm finally becoming aware it's okay to be angry even when others don't think so. Sometimes only you can give yourself that permission as long as that angry doesn't become destructive. As Alice Miller affirmed, "I don't have to look cheerful for someone else,and I don't have to suppress my distress or anxiety to fit other people's needs. I can be angry and no one will die or get a headache because of it." This is the emerging of the authentic self.