Posted by trouble on February 6, 2002, at 22:24:38
I never claimed to have the conflict resolution skills of Mahatma Ghandi, what's it to ya? Besides, as I write this I am at ease in my world, composed, lucid, safe, adult, bland, reasonable, cohesive, sane, responsive, and fundamentally alone. I mean OK.
Do normal people just take it for granted that they have a right to feel this way as a matter of course? Cause I have to fight for it, fight phantoms of the past which I project into flesh and blood adversaries who befoul my current environment and that everyone else perceives as fundamentally OK human beings. Just like them, Frank Zappa on the stereo.
We can be friends, but there has to be a fight first.
I've been perpetrating...having a lot of CONflicts lately, clients, vendors, store clerks, bank tellers, people who need people, insignificant targets, weak, "safe" to intimidate. The instant someone crosses me right now it's been-
"You listen to me you little bitch, you fat f*cking cow, you think you get to go around treating people any way you want w/out facing the consequences? You are a discredit to your GENder, your ethnICity, AND you're perpetuating a negative stereotype about the class of people who reside in trailer courts."
I said this today, w/out a hint of irony. No self-awareness. Unbelievable.Any reasonable person would have seen she was picking on me for no reason. That's a fact. But I was the one spewing hate, except it was HER hatred, HER hostility that she felt toward me, which NORMAL people delude themselves into believing they can conceal under a thinly veiled patina of respectability. I see thru people. So what? People everywhere see thru people. All of them are in league to pretend they are what they pretend to be and everyone goes home happy. I'd probably join the club myself if it wasn't for this pesky schizophrenia. You try soaking and rubbing and you still can't get it out.
I want to engage with what's underneath the respectibility, b/c I can't find anything else to relate to. I know injustice when I see it. I call forth every g*ddamn animosity I find b/c I find every one of them thoroughly unwarranted and if it ends up punching me in the face I'll savor that too. It's 1979, and I'm James White at CBGBs busting a whiskey bottle over my own head screaming YOU CAN'T HURT ME!!!!The problem is all this therapy I've had. The Inner Psychologist. The id police. You-may-mirror-her inner-experience-but-that-doesn't-mean-she-sees HERSELF-in-your-portrayal. What-she-sees-in-you-only- solidifies-her-animosity, ergo,-something-else-is-going-on.
I need to separate acting in a particular way to gain a reaction, from acting OUT in a particular way to gain whatever we gain from acting out which is anybody's guess. In the first mode I'm a scientist, in the latter some sort of slovenly crack whore or something. Nothing against crack whores. My mom used to demand unmitigated hysteria in me, I had this Budda stillness that unnerved her beyond repose, so I pretended to be a florid psychotic for her sake but inside I was a scientist.After I acted psychotic today I went into the sane, composed reasonable mode. That's how it goes: chaos is prior to clarity, no integration w/out fragmentation.
Is this okay? Cause I'm tired of trying to cure a bunch of things that must only be endured. That's a very scientific approach. I have plenty of other faults than can be improved upon. And unlike some people who have advanced degrees I do eventually regain objectivity, like a light switch the blinding rage is replaced by problem solving:1. Anger at violation of sacred principle
2. Gathering of resources
3. Proceed from position of defending important principleIt's the stupid dysfunctional regrets for having been "mean" to people when all I did was bring out the worst in them. I'm making this sound more romantic than it is, believe me I'm not going to get myself killed someday, not with all these inner controls. I paid for them, you'd think I'd be happy. Sometimes I am. Happy about using restraint not out of compassion, but just so I can make winning remarks in session now and then so I don't get booted from therapy. Someday I'll want to skip acting psychotic and go right into problem solving so much that I'll learn how. Everyone knows I can do it. Defy my upbringing, my soul murder, the social security psychiatrist who claims I'm gradually decompensating. You'll see.
All I can say for now is when I sat down at the keyboard tonight I was convinced that these rage reactions are just a neurotoxic effect of my new mood stabilizer, case closed. I no longer agree, but don't know what to think. It took me 36 minutes to write that sentence.
Not having
an opinion
on something
important
that pertains
to me
feels like a freight train looming down.
poster:trouble
thread:17875
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/social/20020202/msgs/17875.html