GoodPersonEffed
Brevity is my middle name, but my name was TL
- Jan 11, 2020
- 6,727
I know I write about these issues a lot regarding my parents. I can imagine some folks are sick of me going on about it, and that's okay. I get feeling that way and thinking that way, and I'm not offended. I'm working more than that out here, but there's never an expectation or demand that anyone reads everything I post.
Once again discomfort arose toward my parents and their illegitimate power and abuses of power, past, present, and anticipated future.
The Laws of Emotion posits that most emotions arise to motivate next actions. We always need next actions, we cannot physically or internally rest for long, which partly explains why we often cannot remain satisfied with what we attain and seek new attainments. One example of a next action in progress is blame. Blame is an emotionally intense action that discharges feelings like discomfort, helplessness, and fear. Blame may motivate additional actions beyond finger-pointing, such as protest, revenge, or incarceration.
It is similar with my parents. I am uncomfortable and try to find acceptance and peace with my discomfort, but I return to blame. Then I want to defend myself, which motivates me to write to them, and every draft, I unleash everything they've ever done that made no goddamn sense and hold them accountable.
Sometimes I write letter drafts to the people they're lying to that we still have a relationship after they permanently shunned me, and I out them. I can't just stop at saying, "You're being fed bullshit, we haven't had a relationship for eight years and they closed the doors for good three years ago." Just as when I write drafts to my parents, I end up pouring out disclosures of the domestic violence I experienced until the age of 18, and the utterly irrational emotional blackmail, intrusions, and other manipulations and attemps to control me that lasted until that moment eight years ago when I asked my parents to take some financial responsibility for my recovery from physical injuries and PTSD directly caused by my mother.
After every draft I write, whether to my parents or to their friends and our extended family, I come back to my values and ethics. Though I have every right to those mutual relationships, I stopped maintaining prior to the request for financial support. Therefore, it's not a matter of me protecting those relationships, its a matter of revenge. It doesn't serve any practical purpose to out my parents except to discharge the buildup of feelings of discomfort and impotence. I know myself and I value my virtues, and a virtue can't really be claimed as a virtue until it is put to the test. This situation is testing my virtues, but I know that if I give in to the baser instincts, once my anger and self-righteous idignation and wounded resenment have expended their wrath, I will regret having caused irreparable harm to my parents' support system, even if it has shaky foundations and weak construction due to their lying. It doesn't undo anything they've done. It doesn't heal what was hurt. It doesn't return the love they yanked back from me. My anger and emotions will be discharged, and the result will be carnage, smoking ruins, and an escalation in their negativity toward me. If, having been harmed, I in turn cause great harm, and I fall off my high horse and find I've created carnage and smoking ruins in my spirit.
Sometimes I feel trapped in this cycle of thinking, feeling, writing drafts, posting, connecting with what I value most, letting it go, and thinking again. I want release from it, yet so far it seems like the only way to stop it is to blow, to do something definitive and retaliatory. But when I do that, I feel worse. It's not volatile, but it's directed inward. It is the ache and the repeating sting of remorse and shame. For me, it is indeed far more wretched to harm than to be harmed (Seneca). That doesn't mean I'm morally superior, it's just how I am, for whatever reasons, and I am not at all motivated to become different. My virtues provide me some measure of comfort when I hold back in spite of the nearly torturous suffering that my emotions cause along with blame. I find Guatama's words to be true that beings have their actions as their refuge and shelter. Shitty actions make shitty shelters and expose one to acts of retaliation, revenge, or even justified punishment such as arrest and imprisonment. My parents' actions are exposing them to my retaliation, revenge, and justifiable punishment. They really don't get how vulnerable they are to me because I don't flex my power as they do: I am not violent nor oppressive toward them, I hold back rather than unleash, I have personal power and do not seek further power by harming or oppressing another. If I do, I will experience harmful damage to my sense of self and, as part of that, what I call my spirit. I have a spirit that loves virtue, not revenge. I love what I wanted done for me and toward me: respect, restraint, honoring of integrity (wholeness) of the self, one's boundaries, one's foundations, and one's support and shelters.
The cycle expands beyond my family. I hurt over how not just my parents, but so many humans are ignorant to their impacts on others, and how they fall into belief systems that justify hate and abuse, and cling to them, and get damned high off of them -- such as my mother did in releasing her rage on me, and justified it with ethics like not sparing the rod to spoil the child, using rods that were comercially sold for that purpose, and the belief that parents have a right to dominate their children and demand respect without earning it. It is not respect, it is submission in the face of dominance. And they cycles continue. Domination, submission, and then the submissive one's turn: repeat? fall apart? find or create a different way?
The more clarity I have about this situation, the more I see it in the world, and my pain, despair and hopelessness are compounded. I cannot get my parents to wake the fuck up. The Hutus couldn't get the Tutsis to wake the fuck up. The Native Americans couldn't get the colonists to wake the fuck up. The Jews couldn't get the Nazis to wake the fuck up.
The world doesn't lean toward waking the fuck up. It leans toward dominance, manipulation, torture, enslavement, and destruction of spirits for the drug-like high of power over others rather than the self, for the love of destroying rather than respecting and honoring a boundary.
To shrug, give up and give in to the power of dominance and claim it is to discharge my discomfort and my self. Jesus asked, "What does it benefit a man if he gains the whole world but loses his very self?" To get that drug-like high is to cover up the pain, but it will still be there, and when the high wears off, the pain must continually be covered over and buried by layers until it is lost, and the genuine self who felt that pain is lost. But it is never gone. It will always want to rise up and return, to be valid, to belong in the self if nowhere else.
This hurts.
I belong in my self, and as such, I belong no matter where I go. But my self -- my boundaries, my virtues, my right to exist -- are not accepted everywhere I go, not by my family, not by most of the world. I contine to talk and to walk my talk, and some of those who at first reject and hate me come to appreciate my talk and even in their own ways emulate my walk, just as I do when I find a talk and a walk that serve my wholeness, my boundaries, my virtue, my sense of well-being in my self if not the world.
I see the world and I hurt. I cannot fix all the pain that is being caused. I cannot blow away the webs of all the illusions. I cannot stop the incredible violence: assualts, rapes, torture, violence toward bodies but directed at spirits, meant to break the very core of a human and destroy it, but yet whenever it has the opportunity, will again rise. Perhaps that's not so inspiring, perhaps it's just the law of emotions driving next actions. It seems that humans are never satisfied with impediments to freedom. It just seems to me an unjustifiable abomination that one sees another's freedom as a limit or offense to their own.
It hurts.
I wonder what will be the end result of this reptitve, cyclic hurting and bubbling up. I am constantly compelled to next actions yet feel impotent because the only available actions are either abhorrent or, because there is no emotional discharge, they return to me, only to rise up, hurt, and bubble again. Will I have a huge breakthrough like inventors, great thinkers, and enlightened beings? Is it un-breakthrough-able, and will I bang my head against it so much that my brain gets addled and, in spite of how much I work to stay present, aware, and grounded, will I have a goddamned breakdown? Probably not. That kind of escape doesn't appeal to me. But the only escape from the torture in this world, if I have no power or agency to stop it, is to end my life and get out of this world. I experience more torture than you know. I don't talk about it. And that's probably part of my solution-seeking, because humans are solutions-seekers.
It's not that I'm a martyr or messiah who wants to save the world, it's that I want to save myself, and I see that everyone else is compelled and imprisoned by the same shit.
I want to stop hurting. I want everybody to stop hurting each other. I want ignorance and torture to be abolished. I want the cycles to stop. And there's no guarantee that if I step out of the world and out of life that for me the cycles would stop, otherwise I'd die today in spite of the suffering of sodium nitrate. I'm so goddamned tired of suffering, even on the way out to whatever happens after. I don't know for sure that what happens after is the end. It wouldn't be the first time I've escaped one trap only to find that the exit led to another.
It all hurts.
When I soothe others, it soothes my own hurt. We all feel the same hurt and are all in the same prisons, even if we're guards rather than inmates. The prison hurts the soul regardless of whether one is chained to it or walks it with weapons. The prison still defines. I want to surround the prison with love and dissolve it. I want to be safe and I want to relax.
Once again discomfort arose toward my parents and their illegitimate power and abuses of power, past, present, and anticipated future.
The Laws of Emotion posits that most emotions arise to motivate next actions. We always need next actions, we cannot physically or internally rest for long, which partly explains why we often cannot remain satisfied with what we attain and seek new attainments. One example of a next action in progress is blame. Blame is an emotionally intense action that discharges feelings like discomfort, helplessness, and fear. Blame may motivate additional actions beyond finger-pointing, such as protest, revenge, or incarceration.
It is similar with my parents. I am uncomfortable and try to find acceptance and peace with my discomfort, but I return to blame. Then I want to defend myself, which motivates me to write to them, and every draft, I unleash everything they've ever done that made no goddamn sense and hold them accountable.
Sometimes I write letter drafts to the people they're lying to that we still have a relationship after they permanently shunned me, and I out them. I can't just stop at saying, "You're being fed bullshit, we haven't had a relationship for eight years and they closed the doors for good three years ago." Just as when I write drafts to my parents, I end up pouring out disclosures of the domestic violence I experienced until the age of 18, and the utterly irrational emotional blackmail, intrusions, and other manipulations and attemps to control me that lasted until that moment eight years ago when I asked my parents to take some financial responsibility for my recovery from physical injuries and PTSD directly caused by my mother.
After every draft I write, whether to my parents or to their friends and our extended family, I come back to my values and ethics. Though I have every right to those mutual relationships, I stopped maintaining prior to the request for financial support. Therefore, it's not a matter of me protecting those relationships, its a matter of revenge. It doesn't serve any practical purpose to out my parents except to discharge the buildup of feelings of discomfort and impotence. I know myself and I value my virtues, and a virtue can't really be claimed as a virtue until it is put to the test. This situation is testing my virtues, but I know that if I give in to the baser instincts, once my anger and self-righteous idignation and wounded resenment have expended their wrath, I will regret having caused irreparable harm to my parents' support system, even if it has shaky foundations and weak construction due to their lying. It doesn't undo anything they've done. It doesn't heal what was hurt. It doesn't return the love they yanked back from me. My anger and emotions will be discharged, and the result will be carnage, smoking ruins, and an escalation in their negativity toward me. If, having been harmed, I in turn cause great harm, and I fall off my high horse and find I've created carnage and smoking ruins in my spirit.
Sometimes I feel trapped in this cycle of thinking, feeling, writing drafts, posting, connecting with what I value most, letting it go, and thinking again. I want release from it, yet so far it seems like the only way to stop it is to blow, to do something definitive and retaliatory. But when I do that, I feel worse. It's not volatile, but it's directed inward. It is the ache and the repeating sting of remorse and shame. For me, it is indeed far more wretched to harm than to be harmed (Seneca). That doesn't mean I'm morally superior, it's just how I am, for whatever reasons, and I am not at all motivated to become different. My virtues provide me some measure of comfort when I hold back in spite of the nearly torturous suffering that my emotions cause along with blame. I find Guatama's words to be true that beings have their actions as their refuge and shelter. Shitty actions make shitty shelters and expose one to acts of retaliation, revenge, or even justified punishment such as arrest and imprisonment. My parents' actions are exposing them to my retaliation, revenge, and justifiable punishment. They really don't get how vulnerable they are to me because I don't flex my power as they do: I am not violent nor oppressive toward them, I hold back rather than unleash, I have personal power and do not seek further power by harming or oppressing another. If I do, I will experience harmful damage to my sense of self and, as part of that, what I call my spirit. I have a spirit that loves virtue, not revenge. I love what I wanted done for me and toward me: respect, restraint, honoring of integrity (wholeness) of the self, one's boundaries, one's foundations, and one's support and shelters.
The cycle expands beyond my family. I hurt over how not just my parents, but so many humans are ignorant to their impacts on others, and how they fall into belief systems that justify hate and abuse, and cling to them, and get damned high off of them -- such as my mother did in releasing her rage on me, and justified it with ethics like not sparing the rod to spoil the child, using rods that were comercially sold for that purpose, and the belief that parents have a right to dominate their children and demand respect without earning it. It is not respect, it is submission in the face of dominance. And they cycles continue. Domination, submission, and then the submissive one's turn: repeat? fall apart? find or create a different way?
The more clarity I have about this situation, the more I see it in the world, and my pain, despair and hopelessness are compounded. I cannot get my parents to wake the fuck up. The Hutus couldn't get the Tutsis to wake the fuck up. The Native Americans couldn't get the colonists to wake the fuck up. The Jews couldn't get the Nazis to wake the fuck up.
The world doesn't lean toward waking the fuck up. It leans toward dominance, manipulation, torture, enslavement, and destruction of spirits for the drug-like high of power over others rather than the self, for the love of destroying rather than respecting and honoring a boundary.
To shrug, give up and give in to the power of dominance and claim it is to discharge my discomfort and my self. Jesus asked, "What does it benefit a man if he gains the whole world but loses his very self?" To get that drug-like high is to cover up the pain, but it will still be there, and when the high wears off, the pain must continually be covered over and buried by layers until it is lost, and the genuine self who felt that pain is lost. But it is never gone. It will always want to rise up and return, to be valid, to belong in the self if nowhere else.
This hurts.
I belong in my self, and as such, I belong no matter where I go. But my self -- my boundaries, my virtues, my right to exist -- are not accepted everywhere I go, not by my family, not by most of the world. I contine to talk and to walk my talk, and some of those who at first reject and hate me come to appreciate my talk and even in their own ways emulate my walk, just as I do when I find a talk and a walk that serve my wholeness, my boundaries, my virtue, my sense of well-being in my self if not the world.
I see the world and I hurt. I cannot fix all the pain that is being caused. I cannot blow away the webs of all the illusions. I cannot stop the incredible violence: assualts, rapes, torture, violence toward bodies but directed at spirits, meant to break the very core of a human and destroy it, but yet whenever it has the opportunity, will again rise. Perhaps that's not so inspiring, perhaps it's just the law of emotions driving next actions. It seems that humans are never satisfied with impediments to freedom. It just seems to me an unjustifiable abomination that one sees another's freedom as a limit or offense to their own.
It hurts.
I wonder what will be the end result of this reptitve, cyclic hurting and bubbling up. I am constantly compelled to next actions yet feel impotent because the only available actions are either abhorrent or, because there is no emotional discharge, they return to me, only to rise up, hurt, and bubble again. Will I have a huge breakthrough like inventors, great thinkers, and enlightened beings? Is it un-breakthrough-able, and will I bang my head against it so much that my brain gets addled and, in spite of how much I work to stay present, aware, and grounded, will I have a goddamned breakdown? Probably not. That kind of escape doesn't appeal to me. But the only escape from the torture in this world, if I have no power or agency to stop it, is to end my life and get out of this world. I experience more torture than you know. I don't talk about it. And that's probably part of my solution-seeking, because humans are solutions-seekers.
It's not that I'm a martyr or messiah who wants to save the world, it's that I want to save myself, and I see that everyone else is compelled and imprisoned by the same shit.
I want to stop hurting. I want everybody to stop hurting each other. I want ignorance and torture to be abolished. I want the cycles to stop. And there's no guarantee that if I step out of the world and out of life that for me the cycles would stop, otherwise I'd die today in spite of the suffering of sodium nitrate. I'm so goddamned tired of suffering, even on the way out to whatever happens after. I don't know for sure that what happens after is the end. It wouldn't be the first time I've escaped one trap only to find that the exit led to another.
It all hurts.
When I soothe others, it soothes my own hurt. We all feel the same hurt and are all in the same prisons, even if we're guards rather than inmates. The prison hurts the soul regardless of whether one is chained to it or walks it with weapons. The prison still defines. I want to surround the prison with love and dissolve it. I want to be safe and I want to relax.
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